Xehanort had long since stopped worrying about the fact that he was seeing things.

Too many long nights and too much caffeine would take their toll on anyone's lucidity. When he spun around in his chair convinced that something was watching him but saw nothing, or caught a glimpse of shadows moving in ways they shouldn't out of the corner of his eye, it was just his brain reminding him to get some rest once in a while.

And when you were experimenting on yourself, certain minor issues were only to be expected. His tendency to forget to turn on the lights when he walked into a lab, and not notice he hadn't until Ansem made an appearance and told him he was ruining his eyes, that had turned into a bit of a running joke. More so now that most of the rest were suffering from the same affliction. They were all too caught up in the thrill of discovery to worry about the little things, most of the time.

He made note of possible hallucinations and got back to work, and ignored whatever he saw until other people started seeing it too, and lent his delusions rather more solidity than he preferred them to have.

Which didn't mean there was no longer a logical explanation. There was always a logical explanation, he told himself, and opened the door to the spare room in the dungeons with more interest than trepidation.

Xehanort blinked once. Wide yellow eyes stared back at him, unblinking and faintly luminous. Not one pair, but many, perhaps dozens. (Had they gone through so many subjects already, or were they replicating on their own now?)

Despite their numbers, they showed no sign of overt hostility. He'd been expecting something from them, after Braig stomped upstairs swearing about monsters, hordes of the little buggers, but they seemed content to stare, until a handful began to creep closer, stirred by curiosity - no, stop anthropomorphizing the specimens.

He wasn't nervous, really, even when they were within inches of him. But when one of them tugged at the hem of his labcoat he stepped backward involuntarily, narrowly avoiding an undignified stumble. "Stop that."

It stopped. So did all the rest, ending their advance towards him, seemingly content to go back to merely looking. The foremost one tilted its round head to one side and made a faint questioning noise, and Xehanort spun on his heel and left the room, barely pausing the make sure the door was safely secured behind him.

It wasn't even the fact that the darkness had started staring back at him that he found disturbing, or that it listened to him, or that he could very well have finally lost it entirely. Xehanort could deal with that.

But they squeaked.