Scattered Dreams Chapter 2: Xigbar and Xaldin, a kingdom hearts fanfic

I do not own any of the franchises or any related characters mentioned here. This was written out of enjoyment of the series, and no profit is being made.

Claim: Xaldin&Xigbar
Rating: R for language and blood
Notes: I don't know how, but these two have become my OTF.

Anti-Hero, Anti-Villain

In Xigbar's mind, 'night off' is synonymous with 'night out.' And when 'night out' happens, it means Xaldin's getting dragged off somewhere.

"I'm telling you man," Xigbar says as they walk the streets of Traverse Town. "You have the gift of the gods."

He refers, of course, to Xaldin's affinity for wind manipulation and how they might affect the woman's pink dress up ahead. The teenager who's with her is wearing a pair of shorts, and at worst would lose the scarf around her shoulders. (Xaldin can't shake the feeling that he's seen that braided hair before...)

"No."

"Come on! At least the power of the eidolons?"

"No."

"...The fairies?"

"Definitely no."

"Me and him?" The man with the eye patch points to the taller, darker man sitting behind him at the bar. "Known each other since the day we were born."

The man being pointed at stirs his glass passively and mumbles, "He's been using that line for nearly as long."

(The first one, meanwhile, can't shake the feeling that he's seen the bartender and her odd red eyes somewhere.)

"Braig was a huge comic-book nerd."

Xigbar stops the blowtorch, and flips the visor up to stare at Xaldin. "He was not."

"No, wait," Vexen calls from his place next to Zexion, standing a safe distance from the gummi ship they were repairing. Whenever the five of them end up doing something like this, their combined minds are enough to draw in bits of memories like bits of iron dust to a magnet. "I think Xaldin's right."

"Yup," Zexion confirmed, smoothing a crease in the blueprints.

"Oh, come on!" Xigbar looks from Xaldin to the two at the desk. "Sure, he was a nerd, but so were you four! We were all scientists."

Lexaeus comes around the corner of the monstrous machine, having just finished inspecting the control panel. "What was it you said when I told you about that new world I found?"

"Something along the lines of, 'Dude, we have to check it out.' If I remember correctly," Vexen says. "Why are you using my best blowtorch on a gummi ship? The blocks fit together on their own."

"It's a new world! We have to check out all of them, don't we?" Xigbar stands and points the blowtorch threateningly at the only blonde. "And I'm using it because we can't take any risks of blocks coming apart. It was Heartless ships that did all this damage."

"Yes, but we find new worlds every day, Xigbar," Zexion said, taking a bite of one of the bread rolls that served as their dinner. "You had never been quite so... adamant to explore any of them before this one."

"Yeah? Well, that's because..."

"Because Braig was a wimpy comic-book nerd," Xaldin deadpanned.

"Alright, that's it!" Xigbar backed away from them all, as though disgusted he associated himself with any of them. "You'll see. You'll all see."

Xaldin laughs for the first time in his existance after Xigbar tells him where he managed to get such perfect uniforms.

"...Edna Mole?"

"Edna Mode!"

"I'm afraid she doesn't ring any bells."

"Dude! She's only the greatest designer of..." he drifts off suddenly, pretending to be interested in some neon sign in the distance.

"Of what?" Xaldin presses. "Of..."

He grins, understanding dawning on him. "Of super hero outfits."

"Uniforms," the other gives a muttered correction.

Xaldin was actually the ones who made their weapons. It's a strange process.

When a Nobody's powers first present themselves, it happens without the weapon appearing. Just a burst of cold or an odd electric current. As the Nobody continues to train these powers, the weapons gradually reveal themselves, but only in ghostly half-solid forms that fall apart during battle.

One day, during the Organization VI era, Xaldin took it upon himself to actually construct the strange blue shield that had been appearing around Vexen during battle with the Heartless. Once it exsisted in solid form, the Chilly Academic was able to summon his weapon with a burst of snowflakes and cold from any distance.

Xigbar's weapons are different from the rest in that his guns are the only ones that required technology to be programmed, wires to be tested, systems to be checked. It's worth it for the reaction.

"Dude..." Xigbar's voice quivers, though they know it can't be with emotion. He clicks the pistols together into a sniper rifle and aims at the target set up near the forge.

They feel the odd tremor in their inactive veins as Space shifts and Xigbar summons the light bullets that load the gun. There is a pause as the gun warms up under the touch of its new master.

There a stream-lined explosion as the bullets merge and leave the barrel in a blue surge of energy.

