When it came time for his training with the gate, Lexaeus showed no signs of doubt. He spoke only of the need to keep his gardens watered, sketching out a careful list of hours and amounts, plotting out the lawns on a long sheet of grid paper. Problem shrubs were flagged with red circles. Experimental seedlings, in green. Several other notations joined the chart, until the territory seemed like a battleground, with multiple skirmish points for victory.
Once he had finished spelling everything out in careful, precise recitation, Lexaeus glanced back over his shoulder at the room, and then disappeared through the portal.
He was gone for a month. Xaldin was absent with him, with Xigbar serving as the only liaison between their split forces. At times, the gunner would return to drop off fresh supplies from Twilight, along with tidbits of information, mixing gossip with accounting books. Healthy trade with the town was still vital, until they could build up enough resources to afford isolation once more. While the City had given them the basics, it could not provide an explanation for its broken laws of physics, and a structure that seemed impossible to predict.
True to form, Lexaeus's first priorities did not involve a study of Twilight Town's society - or its economy, or even its structural layout. Unlike Xaldin and Xigbar, the redhead chose instead to invest his efforts in understanding the planet itself. He sent Xigbar back with samples of the terrain carefully preserved in tins labeled with masking tape, and plants that had been pressed and dried in paper. Seed pods, the wings of insects, river pebbles: all tiny components that built an encyclopedia of this new land, strung as carefully as silk in a spiderweb.
At first the samples remained moderate, conservative in how much of Twilight they were meant to represent. Then they began to grow. New shipments back to the City included more and more bags, until finally an entire cart's worth of sacks was being ferried through the library gate each time, hauled by an exasperated gunner.
Xigbar's deft manipulations of gravity carried each shipment easily enough, but the bags were loosely tied, and the coverings were smudged on the outside. They gleefully transferred their stains onto whatever they came in contact with during their passage. Several clumps of soil constantly littered the rugs. The distinctive shapes of bootprints were ground into the fibers of the carpets, marking where careless feet had tromped back and forth without looking down.
Vexen, squashed into the rapidly diminishing free space in the library, threw down his pen on the third week when yet another portal opened and spat out a fresh load of burlap sacks. The gunner soon followed, hauling another pair of bags in one hand, a glass bottle full of sand in the other. The scientist straightened himself up with as much affront as he could manage, not wasting any time as Xigbar settled his newest burdens on the floor with a dusty thump.
"Dirt," Vexen observed flatly, allowing the choice of words to convey his scorn. "Lexaeus has you bringing back dirt."
Xigbar squinted up at him, offering a rakish grin. His labors had given him a smudge down the side of his face where he'd rubbed at an itch; the mark intersected his old scar, and made his skin appear dented. The bruised peach of his mouth quirked. "It's good dirt."
The gunner's arrival had run invisible signals through the warehouse; even as the two researchers stared at each other across the library, they were interrupted by a parade of Dusks. A line of the flat-handed garden creatures bustled between them, operating together with the same mute efficiency as a bevy of ants to cluster around the bags, pointed faces rubbing against the burlap. One of them squatted down, bracing itself as it wrapped its paws around the nearest sack; the rest pitched their weight behind him until they had the leverage needed to start dragging the stolen dirt away.
Folding his arms as the Dusks writhed past, Vexen wrinkled his nose. "Why doesn't he simply teleport these straight to his yards, rather than have you muck up the carpets?"
A workman's grunt, and Xigbar was fishing the thick bottle off the ground, suspending the mass as neatly as a soap bubble over his palm. "He says he doesn't trust me to keep his gardens from becoming contaminated. Can you imagine? I'm supposed to store the samples in the sheds for now, until he gets back and decides where to put them."
Vexen blinked. "We have sheds?"
"They're behind the firing range." Seeing the scientist's expression shift from surprise into horror, Xigbar broke into rich laughter, neatly spinning the glass bottle in the air. "I'm kidding! Kidding. Maybe. Haven't you seen for yourself yet?" he added, striding across the library as the last Dusk limb began to disappear through the doorway. "Or are you going to stay inside forever?"
Aerlen was missing from her rooms.
Once, that event had caused havoc. But the lack of results, coupled with the discovery of Twilight Town, had rapidly diminished the girl's value; no one seemed inclined to forcing answers out of an unwilling subject when so many more options were freely at hand. The fact that she had taken the initiative to leave her rooms was not particularly surprising - after all, Vexen had ignored her once already, causing her to search him out in the library. Even though that encounter should have encouraged him to spend more time with the girl, Vexen found himself preferring to leave her in storage with her Dusk guards, safely in reserve. Her disobedience was not a thing he could control or shape, and in many ways, Aerlen was simply a lost cause to him.
But the girl herself remained under his jurisdiction, and as tempting as it might be to misplace her conveniently down a dark well, the last thing that Vexen needed was one of the other researchers accusing him of incompetence.
