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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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.

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