The Freeshooter turns back grinning after observing the hole in the wall where the bull's-eye used to be, a post-explosion gust blowing their tied-back hair around their faces. "How the hell are you going to bring yourself to make weapons after these babies?"

Xaldin stands, smirking. "Oh, I'm sure I won't have a problem when my powers come along."

On mornings when Xigbar waltzes (or stumbles; it's pretty much fifty-fifty) into the kitchen with his hair only half tied back into its convenient ponytail it can only mean that some memory has come back to him crystal clear in a dream. Today's tidbit: "Wimpy comic-book nerd Braig had a girl."

Xaldin doesn't flinch as he sips his coffee. "So did Dilan."

"...Damn," II slumps into the chair beside him, some of his apparent pride in his Other deflated.

"It's been, what, how many years since I made that comment? I've told you a thousand times it's not a bad thing."

"Yeah yeah yeah." Xigbar casts his one eye around the room, seeing that none of the other members were present. "I need a cup of coffee."

As walks over to the (ridiculously over-complicated; Zexion and his tinkering) coffee machine, he gets a "So?" from Xaldin.

"So what?" He grabs his (colour-coded; Vexen and his order of things) coffee mug from the cupboard and fills it, turning back so he could look over the counter at the table. "The girl?"

"What was she like?"

"...What the hell is in this coffee?"

"For Carbuncle's sake, Xigbar..."

"You couldn't have just asked me what my girl was like."

"But she was Braig's girl."

Xigbar seems to contemplate this before retrieving milk from the fridge and slamming it onto the counter beside his mug, but not pouring it into his coffee. He stares down Xaldin who only blinks back, nonplussed.

"...Too shy."

"Really? I don't think I would mind shyness."

"You're joking," Xigbar finally pours the milk and sips. "You and shyness?"

Xaldin shrugs noncommittally. "I certainly wouldn't be able to stand her yapping at me."

A pause. "Seriously though, who drugged the coffee?"

They are both so stubborn when it comes to insults that Xigbar was known as "Imbecile" and Xaldin "Fuzzface" for nearly a week before everyone's complaints convinced them to drop it.

The titles still crop up as the occasional nickname.

The new ones never quite believe that Xaldin and Xigbar were once scientists. If they manage to see past Xigbar's scars and Xaldin's six weapons and recognize that calculations constantly spin through their minds, they always point out that they never see either of them in the basement lab. That's because Xemnas banished them from it.

The Neophytes know next to nothing about it, as the original six don't like to talk about it much (especially Vexen. He likes to freeze big, expensive things when someone brings it up). Lexaeus once offered something about propellers and Xaldin once left them to contemplate a cryptic hint about sodium chloride. Saïx once asked why Xemnas didn't write a record of it and his explanation was "All you need to now is that there were explosions. A series of explosions."

The two of them seem to look back on it fondly.

Xigbar wasn't born with one eye. The losing of it happened in Hollow Bastion, all the same.

"I don't care how badly Xemnas needs this report," Xaldin says. He mentally latches himself into the blue cliff with nonexistent cleats on the soles of his boots. "I'm not going back into that castle."

"Geeze, wouldn't expect you to be superstitious one, Xal."

"It's Xaldin, and I'm not being superstitious. We were responsible for unleashing the Heartless on this World."

Xigbar is standing on the beginning of a step path down into the castle town. "Our Others were the ones who did that, remember?"

"Same difference. Only misfortune waits for us down there."

"Karmastitious then." He waves a hand. "If that's a word."

He turns from the village and grins manically at him, blinking his (two) gold eyes. Xaldin only narrows blue ones in response.

"Oh, come on! I bet you're just jealous 'cause your powers haven't presented themselves yet."

No response.

"I'll go down there alone if I have to."

No response.

"I'll take all the credit."

After several more offers, Xaldin got tired of not responding and nearly pushed Xigbar down the cliff as he shoved past him. "Just shut up and make sure you don't damage the guns."

"There's still people living here. After what we did."

Xigbar looks around what they had thought until now was a ghost town. "You're right," he says. He points to a window, where bright morning glories sway in the weak wind. "Those flowers would've wilted by now. Not much rain here during the summer."

They continue walking into the town, towards the castle. Not five minutes later Xaldin stops again. "Do you smell something?"

His companion inhales deeply. "Yeah. Smoke."

"That's what I thought," III takes off running down an alleyway.

"Hey, wait! Where are you going?" II runs after him through some backstreets and down more alleyways until he practically runs straight into Xaldin's back. "What the hell are you..."

