logsinthenight

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characters: Riku, Vanitas, Bruce Wayne
location: The Museum
date/time: Oct 18 thru the end of the month-ish
content: Riku didn't exactly have the option to agree to be Bruce Wayne's guest at the Museum, as evidenced by the rope burns on his wrists.
warnings: descriptions of injuries, this also deals with character death, complicated grief, depression, and suicidal ideation.

Riku doesn't dream.

He hangs suspended in the featureless black of unconsciousness. For a mercy, it's quiet. No imposing figure comes to drip poison into his ears about the Darkness. Nothing changes. It's an emptiness that demands and expects nothing.

Sometimes it slips away. There's one moment he thinks someone has put a hand on his face to guide it up so his mouth meets the curve of something hard. A cup, he thinks, when it tips water past his lips and he drinks. Twice more he flirts with regaining consciousness, he hears footsteps, or an odd sound he can't identify somewhere else.

When he wakes entirely, it's to a persistent and disorienting black. Only when his pale lashes brush against the cloth does he realize he's been blindfolded, which gives him pause for how it launches his mind into speculative motion. Riku associates the blindfold for a time long since passed, with a specific frame of mind. Why would he wear one now?

And why - as he tries to touch the blindfold and discovers both of his hands are tethered by the wrists, arms out at either side - is he tied up?

It comes back to him in pieces.

The cold. The dark. The desperation and fury as he fought his masked opponent, rolling in the dirt. His right eye feels hot too large in its socket, he's sure he has a black eye under that blindfold, his body is stiff, its numerous aches beginning to sound off as his consciousness sharpens. These are fine - as a guardian of light, he isn't a stranger to injuries more serious than these - it's the other realization.

He saw Sora's lantern scatter to the forest floor in flameless and irreparable pieces and that loss swells huge and smothering. Moments after waking, Riku gasps. It sounds loud after all the silence.

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It isn't rope, it's cable. He doesn't yet have the full measure of Riku's abilities and knows that while their fight had shown him a young man at the peak of his desperation, Bruce doesn't mistake that for being the peak of his capability. It's the reason that the cable creaks but doesn't yield, the way that soft rope fiber might. The memory of his mother is there, smiling playfully before she taps the tip of her finger against his nose: If you can't be good, be careful.

Bruce reaches the top of the stairs and regards him in silence. Watches him test his strength, the strength of the bonds. Riku's expression twists, the shape of his mouth is wretched and bare for the way his eyes are covered. His knuckles are bleeding freshly.

"It's for your safety."

This wouldn't be an adequate explanation for anyone, but it isn't meant to be. Bruce uses it to announce his presence, a quiet, measured voice from a short distance away. He's damp with sweat and sore from the exertion of the morning- to say nothing of the healing his body has yet to be allowed to begin. He knows that Riku will not be able to see through the fabric over his face, but that isn't the reason his posture is so precise. That's simply practice.

"We've been experiencing hallucinations for several days, largely visual and auditory. Accompanied by persistent hands that grab and touch."

He paces his way forward, eyes landing on the broad line of Riku's shoulders. The red on his knuckles, the mottled bruising across his face and the dark, swollen circle beneath one eye. The bruises starting around his wrists. There is no creak of floorboards beneath him and by extension there's very little means to follow his movements without using his voice as a point of reference. And that's what Bruce is trying to do. To let himself be followed. To offer information in the hope that it might help him clear his head, stay calm. He's known Riku to be a thoughtful, reasonable personality thus far. There's no reason to believe he can't be that again.

"The hands have vanished, but I can't be certain that the hallucinations have stopped entirely."

There are inches between them. Bruce stands in the narrow crescent of his space and knows that he has many reasons to refuse. But.

"I'd like to keep you this way for a little longer. Just in case."

It's for your safety.

The whole of Riku's frame tenses and goes still but that isn't the same as saying the fight has left him, cables still taut for the sustained strain of muscle against their manufactured reliability. There's even an attempt to strip the anguish from his expression, some automatic mask he slaps over his mouth.

