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“Ventus,” Vanitas called.
“You’re really never gonna call me Ven, huh?” he sighed with his back still turned.
“…He chose the name ‘Ventus’ for himself. Didn’t he?”
That got the inheritor of that name to look over. He was using a pitcher to water his plants, which had come to dominate the space of their now-shared room: ivies from Enchanted Dominion, ferns from Dwarf Woodlands, succulents from Radiant Garden. Meanwhile, Vanitas was leaning in the doorway and felt the instinctive urge to jeer at him for apparently not knowing how to cast a Water spell, but he held his tongue.
“You…” Ventus’s brows curved a little apprehensively. “Do you have memories of that?”
“No.” Their early childhood had always been shrouded in a haze. “It’s just a feeling I get.”
Yes, an antsy feeling. But he forced that emotion to scurry inside his chest instead of out, and was careful to keep his words from sharpening beyond what was useful. He was convinced that Ventus’s expressiveness, his colorful tones and thoughtless gestures, had been rubbing off on him way too much for way too long. Vanitas pressed his thumbnail into the skin of his index finger, and didn’t allow himself anything more than that.
“Huh.” Ventus stared down at his pitcher as he idly sloshed the water around. A prime example of Vanitas’s point. “I guess that would make sense, since…”
Vanitas, impatient, finished for him. “He was born a girl, but inside, he felt like a boy.”
“…Yeah.”
They lapsed into quiet for a bit, until Vanitas steeled himself and asked the question that he’d come to ask. “Do you… feel like a boy?”
Ventus’s eyes wandered around the floor as he considered it. “I mean, mostly,” he replied. His hand had stilled. “Sometimes… I feel like I’d rather be a cloud—or like I’m made of air. Which, maybe that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but…” He smiled sheepishly, and then looked back up at Vanitas. “Why’re you asking?”
It made a lot more sense than Vanitas cared to admit. He mulled it over, his face placid.
After it became clear that Vanitas wasn’t going to say anything else, Ventus goaded, “C’mooon, talk to me. I’m your brother, aren’t I?”
Vanitas’s nail pressed deeper into his skin. They were boys; they were born together; and naturally, that meant that they were brothers. But weren’t each of those statements only half-true, at best?
He could feel a twinge of annoyance in some little corner of Ventus’s heart—probably because of Vanitas’s reticence, which he couldn’t help but find somewhat funny. It seemed like Ventus still hadn’t gotten the hang of sensing those finer details in Vanitas’s own heart. He hoped that it would stay that way. He didn’t want anyone to read what was there. Especially not now, and especially not Ventus.
He swallowed and said flatly, “I just wanted to know what it means to be a boy.”
“Oh!” Ventus brought his free hand up to his chin. “Well, like you said, it’s something you feel inside your heart, right? But for me, it’s also in the way I look—how I dress, and do my hair, and my voice too…”
An Unversed was forming behind Vanitas’s eyes and he ordered it to stay there. “For you?” he asked. “Is it not the same for everyone?”
Ventus shook his head. “I don’t think so. Me being a boy is different from, like, Terra being a boy.” He blinked, realized something, and then grinned widely. “Oh, you should go ask Terra about it!”
Vanitas didn’t get a chance to emphatically decline, because Ventus saw it coming and cut in again. “He’s basically my role model for being a boy,” he insisted. “And he can probably explain this stuff way better than me. You should talk to him!”
Vanitas faltered like a moron and Ventus went in for the kill. “I can ask him for you, if—”
“I’m not a child,” Vanitas interrupted coldly. “I don’t need to hide behind anyone. If I want to ask him, I’ll ask him.”
“You do that,” Ventus answered with a cheeky smile. Vanitas felt the instinctive urge to melt it off his face with a Dark Firaga, but didn’t.
Instead, he turned and left. He closed the door behind him and walked down the tiled hallways, far enough that Ventus wouldn’t be able to hear anything, before he lurched forward with a gasp and let a variegated rush of Unversed pour out of him. They coagulated on every surface, scuttling and chattering and peering at him while he leaned on the wall to catch his breath.
