It was during his fourth year of life that Sora noticed he was not alone in his mind.
The first voice belonged to someone he later learned was named Ventus, but, up to that point, he called an angel. This voice provided him with advice and helped him make the right decision in many different situations.
He was so naïve and yearned for friendship, so he accepted it as it was and never questioned it, nor did he dare mention anything to either Riku or his mother.
. . .
"Would you mind if I stayed here for a while, Sora?" he had inquired, his voice adopting an echo in the confines of the small four-year-old's mind.
"Nahh," he had whispered in reply, crouching down until his bottom nearly touched the sand as the sea water swirled around his ankles, "you sound nice." Tracing a damp stick he had clutched in a delicate grip in the sand, he coaxed a small fish out of hiding. His eyes followed it as it swirled around the rocks in an attempt to escape him. With a smile he dragged the stick through the sediment.
"I'll help you out while I'm here, alright?"
"Alright."
. . .
The second voice was the exact opposite of Ventus, but Sora did not learn of its presence until he was six years old. It was abrupt and sudden, and fear had struck him harshly when he had first encountered this presence.
He had learned he was named Vanitas, but the small child only thought of him as the devil, and within good reason. This voice tried and tried to make the poor boy do naughty things, and sometimes in succession.
. . .
"She won't ever find out," the voice hissed, seemingly into his ear, as he stared into the mirror. He gingerly flicked the spikes of his hair.
"Mom doesn't like me playing with scissors. She says I could hurt myself."
A dark, amused chuckle resounded through his mind . "You don't like your hair anyway, so why not?"
"Alright…"
He almost thought he heard Ventus whisper, "Leave him alone! Why do you want him to do that? Don't do it, Sora!" but he had already picked up the scissors and snipped off the already jagged ends of his hair.
It hardly meant anything, but it was the principle of the matter.
. . .
The third voice appeared a decade after the first, and despite bringing six other voices along with it, they all were mere fleeting existences and were gone as soon as they came. One of the voices was a manifestation of his friend Kairi, and her arrival deeply disturbed him. She said little, but her presence itself was deafening, and he himself grew less and less talkative everyday.
His smiles were no longer genuine and he soon found himself being shut up in his room just to avoid the real her. He ignored the voice as well. How could he bring himself to talk to her when she was already here?
. . .
His head was buzzing with conversation and he stared out his window with a blank expression. "Just stop," he whispered, but the sound never ceased. "Stop," he muttered, his voice a bit forced and yet holding a firm tone.
No response, just aimless talking.
His hand fisted in the sheets beneath him.
"Shut up!"
They all complied.
. . .
A few months after the voice of "Kairi", as well as the others, had left him, a single voice, Xion, joined the other two. Like Kairi, she was quiet, but he had a feeling deep down that he would be hearing much more from her soon.
When he was fifteen, three voices joined his mind; one loud and calculating, the second both bitter and sweet, and the last too fleeting to assess. Axel, Roxas, and Naminè.
He had learned to suppress so much, that his mother no longer suspected a thing. He had learned the art of lying with no remorse, excuses and twisted stories falling from his lips without a second thought. All he wanted was to be normal, but he never really knew what normal was in the first place.
. . .
The laughing and joking was a bit hard to ignore, and sometimes even he would giggle outwardly when Axel would say something funny, but he would catch himself before anyone saw.
He wasn't crazy, he was just cursed.
. . .
When he was sixteen, Vanitas began growing more violent and angry each and every day.
It was then that Sora began experiencing blackouts, waking each morning somewhere he did not know, with blood and dirt streaked on his face and bruises covering his body. It was when he was sixteen that he began losing friends, and the mothers that used to adore him would give him nervous glances. He heard their whispering, and instead of becoming depressed, he would hate them.
These fleeting moments of violent loathing could only be blamed on one thing. Soon Sora began to not care anymore.
It was then that he began listening to Vanitas and his manipulating words in his own bitterness, despite the fact that the evil presence already had the power to hijack his mind, as he had done many times before.
His mother was too naïve, or just in complete denial, to notice that her son would sneak out at night. Sometimes as himself, and other times not.
Ventus tried, he really did, to suppress the devil, the evil in Sora's young, impressionable mind, but in the end it was all in vain.
. . .
"You know, I don't think the cashier would really care if you took it. One bottle of alcohol isn't going to put that big of a dent in their stock."
Sora only glanced up and down the aisle before gripping the neck in his sweaty hands, the alcohol nearly slipping from his trembling hands before he stuffed it beneath his jacket.
Shoving his hands into his pocket, he strolled to the counter and placed onto it the candy bar that he had hastily grabbed as a guilt-ridden cover-up.
The cashier never really suspected him… At first.
. . .
It was when Sora turned eighteen that he invested in a handgun. He never really knew why he had purchased it, but he had a sudden urge deep within him the day he did. He had no idea he ever used it until he had come to with a stain of gun powder on his hands.