He recognizes that voice and after a beat he surges against the bonds again. They hold fast. Turns out, Bruce's mother made a good point. An abundance of care may have spared Bruce another broken bone and Riku a smashed lantern.

"I know what I saw," Riku croaks. Disuse and panting at air gone dry and musty this far from the shore and this deep into autumn has put a layer of rust on his voice, "People would say anything to save their own skin."

The threat is explicit. He still blames him for his part in Riku's perceived failure to save that one last speck of light he had hoped for, had strived for. He's still... angry and frustrated, for all that exhaustion and grief have crushed its sharper edges into powder. The closer he gets, the more he becomes aware of that scent, the more certain Riku becomes.

It's crazy to think he hadn't identified his masked attacker sooner, but he'd been...

Distracted.

This instead feels like a betrayal, even if they hadn't been close. Because in Bruce he had thought he saw a kindred spirit. A heart that sought to use the light and dark for a better future, not just for himself but for everyone. Someone unafraid of the shadows, a protector of the weak.

Instead, he stopped him. Like Riku needed protecting when he was only trying to protect the one last thing that really mattered. And now he's still doing it. He hears Bruce say he'd like to keep him this way for a little longer, and Riku tosses his head, arches his spine. The cables don't give.

"LIAR!"

He has the answer before Riku strings the words together. The muscle in his arms goes taut, his fingers flex and he becomes still- Bruce recognizes it as the moment before a strike. It's the reason he takes a single step backwards right before Riku surges against the restraints.

Bruce waits through it because that's the only thing he can do. He glances briefly down the hall to where Vanitas has been sleeping, the hope that it won't rouse him and that by extension, Vanitas won't appear and stagger over, try to make things worse. He paces to a small tableau on the opposite wall, withdrawing fresh cloth and a canteen of water. "But you didn't see it, did you?"

It's a place where he could be cruel, but cruelty isn't in Bruce's nature. He understands the pain Riku feels now, because even though the experience is synthetic, the sensation of loss is real. There was too much smoke for a vision to have reached him and that had been the point, he'd been attempting to limit outside input.

"It's an idea. Convincing, like a nightmare. But without any evidence."

The rim of the canteen lifts and Bruce reaches gently, but firmly, for his jaw. Guides the mouth of it to his lips.

"Water. You're dehydrated."

Riku can't see him. No - what he can't see are the details, like how he's dressed or the features of his face. He can still sense Bruce. Even with the blindfold and in the spaces when he doesn't have Bruce's voice to track him with, Riku follows him as he moves around the room. It's not just the darkness that he can smell, it's the light that whispers on just the other side of it, steadfast and quiet.

He finds he resents him for being so calm.

It would be easier if Bruce was angry too. Riku broke his nose, he battered him, with fists and anything else at his disposal, and if not for his restraints Riku might have choked the life out of him, too. Bruce so reasonably claims he didn't see and Riku grits his teeth, a muscle jumps in his cheek for the creaking pressure in his jaw.

Of course he saw! And how clearly, the glitter of glass as it rained down in a shatter, the wisp of smoke where there was once a flame in that wreck that was a lantern. He even choked on that same smoke, so thick it burned his eyes, his lungs--

Was it really that thick?

How would he have seen anything?

No. No, it was Ansem, Xehanort's Heartless who was the illusion. Not Sora. He was there, he was so sure of it..! He must be lying!

And yet his heart, the sorrowful mess it is, has doubts. Those doubts begin to drain the tension in his jaw, makes his face more slack with exhaustion and uncertainty. He remembers telling Quentin about the last time he and Sora spoke, about his own concerns that it might have been something his mind made up to quell the heartache.

Did he ever feel Sora's light, in the forest? The way he never scented Ansem's darkness? Was that, too, just wishful thinking, or his private fears given life? His heart aches, filled to splitting with questions, regrets. Bruce has approached again and the grasp at Riku's chin makes him startle, until he smells the water in the canteen. Anger, grief, confusion, even the resentment curdling over Bruce's continued calm doesn't hold up against his own thirst, he relents and drinks.