When he stopped wheezing, a Shoegazer tapped him hesitantly with the toe of its boot. He snarled and destroyed the entire mob with a few swipes of his Keyblade.
❦
After an hour or so of nervous pacing, Vanitas finally climbed upstairs to the room that had been styled as a craft studio and ducked his head inside. Sure enough, Terra was there, carving away at the roof of a birdhouse—the third one he’d made in as many months.
It still took a few awful minutes to bring himself to open his mouth. “...Hey.”
Terra’s attention immediately jumped up from the work of his hands. “Oh, hi, Vanitas. I didn’t see you there.”
“I want to talk about something.”
Terra’s expression only betrayed a little of his surprise. “No problem,” he said, gesturing at the chair next to his own. “Wanna sit?”
Vanitas crossed the room, forcing his strides to be certain, even though he felt anything but. He sat down and folded his hands in his lap and looked away from the person he was supposed to be speaking to, his gaze settling on the desk that Aqua used for her metalworking. All her tools were lined up perfectly.
…Man, he had absolutely no clue how to do this. But Terra just waited for him patiently, until eventually Vanitas managed to blurt out, “Ventus says you’re his role model for being a boy.”
Terra was quiet for a moment more, and then he chuckled. “That’s nice of him. I hope I’m doing alright at it.”
You didn’t always sound this way, Vanitas thought. In the memories that had seeped into him during Ventus’s apprenticeship to Eraqus, Terra talked more and laughed louder. He’d carried himself like a pillar, with pride. It seemed to Vanitas like that pillar had toppled over and been worn away over the years, as though by a steady rush of water.
He watched from the corner of his eye as Terra carded a wide hand through his bangs, where a streak of silver ran through the chestnut-brown, and admitted in his earthen voice, “I don’t really know what I am nowadays, though.”
Vanitas glared at the floor. “How can you not know?” he asked, too tense to completely stop it from sounding like an accusation.
He heard Terra give a little sigh through his nose, heard him scratch gently at his nape, heard the dark, wavering beat that drummed within his heart. Figures that Ventus would be wrong. This guy can’t explain it to me, either.
But then Terra said, slowly, “I spent a really long time as someone else. In a heart that wasn’t my own. It makes it hard to feel like I know myself.” He paused, and Vanitas could feel his glance alight on him. “Right?”
It burned. Vanitas didn’t react.
“Ansem would call on me when he needed me,” Terra continued. “And when he didn’t, I’d just sleep. I wasn’t… in control of myself. A lot of the time, I couldn’t remember who I used to be at all. Fragments would come to me in dreams, but it felt like those memories weren’t even mine.”
Vanitas shut his eyes tightly. Claws scrabbled for purchase inside his temple. He, too, had slept for a long time.
After ten years he’d awoken—floating on the surface of a great and fathomless ocean of darkness—to the immense sound of glass shattering. He’d forgotten his own name, but not Sora’s. Not anyone’s. Ventus, Terra, Aqua. Riku, Kairi, Naminé. Roxas, Axel, Xion. Even the ones that everyone else forgot, he’d known. Because all forgotten things went down into the dark.
He’d heard them calling to each other, but never him. They couldn’t even tell that he was there; they’d let themselves be imprisoned by light. He’d thought that with the draw of the sea, he might be able to pull back the moon, occult the sun. Now you’ll have to acknowledge us, he’d said, climbing out of Sora’s shadow, acting as an outlet for the power that he refused to wield himself. Me and your darkness. There hadn’t been a difference between the two, in those days.
Still, no one had called. But how could they, when he had no name? He’d crawled, abominable, beneath the tide of that twilit beach, where Ventus, Roxas, and Xion watched the sun ever-setting. Desperate for one of them to remember him, to tell him who he was, so that he could at last stand up and breathe.
È giunta l’ora, they’d murmured instead. Destati…
Why had their song sounded so familiar?
