logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

characters: everyone.
location: around town.
date/time: october 9-17.
content: the hallucinations begin...
warnings: psychological horror. please cw tags appropriately.

it's probably something that shouldn't be said out loud

October 9 feels like a normal day at first, save for the red lighthouse beam cutting through the darkness overhead. You know by now—or you've heard—that the lighthouse is only active during ferry arrivals and events... And there's definitely no ferry docked at the, er. Beach. The town is quiet, the forest spirits behave business-as-usual, Rastus doesn't know what's up. Whatever's going on, you'll have to figure it out for yourself.

And you will, though the hallucinations are subtle at first: objects moving when they shouldn't, people's proportions looking just a bit off, voices in an empty room, and so on. Is it just your mind playing tricks in the darkness? Might be! Will did warn you all about the effects of living without a sun and a proper day/night cycle.

As the days go on, the hallucinations are harder to ignore, no matter how much you may wish to wave them off as flukes. What's wrong with everyone's faces? When did all the howling start? Who do you hold onto when the world drops out from under you? And those hands...

While you might know it can't be real, it certainly feels real. But at least it can't last forever!

...Right?

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[ He isn't unaffected by what's happening. The hands come for him, too, but Vanitas thinks maybe he has a leg up on everyone else. Is it the Darkness itself? Because he is Darkness? Is it that he doesn't fight them so much as let them exist around him? Is it the way everyone's stress and anxiety feed into him, making him stronger, a direct correlation to all the negative emotion they pour all over everything? He doesn't know, but he doesn't really care to know, either. The old man would; but Vanitas knows now that the figure he's been seeing isn't actually him. So there's nobody left to wonder.

The stores dwindle. He's seen more than one person come this way to pick at the alcohol. It's funny, in a way, given what that man on the network had been going on about: rationing. Did liquor count for that sort of thing? Maybe it doesn't matter. Everyone is so distracted that Vanitas doubts anyone will notice until this is all over.

Bruce reaches for a bottle— Vanitas knows it's him, despite the way he's got his face covered— and something unseen jerks him away from the bar. Glasses behind him clatter to the ground, smashing on impact. Vanitas rolls his shoulder underneath one groping hand, slips under the counter and in between Bruce and the backbar. He pulls the bottle off and turns around, shaking it and it's mostly full contents at the other boy. His eyes gleam like twin suns in the dim. ]

After this?

[It's happening more frequently.

The hallucinations are becoming more intense and more convincing, and Bruce has seen others in town that look for too long at an empty space. Who talk to air or who react to the invisible. And if he's honest with himself, he doesn't know if he's afraid or if he's angry: of all the things he's heard, the voices in another room, the questions to dead air- none of it has been Thomas or Martha Wayne. Instead the presence of the hands have increased.

What were one tugs on his sleeve or nudges, a poke or a brush- has turned into pushing and grabbing and shoving. The bag has come off his shoulder twice. His head is shoved down. His ankles have been pulled out from under him. There's no point fighting against it because he can't control it- he can only control his own momentum. How much power he gives them. Mostly he allows his body to travel with it, yielding into the force and accepting redirection instead of spending all of his energy trying course correct.

He reaches for the next bottle and is grabbed, shoved bodily backwards. The pressure is significant enough that his back slams into the side of the bar. It hurts. Maybe enough to bruise. But when he looks up, instead of being alone, Vanitas is there. Less of a surprise is how pleased his expression is- the almost childish triumph glinting back at him in the dark, as he sloshes the bottle from side to side.]

Yes.

[Bruce tells him, because that's the answer. And because it lets Vanitas have the win.

He tips back onto his feet and feels the muscle in his back flex, where he'd made impact. Sore.]

Did you want it too?

[ Vanitas has little experience with what's in this bottle. The closest he's gotten to it was when M.K. put that glass of juice in front of him, looking uncannily like whatever Riku had been drinking. But that felt like eons ago, now. It's less that Vanitas can't keep track of the time, and more that all this power warps his sense of reality. Nothing else really matters but the darkness, and the way it's pooled into all his empty, jagged holes. He doesn't even think about the finite nature of it.

