III
They're somewhere in an inverted Underworld, deep under a silver ocean when the slow building heat within Sora first catches his attention. It's familiar, it's unwanted, and it's promptly shoved deep down.
It's probably just the moody location that's getting to him. That's all. It would be stupid to get mad at… at…
See? Sora doesn't even know! There's nothing to be mad at, other than just, all these nothingness and weirdness.
Bubbling resentment builds within his chest anyway. Makes angry green spires of flame shoot downward from the watery ceiling.
Roxas jolts out of the way, doing a little flip that would probably have looked really cool on his skateboard, but looks quite silly under the water with his legs trying to figure out if they should actually be fins or not.
Not that Sora's body is doing much better at figuring out what shape to take in the latest iteration of bizarre. Half the time his legs give up trying to decide between being a tail or not and he sort of just floats along as a torso for a few paces. Once, his legs came back with dolphin skin and no pants and, oh man, wasn't that embarrassing.
Maybe that's what his heart is all upset about. This confusing mess of a place would be enough to get on anyone's nerves!
Roxas glowers up at where the angry vent of fire had flared down from, but it's already gone. Instead, there's just static left in its place.
"Everytime I think one of these places can't get any worse," Roxas mutters. Bitterly, he stomps his feet firmly against the ocean floor to shake off the fins growing from his ankles. "I think I liked it better when we couldn't even keep the floor on the ground. Can't we just, I dunno, think this place away?"
Sora hums. "Maybe? I guess I don't really get why some of this stuff shows up on its own." In entire worlds now, no less.
"Wish my body would figure itself out on its own," grumbles Roxas.
Sora snorts. "Well then, let's give it a shot. Where do you want to be?"
"Anywhere but here."
They both stop to focus, faces pinched in concentration. Shimmers of shorelines and marketplaces waver like a mirage under their efforts. But in the end, all they manage to do is cage themselves in with giant elephant ribs, while sea vents above and below them spurt sickly green floods of Underworld.
Sora's not exactly sure where the crags are from, encircling them like a great maw. The outskirts of Radiant Garden, perhaps. But if that were true, the stones should be some degree of blue. Instead, they're the dusty red of the Keyblade Graveyard. But there are definitely no keyblades around.
Sora and Roxas have both tried several times to summon their own keyblades. All they've managed were goopy rods that looked more like a child's failed papier mache project than anything else. The glint of light Sora normally feels within him when he summons the keyblade remains stubbornly absent with each attempt.
Sickeningly familiar gurgles of darkness seethe ever hotter within him instead. And it's here in this barren wasteland of stone that it overflows.
It's short lived. Just a flare of darkness that whirls around Sora, replacing his body in a cruel, misshapen, wild form of shadowy wisps and glowing eyes. And then it's gone.
Still, it's enough to make Sora instinctively spin away from Roxas, like all the times that dark, angry form had taken him over with Donald and Goofy. Fearful shame flays Sora's body, parts of him blinking away as if to run from the darkness that had momentarily taken him. Taking a long, slow breath with lungs that probably aren't even there, Sora slowly takes note of each part of his body. He makes sure they're all in their proper place while he douses cold water on the flames of rage still boiling in his gut.
It's not until he's fully slotted himself back together and cooled himself off that he notices Roxas has shrunken away from him, seeming… compressed, somehow. Like an animal that's slicked its fur tight down against its frame to appear smaller.
"Sorry about that," Sora says, with a nervous laugh. He rubs the back of his neck. "Didn't think that could happen here."
Roxas's eyes flick to a dusty boulder nearby. He nods tightly.
"You don't have to worry about it!" Sora adds quickly, nausea making his cheeks cool. He scared Roxas. Of course he did. It's scary. That horrible dark part of Sora. It's always been scary. He tries to smile to reassure Roxas.
Seeing someone's fear of that form never hurts any less. But what's important is making sure no one feels scared or upset by it. It's Sora's problem, so it's his own responsibility to clean up after it.
"It - I won't hurt you," Sora insists weakly. "When I get like that I, I mean I, I've never hurt anyone I care about when that happens."
Roxas chews his lip, hugging himself with one arm. He doesn't lift his eyes away from the boulder when he quietly says, "I know."
