farsickness | (no subject)

(no subject)

WHO: Vanitas and OTA!
WHEN: throughout February and almost chiefly at night
WHAT: Vanitas' arrival and subsequent attempts to settle in, adjusting poorly to the daylight
WHERE: Gazin + surrounding area
WARNINGS: just Vanitas things

ARRIVAL - DAY

Vanitas arrives in the morning. His eyes pop open, and the shout that peels out of him is reflex to the searing pain in his eyes. Both hands slam to his face, the heels of his palms pressing against his sockets. It's as though his whole body kickstarts at once, his heart slamming into his ribs, his lungs seizing; fear and anxiety make his breathing labored.

Seconds ago he'd been in the museum, in the comforting cover of eternal darkness. It was snowing, and it was cold, and not for the first time the lonely ache had filled him from bottom to top—

It's so bright. Even with his hands no his face, he can feel the winter sun heavy on his clothing and his skin. He has to take his palms down to get up, but even with his eyes closed, the sun is impossibly relentless. He can see it through his eyelids, turning his vision red. With shaking hands, he unwinds his scarf and raises it, ties it around his face. It renders him blind, but that's fine— he has other methods of getting somewhere safe.

The Unversed rises up under his palm, wolfish in it's appearance despite being shaped all wrong. Shaking, Vanitas puts his hand out to fist his fingers in it's collar and lets it lead him into the woods, deeper and deeper, where the shadows are deepest.

OUTSIDE GAZIN - NIGHT

His tablet doesn't work, despite the fact it's lit up. NO CONNECTION it winks at him. He can only see everything that was there prior to this moment. Still, he tries to use it anyway. He navigates to Bruce's name and messages him. He navigates to Riku's name, messages him too.

At his side, the Unversed shivers, responding to his grief.

So, I really am alone again. He thinks, blinking through hot tears, then raising his wrist to wipe furiously at them. It's fine. They had all known their time would end there, eventually. Vanitas just thought...

He stands up abruptly and the wolfish Unversed stands up with him. Turning to it, he stares into it's face, and it looks back at him expressionlessly.

"It's fine." He says, and lets his feelings come off of him as Unversed. Floods draw themselves from his shadow, spreading out like twitchy rabbits at his side. "Lets see what this world has in store for us."

Without a gesture from him, the Unversed scatter. They rush into the woods, they rush out into the fields. Under the night, they look like moving shadows, little glowing red eyes that bounce around at ankle level. He bleeds more of them out, Unversed in the shape of bats, and sends them up into the black sky, blotting out the stars.

Anyone could see them, anyone could attack them, or be attacked by them.

GAZIN - NIGHT

Vanitas only heads out under the cover of Night. When the sun goes down and dusk has fizzled out into nothing but the stars and the moon.

There's an irony there. He was raised under the harsh desert sun, despite being made of Darkness itself, and has always coveted the Light. Then, in Beacon, the endless stretches of night time... he finds he can't stand being under the sun, despite how much they all seemed to miss it in that place.

It means he is one of the few that are walking around the mostly empty streets of Gazin when the moon is high. Dressed in black from neck to ankle, with his pale, pale skin and the striking yellow of his eyes, it would be easy to mistake him as some kind of spectre. Those that might think so aren't entirely wrong, either. Vanitas, after all, is made entirely of Darkness, a living embodiment of negative emotion.

Since shops aren't really open, it means that if Vanitas wants information he has to go to whatever taverns still have their doors unlocked. When he makes his way to the counter of the bar, he never purchases a drink; he trades his coin for sweet breads and butter.

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Most of the work Riku has been finding to get by day to day has taken place when the sun is up, while he was unloading barrels and crates at market, he overheard that the man who usually works the stables at the tavern had taken a kick from a horse and broke his leg, he was going to see the healer.

More importantly, that meant an opportunity for some better pay. He had worked over there a few times, unloading large, yeasty kegs for a few coins and a hearty bowl of stew from the kindly matron who bustled around its kitchen. Turns out the old man who ran the place did need someone to tend the stables and not just that, he needed someone to guard them. Special guest who was very attached to his steed.