He eventually sought her out as a matter of curiosity - or so he reasoned it to himself, finding nothing else available to occupy his time until the libraries were clear. His own research seemed destined to be utterly thwarted by Twilight. Lexaeus was scheduled to monitor the girl once Vexen had finished with her, but the work off-world meant that no handoff was possible. Zexion had not explained the reasons behind his strange demand that the girl not be terminated early; he did not volunteer to take Aerlen either, so Vexen was stuck with her in the meantime.
With no hints of her location, the scientist resorted to searching through the warehouse on foot. Asking the Dusks for her location seemed gauche; he disdained treating the creatures as equals, not when they wriggled around like distorted puppets. They would have alerted someone if the girl had attempted to leave the warehouse grounds, that much he could at least count on - which meant that Aerlen was still somewhere near the building.
After hours of navigating cramped stairwells and back corridors, Vexen finally discovered the girl in the center of Lexaeus's garden, surrounded by half-wilted bushes and upturned pots. Her Dusk-attendees bobbed across the stubbled lawn, floating like malformed balloons. The watering schedule was spread out on the long workbench beside her; noticing it, Vexen fought back a wince. None of the researchers had spoken of accepting Lexaeus's assignment, each expecting someone else to handle the chore.
Apparently - when none of them must have remembered - that someone had been Aerlen. A half-filled bucket of water was lined up near her feet as she perched on her bench, curled up with her hands cupped over her toes. Her legs were tucked up against her chest, into a protective ball of limbs and mismatched clothes.
She looked, he thought, like an orphan shielding herself from the rain.
The illusion was easily dispelled with a shake of his head. Vexen picked his way along the garden, sidestepping larger pebbles that creased the soles of his shoes, until he did not have to expend the effort of shouting his question. "Why are you here, Aerlen?"
For a moment, he expected she would not answer. Then her chin lifted a degree, and her voice came like a stiff arrow in the wind, unwavering. "Because I'm waiting for the only person who cares about me."
Cares. The word caught at Vexen's ears, more than the ludicrous nature of her sentimentalism. Faced with such stubborn refusal to tolerate the facts, the scientist strode forward the rest of the way, glaring down at her along the bridge of his nose. "You're delusional."
"You're a bastard," she parried evenly, without missing a beat.
The boldness with which the girl delivered the insult only incited the scientist to further disdain. "And when did you start using those kinds of words?"
She gave an indifferent roll of her shoulder. "Since I met Xigbar." When Vexen did not move away, the line of his shadow falling across her body, she finally looked up. "Is it really so wierd that I'm out here? Haven't you ever waited for someone to come home?"
Vexen opened his mouth, and then closed it again, searching the trove of his memories. Only a few years made it past review before he terminated the effort. "No."
The girl seemed to accept the lie, for she turned away, unfolding her legs until her heels dangled on the ground. Practicality had led her to pin back the moppishly long bangs, causing them to hang limply on either side of her ears. He wasn't sure where she might have found the hair clips, or who might have given them to her, but the slender metal glinted with a coppery hue whenever she turned her head, drawing tiny firefly sparks amidst the brown.
"We're not too much different, you know," she volunteered suddenly. One hand moved down to her knee, scratching at an itch. "You and I both get left behind."
Rather than grant her any indication of truth, Vexen only swept back his long vest and settled on the bench beside her. "You know nothing about me."
"I know what you're like now." The humidity was different in the garden air than in the warehouse or the streets; the musky scent of living soil and dying plants drifted around them both, a perfume of the organic that had been crammed into a quarter where it could not flourish. "Was everyone so different? Before?"
Hesitating over the dangers of too much idle conversation, Vexen finally took the risk. He had rarely managed to convince Aerlen to speak freely before; if he encouraged her now, she might reveal something about her past after all. "I don't remember," he replied, allowing a small measure of honesty to slip through. "Some of our behaviors remain logical, and so we continue them. Other traits are habit. However much we have changed, it is uncertain if it's because of the Darkness, or if it's because we are no longer under the influence of uncontrollable emotions."
Aerlen shoved the watering can aside with her foot, scraping it along the ground until it slid underneath the workbench. "So what does a heart give, if you're still yourselves without it?"
"We are not sure yet." Vexen paused, feeling the expanse of uncertain territory yawn like a second abyss, lurking within the city to devour any who wandered near. "Other than a connection, perhaps."
"To people?"
He shook his head. "To the Darkness."
"But the Darkness just takes things." She laced her fingers together in her lap, rolling her wrists outwards in a stretch. "Is that why you don't remember what feelings are like? Not because you don't have them, but because you don't remember enough to recognize them?"
Uncomfortable with her assumptions, Vexen cut off his half of the conversation with a scoff. "Who encouraged you on such trains of thought?"