A pregnant silence stretches between them. The ground expands between them to shove Roxas away. Sora's not sure which one of them makes it do that, but it makes Roxas look up, blinking. Turning to face Sora, Roxas takes a step back to close the distance.
"It's okay," Roxas says. But the assurance is lost a bit in the slight shake of his voice. "I know you're safe. It's just -" He looks away again, shakes his head, looks back to meet Sora's eyes with an apologetic grin. "I just remember how bad that felt."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"When I was in your heart," Roxas says with a shrug. "I could feel how much that… that darkness hurt. I remember sort of just, hiding from it when that would happen, sorta. Sorry. Old habit, I guess." A muscle twitches in his jaw. "It's worse for you. I know. I've felt that. Don't worry about it."
It's never occurred to Sora that any of the residents within his heart would have felt that form. Maybe it should have. It's a feeling like any other. Obviously they'd have been aware of it in some way. But he still feels blindsided by the realization, doesn't know what to say.
"Seriously, don't worry about it," Roxas repeats.
It just makes Sora feel worse.
The next time it takes over, Sora slices at the very fabric of this stupid, wretched, bunk world with his claws. Digs his fingers in, snarling as he rips it all away. The vacuum of existence is all that's left by time he returns to his senses, still trembling under smoldering rage.
The anger vanishes the instant he sees Roxas sitting in the void, face stoney and carefully blank. The composition of him is made of fragments, like a cubist painting held together by thin lines. Remorse rushes over Sora as a heavy wave and leaves him dripping with it. He takes a hesitant step towards Roxas, apology already at the edge of his teeth.
"What's setting you off?" Roxas asks, before Sora can get the 'sorry' out. His voice is as delicately devoid of expression as his face.
Another tremor wracks up Sora's spine, a laceration of Kairi-Donald-Goofy-Riku slicing an opening in his chest. Shadows use their claws and twitching antennas to reach out and pull his skin back shut. Sora uses a hand to wipe some of the dribbling regret from his shoulders.
Sora opens his mouth to properly apologize, but what comes out instead is a furious, "What was the point?!" His shout startles them both. Roxas blinks himself into standing, alert. But the despairing anger that hadn't finished leaving Sora surges fresh. "After all that fighting, all those worlds, all we've done, it all just ends? How is that fair? How is any of this fair!"
His teeth gnash at the injustice. Wild wrath snarls around something fragile inside him like a furious guard dog.
His fists dig claws deep into his palms and when he looks down at them, they're consumed again in black ichor and smog, threatening to pull him back into that horrible form that shouldn't even exist.
Roxas's fingers are shaking when they lay tentatively on Sora's forearm. Sora jolts, looks up to see Roxas's guarded expression. Wary, worried. It tempers the heat, replaces it instead with shame. This time, when Sora tries to apologize, he succeeds.
"Sorry." It sounds deflated, even to his own ears. But at least he managed it, and at least it makes the darkness licking up his frame dissipate like smoke.
"It's okay," Roxas replies automatically, but Sora can feel shrinking figures and melting darkness and red bandages and computers in Roxas's quivering touch.
Biting the inside of his cheek, Sora just nods.
There has to be a way out of here. Some way to fix this. There's no way the universe could be so unjust and cruel. It just can't. And when they get back to the real world, he'll work on this. He'll stop avoiding this dark thing inside him. He swears it on his keyblade, on light, on everything. He'll stop scaring his friends. He'll be better. He promises.
Maybe that's what he needs to do. Maybe he just needs to be better. Maybe that's the way out.
He just has to be better.
The matter around them has been shifting more frequently. It has continued to grow more concrete and vivid, but it bubbles, distorting in and out, fast enough that traversing becomes difficult. Fighting stubbornly against the heat and shuddering ghosts within him, Sora makes a few tries at jokes about the whole mess. Kinda funny how the door on that building looks like a face with how it jitters about, right? But he gives up when all he gets in response are increasingly broody scowls.
A funny distortion has been lurking around Roxas for a while, growing in and out of thin air. It's hard to tell what it is, but it crackles and fizzes, and gets caught in Roxas's skin, tinting it in shades of blue and static and rippling numbers.
