Demyx celebrated life every day.
Not his own non-life. He tried, but it never ended well when he was always forced to the realization that he would never be, despite his brotherhood's efforts. Instead, he admired the beauty and simple complexity of the worlds around him.
He left the ghastly halls of The Castle That Never was quite often with his Sitar, visiting any world that he willed to look upon the beauty there, especially the fabled island of Atlantis.
Demyx was among the few neophytes who still wanted tried to tell himself they still had hearts, despite the reprimands and scornful remarks he got from superiors and inferiors alike. He refused to listen to them, though, letting any snippy remarks roll off of him as easily as the ocean recedes from the shore. Instead, he went on believing-or rather lying to himself, hoping beyond hope that if he believed enough, he really would have a heart. However, tucked away with the dark recesses of his mind was the memory of having lost his heart to an Air Pirate Heartless, providing irrefutable proof that he didn't have one, and never would(why would Kingdom Hearts take mercy on him and give him one when he didn't cherish the one he had before?).
The Melodious Nocturne was now perched upon the head of one of the guardians of the magnificent city, legs crossed with his Sitar resting in his lap as he stared over the graceful majesty of the mythic Atlantis. Nimble fingers, plagued with protective calluses from playing, brushed over the tuned strings once and hushed, just staring contemplatively at the intricate symbols floating over the palace whilst waiting for the chords that he was meant to play this day. As he waited, a playful smile crossed his lips when a fond memory struck him.
He saw a young boy with strikingly bright eyes and hair so blonde it was almost white running through the streets and to a fair-skinned woman with a toddler perched on one hip and a basket in the other. The boy nearly tackled the woman's legs and received a brief scolding before the muscles in his dirty face pulled his lips into a goofy and conceited lips as he presented the woman with a small Orichalcum sculpture he bought with munny he had saved for months.
Demyx's chest heaved with a content sigh as the warmth from the embrace the young boy got after presenting the gift spread throughout him. It was times like that when he believed the most, but others always told him it was just the ghost Myde's emotions returning to haunt him. Demyx gave a brief, dismissive shake of his head and leaned over his Sitar again, turning to his faithful friend once more for comfort, asking it to drown him with pulsing walls of sound and trap him in the intricately woven follies with shackles made from interlocked chords. Cyan blue eyes slowly fell closed as he let his fingers move as they wanted along the rift board and body. His fingers waltzed over the strings as if they were his lips on a lover, letting the symphonic harmonies made by lingering undertones of past notes echo, threading betwixt the most recent chords he played.
A few wyrms, parrot-sized dragons with neither legs nor arms, curled their snake-like bodies up somewhere near by and listened respectfully to the Sitarist's lyrical tune. He never had to look down at the instrument. It wouldn't matter anyway. There were no sour notes in the session. There couldn't be. Instead, he admired the beauty of the world and life he once took for granted, but who could blame him? Atlanteans lived for eons, and no one could ever foresee the maelstrom of fear and chaos that would almost swallow the peaceful metropolis, where people weren't afraid to leave doors and windows unlocked and let their children run off to play in any of the city's tiers for an entire day, into Oblivion.
He saw the city in all of its glory. Grand tiers made of pristine alabaster where glowing inscriptions for blessings and praise were skillfully chiseled into the walls in the ancient language, each tier holding not a different class of people, but only different types of buildings. He watched how the whimsical city, with its temple to their reigning god shimmering a sunset red from the Orichalcum the artisans made it from perched closely to the palace that blessed, rather than scraped the skyline, where stone tablets intricately carved to resemble kings long past regally protected the source of the Atlantean's longevity and power.
Demyx stared at the source for a moment, watching how the warm light, as bright as his eyes, embraced the tablets and bestow its blessing upon every citizen before letting his gaze drift to the lazy water, which was far deeper than it seemed, was cascading over the edge to give it a haunting and foreboding look. The crowns of some once mighty buildings breached the surface, buildings that had fallen when the world was crumbling, and had started to give to the darkness.
But it never fell.
Wave upon wave of darkness had crashed down upon their world, threatening to destroy it. People dropped left and right, their weapons hardly effective against the creatures that ranged from miniscule to gargantuan, piercing yellow eyes blankly staring into space as they darted around, but they knew. You could feel that awareness of the fear they both created and fed from when you happened to gaze into the empty yellow glow. He was among those who valiantly opposed the darkness--or was it ignorantly--and had lost his heart after being swallowed alive when caught alone by a small colony of shadows.
He plucked a sour note on his Sitar, and suddenly stopped.
"Why did you stop?" He heard a calm voice inquire. Apparently, someone had quietly arrived, unnoticed, while he was playing.
"I can't play for something I don't believe in," was his simple reply.
"What don't you believe in, Demyx?" The voice, crisp and apathetic, somehow soothed him. Perhaps it was the subtle note of serenity only trained musician's ears could pick up on in the familiar voice that calmed him.
"That we've lost the ability to feel. I know I can..else we'd be Heartless instead of Nobodies.." He wrapping his arms around the neck of the Sitar and stared out in the distance. Demyx never worried about being taunted by him, he was above that.
"I understand where you get your logic from, but you've seen it hundreds of times on your missions."
Demyx sighed and leaned his head against the neck of the Sitar. It was always the same answer. "The heart's swallowed up by darkness, but look what our bodies are made out of. Just like somebodies can't be made up of just light, we can't be made of darkness alone."
"We've gone over this hundreds of times, and every time your theories collapse." He didn't tolerate Demyx's musings, opting to continue with what he was doing, but he never showed how annoyed he sometimes became with the neophyte's insistence, and Demyx took his lack of a verbal refusal to listen as an invitation, not at all noticing he was no more than background noise most of the time. He was above the other's childish games of taunting Demyx, anyway.
He turned to look up to the superior nobody with a small, disheartened frown.
"That frown doesn't suit you, Nocturne. Now get up, The Superior has been looking for you."
He stood and dismissed the Sitar, threads of darkness swelling from the statue, scattering the once calm wyrms. Demyx paused in front of the slate-haired nobody, crooning to him, despite the reserved, and otherwise unreadable stare he got in return. "If I wrapped up my heart to give it to you, would you accept it?"