Silver

The only thing gold about her is her hair.

In all other ways she is silver. Her footsteps trail mist, barely there. Her hands craft fog that she weaves into the minds of those she touches before she vanishes without a trace. She is the silver links in a chain, the pale white of her dress, the starkness of her castle cell. She is faded, no more than a ghost.

Her chest aches then, to put pencil to paper and produce such golden images; friends playing and hands twined together, people bound to one another. She bleeds color into sunsets and islands, gives shape to friendships, to shining destinies.

She gives form to love.

Love. 

She brings his face to life with soft pastels. He is her hero, though he doesn't know it. Kindness is stitched into his very soul, his thoughtfulness made less of intellect and more of tenderness. If given the chance he will reach out to all the puppets and ghosts of the world and fill them with his light, his life. He will take the shutters on their chest in hand and pull them back so they might see their hearts shining within.

He is adventure, he is fun, he is friendship. He is a hero.

He is her hero.

Except he isn't. In a kinder world, he never would be. He did not come here for her, and will not until she reaches into his heart and rearranges it piece by piece. Will not until she has taken all his sweetness and smashed it, put the pieces back together to her captors' preference.

The worst is that she likes it. The rearrangement will bind him to her and she'll have her hero. The loneliness she feels will ease. Finally, someone to open the lock upon the princess's cage and turn silver to gold. Finally, she could be the sun in his sky.

But no matter how she wishes she is not a princess. She is a ghost and a witch, and no matter how she likes the changes that she makes, it is not her choice. Thorns and thunder, fire and ice and the promise of endless captivity is what moves her hand.

That does not make her feel any less ugly for her desires.

She loves him, after all, not because he loves her, but because he loves. He loves so many and so brightly. Still, there is only one sun in his sky. No matter whether he exists as night or day, it is her light he longs for, and Naminé is only the moon—a mirror that reflects, longing to be real.

She is not his only moon either. There is another, and she suspects there may be one more that she must carve from that other moon's shape.

She thinks perhaps the boy who longs to be the hero's sun has a greater chance than her. He might rise as dawn one day, and not a dark new moon. Regardless, if a mirror is made of him, a moon of a moon, then she knows he will long for the sky too.

Maybe she would make him long for her, just to save him that agony. Maybe he would care for her without that. Maybe he would understand what it was like to be silver and make her gold.

She knows she is selfish, but is that truly so bad? Is it so wrong for a doll in a cage to long for more? And if she must be cruel to survive, would it be so bad for her to find a little pleasure in that cruelty? Would it be so bad for her to shape him as she likes?

But there is none, no shape she loves more than how he is now. He is so lovely in all her sketches and lovelier still in her mind. She is sure he will be loveliest in person, and oh, how she wishes they could meet in any other way.

In the end she is sure she is the same as the boy who longs, and the mirror to be of that boy, and perhaps all others not so lucky as to be the hero's sun.

I would rather be silver and see him shine than shatter him and be his gold.