logsinthenight | And the saddest thing was, all of it could have been avoided (closed)

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And the saddest thing was, all of it could have been avoided (closed)

characters: Vanitas and Riku
location: In and around the Boathouse
date/time: Oct 8 (during the thunderstorm)
content: Vanitas and Riku have been circling each other even before Sora's disappearance. It all finally comes to a head, appropriately, under cover of a violent thunderstorm. Hearts are a mess.
warnings: violence, complicated grief

Looking at the boathouse now, it couldn't be more different than from those days when they lived here. When there were hammocks strung up under a couple of tarps because rain would somehow find a way through the leaky roof no matter how many wood shingles and flattened tin cans they nailed up there. When their belongings amounted to a couple of sacks and pairs of shoes littering the floor and the laundry dried from the rafters.

For a little while, it was alive here. A peculiar little home. Now it's reverted back to its old ways, ramshackle storage with recently-used life preservers hung up all over the drafty walls. A single sack in the corner, a bucket collecting rainwater pouring in from a new hole in the roof. The wind blows and the whole structure creaks, the rain is a hundred thousand impatient fingers drumming on the tin.

The only sign that anyone lives here at all is that stupid blanket crumpled on the floor, and in the light of the torch burning from a sconce fashioned into the central support beam, a few strands of hair shine silver-gold against the moth-eaten wool.

Riku had stripped the place of every sign that they had been there, with a few graves on the hill overlooking the shore to remember Dawn and Kairi by. It's not that Riku wants to forget, to erase them, he can't. But it's hard to keep his promise when he can't look around this space without his heart banging around this box full of broken glass called the grief. Does enough of that all on its own and it will for a long time.

So he gave away Kairi's arts and crafts supplies. He gave away the hammocks and extra clothes and stuff that were for the three of them, for Sora, Kairi and Riku, because he would wake up and look around for them asleep (or pretending to be) in the other two, or he'd grab the wrong pack and try to remember how to breathe around the name lodged in his throat.

No one would blame anyone for reading his intentions wrong.

Riku isn't at the boathouse yet, because he's making his way back from another fruitless search of the General Store for a coat that'll fit, his hood pulled up and his lantern shielded from the rain by a scrap of canvas he's threaded through its handle.

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He doesn't know, or care, if Riku might be in the boathouse. Really, he's not thinking about what that other boy is up to— what drives him is a fruitless need to ease the ache.

Vanitas wishes that he didn't know what it felt like— to have something akin to comfort. He wishes Sora had never been here at all, so he wouldn't know what this carved out place in his chest was— that hollow feeling that was so much more than just the aching loss he'd experienced when Gene didn't come back. It's more than that. It's the chunk of his ragged heart that belonged to Ventus, once, the one Sora had patched up with himself— cracked and left open like a gaping wound.

Sometimes, being in the church helps. Ever since he saw her, looking so much like he once did, with her glowing eyes and the pressure all around, being there... it was quiet. He hasn't seen her since, but he knows she's there— he can hear her. He has the evidence when he wakes up with the blanket tucked up around his neck. It's barely anything at all, but it can be enough if he closes his eyes tight enough and tries hard.

But he can't go there when others are present, and as the church is slowly rebuilt, the busier it seems to get— and being around that man, the one that shines like a small sun, is almost physically too painful.

It's stupid that he comes here at all. Vanitas knows Sora isn't here— but maybe, he can take something of his. Anything he left behind— clothes, or his hammock. The idea sits in the back of his mind; like maybe, by crawling into the hammock they'd shared on occasion he can pretend like it never happened.

The door creaks as Vanitas shoulders it open, and while the storm outside doesn't buffet against him any longer— the screaming of the wind and the crash of thunder only intensifies in the large echoing space when he freezes on the threshold.

There's nothing here.

The shock roots him to the spot, just for a moment. The hammocks are gone, the patchwork bags are gone. The place would look utterly abandoned, save that single torch throwing fire all over the old walls. Over that single blanket, crumpled pathetically underneath it. Vanitas inhales, sharp and thin and moves forward stiffly. There were two posts that Sora's hammock hung between. It always had the blanket hanging half off, like Sora was always in too much of a hurry to bother putting it back. Something cold crawls all through Vanitas body, whiting out his thoughts, pushing everything out to his periphery. Everything is gone, and the only person that could've done something like this...

Vanitas has left the door hanging open. Lightning crashes through the gap, throwing his dark silhouette into relief.