"Why?"

He says, his voice a little clearer for the water.

"Why are you doing this?"

Hadn't he tried to kill him?

There it is- the first sign of lucidity.

Riku has a very spirited nature underneath the polite composure he wears around town. It isn't enthusiastic or optimistic, but instead it speaks to qualities that Bruce can recognize in himself too. A stubborn unwillingness to budge, a kind of single-minded determination. Everything Bruce has ever let go of had claw marks in it. He can understand the uncertain waver at the corner of Riku's mouth- somewhere between a clenched jaw and curl of resentment, of grief. But despite the complexity of his feelings, despite the situation and the circumstances, Bruce can see him trying to reason his way through it. The moment that he questions himself. Tests the water.

He takes a small sip and Bruce watches his throat contract as he swallows- lowers the cup just a little as he sees a small bead at the corner of his mouth. The angle seems to make it easier, because he swallows more readily after that, perhaps propelled by instinct instead of desire. Bruce takes the moment to examine him more closely. The bruises beside his eye are still a deep ugly purple and his wrists will be raw soon. Perhaps when Riku drifts off again he can come back and wrap the skin beneath the cable, to protect it from worse wear and seal in antibiotics. He'll need to do that part first, because applying a cool compress beneath his blindfold might be enough to rouse him. As the time has passed Riku's become more aware, unconsciously, of his environment than he was at the start. He isn't as pliant for nearly as long.

The cup lowers carefully. Riku's mouth it still wet with it, but nothing spills and nothing rolls down his jaw. He's watching him in profile when the question breaks the air. It isn't strange, all things considered. But there is a kind of sadness in it. Bruce had done all kinds of reckless things in his grief, but no one believed that he deserved punished for it. It begs the question- how many things has Riku had to atone for? How much of it did he think was necessary.

"Because I want to see you recover."

It's a very honest, very simple answer, while the rest of it clutters the inside of his mouth. And then, because the reminder is worth having, especially in times like this, he says-

"There's someone important you're doing all of this for, isn't there?"

It would be easy to give him too much or too little from the canteen; the conscientiousness surprises him. The feeling isn't very direct, it sits a little apart from himself, the way he might if he took a particularly shaking blow. He notices. Sets that aside for whenever he's in a position to investigate what it means.

The water he's swallowed has painted a vaguely cool column all the way through his core. Like some of the others in Beacon, once Riku realized how limited their resources would become, he reduced his own intake to a thermos of broth. A little more, to eat something with more substance to make up for poor sleep. It hadn't been enough to spare him the stresses that had waiting for them all when the hallucinations really got going.

Other than a cramp in his empty gut, Riku doesn't feel hungry. Just hollow.

I want to see you recover.

Riku feels something stir in his chest at his answer. Reminded, like stumbling on a nostalgic scent on the air or discovering a photograph at the bottom of a drawer, of a feeling that glows in the dark and hollow space he's in. He felt this the first time they met - that brief encounter on the chaotic lake shore, the ferry sinking and panic a sharp tang on the night breeze.

That kindred desire to protect. Of having something to protect to begin with. What sticks in his thoughts like a burr is all the questions that pop up around the reawakened sentiment. Why he was there that night in the forest?

In his thoughts, he sees Quentin, looking with a dark longing at the dangerous waters below the bridge. He had been so desperate, haunted by phantoms that were all the more real for the cracks they split into his heart. They weren't close. They weren't even friends. Still, Riku couldn't turn away, he needed someone to pull him back from the edge of something irreversible.

Riku's lips part silently. Maybe it's realization, or simply being at a loss for words at Bruce's question.

After a long moment, his head inclines, "...Sora."

