A/N: Welp, this is the other AEM-verse oneshot that I've had sitting around in my files for a while now, and haven't gotten around to posting yet. *headdesk* It's actually been a little over two years since I wrote this, I think...wow. XD
Anyway! I originally wrote this for my friend R-girl, who had been dying to know how in the world Vanitas and Zack ever met and became friends in the AEM verse, so here it is! She's actually already seen this, but now I'm finally getting my butt in gear and actually posting it. Woo!
Warnings: Uh...lots of swearing, some violence, and imprisonment. For the last two, it's nothing terribly serious, so don't worry. Also, Vanitas's description of Barret might be a bit racist? I dunno. Let me know if it's too much?
Characters: Zack Fair and Vanitas Valentine, AEM verse
Dedication: To R-girl, for inspiring me to hammer out this particular backstory!
Oh, and Happy Holidays to everyone (even if this fic has absolutely nothing to do with any of that XP)!
Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, and am making no profit from this at all. The "An Enchanted Moment" AU verse is my brainchild, along with my cohorts, Ghostwriter No. 3 and owlpostagain. The title of this fic comes from the song, "Bad Company" (which I think is originally by a band of the same name?).
Destiny is the Rising Sun
If one more person opened their stupid mouth and said anything, Vanitas felt that whatever reserves of self-control he had left would snap, and he'd start swinging and something would go flying. Be it heads or the tattered remnants of his dignity, and it just wouldn't be his fault. He refused to be held accountable to any of these farcical goings-on.
But then, Vanitas very rarely got what he believed he deserved from life.
And sadly, it was unlikely he would get any of the silence or peace that he desired.
He was, after all, in a jail. A jail cell to be precise, but the point was that there was noise, and said noise was basically the manifestation of the lifeblood of prisons everywhere, and thus unlikely to just fucking stop any time soon.
Vanitas briefly considered whether banging his head against the bars of his (goddamned) jail cell would lessen his annoyance at the cacophony—a litany of shouting, hurtled insults, cussing out everything from someone's mother to the moon, pleas of innocence, cries about police brutality and civil rights, orders and demands from the good, upstanding officers to shut the fuck up, people, and the occasional warbling from the drunk and disorderly or the stoners—or just result in a headache.
Unfortunately, he'd have to bet that he'd get the headache. And then the pounding in his skull would just make the noise levels sound all the louder.
And the greatest indignity of all?
He barely knew what the fuck he'd been arrested for.
Honestly, he'd just gone to the university library as a favor for his brother. Ventus had begged and groveled for him to go drop off a stupid book that was due, because Ventus absolutely could not get away from whatever-the-fuck important thing he was doing, and would Vanitas please, please, please go in Ventus's stead?
See if he ever did his brother a favor, ever again.
So there he'd been, innocently doing the drop off that Ventus had repeatedly assured him would be simplistic—which, duh, Vanitas wasn't a moron, he'd been in a library before, thanks very much, and surely the process was universal everywhere—and there'd been a bunch of stupid people waving some stupid signs, shoving stupid pamphlets at unwary passersby, nattering on about some stupid cause that Vanitas could give absolutely no fucks about, in unnecessarily loud, protest-y voices. Vanitas therefore had proceeded to ignore them and gone on his innocent way, accomplishing his task and depositing stupid Ventus's stupid book.
And then, well, things went to hell in a flammable hand basket.
Vanitas didn't really know how or when the police had showed up, nor did he know the whys or how a riot had gotten started. Vanitas had been in blissful ignorance.
All Vanitas did know was that he'd gotten punched in the face upon exiting the library. And being Vanitas, he hadn't missed much of a beat before punching the offender right back.
Come on, it was totally justified self-defense or whatever.
Seeing as his original thought of, What the actual fuck, had been useless, the only other thought Vanitas had had was that he just wanted to be on the other side of this melee and on his merry way home, okay, and that if he had to knock a few flailing body parts or faces aside with his fists—well, it really wasn't his fault, now was it?
