Don't Fuck with the Forest Spirits || OTA

[evulsed]

characters: Vanitas (evulsed) + OTA
location: mostly The Church, the Invincible + the Boathouse
date/time: July 19 and the days following
content: just waking-up-after-being-dismembered things
warnings: violence

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[evulsed]

[ Even before he says it, Vanitas knows it coming. It should be a choice, Ventus had said. Not just Light. Not just Darkness.

That's what the doctor is saying, too, and Vanitas feels some part of him sink heavily down through the floor. It isn't sadness. Vanitas is always sad, a sensation that stretches end to end with varying degrees of anger and hurt in between. No, this is that same sensation from before— the one he had right before the power had gone out of him. Darkness is all he has, and all he is.

Gene doesn't understand, and how could he? This man fought a war and in it, was their cleric— their healer. Like Sora, he's the kind of person that chooses to reach for the Light, even if it isn't all that makes him up.

But Vanitas doesn't share that kind of fate. When he'd been riven from Ventus, the reality of his situation had been set in stone. He hadn't understood it at the time, of course. He'd been lost, lonely— confused by why he existed at all. Why was Vanitas in this endless cycle of anguish when Ventus, his other half, didn't suffer the same way he did? It wasn't fair. He hated Ventus then, just as he still does— but the difference is that Vanitas understands, now. I've made my choice, don't you see? Darkness is what he is. Darkness is all he can be. If he loses that, then everything he'd been created for, all that pain would be for nothing. ]

You're wrong, if you think I haven't already made my choice.

[ There's no indecision or falter in his voice, despite the way it still rubs like sandpaper around the edges. He swallows against the dry feeling and his eyes go to the cloth the doctor had been using, because it had been wet. He swallows again. ]

—Water.

[preseance]

( he unscrews the top of the canteen, holds out the canteen on offer. soft, )

If you'd made up your mind, you wouldn't'a called off your shadows.

( if this 'darkness' is a stand-in for what it means to be evil, it's a good enough parallel. ain't nobody evil an' nothin' else who craves comfort like that, who cries in the arms of someone who's barely beyond a stranger.

an' he knows full well too that sayin' that with someone who's expressed a fair amount of volatility in the past might take it as a challenge. could be, he's signin' somethin' like a death warrant with that observation. he finds he don't much care. he's seen that same terror an' fear in boys on the front lines, an' it's as much his job to tend it as it is to fix broken bones an' bullet holes. )

[evulsed]

[ Vanitas takes the canteen, and there's something like de ja vu there, with their first interaction having been exactly this. Only this time, when Vanitas looks at him over the canteen, it isn't with the violent uncertainty of that initial meeting. The truth is he hadn't really been thinking about it. He doesn't have an argument against what Gene is saying because in the moment, it had all been recognition. Seeing the man, instead of those monsters that came at him so quickly.

Just thinking about it makes everything in him go tight, makes his throat lock up around the water. He nearly chokes, and swallows hard, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and inhaling— but it comes quick and uneven, and then keeps coming. Vanitas knows fear. He's known it all his life, but this sort of terror, this kind that keeps rising up on him in waves—

It spills out of him, sprouting up as the little black, jagged creatures that follow him around. He can't keep it contained, even if he controls them. Their beady red eyes materialize from underneath the pews, the sound of their tiny claws scratching like rats against the hardwood as they skitter into dark corners away from Vanitas and the doctor. On the edge of hyperventilation, Vanitas puts his arms around himself, like he's worried he might fly apart otherwise. Some part of him still is, as his eyes dart into the dark corners of the church, looking everywhere but at Gene even as the unfiltered desperation for some kind of control keeps him speaking: ]

I could kill you if I wanted. You couldn't stop me.

[preseance]

I know.

( he ain't hardly a fool. his voice is mild, but there's no fear lurking in behind it. he recognizes that he's losing the kid to panic an' fear an' so he just leans in again, pullin' him back into his arms, rubbing a hand up and down his spine. )

I've known you were dangerous from the start. First time we met I had a fella here with a gun trained on you just in case you tried anythin'. I was a noncombatant in war, boy, I ain't blind.

( medics couldn't even carry guns or risk violatin' the geneva convention. he only started carrying a pistol a few weeks before he died, an' even then it was beneath his coat, an' only because of the way marion died in holland. the s.s was respectin' the medic's band less an' less as the war rolled on. )

But that's livin'. Hell, a bad case of TB would kill me just as sure. Humans are fragile when they can't call lightnin' or fire to their fingertips. ( like kyna. ) Or darkness, I s'ppose. ( like vanitas. ) I've made peace with that. But could ain't will. Bein' dangerous don't mean you ain't deservin' of kindness anyhow.

cw: violent thoughts, abuse mention

[evulsed]

[ The tremble lingers in his frame, and it speaks to his headspace that when Gene leans in to pull him close again, Vanitas doesn't fight him. He lets it happen, lets the wrap around his shoulders act as the band holding his body together. Without unbridled terror facilitating his every thought and movement, he can recognize that it does something to him. It calms the static in his brain, and he can feel the rapid gallop of his heart ease.

He doesn't understand that this is what being soothed feels like. He's never had the experience before.

But it isn't just that. It's I had a gun trained on you, it's I've known you were dangerous— familiar sentiments, things that aren't insisting that Vanitas be more, or better, or good, or light. He cleaves so desperately to these shadows because without them, he doesn't know what he could possibly be. If he wasn't darkness, a constant threat, then what did he have left?

Gene is warm. Vanitas can feel it through the doctor's shirt, and in the friction that smooths up and down his back. Somehow, it reminds Vanitas of the peace he'd felt in Sora's death memory. It makes him want to crack open the doctor's ribs and climb into his chest. Instead, Vanitas curls his hands into fists in his lap and puts his cheek down on Gene's shoulder.

Doing this is a weakness. Xehanort would beat him for it and leave him to pick up the pieces, scar tissue meant to make him stronger. But his Master isn't here, and nobody is around to see it. ]

[preseance]

( so he lets it sit an' settle. doesn't do much else, or offer anymore words than that. it's a rarefied thing, doin' this when there's time. when the world around them ain't bound up in blood an' gunfire. a damn luxury to be able to offer comfort where it's needed an' due without a caveat or somethin' else more pressin' that needs his attention.

a shell-shocked soldier is only less critical than a man with a suckin' chest wound by dint of impending mortality. but it ain't any less a wound.

so he's here. long as he's needed. the occasional murmur of some soft sentiment just to ease the boy's mind on his lips. )