“You know,” Terra said, startling Vanitas back to the present, “when you sent the Unversed through the worlds, I thought once… that maybe they were my own darkness come to life.” He paused. “And then, behind Ansem, I wasn’t a human, or a Heartless, or a Nobody. So I can’t help but wonder if I might’ve become an Unversed myself, in the end.”
Vanitas finally stared openly at him. And then, unable to contain himself, he barked out a laugh.
“That’s ridiculous!” he sneered. “When I disappeared, the Unversed did, too.”
They’d been with him all his life—all this life, anyways—and there was no one else who could make the things. No one else had to endure the pain of being ripped into dozens of little pieces, and the pain of stitching them back together just to fall apart again, constantly, over and over and over and…
Terra looked back calmly and said, “A strange creature that exists to protect a dark heart… Reminds me of an Unversed. It’s just a thought, though.”
Vanitas grinned with all his own crooked teeth, but he could feel other fangs stabbing into every inch of him. “That’s,” he said, bright and forceful, “that’s idiotic. Why would he only make one of them, then? Did Ansem only ever feel one thing?”
“Desire,” Terra answered immediately, and then stiffened, as if he hadn’t said that of his own accord. He clenched and unclenched his hands, restless, and then said quietly, “All emotions serve desire—he’d probably say something like that. Happiness when you get what you want, sadness and anger and fear when you don’t… Maybe that’s…” He trailed off.
The Unversed were straining against their bonds. Vanitas started, near-imperceptibly, to shiver from the effort that it took to hold them back.
Haltingly, softly, almost to himself, Terra spoke. “I mean, it’s… not the worst thing in the world if I don’t know what I was. If I’m unsure of what I am now. Ansem was obsessed with knowing. And me, too—I was so terrified of my own doubt back then. That was what destroyed me, not the darkness. But I didn’t realize it until the damage had already been done.”
Terra’s heartbeat steadied. “So I think that maybe the most important thing isn’t knowing. Maybe it’s just… feeling.”
The bonds snapped, Vanitas flinched, and they all tumbled out, Scrappers and Thornbites and Jellyshades and a couple of Wild Bruisers, a Triple Wrecker rattling by his head, an Archraven circling around Terra’s.
Feeling was the one thing that Vanitas couldn’t stop doing. But it hadn’t helped him yet. He shot out of his chair and called his Keyblade into his hand.
“Vanitas?” Terra sounded shocked. “Wait—”
He quickly dispatched the Wild Bruisers and felt their pain flow into him.
“Wait, you don’t have to—”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he hissed, “and don’t compare me to that—!” He cut himself off.
Vanitas could feel those eyes burning into him again. “I-I’m sorry,” Terra said hurriedly. “I didn’t… mean it like that. He hurt me, too. I’m—I was trying to say that we’re alike. That I understand. And it’s okay, if you don’t… know what you are. It’s alright.”
He was so earnest that it hurt. The sincere, awkward concern in Terra’s heart reached out and touched Vanitas’s own—or, rather, it touched the empty space inside him, the half that belonged to Ventus: vestigial memories of chatting and sparring, sweets and almonds, starry nights, a wooden Keyblade. The Unversed buzzed and whined for the older brother that had never been theirs, gathering meekly at Terra’s feet.
Vanitas tried to order them to get away, but something rose in his throat. He clapped his free hand over his mouth, a wave of nausea and dizziness overcoming him.
“Vanitas!”
He ripped open a corridor of darkness and shouted, not with words but with every fiber of his being, for the Unversed to go through. They did, and he followed.
❦
The corridor took Vanitas and his parade of vermin to the Land of Departure’s summit. Not far from where the ground fell off into sheer cliffs, he stumbled to his knees, and let his Keyblade blink out of existence, and sank his fingers into the grass, and hunched over, and vomited, and thought, as he did every single day, of being whole.
