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[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

[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.