Riku tried not to speculate, and as tired as he'd be staying up late while this guest gambled or whatever he did upstairs, the pay would be better than what he was getting hauling goods.

The presence of his blindfold - to protect his still sensitive eyes from strong light, like the sun and the glowing warmth inside the tavern at night - had given the woman working there the wrong idea about him. Riku thinks it's pity that has her trying to press a bowl of stew into his hands late that night, after their guest had taken his steed and left, stinking of beer and perfume.

There was something else, too, some other smell pulling at him, demanding his attention through the lingering stink of perfume and ale, of horse manure and rich stew, something... familiar. He cranes to look out into the tavern, but the old man's on his way back and bellowing about why he's messing up the kitchen with his dirty boots, and ushering him back outside with his steaming wooden bowl.

Riku seats himself on a barrel outside the stables, shoveling some of the stew into his mouth with the crust of bread that went with it, his curiosity, a strange and sinking nostalgia nagging at him.

"...It's late," he sighs, listening to a distant bell, "That's all."

It's pure coincidence.

Vanitas doesn't have the same sense for Darkness that Riku does— not in the same fashion, anyway. This world, these people, and all their varying shades of it muddy his instincts. The grey means it takes a particular slash of bright, or a specific kind of dark, to cut through the din and catch his attention. At night, the Darkness is more pronounced— so much negativity, stewing in those that spend their lives in the shadows like Vanitas himself.

There's a learning curve to it. Maybe some of it is just how small his sample size has been, even up to this point, of socialization.

So in the din, he doesn't notice the distinct shape of Riku's twilight. It fades into all the background noise— so much so that it isn't even his magic that draws Vanitas' attention. It's that shock of silver hair— of which he sees a wink of, out of the corner of his eye. Just enough to make him turn his head.

The bread pauses halfway to his mouth, frozen in time as he stares out the side door the cloaked shape had juts vanished through. A heartbeat passes, wherein Vanitas desperately tries to quell the surge of violent excitement in his chest— but in the end, he can't contain it. He's never been good at shoving down his emotions— he's only ever let them loose.

He pushes off his stool, abandoning his half eaten meal and making for the exit. Maybe he charges out into the night a little too quickly, but it's enough to take a few steps forward and bypass the person sitting on the barrel near the door entirely to squint out into the night, hunting for that silver hair.

It's cold outside. Not as cold as it had been, when he was in a place where the wind whipped in off the frozen lake, lending a kind of frigid, damp bite to the air. Unwilling to let the warmth of the stew go to waste, Riku eats quickly, scalding his tongue. For the little good it does him, he's waving a hand in front of his mouth when the door bangs open and Vanitas charges out past the cloaked, blindfolded figure sitting there.

The Darkness he senses from Vanitas is a powerful thing, it pushes on Riku's attention like a shove might and Riku, in his surprise, drops the bowl and crust of bread to a woody clatter. His spine goes straight and, without thinking, one booted foot touches the ground as he prepares to stand. It feels syrupy and unreal, the moment, as if the shock of recognition is so potent that his mind is sluggish in catching up.

Until it does, bringing a warning.
It's him. But Vanitas might not be the same as Riku remembers.
They could be enemies again, as if all these months and their unique circumstances that, through blood and pain, sorrow and terror, in bringing them together only to tear them apart suddenly don't count for anything.
Gone, lost like Kairi and Sora were. Like Quentin and Eleven and Bruce and so, so many others.

"Van-"

That slips out anyway, an act of defiance his heart makes against the reasoned fear his mind warns against, "Vanitas?"

Before going to Beacon, he'd never heard his name said with anything other than hatred or anger. Even when he surprised people, the startled shape of the syllables was still crowded with anxiety. And why shouldn't it? Vanitas has only ever wanted to cultivate that emotion, stirring up in others what he is cursed to feel himself.

Vanitas? Riku says, and Vanitas whirls to face him.

He knows, immediately, that this is his Riku — even if looking at him, he's barely recognizable. The clothing, the blindfold, he has no lantern, but Vanitas knows by the way his name sits in his mouth. A breathless sort of shock, hope instead of fury.