He thought of Roxas and Xion standing on that beach. How they couldn’t help their utter love for Sora, even though he’d tried to bury them in the sand—unwittingly or not. Vanitas, too, had always been helpless before his own other half, but there was no love in him. He wasn’t capable of it. Nothing in his heart resembled it. Even his hope and his longing were shambling and seething and aching all the time, not beacons and anchors like everyone else’s.
He thought of those breathless few minutes when he and Ventus had been reunited; when he had no longer been himself, but the world. Weeping and smiling, raging and laughing, thrashing and singing and screaming and screaming—the χ-blade humming in his hands, first sword, then scissors—“I’m me! I’m me!” he’d cried. “Nobody else!” He’d been born to destroy everything, and to remake it in oneness and perfection. He’d been born to suffer, and to erase all suffering.
He thought of how Kingdom Hearts had spoken to him. In his own voice, in Ventus’s: We’ll go together.
It was the only being beside himself that understood what it meant to exist this way, terrible and singular. He refused to believe that anyone else could. Especially not that old man’s Heartless.
No, if all that Ansem had felt was “desire,” then he definitely hadn’t understood. Darkness went much deeper than that. True darkness was the forfeiture of desire. It was total hopelessness and despair. Realizing that the thing you desired most would always be too far from you to reach, but never far enough to stop haunting you with the dream of it.
Vanitas sat down with arms wrapped around his legs, head pressed to his knees, breath ragged in his lungs. The Unversed that he had just spat out was brushing against his side, but he didn’t want to look—he didn’t want to know or feel. It wasn’t wholeness, and it wasn’t happiness, and it wouldn’t ever be. So it didn’t matter.
“Vanitas…”
All of the Unversed rose to attention, their red glares trained on the intruder. Vanitas stayed where he was. He didn’t need his eyes; the dreadful light of Aqua’s heart would always give her away.
“Just go,” he said shakily, and hated himself for it, hated how he couldn’t don his old deadened voice as easily as he used to, hated that he couldn’t hide his face behind a mask anymore without looking like a coward.
She stood there, silently, and memories came unbidden to Vanitas’s mind.
His first day here, she’d knocked on the door of his bedroom—a long-unoccupied one, initially—and came in saying that she’d brought him clothes. A set of Ventus’s pajamas, until Vanitas could get a “proper wardrobe change.” He’d rebuffed her. His armor could not be taken off, because he didn’t have a body underneath it. His “form” was nothing but pure darkness.
(That was what he’d believed then, and still half-believed now. Why else would he have been paralyzed by such a visceral, all-consuming agony when he had first unknowingly returned to this place, back when it had been Castle Oblivion, Aqua’s own creation? Because he had been able to sense Ventus’s comatose body lost in its depths. Because it was still Vanitas’s body, too, even if he’d been torn out of it. Why am I here, he’d wept—trying fruitlessly to writhe his way back down those white stairs while Sora heedlessly continued to ascend, taking him farther and farther away from himself—and not there?)
He’d fended off Aqua’s attempts to debate him until she took a step closer to where he sat on the unadorned bed, her presence looming, luminous. Ah, I made her mad, he’d thought. His fingers had automatically curled around the grip of his yet-unsummoned Keyblade. Well, fighting is easier than talking.
But then, to his bewilderment, she’d spoken quietly: “When I was in the Realm of Darkness… at some point, I stopped having hope in escaping. I truly believed that no one would ever come for me, and that I would be trapped there, for eternity.” She’d laid the pajamas on the bed. The shirt pocket had a shape like a star or a five-petalled flower embroidered onto it. “I was proven wrong.”
She’d looked at him. “Suffering misguides us, Vanitas. It convinces us of horrible things that aren’t true. So please… let me at least try.”
Why had he let her?
Delicately, with Rainfell’s teeth, she’d split open the back of his right hand. An impossible cut in the shape of a keyhole, baring an untouched sliver of skin.
He’d been so terrified that he didn’t even remember what he’d said to her after that. Probably not anything kind.