Sora. It isn't the first time Bruce has heard this name, and while he lacks personal experience with it, has no face to align with the syllables, it isn't necessary now. Riku says it like an incantation, a magic word that's powerful because he believes in it, because it means something special to him. Bruce knows that he stopped the other boy from pursuing his own demise, that he's wrapped sprains and wrapped cuts. But there's no stitch or splint or bandage for a broken heart. They heal, or they don't.

Riku is very still and Bruce, a matter of inches away from him, watches it pass through him. Instead of pushing any further, he reaches bandaged fingers into the pocket of his slacks and withdraws a small bottle. The ferry gives them very little to work with and this is no exception, but Bruce has been carefully shoring up reserves inside the museum since his arrival. He doesn't have a lot, but he has enough to share. A plastic lid is removed from a plastic bottle. Bruce's hands are, and always have been, steady- but he makes the conscious decision to jerk just a little. Enough that the pills rattle inside the case and by extension, that Riku can know what he's doing.

"Here. They'll help with the swelling."

Two tablets hover, waiting for Riku to make the decision on his own and by extension, to open his mouth. To give Bruce the opportunity to place them inside and follow up with another swallow of water.

"I'll wake you in a few more hours, we'll talk then."

The rattle seems to pull him out of his thoughts. He remembers the sound from the first aid kit he brought off the ferry and delivered to the church, can guess it's something like those little plastic bottles full of mild painkillers and antibiotics. Riku knows how in short supply medicine and medical supplies are, even more so now that the ferry is gone. And so few of them who know how to use them properly.

Again, Bruce is opening his hands when all Riku had given him was his closed fist, broken bones and broken skin.

Minutes earlier, Riku had come back to himself ready to find a way to end it and maybe take him down with him, he wouldn't call what he feels optimism, but he does feel like Bruce has added days to the future when Riku had only moments to hold. Sora. Had Sora not really been there at all? Riku's heart doesn't have a sense of certainty that he wasn't there... and about as much of a lack of certainty that he was.

Bruce is doing this because he said he wanted him to get better. If his story is true, then what he did was selflessly save a stranger's life, no matter how much it hurt him. Riku, he realizes, is a little done with fighting Bruce. Sora would have believed in him, which makes the choice a little easier.

He takes the medicine, and the swallow of water that ushers them down his throat.

"...Thanks. I know how tight supplies are."

"You don't need to worry." This, in and of itself, will not be enough to deter Riku- who he has not known particularly long, but who he knows will worry anyway. It's part of the reason that he doesn't leave the thought there, even if he does pause just long enough to put the canteen aside. To reach for a cloth and begin to fold it. One of Bruce's earliest lessons about the world had been about its unpredictability- about how strange and volatile it could be. He armors himself with information, and it's an armor he extends to Riku now.

"I've been collecting supplies since I arrived. For emergencies."

There's enough water that's left for Bruce to not just fold the towel, but to soak it. It takes some careful maneuvering after the split he's put together on two fingers, but Bruce has always had a methodical, patient nature. He takes each end in hand and wrings it carefully, leaves enough moisture behind that he won't have to rely entirely on friction, and he carefully closes the distance again. The body's instinctive desire to slake his thirst has reopened the gash that splits Riku's bottom lip. It's this cut that Bruce tends to now, dabbing gently at the fresh blood- holding the cloth against his skin so that some of the cold might soak in.

"I'll take care of your wrists in a few hours, once I can bring you down. Is there anything else you need?"

Edited 2019-11-13 05:17 (UTC)

If only Riku had been so deliberate. What has he been doing, since Kairi and Dawn died, since Sora left on his quest with the spirits? Plenty, to a casual observer: he's assisted with explorations, he's built and repaired structures, gathered and organized resources and supplies. He's helped pull together information to keep newcomers informed. He's wandered to get the lay of the land and familiarize himself with the faces and voices of those in it. But how much of that was the deliberate, methodical amassing of information he used to do, how much of it was filling up his time, keeping himself busy so he couldn't slow down long enough to feel the yawning ache?

