SEA LEVEL DOWN
— swallow, swallow.

—

—

1 - they call it oblivion because.

She lives in the corner of far-far-away that you didn’t dream of, in a castle of hollow stone like you’ll never see.

She lives at the top of a spiral to hell — the trapped princess and the evil witch in bloody synchrony. Only she doesn’t see it just yet. The parallels, the contrast. The blood.

She counts the tiles and runs her fingers down the ridges between because she doesn’t know — she doesn’t know what else there is. She doesn’t know of seas yet, of skies and songs that make you swell.

She only knows the shadows of these things, all in the Other Girl’s memories.

She only knows her place.

Her place is a place where you’d draw a line on paper and feel the stroke against your throat. Her place is to shape and scribble and dream another heart’s dream. And she’s alright with that.

Boys fighting for fake heroines and girls who don’t deserve to breathe — she’s alright with that, too.

She’s fine, just fine.

Witch girl, doll girl, crayon girl.

Just fine for now.

—

She draws love every day and it claws at her from the inside.

She draws the sky one day and she nearly goes blue.

Shell girl, shadow girl, devil girl.

It’s not alright, he says. He leaves flower petals, sky-bright on the white, white floor. Not love, she knows, because she’s drawn it enough to get the point. Not love. Just blood.

Her blood is the blood of the Other Girl. He said to her, long ago. And whatever you think you’re feeling... it’s all Her, Naminé. The tears she might have already cried. The songs she’s already sung — she knows all this now, the way she once memorized the blue branch patterns on her pale skin. Girls who aren’t real, real like the Other, they don’t have arteries, didn’t you know? They’re all veins, pain, crayon stains. They’re all dormant inside.

I know you’re not sleeping, he says.

I have a job for you today, he says.

He says nothing of the wax rainbows under her nails and the sketchbook shreds piled high.

He says nothing of the way she (barely) breathes and the watercolour tears she’s forgotten how to cry.

It’s all blood, you see.

—

2 - lead-heavy hearts and secrets in stone.

She doesn’t know when the stories come to fill her but they do. She can pretend, pretend like she learned or read or heard the tales all on her own — like the Other Girl has no older memory to draw them from. Girls with soft-edged crowns who live in portraits more than anyplace else; girls in silver-lined cloud castles finding love. Are such things real?

Are such things real for everyone?

The castle is full of echoes. Sometimes they carry. Sometimes, there’s talk of a princess and she stops and starts and strains like it’s her name being called.

Why, caged girl, copy girl, tool girl — do you fancy yourself a princess?

Lightning jolts her awake, static dancing in the words.

She thinks maybe Other Girl is also the Princess Girl they talk about and that’s why the heart that isn’t hers always skips one. But she doesn’t dare say it.

She’s losing her place in timid little steps, but she knows it so well — like the tiles and the veins and the shadows.

She wants to go. But she doesn’t want to try to leave.

—

Her secret is that place where the words she likes are scratched beneath the mattress, right into the tiles — rebel girl, rebel girl, rebel girl, she fancies, more than gowns and lace and castles painted up to be called palaces, where the thorns are clipped from their stems. This is me as I am. This is me fighting back. There is no Other Girl, Perfect Girl, First Girl. This is me.

It takes so long to chip away at the porcelain. She has three words and that’s all for her. She thinks of tree-cluster caves and another secret place, but she tries not to. The mattress goes back down on jagged lines and angular letters, secrets on her lips. Charm. Stardust. Sky.

Sing me to sleep.

Hushed voices, like ghosts under ice.

—

3 - take this pink ribbon off my eyes.

She dreams like a doll lost in some stranger’s wonderland — upside down and at the edges of everything. Only some stranger is Some Girl and Some Girl is close enough to touch but too far to feel, and Some Girl is running on the warm, warm sand that burns her shadow’s eyes.

And that shadow hasn’t felt this before: love, and it overwhelms. In retrospect, Some Girl simply loves her boys like the brothers she never had to call her own, like the family she’d never known (no wonder it’s so easy for the shadow to feel lonely, she thinks to herself) and it’s a different kind of love from what Naminé right now feels shaking where her heart shouldn’t be.

But she, the shadow, she doesn’t know the difference.

Hearts bound like brothers and a sister — or boys and girls in love, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know how it goes.

She only knows: oh, this is new. oh, this is love. maybe.

She only knows the flicker and the fall and the lovesick tunes of waking up.