But he recalled her words exactly. “Bodies can regrow their own hearts. So it must work the other way around, too. You deserve to know… that what you are is human. That you’re a living being.” Her expression had waned into something distant. “Your skin deserves to feel. The wind… the sea… the sun.”
A fleeting image of her daydreaming alone on a leaden shore. A strange current in the air as her fingertips ghosted just above that rupture, that fissure, that wound.
He’d flinched. He’d made her leave. He’d sat there, wracked with tremors of fear, mustering the strength to move. And then he’d peeled the strands of dark tissue apart.
One by one, watching them crackle into shadow and blow away like dust, exposing arms that he’d never seen before, never thought he’d even had. Then, gingerly, he’d clasped his bare hands together. Cupped his own face with them. Felt tears sting his eyes and pour out as boiling Floods.
This isn’t real, he’d told himself furiously, repeating it a thousand times as he tried to restrain his breathing, this isn’t real, this isn’t mine! It’s just a guardian’s ruse, a trick of the light…!
The memories dissipated as more Unversed wrung themselves out of him, despite his best efforts. He bit down on something small and pathetic that was nesting in the back of his mouth—another Flood, maybe, or just a whimper.
Aqua finally approached him. Her steps were deliberate and slow, just like back then. “You’ve… been holding them in,” she realized with alarm. “Why?”
“...I’m just trying to keep them where they belong,” Vanitas muttered, drenching his voice in scorn to stop it from breaking. “Less work for you people, isn’t it?”
“You’re in pain.”
“That’s news to me,” he snorted.
“You shouldn’t put yourself through that,” she said firmly.
Yes, I should. It’ll make me stronger. What’s it matter to you?
He didn’t ask it aloud because he knew what she’d answer with. Her light was so simplistic and childish that way, only seeing what it wanted to see. But she’d fumbled in the dark for more than a decade—of course she’d never want to let the light go ever again.
It was something that they had in common, and he loathed it. Why did he still crave what he knew he couldn’t have?
She stopped where the thicket of Unversed prevented her from getting closer, and kneeled. “What’s wrong?” she asked gently, so much so that it made him want to throw a fit. Hadn’t she humiliated him enough?
“Don’t pity me,” he said, his tone like a low but livid flame. “I can’t stand that stupid, conditional pity… You’d put me down like any other monster if you weren’t so set on pretending that I’m human. But sure, I’m the delusional one…”
“I don’t think you’re delusional,” she rebutted immediately, in that self-righteous Masterly way.
He answered with bitter amusement: “Coulda fooled me, the way you never believe anything I say. Humans only bother with other humans—that’s why you need to pretend. Anything else is defective at best, or isn’t supposed to exist at worst. You all talk about being human like it’s so great, like I’m supposed to want to be one, but your lives weren’t ruined by Heartless or Nobodies, they were ruined by a human!” He lost control of the flame, and his words shot out like sparks, with even more Unversed in tow.
Aqua didn’t reply. Vanitas almost regretted his victory from how sick the satisfaction made him feel, coiling noxiously in his stomach.
“I know what I am,” he whispered to no one as he hugged himself tighter and fought to not throw up again. “I do. And I can’t change.”
“...I’m not trying to change you,” Aqua said in a small voice. She paused for a while before continuing. “It’s exactly like you said, Vanitas. We were raised to destroy anything that threatened our ideals of humanity, and of light. But I can’t uphold those teachings anymore, after seeing firsthand what misery it causes.”
Spiderchests teetered around her, hostile but not attacking, wary but not backing away.
“If you say you’re not human, then… I won’t tell you you’re wrong, anymore. I’ll call you what you want to be called. Everyone has that right. But I also believe that everyone changes, even without trying to. And it can be scary. It’s certainly scared me.” She sighed softly. “...But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
I’m not scared, he wanted to snarl, even though that had never, ever been true.
He didn’t want to change. What a great betrayal that would be to the entire crux of his meager little life, which was to go back, to return to how he’d been.