He only exists here, in this moment. Between Bruce and something he wants, doing his best to exacerbate all the negative emotion seeping like a fog through this town.

The bottle is stoppered. Vanitas flips it over in his hand, using the neck like a handle. It's hard to tell if it looks more like a club or a knife, the way he tosses it and catches it again, over and over. In either case, it's potential to be used like a weapon is there in the arch of his wrist everytime it lifts into the air. ]

People drink this stuff when they want to forget something.

Are you trying to do that, Bruce?

Not always.

[He swings it casually, not like a bottle but like a weapon- and that suggests that he's more familiar with the latter than the former. It isn't the first time Bruce's safety has been threatened and the cumulative experience is the reason he's able to maintain a level head. There's no jolt to his posture or wary framing of his hands. Vanitas has always been antagonistic and conversations on the network have mentioned this aspect of his behavior, that it's to do with his nature. Bruce isn't sure if he believes that in it's entirety; everyone he's met is a combination of both nature and nurture. What does that mean for Vanitas then? How much of the boy in front of him has been cultivated?

There's a lot of night in him.

Bruce was afraid of the dark until he took it into his hands. This isn't a competition and he can't treat it that way- he knows that what Vanitas is asking for is a fight- a race to some mutually destructive point. He reaches for his own bag instead and pulls out one of the bottles he'd already taken from the shelf, turning the label into the space between them. A sweet liquor.]

People also drink it because the like the taste.

Have you tried this one before?

[ Vanitas' encounter with it hadn't been particularly pleasant. He didn't understand the allure. It wasn't like eating a bottle of honey, or sucking on a piece of chocolate. Those things he felt directly, spreading all through him like the sun coming up at daybreak and warming the bleak, cold desert— those moments before it became scorching and unpleasant. What Vanitas had encountered had been bitter and tangy, leaving something tart on the corners of his mouth and lingering in his nose.

He flips the bottle once more and catches it in a fist, right side up. It would seem like a mirror of what Bruce is doing, if it somehow didn't look like Vanitas was about to use it to stab someone instead of drink out of. ]

Those people are stupid.

[ The suggestion here being that maybe he thinks Bruce is stupid, too. It doesn't matter if Vanitas really believes it or not. He's not really saying it to have a conversation so much as to be provocative.

He smirks and wiggles the bottle, barely glancing at what Bruce is trying to show him. The label doesn't mean anything to him, anyway. ]

How many more of these do you need on your own?

Those hands will just smash all the bottles before you get back.

Perhaps. [It doesn't get a rise out of him. Not the implication, not the threat, not the question. Vanitas wiggles the bottle again and Bruce takes the signal for what it is- he isn't getting that back anytime soon.

A different approach then.

Bruce's head lifts, up towards the glasses dangling overhead. Not what he's looking for. He leans back and then crouches, looking beneath the bar instead; that's where he finds them. From the railing above them, a ghostly hand grabs at one of the cocktail glasses and throws it- sending it singing through the air until it crashes against a wall. Bruce stands back up in just in time to see the pieces splinter. To his credit it does make him pause for a moment.

It doesn't last. He sets two shot glasses on the wood ahead of him and brings his bottle closer, unscrews the cap.]

Can you get the one over there? It says 'cacao.'

[ Bruce is strange.

Maybe that's what keeps Vanitas orbiting him like some dark star, never quiet drawing near, but never drifting far enough away to lose his trajectory. He isn't without feeling, like a Nobody without a Heart. Neither is he just dark or light. There's nothing even that remarkable about him— not like Mary, or that angel, or even Riku.

He doesn't rise to Vantas' needling, but neither does he walk away. He turns his back on Vanitas, instead, and he doesn't have the moment to let the irritation rise at being disregarded so blatantly before Bruce is speaking to him again. Vanitas lowers the bottle just a little and frowns. He hardly notices the way some of his momentum fizzles in the wake of this unexpected development. ]

That wasn't an invitation.