From a distance, Riku sees him silhouetted by the torchlight filling up the interior of the boathouse the way Vanitas fills up the doorway, the edges a little blurred by the violent downpour. For a second the bottom of his guts drops away because he mistakes the wild jut of his hair for Sora's and then the scent of Darkness slams into him a moment later, heavy and harsh under the smell of ozone.

"Vanitas," Riku calls, his footfalls wet from the way rainfall is drenching the shore so fast the sandy earth can't soak it up fast enough. Thunder snarls through the clouds full-throated and on the heels of that noise he shouts again.

"What are you doing here?"

It's not like him to come to the boathouse. There's no reason for him to visit.

Not when Sora is gone and with him, any reason for his darker dead ringer to come skulking around their once-shared living space. His hooded jacket has kept the rain off his head and core but his arms are soaked, the flash of lighting turns the rivulets of run-off silver, bright drops falling from his fists.

His instincts are blaring a warning and he suspects it's the scent of malice that has him so on edge, the feeling that he couldn't be here for a good reason.

His head snaps up, like the sound of Riku's voice is a gunshot— and his eyes lock to his hooded figure with an almost audible click. His pupils contract, and Vanitas has never been the kind of person to try and disguise the way emotion contorts his face. He has never been a creature that doesn't feel, after all, and it wasn't as if the old man ever tried to beat it out of him. He'd only ever wanted Vanitas to lean into them harder, let them make him stronger, and meaner.

And he barrels into that sensation at full speed, now, letting that shocky, wild fury well up and fill the hollow, broken part of his heart.

"You—" He snarls, there's no other term for the way his voice goes deep like gravel. Vanitas puts his hand out and Void Gear materializes in his palm in a flash of darkness. The gesture is punctuated by the smash of thunder, so loud and so close that it seems to rattle the boathouse. The lightning illuminates his yellow eyes, like an animal, in the darkness.

"You did this!" There's no pause, no warning. There is only Vanitas pointing his weapon at the other boy and the rush of black that charges at him from the blade.

Riku twists away from the black jet that lances straight out at him. Still he feels it, the caustic, blistering chill as it blasts past, near enough to make the little hairs on his nape stand on end.

You.

Letting his own momentum carry him from twist to turn, Riku follows through with knees bent in the moment before he springs forward. Perhaps it would be wiser to dive away from the open doorway instead of through it, but Riku is banking on the fact that the quarters inside the boathouse are close enough that neither of them can swing their Keyblades too freely without smacking into something.

A handicap for Riku is still one for Vanitas.

You did this.

There's no mistaking this for anything but unchecked wrath; anticipating that Vanitas might try to take him down in his headlong dive inside, Riku draws on his own Darkness. He slips briefly into it, one great blurry surge forward that he hopes presents a less easily struck target.

"Did what?"

Riku dives for him, instead of away from him, but that doesn't surprise him. All these keyblade wielders are the same. The only one that ever ran from a fight from him, that he can remember anyway, was Ventus— and he hadn't even run. He'd walked, sedately, as if turning Vanitas down from a battle would have ever prevented their clash.

But Ventus isn't here. And neither is Sora. There is only Riku, coming into the shell of the boathouse, slipping into the darkness.

He dodges, and Vanitas goes on the offensive. He isn't wearing his armor or his helmet. Just the soft long sleeve shirt and the black jeans he's adopted under the novelty to wear because he can. But he doesn't act like he isn't in a full suit of armor right now. Riku isn't that hard to follow— but only because Vanitas knows darkness. He knows the way it warps, and he's on Riku immediately, seemingly undeterred by the close quarters.

Vanitas roars and swings, and Voidgear cleaves downward.

Carried forward with his own momentum, Riku doesn't spare the energy to try to stop when he emerges to see Voidgear swinging down at him. Stubborn pride and cold fury can erect walls around a heart as easily as the barrier he gathers around himself, his dark shield a spherical ripple in the torchlight.

It's a shield hastily made and that downward cleave is made as if Vanitas means it (and he does, that's clear). Riku feels the whole shield shudder, cracks spiderweb out of a glancing blow that would have probably sent him into the floor if he'd been a little slower. Vanitas is strong, which Riku expected, it's the fury he feels, it's his darkness that fuels him.

Enough force had gone behind his swing that Voidgear splinters the floorboard.

And Riku, staggered and having sacrificed much of his forward momentum to withstand the strike, tucks his shoulder and seeks to slam into Vanitas and push him up into the central beam that used to carry their hammocks and laundry lines, the tarps that kept the rain off their slumbering bodies.

