Work Text:
Ienzo is the one who finds her first. Rather, he is the only one still awake in the grey hours of early morning when the ground beneath his feet starts to rumble and the unearthly sound of screeching metal echoes through the castle. Ienzo has never been much of a runner, or much of anything other than obnoxiously intelligent, but he runs, for once heedless of his notes scattering to the floor behind him.
The sounds are coming from Ansem's computer room, where Ienzo had camped earlier today salvaging whatever data he could. It was a daunting task and no one else had the technical expertise to help him-- Aeleus looking like he'd sooner put a fist through the monitor and Lea waving him off with talk of Keyblade training. There was that other man, now called Leon, whom Ienzo remembers from his childhood, but he was off roofing houses in the newly rebuilt residential district. There are moments when Ienzo is still grasping for clarity, so soon after having been recompleted, and so his progress with the computer had been modest at best, and he had to stop in the late afternoon to stave off a growing headache.
What carries Ienzo's feet now is the fear of irreparable corruption of the records he had not yet managed to extract from beneath the countless password-protected layers of the castle's security system. Ansem had always been a paranoid man, Ienzo remembers--and Ienzo has to stop his mind from wandering because there is grief and remorse further down that road and Ienzo is already defenseless without being incapacitated by old memories as well. Later he will retrace every one of his steps and his actions, and he will observe how he rushed in without a weapon to defend himself against whatever unholy beast is making that racket, and he will chastise himself accordingly. But for now, his only thought is the years of research--forbidden or otherwise--they will lose if he isn't fast enough.
Reaching Ansem's study, he sees an artificial red light spilling from the computer room into the hall. It's a steady pulse along with the blare of the alarms and Ienzo, ignoring the burn in his lungs, throws himself into the room. There are warnings flashing on every screen, streams of pop-ups alerting him to security breaches and critical errors. Before he can do anything, the screeching comes again, snapping Ienzo's focus away from the computer console. It comes louder this time, and then louder still, until it's loud enough to make Ienzo flinch. He is able to pinpoint its source now. It's coming from the Heartless Manufactory below.
Xigbar's voice resurfaces in Ienzo’s mind again, unbidden. It goads him, spinning suspicion about the Keyblade Wars and that hidden room, deep in the belly of the castle, where Xemnas would hold conversations with a friend, a ghost, another. It had been Xemnas's secret to keep and he had always kept it close to his empty chest.
But now that friend, that ghost, that other, is clawing its way up and out of that secret room. Ienzo is unshakable in his knowledge of this.
There is a long, fraught moment with only Tron's voice listing off error codes and the flashing red light throwing Ienzo's shadow rhythmically against the walls. And then comes the unmistakable, plangent impact of metal hitting metal, with enough force for Ienzo to feel the reverberations even where he stands.
Ienzo doesn't hesitate. There is simply no time. Rushing across the room to the walkway overlooking the Heartless Manufactory, Ienzo sees it: the thick metal floor crumpling upward with each resounding impact. Like a battering ram, his mind supplies. A relentless force. Ienzo watches, cataloging everything even as his blood roars.
The pounding stops. Silence falls and his breath holds itself in his throat.
There is an opening in the floor, now, just wide enough-- for gloved fingers to reach through-- the screeching again, metal grinding, that awful sound-- Ienzo’s eyes strain, his hands gripping the railing-- slowly, incrementally-- the entire floor opening up before Ienzo's eyes.
And from the darkness underneath, she rises.
She sleeps through the next day, which gives them a chance to survey the damage. Leon and Aeleus had gone down into the unexplored depths of the castle, and found the shattered throne and broken chains in Xemnas's Chamber of Repose. The door to it had been forced open from the inside, with indents in the shape of her fingers.
Her helmet is the only piece of armor they removed. It's proper, Ienzo thinks, though Ienzo's experience with ladies is admittedly lacking.
They all take turns watching her throughout the day. Aerith brings flowers to brighten the room and Yuffie even refrains from pawing at her armor. Ienzo does not remember either of them at all from his life before Zexion, but he had rarely ventured out from the castle anyway when he was young. He only remembers Leon because he'd always see him on the castle grounds training with the guards and there was Cid, who frequently did work on the lift system.
It's Ienzo's shift when she wakes the next night, breathless and pale, her hands twisted in the sheets.
"Are you alright?" Ienzo asks, sitting forward. He puts aside the book he had been reading, left behind by Even when Ienzo relieved him.
Her eyes are wide and liquid in the candlelight. "I was trying to--" Her voice breaks. "I need to--"
"You should rest," says Ienzo. "Surely whatever it is can wait until morning? You just tore your way out of what's essentially the castle dungeons." He hopes he doesn't sound condescending; he often has that problem.
"No," she says. "Ventus. Terra."
The names are not familiar to Ienzo.