"Riku," He jerks forward, reaching one hand out to snag his cloak. Is this what relief is like? It feels too intense, like his skin is prickling, like every tension in his frame has simultaneously evacuated to make room for this other sensation. It peels off Vanitas as small Unversed, shapes the size of his fist that glow gold like fireflies in the dark.

He reaches up with his free hand to grab that blindfold, pulling on the fabric to take it from Riku's eyes and unobscure his face. The action is impulse, like so many things Vanitas does. He could never explain it, how badly he needs to see his face, his eyes, his expression—

Riku, on the other hand, doesn't know it's the Vanitas with whom he spent over half a year in the dark, not even when he whirls around to face him. They've been circling each other since the day they met properly, Vanitas would snarl and sneer and Riku would cut him back with dismissal and suspicion. They were on opposite sides of the same conflict.

It's not until he says it, says his name and reaches for Riku's cloak that he realizes, his breath growing more stale where it's trapped in his lungs. He steps forward and his boot catches the edge of the bowl. When it slips, it almost takes his foot out with it. Instead he steadies himself with his hands on Vanitas's shoulders and blinks quickly against the dim light spilling from the tavern.

This amount of light he can handle without the blindfold. Brighter light is taking longer to adapt to, after so much time living with that pervasive darkness. The soft, golden glow are shapes he's not used to seeing, some new product of Vanitas's emotions shaking themselves loose of his shadow.

"You made it," he hates how thready and strangled his voice sounds, as if he'd choked on his meal instead of wolfing it down. Fingers curl into his shoulders tighter, possessed of the impossible idea that he might blow away in a second, no more than an apparition. The intensity of his focus is near feverish, eyes roaming over his face, to read something false or some sign of injury instead.

It breaks when Riku abruptly smiles, a soft bark of laughter on its heels, "I thought I was alone!"

Vanitas drops the blindfold once it comes loose, lets it fall to the ground without thinking twice about it; whether Riku needs it, if he has another. None of it occurs to him around the shape of his own intense need. Vanitas is a selfish creature, and despite the ways he's grown, thinking of others is still not something that comes naturally or easily.

The low light makes this almost like de ja vu— even though it's brighter, with the light from the tavern, the light from the moon, than it ever was in Beacon. Riku's eyes look brighter for it, even with his brow drawn tight under the intensity of emotion. He puts both hands in Riku's cloak, up near his throat, a gesture that would have been filled with ill intent half a year ago.

When Riku laughs, it's a startled thing that bursts out of him, and Vanitas thinks he might choke on it. I thought I was alone.

Pulling on Riku's cloak he takes that final step closer and puts his face against his chest, buries it in the coarse fabric, the linen underneath that smells faintly of smoke and horses— but it isn't the smell that he's looking for. It's that familiar twilight weight of his Light, his Darkness. He was so sure... that he'd lost everything from that place. The overwhelming relief chases everything else out of him for a moment, all of his questions and all of his fear, the yawning void of loneliness he was slowly being eaten alive by.

The blindfold ends up under the filthy treads of Riku's boots, rendering it no longer salvageable when he's been tromping around horse droppings all evening. He'll have to get another, or steal another dark piece of clothing off a drying line and make a few spare blindfolds and bandages out of the rest, just in case.

It's dark enough now that he doesn't need it.

Much is said when Vanitas reaches up towards his collar and Riku doesn't instantly flinch away or protect himself. His throat still wears a scar from a fairly recent injury that took his voice once and almost his life. They've been at each other's throats early on when they first met on that other world.

No... what arrests Riku is that the rest of the boy follows, leaning in against him like it's a sag of relief. And Riku, who tended to limit his gestures of affection to harmless headlocks and other displays of camaraderie to the exclusion of initiating hugs, makes rare exceptions.

Like right now, when he puts his arms around the back of his shoulders, a hug tight enough to feel a bit crushing. It's okay. It's better now, easier, knowing that he managed to find just one friend, that maybe his wish rescued even one person who had become important, precious to him. It had felt so lonely without them, after so many months growing accustomed to their presence in each other's lives, learning how to navigate around each other's priorities and personalities.

How desolate it must have felt to come here and be alone. Like that inhospitable wasteland all over again.

"...You too."

