written a while ago for the prompt "under lock and key". a bit interesting, i suppose. we all need ansem-fic.
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Deep down in Ansem's laboratory, there is a locked room with no key; a small, secondary laboratory quarantined as though it contained within its walls the most dangerous knowledge mankind could posses. And maybe, once, it did. Ansem himself has never once opened the door since he closed it, a final click as the elegy for six bodies (only sleeping, he tells himself.)
He remembers standing outside of that door and listening to Xehanort's voice in the darkness, as rich as wine and twice as intoxicating. The words themselves don't matter much to him, only the sentiment and the philosophy and the emotion that drove them. All of his work after that day is filled with half-done equations for happiness and reason and greed, as though numbers could tell him where he went wrong.
Sometimes he presses he ear against the grain of the wood and listens for their breathing- Elaeus' rumbling snore or Even's whistle-breaths, even Xehanort's deep, even rhythm of inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale-
-inhale as he turns away and waits for the faint strain of light that was never there.