Dreams hold our memories, Ansem had said once. Sleep holds our dreams. And darkness—it holds our sleep. That was why Vanitas had been able to subsist within Sora’s heart for all those years, and why he knew everything that these lightbringers didn’t. He’d fed on all the rage and the guilt and the grief that they had thrown away, all the things that they didn’t want to remember. So surely, whatever Vanitas himself had lost must be buried down there, somewhere, in the dark.
Maybe he could get Naminé to reach inside and fix the broken chain. Maybe he could go to Radiant Garden and let those researchers perform tests and experiments on him to confirm the absence of his body and outline the unhealed, serrated schism of his heart. Maybe he could persuade or force Ventus to be the person they used to be again and finally recollect the scattered pieces of their fractured childhood. So what if they were probably better off not knowing? It belonged to them—to him. And so few things did. Not even his name was truly his.
This disgusting lack. This void. None of it felt real. Had it all just been a dream? Was it better to be lucid, or unaware? How could he have dared to survive the end of the world? Shadow of a shadow—what was he supposed to be now?
I don’t know what I am.
I want to. And I’m afraid to.
I’m afraid to be something that he isn’t.
But Vanitas couldn’t say any of that.
Instead, he made himself take in a deep, uneasy breath. Then he lifted his head, glowered at Aqua, and demanded, “Does wanting to wear a skirt mean you’re a girl?”
For a moment, she just blinked at him. “...Huh?”
“Answer the question.”
She sat back on her haunches with a mildly confused look. “I, uh… sorry, I just wasn’t expecting that. But no, not necessarily.”
“Then what does it mean?”
“Whatever it means to the person who wants to wear it.”
“That makes no sense,” he grumbled.
“Maybe not,” Aqua shrugged. “Or maybe it’s just complicated. Clothes can’t be pinned down to just ‘girl’ or ‘boy.’ Neither can hearts, nor bodies… and I suspect that souls can’t be, either. It’s like light and darkness, I think.” She looked down at the ground, and a few of the Unversed followed her gaze, like they were trying to see what she saw, amid the bowed blades of grass. “They can never be completely separated. There are always things between them. And there are even things beyond them.”
Vanitas shook his head to himself, irritated and unconvinced. Surely this wasn’t comparable to the great mystery of light and darkness! Yet not even a Master knew how to explain it.
What if no one did?
After all, if it were truly something knowable, if he could understand just by looking inside, then he wouldn’t be doing all this: making a fool of himself, running around and asking stupid questions of people whom he didn’t trust and who didn’t trust him. Revealing his incompetencies to former enemies who could easily become such again, as soon as he crossed the line from “tentative, maybe-human” back over to “abomination beyond hope of salvation.”
He was so tired.
But Aqua’s voice came, like a blanket over his shoulders: “Vanitas… do you feel like you might not be a boy?”
Those words made him feel something. Or somethings. It wasn’t that uncommon for him to struggle to name his emotions until the Unversed spawned and acted them out for him.
He winced as they cleaved themselves from his form: Blobmobs, Hareraisers, Mandrakes. Was feeling melancholy or terror or shame different from feeling “like a boy”? Was that why no Unversed was born to represent it?
Was it supposed to be a “happy” feeling, rather than a painful one? Was that why?
At least that would make some sense. To be happy, to be a boy or a girl or anything else—those were all human endeavors in the first place, weren’t they? So of course it would be futile for Vanitas to try and understand, inhuman as he was.
Beyond light and darkness was emptiness. Everything that he sought was in a world that he couldn’t be a part of.
Then Aqua cut through his thoughts once more. “It took me years to figure out that I was a girl, myself.”
Vanitas fixed her with a wide-eyed stare. “It… did?”
“Can I sit next to you? Feels a little silly talking about this from all the way over here.”
He leered at her skeptically for a bit. Then he waved a hand at the sea of Unversed, and it parted. The Red Hot Chilis and Blue Sea Salts giggled derisively as she passed them.
She sat down beside Vanitas, but still left him some space and didn’t touch him, which he supposed he could be grateful for. “Thanks,” she said with a temperate smile. “I’d like to help you out, if I can.”