Voidgear clangs off the shield with the hollow tone of metal on magic. The real sound comes in the way his momentum crushes Riku and his shield into the floorboards. They splinter, the shield and the wood taking the worst of the impact. It leaves Vanitas slightly open, because his downward swing can't complete when it hits that physical barrier. His arm goes wide and leaves Riku the space to lunge through the wall and put his shoulder into his stomach.

It all happens very quickly, but for a moment it's like slow motion. The way Vanitas' eyes shine from under his keyblade, Riku looking up at him over his raised arm, sustaining his fractured shield.

All the breath gusts out of Vanitas when he hits the support beam. He feels the grain of the wood through his shirt and count the knobs of his spine. Without his armor, it'll bruise. The beam shudders under their combined weight, creaking ominously around the howling of the rain beating on the roof. Vanitas lifts both knees to drive them into Riku's belly, puts both boots on his thighs and uses the central support as a counterpoint to kick him away and put distance between them again.

He shouts: "Destroy!" and cuts his Keyblade through the air. The Dark Firaga he summons gives off no light. It's only a shimmer of black that follows Riku's trajectory.

Vanitas resets, holding Voidgear over his head.

Vanitas lifts up both of his knees and Riku braces, his stomach tightens on reflex. His knees still drive the breath out of him in a hard grunt, his kick pushes him back into the wall. He's lucky that the pegs holding the life preservers to the wall narrowly misses punching him in the kidney, the impact sends some of these floats thudding to the floor.

There is no flash of light when Riku summons Braveheart, there hasn't been since he arrived on this world, it's too narrow in this space to fight with a weapon of this size and that isn't the point.

He drives it forward to cleave in twain the shimmer of black that Vanitas launched at him. It splits, slaps a pair of scorch marks into the wall to either side and one of the life preservers smolders instead of burns, still too damp from recent use, the humidity in the air. No longer does the question of why matter. Vanitas is here for a fight.

Pushing off from the wall with a grunt, Riku's overhead swing is limited - he can't bring it all the way back, there isn't room - but his strength is brought to bear with the aim of driving his blade down to lock with Voidgear. And then, blade-locked and grappling, to aim Vanitas' back to the open doorway.

There's no guile here, he's trying to maneuver for an advantage and Riku expects Vanitas will be doing the same. Even as furious as he is, as hurt, he fights with predatory instinct and those instincts have proven formidable in battle.

Braveheart is a fine keyblade. Solid, large, designed to protect. It's nothing at all like the monster of a weapon Vanitas raises to meet the downward swing Riku drives into him. Voidgear is as jagged as it's wielder, all strange edges, wrapped up in chains like it's trying to keep something trapped and controlled inside, behind that blue all-seeing eye. When their blades meet, the resulting clang is like a microexplosion. Vanitas bares his teeth like an animal between the cross their weapons back, and lets Riku steer him.

Vanitas is strong, but his strength doesn't come from brute power— not like the kind that bunches in Riku's biceps. Vanitas knows he would never be able to win directly, not without exercising other skills in his arsenal.

He's trying to push Vanitas out. Push him away— but Vanitas won't go. He came here for a reason, and Riku— he should have been reliable. He should have been like every other lightbearing fool that clung so desperately to their friends. It's what Ventus did. But he wiped this place clean, like Sora had never even existed. Seeing this boathouse scooped out, it's like seeing his inner world made real:

There is nothing left.
Sora isn't coming back.
Vanitas is this very same thing— scraped out and void of life, only a remnant of what he could be, of what he maybe once was.

Riku pushes him toward the door and Vanitas snarls and pushes back— and dematerializes. For half a second, a mirror of him remains, locked in combat with Riku— and in the breath that follows Vanitas is above and behind him, the copy is gone, and he's striking down in a flood of darkness.

There are plenty of ways that Riku is alike and unlike most of the other Guardians of Light. Like Lea, for example, he's capable of doing anything for his friends. What Riku couldn't do was bear with the constant reminders that would play tricks on his exhausted mind when sleep came reluctantly. His daily visits to Kairi and Dawn's graves were not entirely to their memory, it was to remind himself that whatever he thought he saw or heard, they were gone.

What Riku failed to account for was that Vanitas might come here at all. How could he? They weren't friends, though he wouldn't call them enemies, when both of them had different, private, and unopposed priorities. And Sora... wanted to help him, Riku thinks. The way he wants to help everyone, selflessly. Riku has no doubt that it didn't matter if they were connected somehow or not, that's just how brightly Sora shines.

Sora never really seemed to need a reason to care about anyone.
He's gone, because he cared too much to leave anything as it was.

Their Keyblades connect and Riku feels that impact shudder through his whole body, he digs in his heels, squares his shoulders, leans his weight and strength into it, bearing down. Staggers forward, even though a shadowy afterimage of Vanitas still faces off against him.