[ But he doesn't seem to have much of a choice. From his left, nothing gives him a good push, and Vanitas lets himself stagger into it, instead of trying to fight it. When he rights himself, it's to come eye-to-eye with 'Cacao'. He considers pretending he didn't see it. He considers forcing the matter. Maybe smashing the bottle in his hand over Bruce's spine, just to hear to shatter.

But curiousity wins out. He pulls the 'cacao' down and puts it next to Bruce's elbow, still holding the first bottle in his fist at his side. ]

Thank you.

[Sometimes the best thing to do with confrontation is to side-step it. Many of Bruce's opponents have been larger than he is. They have been stronger or greater in number, and he'd had neither speed or surprise to make up the difference. The only thing left to do is endure it and wait for an opening- to redirect momentum that he can't create himself.

Vanitas goes stumbling away from him and Bruce doesn't follow him with his gaze because that too is a careful decision. It preserves his sense of privacy and extends the assumption of trust- as if he knows where Vanitas is going and anticipates his return. It isn't strange then, when he appears back at his side.

A hand comes out of the dark and pushes at the back of one of his legs- the force behind it is strong enough that his knee slams into the bar. He thinks that will probably also bruise, and doesn't reach for the bottle. He looks inside the mouth of his bottle instead, then at Vanitas again. At the creme de cacao.]

We need to pour some of that into each of these. Approximately three-quarters please.

[ Annoyance rises up in him again, ebbing and flowing like the tide. This reminds him of the pancakes, before all these hallucinations and ghostly hand starting pinching and pushing and pulling.

It hadn't irritated him then. He'd wanted to know the process, even if he wasn't exactly hands-on about it. But they weren't supposed to be making or building. They were supposed to be fighting. When the darkness intensified, Vanitas leaned into it and encouraged the behaviour. That's what he is and what he does.

Vanitas feels an invisible hand take him by the back of the neck. It doesn't yank, but just holds on. His eyes cut away from Bruce to the hunched shape of his Master in the corner of the room. Vanitas knows he isn't really there, despite how real he seems. ]

Do I look like I'm here to do what you want?

[ He asks Bruce, without looking away from his Master's yellow eyes. ]

[There's almost a tangible quality to Vanitas's moods. The ebb and flow of his temper has an almanac of its own making, one that Bruce is learning how to read, taking one page at a time. Here he watches the tension build inside his hands and shoulders, in his arms. There's almost a flinch, where his head could bow if it tipped just a few centimeters more, became more than just a suggestion. His gaze isn't simply guarded and distrustful, it sharpens. The moment that a knife moves from flat edge to a point.

Bruce wonders what he must be seeing, because surely it's a hallucination of his own- for the precise place that his attention lands. But maybe it's a voice. Bruce has heard many already and not a single one from the people he misses most.

Instead of looking in the same direction, Bruce carefully tugs the fabric of his sleeves, one at a time, until his wrists are bared.]

Don't you want to try it?

[It's framed and phrased very deliberately. It leaves both bottles in Vanitas's possession and makes him, and his participation essential to the process. It presents whatever they do as an extension of Vanitas's power.]

I'd pour this one first, but it's supposed to float on top.

[ Part of him revolts, wants to tell Bruce no. No, this isn't the way this is supposed to go. What are you doing?

Everyone else caves, in some way or another. Even if they don't rise to what Vanitas says to them, even if they don't follow the trail of crumbs he's been taught to leave to control the situation. Something still shifts in them. Frustration, or anger, storming away from the interactino. But Vanitas had never needed to be the one to manipulate everything from above. For all his Master forged him into the perfect weapon, Vanitas has only truly been following his own desire.

Completing the x-Blade, causing more strife to feed from, instigating the second Keyblade War. The more Darkness, the better. If he can't put an end to his suffering, then the least he can do is make sure everyone around him hurts the way he does.

Xehanort smiles.

Vanitas jerks his gaze away and puts the second bottle on the counter to free both his hands. ]

What difference does it make?

