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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Vanitas watches him in profile, the way Riku leans into his thought with his head, the way his silver hair pieces around his skin like desert clouds parting around a sunbeam. With his lashes gone low the brilliant teal of his eyes look stormy and dark, backlit by the shape of his lantern at his side. Here, Vanitas can almost see it as much as he can feel it. There's a darkness in Riku, but it's filtered through a sort of light that could smother everything around it. It's not like Sora, marbled and evn. It's not like Kairi or Ventus, undiluted. It's something else, something that shines brighter, maybe because that darkness in Riku is there to strengthen it. The Light was brighter the closer to Darkness it got.

I'm the shadow that you cast. Vanitas snorts, and it's hard for even him to tell if it's at the memory or at what Riku is asking him. He tilts his head against his shoulder, pressing his cheek against the black cotton of Bruce's shirt. It makes the spinning settle a little, and his eyes focus a little better on Riku's face. He has a healing scrape on his cheekbone. Vanitas wonders if Bruce smashed his face into the dirt to make it.

"I always hurt, stupid," He's not slurring, but he is drawling, his voice drawn out and slow, and he sniggers at his own admission, his eyes heavy. That was the point, wasn't it? The more he hurt, the stronger he was. But that was what the old man had never really understood. It hadn't really been all about the power for Vanitas.

Mostly, he just wanted it all to stop.

"Not now, though," He goes on, and raises his mostly empty glass at Riku, almost like he's toasting. He wiggles the cup and the liquid threatens to slosh over the rim. "Better than Curaga." And Vanitas giggles again, because he doesn't actually know if that's true. It's not like he's ever felt one cast on himself.

Riku thinks often about the nature of light and darkness. The stronger the light, the deeper the shadows. How it's not about what came first, the Darkness or the Light, it's not deciding this that's important as much as how much the dark loves the light, ever chasing after. How it can't smother the Light entirely, how it burns brightly even in the deepest Darkness. In this nearly lightless world, he's learned how true that is, even if sometimes the light burns somewhat desperately.

His heart's been cracked by the strain it's been under, by the weight of his grief, even Braveheart won't answer its call. Its appearance as the broken Way to Dawn that night in the forest had been a warning, Riku thinks, and instead of heeding it he nearly tried to kill the person who had tried to help him.

While he was still tied up - both for their protection and his own - Riku thinks it was just desperation holding together the pieces. Determination, then, when Bruce released his bonds, tested the treatment he'd given his wrists as he slept, wrapped them again. He feels worn thin and brittle and he's glad for the relative privacy of the museum. It... feels like a place safe enough to be brittle in until he gets stronger.

Bruce doesn't press him, doesn't give the impression he needs to hurry up and get over it and he speculates that perhaps Bruce has been in this sort of position, that maybe he understands what it means to lose something so important it breaks your heart.

Vanitas always hurts, and his honest admission should shock him as much as the revelation but Riku has room for only one. He always hurts, like it's a matter of fact, and abruptly he understands why he's always quick to fight, on the offensive, why he claws out instead of allowing anyone in, why it would take someone like Sora to reach him. Why, with him gone, he might say something like how we don't all have to survive.

He stares at him for a long moment, the slight part of his mouth speechless.

"Nothing like Curaga," he automatically answers, just for something to say, "But what do I know."

Exhaling softly, Riku lifts his hand, reaching for the glass experimentally, "Never tried it."

Vanitas' thoughts are too slow and syrupy to appreciate that he's shocked Riku with this information. And even if he wasn't, there's no guarantee that Vanitas would even realize that's what's so surprising. Living in it every day, with every keyblade wielder knowing what Darkness is and what it does to a person, then why should this be any kind of surprise? Vanitas was made of it, he'd never gotten the chance to try and be anything else, even back when he wanted it. Back when it was mostly just jealousy filtered through a lens of hatred.

Ventus was everything he didn't get to have. He was everything Vanitas should have been, but he'd been sifted out of his heart and left this hungry, yawning void, separated from any stimulus that wasn't the empty abandonment of the desert. All he'd wanted was to find a way for it to end, and Xehanort told him to do that, he had to but them back together.