And there was the hole in his heart again, filling with secondhand affection for the sister who had unfurled a labyrinth about his throne to protect him as he slept, who had survived her lone hell completely on the strength of her desire to see him wake up.
He looked away from her, worried that it would show on his face. “Was it… that hard to figure out? That you’re a girl?”
“I was a little younger than you when I started to fully realize it. For a long time before that, though, I felt that there was something different about me—but I didn’t have the words to describe it.” She crossed one ankle over the other. “Do you feel that way?”
“...I don’t need to describe it,” Vanitas said with a calm determination. “He was a boy. So if I’m anything, that’s what I have to be.”
“He?” she repeated.
“You know. Him.” He chose his words carefully. “...Ventus—the one who existed before us two. Before we got split.”
“Hmm…” Aqua tilted her head. “That sounds kind of like something I’d tell myself when I was struggling to accept that I was a girl.”
Mutely, he met her eyes again. She was still smiling. But there was a veneer of sadness over it.
“I’d think to myself: you’ve always been a boy. You’ve always been like Master Eraqus’s eldest son. What else can you be, if not that? Everything that you are is because of him. How will you carry on his legacy if you’re not what you thought you were?”
A hush fell over the summit. The Unversed were still. Only the wind continued to sing.
“That—” Vanitas tried arduously to choke out something coherent, but he couldn’t. “That’s…”
“I’m sorry,” Aqua murmured, and he wanted to snap at her to stop pitying him already, but she wasn’t. He couldn’t deny it. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”
Vanitas shook his head again, more frantic this time. He was losing his ability to speak. The Unversed began to chitter nervously in his stead.
It was hard. It was so hard. It was unbearable.
Was he a boy? A girl? Something different? Was he a human—a person—his own person—or not? What did it mean, to be both “himself” and “another” at the same time?
Where was his heart? His body? His memory? His name?
Where was Kingdom Hearts? Its Secret? Its Truth?
Here, or there? Or somewhere else entirely?
He felt like he’d held the key to it all, once.
“If I’ve learned anything since becoming a Master,” Aqua said—so achingly, so tenderly—“it’s that so much about our world and about ourselves can’t be quantified, can’t be categorized… We’ve been taught to believe in the trinity of heart and body and soul; the duality of light and darkness; the primacy of humankind. But is it really so? Can we ever hope to explain all these things, these impossibly complex things, through the words we invent?”
She gazed out over the cliff, at the remote mountains. “We can try. And that matters, too. All of our efforts matter. They’re not in vain. But you don’t have to know what you are in order to live as you are.”
Badlands dust. Sting of No Name’s teeth. Waiting and waiting for purpose, for divinity. And it amounted to this? Just this?
Something welled up in Vanitas’s eyes. He bit his tongue.
“...May I?”
He looked at her. She’d extended her right hand towards him.
All that he could imagine was Rainfell coming down on his skull.
She’d used it to crush him twice, now. First as “Ventus,” at the site of all worlds’ end. Then as “Vanitas,” in a vacant room. Whatever he was now, she would obliterate that, too. It was her right as a Master, after all. It was her authority to pronounce judgment; it was her duty to chase the shadows away. He was in no position to begrudge her that anymore, was he? He didn’t have the will or the strength.
Before, he never would have let his exhaustion keep him from lying and fighting and doing everything in his power to complete his mission, even if it left him convulsing in the dirt. He must have grown soft—Aqua had gotten to him the moment he’d come here. Why? Because he’d thought that the worlds were rid of that old man, maybe. Because these guardians had let him into a place that was sheltered from the elements and had things like showers and beds and they said that they’d get him new clothes. Because he was an idiot and a pawn and believed anything that might give him a reason to keep living, to try.
He took in several quiet, erratic breaths before slowly bowing his head. If she decided to take the chance and kill him, she could go ahead. Finally, at least, his wretched existence would be over.