[ He sneers, gesturing with his freshly emptied palm at the shot glasses. ]

Just drink it from the bottle like everyone else. It'll be disgusting either way.

[He lets the bottle go and his gaze cuts away, a sharp, decisive separation. The glass base clicks where it meets the bartop and Bruce feels the same hand from only moments earlier ram his knee into the wood again. Feels bone connect in precisely the same place.

You can stop pretending. I know you're afraid.
It's been many years since he last saw Silver St Cloud, but her voice sounds exactly the way he remembers it. This much is true of every voice he's heard so far- they're trapped in time, repeating conversations that have already happened instead of reacting to what's around him now. Every time Bruce has heard them he's picked through his memories, trying to place the precise moment that this snippet of dialogue occurred. It helps, to distinguish the difference between figment and reality.

Bruce reaches for the creme de cacao and pours, a dutiful three-quarters. And then he reaches for the cream liquor, topping each shot glass to the rim.]

That's the secret. Things like this are better when they're mixed.

[Then, as if to prove his point, Bruce takes his glass and raises it in a small toast. For the first time since their standoff he meets Vanitas's unnatural yellow gaze. And then he drinks it.]

[ Vanitas stares first at what he does, the layering of the alcohol, and admittedly is a little fascinated by the split in colour. Whatever he does, the dark base and the lighter float on top create a perfect line. Vanitas has never gone out of his way to study what's in any of these bottles. His attention only comes up when the glass comes up off the counter.

Bruce looks him in the eye when he drinks it, like that's supposed to prove something. Like Vanitas hadn't watched every other person in this bar do this exact same thing. Like Riku hadn't given him a glass he'd been drinking out of, like M.K. hadn't also done the same.

He narrows his eyes, staring hard at his expression, looking for that tell-tale wince that always follows this gesture. Either Bruce is very good at hiding it, or it's not actually there, because no crease follows after he swallows the whole thing down in one go. ]

That doesn't make any sense.

[It's sweet. Bruce has never really had a sweet tooth, but his first forays into binge drinking had tended towards this end of the spectrum- before landing on champagne and the occasional scotch. Lived experience informs part of his decision and their last meeting, over pancakes, informs the other. Vanitas had preferred the pancakes with chocolate chips, he'd been liberal with the sugar and syrup. This isn't a fruity cocktail but he thinks it will be a reasonable leap.

His empty shot glass comes to rest on the counter and Bruce is acutely aware that he's been observed. Monitored for a specific reaction. Perhaps Vanitas thinks he's lying. That's certainly possible, but to what end? What's happened to lead him to this conclusion?]

Sure it does.

I told you, some things are meant to go together.

[He takes the moment to begin pouring another shot, beside the one still meant for his companion. Cacao in first.]

Like syrup and pancakes.

[ He starts to measure out another while the that first one still sits on the counter. Vanitas wonders if left there long enough, if the hand on the back of his neck would move to that and knock it on the floor, spilling it's contents with the same sort of carelessness that Vanitas moves around Beacon with.

Maybe that's all those grasping fingers are, then. Darkness manifesting. He wouldn't really be surprised. Maybe that's what he's feeling, as much as the desperation and fear and anxiety from all the citizens. When enough of that negative emotion coalesces, after all, it can be hard to start picking it apart to it's baser aspects.

As if responding to his thoughts, another hand takes him by the bicep and gives him a firm yank. The scant inches between Vanitas and the bartop close and he feels it clip his hip and his waist. Another bruise to add to the rest.

Vanitas looks down at the shot. Some things are meant to go together. It's not that he trusts Bruce— he doesn't trust him any more or less than any other idiot in this light forsaken town&mdah; but he recognizes a challenge when he sees one. And besides, if this is some kind of prank, it isn't like Vanitas can't just take him out at the knees right this second.