And whatever it is, it's clearly driving Roxas crazy, because the crease between his brows grows deeper, dark shadows like bruises under his eyes and, huh, actually, they haven't slept at all in this place. Do they need to? Sora doesn't feel tired. Just drained.
A sound like a popping lightbulb and Sora twists inside out, feels his body come apart like the teeth of a zipper only to bite back down and rebraid onto amber streets.
Sora staggers at the shift, balance left behind in the sudden yank into a new reality. He catches himself against the side of a brick building the texture of rotted wood and swivels his head around to where Roxas had been standing, heart suddenly icy with fear that he's been wrenched into someplace alone.
The split second of relief he feels when he finds Roxas still beside him is lost when he notices the quake seizing through Roxas. Fractal pieces of his discolor and spark at his joints, bright and awful in his shaking fists. Grinding teeth chatter along his spine and Sora flinches as he feels an echo of it down his own back.
"Roxas?" Sora says around the broken glass in his mouth. He swallows hard to clear it out.
The guttural shout from Roxas bounces around the alleyway, bending to catch in the grout between bricks and cobblestone. It vibrates around them even after Roxas falls silent. He slashes an arm out and for the briefest moment, a keyblade appears in his hand. Just long enough to collide with the wall and send spiderwebs of sparks across it. The wall flickers with the cracks and turns black.
"...Roxas?"
"You're right, Sora," Roxas says to the ground. Sora would call his tone a growl if it didn't sound so wounded. "This isn't fair."
The black wall looms impressively behind Roxas, but Sora forces himself not to look, instead takes a step around Roxas to face him head on. He ducks low to tilt his chin up and meet Roxas's eyes.
He's losing himself again. Face distorting, hair shifting, his edges undefined like an artist's quick sketch - a rough capture of him rather than anything fully conceived. Roxas is so much worse at keeping his appearance together than he is at constructing the world around them. Other than the creeping wrongness of the broken wall, the alley - Roxas's friends' Secret Place - is perfectly captured and formed.
"It's not," Sora agrees gently, deliberate in keeping his eyes locked with Roxas's, refusing to look inward at the way it makes hornets buzz angrily in his veins. "It sucks."
Roxas flinches, grimacing. Wisps of Sora's own wrathful form catch around the edges of Roxas's poorly defined body. Drawing his hands up to clutch at his hair, Roxas shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut.
"I can't believe it's all gone," Roxas stresses. His eyes are still narrowed in pain when he cracks them open. They bore into Sora's like he's trying to pass an entire cosmos of jaded disillusion through one stare. "I barely even got a few years that were my own."
The defeated anguish in his voice hurts to listen to. The admission makes him sound so young. Like a child who's had a promise finally given to him, only to have it stolen away. And Roxas can be angry or cry but it doesn't matter, because the universe will hold it over his head no matter how high he jumps.
It hits like a steel mallet against Sora's ribs, resonating through his core. The dark wall pushes forward, begging Sora to acknowledge it. He won't. He can't look away from Roxas's pleading eyes, at once far too young and far too old for the face that holds them.
Maybe that's what Sora needs to do. Maybe helping Roxas is the key to fixing this somehow. If he can just help Roxas feel better, get his body and form all proper and concrete and comfortable, then maybe they can go home. A quiet part of Sora's mind tells him the thought is irrational, but the louder part of him latches onto the hope of having something he can actually do.
But before Sora can think of something to suggest, to help, to do, Roxas beats him to the punch.
"Maybe I'm supposed to merge with you again, after all," Roxas whispers miserably. He turns his head away from Sora, stares deep into the dark wall instead. But he keeps talking, a pressure behind his words making them spill out in a rushed mess. "Maybe that's the way out. Maybe, maybe this isn't really the end, you know? Maybe you're just broken or - or fractured. And that's all this place is. Just some, I don't know, some broken mindplace. And if you're whole again, it'll fix things and then at least you'll be out of here and everyone will be okay again."
The widening of Sora's eyes and slack jaw don't show even half the horror Sora feels at Roxas's rambling. It sinks cold teeth of terror through him and it's not just from the idea that Roxas is still seeing himself as just a mere extension of Sora. No, the icy panic that grabs hold of him comes from the no, nonono please don't leave me alone. Pleasedon'tgo, I need you here, please -
Sora's voice cracks on a laugh, cheeks pulling too far around his grin. Vehemently, he shakes his head, straightening up to grasp Roxas's shoulders and give him an urgent shake.
