A.N. – one-shot mania, and I solemnly swear that I'm up to- blegh, make that I swear to finish the overdue crazy challenge I still have going on. As always, nothing here belongs to me and I'm probably going to blame the idea on some plot bunnies or ten.
Oh yeah, the fractions are to be read exactly as that – fractions in decreasing size. Because, y'know, this is and most of us are going to go pairings-oh-my-(insert appropriate)! That said, no offense meant to any of you, enjoy, and end A.N.!
(And, as par for this site… reviews are super appreciated, but I'm happy with you just reading it to the end!)
13/14
He's the most complete of them, even when counting the almost-carbon copy and the limits set on Roxas's un-lifespan. Maybe it's due to all of the boundless light filtering through impossibly forget-me-not windows, or the fact that of all of them, he pretends to have a soul the hardest.
A soul that tastes of sea-salt and stolen sunsets perched on death's clock, marred on purpose by shadows that are unleashed for him only partially due to necessity. He's almost living nearly as much as he's almost dead, eroded by memories and a longing that never has been Roxas's own.
It is as incorporeal and fantastic as all the Cloaked Ones are, but around the boy there is always the faintest clue of jealousy at the not-quite glimpses of something passing convincingly off as an emotion.
12/13
Larxene prides herself on retaining. The gloved hands bear the same markings from a previous existence; the mannerisms are still those that had earned her such a reputation before; the smirk donned is a better replica of the times past than the little dolls will ever be.
But Larxene only retains, having pinned the small shards of some other girl to so many targets at the end of a needle knife. She needs neither the seductive banter nor the subtle deceptions, although she's gotten as better as is possible. The old personality has been subject to all the delightful events in her torture books – both instigator and victim and spectator.
But never martyr. Larxene –or whoever she once was- had willingly leapt into the shadow tiger's maws, had gambled all along with the fleeting sparks of a monsoon and all the literary knives do is give her a sharp edge.
Larxene prides herself on retaining, but the interpretation is all new, all from the ghost-eyed girl glaring from between de Sade's lines.
11/12
Marluxia still dreams, or emulates such a vain action with all the flowery cobwebs seen so much in fiction. He still aches for freedom, he still schemes for a place of tranquil power, he still connives with the usual phrases.
A life-long dream of mine...
But now, when Marluxia even thinks of aching, a pocket-sized void flares up. The schemes are still for power, only he now is uncaring for the reinforcements. Solely the phrases haven't changed, because a partial truth is the best lie.
10/11
He's time incarnate, and can replay all of his past life at will. Luxord often sets out a special deck of cards – somewhere, he's heard that they can foretell the future.
All cards can, but Luxord prefers the deck named Tarot for this after realizing that they all match the faces on an average deck with a perfection that hints at Mistress Fate's favored playthings.
At least he's favored, Luxord thinks, as he shuffles the paper diviners around, whispering a second into each of their names and laying them face up on an immaculate table.
He flips one around, a younger him gallivants with a lady on his arm. Another, he's gambling off something from beyond the slim frame. Another, he's donning a hat and a smile that is calculated for maximum impact because the time frame for a catch is exceedingly narrow in war and love and card games. He isn't sure of the difference between them in either case.
They are all disconnected – despite his tinkering with time, Luxord can't reform an exact story or much else save for a handful quirks and the outline of a personality.
It comes at an absurd price, of not recognizing the man in the pictures as himself and the odd detachment from even the hands that keep flipping the snapshot seconds around.
Luxord doesn't notice this, thinking it's only Fate's design. It's her game, after all, and all he can and could do is bank his cards.
The last card he flips is empty, as he knew it would be.
9/10
The piece Demyx plays the most isn't an attack, or a mournful dirge or the lulling nocturnes that chose him over the shapeless Dusks. Demyx mostly plays requiems, and even then mostly because of the nice-sounding name.
