Closed

[equinoctials]

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.

Comments

fucking love that imagery

[evulsed]

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.

tyvm

[equinoctials]

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.

[evulsed]

"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.

[equinoctials]

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?!"

[evulsed]

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."

[equinoctials]

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?"

[evulsed]

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.

[equinoctials]

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!"

[evulsed]

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.