He's never done this before, but that does nothing to dissuade his determination. Caving, Vanitas picks up the shot and tips it back in one relatively smooth gesture. He's expecting a similar experience from before: tang and citrus, salt and lime and the sharp after-effect of tequila. What he gets, instead, is the smooth silk of chocolate and cream. It's sweet, like a candy bar, and there's a burn that lingers afterward on the edges of his tongue and the back of his throat.

The surprise is all over his face, and he directs it at Bruce like he's been slapped, utterly bewildered. ]

[If Vanitas were someone else and if their relationship had begun to unfold differently, Bruce might have winked in his direction and lifted his glass to drain it for the second time. But it's more complicated than that. Vanitas has been a uniformly antagonistic presence when when antagonism hasn't been warranted- when there's been no personal element to the conflict. He seems to cultivate and even thrive on the discord that's omnipresent around them. And in the same hand he lacks a number of basic life and social skills that any one of their peers might have seen modeled by family and friends, by classmates and peers. Riku, an individual he knows from his own world, has approached this place methodically- acknowledging differences between Beacon and the things he knows without mention of vast cultural or technological differences. Vanitas didn't recognize a stove.

It isn't a matter of finding excuses or explanations, Bruce looks at these details as a way to inform the future. The most effective way to respond, the most efficient way to achieve his goals.

It's the reason that instead of saying I told you so, Bruce simply raises an eyebrow that says it for him. Before he leans over and begins refilling the glass, cacao. Creme. He's pleased to see that his conjecture about Vanitas's sweet tooth has paid off.]

What is this?

[ He asks, abruptly accusatory in the face of Bruce's smug expression. He points at the shot glass instead of at the bottles the young man is using to mix the drink, but maybe that's only because the shot glass is the more immediate culprit. It's not as if Vanitas thinks Bruce did something magical with it, but only because he's never seen the guy do anything even remotely magical. Even the people that are trying to hide it have tells.

Bruce would be a normal person, if he didn't do everything just slightly to the left. Just a little bit wrong to what Vanitas' limited understanding of the world and the universe dictates.

He only stops pointing when a hand shoves at the back of his knee, and Vanitas buckles on one side while maintaining his upright position with the other. Off in the corner, he hears the old man make a sound of disappointment. Steadfastly, Vanitas continues looking at Bruce, demanding his explanation, even as Vanitas starts to reach for the refilled shot glass. ]

Why does it taste like that?

The clear one you grabbed is flavored like chocolate.

[The accusatory timbre puts them on more familiar ground. Bruce doesn't have to make a deliberate decision to avoid coming across as arrogant, he just isn't. In some ways Vanitas reminds him of the uneasy teenager he'd once been- a mercurial child trying to understand a world that he had always believed to be one way, only to realize that it was precisely the opposite.

Bruce reaches for the clear bottle just to tilt it backwards, to bare the label as Vanitas buckles, shoved hard towards one side.]

But the alcohol content is strong enough that it doesn't taste very good on it's own. The taste is synthetic.

[The second bottle comes closer, a dark, opaque glass.]

This is a cream liquor and it's thick like milk. It helps to get rid of the unpleasant alcohol flavor so that when they're combined, you taste the chocolate.

[He takes the moment to carefully fill the rest of the shot glass, liquid held together by surface tension alone instead of spilling over.]

Not everyone drinks to forget.

[ Despite the way he runs his mouth, Vanitas isn't ignorant. This information isn't the kind that he once would have had any use for. Everything about his existence boiled down to how much pain he could inflict and how quickly. If it didn't pertain to that, then he had no real use of it, and his Master certainly didn't cultivate curiousity in him.

But maybe that had been half the problem. Vanitas wasn't just the weapon Xehanort had wanted him to be. He wasn't a complete blank canvas to rewrite over— as much as the old man had wanted so badly to just make an army of himself. Hearts were much more volatile than that— and Vanitas might have been the most unstable of them all.

His yellow eyes narrow as they jump between the bottles, his hand frozen halfway to reaching for the glass as he absorbs what he's being told. Mix two things together to make a greater whole, something more palatable. Once he understands, Vanitas' eyes cut back to Bruce, narrowed and sidelong. ]

Maybe not. But that isn't why you're here.

