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Each suit in a deck of cards stands for an element. One of the classic four, not the gambler's dozen that make up the Organization. Earth, air, fire, water. What it means to be human and what it means to be real.
Hearts are the suit of water.
Demyx wants. That feels like an illicit, dangerous thing to admit, in company like this. There's an echo to it when the others talk about "wanting" their hearts back, a hollow sound like the belly of an instrument out of tune. Demyx feels it like the pull of a whirlpool, this vortex in his chest where something that should be pouring forth is instead draining away.
There are people who argue that art is an intellectual thing, that you can make it based on formulas and study and knowledge. That emotional passions make low art. Demyx rolled his eyes at that when he still had all his equipment. He can remember telling people -- long, rambling, passionate speeches -- about how music was something you had to feel to be able to play it right.
And now, when he's water trying not to drain down a vortex to pure nothing? He wants answers. He wants to understand. He wants to feel.
Luxord is more approachable than most of the others. Demyx thinks it's because they're two of a kind, artists and lovers -- hah -- of life, the kind of guys who would rather enjoy a sunny afternoon than chart the change in temperature over time. They balance each other, not because they're opposites and not because they're identical, but because they do a pretty decent harmony together. Demyx likes Luxord, as much as he can really say he likes any --
No. He likes Luxord. He does. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
Of course, Luxord is still guarded. You probably have to be, to get this far. He doesn't want to just share memories, doesn't want to just talk about what he feels (or doesn't). He wants to make it a game.
"Sure," Demyx says. He watches Luxord shuffle and split and shuffle again, the cards dancing between agile gloved hands. He thinks about the dexterity it takes to juggle, the way that starts with having one more ball than you have hands to hold them in. He thinks about the street-corner shell game runners, with their light quick hands keeping the prize always out of reach. None of them made it through the end of the world. Demyx wonders if that makes Luxord sneakier, or just luckier. He wonders, if he asked, whether Luxord would say there's a difference.
"Pick a card," Luxord says, fanning the deck out in front of him. "Any card."
Demyx reaches out to take the card Luxord wants him to. And smiles. "The King of Hearts."
"The Suicide King," Luxord corrects him, taking the card and setting it face up on the table.
Demyx makes a face. "That's a pretty gloomy name," he says.
"It's a name with history," Luxord says. "It's a name that looks at what the king has become." He taps the card with one gloved finger, pointing to the half blade of the sword. "His axe head was lost somewhere in time, and its haft became the sword's blade, and that blade..." He traces it into the king's head.
The pause clearly means it's his turn to say something. Demyx thinks for a second. That looks like an awful way to kill yourself is probably not helpful. I thought the sword was just supposed to be behind him is true but would sound like heckling. "So," he says, "this is a story about how time defeats even kings?" It doesn't matter if he guesses right; it just matters that he gives Luxord a good prompt to go on.
Luxord smiles graciously, nodding his head to acknowledge that Demyx has played the part well. "This is a story about what time and greed have done to all of us. About facing one's own destruction." He shrugs, a rehearsed gesture of apology. "The game is difficult enough to match the stakes. Are you in?"
Demyx nods. "I'm in."
"Excellent." Luxord produces a pen with a flourish, stroking a bold, wet ink line across the card. He lifts it from the table, holds it up, and makes it vanish. "Your move. Find the Suicide King."
Deym had a little brother. Really little, only five when the darkness came. When the Heartless swarmed through the streets and bubbled up from the canals, empty, ravenous. Demyx remembers watching him die, and even remembers how much it hurt at the time.
It doesn't hurt now.
Nothing hurts like that now; there's an empty space where the pain should be, a silence in place of sound. Demyx is a creature of echoes, the memory of music that used to happen. He keeps hoping -- telling himself -- trying to use language that doesn't center around the heart is tricky -- he has a theory, even if he's bad at the scientific method, he has a theory that listening to other people's echoes will help him remember the sounds of Deym's heart. If he can remember, he can hold on. If he can hold on, maybe there will be something worth recovering.
He scours the dark city for Luxord's missing card, for all the echoes of life it represents.
There are so many places to hide things in the World That Never Was, it's a little ridiculous. Especially something as small as a card. Demyx tells himself it's not possible for him to feel daunted, and gets on with it: behind bookcases, beneath mattresses, in and under flowerpots, under crates and at the ends of alleys, even in Luxord's room when Luxord is supposed to be away (and isn't away quite long enough, leading to an encounter which Demyx only later remembers he can't be embarrassed by). He tells his Dusks and Dancers what he's looking for, and they bring him a number of cards with hearts on them, swaying gently in what looks like the hope of pleasing him. None of them are the card, but he keeps them all anyway.
Eventually he comes to a conclusion that was probably supposed to be obvious from the start: he's not going to find this card just by looking everywhere that occurs to him. To track it down, he'll have to figure out where Luxord would think it should be hidden. He'll have half of what he's looking for just from the process of searching for it.
He can't catch Luxord off guard, since Luxord was the one who started the game in the first place. Instead Demyx will have to be convincing. He has a lot of practice at that, though mostly it's with people who have a disadvantage that Luxord lacks. Funny, isn't it? How a heart can be a disadvantage sometimes? When he says as much in conversation over a hand of cards, Luxord treats it as a riddle.
