Disclaimer: キングダム ハーツ © Square Enix

She encircles his wrist with her fingers, guides it towards her chest. Presses his palm flat against the place where her heart should be. They breathe in unison.

Do you feel the flutter?

He glances down at her, and this prompts her to tighten her grip. Pushes his hand in further until he's sure that it's hurting her ribcage.

Yes, he lies.

Cherry lips form a small smile as she releases him.

Your nose will grow longer.

Slightly perturbed, he reaches up to touch his nose and her soft laughter echoes all around them. Their small little enclosed world of white walls and cold gates.

Sometimes, he wakes up in the middle of the night screaming from nightmares of feeling like someone else altogether.

But it's all right, because she never sleeps. He knows that when he opens his eyes, she'll always be sitting in her chair with a crayon in hand, always watching over him.

Her lap makes a bony pillow that's three sizes too small, but he feels a sense of comfort when he lies there and lets her fingers ghost over his eyelashes. Shuts his eyes like she's putting the dead to rest.

The witch kisses his forehead, breaking mending forming plaiting rusty chains of false realities as she wonders a little desperately (just a little), when will the abyss of lies end?

He always greets her with a smile the next morning –

it just makes her want to cry.

The end is near. He fights the boy in his fake memories, the one filled with warmth and strength and everything that he's not.

He fights and he loses, but the boy is foolishly kind to people who look like his real, forgotten friends. The rules are broken as he attacks the unarmed boy and he smiles the smile reserved for his favourite witch because he's really her knight –

but she has to save the real boy, and rips his heart to shreds without qualms.

It's hard to exist when you can't feel that familiar pulse or recall the name of someone you might have known a long time ago.

He realises that she's not a very good witch, as snatches of her icy fingertips guiding his across paper and her disjointed humming float into his mind against his will. Like an out-of-time tune and the occasional memory of a lyric.

To him, she no longer has a name – but it doesn't matter anymore, because beneath all the fuzz and the deceit, he knows that he was born to accomplish just one thing.

Protecting her.

This time, she lets her tears fall as she feels him die somewhere far, far, away from her.