A.N. – okay, this requires and explanation. Basically, it's a half-crossover between KH-Vivi being aware of FFIX-Vivi with a side of Xion. Wondered what would've happened if both artificial guys met, with a lot of liberties and going crazy.
So that's that, and hope you enjoy this piece!
Twilight Town flickers for the space of a blink.
Now, that should've been astounding. Muddling, even. But Vivi has seen many of those already. He'll be swinging a sporting bat a second, firing a sunset-colored orb the next, stunned and blinded by the radiance only to find himself staring at the concrete pipes in his secluded training spot, no fiery spell in sight, no aftermath aside from a dropped stick on the ground.
Vivi will misread the names, catching something that goes Zi- before defaulting to Hayner or Seifer or whoever it supposedly was.
He'll stare at mirrors for an overly long time. And not because he's vain or anything- Vivi is chronically insecure, but for a fleeting minute he can swear that he expects the other boy to march and wave of its own accord and is even disappointed when it doesn't happen.
The static sunset blurs again, melting and reforming in a fiery trance-
(And the thought sets Vivi to quiver, even if it's usual and no-one remarks on the event anymore)
-then it's gone like the last specks of dust on the ground. Vivi just plods back home, dragging the long bat behind him and pulling his hat lower down on his head.
He thinks he had brothers. Or a sister, loud and brash and inconveniently cute, but that's not the case.
The real case is that Vivi lives with one of the vendors of one of the shops, unrelated to him in every way, like most people. A Moogle who doesn't like his pom-pom ruffled, claims to have been a Struggle champion before he took up the commercial trade and collects postcards.
Collects, not sends. Vivi always asks if he ever wants to send one, or if he receives one from anywhere else than the school kids who bargain with him by offering handmade cards for extra balls or match tickets.
The Moogle always says the same.
"No, why kupo. Would like to, but no-one travels much kupo."
But Vivi knows and thinks that once, he heard of a brave adventurer who traveled far and wide. And Vivi used to carry messages along, with a blond-not-Twilight-Town by his side making passes at pretty girls that aren't the sunset villa's usual stock.
Vivi thinks he remembers fighting things that weren't his own shadows or teenagers in Struggle gear. Vivi once upon a time had been beyond the dull-green patch of forest, beyond the wave-licked beaches, beyond even the lands that the imposing clock tower could see.
But that is the stuff of dreams, Vivi thinks, when all his messages are delivered to and from the storefront to the promising clients and all the battles are timed and judged and won or lost with no consequence.
The girl is the one who finds Vivi, instead of the other way round. Kind faced, large eyes of a startling blue and short black hair.
Vivi doesn't say hello at first. He says something that sounds like 'Garnet' or like 'Dagger' and why ever would he say that when she wields nothing and has not even a speck of red.
She just looks, a bit uncomfortably. For the record, she then tells Vivi that really, she was amazed at finding someone there. She had just been following some dog, and oh, sorry for not saying hello first.
Vivi's never been good with girls. Not from the dream-memories with tangled greens, not from real-Vivi in the orange-stained skies. And here is the odd thing, the little change that differences no-name-girl from Olette or Fuu or the others.
A timid greeting, little more than a drowsy wave and tilting his head up so that lantern-yellow eyes are visible under the brim of the hat.
Her smile- tiny, shy and her hand curling around air in a motion that sounds forced and-
(For a moment, she is in something odd the color of sunset and billowing white sleeves instead of the sleek black cloak, then the eyes are wrong and the illusion ends-)
Vivi bites back the are you real bubbling up from lips and flashing so bright across his eyes.
She blinks once before laughing- at Vivi's face, most certainly- and offering up a name.
Xion, she says. Liquid sounding, unlike the eerily solid names that Vivi's illusions have and he gets the idea that she fits there as well.
But no-one does. The black-cloaked ones aren't from Twilight Town-
(Any more than Vivi is).
It's a gradual bonding. Awkward, stilted: Vivi has flashes of Xion doing other things instead of sitting not-quite-primly there or analyzing everything with machine-like precision.
He'll see small things that are not there, and some that are but Vivi can't name. Xion can, fast enough to make him familiar with the concept. Heartless, he hears her say in between key-bat swings and popsicle licks.
Heartless he hears, but clone he understands. And that is what he poses to Xion, after watching her scythe through another one a day on the sandlot.
"They all look the same." Feel the ominous same, have the same lack of sound and share lamp-eyes similar to Vivi's own.
"They do. Not sure why."
Then a doubt gracelessly careens across Xion's (dream-girl's, Garnet-and-Dagger-girl's) face before falling out and Vivi thinks he just dreamt it all up.
Vivi is quite attuned to silences. Solitude does that to a person, his Moogle always says. It also means he is quite attuned to sounds.
Which is why Vivi is the first one to notice the receding tides of Xion's voice. She'll drift off, but never midsentence, and take sad glimpses at herself in reflections.
(Xion being fitted for a crown, but that's not her. Neither is she the girl gazing lost at a carved wall or at a ruined castle in shades of ash)
"You're not getting the antennae that the Heartless have."
She lacks the laugh. She quirks up in a half-drowned smile, she looks at Vivi and quips something along the lines of a hat getting stuck like the Heartless's.
"But it's not that, Vivi."