Her fingers brushed against the tips of his hair and despite all his trying not to, he flinched.
“It’s okay,” she said, as she stroked his hair, like she did Ventus’s.
Vanitas would’ve resented the assumption that he shared Ventus’s love of being pet like some docile animal if it hadn’t been correct.
He let her comb through the black locks. The ones he hated.
And what he couldn’t stand for anyone to read, he confessed with his own mouth.
“...I wish that I could grow my hair long,” he said, voice trembling. “But it won’t—it won’t—”
If this body really was his own, why did it have to feel like such a prison?
“It will,” she soothed. “Accept that you can change… and it will.”
He hissed out some miserable sound, but didn’t pull away from her. The tears rolled down his cheeks silently, and she did not break the silence. A murder of Unversed crept into their laps, trilling, purring.
❦
As if her promise had cast a spell, it came true. What was it about Aqua that let her accomplish impossible things, that let her draw this kind of magic from the world, like water from a well? Maybe that was what it truly meant to be a Master.
He had already long lost his pride, so there was nothing more that he had to swallow before the words could come out.
“Thank you,” he told her.
She smiled, and said something mystifying: “It was your own strength.”
He thought of toppled pillars and birdhouses.
Maybe this was better than pride.
To live in the dark was to live in the unknown. Unable to be illuminated, or mapped, or explained. To be dark was to be made strange and new.
And he knew this. He had always been terrible and singular. Always something undefined, eluding comprehension. There had never been anything quite like him before. The nadir of darkness was infinite, abyssal. That was its power.
But still, Ventus would walk around with the body that Vanitas had once lived in so casually, light as air, like it was nothing—accidentally scraping himself and getting mildly annoyed, as if his bruises were just bruises and his blood was just blood—while Vanitas would look on with a rawness and a sickness and a yearning so intense that they threatened to propel him forward of their own accord, Keyblade in his hand and “Join with me!” on his lips. Yet he resisted, even as an infantry of Shoegazers stomped in sync around him.
Because he knew that their shared heart had already shattered so completely that the pieces could never wholly fit together again. He knew that there was no such thing as pure light or pure darkness. He knew.
It was just hard to let go of the dream. Of oneness, of perfection. Would it ever stop being hard?
Ventus was using a pitcher to water his plants. Meanwhile, Vanitas was leaning in the doorway.
He uncrossed his arms. Fidgeted with his short ponytail. Tugged at the hem of his tasseled skirt.
Both of them were different from what they’d once been.
Hey... if he could choose what to be for himself... does that mean we can, too?
Is that really okay?
“...Ven?” Vanitas called.
He looked over.
“Nita,” he said, grinning.
Vanitas hadn’t heard that nickname in some time. He fidgeted more, his face warming a little bit from embarrassment.
Wait, he hadn’t even thought of what he was going to say after that. He blurted out the first thing that popped into his mind. “What… plant is that?”
Ven’s expression lit up even more. “It’s one of my favorites! Sora got it for me from the Pride Lands—and it’s called a ‘chain of hearts’! Because the leaves are heart-shaped, see?”
Vanitas shuffled over and observed the long, curling stems, from which clusters of little green-and-pink leaves sprouted.
“It looks so pretty with the vines hanging down like this, right?” Ven said proudly; Vanitas could sense the happiness rippling across his heart, like ocean waves.
Ven had often insisted that Vanitas could feel happiness, too. But before, Vanitas had always told himself that if there was something like that in his heart, it was merely a poor reflection of Ven’s own. Derivative. Splintered. Stolen.
(Before the χ-blade had thrown his every atom into a frenzied, violent joy to equal his other half’s—before he’d started to get worn down by Ven constantly telling him that being “honest” with your “emotions” was “healthy,” even though Ven was really the one who constantly failed to do that—)
…But maybe he’d grown a little past the realm of “before,” and stepped a little farther into the realm of “right now.”
And right now, he might actually find himself capable of believing it.
“Yeah,” Vanitas sighed, letting the tide wash over him. “It does.”