"You did," she shot back. "It's all you ever talk about, what else should I -" Breaking off suddenly, she turned her head away, tucking her chin against her shoulder in a rejection of his company.
They said nothing then for a while, keeping vigil silently in the garden. Night came in the form of tracklights activating on mechanical timers, dimming slowly by degrees until Vexen found himself blinking against the blackness that had crawled in around his eyes. Lexaeus had rigged a canvas to help block out the ambient light from the roads - falsifying a diurnal cycle for a sky which held no sun - and the line it formed thickened with the darkness until it seemed like a solid wall.
Hidden within its isolated corners, the garden seemed murky and secluded. Aerlen was a mixed blur of grey skin and black hair, turned monotone from the fainter light. When at last she stirred, it was to lean back against the table, crinkling the watering chart underneath one elbow.
Her voice was very quiet.
"When can I go home?"
"You can't." Vexen provided the reminder without malice. "Your world is quite likely destroyed."
"But not all villages are gone yet," she persisted. "The Dusks brought back food, right? And books. I could go to this Twilight Town - I could go somewhere. The gates are a way out. I can take them."
Hearing this, Vexen fought back a sigh. "There is no guarantee that a normal human can travel one of the gates safely, Aerlen. You might attract Heartless," he lectured, watching the pair of Dusk guards imitating a game of catch across the lawns.
The old threat held less weight that he had hoped; Aerlen flexed her ankles, kicking one heel against the ground to leave a divot in the dirt. "I'll be caught by the Heartless anyway," was her sour retort. "Sooner or later, they'll take me. You don't need me anymore," she suddenly pled, bitterness turning to stunted hope. "There are... there are other people you can study. You don't even want me. Can't I go?"
"You have no choice," Vexen insisted blankly. The situation was inevitable; she could have been arguing about the color of the sky, and claiming that black was white. "You are required to stay. As the only surviving example of a reunited Dusk and Heartless," he stressed, feeling the ancient excuse spell out its ritual defense, "you are too valuable as a test specimen - "
"In case you need me," she finished for him, balling up her hands into tight fists. Her face was a vague oval in the gloom. "But you don't. I'm not an object, I'm a person." The workbench shuddered as she struck it, drumming the wood with an anger that quickly shriveled and died away. "Is it really so hard to see me like that?"
The frustrated seesawing of her violence tugged at a part of his attention, pouring into Vexen's thoughts until he found himself watching her, dissecting the emotions of her claim until they grew smaller and smaller: sentences becoming words, becoming sounds, and thereby tame. "No hearts," he reminded her softly. The words were unexpectedly restrained, lacking their customary vitriol. "No hearts, no connection."
She stared at him for a moment before reaching out, splaying her fingers on either side of his face. One of her fingers was sticky; it caught in the strands of his hair, tugging them with the insistence of lost children. "I'm right here. I'm alive. Look at me," she whispered, harsh enough to be a hiss, her dark eyes hot as starving wolves. "I'm here."
Her intensity was discomforting. Vexen's gaze skipped away from her expression. "No," he refused hollowly, fumbling to take her wrists in his hands. "You're nothing."
Repetition of the words did nothing to dissolve the grim mien that weighed down the girl's lips. Somehow, she had crawled forward on the bench while they'd been speaking, until her knees pressed against his leg; then her weight saddled itself across his lap as she continued to advance, warm and heavy. She refused to let him glance away, fingers digging into his jaw and skull as she kept turning his head back towards her, again and again, no matter how many times he flinched.
Confronted by a ferocity that he had not seen in all the time since they retained her, Vexen froze. For the first time, he found himself wondering how old Aerlen really was - and how dangerous.
They stared each other down in the mixed light of the garden, painted in lukewarm shadows that gathered and swelled around them. Tendons flexed under his palms as his fingers gripped at her arms. He did not know how to break the stand-off; did not know what she wanted, except for an impossible dream that no logic could satisfy.
"Fine," she decided eventually, releasing her touch on his face, allowing him to push her away. "I can hate you enough for the both of us."
"Aerlen," he announced later, "doesn't seem to like me."
Zexion glanced up from where he was sorting through the supplies strewn about the library table. "Can you blame her?"
Lexaeus had returned the previous evening with a minimum of fuss. He had not shouted about the success of his time in Twilight, but there was a pleased flush across his cheeks, and he ate well at dinner that night. The inventory of Twilight ecology encompassed an entire catalogue; he offered the neatly-printed journal to the rest of them, filled from page to page with precise annotations of all the samples he had taken.
Vexen wasted no time in informing the redhead that Aerlen was now transferred to his possession. Even that fact did not dim Lexaeus's energy, and he took the news in stride as he carried his bags back to his room, laughing.