[ The bottle Vanitas had been holding, after all, hadn't been either of the ones Bruce is using the mix shots. Vanitas pushes the bottle in question forward by it's base, as if to prove his point.

Two more shots have been poured, and Vanitas wants to have that flavor again, so he picks one of them up and copies what he's seen other people do— drinking it all in one go instead of sipping it like those things that come in larger glasses. The flood of bright and bitter chocolate lights all his tastebuds up, searing and much sharper than the slow melt he gets from honey or candy bars. Vanitas licks out the inside of the glass to chase the dregs of liquor while watching Bruce shrewdly. ]

[Vanitas watches him with the kind of wary skepticism reserved for wild animals- his gaze scrutinizes Bruce's face and lands on his hands in equal measure. Trying to determine how much of whatever he says might be true, how much it should be trusted, how much it matters. This doesn't trouble him; Bruce has spent the lion's share of his life under public scrutiny- watched by the social elite, watched by the press. It was an intensity he anticipated would increase with age and with the persona he'd decided to cultivate. And it's strangely irrelevant now.

But Vanitas pushes the earlier bottle forward with some small measure of petulance and Bruce lifts it off of the counter now that his companion's attention has been diverted. The bag opens and it too is lowered within.]

On a matter of taste that's simple; I don't really have a sweet tooth.

[The shot is swallowed and Bruce doesn't stare but he does watch- watches Vanitas pour the whole thing into his mouth, watches him lick the inside of the glass the way one might scrape the bottom of a bowl for icecream. There's a flush to his cheeks that didn't exist before, the warmth of alcohol making him pink. Inexperience, he thinks. A low tolerance.]

But you're right. I'm not here for pleasure.

Are you going to stay? [At the bar?]

[ Vanitas can feel a heat curling in his belly, one he's unfamiliar with. Like in swallowing the liquid in that little glass, it struck a flint against a rock and set off sparks. Like someone has cast Fira straight into the inside of his belly. The sensation is strange, but it fills him up— distracts him from the other things that take up his attention. The yawning void in his chest where a piece of his heart has been yanked out. The creeping, humid cold that's slowly been reaching it's icy fingers across Beacon as the weather turns. The hollow apathy that's kept him in bed for days on end.

The other shot glass stays on the counter for a beat longer. Bruce speaks instead of reaching for it— so Vanitas makes the decision for him and picks it up, tips that one back, too. That chocolate flavor spreads out all over him, burns his mouth and reaches up into his face, pinching his cheeks pink. When he puts the glass down, it's just a little too hard, a little clumsy.

Vanitas turns, then, and reaches for the first bottle Bruce had been using to pour. ]

What do you care?

[ It's not that Vanitas is less aggressive now, but the viciousness with which he'd come at Bruce with when they first met has been successfully diverted. Instead of putting his energy into making Bruce feel as bad as possible, Vanitas redirects that focus into trying to recreate the layered effect Bruce had made in the tiny glass.

He messes up the first one, the colors pool together into something muddy. Vanitas picks that one up and tosses it back, throat working around the burn, and tries again— this time with a little more success. ]

You got what you came here for.

[That isn't a question that's easy to answer. Bruce does care- he cares not simply on principle, but almost as a reflex. How many times has Alfred told him?

It's appropriate that he hears him again now
He is not your responsibility.

But what's the point then, in any of it? Why have the money and the power? Why have the privileged and the ability, the will and the discipline? He has to use it or it'll mean nothing at all, and Bruce is tired of accepting helplessness. Jim Gordon had been there- Alfred and Selina had been there, to make him feel held not only when the world came down around him, but when he couldn't see a way through the darkness.

He could leave. Vanitas is unlikely to stop him and Bruce suspects that if left to his own devices he might give himself alcohol poisoning within the hour. If nothing else stopped him, if the soft parts of his heart didn't give him pause, it would be the sight. That Vanitas tries to layer the shot, fails. Then tries again, tries a little better. He isn't just a quick learner. He's eager to learn. To master.]