Vaguely, he remembers that it has something to do with remembrance. Vaguely, he associates the waves that plucking any requiem's notes will produce with the memories that he still has, of lounging and endless tan-brown beaches. Maybe he'll get a brief look at a blurry detail – a face that is somehow familiar, a name with nothing to it, any action from the boy featuring so much in the waters' eye that is different from just drifting along.
They are often also swept away with the last drops of melody, and Demyx will be reduced to resuming his carefree routine, waiting for another tide of past events to rock his routine.
Although Demyx will often just let them pass by, as it's too consuming to chase after every one.
8/9
Eight, Axel reasons, is just infinity choosing to stand in one little point at a time rather than doing the normal thing and just stretching along.
Infinity is what he sort of has memorized, a cacophony of images that clash and burn between them. Lea (thank it all he still has his old name) clambering up with 'Isa' up… somewhere, but it wasn't a bleached castle wall that is nearly identical to the outside façade of wherever he is now. Stabbing something on loop with something vaguely silvery, and blinking between a chakram's outline and a mundane something. Roxas in something more ridiculous than the standard issue cloak. Zexion being even less than half his size and still lobbing the same bloated book around, only the cover might just be different. A freaking hysterical laugh, and only seeing Lea's face and not what he was laughing at.
Axel thinks it's looking at him with his long and bizarre attire, at the tattoos under his eyes and the surreal disks he carries.
He still has Lea's desires though – boyishly simple and all sunk in a manner too epic for Lea's vocabulary. Or some of them at least – a bunch of friends, fame, a fortune in sea-salt ice-creams, having just that one inch on Isa. Validation, his existence marked with one of the fancy indelible markers as his own, no substitutes accepted.
The last one is shared between both of them, a small axel where the infinity-eight spirals around and around on its edge.
7/8
Saïx lets the moon carry the burdens of a berserker, with its deified powers over emotion, tides and the like. It mostly falls to a quiet boy lodged under the scar between his lunar gold eyes, fidgeting between wakefulness and just reliving a tiny bit of an escapade with the hyperactive 'friends' he no longer longs to have or a dream.
The latter is what means danger, when the boy will fall into a fitful nightmare and just fight against what for him is death given an incongruently cute body by calling forth a strength based off synthetic adrenalin and moonlight.
When awake, Isa will just stare off into space, concentrated on the dull chores that are set for the day. Murder masqueraded as math, a long drama session that never ends but he does anyways because the part is simple – Isa was never good for emotionality anyways.
For his own good, Saïx sleeps with the curtains shrouding the moonlight – between the barred windows and the ascetic décor, the illusion of a looming threat is often too much for what remains of Isa.
And Saïx is even worse at letting himself be guided on impulse than Isa was.
6/7
Ienzo was barely there to being with. He lived in books and experiments, hidden behind the haze of chemical fumes and long chronicles that to him were as good as fiction.
It follows that Zexion would borrow heavily from such things – deceptions lifted from psychological studies, movements cribbed from the characters, theories and strategies from the long discourses on warfare and science.
He studies it daily, reading his Lexicon away, storing the definitions and minutia of his pretenses in a corner of his mind for when he needs it.
At least, he kept Ienzo's knack for logic and memory, to weave the elaborate arguments to sway anything to his favor.
And now, finally recovering his voice, he finds that he wants no more from the boy than the heart he neglected.
5/6
Unlike the others who crash-landed into darkness at the same time as he, Lexaeus has fallen into an even deeper silence.
He does it to catch the ends of the complaints rarely voiced by someone else he knew so well, to match up the aged faces to the younger ones that are fading and blurring at an alarming speed for someone who wasn't much for change at all.
He keeps his silence to order the thoughts, to run through the strategies he finds himself following and maybe, to try and see how this was supposed to fit the guardian he once was.
Lexaeus is the one who ponders their titles the most, their powers the most, their alliances. He tinkers with geography simplified into metallic puzzles, he's pin-pointed just how allegiances lie between them.
And he has done it all to evade as well as he can the fact that far down enough, the life he supposedly wants to return to is just a constant nagging in his head.
