Good Night [Ventus]

When he first woke up, he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who he was. The black of his hands were jarring to the blinding white of the room. Wherever he was, just keeping his eyes open was a struggle.

He was getting the impression of being in a misplaced dream, or that he didn’t really exist, when the reality of Ventus’ face in the room stopped him. Ventus. He remembered that name faster than he could remember anything else about himself.

As the dark one stood, drawn by the sleeping form, the memories fed into him in waves of headaches. His beginning. His pain. Ventus’ beginning, Ventus’ eternal bliss. A battle lost in the recesses of the mind, and the crippling fear of fading away.

Ventus sat there, limp in his throne, a mockery to his half's eternal restlessness. Vanitas was still drunk by the effects of his reawakening, but he could feel his blood beginning to boil. He hated Ventus. He hated him so much.

His fist curled into the boy's hair and tugged so that his head was tilting up. Vanitas could only chuckle When he saw the empty void for eyes. Ventus was having the nap of his life, while his nemesis was right here in front of him. Ventus was having the nap of his life while Vanitas was remembering, feeling and experiencing the pain of his existence. Again.

“Having a nice sleep?” he dared to ask, “I bet it’s real comfortable in there, after everything you went through, you—”

his muscles locked, fist curling around the boy’s collar, and in a fit of angry adrenaline, he hurled the boy to slide across the marble.

“—you deserve it!”

But he still wasn’t satisfied. No, his anger was only building, nostrils flaring as he crossed the room in wide strides. Vanitas drew his weapon and stood over his failure with a boot forcing the boy on his back. Ventus wasn’t going to haunt him anymore. At least now he knew he could destroy him for good. They were alone. Ventus was going to die. Ventus was going to die.

His expression bound in cloying delight, the shadow raised his Keyblade over his head.

"Nighty night, Ventus."

 And without a second thought, he plunged it into his haunt’s unprotected chest.

Ventus dreams of his friends, of happiness that could have been had it not been for Xehanort and his dark twin. Even as the other wakens opposite him he can't manage to bring himself to face the harsh whiteness of the Chamber of Waking just yet. Even as dark fingers pull at cornflower hair his eyes remain closed, stubbornly remaining asleep as he's pulled at and thrown, only the sharp feeling of the wall against his skull is enough to start waking him.



The pain isn't enough though, it's the dark emotions boiling over in the other's Heart that really pull him toward the world of the wakefullness.



Wayward Wind is in his hand before his eyes even open, the Keyblade resting over his chest to block the Void Gear from ending his very existence. The harsh metal clanging is what causes is eyes to open, blearily focusing on the dark figure amongst the white walls around him.



"Vanitas....?" His voice is cloyed with sleep and confusion, those innocent blues looking up at his other half," How....?"



He started to push back against the other's blade until he was on his knees," What are you doing?!" Anger laced into his voice at last
, the sleep starting to fade as he pushed harder, trying to force himself to his feet and Vanitas back. 

Why was it so damn easy to underestimate Ventus? Maybe if he stopped mistaking him for a tick he wouldn't be inconvenienced so damn much.

Vanitas hid his contempt behind a proud sneer. The resistance of Ventus’ blade-arm was surprisingly potent, for someone who just woke up. The impeccable timing made Vanitas wonder how deep the veins of the boy’s luck truly ran, and if luck was one of the things Vanitas failed in extracting from him during their split.

...and what the hell was this kid looking at him like that for? What was he even talking about? Ventus rarely made sense on a normal basis but this was just ridiculous. And did he seriously ask what Vanitas was doing?

The dark-half's posture didn't betray his confusion. He hissed, "I'm trying to kill you, moron, what else?" and engaged the opposing blade with a rain of his own, meaning to kill in every blow.

He was trying to kill Ventus because he hated him. He hated him because they were nothing alike. They were nothing alike because if they were, they'd be the same person. Vanitas blinked, briefly sidetracked by thoughts that didn't seem to add up. Why weren't they the same person? And for that matter, if his memory was aligned right, why didn't they disappear, and Vanitas himself especially? There was no evidence nor recollection of the X-blade being forged. He still felt empty inside. But he also felt like he hadn't entirely remembered everything up to this point.

Still - he didn't relent on his swordplay. If Ventus would allow him one opening, his retaliation would come swift and fatal.