All this finally brought Vexen back to the library, only to discover that Zexion had been preparing for an extended trip of his own.
Two of the packs on the table were empty, brought along to be filled with whatever provisions Zexion chose to purchase on his visit. A munny pouch was tied to the side of the third. Vexen's idle investigations had spilled out the contents, and now he was sorting through the assortment of currency, noting familiar gil mixed with coins cut from ivory. Many sported black numbers on their faces to translate their relative financial value. A few had profiles of various dead rulers, kings and queens and - in one case - a frog.
Just as Vexen had begun to decipher some of the markings, Zexion swept up the coins with one hand, gathering them back into the munny pouch. "I'll be back later," he announced, and then, "Can you meet me in the Town Square in a few hours? There are some things I'd like to show you."
Caught off-guard, Vexen jerked out of his distraction. "No," he stammered out, unwilling to admit to unfamiliarity when everyone else had already mastered the gates. "I mean, I'm afraid that I'm busy."
Zexion lifted a thin eyebrow. "How about tomorrow morning?"
"That's... not a good time either."
He might have known better than to fool the younger researcher; Zexion only shrugged, a knowing smile seeping across his features. "Another time, then. I'll see you later."
Xaldin and Xigbar were no sooner back to the warehouse than gone again, this time with claims of further Dusk training. Lexaeus was only seen sporadically at meals, his broad hands lined with soil from his garden, and his attention fixed on his journals. Even the Dusks seemed distracted, arranging themselves by types that had gradually started to differ more and more depending on who had interacted with them last.
With Aerlen finally whisked away to other keepers, Vexen found his days increasingly empty of any diversions. The riddles of the City had all been abandoned, much like the empty apartments and mislabeled convenience stores; none of the other researchers seemed to care about where everything had come from, now that there was the ability to explore outside of their hollow cage. It no longer mattered to try and formulate a time system for a world with no sun; malformed compass directions were equally discarded, and the suggestions for cartography were neatly shoved aside to gather dust on the lowest shelves in the library. Now there were the secrets of Twilight to uncover. Books with words were far more appealing than those without, and Vexen found that his colleagues were - predictably - tackling the new wonders at hand rather than circling endlessly like hawks around mysteries that refused to unveil themselves.
Of the City's continued decay, Vexen knew little. An afternoon spent trying to match up the streets to those marked out on Xemnas's private maps only resulted in disorientation; Vexen found himself at the same street corner three times in a row, bathed in the blinking pink and green lights of a grocery store advertisement. He could not find his way to the eroded streets. He did not even know where to start on his own.
His hunt for direction dragged him back into the warehouse in search of Xemnas. Somehow, the effects of the Dusks - or whatever force was manipulating the warehouse - had finally reached the man's lair, deftly replacing the room with a spiral stairwell that led all the way up to the third floor. The new office bore little resemblance to its first incarnation as a cramped storage room. Now it had expanded into a long chamber, with several windows lacing two of the walls, sandwiching the length of the study like a sunroom under glass. On either side, streetlights could be seen extending to the edges of the horizon, forming rows and rows of doubled stars and intersections, constellations mired to the ground.
Winter had left the city behind as gracefully as a mist vanishing at noon. In Xemnas's office, it felt already like summer. The third floor was not the highest section of the warehouse - a term which was rapidly becoming inapplicable, with all the changes that had mutated the building - but Xemnas's office was well above those chosen by the other researchers, who remained on the first and second levels. With the windows shut, the temperatures bordered on stifling. There was no direct sunlight to heat up the interior, but warm air still wafted up through the stairwells and halls, collecting in the upper rooms and drifting around the lone figure of Xemnas as he read on a couch far across the room, surrounded by stacks of books.
Vexen scowled at the heat. Unaddressed, he made directly for the left side of the room, hoping that none of the windows had been locked from the outside.
As he flicked open the curtains, searching for a latch, Xemnas finally spoke.
"They're on the right." The sentence drifted for a moment without explanation, and then, "The fastenings. They're on the right side of the frames."
Irritated by the ease with which Xemnas had predicted his troubles, Vexen located the nearest switch and cranked open the window. A cool breeze instantly trickled over his hand. "How can you stay in here and read at a time like this?"
"I could ask you the same thing. Aren't you supposed to be out somewhere?" Gaze fastened to the pages of his book, Xemnas gave a loose flap of his hand. "Perhaps, doing something productive with everyone else? Something with fusion spells, or fixing the lights in the downstairs hall?"
Ignoring the blatant dismissal, Vexen only moved to the next window, tilting it open as well. "More productive than you?" he bit out in reply. "Tell me, have you found a way to destroy a Keyblade Master yet, or have you simply been wasting your time?"
