Final Fantasy IX Color In The Spaces

**NOTE: **_Part of WAS's I Will Add Line Breaks club. Too chunky right now, it's euchh._

**A/N:** My first try at a Final Fantasy IX fic.

HEY YOU! Don't read further if you haven't finished the game yet. Or just risk burning your retinas with SPOILERS.

This is basically Dagger's thoughts after Zidane doesn't comes back from his venture into the Iifa Tree. (An advance apology for the slightly too-mopey Dagger. Oh well, I suppose I'll fix it if/when I get around to rewriting this.)

**Disclaimer:** Hah, I wish.

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**Color In The Spaces**

**Colors (n.)**–_the quality of an object or substance with respect to light reflected by the object; saturation or chroma; hue._

Her hands, they look so delicate.

White, they are white, like snow and bright lights and every color and no color. White like her life, everything and nothing.

White like her heart, which is blank and empty in such big patches that it may never heal. Her friends, they fit in there somewhere but not everywhere, not in the places where it's most tender and it hurts most when pressed and touched and handled, the delicate places where the great white bruises hurt worst.

Those gloves, they cover up delicate things. Fragile, breakable, that's her.

The voices, they are pink, endless cheery babble that means nothing to her. Pink like dawn and dusk and certain types of roses (but in truth she likes the white ones best). Happy things that she'll smile a nice white smile at but that don't mean a thing. Pink that will come for her soon, to take her away to deal with responsibilities that feel less like hers and more like Garnet til Alexandros XVII's.

Though she does own that name, doesn't she? Or maybe it's the name that owns her, she can't quite tell anymore. The name, it's black, something that weighs on her because sometimes she forgets and she acts like Dagger again and she'll want to go out and hunt a few fiends or wield her staff or go traveling because she can, because there aren't any restraints, but then she'll remember that she's Garnet, that she has babies to kiss and people to govern and important decisions to make.

It's not like she doesn't love her role, though, because she does, it's like green to her. Green like grass, like a solid, everyday, dependable thing that will be there tomorrow. Green like leaves and plants and vegetables that she can't do without. Green like life because being queen _is_ her life, she loves it just like she loves green (limes/four-leaf clovers/_his eyes, _well, yeah maybe she loves green a little too much).

Being queen, she was born to do it, even if she's not really Princess Garnet, even if her birthplace isn't Alexandria, it's Madain Sari, it doesn't matter because Alexandria is her home, she won't leave it, it's so filled with life for her that she's exploding with love for it, she wouldn't want anyone on the throne but her, because no one loves Alexandria like she does. It's every color, (white/black it's debatable, really) because it is almost everything to her.

Almost.

And in the pink of voices she hears Beatrix's, and not just her face but her heart smiles because Beatrix is one of her very best and most loyal friends, and her friends are her everything too (she has a lot of everything's, everything means something to someone who almost ended up with nothing). In times of need her friends were there for her and there's no feeling like the yellow of someone who cares. Yellow like sunshine and sunlight and everything that made her feel like giggling and hugging something with pure joy. Yellow like warmth and golden rays of delight that make her feel like she is invincible, she is the sun that is so yellow and she's sitting on top of the world, so small underneath her.

Yellow and white are related, right? She can't remember the sciences of light and reflecting colors, but some days she'll wake up as yellow as the sunlight pouring through her window and some days her yellow is paler than usual, and those days are usually white days.

It strikes her as sort of ironic that certain happy things like the yellow of joy and the pink of mindless chatter all just get duller when mixed with white. When confronted with her. It's a sad thought, so she doesn't think it. She's not white all the time, anyways. She smiles a lot and laughs a lot and is a happy person in general that people adore, that people look up to with affection because they know she'll take care of them. She's lovely and radiant and even if she is bruised inside she won't ever show it because she is just one person who is hurting and she needs to be strong for the millions who look at her for guidance who are hurting too. And it would be selfish to put her own feelings first, when so many people depend on her.