"What happened since last time? Why am I back? And why are you?"

The fog is still slow to fade, so Ventus shakes his head hard in an attempt to rid himself of it, wide blue eyes fixing on Vanitas once more as he keeps pushing the other further back, never pulling his keyblade away to retaliate. Fighting was what forged the x-blade before and even though they clearly weren't in the Keyblade Graveyard he was still wary of fighting the other. He didn't want to reforge the blade, he didn't want to go back to sleep, and more than that everything about this fight felt wrong. The memories were alreaday slipping away from him though, the further he came into the waking world the more his dreams faded. The fighting in his heart, the healing they had done, all of it lost to fragile memory. 

"Why?!" He finally asked," Doesn't this feel wrong to you?! Where are we?" Ven's voice is desperate and confused as he blocks the deadly blows the other is trying his hardest to strike him with, and if he's honest he's already tiring, it's been ten years since his body was put through this much strain all at once. 

"I don't know what happened, I.... I can't remember," He shook his head again, as if hoping it would bring back the things he had lost," But it's a second chance isn't it? We don't have to do this again!" 

He was desperatley pleaing with the other, the fear of death in him as it would be any other living creature but also hope that something in Vanitas would want to hear that they didn't have to fight, to try to kill each other for a weapon and that they could live different lives now. 

Vanitas could be happy, and so could Ventus. 

Vanitas did the unthinkable. He considered Ventus' concerns and found them actually...plausible?

Unnerved, the entity separated them with a final clash of their blades and hopped back. He didn't talk immediately.

He remembered shreds of a happening in the hollow they called their heart. He remembered blood and anger, and oddly enough, something coming undone in his chest after years of being an ugly tangle...or was there even such a memory at all? Maybe Ventus is playing mind games with him, like he did with Ventus.

“Bullshit,” the negativity spat, but his growing doubt kept his sword-hand by his side.

He could take Ventus' life into his own hands right now and squeeze it until there was nothing left. He'd be high on happiness imitations for a while before going empty again...but there was a strong need to find some absolution, first. To think a little longer and remember some more.

With an atlas sigh, Vanitas retracted his Keyblade. "Let's say you're right," he proposed, "that there’s something missing. I'm good at remembering a lot of things.” Which makes one of us. "Eventually I'll remember what I'm missing. You've got a free pass to keep breathing until then."

He glanced around them, and the questions of their wherabouts came back around. The castle felt empty, if the absence of emotional energies was any indication. He’d have to get out of here first to make sense of anything else.

Returning to the blond, Vanitas ordered, “Walk with me. And don’t try anything funny.” and then he was out the door.

The entire castle was a literal labyrinth, but Vanitas had navigated through the Realm of Darkness before. Beyond the final bulwark awaited a familiar landscape and a star-spangled sky, which didn’t fit with the parched badlands and rustling clouds of the Keyblade graveyard; the place of their assumed demise.

“I can’t sense the master,” observed Vanitas. To Ventus, he continued, “I don’t think I can sense your friends, either. Maybe everything that’s happened didn’t just affect us. But that still doesn’t prove why we’re here, after…”

He didn’t follow that line of speech. “...what kind of sick joke is this?”

Come to think of it, what was he supposed to do with nothing left to do? Besides Ventus' stupid fairy ideas.

Without the old man there, there was hardly any guidance. Vanitas began to feel oddly lost, standing here.

He let Wayward Wind disapate once the other pulled back, still too weak to keep his hold on it much longer anyway. He was grateful that Vanitas chose now to listen to him, although that didn't feel right either. Strange. He put it out of his mind for the moment though, following after Vanitas as quickly as he can, only looking back at the room he was sleeping in once before tagging behind the other with all of his attention.

Labrynth didn't even begin to describe the castle to the blonde, and if it weren't for Vanitas he surely would have been lost himself, the emptiness seeping into him far worse than it did his counterpart. Honestly he was more like a zombie on their way to the door than he was when he first woke up. He was sure Vanitas enjoyed that though, at least when he could feel enough to be sure of anything. What was wrong with this place anyway? What about it made him so forgetful here, and why didn't it bother the other? Was it because he wasn't complete? 