In his existence, he can count on one hand the number of times he's been held like this. Never before he'd been in Beacon, and even in that place only a handful of times. This sort of intimacy doesn't come easy, when Vanitas spends most of his time lashing out like a hurricane, doing his best to tear everyone down around him. Getting close is never easy, no matter how much he might want it.

Riku puts his arms around his shoulders, crushes him against his chest and Vanitas closes his eyes. The fabric is heavy and coarse, and it bunches up when Riku squeezes him close. It could smother him, if he didn't open his mouth to inhale deeply around it all— but even with the threat of losing his breath, he doesn't shake Riku off. Instead, his elbows tuck in and he crowds himself closer to his chest.

This close there's no denying the shine of his twilight, and it soothes Vanitas' heart the way Riku's grip around his shoulders soothes the sensation that it seemed like he would shake apart. He doesn't want Riku to let him go, so his grip tightens on his cloak when he feels the hug start to loosen. His fingers stay there, caught up, even when he takes the half step back to look up into his face.

Despite the desperation turning his knuckles white in the fabric, he somehow still manages to look almost angry. "Have you seen anyone else?"

Riku's always held himself back from these kinds of things, that's something about Riku that's had to change, when the long and endless dark started wearing people down, had started to wear Riku down. There's a great comfort in connecting with the people you care about. He can't deny the relief he feels swelling in his heart, like a tight knot unfurling.

His exhale stirs his black hair. To think there was a time when he'd wrinkle his nose at the scent of his Darkness and steer clear, after over half a year of blood and grief, of surviving over the bodies of friends they had lost, a lot has changed.

That embrace lasts quite a bit longer than he might have usually, who tends to keep these rare things brief. Vanitas draws a step back to glare at him, and Riku's hands land on his shoulders as his face falls - it isn't enough to completely spoil the discovery of one friend in this world, but he still feels the loss.

"No one I recognize..." he answers quietly, "Did we leave him alone in that awful place? Bruce," he shakes his head, a pained crease between his eyebrows, "I remember trying to reach for him too when it happened. But..."

There's nothing he can do for someone who is worlds away. In front of him right now is someone he can help. Vanitas has never needed his protection, but that doesn't mean his wellbeing isn't a concern of his. His fingers tighten on his shoulders, "What about you, are you alright?"

Bruce. Vanitas grimaces and he looks down, his eyes in a space somewhere between his hands where they grip Riku's clothing. He's not really looking at what he's wearing so much as looking beyond it, looking backward to what he'd left behind. Was it serendipity that they ended up here? Maybe, did Bruce escape this fate? Did they leave Beacon behind to be destroyed? Or maybe were they all cast out, scattered to all new worlds, despite whatever garbage they'd been saying about it not being possible?

He shakes his head to bring himself back to the present, just as Riku to tightens his grip on his shoulders, and it brings Vanitas' attention back up— yellow rising to find the striking teal of Riku's irises. Two things happen, then: he recognizes that Riku is asking because he cares, and he realizes that for once, he hasn't lost everything.

Beacon might be gone, but he still has Riku. He slides his hands up higher, taking the fabric under Riku's ears into two fists and pulling him down until their foreheads touch, the way Maridel inadvertently taught him. His eyes shut just for a moment, basking in this strange new feeling, before he looks at Riku up close.

"You look stupid in that blindfold." I'm fine.

Sora doesn't stay inside Gazin at night. He's making his way here by fishing, using the munny he had in his pockets to get enough supplies that he'd be able to camp out near the river and head into town first thing in the morning with his catch. It's not really that it'd be too expensive to rent a room at one of the inns; it's more to do with Sora's innate laziness. It's hard enough to drag himself out of bed and go wading into the water before daylight. There's no way he'd actually get dressed, make his way out of the city and into the woods, then change, then get to work just to haul everything in for the day.

This kind of routine is way better, even if it's not all that glamorous. It means that he's in Gazin properly for breakfast and all through the high part of the day, and then he starts making his way out before the taverns get rowdy and noisy. It's a routine he's done a dozen times since he got here. But this is the first night that he's heard a rustling in the brush along the way. This is the first night that rustling had been-

"-Unversed?"