Even now, he's not sure how to reconcile the fact he has the x-Blade in his possession, because the actual weapon is meaningless in his palms. Having it doesn't make him hurt any less. It's no different than that wooden toy Vanitas snapped in half in Neverland. But it's the only tether he has to Sora, or to Master Xehanort, and Vanitas isn't sure what he would be without them both lingering like ghosts, defining him even when they aren't around.

Riku reaches for his cup and Vanitas, clicking back into the conversation, frowns at him and possessively pulls it away. It's not out of reach, cuddled in against his chest like that. He and Riku are sitting close enough that Riku could still take it from him.

"Yes you have," He argues, though it looks more like a pout, misunderstanding completely. "You tried to give me that gross..." He raises wiggles his unoccupied wrist, where it dangles off the edge of the bench. "... with the salt."

"Never tried getting wasted," Riku clarifies without chasing the glass when Vanitas draws it closer to his chest. He could take it by force - Vanitas is probably too drunk to put up much resistance - but the fact is he isn't interested in tearing anything out of his grip. Riku thinks it's not exactly about lacking the energy for it. It just seems unkind.

The closest he got was this time, once, when he felt tipsy, like the room was doing a very slow pirouette in his head. He was younger, pinching from his father's cabinet, just being a stupid kid.

Something about the feeling spooked him. Maybe it was feeling like he'd lost control of himself when he couldn't afford to. Kids could be cruel. Crueler if you were different.

"You should've tried it," he muses aloud, making a motion like he means to cross his arms, but thinks the better of the movement. He's still sore and stiff, "The salt was supposed to contrast the sweet and tart."

Exhaling, he leans back his head. It's dark. The ceiling is drenched in shadows, some of them stir, he thinks, or maybe his eyes are playing tricks on him, too long in the dark. You should've tried it, he'd said to Vanitas, and he can't help but be reminded of when he had voiced a different regret.

I really should have tried that paopu thing.

"If you stick to sweets and booze all the time, you're gonna get sick of it. Try mixing it up sometimes. You could try something different."

The moment feels oddly normal. Surreal, even, in how completely mundane it is. Everything feels a little dreamlike and unreal these days. Heavy and drained of color. He's probably just tired, even though he's been sleeping more than he ever remembers sleeping.

"Maybe you'd even hurt less."

The shadows really do move, this time, at least. Roosting in the dark rafters are swathes of Unversed, bat-like creatures that huddle into the nooks and crannies with their wings folded and their eyes closed, shuttering them from view. These ones, like handfuls of others littering this place, weren't put there purposefully. Or rather— Vanitas has just never bothered to stop them from manifesting.

Most of them vanish into the woods, anyway, and return to Vanitas in sharp little stabs of feeling. He doesn't think of these ones as safe, but that's what they are, nestled away in this abandoned mausoleum.

Vanitas snorts, and rolls onto his back again. The drink comes away from his chest, held out to the side and propped just for the way Vanitas' bicep lays against the stone. The glass tips in his palm, and if it were more full, it would've probably spilled.

"What would you know," He murmurs, closing his eyes. Even with them closed, it still feels like his body is spinning on a slow axis. "You think you know everything... Keyblade Master. Just cause you were in the Dark for a little while." He's babbling, which really isn't that much of a stretch from how Vanitas has a tendency to fill silences with his own voice anyway. Only now it drawls, and his trajectory is aimless, instead of honing directly onto any perceived weakness he can set his sights on.

"I didn't get anything like this." He wiggles his drink. A little bit sloshes over the edge. "Cake... or chocolate." Vanitas doesn't open his eyes. "No cake in the desert."

Vanitas murmurs and it might sound sleepy if he couldn't smell the liquor on his breath, cloyingly sweet. He looks. It's rare to see him with his eyes closed, rarer to see anything ease the lines of tension and malice from his face, and if it weren't for how much darker his hair is, in the lantern light he looks a lot like--

Riku's grimace is thin and brief. He turns his face away, as if he thought, irrationally, Vanitas might somehow spy it through his eyelids. The only saving grace is that Riku is too thoroughly exhausted to feel anything too sharply, it's just a thorny twist in his chest that fades into something tired and gray.

He lifts his hand to press the back of it against the tipped cup, "You're spilling everywhere," is an exaggeration, but not an extreme one. For some reason, the weight of the glass against his knuckles feels... comforting.

"Why would anyone live in the desert? It's empty, there's never anything there but dust, right?"