"What?!" Riku starts to say, flinching a glance up as the scent of that Darkness greets him from another direction. Not soon enough to dodge enough and the torrent drives Riku to one knee. In retaliation, he surges back up, intending not on knocking away Vanitas's weapon with his own, but by bypassing it completely to drive the hard top of his skull up into his chin.

There are a lot of ways Riku isn't just like the other lightbearers. For one, he fights dirty when the moment calls for it.

Riku surprises him.

Not the way Sora had a reputation for— the way he would think of things differently, interrupt and interject, veritably alter the course of histories. The way he could seamlessly take Vanitas' rage and despair and not stop it, but redirect it in another direction.

Riku surprises him in the ways he lets himself drop into it— the Darkness everyone said he was immune to. Vanitas has a hard time understanding how it's possible. Not that he doesn't understand Light and Dark can't exist in the same place at the same time— after all, he and Ventus had been one singular heart once, and every other being he's come across is some yin yang of those same energies— but he uses it without attempting to deflect it. It isn't so simple as the black magic he casts. It's in moments like this:

He could attack in any number of ways. Vanitas has fought Keyblade Masters and knows, after a fashion, how they'll attack. But Riku surges into the brief opening and Vanitas, without his helmet, takes the full brunt of the attack. Not from the keyblade, but from Riku's skull. Vanitas' teeth click, his head jerks back, and he bites hard on his tongue. The flavor of copper explodes into his mouth, but instead of flinching backward, Vanitas holds his ground.

He learned long ago how to take a beating.

Keyblades are useless in such close quarters, so Vanitas grabs Riku by the throat before he's even reset back from the headbutt. It isn't to choke him, but instead, Vanitas takes a half step back and wheels Riku around before he's regained his balance on both feet— flinging him back into the depths of the boathouse, taking their fight toward the opposite end, away from the door still hanging open to let the screaming wind into the building.

Lightning crashes, throwing Vanitas's yellow eyes and pale face into sharp relief. There's blood on his teeth and on his lips as he charges after Riku, swinging horizontal with his Keyblade.

The violence and fury in him can't be contained, but the animal nature of his attacks makes him a little sloppy. He takes a chunk out of the pillar holding up the ceiling with the breadth of his swing. He cuts down one of the hanging lines Riku likely uses for hanging his clothes with zero sense that he should be preserving any piece of this building. The strength of his swing makes the torch, tucked into the brace, flicker wildly. If it were any other sort of flame, it might have been put out.

Vanitas proves once again to be made of sterner stuff, immovable, with the kind of ingrained reflexes that leaves no room for Riku to doubt that he could kill and kill swiftly. It's a small wonder he doesn't just crumple his windpipe - that's what Riku braces for, when he feels his fingers clutch at his neck - and instead he wheels around to throw him. If only that had been all momentum, but it's not and he knows the difference; Vanitas is powerful, rugged, and dangerous.

He swings and Void Gear bites at the support pillar, snaps in two pieces the rope that Sora hung himself, once. The torchlight flutters, throwing shadows wide and wild in the boy's wake. Outside, lightning flashes again, a violent white flicker piercing the small gaps between the drafty wooden planks.

Thunder chases hot on its bright heels and Riku doesn't know which shakes him to his bones more, that or the blow he meets with Braveheart brought up like a shield. They clash and a shockwave shudders the shack, life preservers hanging from pegs in the walls falling as one to the floor.

"Guh!"

The strike, even met head-on with his Keyblade, still knocks him back with enough force that it dislodges a plank of wood on the wall free of the frame of the shack when his back collides with it. Planting the sole of one boot against the wall, Riku pushes off and forward, thrusting ahead with his blade.

The shockwave of their keyblades colliding is loud as the thunder outside. It ricochets in the small space, echoes back down on them, deafening. The shack shudders ominously. It jars up Vanitas' arm, shaking him in muscle and bone and vibrating into the core of his limping, lopsided heart. Vanitas skids back half a step, two tracks in the earth— a mirror to the way Riku surges back into the wall where the life preserves had been hanging, ready, moments before.

Vanitas bares his bloody teeth, and where he could dodge out of the way of Riku's graceful lunge, he braces. He sinks into his knees, maybe uncannily like another boy they know, and takes the blow. Feels it shudder through his arms and into his heels, and no sooner has he collected it does he turn it back on Riku.

