vacantis

Silence...

A boy who everyone called Ventus couldn't believe how little he once considered the world. Foolishly he'd once thought of silence as just an absence, a background when things were a little boring, nothing to be given any thought. How wrong he was. Silence was, as teacher who were people once said, golden. Silence was a sanctuary where no one could hurt you.

It made him so happy, curled up in a bed in a bunk he didn't want to think about, that Ventus didn't quite trust it. Sleepy, safe, quiet. Alone in his own head, not thinking about anything. It didn't seem real. A bit of safety like this felt so foreign after a few months that he couldn't wrap his head around it. Could't move, for fear of breaking it. Whatever. It didn't matter. Anything he said yesterday felt stupid the second he'd gone home, slunk away from that silence and back to...too...

For a second he flipped one of the earmufflers up just to test that he wasn't crazy. The roar of machinary, the shaking of this building, the sound of a hundred other children yelling or crying or just...breathing to close was enough. Ven curled up around his tiny corner bed, and absolved himself to stay here forever. He wouldn't even leave this place to eat, if it meant taking his quiet away.

There's another boy in the Land of Departure.

Ventus has seen him, maybe three times, despite apparently everyone involved's best efforts. Always in the evening or the early morning. Questioning Aqua and Terra never helped, and the one time he walked up to Master Eraqus and asked him plainly he'd gotten a firm hand on his head and a stern word to mind his studies.


He'd...forgotten about it for a while after that. Just hadn't thought about it, and went back to training with Terra and Aqua. They were finally letting him use keyblade, and they said it was fall now, and the leaves turning red meant snow was on the way, and it was so dreadfully exciting.

But he'd seen the boy again, when grabbing a book for Terra late at night, just a flash of a head of black hair from a window, but before he could stop himself he was pressed up to the glass like someone had pulled a wire taunt.

The other figure, the other boy, his age maybe, was limping along back towards a wing of the house Ventus had thought nobody used. He'd opened a door, vanishing from veiw, and Ventus had reeled back as the spell was broken.

The desire to follow the other boy was overwelming. Ventus had to swallow it down, a hand on his chest as his heart pounded. He'd finally managed to stumble to bed, but his mind kept returning to the door, to the boy, to the...incessent pulling he felt. It was frightening, but he kept it to himself, even as Aqua scolded him for poor footwork.

That night he sat up in bed, eyes wide and unblinking. He could put it off no longer. Without even bothering to put anything over his sleep clothes he walked out over the wet grass towards the unused wing of the house, its windows boarded up and dark. The door, when he put his hand onto it was cold. It was also locked.

Ventus groaned. Unlock spells...the simplest imaginable, still eluded him. There was only one thing to do. With a huff he shot a palm out, a giant gust of wind following and rattling the door on his hinges. It remained closed, feeling desperate, the pull in his mind growing stronger, Ven tried again and again.

When he paused, opening his eyes and breathing raggedly, the door was swinging--its lock shattered and its hinges squealing from the abuse. Ven felt terrible for about a half second, before he stepped inside.

"Ventus" was at school again. Or whatever seemed to pass for it.

The screen in front of him was grainy and covered in what seemed like eons worth of dust and grease--something he knew from experience from the first time he'd tried to rub at it to get a clearer veiw and it had left a brown smear across his hand. One he couldn't get off for days, without any water to spare and nothing to resemble clean anywhere around him.

That's right. He thought, even as he gripped at this thin clothes he wore and drew his knees up to stare at the screen, to ignore the tinny hum of the speakers nearby. Something about rules, and traffic, and it was so unbearable spoken in a condescending cruel tone that Ventus had grown to hate that he found himself covering his ears. Everything here is unclean.

It wasn't enough that there wasn't any sun (but what was the sun anyway, if nobody believed in it), it wasn't that there wasn't enough space, that the kids at the shelter pushed and shoved or stared with dark eyes (or even worse, with nothing and that scared Ventus down to his core). It wasn't that he wasn't believed, or he couldn't even believe in himself anymore.

It was that he was so, damnably unclean. It got to him in the way nothing else could. He didn't know anything but he knew he couldn't have felt like this always--trapped with no way out, wanting to rip his own skin off just to...to what? Escape it?

He was beginning to realize his thoughts weren't making sense, which was so close to what the doctors had told him it made him grip his head tighter, rocking back and forth on the chair because that at least, he'd figured out, the people here allowed.

For once, nothing hurt.

Awareness had shifted for a bit for Ventus, like he'd lost time. He'd been sitting, and there had been a loud sound,the kind that usually usually he'd try for his keyblade on instinct (which was stupid because there was nothing to fight and he had no real way of doing so without his keyblade, and that was the issue that Ventus had no idea what to do with himself otherwise).

For once, however, he'd not met unexpected stimuli with untoward and vigorously applied violence (no point). No he'd gone and done something else, entirely by instinct. He blinked down at his Vanitas's no name deamon, his fist balled into her fur despite any protests. The contact was intense, strange and foreign and familiar at the same time. It was so intense it hurt, and yet it filled some acheing void in his bones that had been so everpresent he'd nearly suceeded in forgetting it.

He looked at Vanitas across the room, dug his fingers in, and narrowed his eyes ever so, slightly.

The endless horizon drifts beneath his feet as he swings them a little, tapping his heels against the edge of this world tunelessly.

Ventus doesn't know where he is.

That's, it's not exactly the most odd thing. Ventus often doesn't really know the names of the worlds he's on, because it doesn't really matter. But usually then he has a plan, or orders, but he woke up with no notes in his pocket and swinging Wayward Wind around did nothing to summon a portal back home. He's stuck here, purposeless...perhaps its a punishment. Ventus doesn't know what he's done wrong, runs over recent events in his head as he stares out blankly. He'd fought his other self once, beaten up that blue haired girl, unleashed heartless to strengthen Vanitas and draw Xehanorts new body away. All according to plan, so why?

He rips up a bit of grass from the lawn beside him, sprinkling it down slowly into the abyss instead of pondering further. The why wasn't that important, actually. He'd messed up, so he just needed to wait until it was clear what he needed to do.