If he had expected some grand magic to leap out of Xemnas's office - out of an incantation drawn on the floor, or in the form of a monstrous Dusk appearing suddenly out of a book - Vexen found nothing but disappointment. Xemnas pinched the chapter pages in his fingers as he flipped back through the book, searching and skimming. "You'd be surprised," the man answered mildly. "You should see some of the new material the Dusks are bringing back from other worlds. I can't make sense of it all - there are references to all kinds of different things, and none of them are from the same kingdom." Leaning forward, his voice taking on a feverish note, Xemnas continued to rifle through the printed sections. "There's a philosopher here who speaks about the principles of humanoid groups as a... a collective unconscious called an animus, with the desire for independent consciousness as an anima. It's an interesting idea, but there's another volume here," he continued, putting aside the first book in favor of pawing through the stacks, dark fingers splayed with a student's abandon, "that tries to talk about them as masculine and feminine qualities instead. I think they're just using the same words." Delivering his conclusion with a needlessly dramatic sigh, he flopped back against the couch. "That, or they're all insane. The first author also goes on to say that giant machines will tread across the earth and bring war behind them, so I'm not sure how much I should believe everything he's written. Plus, I think he observes a holy day that involves fish gelatin."
Vexen folded his arms as he leaned back against the windowsill, allowing the words to settle on the air, bright shards of inspiration that floated like firepit sparks. Then he presented the one challenge that all of Xemnas's enthusiasm could not defend against. "Is any of this useful for learning the gates?"
Caught in a terminal lack of practicality, Xemnas worked the pad of a finger against one of his eyebrows, rubbing it in the familiar pattern of an impending headache that Vexen recognized from his own studies. "No," he admitted, around the crook of his smile: a shameless means of confession that their old master had been too fond of forgiving; it had smuggled him out of study halls and homework assignments with abandon. "I got distracted. The theories reminded me of the Dusks. Namely, the difference between the common Dusks, and ourselves."
Vexen resisted the temptation to roll his eyes at the other man's frivolousness. "Now is hardly the time to become introspective about our natures," he retorted.
White hair shifted; Xemnas straightened from his slouch with a sharp toss of his head. "Now is the perfect time, Vexen. The Dusks obey us. Why?" The question presented, he followed it up with a rapid series of conclusions. "Because we are greater forms of Dusk, Vexen. Just as the Heartless obey the stronger beings within their ranks, so are the smaller Dusks compelled to serve us. At the same time, they are linked by a common thread that we are not a part of - a collective, as we are independent. Or so we believe." His hands slid over the books again; he turned the cover of a leather-bound tome over and over, restlessness propelling his motions. "Could it be that someday, there will be a Dusk powerful enough to command even ourselves? One that we will be unable to say no to, simply because it exists?"
Snarled by the roundabout twists of Xemnas's logic, Vexen found himself retreating mentally, reviewing the conversation in search of whatever gaps he might have missed - or that Xemnas might have simply leapt straight across. "It may be," he was forced to admit, the words leaking grudgingly from his mouth. "But if that is the case, we will be helpless against this being's control, with no ability to defend ourselves from such a thing."
The prospect brought little in the way of discouragement to Xemnas's face. Instead, the man smiled, impossibly at ease. "Then I'll have to become the strongest first," he offered congenially, as guileless as a child discussing a caramel sweet, "won't I?"
When the third week went by, and the city itself began to feel like a cage - gentler weather made it easier to go walking, but the snow had turned to rain, flooding the streets once more - Vexen gave up any attempts to organize his studies. The lack of resources grated. In all the transformations that the warehouse had taken, none of them had produced a laboratory for him to use, and each of the other researchers had engaged in their own studies already.
He did not know what it would mean, if everyone else had a chance to move on, and he was left flagging.
Surprisingly, it was Xigbar who exercised tact on the matter. When Vexen finally bit down on his own pride and sought out the gunner for help with the gates, Xigbar only shrugged, his attention fixed on dissembling what looked like a primitive handgun. "Xaldin and I were wondering when you'd come by," he commented, fumbling for an oilcloth. "Tomorrow afternoon works. Meet us in the library."
The ease by which he'd requested the appointment might have disconcerted Vexen, if his thoughts had not already been filled with doubt of Xemnas's behavior. After their last conversation, Vexen had taken up avoiding the other man; then, when Xemnas did not even seem to notice the numerous cold shoulders turned in his direction, Vexen abandoned his efforts to force the other man to speak. Xemnas had never bothered to stick to the same trains of thought as everyone else. Gateways to mysterious lands could not even begin to change that.
Too, Vexen could not shake the impression that Xemnas - once again - had not revealed all the reasons behind his sudden interest in the nature of Dusks.
His reverie was broken by Xaldin's arrival through one of the gates just as the hour slid past noon; the doorway yawned open in front of a bookshelf and left the lancer behind, shaking raindrops off the long coils of his hair.