It's the first of a number of riddles they trade back and forth over the coming days. Luxord will leave him a pair of cards, a careful stack of coins, once a carefully strewn batch of yarrow sticks; Demyx will answer with a snatch of song or an arrangement of seashells in a particular shape. They tell stories from the places they've been, little teasing fragments of folklore. Demyx makes notes to himself to remember the things that keep coming up in the background of Luxord's stories: people are always traveling. Foxes are the cleverest animals. Churchmen can't be trusted. He wonders what he's giving away with his own contributions, and how Luxord is putting his pieces together.
One night the note he gets from Luxord isn't a new hint, but rather a straightforward communication: I hear VI has some tasks for us to take on. Shall we meet at the clocktower at third twilight?
Maybe he'll get the chance to draw out more substantial things if they're on the same mission. Demyx nods, folding up the page. "Tell him I'll be there," he says.
The Gambler who brought the message doffs an imaginary cap, and disappears like a card up a magician's sleeve.
They're making their way across a black plain sprinkled with ghostly white trees when Luxord begins to volunteer a story. Demyx hadn't bribed him for it, hadn't won it on a coin toss, hadn't traded one of his own. It's a gift, maybe from Luxord's own benevolence, maybe from the eerie surroundings. When they pass near any of the trees, a quiet but insistent need for sleep weighs down their limbs, but the gnarled roots caging in nearly-whole skeletons are enough warning to drive them away again.
Luxord tells a story of other trees in another world, a dense forest knitted together into darkness. The water that flowed in the forest was poison, but the road winding through it was the only one the caravan could take. There were standing pools of water, heavy mist on the air, droplets glistening on evergreen needles. It's a story about wanting and not being able to have, mostly. Demyx wonders if it's a compliment, this story about how essential water is. He wonders if it would be bad form to point out that he could have solved the problem: teasing pure water out of impure is easy for him now.
"My sister and I dared each other to take just a mouthful," Luxord says, and for an instant something that might be real flickers across his face.
Demyx wants to grab for that memory so much. He swallows his first question, poison or no. "I bet you were too careful to do something like that," he says instead.
They take on more missions together. Sometimes the objectives seem pointless, repetitive; sometimes it seems like the real goal is just to keep them moving, give them stuff to do so they won't sit there sinking into nothingness. It's kind of silly, or it would be if it were happening to somebody else, that Nobodies' worst enemy is nothingness.
They travel through a world where each realm is distinguished by a signature color, and where the great conflict is presented as a struggle between logic and magic. Zexion's terse, spiky notes on the subject don't have much personal flavor, but Demyx likes to think he can read annoyance in their brusqueness this time. The top six were making a science out of the heart's mysteries, weren't they? Wouldn't they take the opposition personally?
When night falls and the local predators come after them, shrieking and wailing a spell of despair, Demyx is ready to answer them. He plays melodies for all the things he's seen in the many worlds, for the glittering bursts of fireworks and the bright splash of waves on a beach, for the dance of wild flowers in a breeze and the laughter of playing children. He plays songs of joy, because he still at least knows what joy sounds like, and as he plays Luxord slaughters their enemies.
Afterward, as the Heartless fade back into the ordinary shadows of the night, Luxord bows to him. "Beautiful," he says.
Demyx stows his sitar in its space of not-being. "Thanks," he says. "It's nice to feel like I've still got it."
Luxord nods. "Come," he says. "We should move on before more of them arrive." He takes Demyx's hand as they leave.
They've been flirting enough, in the course of this game Luxord designed, that it seems like it was probably only a matter of time -- hah -- before they wound up in Luxord's bed. The flirting didn't have much force behind it, all flashy effects with nothing solid to back it up. It's just a, what was that word Vexen likes? It's a vestigial habit. A leftover from their old lives.
But flirting leads somewhere, and they both know where, so eventually they do take the next step. They're both plenty experienced, or they were, and damn do they know how to go through the motions. It's like a terrible old musicians' joke:
Do you know how to satisfy a Nobody?
No, but if you hum a few bars, I can fake it.
Luxord remains a man of mystery, guarding whatever secrets he knows, ready with a flip answer and a misdirection for almost everything. His glances and his smiles are as much a part of the act as the unbelievable dexterity of his hands. Demyx has to admire it, really. He watches and he knows he's being held at bay, knows he's being put off, but he still can't figure out the trick to it.
Maybe the trick is there's nothing up his sleeves after all. Maybe the trick is that all the cups are empty. Demyx decides not to believe that.
His sister has to be the key.
"You never did tell me the rest of the stories about your sister," Demyx says, relaxing on Luxord's patio with a glass of brandy his host provided. He's close; he wants to understand Luxord, wants to feel the connection between them.
Luxord smiles, and it's a beautiful thing, believably warm. He tells a story, the tones of his voice rich and melodic, the cadence comforting. Demyx imagines the girl in that story, the swirl of her skirts to the sound of violins, the golden beauty of her movement. The way her theme twists into a minor key as her tragedy comes to the fore, the knowledge she can't unsee and can't unmake. Demyx's hands move as he listens, tracing melody and chords. He knows what her song would sound like, will have to write it down once he hears how it ends.
And like a showman, Luxord stops before he gets there, leaves the notes hanging suspended on the edge of resolution. Demyx clenches his fist to keep himself from supplying the final chord himself. "What happened to her?" he asks. He's more than willing to give the applause this performance deserves. "To your sister."
Luxord arches an eyebrow. "I had a sister?" he asks. He snaps his fingers and summons his missing card.
Demyx looks away. The discord rings in his ears, reverberates through his empty chest, smashing even the memory of the tune that was coming together. The card showed Luxord's hand from the beginning, didn't it? If only he'd been paying attention.
The King of Hearts is dead.