More often then not the teenager found himself scrubbing harder and harder at his hands with each passing day, paying close attention to the newspapers.
He had no control and he was afraid.
More often than not, as Sora would seat himself beside his bedside table, he would pick the gun, weigh it in his hands, turn off the safety, and hold it to his head.
. . .
"Don't do it, Sora," Ventus would whisper, voice as pleading as always. "Please."
He never did much, so why did he even care in the first place? It was most likely in his own interest than Sora's. After all, he resided in the very place that the gun was held to.
"You won't go through with it," Vanitas would hiss, and Sora would pull the trigger, only to find the gun empty yet again, no matter how many times he reloaded it.
. . .
It was the morning of his nineteenth birthday, however, when he awoke in a foreign bed, beside a nude Kairi, that he knew Vanitas had crossed a line he should have kept sacred.
He had scribbled out a messy note, filled with bullshit about how he was so sorry, that he shouldn't have done whatever he had done, that he loved her but could not live with what he had forced her into, and he had run out of her apartment still pulling on his shirt with tears stinging at his eyes. His home was only down the street, and when he had stumbled into it, he ran to his bathroom, staring at the mirror with steady streams of tears dribbling down his chin.
"What have you done?" he screamed into the mirror, at his reflection, gripping the sink with shaking hands as he waited for an answer. His vision began to blur, but he withheld his sobs with a bite to his lip.
For a split second he thought he saw his eye color change to a golden yellow, but it had snapped back so quickly that he naïvely blamed it on a trick of the lights.
"Answer me!"
"Stop overreacting, idiot. She wanted it,"the familiar voice drawled back, and he could have sworn he saw someone standing beside him. He whipped his head around, searching for whatever he had seen, but found nothing.
"Kairi's my friend! How could you do that to me?"
He had lost control, and he was sobbing uncontrollably. He was violently trembling, relying heavily on the counter so he would not fall.
"I thought you loved her," Vanitas mocked, his voice adopting a teasing tone that reduced Sora to a sniveling mess.
"You took advantage of her! Oh, God, Vanitas," he wiped at his eyes, "you- you-"
"Fucked her?" he supplied, and Sora could nearly hear the smirk as he said it. The brunet only choked out an intelligible mess of words as he slid to the floor, his back against the cabinets as he fisted his fingers in his hair.
"Why?" he whispered. "WHY!"
Silence.
Where was Ventus when he needed him?
"Just to see if I could."
His eyes snapped open and he jerked his head back quickly, his head snapping hard against the counter as golden eyes stared at him, narrowed and mocking. However, when he had blinked, the person had vanished.
"I'm going crazy," he whispered, and immediately scrambled to his feet, running into his room and to his bedside table. "I'm going crazy," he repeated. He pulled out his handgun and checked the chamber,
Just one left,
And switched off the safety.
"You don't have the balls."
"Shut up," he hissed, wiping at his eyes once again as he vaguely considered writing a suicide note…
No.
He seated himself on his bed, and he held the gun up to his ear, the one that only Vanitas would speak into, and stared blankly at the person lying beside him in his bed. The relaxed position greatly contradicted the large grin on his lips as he stared up at him expectantly.
Sora's eyes stung and his throat suddenly felt raw.
"Do it," the person hissed, golden eyes flashing with something unknown intention as he propped himself onto his elbow. "I know you won't."
Where's Ventus to talk him out of it?
"What're you waiting for?"
"Shut up," he hissed, before slowly counting down from five in his mind.
Five. Vanitas moved to a sitting position, whispering dark words of encouragement.
Four. He could feel his finger shaking on the trigger as he leaned away from the entity that had been making his life a living hell for thirteen years.
Three. Vanitas only advanced on him, a smirk growing across his lips as he leaned forward, his hand wrapping around Sora's wrist in a tight grip.
It felt cold, and yet warm.
Two. Feeling it tremble, Vanitas tugged at Sora's wrist, knocking the barrel closer to his skull, keeping his hand steady.
One. He grinned maliciously. "Do it, set me free."
"Sora!"
Shit.
A/n: Hello there. I apologize for the disturbing plot and story. Take this as me going out with a bang before I bow out of the Kingdom Hearts fandom for now. I dislike this story right now, so I suppose I'll continue editing and editing before I'm finally happy with it.
My inspiration was the fact that Sora has so many people tied to him. What if he could actually converse with them? And I understand Vanitas is a bit out of character, but hey, I'd be pissed if I was trapped in some kid's head.
If you just so happen to be a reader for Lygophobia, I'm going to take this time to explain to you that I will not be writing for it for now. I'm not abandoning it. No, not at all. It's not really a hiatus because I will attempt to write for it at any given chance, but just... just not right now. I've lost my passion for writing anything Kingdom Hearts, and now I'm aiming for something different I suppose. I'm mostly writing original fiction if it makes up for anything...
Review and tell me how much you hate this/are mad at me I suppose. Happy early Halloween to you all.