Riku is bigger than him, but then, most people are. He's stronger in brute force, too, but Vanitas makes up for it with the adrenaline of his rage and soul-deep anguish. He could go on the defensive, but the need to destroy, to wreck, to make Riku feel even a fraction of his despair, makes him offensive. He swings Voidgear like it's a bludgeon, bringing the full weight of his not inconsiderable strength into it. Every time they collide, the unseen shock of their power at odds makes the whole building shake.

"You— you excised it all! You, who say you do everything for your friends," He spits the word like it's a cuss, inadvertently spiting blood in the process, with a particularly vicious downward stroke.

Riku blocks it with his own Keyblade, and realizes his mistake right away when the impact makes his fingers go numb around their white-knuckled grip on its handle. At once he feels the strength in his arms waver, digging in, he surges with his whole body up against the weapon he's locked with to make up for it. Each puff of his breath through his gritted teeth stirs at the silver hair trying to stick to the sweat on his brow.

The building groans disconcertingly. If he could spare a moment to look, he'd see how the walls were starting to lean, something in the very framework was broken and starting to fail.

All he sees is Vanitas on the other end of their crossed weapons.

Excised.

For a quick moment he sees it, Vanitas and his turned back, the way he was standing in the way of all those candles like one great black pit in the shape of a boy. Waiting for Gene to come back. He came here for... His eyes a little wide, Riku's thoughts find their way out of his mouth.

"You came here looking for something of his, just like at the church, didn't you?"

Vanitas keeps swinging, beating down onto Riku's raised keyblade like he could smash through this shield by blind fury alone. It's utterly unlike him, gone feral and wild in a way Xehanort would never have approved of, but he isn't here to stop him. There's nothing here that can stop him.

"Is must be so easy for you— to throw it all away!" He's all but screaming over the sound of their battle, over that shout of the thunder overhead. Riku's solid defense won't break, so Vanitas pulls the darkness up and blasts it out from himself— a supernova in the middle of the boathouse. It rushes out like wind, diverts around Braveheart and slams out the wall nearest them. Immediately, the shriek of the growing storm fills the space, the rushing of the wind. Out there, the surge of the ocean snarls against the shoreline.

It lashes against them both and somehow, makes Vanitas look even more wild, his black hair caught up in the wind. His pupils are pinpricks in the gold of his irises. "Not to feel what it's like— without half your heart!" Vanitas surges toward him again, trying to bat Riku's keyblade out of the way, trying to get past his defense to lay into his body.

Without half-?

There are truths that the heart recognizes immediately and sometimes those truths are painful enough, damaging enough that the mind turns away from them. Riku does that now, when his hammering heart tells him it's no coincidence that Sora screamed and thrashed in abject agony that time when Vanitas died - he still doesn't know how it happened, he never asked - when his heart tells him that must mean Sora is gone if he says he's without half his heart.

Because that's how it feels without Dawn here, like a piece of his own heart has gone missing. Sora's gone on a quest, his mind insists, because any other story threatens to shatter him. Later, the seed of that fear planted in this moment will grow into the hallucination that sends Riku recklessly into the forest to chase a phantom in the shape of his friend.

How deep does his misery and despair run, to inexhaustibly pour out wave after wave of such powerful Darkness? He's said it's what he is, Riku can sense it, but the way it tears at them both and blows open a wall to let the storm thrash at them takes his breath away. Vanitas manages to bat Riku's weapon out of the way, but this time Riku is ready, surging inside of Vanitas's following swing to drive his knee straight into his gut - and driving his knuckles towards his cheek in a wild backhand.

They're again too close for keyblades. Vanitas casts his own away in the same moment that Riku drives his knee into his gut— seconds before he backhands him, the crack of the swing punctuated by the crash of thunder outside. Instead of letting it put space between them again, though, Vanitas turns with it— wraps his arm around Riku's, the one still holding Braveheart, and locks his arm into his armpit. The pressure, the angle, wedges Riku's arm into an awkward angle— all Vanitas would have to do is exert the right amount of force and it would dislocate his shoulder, or pop out his elbow.

Instead, Vanitas uses the position to wrest the keyblade out of Riku's grip, to render him as weaponless as Vanitas is.

His cheekbone is pink and stinging, his mouth is bloody where he's bit his own tongue, the raging storm whips his hair and his clothes up into a frenzy. Almost nothing about him seems human at all— it's as though all the rage and anguish in him as rushed to the surface, flooded all of him to make him nothing more than a creature operating on instinct.

Again, he throws Riku, with the arm he's held captive— and leaps at him, shadow-stepping through the distance before Riku has even righted himself. It means when he swings down with his fist, to punch him in the face, he's doing it from slightly above Riku— driving downward.

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And the saddest thing was, all of it could have been avoided (closed)

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