He had just been returning a goddamned book, alright? And he didn't fucking know any of these people, and he was most certainly not involved in any way, shape, or form with their Cause for Protestation. He didn't even go to school on this campus.
Therefore, Vanitas thought that it was completely unfair that he'd been arrested alongside of the rest of the protestors-turned-rioters, and that absolutely no one had listened, much less believed him, when he'd said that he really, really wasn't involved.
And to top it all off, he was eighteen and thus an adult, and so he was looking forward to spending a night in a jail cell at the least, and hope that his checking account wouldn't bounce with the removal of the money he'd need for bail.
Vanitas wondered whether he'd be able to guilt Ventus into reimbursing him, or if his mother would get wind of it and lecture him on taking advantage of poor college students like his brother.
At the very least, Vanitas was going to rest the blame firmly on his brother's shoulders, recompense or no.
Anyway, so thus it was that he came to be in such a despicable, disgraceful place, with such an event being the evil mound of whipped cream that drowned and suffocated the ice cream that had been his innocent day, free of being surrounded by a group of such insufferable morons.
Correction—as Vanitas did have awesome reasoning and deductive skills, and was in possession of such wondrous things as Logic and Common Sense—he was surrounded by a group of insufferable, moronic environmentalist hippies. Again, trust his luck to be swept up in some kind of riot with a bunch of tree-huggers.
Not that Vanitas wasn't all for helping the environment, or anything like that. He just felt that there were more intelligent ways to go about it. Ways that involved making lots of money, and buying out or bankrupting the threats, or even maybe toss in a bit of good old-fashioned blackmail. Beating the enemy at their own game, essentially.
However, Vanitas wished to believe that most people were unlike him in that they were in possession of morals, and thus he never suggested such ideas to those who upheld said Causes, so as to avoid totally disillusioning himself and losing his faith in humanity entirely. He had enough trouble with that sort of thing as it was.
"Don't you fucking care that the fucking planet is being sucked dry, you assholes?" shouted the Stereotypical Angry Black Man. Vanitas assumed he was waving his arms around so that he wouldn't start shaking the bars in his agitation. "Soon it'll be just a lump of dead rock floating in space!"
"If by 'soon', you mean another couple million years," Vanitas muttered under his breath, and he wearily leaned his head against the bars. He was so done with this bullshit.
A man nearby chuckled in response, and Vanitas felt his spine stiffen. He hadn't realized that someone was close enough, and well inside his personal space, to be able to hear him. He tilted his head slightly to direct a hard, yellow-eyed glare onto his neighbor. Said neighbor merely lifted his eyebrows.
"You've got some freaky eyes, man, you know that?" His voice was completely friendly, light and conversational, as if he were merely commenting on the weather. This caused Vanitas's glare to sharpen even further.
"That's rich, coming from you," Vanitas snapped.
At least it was true. The other man's eyes were blue, which was a common enough eye color. But Vanitas had never seen blue eyes like his before—and he'd grown up around blue-eyed people. They were so bright as to be almost glowing, an almost-painful-to-look-at electric, neon, glow-in-the-dark blue. If he hadn't been seeing it himself, he wouldn't have believed that such a thing as this man's eyes were possible, and as it was, he knew that there was something that was a bit…unnatural about them. Vanitas would have bet money that the color was engineered somehow.
The man stifled a snort, those eerie eyes twinkling.
"True enough, I guess," he said, with a carefree shrug of his shoulders. He held out his hand. "I'm Zack, by the way."
Vanitas didn't respond—he refused to play at social niceties while he was wrongfully in jail. To that end, he pointedly turned his head away and stared back out through the bars: a blatant sign that he considered this conversation to now be over.
Out of the corner of his eye—because of course Vanitas wasn't stupid enough to turn his back completely on this unknown factor—he saw that Zack's mouth only stretched into a broad, seemingly guileless grin. Undeterred, the man leaned forward and stuck his hand in front of Vanitas's face, fingers wiggling in invitation scant inches away from his nose.