She folds her hands in her lap and looks out to the setting sun, it's orange fingertips painting soft strokes of sunlight across the sky, and lets herself think of Dagger, not Garnet, for a second, and the orange suit she wore and the orange life she had that was happy (yellow) but daring, bold, emotional (red). Orange, it's a pretty color, she decides. Maybe not as comforting as green or as cheerful as yellow, but good all the same.

And then the pink voices are upon her and Beatrix is bowing low (why does she still do that? They're all friends, even if she is a queen) before mentioning something about plays and shows and Tantalus coming to town to put on a special performance of _I Want To Be Your Canary_ for her.

She listens and looks up and her eyes sparkle, with what Beatrix doesn't know. She realizes that for the queen, Tantalus must be a double-edged sword. Tantalus was the theater (thief, really) troupe that became her friends and allies on her long journey and who put on the original show that started it all but also the troupe to with which_ he_ belonged and Beatrix doesn't doubt that her queen is thinking of this right now, and is that sparkle of tears or joy? Maybe both. She bets (no, she _knows_) her liege has had a troubled time thanks to her troubled heart, and there's only one thing that'll mend it for good (and it's not the yellow of friendship, even if that does help), so she'll just bow again and leave, taking with her the babbling voices that the queen wasn't paying much attention to anyways.

And then the sunset has her enchanted again, she doesn't feel like doing much and so she doesn't think she will. The babies would have to go unkissed tonight.

She watched the scarlet tendrils of fiery sunlight sneak in among the orange streaks, and is reminded so forcefully of another fiery moment, and so many explosions and lives lost and what was her mother _thinking_? The memory came back in selective patches, because in cases like these she tended to suppress the more painful parts, which weren't even the image of blazing crimson fireballs staining themselves forever in her mind's eye, but of his arms, comfortably warm (because watching things erupt in the conflagration made her sickeningly chilled inside) snaking around her and holding her close as she sank to her knees in horror. Those stifled parts could stay buried under layers of businesslike thoughts and orderly edicts and queenly duties, because they just made her heart (so white) ache.

Memories, they itch at her brain sometimes, begging to be brushed over and polished up from their current dusty condition, but she's reluctant to pull out some of the more persistent ones. Like the night of Alexander, or that day where she leaned over the side of the airship and saw him for the –_not_– last time, or that day in Terra when she saw the Invincible again and that gleaming eye that, above all, made her knees weak and vision swim with snakelike tendrils of red.

Red, like anger that boiled her blood at the thought of her fallen mother and comrades. Like Trance Kuja (anger personified), like his hair that fanned out so fluidly, like blood that leaked from _his_ wounds that he refused to let her tend, like the fire she'd seen ravage her world so many times, red like the fiery emotions that she didn't know that she had that ignited inside of her, red like adventure, like the days where they could run, go anywhere, do anything because they had freedom and each other. Red like days past that are different now, red like memories.

Memories of him, of laughter and joy and she smiles a little to herself, thinking of him because the thoughts, however much they hurt, still bring her a modicum of happiness because it's _him_.

He's her blue, like a soothing touch, like the endless expanse of pale sky above and the endless expanse of cerulean seas below. He represents her calmness, her inner peace. He's like her red, too, that makes her heart explode with something that's not altogether white, with raging emotions that she didn't think capable of her own delicate self. He's her orange, her adventure, her journey, her curiosity and exploration. He's part of her inner yellow, her sunshine, her happiness. He's so very green, because he was (is) so full of life, so lively, he _is_ a part of her life, he's the part that'll fill in the blotchy blanks within her heart.

And one day he'll come back for her, and she'll be waiting, because she's not a quitter and she won't give up on him because she's knows he'd never give up on her, at this moment he's trying to come back home to her, he is, because he's not a quitter either. It doesn't matter how long he takes (though faster would be better, please and thank you), because she promises herself that she'll wait for him, because emotions like these conquer all, right? This was just an obstacle, a test of her will, and she'd come out on top, she swears it. It'd be worth it, it would. Because once he came back he'd take her hand and they'd have the best happily ever after (princess and her prince) possible.

Until then, she'd be patient, and she'd wait with her white heart for him to come and fill the spaces up with a rainbow.


End file.