He drifts off as he looks down the staircase into the Borough, where the survivors of that initial Heartless swarm must've gathered. Black shadows creep through the burning carcasses of houses. Occasionally the pink glow of a heart would appear, only to be snuffed out as another Shadow or Wyvern or Darkball came into existence.

"...Crap," Xigbar whispered.

They shouldn't have split up after they descended those stairs.

Xaldin once held a heart in his hand.

The Wyvern had swooped down and grabbed the girl with its talon, stabbing her through the stomach and killing her instantly. The heart had left the body, falling to the ground. But he finished the Shadow that lunched to devour it, then threw his last wreckage-salvaged bomb at the Wyvern as it let the girl drop to the ground.

And he was left with her heart as a boy, her only companion, ran to the body.

Looking back on it, he should've run for it then and there. He should've taken it back to the castle. They could've lived.

And yet he doesn't run.

Because somewhere in his head, logic wins out again. He knew that had he taken this heart the girl's empty shell would appear behind his closed eyelids and the boy's pleading would ring in his ears for as long as he lived.

He walks across the courtyard, boots crunching on roof tiles and broken flower pots. He wonders how old these two are as the boy holds onto her as though never letting go.

He feels the crystaline heart pulse as he nears its home. The boy looks up at him with frightened blue eyes, his bangs stained like bloody straw from a cut in his forehead. The Nobody kneels, looking down into the blank green eyes of the girl.

He lets the heart fall, feather soft, from his hand.

There is a warm light as the heart is reunited with the body. The wound in her stomach repairs itself, renewing itself to make a new house for its returned resident.

She blinks, as though waking from a very deep sleep.

"Aeris?" the boy asks.

She looks up at him in confusion. "Why are you looking at me like that? What's happening?"

"Can you carry her?" Xaldin asks.

"Who is he?" the girl (with the braided hair) asks.

The boy ignores her for a second, nodding.

"Make your way to the Rising Falls. It's safer there."

The boy stands, and the girl has to wrap her arms around his neck for fear of falling. He runs as quickly as he can out of the courtyard and never looks back, but the girl watches the Nobody over his shoulder.

Xaldin watches back until he hears someone screaming in what could only be described as pain.

Xigbar.

His last memory before losing his eye is giving the girl (with the red eyes) and the boy with the sword instructions on how to find a secret Gummi garage near the base of the castle. How they need to use it to leave this rock, how they're not going to be able to wait for the darkness to just ebb away.

He breaks away from them, flips. The bullets sing as they rain down on the Heartless. "Go!" he shouts.

The boy grips the huge sword in his hand, anxious to join in. The girl tugs on his arm and says something like "Zack, we have to find Yuffie!"

This seems to jolt the boy back into reality and he turns and runs with her up out of the Castle Gate area. He watches them, almost smiling. He had saved their lives. Him.

Then his legs go cold and he wonders why the hell that shadow is pooling around his feet (the angle of the sun isn't right) and why is it growing eyes...?

The title 'Heartless' is very misleading. The black creatures are really just hearts that have given into the darkness inside them. Perhaps, Xigbar thinks as he struggles, cold claws digging into his legs and tearing him down to his knees, that they could feel anger.

They were angry at him for letting his prey escape, he realizes, as Heartless swarm up his upper torso, clawing at his empty cavity for the heart not there. The absent heartbeat seems to provoke them further and they reach up to his face. He manages to struggle against the constriction for a brief essential second, and the claw misses his left eye but strikes him just beneath, dragging a curved path down his chin.

But then the darkness grows as thick as tar as more shadows join it. And then the claws swing towards his face again, to the right-

Xaldin only hated the feeling of his blood rushing once. The fighting instinct that all Nobodies are born with starts to pump the blood around their veins when they enter battle. And maybe that's why some of the members, including himself, absolutely thrived on it.

But he hated the preparative rushing this time because he couldn't help thinking that he hadn't fought, hadn't ran fast enough. He had torn the suffocating black shroud off the silhouette too late.

The smell of stagnant blood fills his nostrils as it spills from the shell's right socket and too many wounds to count. His mind goes into overdrive when he sees that the thing is still a man, just barely, because he's struggling to take in breaths and is still living.

"Xigbar..." The smell is crashing over his head again and again and his head is spinning wildly. "Shit... shit."

He wonders absently what that tearing sound is and realizes with a delay that Heartless are shredding his back to pieces and he's losing blood.