The bramble remains pulled away, held in his hands as Sora looks down at the cause of the noise. As he sees what looks like a long black... rabbit? With glowing eyes. It stares back at him, twitching, and Sora sucks in a breath suddenly, prepared for the attack that doesn't come. And then, slowly, Sora leans away and looks back over his shoulder. Looks left, looks right. Why are the Unversed here? And how? Hey doesn't that mean-

Both hands come to cup his mouth, and Sora shouts out- "Vanitas!"

The Unversed looks at him, cocks it's head back and forth. It doesn't attack, and maybe that's only because it recognizes Sora as familiar. Maybe it's because when Vanitas sent them out to hunt, it wasn't to look for a fight so much as seek. Sora leans back and the Unversed darts away, vanishes into the night in a slippery streak of black.

It's coming back to find the rest of it— but it doesn't need to.

Vanitas jerks up from where he'd been kneeling on the bank of a cold stream. The water drips from his face, falls from his hands. He can feel it— a sudden awareness that hasn't been there for so long that maybe, somehow, he forgot what it was. Forgot what it felt like— another heart, nudging up against his own. In his grief of everything he'd lost, everything from Beacon, he hadn't been able to feel anything beyond the numbing hurt.

But someone—

He's much too far away for Vanitas to hear him with his ears, but he hears it with his heart. Vanitas!

"Sora," He says into the night, and stands up, whirling to peer into the dim. It's just as black as Beacon, made blacker because no lanterns dot the horizon. Only an endless night with the pregnant moon, the wink of the stars. He reaches for his Darkness, yanks it up with too much vehemence and opens the corridor, connecting it to the tether in his heart. It's the only way the yawning void knows exactly where to open up, feet away from where Sora stands.

He knows Vanitas is nearby. He doesn't think about how he knows this, but that's not so strange for Sora anyway. May your heart be your guiding key Goofy said- and that advice has always lead him where he needed to go before. His heart always seemed to know what to do even if his head didn't.

Sora pushes slowly to his feet, it isn't urgency or panic that spurs him onward, just the certainty that if he keeps calling they'll probably find each other- the certainty that Vanitas must be here somewhere, and how big is a whole world anyway, when he'd found his friends across a whole universe of them? The trees rustle with the breeze and he can hear the gurgling of the river a little further away, where water runs over smooth stones, a current that's probably as old as the world itself.

Both hands stay cupped around his mouth and Sora paces a little further through the trees, startling a pair of birds with the next shout and sending them fluttering up against the starlit sky. "Vanitas? Hello!"

"Stop shouting, loser." Vanitas answers from the darkness. Sora is facing away from him when the corridor drops closed and he steps forward from the brush. The shadows are deep, but the moon above casts everything in an ethereal glow. It's brighter than Beacon had ever been, and seeing Sora cast in it's gentle light is more unreal than any hallucination he'd ever experienced in that other world.

He's not sure how his voice sounds so even; maybe it's the shock. He can't know how long it's been for Sora— in fact, he doesn't even know if this is the Sora he knows. The one that was there all those months, then disappeared on some fool's errand. That strange one had turned up in that town before he ever found himself in this place. But the voice— it was the one he remembers. And there's no denying the tug in his sternum, the pull in his heart luring him forward.

Vanitas is dressed for this planet; a heavy traveling cloak, his helmet missing. It makes his expression and yellow eyes all the more obvious as they carve over Sora, like he's picking him apart with just a look alone.

"Ahh!" As a kid he'd always been the first one to jump as soon as a ghost story reached the inevitable boo!. He's the one that slept with a night light the longest and the one that always covered his face when a movie got to the scary part. Even though Sora is older and taller, even though he's seen more of the world, the worlds than he ever could have dreamed of- to hear Vanitas's voice jump out at him from dark, foreign, isolated woods makes him jump about two feet in the air.

He pivots immediately to indignation. Heart thrumming wildly in his chest, both of Sora's hands tuck close on instinct, as if they're going to cross, only to land on his hips instead. It doesn't seem to matter that Vanitas is a long time enemy, that he's always been a force of antagonism, that he's staring out of the blackness with only a pair of glowing yellow eyes. Sora scowls, accusatory.

"Hey! What'd you have to do that for!"

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