"Here," was all he said, dropping a heavy wad of leather onto Vexen's lap.
The material reeked of chemicals; it had been freshly treated against moisture, judging by the smell, and left an oily residue behind on his fingers when Vexen tried to tug it away. "What is this?"
"Your new coat." Glimpsing the scientist's revulsion, Xaldin laughed. "I asked Lexaeus for your measurements the last time I went out. Most of us," he continued ruthlessly, "have similar builds. You were an exception. As long as we wear the same jackets while we're out on business, no one should be able to tell us apart. Strength in ignorance," he added with a grin, exposing the neat white rows of his teeth.
Leather creaked as Vexen turned the coat around to try and determine which side was up. He managed to parse out the sleeves, though the sheer amount of the material seemed better suited for a dress. "Will this take long?" he asked loftily.
The lancer propped up one of his boots on a chair cushion, fiddling with the laces to make certain they were uniformly tight. "Zexion got the knack of it in less than an hour. I'm sure you can do better."
"And Xemnas?"
"Xemnas," the lancer announced, smoothing out the man's name like a ream of black silk, "hasn't asked to go yet."
The irregularity jarred against Vexen's nerves; he pushed himself to his feet, dumping the jacket onto the chair. It instantly began to slither to the floor. He did not wait to explain himself, kicking the material out of the way and running for the door; the soles of his boots skidded on the floor when he hooked the turn too quickly, and had to catch himself on the corner of the hall.
He clambered up the stairs, gripping the spiral railing to help haul his weight up the twists. Xemnas's door was still ajar, as it had been the first time the scientist had visited; without pausing to count his luck, Vexen simply shoved the door the rest of the way open, a name on his lips before he had even managed to steady the rhythm of his own breath.
"Xemnas!"
The man in question was standing at one of the windows on the right side of the office, a teacup in his hands as he regarded the city. The air smelled faintly of lemongrass; it reeked of tinctures brewed in a Bastion summer, and Vexen instantly disliked it.
"In such a hurry, Vexen? Xaldin told me the three of you would be visiting Twilight by now." After a moment, the man arched a polite eyebrow. "Shouldn't you be there with them?"
"Yes." At first Vexen simply leaned against the doorway, wondering if his suspicion was painted on his face; then, when no verbal reprimand came, he pressed ahead, ignoring caution. "What about your plans? It's not like you to avoid testing a discovery like this."
Xemnas lifted his teacup, smiling enigmatically against the rim. "You speak as if it's a regular occurrence."
"And the last time you refrained from joining in," the scientist retorted brutally, refusing to back down, "I discovered you had been filling your time by slaughtering Dusks."
Vexen's reward was silence. Then Xemnas lowered the cup back onto the saucer with a small tink. "I've been measuring the decay again," he revealed, his voice carefully neutral. "Traveling through the gates to Twilight has done nothing to arrest it."
The logic - or lack of it - brought a bark of laughter to Vexen's mouth. Discovering that Xemnas's recent seclusion hinged off a faulty premise was beyond ludicrous. "And did you expect it would?"
Xemnas only frowned. "I might have hoped the connection to something more stable would help." He turned away from the window at last, pacing along the length of the office, away from Vexen and back again. "It looks like the only way to reinforce the existence of this world is to increase the number of Dusks - of Nobodies," the man grimaced, mouthing the word a second time as if the taste might be better with repetition. "And to do that is to encourage the Heartless to devour more worlds. In order to guide the Heartless," he continued, ruthlessly progressing down each conclusion in the chain, "we must become powerful - more powerful than we ever have been before, if we're to control two warring forces. All to buy time until we can claim hearts of our own. That's what I've been thinking about here," he concluded sharply, settling the saucer and its companion teacup on his desk. He brought the weight of his gaze back upon Vexen, his voice light with sarcasm. "But you should visit Twilight. Have fun. Enjoy yourself. Bring back something colorful."
The expression in Xemnas's eyes did not match the rest of his face. Vexen, staring into a gaze that seemed to have forgotten all humor, gave himself a mental shake. "No." He searched for the rest of his eloquent suspicions; finding nothing left save for a stunned emptiness, Vexen could offer only the truth. "I... don't trust you on your own."
Xemnas gave him a thin smile, one that Vexen could not tell was pleased or not. "Good. You shouldn't. It's your turn to learn the gate, though. Go with Xaldin."
The words bordered on a direct order; still, Vexen lingered, fingers sliding down the doorframe, hooking themselves in the wooden carvings of the latch.
"Come with me." It was a strangely desperate demand, one that he almost did not recognize as coming out of his own mouth - as if it had escaped from the dusty corners of his chest, as if he had wanted to say the words years earlier to drag Xemnas out of his self-imposed solitude. It would have been better than endlessly running after the other man, always wondering, always in chase.