But Riku's experience was limited to the time - times - in the Keyblade Graveyard, to the blistering heat and whipping sandstorms of certain desert worlds. Entries in books. He never really bothered to learn that desert wastelands can be host to their own ecosystems, that only the truly hardy things survive in such hostile environments. He had other things to do.

Remembering his own yearning at the edge of a tiny world:

"Or did you have a choice?"

"Idiot," He says it like breathing. Knocking others down like this, putting himself over them, he was created with that kind of arrogance just as much as he was taught to cultivate it and use it as a weapon to put other people beneath him. Xenahort had been a master of that kind of thing, and Vanitas was the only one underneath him left— at least, before Ventus shattered his heart, and sent them both careening into slumber for a decade.

Riku puts his knuckles against the glass and Vanitas feels it at a distance, like the water buoying up the edge of a boat, keeping it from sinking. He doesn't try to right his grip, or pull the glass back in toward himself. He sighs, long and slow, and the barrel of his chest sinks with it. Tension bleeds out of his muscles as sleep works it's way in, pushing up against his consciousness like a needy cat.

"Where else would I go?" He murmurs this without opening his eyes, and there's a melancholy to it that he'd never let slip in front of a person that was once his enemy.

The museum is cavernous compared with many of the other places one could reasonably shack up in, but it's well guarded against the elements. Certain attempts have been made to create a slightly more comfortable, even homier environment. A kind of kitchen and eating area, this collection of bottles Riku could assume is a bar of sorts, or just whatever Vanitas managed to get his hands on.

Sofa seats and benches. Cushions found from who knows where. Riku sits, his knuckles perched against the glass that's half-falling from Vanitas's lazy grip, and he feels leaden, uninterested in moving. He's probably tired, even if he's done nothing but rest.

Vanitas sounds like he's in a slow and inevitable topple off the precipice between consciousness and sleep. It seems wrong to press him while he's deep in his drink and tired enough to loosen his tongue. Invasive, surely.

Where else would he go. Xehanort put him in a vast, desert prison. That he feels something - when he feels little else right now, numb and lost - makes it stand out, a searing hole glowing through the fog. Did he ever look out over that desert and long to be anywhere else? How long was he alone in that awful, empty place?

It takes nothing at all to send him over the edge. Less than a breeze, reflected in the way he exhales one more time and the sound that comes on the tail end of it sounds like a hum. Sleep should be a kindness, and sometimes it is. Sometimes he falls asleep and it's nothing but a long blackness. Other times, it's reliving the endless cycle of his existence. He doesn't always remember it when he wakes up, but that doesn't really change the fact that it exists.

In the waking world, his hand goes slack. If Riku doesn't catch it, the glass will tumble freely from his limp hand and tinkle against the floor to spill a dark patch on the ground.

But in sleep, he is far from any kind of guarded. In sleep, his heart station is an open, if broken, thing, almost identical to the grave stone that had been erected for him so many months ago. Only this one is a complete circle, with a fracture down the middle with half the picture missing. Vanitas falls into it, through it, and dreams about the desert.

The cup drops into Riku's palm.

It's weight fits there, pushing the back of his hand into the floor until, he thinks, it drops straight through and the rest of him goes along with it, like there's a line hooked into his wrist and, like a fish, he's reeled right down into the watery deep.

His own heart is fissured, it's all he can do to hold the pieces together, to slowly pour his determination into the cracks. Yet still his heart knows what to do. Dropping is easy. It isn't Sora he falls to protect, but someone he has clashed with in different ways all along.

Vanitas falls into sleep and Riku falls into the dark after him, goes spinning down an invisible current, so strong it rakes his hair back from his face, takes from him his hooded jacket from his shoulders.

Black blooms across the back of his white shirt, lines curving and connecting, forming a single blossoming sigil that marks him for what he is in the realm of sleep. Even incomplete, the stained glass paints his eyes a kaleidoscope of colors when he descends into the desert of his dream.

The desert is familiar to Riku, because he's been there before. In this dreamscape it doesn't look so different, only the graveyard of keys is missing. Or maybe not missing, but somewhere just out of sight. But figuring out which direction to go to find it is almost impossible — in every direction there's nothing but sand. Miles of it, cracked and parched, with only the lifeless bones of what might have once been plant life. Or is it really bones? They're so blanched its hard to tell.