He tries to look for the piece of support beam he had been using a weapon until now but can't see it and he has to do something soon because they're clawing at the back of his knees and forcing him downward. He grits his teeth and a sound rips up from his stomach-

The air moves as though enraged, whipping over his head and blowing the tar off him like a jet stream as he roars in empty panic and fear and anger. He stumbles and looks across the pool of Xigbar's blood where a dragon shaped spear stands point down in the ground, vibrating slightly.

The man who lies beneath him rasps, the wind apparently having shaken him out of unconsciousness. One eye stares up at him, flat gold and panicked.

"Xigbar, you have to open a portal before the Heartless come back." He kneels for the second time that day and he hears his knees hit blood.

Xigbar clamps his teeth and breathes through them, a horrible weakened wheeze, to show he understands. He raises a shaking, bleeding arm, and a dark purple orb appears in his palm, chipped in places like a veteran playground marble.

Zzchk. It flickers, but Xaldin takes it before it can disappear and gives the pathway form. Blackness swirls around the dark purple and he can almost see the basement of their castle through it.

The portal is two steps away, but as he lifts the Freeshooter with tattered arms and lurches forward on torn legs, it hurts like fucking hell. He falls through the portal and almost onto the white tiles of the lab, but he is suddenly supported on three more spears, points down in the floor.

"Xaldin...?" someone echoes across the room.

He struggles to lift his head but he can feel blood spill out from him and run down his back. He really needs to throw up. "Hel..." The spears splinter against the weight and the floor rushes up to greet him home.

It's the first and last time that any of them get vacation time.

The little beach house Xemnas had found on the little tropical World has been abandoned for years, but he still worries that someone is going to walk too far down the beach one day and come across them. They would probably look like alcoholics, what with all the empty hi-potion and ether bottles scattered around. The odd haze of tingly healing that comes after so much is drunk probably didn't help them either.

But it does open up some doors.

He's sitting in the doorway, looking out at the sunset. Xigbar has recovered enough that he can sit up. He's propped on the coffee table nearby. Xaldin can hear him idly tearing the label off his seventh bottle.

"Hey, Xaldin," he says, but his tone raises at the end, so maybe there's a question mark there.

"Yes, Xigbar."

"When I get married," and Xaldin has to turn and look at him, because this is the last thing he expected to hear, "will you be my best man?"

The waves crash out on the sand, and wind blows in the open door. Xigbar trains his one eye on the bottle and its label the entire time, not seeming to care if the other man ever answered.

There is a very long pause.

"Only if you'll be mine," Xaldin mumbles.

Xigbar smiles, very slowly.

They turn back to the sunset and watch.

When Xigbar is well enough to stand and walk again, they usually pass the day by walking down to the little brick wall near the beach and just sitting. Sometimes they can see cars moving off on the main island when the mist clears and they wonder if technology is catching on in all the Worlds, or if they've even been Connected yet. The wind cools their burning skin as red scar tissues grows.

"Hey, you know what's kinda funny?" Xigbar asks one day.

"Mmm?" the taller mumbles wearily.

"I have scars down my front," Xigbar peers down at his right foot, where one of said scars ends near his big toe, "and you have scars down your back."

Xaldin takes a swig of his ether bottle, then closes his eyes as the medicinal cloud in his head thickens. "So?"

"So? It's like," Xigbar raises his hand blankly into the air, as through that will help him form a proper sentence. "It's like we're the flip side of each other's coin or summin."

The taller man blinks through the haze. "...What?"

"I...dunno." Xigbar blinks his remaining eye. He gingerly fingers his new eye-patch and glances at his companion. "D'you think the chicks will dig it?"

They start laughing for a reason they can't grasp and don't stop for several minutes.

Xigbar hates the sound of Xaldin falling. The spears shriek too loudly as they rend the sky and when they're finished, they either clatter against one of their sextuplets or thud into the ground. And in the middle of it there is a stupidly stubborn silence that is the Whirlwind Lancer determined not to admit anything is wrong.

"You idiot," he says one day as Xaldin gets up and starts to walk back up the hill. "You're an idiot. We practically just came back. And now you're throwing yourself into the ground without even thinking about how your powers work."

Xaldin keeps walking up the steep road. The lances follow, spinning weakly and points dragging against the pavement.

"Hey! Don't walk away from me, you idiot! I'm fucking talking to you!" Xigbar pounds up the hill after him until they're side by side. "If you keep jumping into the air like this you're just going to rip your back open all over again."

One of the lances swing deathly close to Xigbar's head. He bends backwards at the hips just in time, but nearly falls all the way back to the bottom of the hill at the shift in his balance. When he straightens up again and looks for Xaldin, the man is at the top of the hill.