Yet Xemnas only shook his head, turning the teacup around on the saucer as he regarded the liquid within. "No," he insisted softly, lips twisted in a smirk. "For something like this, I think everyone should have a chance to go alone."
Slinking back to the library felt far too much like a retreat for Vexen's tastes. But he had not known what else to say to Xemnas - or what even could be said anymore. Xemnas was more ruthless without his heart. He no longer retained the easy gullibility of Xehanort; instead, a reckless idealism had replaced that innocence, merging with the insanity that Darkness had brought. The result was a changed man, and Vexen did not know how far Xemnas would go in pursuit of his goals, no longer restrained by the boundaries of his former life.
Whatever new horizons coaxed Xemnas onwards, Vexen could no longer guess.
Xaldin was still waiting in the library. He might have guessed the nature of Vexen's absence, for he made no comment as the scientist drifted back into the room. Only when Vexen had finished pulling on his new coat did the lancer speak.
"Are you ready now?"
The lancer's effort at monotone was unexpectedly welcome; Vexen was able to focus on the zipper of his jacket rather than split his attention mounting a verbal defense. "Where's Xigbar?"
Xaldin finished checking his boots with a flick of his thumb; hooking a waistpouch on his belt, the lancer straightened his jacket to hang flat, making clean lines out of leather stitching as he prepared for the trip. "He's waiting for you on the other side. He'll mark the destination you're meant to find. Just don't mess up."
Before the scientist could retort, Xaldin swung his hand forward, planting his knuckles in Vexen's back.
He stumbled forward, balance scrambling for orientation even as the air stretched open into a vast maw. The ground vanished underneath his feet. With a garbled cry of surprise, Vexen tumbled into the gate, and through it.
The air was cool around him as he fell. An old memory of fear flickered into place in Vexen's mind; it dissolved before the scientist could catch it, and he refused to let the Darkness take its place. Xaldin's punch had not carried the full force of an attack. It had pushed him through the doorway without harming him, which meant that the portal could not have been a trap.
His guess was proven right a moment later when his feet struck a hard surface, landing with enough impact to send a twinge through both ankles. Beside him, he could hear the scrape of Xaldin's boots. The void was brighter than he'd expected: black bands scorched the air, mixing with glimmering patches of white light to form bastard zones of grey. Dusk-marks rotated endlessly in criss-crossing spirals. And the floor - the floor was nothing, nonexistent, suspending the two researchers like flies on a sheet of polished glass.
Vexen dropped to his knees, overcoming the sense of vertigo by flattening his hands against the invisible ground. Xaldin had not bothered to supply him with gloves; the chill seared his skin before he glossed it over with a protective layer of frost, negating the temperature difference and regulating it to negligible.
Far below them, the darkness waited.
If he had expected mercy from the lancer, he should have thought twice. Xaldin was already halfway down the corridor, steps meticulous and patient as he crossed the invisible walkway. Vexen hunched his shoulders as he ripped his gaze away from the void below. "Where's the way out?"
At the words, Xaldin paused, and then gave a lazy wave towards a sullen mass of energy lurking in the distance. "Somewhere in there. You'll have to find it."
Reminded of similar demands in an alleyway filled with snow, Vexen pulled himself to his feet, resurrecting his dignity as best he could without tripping on the long hem of his jacket. "And how am I supposed to accomplish a task like that?"
"If you can't find a method," was the languid reply, "then I'll just leave you here forever."
The ultimatum was clear enough. Steeling his nerves, Vexen strode quickly down the passage, refusing to look down. He did not turn his gaze away from the blackness ahead; if he could pretend that nothing else existed, he could also pretend that he was not traveling in a void between worlds, dangerously poised to be lost forever if anything should go wrong.
His confidence carried him across the tunnel more quickly than he expected. All too soon, the mass of untamed Darkness lurked before him; it stretched taller than he had expected, high enough that it dwarfed enough the two researchers like children. The mass filtered through the end of the tunnel like a particularly vicious soot cloud, settling across the pathway and drifting along the sides.
When the lancer did not give any indication of what he was supposed to do, Vexen gritted his teeth and lifted one hand to touch the shadows.
The energy swam around his fingers, content to ignore his presence. Swallowing down a curse, the scientist gathered the remnants of his concentration. Find Xigbar, he ordered it mentally, attempting to form a picture in his thoughts of the gunner - and failing. The scarred face constructed itself and then shredded to pieces within his mind, morphing into stray impressions of the day, of the shifting halls of the warehouse. Of Xemnas, of slender fingers on a teacup, and endless riddles in a room of stolen books.
"It won't do us any good to travel back home," Xaldin interrupted sharply. "Focus."
Steering his concentration with an effort, Vexen wrestled his control back over the Darkness, repeating the gunner's name to himself until the whirling energies pooled themselves into an oval gateway, simmering with dormant power. The edges wavered, and then stabilized; Xaldin gave it a long, suspicious stare before finally giving his approval with a nod.