The scent of flowers never freed from thorns — it brings her back.

Seed girl, edge girl, root girl. Rot girl?

He reminds her with the blood of those thorns by his fingertips, blood of the eyes that won’t water when hers melt.

Your secrets are never your own, remember?

This castle becomes you, me, all of us.

These walls hear your every thought.

Your dreams sink into the floors.

(We should burn down the castle. Burn it down, down, down to ash and dust and ground. To heartless-violet smoke we’ll breathe like the air we don’t. And then we’ll be free; won’t we? All the dreams buried underground, we can free them. We can free us.)

It makes sense, maybe; becoming the castle. Like becoming paper, ink and stone. Like the art that chokes her tight and tighter, strokes and spirals down her glass doll skin — the old, old borrowed blood that bleeds only through a pen. The tile-carved words branded into her eyes.

She hears the echo of First Girl’s heartbeat like it’s coming from her chest.

She hears him speaking to the beat of a song that doesn’t belong, swaying in her.

You shouldn’t be dreaming at all. Especially not of them, that place, those shadow feelings. I’m telling you. I’m telling you and you’ve been told and you should know...

But I’ll forgive it.

The castle only speaks to me. No one else has to hear of it.

His thorned-stem touch strokes her hair, strokes her face, strokes her closed, tight eyes.

Blood is compulsory — remember?

And no one has to know. No one knows how much power words have.

That’s right, just words, he laughs.

Here I am on the other side of the room, and your eyes still scream like I’m pulling you apart.

—

4 - choking down on memory lane.

She gets assignments in stacks now. Nothing at all is left to the imagination — orders, orders, orders. It’s all on purpose, she knows. She used to like to dream, writing tales like the lucky charm on the night of the meteor shower. Pretend, she thought back then, is so pretty. It’s so pretty, pretty, pretty to pretend.

Charm girl.

No more of that in the winding castle’s tower room.

He finally comes back one day, and it’s only so he can shut the music and she can shut her eyes. Stone-and-paper silent. Tile-and-marble, hallowed halls. The ink spills from his lips. His voice is all echoes, hands against a marble frame.

You never wanted to be an artist, did you?

You’re not supposed to know the things people choose not to tell you.

I know what you do. I know what you want.

She thinks so fervently she could have whispered it into his ear:I do nothing but what you say. Pages and pages and pages of fabricated love; I know nothing but what you want me to know and only so little of whatever She knows. I’m puppet girl, ghost girl, halfway-dead girl. So what could the walls have possibly told you this time?

But when she opens her mouth and her lips go dry she says nothing at all — just looks at him with her glassy, glassy eyes, full of stories she won’t speak.

—

When she dreams again, it’s all in monochrome except the blue. Black and white and veins.

The sky and his eyes and his lips — the earth and his words and his buried, secret songs — and the sea, oh, the sea. And the waves at her feet are criss-crossed, cross-hatched, with old bloodlines and it’s all Some Girl’s paradise. She swims in an ink-thick sea of all the memories she chose to spin, back when she wanted her gift-curse-link because it was something she had.

The only thing Princess Girl didn’t do first.

But there’s something that she wants more than to be first.

Stories.

Words over pictures. Pictures in words.

She sees her marks on the castle floor scribed into the sand; against the trees; across her chest.

Story girl, ink girl, paper girl.

I’d spin the colours into book-binding glue if I could. I’d write for everyone I’d see, write about the swollen halves of their hearts to see the shine in their eyes. I’d write about things I felt without knowing how. And maybe he’d hear me. And maybe he’d sing along with me. And maybe she’d see. But I’d mostly write for me.

—

5 - flash back a bit; you’re in my stars, you know.

There was one day when she woke up. And another, and again. And one-by-one-at-a-time, she wasn’t the only one.

Puppets here, there, everywhere.

A voice like fire dancing high — we’re all mad here and don’t you know it. Where’s Luxord and his tea kettle when you need the rush?

This part is a blur and too close to everything else to be really different but she dreamt about her castle-in-the-sky boy and her twilight-road boy when the puppets danced and half the time she was pulling their strings, and everything else was strings, strings, lines of ink tighter than ever — stealing the words from her mouth from her lips down to the toenails she painted, water-based vanity because it was all she could do. Because who are you? Who are you anyway?

I don’t deserve to live, do I? the Replica had said to her one day.

And she’d said, she’d said, no more than I.

But he left anyway.