There is a sound of metal and light as one of the pistols they both knew so well is summoned. "You better as hell not jump again."

Xaldin inhales and Xigbar shoots.

One of the spears shriek again, and whacks the bullet out of the air, sending back to its shooter. Xigbar dodges and looks into the sky to see the odd shape of Xaldin in flight. A shadow like a man in the center of six draconic spider legs crawling, and stumbling, across the sky.

"You fucking idiot!" he shouts as the spider releases too much thread and one of its legs grazes the ground and trails sparks. He doesn't even have to think about bringing the other gun into existence before he's opened fire.

But for every bullet that sings through the air there is a collision with dragon steel and for every collision there is a new red light point down in the road.

The Freeshooter looks up and somehow the spider has transformed into just Xaldin, each spear following its own path around its master but never colliding into one another. Like electrons on thier path around the nucleus.

A flying Xaldin. They were all doomed.

"You... jerk! You big lug!" He trips around the red bullets laying in the street like lanterns. "You're flying!"

"Oh, I'm a jerk now, am I? What happened to 'idiot'?"

One must note that Demyx was more or less initiated into the then Organization IX by Xigbar, and that the two carried off a relationship that reminded some of 'that duck and his nephews'. While the Neophyte often grated Xigbar's nerves by somehow managing to get himself into some new brand of trouble, and Demyx was none too appreciative of the elder's teasing insults, there was a definite mutual respect.

So when Demyx dies, Xigbar sits on the steps of the Castle Gate, staring out at the blue and green rain soaked tiles where he himself might've died. If it hadn't been for Xaldin, sitting beside him. Alive.

"I know you hate this place," he says quietly to him. "Why'd you come here?"

The Lancer stares with blank eyes at the center of the tiles, determined not to look at him. It's eerie, that stare. He feels like he can see himself in the reflection, sees what no doubt haunts Xaldin. Why he avoids this place like the plague.

The lightning flashes and Xaldin squeezes his eyes shut. It had illuminated the scene in his mind he was hoping to keep concealed.

He opens his eyes and shakes his head numbly as thunder rumbles out near the Great Maw. "I had to."

"The tear ducts in your left eye must've been weakened when the Heartless took the other one."

"No, damn it!" Xigbar pounds the red portal. His legs ache from kneeling so long. "Is it so hard to believe that you're gone and I can't accept that?"

"Yes, it is hard to believe. You don't have a heart," the figment says in that controlled voice.

"Damn it, how could you lose? A duck, a dog and a kid."

"You know they're much more than that."

"...They're friends."

"We could be heroes."

Xigbar sits up, taking his eyes off the clouds skidding across the sky. "There are so many things wrong with that sentence."

Xaldin glances at him. "Explain."

"First of all, we're dead. Second of all, you were always the one saying that I was an idiot for helping those kids out in Hollow Bastion."

"That's only two things."

Xigbar scowls. "You were always the one saying that we should let things run their course."

"And you were always the one saying that we shouldn't. And now you're agreeing with me? What's your reason behind that?"

He stands up from the grass. He needed to move when something rubbed him the wrong way. "Who needs a reason? Maybe I just changed."

"Maybe. Or maybe you thought that all being a hero does is bring you is pain. Maybe you gave up on yourself."

"What the hell do you mean by-"

"And when Demyx came along you found someone you could pin your dreams onto. That's why he was so reluctlant to go on missions. He didn't like hurting people in the first place but you-"

"You and I both know that Demyx could be a hundred times the hero we'd ever be. I turned a sacred deity into a Heartless, and you screwed up a Princess of Heart's World."

"Says the man who raced into a burning city to fight against the threat he helped create and save the people he put in danger. With nothing to gain."

Those freakishly blue eyes stare the other down. "You want to know why I followed you that day, Xigbar? Because we've known each other so long I actually believe what your disillusioned mind spits out sometimes.

"I thought, 'Hell, he's right, we can be something. If we save these kids at least we'll exist in their memories.'"

Wind blew over the fields, tossing their hair. Xigbar sat down again.

"Xaldin, that wasn't me. You had a hell of a better reason than I did to save those kids. I didn't know why I rushed in there. I just did."

"Exactly. Sometimes that what we need. Sometimes we don't need to think. Sometimes we just need to move. And that's what you do."

"Huh," he smiles. "We could be heroes."

"We could be friends."

They meet the corners of each other's eyes and smile.

"If we weren't already."