“Again.”

The dirt felt coarse beneath Vanitas' knees. He was gripping his keyblade like a cane, stabbed hard into the earth, panting heavily and squinting an eye shut through the blood that trickled down it. A foolish move when he tossed aside his mask, leaving his face wide open to a single strike and the singe of a spell he narrowly dodged. He could taste the blood and dirt in his grit teeth but it didn't ignore the aches and pains from the tears in his bodysuit, the rips of cloth attached haggardly or thrown to the ground from a keyblade slice here, a stray spell there. He was livid.

But what angered him the most was the man standing a few feet in front of him, vision obscured by light bangs but still looking down at him with a neutral expression. Where Vanitas' chest was heaving and he could feel the sweat clinging to his body, Riku was relatively unscathed save for a small rip in his shirt and right leg, the blood soaking into the denim of his capris. His breath came out almost evenly and his hair was practically unruffled despite their spar that carried on for what felt like an eternity.

“Come on, again.” Riku said, palm pressing into the butt of Braveheart, jammed into the dirt at his side. “You wouldn't be so tired if you didn't keep relying on the darkness, it's not always going to help--”

“Shut up!” Vanitas snapped, rubbing futilely at the blood trickling down his eye, “You're one to talk, you use it, too!””

“Not like you do,” he replied, pulling out the keyblade and heading closer to Vanitas to offer him a hand, which the smaller boy slapped away with a growl.

“I don't need your pity, light-bearer.” Vanitas said, turning his head as Riku sat beside him and threw an arm behind his back to prop himself up. Vanitas, himself, moved to a more comfortable seating position of curling his knees to his chest and hugging them tightly. He felt defeated, exhausted and in shambles, outmatched and outwitted to the point he could almost vomit.

“You are a good fighter, Vanitas,” Riku started, looking straight ahead rather than at him—a comforting sort of motion he learned when dealing with the dark-haired boy. Vanitas had a glare that could burn a hole into someone's chest but wilted when someone else made that eye contact. He learned that very quickly and took steps to change how he spoke to him. Vanitas noticed but that only made him all the more angry towards Riku. Compassion was something Vanitas saw as weakness, as pity. “Relying on the darkness to fight will only tire you out like this.” He gestured vaguely to Vanitas' body, who simply shuffled his knees in closer and scoffed.

“You really think it's something I can just shut off? Idiot, I already told you, I'm made of darkness, it''s not something I can just stop being and relying on.”
“No, but you can also learn to stop relying on it entirely. You're just hurting yourself and others around you.”
“That's the point!” Vanitas snarled, head whipping to face Riku, “It's supposed to hurt people! That's why it's used in a fight!” Beside him, the familiar purple-black of darkness swirled, thickening the air around them and making it harder to breathe. Instinctively, it reached for Riku, seeking the light at first but then responding to the black shell coating his heart, hard and durable, squeezed down tight. Riku's darkness responded in kind, a sort of chime, humming along to the siren song that darkness provided. Vanitas simply felt for a moment and then sunk back the darkness into a wispy sort of smoke that dissipated.

“Maybe if yours was stronger you'd understand,” Vanitas shut his eyes and scrubbed again at the blood with a frown.

“It used to be,” Riku said quietly, enough that Vanitas assumed he misheard until Riku repeated it, sounding absolutely deflated. “A few years ago. It was all I relied on, all I wanted. Darkness was power and it was addicting. It...I...I hurt a lot of people because of it.” he said, voice small despite still towering over Vanitas in a sitting position.

“And they probably threw you away when they found out, huh? Nobody wants a light-bearer who can use darkness, doesn't that defeat the purpose?” Vanitas asked. Riku gave a little roll of his shoulders.

“That's the thing: I pushed them away. But they always tried to bring me back. Light doesn't always mean it's a good thing, Vanitas, just like darkness isn't always bad. It's how you treat the two that matter.”
“Just because you're a master it doesn't mean you get to lecture me.” He had always been told that he was darkness itself, that the light side of him—Ven--had made him weak. So why then, was Riku telling him the opposite? That they could both be good or evil depending on how they were wielded? It made no sense to him at all. Some of Ven's memories bubbled at the surface of Eraqus' lectures, telling him how soft and healing the light was, how it was the ultimate form of righteousness in the world. If that was the case, then why did the X-blade need equal parts darkness?
“Xehanort may have been your creator,” Riku said, getting a dangerous glare from Vanitas, “But that doesn't mean he was a good teacher for you. One day, who knows? Maybe you won't see the world as such black and white.” Riku turned suddenly, sitting to face Vanitas, and he extended a gloved hand.

“What?”

“Take it,” Riku said, wiggling his fingers and then straightening his hand. Warily, Vanitas eyed his expression (still aimed away from Vanitas, towards Riku's own hand) and saw nothing but nervousness masked deeply by a forced neutrality. Vanitas huffed and took his hand, expecting to be pulled to a standing position, but instead snatching it back with a startled yelp.

“What the hell?!”
“You have to trust me.” Riku said, extending his hand again.

“You burned me!”