"Roxas, you gotta stop saying stuff like that," Sora insists weakly. Clinging to the irrational hope that making Roxas feel better will somehow help, he takes a tiny step back to hold out his hands, gesturing at the well-constructed alley around them. "Hey! I've got an idea! Let's see if we can play a game of Struggle!"
Roxas blinks, turns his head back to Sora to give him a quizzical look.
"We gotta, I think, uh -" Sora laughs breathlessly, trying to sort through his frenetic thoughts. "We need a break, I think. So let's have some fun! Let's see if we can get a game of Struggle to work!" They've been getting better at the whole materializing-sense-into-the-world thing. Enough so that perhaps they could get a couple struggle bats and balls to hold together for a game.
Plus, it's been ages since Sora's played any sort of game. Either of them. They've been here so long. When was the last time either of them tried anything fun? It's so impossible to know when time has vanished.
Sora scrunches his nose as he concentrates hard on his hand. The burst of laughter that escapes him this time is delighted as a blue bat forms in his hand. It's a little fuzzy around the edges, but it should work.
"C'mon!" Sora says, holding up the bat for emphasis. "It'll be fun."
Roxas's head tilts, a cheek pinched incredulously, before he shakes it, a wry smile of disbelief slowly replacing his frown. He reaches a hand forward to lay on the side of the bat, and it snaps into focus. Every part of it is exactly as it should be, from the foam buffer around the wood to the rubbery texture of the casing.
"If you think you can manage to keep your bat solid," Roxas needles lightly, but his shoulders relax and his small grin paints his tone with gratitude. In a blink, Roxas has his own struggle bat. Seriously, how is he doing that? "Then, sure."
Physics are a hard thing to get figured out even with a hundred percent of Sora's focus. It's an instinctual thing most of the time, until there's a lot of moving bits everywhere and it's too hard to automatically know when and how gravity should be behaving. So it's not surprising he can never get the physics of the game quite right. The balls bounce off brick walls at inappropriate speeds or pop into a better location just because Sora needs it to.
But in his defense, Roxas isn't doing that much better! He gets so focused on whacking Sora that sometimes the ground falls away and they both have to scramble to catch their feet on hastily added flooring. When a ball fuses itself to the side of Sora's head and gets stuck there, Roxas launches forward to tackle him and snatch it.
They tumble to the ground. It's a good thing Sora's too busy laughing to realize how much it should hurt when his head falls back against the ground. Instead of a crack against stone, there's no more pressure than as if he'd fallen back on pillows, choking on a snort of indignation as Roxas triumphantly plucks the ball free from Sora's hair. He grins down at Sora from where he's got him pinned.
A breathy giggle escapes Sora as joy flutters and ripple around inside him. After so long of being caught up on figuring everything out and the undercurrent of pain and fear and anger, he feels like the bright relief inside him could make him burst. Light halos from behind Roxas as Sora beams up at him. Maybe Sora was right after all. Maybe this is fixing something.
Roxas flops down on top of Sora as he snickers in his ear.
"I win."
"That doesn't count!" Sora protests. "You can't just grab one that got broken like that!" His rightful outrage is undercut by the butterflies in his stomach that giggle audibly alongside his own laughter. The sound tickles and sparkles inside his skull rather than his ears.
Halfheartedly, he pushes against Roxas's shoulders, but smiles wider when Roxas traps him with a crushing hug. Everywhere Roxas touches him sinks melodies into Sora. Shimmers of summer and ice cream and skateboards and fistbumps swirl warm and heavy like gravy
"Nope," Roxas says. Sora can feel Roxas's smile against his skin. "I win."
Sleep doesn't seem to be possible in this place, but as they let the world around them fall away, Sora feels something within him recharging. Sleep doesn't seem to be possible and sleep doesn't come, but with Roxas laying across him like a blanket, they take as close an equivalent to a nap as they can get.
Without their efforts to make sense of the world, it all turns to soup. Just colors and feeling and shapes and noise from dimensions beyond what Sora has words for. And for a while, they let it be that way.
For a while, Sora lets go of everything except the feeling of Roxas against him and lets himself drift.