Whatever the reason Ventus was relieved to feel fresh air on his face, free from the staleness of the castle. 

Blue eyes flickered to Vanitas when he spoke, and he frowned a little," I didn't think they would be here.... they would have been here to wake us up." 

At least him anyway, they probably would have put Vanitas in chains if Terra didn't outright maim the other before they could wake. 

Before he can stop himself his feet start to carry him toward the path ahead of them, curiosity getting the better of him. He does look back at Vanitas though, to see if he's following. He stops dead when he gets a good look at the castle, turning back toward it with what was possibly the dumbest look on his face he'd ever managed.

"No...." 

He recognized the shapes that had been refigured to form the blinding white castle, the longer he stared the more he was sure of it. 

"No... no... NO!" He could feel his heart breaking in two at the site of what had once been his home, despair eating him worse now than it had the entire time they had been trapped in his heart. 

Well and truly, they were both lost now. 

Of course Vanitas would follow. He had the leash between the two. Whether Ventus knew where he was going was still up for debate, though. What could he be looking for by risking being even more lost now? Maybe he was familiar with the look of the land. Come to think of it, it felt like Vanitas had been here himself once.

When he tracked the other's line of site, it came to him immediately. Ventus cried in horror; Vanitas said a mystified, "oh."

Whether he liked it or not, the castle was forever branded behind his lids. It was the origin of the events that dominoed tragically for not only Ventus', but also his family. Now it's faded gates stood as a vestige of that broken family.

Slitted ambers rolled, before pinning on the human-disguised banshee. "You done screaming? Pick up your mouth, and let's start thinking straight. It might help."

When he got the quiet he (and just about everyone else) needed, the splinter decided to take it upon himself to summarize their situation.

"You ended up sealed in a defection of your own home, surrounded by an elaborate labyrinth. I don't think you magically drifted in there yourself. Someone must have put you in there..." analyzed the blond, Vanitas made his careful conclusion. "...to either protect you, or to keep you imprisoned. But it's -your family's- home. It wouldn't make sense for my master to lock you in here. It could have been one of your friends."

Vanitas' face draw-stringed at that idea. He didn't want to say it but it was already hanging there with neon obviousness.

"If I'm right, that means they're still out there. Just not here."

Ventus could barely bring himself to look away from the deformed castle, no longer his home or his family's that was clear. He found himself gazing up at Vanitas with tear-filled eyes, at least relieved that one of them could keep their head on straight in this situation. He was still having problem with his scattered thoughts and worries, for some reason any time he thought about Terra a sense of dread filled him up, Aqua he was less worried about but really in the end Xehanort and Vanitas had considered her an extra at that time. 

".....You're right.... it had to have been someone else." 

And with Master Eraqus dead that could only leave Terra or Aqua, but that dark feeling regaurding Terra couldn't be shaken which meant it must have been Aqua, his surrogate sister. 

"We need to get out of here... this place doesn't feel right anymore," He was almost pleading with the other, even though there were more of the old grounds to look at. He didn't want to see the rest of the destruction, his heart already ached with it but if the other chose to stick to this place for now he had no room to argue, they were protecting each other now he guessed. 

i.imgur.com/TWED7BC.png

If this were any other day, Vanitas would take Ventus' plea and use it to rule over him mercilessly. But now’s not any other day, and Vanitas wasn’t in the luxury of making a habit out of messing with a dummy’s head while everything was in shambles, so instead he said, "there's no other choice. If your home world was scarred to this extent, then who knows what could have happened in the outer worlds while you slept."

When he called upon the power of the darkness to mold into a corridor, the response time came questioningly slow. It couldn’t have been only the worlds that were affected. He could still feel his Unversed tiptoeing behind the screens of his mind, but their influence wasn’t as strong. Vanitas decided that since his awakening, he was substantially weakened. Maybe that weakness extended to Ventus too.

“The best thing to do now is to backtrack on all the worlds you’ve visited and I’ve...also visited. Who knows; I could find my master and you’ll find some friends to hide behind.” He held his tongue against any mention of the Unversed. Ventus didn't need to know about his weak grasp of them - it would give him leverage.

"Well?" Vanitas motioned to the transport. "Don’t let the fact that I constantly tried to destroy you lead you to believe that I’m going to destroy you. It’s just a portal."