"What's your name?" Ienzo tries. He's been told it's rude to think of people as specimens for study so he’s trained himself to ask for names first. To humanize them, so he would remember it was a someone and not a something to be pinned to a mounting board and labelled. Ansem had not been fully satisfied with that compromise, and truthfully it had not made a difference in the end. Ienzo had never been able to help his curiosity and he doesn't even try to now. She had just unearthed herself from the dark depths of the castle. Xemnas's friend, ghost, another. How long had she been kept there? For what purpose? Why rise now?
"Ventus," she says again, her voice rising. "Terra. Please."
"You should lie back down," he says, because she has swung her legs over the side of the bed and is making to stand. Ienzo feels the stirrings of dread inside him. She mustn't go. There are too many questions still unanswered. "You could be injured. Bruises, sprains, broken bones, internal bleeding. Someone should examine you-- not me, because I'm not a medical professional-- but someone. Shall I--"
"Where am I?" she asks instead, so softly Ienzo almost misses it.
"Radiant Garden. Formerly Hollow Bastion. The castle, to be specific. Second floor, east wing, to be even more specific. You are safe, I promise."
She does not respond, her eyes focused on her hands in her lap, and Ienzo is left with a rather awkward silence. His conversations are always prone to those, as he has a predilection for overloading his conversational partner with unasked-for information. But Ienzo suspects that in this case, she is simply too distraught to uphold her end. Ienzo will not blame her, having just run the emotional gauntlet of recompletion himself not too long ago.
"What's your name?" he asks again, in a tone that he hopes is gentle rather than overeager.
Another long pause before she answers, "Aqua." She frowns, and brings a hand to her head. "I'm sorry. I don't know how long it's been."
"Aqua," says Ienzo. His newly returned heart does something strange when he sees her fingers run through her hair. He bookmarks the feeling for later examination. "I must insist you rest."
Her armored shoulders visibly drop, her exhaustion seeming to resettle among the dust of her distress. "In the morning," she says, more to herself than to anyone else. Then she lifts her head and looks at Ienzo with eyes like glass. "I'm sorry. I didn't ask your name."
"Ienzo." Then, because for once he can think of nothing else to say, he stands from his chair by the bed and says, "In the morning, then."
"Please, leave the candle.”
He sets the candle down, the light of it banishing the shadows behind her back against the wall. There was something in the way she asked that was like a hook in his heart, and he contemplates it all the way back to his quarters, his hand to the wall to find his way in the dark.
In the morning, he finds her in the library with Aeleus, who is predictably silent. She does not seem to mind, captivated as she is by the sunlight falling in through the stained glass windows, the dust motes caught in the rays.
"Ienzo," she greets when she sees him. Her armor is gone, save for segments on her arms and her boots. She looks lighter without it, Ienzo thinks, though somehow no less like a warrior. The monumental fact that she had ripped her way out of the Chamber of Repose with her bare hands augments that perception.
"Good morning," he says, suddenly conscious of his sleep-mussed hair and rumpled lab coat with the ink stains on the sleeves. His discomfort must show because he catches the slight quirk of Aeleus's mouth.
"I want to thank you," she tells him. "And to apologize again for all the trouble."
"It was no trouble," he says. And truly it wasn't. Even having to reboot the entire security system felt like an infinitesimal price to pay for her arrival. He’s struck with a sudden, dreadful thought. "Do you already have plans to go off-world?"
Her expression morphs into what Ienzo has learned to recognize as disappointment. In his later days, Ansem's face had shown little else. Other than that, Ienzo is not particularly well-versed in reading emotions, having only had trivial experiences with them himself, even before he was Zexion. He has often wondered if that is why Ansem took such an interest in him. The seemingly Heartless boy with a heart.
"I can summon my Keyblade, but I haven't regained the ability to glide yet," she says.
Of all the days for him to oversleep.
"You have a Keyblade?" he asks, taking two steps forward before he catches himself. "Can I see it?"
She looks taken aback by his request, and Ienzo is afraid he's been rude again. Is it against decorum to ask to see a bearer's Keyblade? He doesn't know. He looks to Aeleus but he had slipped away at some point, eerily silent despite his bulk.
"Sure, I suppose," she says at last, to Ienzo's relief. She summons it in a burst of soft light, accompanied by a gentle wind carrying a scent reminiscent of the Gardens after a rain. "This is Stormfall."
It's fascinating, Ienzo thinks, and it's only the remnant of discomfort left over from his time as Zexion that prevents him from reaching out to touch it.
"I've been so long without it, it doesn't come easy anymore," she confesses. "It almost feels like I've forgotten how to walk, or something silly like that." She laughs, and even Ienzo can tell it's not sincere.
"I know what you mean," he says. "You miss a part of yourself for so long that you finally stop missing it, and when you get it back, it feels too heavy and too strange for you to carry it like you once did."