Under the cloudless sky the heat is searing. The horizon fades into the shimmer of warmth rising from the dirt, and the only sound is the soft hush of a hot breeze pushing the sand around. It's completely empty. There's nothing around, it's totally silent.

Until it isn't — until the clear, ringing sound of two keyblades meeting shatters the quiet. The low sound of an old man's voice, sounding uncannily like a laugh.

The heat is different from island summers, from even the humid heatwave down by Beacon's lightless lakeside. From the blowing grit of Agrabah's oceans of amber colored sands, too. Here, what blows is comparatively dust, eddies and flaying dust devils, coursing across the flattened, cracked and thirsty ground. Winds and years carve rounded riverbeds for the currents of air to pass through.

Another thing Riku notices is no matter where he looks, he can only feel the sun's heat, he can't actually see it. Like even here, in a reimagining of a world he's been to before, his memories won't grant him a view of the sunlight utterly absent in the waking world. Maybe his heart can't take one more thing else to miss.

It isn't something worth dwelling on, his changed clothing, the sudden shortening of his hair all goes with minimal notice, when the sounds of clashing Keyblades make him breathe:

"Battle. That sounds like--!"

And he runs out towards the sound, compelled, even if that voice makes his skin crawl.

"Get up!" His voice rings out, clear even though it's gone deep like gravel in his age. There's power behind it, one that belies his stooped figure.

Vanitas, on the ground, gasps and rolls onto his side. They've been at it for what feels like hours, but whether that's the nature of the desert seeming endless or the nature of the dream is impossible to determine. His body aches, his armor split where Xehanort's attacks have cut through the material. When he raises his head, a string of bloody drool stretches and snaps between his mouth and the puddle he'd left on impact with the sand. It's not the only one there.

Wordless, he snarls and slaps his hand forward, grabbing for the keyblade that had been knocked from his hand. As he stretches, the edges of his body smudge and a handful of Unversed shake themselves like dogs out of him. Xehanort laughs. From a distance it may be harder to see that his dirty face is sliced through with tears.

He staggers back to his feet and wipes his face with his wrist, smearing crimson like warpaint against his cheek.

"Yes, that's it, Vanitas. Savor the pain."

With an animal yell, Vanitas lunges for him again.

Edited 2020-01-02 05:02 (UTC)

That bent back clad in black and white and gray drags up a reflexive reaction, a knee-jerk surge of anger that collides up against the wall of cold logic: he can't possibly be here. His heart has returned to that place all hearts go, where his will one day go if it can ever leave this dead and dark place.

Revenge, if not closure, has been denied him and Sora and every other heart that old bastard tried to subjugate, every soul hurt by his machinations. That fact - that he isn't available to scratch that particular, vengeful itch - is what makes Riku pause. Anything he does wouldn't change anything back home.

But he sees Vanitas. He sees him struggle on the ground, his armor rent into bright slashes, pale except where it's mottled with bruises and scars, where the slashes leak black vapor. He can't see the tears at this distance. He can see the pain and hear the old man's laughter. Both set his teeth on edge.

The blood smeared across Vanitas's cheek summons Braveheart into Riku's waiting fist.

"HEY!"

His voice carries, clear and loud across the vast and empty wasteland. Riku swings his other hand out ahead of him in a slash through the air, balls it up in a fist as he draws it back, taking a step forward, "Just can't get enough, can you?!"

He doesn't get a hit in; the fact is he rarely does, and in these nightmares it never happens. They aren't real, of course, but deep in this abyssal realm Vanitas' conscious can't tell the difference. And it doesn't really matter, when this is just a reflection of the reality that he's lived.

The blue eye on Xehanort's keyblade flashes as he raises the metal, and it clangs off Voidgear clear as a bell. The shattering echo of it resonates around Riku's voice, making it more huge than it has any right to be. Xehanort swings his blade upward and cracks Vanitas under the chin— he hits the ground again.

One ancient set of yellow eyes come around to settle on Riku's singular figure. Vanitas, gasping, tries to get back up, struggling under his his own weakness. He grits his teeth and more Unversed shed off of him.

The old man intones, raising one hand with his palm upward, curled like a claw: "Only this way can you become stronger."