“You burned yourself,” Vanitas' eyes narrowed and he took the hand again, gently, feeling Riku squeeze down on it like a vice. Instantly, there was a flood of heat into Vanitas' hand like he had touched fire and he tried to jerk his hand back, getting a stern squeeze from Riku.

“Stop panicking,” he said, “Just feel. Close your eyes and feel.”

“Feel what?” Vanitas asked. The burning was singing up his arm now, claws rending into his flesh and raking down across his back and side.

“Light.”

Instinctively, Vanitas' darkness coiled to the surface, snuffing out the light like a rain would to a forest fire, leaving black smoke in its wake along his skin. His eyes were wide as he struggled against the singe of heat and the cold, aching darkness battling it out.

“You're doing it again,” Riku chided softly, “You're using the darkness. You don't need to; this isn't happening to hurt you.”
“Then why are you doing it?”

“To help you understand.”

Another flood of heat, pulsing stronger, surging through the smoke and clearing it up. Beneath the acidic burn of flesh was something almost soothing, and it took a moment for Vanitas to realize what it was: Riku's own darkness seeking his own, soothing his aching bones and muscle and worming through the raging waters that the light was. The warmth traveled further, seeping into Vanitas' neck, into his other arm, his chest, pooling into his legs in an aching fire that left him tingling and warmer than the graveyard ever could.

It instantly brought back fuzzy memories he could only recognize as fragment's of Ven's heart, his will, the soft, cotton-like cradle of warmth the light provided. Vanitas hadn't realized his arm had gone slack, that his mouth was hanging open and his knees were no longer tightly drawn to his chest. He was chasing the comforting warmth, suddenly forgetting where he was. Suddenly forgetting the bruises and scars that marred his body, the way his bones snapped under Xehanort's heel, the way he would cry himself to sleep if blood loss didn't claim him first.

The darkness was cold and dreary, a thunderstorm that weathered down his bones and mind until nothing but cold slime filtered through his veins, leaving him sluggish yet rampant. The way it drenched every fiber of his being into a sticky tar he sometimes swore he could almost see dripping from his bodysuit, staining the ground is black ichor. He wondered, sometimes, if his tongue just felt heavy or was so weighed down with the ink-like trails darkness left behind in his words, spat like venom.

The heat began to leave his body and with a panicked grip, his hand crushed down on Riku's, as if to squeeze out any more light. The X-blade had had a similar effect on him and now he was panicking again, chasing the high he didn't know he needed until he had it.

It left his body too quickly as if Riku had selfishly absorbed it back and with a growl, Vanitas was grabbing him by the collar and yanking him close, enraged.

“What the hell was that?!” he demanded to know as if he wasn't told dozens of time it was light. Riku simply blinked once, twice, averted his gaze and said nothing. What was there to even say? Surely this hadn't been the first time Vanitas had let the light in....right?

“I--”

Vanitas snatched his hand away and looked down at his fingers, moving them all separately and keep a close eye on each movement. “It doesn't hurt.” he muttered.

“What?”
“My body, it doesn't hurt.”

“I—yeah, it's not supposed to,” Riku said, eyes narrowed as he glanced over Vanitas' body as if he'd see the source of the pain. It couldn't have been from the spar; Vanitas had been injured but nothing too severe outside of the deep gash above his eye. He still had the scratches and such from the spar but had only been exerted.

“”No, you don't—tch, never mind.”

“Vanitas.”
“Light's supposed to win over darkness, isn't it?” Vanitas asked, tongue mulling over every word as he spoke them. Riku's head tilted a bit in response and he saw that spiky black hair shaking side to side. “I was always told light could vanquish the darkness, that was why you guys were given keyblades. To stop the darkness. So, why then, didn't it hurt me?”

That was what this was about? Riku scratched at the back of his head. He didn't know how he'd even manage to explain this. It wasn't as simple as that; the keyblades had many purposes. Was Vanitas not told why he had one? He chewed at his bottom lip and shrugged it off. Vanitas buried a lot of things deep and this was the most he had ever opened up to anybody, as far as he knew. Even Sora couldn't pry secrets from his 'twin's' lips.

“I think,” Riku began “It's something that you need to discover for yourself. It's not something that I can teach you, it's something you have to feel in your heart.” Riku gently placed his palm on the center of Vanitas' chest, a small, tender surge of warmth entering the smaller boy and then fading into nothingness once more. There was no darkness coming to snuff it out, no darkness to cradle it tenderly before tearing it into pieces and leaving them to wilt and die like flower petals.

Where there was hatred in Xehanort's eyes and anger in the man's words, there was sadness in Riku's, as if the older male didn't know how to talk to him without treading broken glass, and maybe that was true. Vanitas had every right to be walled off the from the world after everything that had happened and yet here they sat after a spar, talking to each other and trying to get past their differences and showing what they had in common.

Maybe things really weren't so black and white, but at the very least, Vanitas understood he didn't have to be alone and hurt by himself anymore. People were out there in the world—good people—who'd give even him a second chance. His fingers touched the spot on his chest where the warmth once was and squeezed.