A lonely Zexion drabble. Trying to get used to his character. This drabble may actually evolve into a oneshot, if I let it.
Zexion was incredulous when received his title and weapon from Xehan--... Xemnas...
A book. How befitting, Not-Ansem told him, his fellow scientists nodding, as he was the last prince to be crowned. It will serve you well, I am sure.
This dark-skinned man was not the curious, ever-watching boy he once fell in love with. Not anymore, not that they apparently had no more need for those feelings now that every one of their failed experiments was a real-life nightmare.
Zexion suffered from them nightly. He had been the first to volunteer for the subject of shifted sleeping patterns, and they were all surprised and shocked if they truly could be when the youngest of them all could no longer close his eyes for more than three-fourths an hour at any given time, leaving his mind restless and his body lethargic.
... "body"? Was it still his body? It surely must have been. He still had freckles in the same spots, still had the same pallor, felt the same beneath his own touch.
It was just ... emptier. One of their first tests had been to check if their blood types were the same, or if it had somehow mutated, but they found ... nothing. No pulse, no filler, nothing to be sucked into the syringe. It was most disquieting.
They continue along their ways: surprising discoveries, new variables activating in their early ... "life" giving their new abilities more refined characteristics.
Vexen was conducting an experiment with a heartless and the silhouette's reaction to liquid nitrogen when his powers sporadically flared and he, only then, learned the depth with which he could control ice.
Xigbar had walked right into his powers. Quite literally, as he was walking with his nose in a book and only realized he was walking up the only half-finished walls of Castle Oblivion when Xaldin called to him from below.
One by one, they all found their abilities until, once again, Zexion was the last to be crowned.
And after months passed, he began to worry, eventually confiding in Lexaeus with whom he still shared his past-worldly relations.
It'll come with time, he said patiently, but, for now, let us figure out why you still can't sleep. The nightmares had progressed, mangling and entwining throughout his body every time he slept, leaving him breathless and writhing in the restraints put on him every time a new trial was begun.
Until Xemnas came unto them and revealed the answer, just as he always did, always perfectly on time.
"He is a Master of Illusion. They begin in his dreams, crawl from the psyche and along the walls until he drives himself slowly insane."
But I'm not insane.
The smirk was sickening. "Not yet, anyway."