Come with me.

[His gaze flicks back up, to his face.]

I'll make something to eat. And we'll try a few more drinks.

[ The truth of it is, left unchecked, there is noting to stop Vanitas from drinkng himself stupid and ending up under the bar before he even realizes what happened. It's not as though he's ever the opportunity to drink alcohol before. When would have ever had the time, between all the training, and all the war? Vanitas might have had the ability to leave the Keyblade Graveyard as his whim, but he'd been well and truly under the thumb of the old man standing in the corner of the bar with his hands behind his back.

Vanitas narrow his eyes at the shot. It's not as clean as the one Bruce had made. The side of it melts into itself, and as gravity takes it, it starts to sink into that muddy colour again. Warmth is collecting under his skin, the burn of the alcohol. Vanitas can feel it simmering, making the high collar of his armor itch against his adam's apple. He raises one hand to pull at the neck of the material.

When he raises his eyes, they're a little bit darker than they had been before. His pupils a little wider, his cheeks pinking up under the effects of liquor. He doesn't yet understand how quickly this is going to affect him: he's never had a real drink in his life. ]

Why would I do that when everyone is so upset?

[ He swallows the shot and puts it on the counter, and shakes his head— a little a dog with a fly in it's ear— when a full body shiver goes through him. This feeling, it's different from the way he fills up on the despair and fear of Beacon's citizens. He's finding it harder to focus, but it creeps up on him in such a way that instead of feeling unnerved, Vanitas' cockiness only seems to intensify. He tips his head back and looks at Bruce from underneath his eyelashes with his chin jut out. ]

I could just make everyone more upset. Feed on their Darkness.

[He'd known before the very first shot had been poured of course, that Vanitas had never had alcohol before. But as always there is a world of difference between knowing and seeing. The blood has rushed to the other's face, tinting him pink and darkening his eyes- his movements are looser and less tightly controlled. He looks, for the first time that Bruce has seen, like a real, ordinary, boy.

Bruce does not need to invite him. It's likely to complicate his plans because not only does he need to account for a witness and maintain stricter control of himself, but he also needs to account for his particular brand of chaotic instigation. Instigation for the sake of instigation.

But the boy shakes his head and his hair falls into his eyes and Bruce remembers what it was like to try and down himself in club after club- surrounded by strangers he didn't care about. Trying to destroy the soft, horrible thing inside him- trying again, night after night.]

You could. [Bruce admits, as if they're talking about restaurants to go to, discussing their options.] But you liked the oven, and the pancakes, and the drink, haven't you? Maybe there'll be more things you'll like.

[One shoulder rises and falls, a barely-there shrug.]

Besides. If you change you mind, you could always go back to darkness.

[ Vanitas wants to be irritated that Bruce is right. He has been on the nose with everything else— and as reluctant as Vanitas has been to engage in a way that isn't entirely antagonistic, he knows it's wrong to say he hasn't got something out of it. He knows how to use the stove, he knows how to make pancakes and that they're good to eat. Being frustrated, though, is hard to reach for when he's feeling full on all the darkness and loose from the liquor.

It's hard to imagine whatever else Bruce might have hidden up his sleeve that Vanitas will like. But he's right about that, too. He did like the drink, and he was sure he wouldn't— not after what Riku did to him, and M.K. tried to do. Vanitas turns the shot glass between his fingers, swaying dramatically when a hand takes him by the arm and starts to push him back and forth, like it's testing his resistance. He gives it none, and it makes his head bobble on his neck as he weighs his options.

The darkness isn't going anywhere. All this anxiety won't just disappear overnight, even if the hands disappear as abruptly as they appeared. And anyway— he kind of likes the way this drink is making him feel. Fuzzy around the edges.

The hands stop shoving him and he reaches over, picking up both bottles, signalling his intent to take them along. ]

Fine. Let's go.

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EVENT LOG: BURY A FRIEND

lil jon voice: shots shots shots

and they say bruce has no chill

he has some chill

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