Vanitas knows this to be true, and he forces himself upright. Looking at him, there's no reason he should still be conscious; hunched and bleeding, its clear he can hardly keep his feet underneath him. He puts himself between this new challenge and his master, one eye nearly closed for the blood that traces the left side of his face. There is no recognition in his expression as he looks at Riku: only blind hate. All he sees is another obstacle to destroy. He puts both shaking hands on his weapon to keep it held aloft, a physical barrier between Riku and Xehanort.

"Yes, Vanitas. Hate them. The people, the world... everything."

The very second that he feels this re-imagined facsimile of Xehanort's eyes fall on him, Riku can guess what he'll do. It's the same thing he's always done. Tried to turn friend against friend, sibling-in-arms against sibling-in-arms. He knows now, because of stories told, because of how those stories made their way into Jiminy's journal, he knows Xehanort pitted Master Aqua and Terra and Ventus against each other.

That he'll isolate and hurt Vanitas, the way Ansem, the seeker of darkness, sought to isolate and control him. That putrid apple doesn't fall far from this withered tree. Dream or not, Xehanort is the same.

This doesn't make Riku eager to clash Keyblades with Vanitas.

"But he was wrong, Vanitas!"

Perhaps he calls out in vain. When it comes to a reimagining of a world, or a thought, or a memory, it's never as easy as simply speaking a subjective truth. What Riku believes, what Vanitas believes, these concepts battle it out until they find one victor to declare what history is.

Same as the rest of mankind.

"Think about it! Has Sora ever met every expectation you were taught? What about me? What about Bruce?"

He's speaking, this challenger, but Vanitas barely hears him. The whole world is distorted when he's like this, syrupy and slow but moving too fast around him. The boy opposite him gestures, with his Keyblade up. Vanitas catches only a handful of words.

And it gives him pause, just for a fraction of a second. Sora. And Bruce. His attention flickers, like he might look away, like a memory is trying to push up against him&mdsah; and then Xehanort laughs, that throaty familiar sound, and Vanitas seems to react like a dog let off it's chain. He yells, inarticulate, and lunges.

But he's been fighting for so long that his movements are clumsy. He can hardly hold his weapon up, nevermind formulate some kind of plan to win a battle against an unknown force. He swings, too heavy, and staggers through it— but his intent is clear in the pinpricks of his pupils. That if he gets the chance, he'll kill his opponent. Behind him, that old man disappears, even though his laugh lingers like an echo.

He knows how good Xehanort - in any form - is at sinking his claws into a person's vulnerabilities and doubts, at prying open the cracks of their insecurities and coaxing them to give in to their darker impulses. He hurts and he hurts, he manipulates, and Riku thinks he was only able to retain his stubborn will against the poison Maleficent and Ansem dripped into his ears and heart because he had his whole young life up until then to build up his sense of self.

Vanitas has only had this desert and this despicable old man who regards him like a neglected dog. It's painful to watch. Worse to think that Sora might have been the first and only kindness he'd ever known, until he was taken from them - no, until Sora chose to go, for the sake of who was taken from him.

"Kch!"

There's no getting through without a fight, huh.

Vanitas is slow, made clumsy by pain and exhaustion, but the murderous intent ripples off of him like a heat mirage. He's still dangerous. And hurt, perhaps more badly than it appears. Rather than meet his heavy swing head-on, Riku decides on another tactic. A one-handed backspring sends Riku backing out of the way.

"Vanitas, you don't have to do this!" He's counting on him coming at him again, pressing the attack, and Riku will keep dancing out of the way, trying to wear him down.

"Xehanort's gone, he lost! He's just a nightmare!"

His gamble is correct. Vanitas wings, and he misses spectacularly. The heavy head of his keyblade hits the ground, and though the balance is perfect for him most of the time it looks right now like the weapon is unwieldy in his hands. His body mass stays low, and that's half because he's hunched against his own injuries.

"Shut up!" He screams it back, even though there's no extraneous noise in this desert. Only that awful echo of Xehanort's laugh, fading out but still ever present, like a bassline that just won't quit.

"What do you know... about nightmares!" This boy— and he's familiar, isn't he? Somehow, Vanitas feels like they've met before— puts the distance between them, but Vanitas needs to close it. He roars and lunges again, and there's a lag between his movement and the raising of his weapon. It creates a gouge in the cracked earth, kicking dirt up in a spray when Vanitas tries to swing heavily down on his opponent again.

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fucking love that imagery

tyvm

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