The door spat them out halfway down a hillside.
At first, Vexen's senses tried to scream nonsense to him, claiming that there was a huge spotlight glaring along the skyline; then he realized it was the sun bobbing on the horizon, the sun, returned after so many years. His eyes started to water as he attempted to look at it, aware of the risks for damage, but unwilling to believe it was there until he could absorb every inch of heat through his skin.
He did not resist when Xaldin took his arm, guiding him roughly along the path until they crested the hill. Xigbar was already there, leaning against a fence that traced a wooden outline along the edge; he gave both of them a lazy wave of a hand by way of greeting. In the distance, the town stretched out in irregular squares of streets and stone buildings. A train chugged its slow way along the tracks below, its smoke mixing with the pastel clouds in the sky. Everything glared with light. The brilliance left spots floating on Vexen's sight, and he could not focus on any single object for long without it beginning to sting.
The noise of village life simmered up from between the buildings: children shouting back and forth, shopdoors chiming, homes preparing for family dinners.
The air smelled like grass and bread dough.
"Welcome to freedom," Xigbar grinned. His gaze lingered on Vexen, and the next question that came was strangely hungry. "What do you think?"
Vexen picked his way gingerly across the hilltop, still wiping at his face with the back of his hand; he was suddenly glad that he was not wearing gloves after all, for the fresh leather would have stung his eyes. "I don't like being tested," he snapped back. "What am I supposed to think?"
Any implied challenge rolled right over Xigbar's nonchalance. "I don't know," the man shrugged. "It's pretty nice out here." Then he crooked his mouth, tilting his head back to glance at Vexen over a shoulder. "Almost makes a person not want to go back, y'know?"
The air in Vexen's lungs seemed to thicken.
"Are you implying," he spelled out carefully, unwilling to leave any room for misinterpretation, "that we should leave the city?"
"It'd just be the five of us right now, but yeah. Xemnas doesn't know how to use the gates yet." Kicking his heels against the fence, Xigbar gave an exaggerated yawn, flexing his arms in a prolonged stretch. "Don't tell me you haven't thought about it."
It might have been the angle of the sun, or the black jacket, or the way that Xigbar's hair had picked up wide bands of grey, or the way that the gauze over the man's face was faintly stained red from the wound beneath; it might have been the dangerously casual note in Xigbar's voice that jangled against the scientist's nerves, screaming warning more effectively than any storm bell. There was a new sense of menace in the gunner's body, one that Vexen was not certain he had ever seen before, not even when Xigbar had been intimidating Aerlen so long ago.
Further down the hill, Xaldin sprawled in a lazy, feline curve of muscle. He had not brought his staffs, or any other sort of weapon, but he was watching Vexen as well, and the fingers of one hand were running along the railings of the fence.
Suddenly, Vexen realized how foreign the two of them both seemed, dressed in black leather instead of lab coats. Small changes could make such a vast difference between the Nobody known as Xigbar and a student named Braig. Even smaller ones could turn a friend into a stranger.
"No," he lied at last. "I haven't thought about it once."
Xigbar pushed off the fence in a long roll of muscle, sleek as a hunting cat, and chuckling. "Yeah. I knew you'd stay. Just had to keep you honest," he chuckled, clapping a hand on Vexen's shoulder and giving the scientist a rough shake. It was the kind of greeting that might have been between equals - but Xigbar's grip stayed in place, tightening in what might have been a warning. "If we've made it this far, we'd better stick together, eh?"
Vexen did not laugh. He pulled away from the gunner with an angry yank of his arm, attempting to ignore the urge to rub the spot that Xigbar had touched. "I question why you felt the need to doubt me in the first place," he snapped. "I detest being played with like that."
Any affront went unsoothed; Xigbar did not apologize. "You don't like it now, just think about what it'll be like in the future." Turning away in a twist of one heel, he vaulted onto the fence with unnatural, spellborn grace, perching like a bird on the metal bar. The folds of his jacket draped down in a leather waterfall off his hips, trailing down over the rails. His hands laced themselves together in a weave of black fingers. "I had a talk with Zexion recently," he began. "We're changing, Vexen. Even if we don't realize it up front, things are different. If we're not all dedicated to this," he warned, "we're gonna fail. And there's no way I plan to be the weak link in this chain. How about you, Vexen? Think you can handle it?"
The questions were fat with implication. Sour-mouthed, Vexen refused them all, all save one, which he picked at with merciless precision. "Do you really believe our cause to be lost before it has even begun in earnest?"
"I believe," came the drawl, as Xigbar straightened up, spreading his arms like a giant crow in silhouette, "with these kinds of odds, it's just going to get a lot worse from here on out."