She returns to the faded girl in the window, run through by ice-cream posters and barely lifts a hand to touch the pane.
"I think I look too much the same."
Later on that day, Vivi stays too long at the mirror, wondering in a vaguely-vain way. The Vivi in the mirror is the same as he's always been, a perfect mimicry flipped left-to-right and slouching slightly.
(Running off behind to half-infinity and eyes duller than exhaustion can wave away and Vivi's falling, crushed between a crowd of replicas)
He throws a starry blanket over it and dissuades anyone from asking with an excuse about a broken pane.
Xion is beginning to look less like her and more like a sunburst. Or chocolate-brown, or even the girl in his memory-dreams with the orange overall.
Maybe Vivi asks her about a blond friend, good with girls and if she knows about another girl, wildly seeking love. New or lost, Vivi doesn't know, only that he may have asked that.
Maybe Vivi says that she doesn't look too much the same. But too much plastic and crystal-clear, like she's a fabrication-
(And Vivi is, he thinks he knows, and he wants to ask Xion if she thinks he is a doll in a wide-brimmed hat and baggy clothes)
He doesn't know what he asks or says. But Vivi does know- and remembers better than yesterday or the backhand Struggle blow- that Xion left quietly like the debris brought in by the tide.
She returned soon enough, like she'd left on a timer. Maybe she did- she feels like a wind-up puppet, the pretty type that dances and spins so long as the mechanism has turns left.
(A little princess, a smaller girl in a wide-brimmed hat with the same faded multicolored clothes and sun-yellow eyes)
"I've a feeling that one day, you'll see another Vivi. In another place, who swings a staff instead of a bat, who can summon little twilights in his hands, who also has a blond friend and a knowing friend in red. And you'll say hello to him, and ask how are you Vivi, and he'll answer like you meant him all along."
Xion is just quiet, waiting for Vivi to release the wind-up mechanism of his words and let her answer twirl in preset motions.
"If you ever see that Vivi…"
(Tell him to send a postcard to Moogle. Tell him to not stop yet, because he can't and Vivi doesn't want the other-and-same himself to cease. Mark him or anything or-)
"I don't think I will."
She is quiet again, after the melancholic phrase. Quiet and nut-brown, with feathery earth-brown hair that closely resembles-
(A bird, but he won't mention that because Xion is a girl and-)
"But you might see another Xion. Or another of what I'm..." (mirroring, replicating and a million words drift from experience to her face)
"I don't think I will, either."
That night, Vivi checks the clocks constantly, as it one would tell him if this-Xion had stopped or if other-Xion was-
But there are no other 'Xion's, not that Vivi knows. She doesn't seem easy to make or replicate.
That word. Re-pli-cate, Re-pli-ca. To him, to her and it's twisting, tangling between a multitude of patchwork-clad small boys and lanky black-cloaked girls crowned with brown spikes of hair.
Vivi goes through the whole night without stopping and seriously deems such a common fact more important than he thinks it should be.
Xion is on her leaving-time again. Gone abroad- Vivi has seen her vanish and reappear most afternoons for ice-creams or window-shopping.
At times, she returns. Briefly, as if something is chasing and catching up to her.
(A regal shadow, extravagant and deadly and it's not for her and locked together.)
When it happens, Xion just breathlessly greets Vivi. A couple whipping hand motions, a couple ghostly smiles, a speedily-acquired (but uneaten) sea-salt popsicle- it's all Xion does, and then she's off.
At times, she'll bring something. A couple paper scraps, a couple sea-shells. Some shiny cards, she says, and maybe your Moogle would like to keep them.
(Soaring pale castles that echo in memory and he's never seen. Wondrous worlds and grinning people that he'll never meet but compares to half-imagined phantoms)
A stern boy blindfolded and fuming. Stiff upper lip, somewhat sarcastic and with an angle of deep sorrow. Much too discolored for one of Vivi's memories, though if he were taller, if he wasn't irrevocably grieving, it could be close enough.
Those souvenirs Vivi keeps- he needs them. For what, he doesn't know.
Maybe it's because he still thinks Xion will stop soon and he needs to make something to prove her existence.
(She has one, same as he does.
She has or is a replica, same as Vivi hopes he isn't but knows he might be.)
But he does make a show of delivering them, a ditzy smile on his face.
"Hey Moogle, you got mail."
It feels comfortingly surreal.
Vivi isn't sure why he waits up on the concrete pipes anymore, or why the flat shadows on the ground don't stare up with mirrored eyes.
(Oh, but they do at times. Before the town flickers in amber shades and they are gone again like the –blanks-)
He just swings the bat around again, between the cracks in the world.
One- a small boy in a nook of a safe town beating at the air with a toy.
Two- Vivi swinging a staff, twilight and fire at his glove-tips and a black-haired girl with the right (wrong) nut-brown eyes.
Three- he's back at the first place, with a shadow ghosting behind him with night-sky eyes and a weird bat and it must be the same girl from before, only-
(Without. Within. Neither of them is here, although Vivi has seen them somewhere, with two blond boys and someone in red.
One Vivi for each- neither real and why does he know about this, a not-only-one and not-wholly-real and-)
Vivi blinks back the latest cobweb of illusion and resumes his practice.
After all, the summer's last Struggle tournament is just a week away.