At least, he hasn't gone directly against the morals that man once had… or at least, so Lexaeus thinks.
4/5
Vexen takes the alleged fall in more stride than he lets on to anyone, much less the uncouth, ignorant neophytes.
He has been exalted to a being who can only think logically, who has no limits to discovery imposed by morality or lowly fears. Vexen isn't like Even was – he doesn't abstain from elaborating and experimenting on all the heart-related theories ripened since then, he doesn't mull over the risks for the test subject.
He hasn't minded the needles probing his skin in a long while either, or the possible after-effects. After all, there is nothing one of his cures or potions can't heal…
And if he has such an inclination for the more dangerous tests, Vexen knows the victims won't be in short supply, and neither will all die.
A Dusk looks up from the menial task it was set to, signaling the end of the boiling period for a chemical and retrieving the next one required in the procedure.
No, they won't die. That is enough to quell the half-discernible concerns from a scientist who had once cared even that much.
3/4
Xaldin's memories of before are about as visible as the wind he wields. Tangible in the way that old sparring matches were, leaving bruises and dexterity that can't be solely due to the heightened physical capabilities of the fallen.
It expanded beyond that – words had edited themselves into lances that are lighter than air and sharper than steel or reprimands directed at a somewhat disorganized, wandering youth who ended up listed into the soldiering offices. A mild case of silver tongue had evolved into a gift that, if he can recall well enough, said man had wanted in order to skive and explore the sprawling town or follow the… suspicious female, even if said interest wasn't purely in the castle inhabitants' best interests.
His memories ended up being the first approaching squalls, the bases for the weapons at his current disposal that shear and sunder in all senses possible.
But never something he could actually relate to, just a wall of weak winds to walk on through.
2/3
Xigbar still has the all-damned scars, and it seems that he-who-won't-be-graced-with-his-name has burned all his memories along with the seared skin and ruined eye.
But the malicious gold? That was all him, and the once-boss now taking his sweet (and, if Xigbar has any say in it, short) time to just finish putting every single phase of the plan in motion. He's kept all his spatial magic; he's lost the damn pawns…
He's found the damn wrong-to-the-nth boy, plus a carbon copy, and neither up to the scratch that had been the past standard. They both are razor dangerous, and as fragile (heh, as if any of them have the true potential for that…) as the slivers of metal.
So, he has the plans and the map of scars and the resources that Xehanort and himself had set up so carefully…
It's also pretty much all he has. But hey, no heart, no caring for that. Plus, if he forgot whatever it was, then it probably didn't matter so much to… Braig back then.
Or at least, it mattered less than the other deep, rich brown eye.
1/2
He has the power over nothing, and it is nothing itself that he recalls. Or almost nothing, only fragments filtering through like a trail of sparkles or the suicide sparks that race from his blades.
A set of blue eyes. The suit of armor lying prone on the ground, and a series of slayings that may or may not have involved the person who once wore it. He sees the armor, but not the face beyond the translucent helm.
It should have stirred something in him – a care, an annoyance – but it doesn't. Nothing does – not the fact that even the fragments are all from a cluster of time, not the fact that the alleged voice in his mind flips abruptly between something he thinks is bleary emotion and something else, dark and powerful which Xemnas thinks is something that he might as well try to imitate, if only because it hasn't varied much since he first became aware of it.
It doesn't come out perfectly, and he doesn't have the inclination to be persnickety about it. Xemnas has only rescued the higher vocabulary, has only taken cursory analysis of the emotions. They are a weakness, in so far as he's observed – while tenacious, the 'younger' of the voices is in what is an apparently futile duel.
He shuts both of them off, focusing on the heart suspended above a sky of void. Somewhere within, there is something he should desperately want…
Only he doesn't, he can't. But he quells the snail-pace of nothingness for a second-beat by raising his hand and cupping the moon in a play of optical illusions.
There is, apparently, nothing for him out there.
And Xemnas can't muster up the will to care beyond his – (the elder voice's) – plans.