"Yes," she says. She holds Stormfall close. "But it is not so precious that I would not give it up again if I had to."
Her face in the sunlight is suddenly terrible with unmistakable grief. And Ienzo's heart is too heavy and too strange. He does not know how to carry it like he once did.
"Sora will be back soon," Leon says. "Until then, you're welcome to stay."
"I can show you around town," offers Yuffie. "I won't let Scrooge con you out of a sea-salt ice cream."
"Thank you," says Aqua. "But I think I'd rather stay in the castle. If that's all right."
Days later, Ienzo finds her in the Chamber of Repose with one hand on the back of the shattered throne. The Nobody sigils on the walls have gone dark and dull, the lines of chains severed, the ground uneven.
Without turning around, she asks, "Did he come down here often?"
It would be insulting to both her and himself to pretend he doesn't know what she means. Xemnas was Xehanort before the excision of his heart, and though Ienzo had been very young, he remembers the day Xehanort was found in Radiant Garden. Looking back on his memories now, he recognizes Aqua too, in that hollow, lifeless armor they brought in with him. The revelation makes his chest feel uncomfortably tight.
"Very often," he answers honestly. "For hours at a time."
Her hand falls from the throne to her side. "Terra," she says, her voice small, even smaller for the tall ceilings of the room shrouded in shadow.
Xemnas, Xehanort, Terra. Ienzo has more questions. He always does. As a child he had never stopped asking why, and how, and what if. The desire to know and understand was ever-present, eventually eclipsing even the quiet joy of sharing a sea-salt ice cream with Ansem. As Zexion he still sought answers, but without his relentless questions, wary of showing ignorance and weakness. And now he keeps his questions silent too, keeping to the door, afraid to disrupt this fragile peace lest the Chamber, so connected to Aqua for so long, collapses upon them.
"Sometimes I thought I could hear him in the Realm of Darkness. He called me 'friend.' I wasn't just imagining it? It was real?"
"You weren't," Ienzo says. "It was."
When she smiles at him, her eyes are wet, and bright too, even so deep in the chill darkness of the castle underbelly. She takes a seat on the ruined throne, and Ienzo can't help but memorize her profile, her head bowed with an emotion Ienzo now has the heart to understand.
Despite the events leading up to his exile and downfall, Ansem the Wise had earned his title many times over as the king of Radiant Garden. Ansem believed, before he was overtaken by obsession, that understanding the heart was more than just a study of light and dark. People were capable of wondrous, monstrous things, of creation and destruction and everything in between, and everything they did gave insight into the innermost mysteries of the heart. As a result, Ansem kept an extensive library, housing vast tapestries of history woven by the noble and the common and the divine, records of glory and blood, letters of good will and goodbye, the spectrum of human emotion in verse. He encouraged Ienzo to peruse it whenever he pleased, believing also in an interdisciplinary curriculum for young minds. And Ienzo did, whenever he wasn't in the labs or shadowing Ansem himself.
His time as Zexion is a long, deep divide between his childhood and his present, but his memories, though distant, are intact. He remembers clearly the gold filigree bordering the cover of that slim book, the yellowed page, the faded ink of the line:
for beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
He remembers the warm, orange light of the sunset, the silence so absolute and brazen it rang itself in his ears. And Ienzo remembers his young heart beating itself numb, the stillness that held his limbs hostage until Even had found him, scolding him for hiding away when there was work to be done.
The same stillness steals over him now, as he catches sight of her in the moonlit gardens. Her back is to him, but Ienzo can easily recall her eyes like glass in the candlelight, her face terrible with grief, the craters in the floor in the shape her fist.
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
There was a man in the Realm of Darkness, she had said to him in the Chamber of Repose. Whose memories were fading, though he held fast to his heart that was once given over to vengeance. He told me Sora would be the one to save us all, to give us new beginnings, and he was right.
I'm going to find Terra and Ven, she had said. And when I do, I'll never leave them again.
What about you, Ienzo? What will you do with your new beginning?
Ienzo was uncertain of his answer. All his life had been about study and research, stepping over the boundaries of human knowledge, and surely there was more of it to be done. There were wrongs to right, reparations to make. And he had friends too a loose application of the term was appropriate here-- who had yet to be found.
You'll find them, Ienzo, she had said.
There was something else he wanted to say, but the weight of it was as heavy as his unfamiliar heart and he did not know how to wield it. Forgiving his lack of response, the smile she gave him was sincere, Ienzo could tell, even from the doorway from where he was still too afraid to move. Her smile was perfect in ways that Ienzo could not scientifically qualify, and Ienzo had found a new reason to be afraid.
every angel is terrifying.
Ienzo watches her now, Stormfall in her hand, her face turned up to the sky. Looking for Sora on the horizon. Strength and courage and resolve in her posture, her open arms.
It is for the best, Ienzo thinks, turning away.