Fan Fiction ❯ Only Dreaming ❯ Only Dreaming ( Chapter 1 )

 

 

Only Dreaming

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A/N: Tegu writes Namine drabble because Tegu is bored and blocked on smut and she tired and hot and her head is pastede on yay.

 

Disclaimer: Not mine. Wah.

 

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The purpose of a dream is to organize and catalogue the events of the day, to try and file them correctly so that the next day and the days after they are easily recalled and interpreted and the proper connection between them and all the chain-mail-mass of older memories is made. That's why they make no sense--comparable to a five year old and a giant jigsaw puzzle. Spiritual people say that dreams can be interpreted to tell the future, to tell the past, the present, and the contents of one's soul. The jury's still out on the verity of most of this, but I think they'd agree that Namine is a special case, since she dreams like no one else: When her...associates at the castle dream, their subconscious is content to juggle only the memories that belong to them. When the witch dreams, it's like the five year old is playing with seven or eight different puzzles, all jumbled together--the memories belonging to the people she's altered over her life.

 

Like most people, she doesn't always remember her dreams, and very rarely does she remember all of them. Also like many people, she's had dreams she's pored over and over and relived a thousand times as she wakes, and she's also had terrible dreams that make her wish her magic worked on herself, make her afraid to go to sleep again. Many times, the former and the latter are one and the same, such as tonight.

 

The summer sun is burning her and she has to RUN, she knows she has to flee, but the sand below her is swallowing her feet and she trips and falls and then it's night again, the moon is glinting off the ocean surrounding the island, white light meeting the red glow from the tiger-headed cave. She doesn't have to run anymore. Why and how don't matter to a dreamer on such trivialities--the dreamer accepts what they are told without question, everything is natural. Like the procession of little men from the cavern, carting gold and jewels and whistling a working song--nothing abnormal about that. Namine who has black hair and red hair and brown hair and wears a red suit and a yellow skirt, she follows the little men for ages and ages across the dunes and the swamps and the forests and the Nothingness to the end of the worlds.

 

What happens next surprises Namine, because the great crevasse she just peeked into is nothing more than a snowy chasm, filled with howling wind, and there's what looks like a slaughtered...a slaughtered...she can't look and diverts her attention to see a great tower, white with a golden tip that she knows she knows from somewhere else, and it definitely shouldn't be there--Agrabah.

 

Someone ought to tell the sultan/her father (Namine-who-was-many-others-too thought), and she turned around but there was Vexen, blocking her way. He laughed, terrible shrieking noise and knocked her back down into the abyss with his shield and she thought she heard him yell "And we shall have a Caucus Race!" but then she was falling into darkness--no no no she doesn't like this part as she is dissociated from all things and she tries to scream but she's forgotten how falling into darkness one of them one of them now one of them one of them one of them one of them no one of us one of us one of--

 

You never die in your dreams.

 

Namine rushed back to herself and she smoothes down her blue pinafore dress before--plop--falling into a bottle floating right atop the ocean, and the bottle's got a bottom that's very leaky, because it's just like those fiery spiky wheels that belong to Axel, and so the bottle and her sink down into the bottom of the sea. It's quite frightening, but Namine isn't anything more than a bit anxious--she can swim free, you know, and that's what she does.

 

The ocean is very beautiful, all swirling reefs and clouds of fishes that really do move as if they're one being. The light is dappled on billions of different colors and billions of different fishes and all shaped like sickles, or screws, or birds, or even dragons. No sooner does that thought occur to Namine, than she realizes she's being chased by two eels, whispering things that are alternately sweet and charming and then hideous and depraved, and they keep on chasing her until she's rounded the big bend, then she's swimming by a dark castle and the water's all greenish and polluted. The eels have gone and they're replaced by a terrible fish--barracuda, no, a pike, don't ask her how she knows this. She runs around and around and even jumps over Charon's boat once, but then she gets away by hiding in an old, rusty helmet.

 

The helmet asks her if she is quite alright, and Namine/Merlin/Ariel/FarTooManyMemories answers yes. It's really quite a kindly old helmet, a bit sad maybe, and then it tells her to use the waterway to get away and into the castle where the pike and the octopus witch can't get her. She remembers that voice now came from Geppeto, and she's about to ask him how Cleo is when the whale comes and she scuttles into the waterways as quick as she can.

 

Inside the castle she can see it's both a hideous masterpiece and a glorious wreck. Sculptures of angels and demons adorn its walls, along with loads of terrible thorny vines, and carefully chiseled flowers of the purest white. When she rounds the corner, she sees a...a hole in reality, in the world, shaped just like the brand emblazoned on Marluxia's little pet, the silver creatures she knows He is fond of. In front of it is Riku-Ansem-Sora-the Beast-and then a witchfire-green mighty dragon she remembers was called Maleficent. She shrieks and scrambles away, but Maleficent-dragon is much stronger and faster, and she catches Namine, and just as her mighty jaws descend--Maleficent is not Maleficent at all, but just Zexion, who takes as many shapes as she takes memories. He tells her she should not be here, he tells her that this is not the place for her, and all the while she idly wonders what's he hiding with his hair? Why does he cover his face? And then from behind, Riku stabs him through the heart, and everything bursts.

 

She's lying on a ship deck and then Sora bursts into being right in front of her, and of course she runs to hold him. The she realizes that she isn't holding a hero, but instead she's holding Marluxia.

 

To dream is to accept, and to fantasize is to deny.

 

She pushes him away, until she backs into Captain Hook, and all of a sudden the Captain's missing hand has become Lexaeus' tomahawk. As she watches, Marluxia shifts again and becomes--what the...becomes an Anti-Sora. It's because she broke his plans, more like smashed them, really. This is almost as bad as falling into Darkness, and she runs and runs and then she jumps off the railing of the ship and she can fly, she can fly, she can fly.

 

So then Namine just flies and flies away through the stars, and nothing can touch her and nothing can stop her. She's free then, and she comes to the islands where all her friends are, and they all smile to see her, and then, and then, (best of all), she goes home. And at home she has a room and her own things, and her brothers and sister and most precious, Mommy and Daddy. She never sees their faces in her dreams, but she knows that they love her very very much.

 

"Namine, my love," her mother whispers in her ear as she holds her close, "It's time to wake up," Her father completes, and then she opens her eyes, crying so hard in her dream that she'd wake up on a wet pillow.

 

"Get up, witch." Larxene sneers and kicks the post of her bed. Marluxia is standing over her. He's smiling, but it's all an act--he's good at that, how else did he get so important an assignment?

 

"Come on, dear Namine." he nudges her with his scythe. "You know what you must do."

 

"Look, she cried in her dreams." Larxene cannot say something without making her words a weapon.

 

Marluxia dismissed them as merely dreams, and then they both left the witch. Namine will be along once she's cleaned herself up.

 

 

--End.

Tegu

(Storybook Love)