farsickness | (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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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!"