—

6 - all the concrete words.

She has their names now; Sky boy, Earth boy, Sea girl. She might have known it all along, but all the same, all the same. This is what comes from saving your victims before it’s their blood on the tiles with yours. You hear things the captors would never have told you.

Except even with those captors gone, dead, she can’t leave.

You’d think the castle would give up and fade, but it’s not like that. It’s not like a place, a world, a cross on a map. Wherever there’s a storm worth running from, you see it at the corner. White halls floating through wherever. So as long as there’s someone —or something— inside, there it goes. There it is, or it isn’t. Vanished. Always.

She sleeps in the same room.

She doesn’t burn a single page. But she keeps the books stacked and closed. These are the important things now: the hero in a shell and his shadow running loose. The plans, the new plans, she recalls.

You fix Sora. I’ll find Roxas.

There are no old drawings for reference. Whole as they are, they’re dead to her. She does the rewrite in words, spinning over the links, shaping them, not adding to the crayon-ink mess of old concepts. It’s harder than she imagined, but she likes it. She likes the long strings of letters around the chains of his memories.

She remembers the King and his voice and the way he was so sure; how he gave her a notebook with lines.

She wonders why her name has no x.

Kairi plus x.

Xirika? Rikaxi?

Nothing fits, and that’s why.

But even with a purpose and the castle all her own, she looks up one day and she’s sinking worse than ever and she hasn’t learned a thing. But she will. She’ll learn. Days that really aren’t alive, go by. Slides of sun on tile and stars at the back of her mind.

She learns like swallowing salt — drowning, drowning, sea level down.

She learns how easy it is to fall.

Stardust girl.

And maybe, she thinks now with her fingers pressed against the hero’s glass-magic cage — it’s safer to count tiles and make paper chains worth tearing. Maybe it’s safer to draw the stories you want told about you instead of toeing the line to live, to put the truth in words.

And she was told, she was told this.

And she should have known, but is dreaming so wrong?

Nothing fits, and this is why.

She’s only half a dream, here. She’s only half.

—

7 - does it even count?

She steps in every now and then; dress blowing in the wind. Remember her peering from the window? Remember the room of her old, old drawings?

Memories reflected rather than redrawn.

Her last assignment; masterpieces, if anything ever was.

But she burned the pages right after he left. Ash stains on white. Her last exhibition. Take a bow.

It’s not her story so much as it used to be, but she’s writing it. Words, words, words.

She keeps to staring at the sky.

And when the portal comes for her? She isn’t scared at all.

She knows who she’s on her way to find.

—

8 - but I’ll come back to haunt you, if I drown.

Meeting Kairi is such a relief, you wouldn’t know.

She’s jealous for being a beat behind. But her being jealous must mean Kairi felt it first and it isn’t so bad that way. And they’re not that far off after all. They’re almost in sync now, so close. When they talk, all Naminé hears is the heartbeat through their held hands — mine, yours, ours — and she doesn’t want to let go.

Like clasping her own hand.

Like someone else to hold the pen.

Stories, stories, stories.

She wants to hold and touch and feel this girl — but more than anything? She wants to be her.

Their fingertips brush.

Sky girl.

Ten, to twenty, to ten again.

Dead girl, live girl, heart girl.

Blood girl.

Sea girl tile girl ocean girl puddle girl princess girl witch girl pen girl ink girl star girl dust girl charm girl trinket girl shell girl flesh girl glass girl stone girl ghost girl spirit girl old girl new girl stained girl blur girl flower girl dirt girl first girl last girl — one — story — one — girl.

And it’s love, love, love without the blood.

—

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—

—

DEDICATION.

yell leader — The quotes she’s used on her livejournal layouts got me started with this. And her journal entries introduced me to Emilie Autumn’s music, and she’s awesome and, um. Yes. 8D;

So this story is dedicated to her, of course.

INFLUENCES.

“I will swallow, swallow
If it’ll help my sea level go down
But I’ll come back to haunt you if I drown.”
— Swallow by Emilie Autumn.

“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
— Rozencrantz and Guidenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard.

“I painted every story about stolen deadened boys, nearly devoured by evil queens, revived by loving girls. I painted myself ripping out my hair, cutting off parts of me, sewing on new ones. I painted myself on the back of a reindeer. Fish girl storm girl mirror girl. But sometimes art can’t save you. It had before I met him but now it couldn’t.”
— Ice from The Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold by Francesca Lia Block.