a very pretentious-y vanitas character-study-ish Something that i know i’ll never finish so this is what it is.
Vanitas cradles a cold face in his shaking hands and the memories rush into him, all these unbeautiful aches punctuated only by remnants of faded laughter; moments experienced in another time, by another boy, by another version of him. The boy in the coma is a ghost. The boy in the coma is a ghost of all the things Vanitas is not. The boy in the coma will never wake up, they tell him, but what is never; what is wake, to the boy who cannot dream?
He was so young, a newborn with shadows leaking from his lungs when he first became aware that he was only half of something greater than himself, a shell of howling emptiness desperate to be filled. He knew Ventus in the way a living thing knows its own blood: a pulse, life; an integral part of him. When he sucked in his first frantic breath atop a crumbling cliff in the Badlands, he felt Ventus inhale beside him and knew they were one and the same. Now he stands silent, his ribcage a graveyard without Ventus to serve as his guiding force.
All the ugly things inside of him whisper. He is a matryoshka doll of ugly things. He is Ventus as seen through the lens of a nightmare; hideous, abominable, wretched. If he ripped the borrowed flesh from his borrowed bones (all that he is was never supposed to exist, he knows, he knows), if he let it melt away beneath the scalding sun blazing white hot over the scarred lands of the Keyblade Graveyard, he would still be left with his heartbeat. Alive. Alive. Alive. Why is that the only sound he can hear?
Vanitas is used to alive now. He is used to blood and bone and the sorrows weeping through his shadow body; he is used the weary rasp of air in a throat dry from screaming. He has always been alive. But he has never been alone.
Xehanort abandoned him in the soil the day he was born and didn’t return for a week. His body had been left alone with the dizzy feeling of being two people, then one, then two again, and in his mind he obsessed over the pieces of a puzzle that didn’t belong to him. But his consciousness was linked with that of another, and the tether that bound them was indestructible. Not a moment passed that Vanitas was not aware of the constant buzz of someone else’s thoughts, and it was like listening through a locked door; sometimes he understood it all, and sometimes only fragments sifted through, but there were always words, and there was always light on the other side.
Now there are no words. Now there is no light. Silence had held no meaning for Vanitas until Ventus left and it shivered through him all at once, grey as thunder and as deep as the bowl of the sky.