Peter tried to warn him against plowing forward without thought to what would happen when he went dry. Bruce tried to stop him when it turned into a reckless act of almost assured self-destruction. Of Bruce he knows little, and the little he knows isn't an observation most could make about a person, that sense of light came to few, and darkness to fewer still. He emptied his meager quarters of its few belongings because they made his heart heavy to see them. He stopped preparing for more than a week out. Bruce has been collecting supplies like he intends to survive with the sort of drive that Riku promised to have.

How long has that been going on? Did he really think he could keep his promise that way?

If it's true, if Sora had been a hallucination the same way all those other phantoms and sensations had been, if Robin is right and that's the work of those green-eyed spirits he's heard about, then he's been leaving himself open and vulnerable to their attacks. He hears Bruce wring water from something, then the cold-hot sting as the wet cloth touches his split lip. He barely flinches, more stunned than anything.

Riku dips his chin, drawing his lip from the cloth.

"You're that sure I won't hurt you again?" he means no, there isn't anything else anyone could give him. The only thing he wants is his friends, the only thing he ever wants is his friends, "You're... confident."

Edited 2019-11-17 21:52 (UTC)

Riku's chin tips forward and Bruce reads it for the signal that it is- a break. But that the words he's chosen to say are an extension of the same worry he has for everything else is somewhat less of a surprise.

"Someone else might call it foolish."

That's being generous, all things considered. He's found voices of people he knows everywhere these last few days, and it isn't difficult to imagine Selina's again now. She would find a window to stay close to, an exit point, and tell him he was an idiot. Remind him of his enormous ego. Maybe once the nerve feels less, raw, less exposed, he'll find a fond smile for the memory. Not for the first time, Bruce is grateful for the blindfold that covers Riku's face, and the privacy it affords him.

Bruce waits, folds the cloth a second time and touches it to the split once more. The color that comes away isn't the same angry red, it's pink. A positive sign. It's far from the most significant injury, but Bruce has treated what he can already- the bruises, scrapes, and swelling won't be addressed until he's safe to approach. Though perhaps it's time to adjust the angle of the bindings, it's dangerous to joints, muscles, and tissue to keep his limbs stretched at the same angle for an extended period of time. Later, once he's out again. In the wake of his more conversational reply there's a brief, contemplative silence. Before Bruce's voice continues, quieter this time.

"I'm not sure." That you won't hurt me again.
"But I can choose to abandon you or I can choose to trust you.

It's a concept he's struggled with for a long time- how much of him is honest? He tries, he can acknowledge that much. But it's evident even in moments like these that Bruce treats the truth like something dangerous- that could be overheard.

"And I've made my decision."

Someone else might call it kind, Riku thinks.

There's a heaviness to the silence that fills the space between foolish and I'm not sure. Riku is in no position to analyze it, to uncover its hidden significance. He can only breathe around the shape of his own grief, around the vague ember he fanned to life by planting doubt in what vision Riku had been so convinced was real. Except this time, when Bruce folds the cloth, Riku lifts his chin to meet it halfway.

Cooperation is a sign, too.

It's too early for Riku to promise anything, but he doesn't feel like he's in danger of toppling over some kind of edge he can't back away from. He's cracked in places but they still fit together, nothing is beyond repair and hearts - hearts are more powerful than most think. Fragile, vulnerable by their very nature, but resilient. Some worlds have artisans, potters who take a broken cup and fill the crack with gold, like there's something in the mending worth wearing like they're proof, the way they carry scars.

Riku does think it would be a poor way to thank a man for saving his life if he betrayed his trust, after he has given him a gift he thought no one could give him anymore.

Hope.

He exhales, gives his head a small shake with his teeth lightly gritted, a little... overwhelmed. Does he thank him? It feels empty, premature, he's given him so much and Riku is too bereft, too exhausted and stunned to feel anything but undeserving and inarticulate.

"Okay."

It's the best he can manage. Okay.

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riku had modesty??? source???

http://gph.is/XJI25L

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