"Oh come on, don't ignore me," whined Zack, his voice pitched too perfectly for it to have been anything but deliberately annoying. Then his fingers swooped and pinched Vanitas's nose, startling him into slamming his head back against the wall.
"The fuck is your problem?" Vanitas snarled, treating Zack to his deadliest glare. Even Ventus would shut up upon receiving it.
Zack, whom Vanitas was quickly coming to loathe, merely smirked at him.
"Obviously, my problem is that you're not telling me what your name is."
Vanitas glared harder. Zack, the fucker, just laughed at him.
"You're going to have to try harder than that to scare me, or whatever. My uncles have way scarier glares than you do."
"You're an intolerable human being," Vanitas informed him loftily. No way was Vanitas going to let this imbecile win and get one over him. He somehow had the feeling that he would never regain the ground if he lost it.
Which was a ridiculous feeling. 'Zack' was only going to be in his life for this one night, and once he was finally freed of this infernal place, they would go on their separate ways, and Vanitas would pray fervently that their paths would never cross again.
"Aw, I think you like me really," was Zack's—thoroughly incorrect—assessment.
"No, I really don't," Vanitas replied back in his frostiest, most snippy tone.
"Maybe not yet," Zack acquiesced with an easy roll of his shoulders. "But you will."
"And what, pray tell, would give you that assumption?"
Vanitas was treated to the brightest smile he'd seen yet from Zack, which given what he'd seen so far, was very disturbing to his soul.
"I'm just that loveable," was Zack's answer, delivered from lips crooked into the most infuriating smirk that Vanitas had ever had the displeasure of seeing.
Vanitas sneered at the man to show just how impressed he was by such a statement, before turning his back once again. He really needed to stop talking to this guy. He had the horrible, sinking feeling that already he was standing at the top of a slippery slope.
"You know, I'm surprised that your nose isn't broken." Zack, of course, wasn't making anything easier on him, as he was still continuing to gab at him like they were friends. "And for the record, I don't think Tifa meant to punch you—probably why your nose isn't broken. I think she tried to pull her punch at the last second. 'Cause, trust me, when Tifa wants to break your nose, consider your nose frickin' broken, you know?"
"No, I don't know," Vanitas snapped once again, inwardly lamenting and chastising himself for letting this guy get under his skin so easily. "Nor do I want to know, or want anything to do with any of you freaks, so stop fucking talking to me!"
"You got a pretty good hit on her, though, so good for you. I don't think someone's landed a blow on Tifa like that in years. Probably why she beat your ass afterwards." Vanitas gritted his teeth; Zack had kept on speaking as blithely as if he hadn't heard anything that Vanitas had just said, and fuck but did that blatant disregard make his blood boil.
"You're doing a spectacular job of rising in leaps and bounds to the top of my shit list," Vanitas growled at him. The only indication Zack gave that he'd heard was yet another wink, but there was no pause in the cadence of his ramblings.
Had he mentioned yet that this Zack was fucking annoying? Possibly even more so than Ventus, which frankly astounded Vanitas, as he hadn't been willing to believe that there could be a more irritating being than his older brother. But then, Ventus didn't frequently devote all of his sickening intensity onto Vanitas, as he had a life and friends and interests and a girlfriend and such completely outside of his relationship with his younger brother. The fact of the matter was that Vanitas was just an afterthought in his brother's world—like a light switch, something underneath your notice until you needed it.
And Vanitas was just fine with that, thank you very much. The only things he wasn't fine with at the moment were Zack, his being in prison, and the fact that he had just mentally compared himself to a fucking light switch, of all things.
He didn't need his brother or this Zack character butting in to where they weren't wanted.
And yet, hours later when he'd fucking finally been liberated and had called a taxi, and Zack had run out into the street like a moron in front of the car, wind-milling his arms in some prehistoric sign language to wait and hold the car—for some reason, he didn't instruct the driver to step on the pedal and run the imbecile over.
Instead, he settled for rolling his eyes and pointedly looking away from Zack's obnoxiously blue eyes and the grin that was eating up the other man's stupid face, and internally lied to himself that this was definitely not something that he should start getting used to.