Half my life's in books' written pages

[radiantlegacy]

Who: Ienzo, Xemnas
What: No matter how many all-nighters Ienzo needs to pull to get a critical project completed, sleep inevitably finds him...and some familiar nightmares are eaiser to turn away from than others.
Where: Radiant Garden/Hollow Bastion, the Realm of Sleep
When: KH3, Pre-endgame
Warnings: SPOILERSLAND? A nice rich history of emotional abuse, childhood infatuation, human experimentation, existential crises, lies and manipulation...


There is so much mystery yet to be cobbled together into some semblance of a life. He's already squandered a decade away. Ienzo can't wait around and let them down any longer.

But realistically speaking, one can only stand and puzzle at lines of code for so many hours, down here in the labs under the cool artificial glow, without the warmth of sunlight's rays touching the skin. You can lose track of time that way. Aeleus can push food and drink on him, offer patient yet increasingly cautious reminders that turning in to bed for at least a short nap should increase productivity, but now that there's been a hint of headway in progress, his determination has reached peak stubbornness.

And he should have listened, because his steady heartbeat has become like a numbing, pendulous sense of sluggish urgency, eyes begining to feel stinging and heavy, each character beginning to blur into the next.

He scrubs at his eyes beneath his bangs and pinches at the bridge of his nose and glances up, out toward the rows and rows of storage tanks, dimly lighting the walls of the old manufactory. The faint mechanical hum is still a lulling, steady white noise. 

Shutting his eyes again, for what he promises himself will only be a moment, the weary apprentice braces himself upright on the console with both arms, and the world goes black with deep and hungering peace-

It's like falling headlong into an abyss, perilously comforting, only to catch himself partway.

Jolting alert, Ienzo shakes himself to consciousness, still feeling fuzzy and surreal with exhaustion.

Ansem's computer has logged him out, and when he tries to enter the right passwords, it doesn't seem to want to respond.

He realizes he's been trying to enter the older ones, and in a crawling panic of staring blankly at the keys, can't remember what he's reset them to.


 

Comments

[letxequalnull]

Even with all the pieces in place - or drawing near to their correct places - there is precious little for Xemnas to do, when he's not being called upon to ensure that Sora follows the path that has been laid out for him. The path that will, inexorably, lead him either to the fated place where destiny lies... or to destruction at their hands. But for now, his part is done. He has made his Appearance, to encourage him further along the path, and now the work of gently shepherding his path to the others of their ranks. For his part he simply takes a moment to... reminisce. To walk paths he'd once known, stepping sideways into the Realm of Sleep without so much as second thought.

Not for him, the broad bright light of Radiant Garden. Not when he knows very well that the wielders of light will be seeking Terra, yet, and are unlikely to be pleased to see him besides. So instead, he walks the echoes of those same halls, pausing only when he feels the ripples of something familiar; an echo of amusement slides across his face as he realizes just what he's come across.

He slips into Ienzo's dream just as easily as he had the Realm of Dreams in the first place, and when the dream solidifies he very nearly lets out a breath of amusement for how familiar the sight before is.

"Having trouble?"

His voice, as ever, is a low rumble, and it's only after he speaks that the unmistakable scent of the void seeps into the dream, cold and harsh and utterly unyielding, though for now it's leashed. Tamed, in so much as it ever is, although even this is unlikely to be particularly comforting.

[radiantlegacy]

A dream should feel more dream-like, should it not?

But Ienzo finds himself just as fatigued, just as frustrated, his heart just as bound up in carefully composed knots of patience, patience, control, just breathe deep, finish up, not yet.

His nostrils flare at the sudden presence that locks his spine up rigidly- Don't move, don't squirm, don't tense, don't shudder.

This can't be real.

Although he's considered the possibility a thousand times already, it can't be happening now. Not without Aeleus or Dilan here beside him.

Not with the lab so suddenly, vacuously quiet. Even the machines have stopped their humming.

If he raised his voice to call out, Ienzo isn't even sure he'd be able to make a sound.

Breathe. Those ties no longer bind us.

"Remind me," he breathes out, knowing exactly who is standing at his back, but not wanting to give so much as the acknowledgement of raised eyes at his reflection in the glass in front of them. "Why should I feel obliged to answer you?"

[letxequalnull]

It can't be happening, no. And yet, here he is all the same. A ghost of the past, come creeping in where he's not wanted, and even with Ienzo not even so much as turning at his presence he can very much see the tension that has Ienzo's spine locking up. He knows, without needing anything more than simple tell that his very presence has already had an effect on things. Nor has he ever needed direct eye contact, besides. He may not be quite as heartless as he has always claimed to be, but even so, he doesn't have it in him to care. Nor to be in the least bit offended by the slight that Ienzo is offering in that simple lack of acknowledgement.

It is, it exists, and that is all that he particularly cares to bother with.

"There is nothing that obliges you to do so."

Ienzo has his heart again. The heart that he had no doubt already been regrowing even before his recompletion. And with that there is nothing to truly force him to answer to Xemnas; the threat of being made to hold even less of a grasp on existence than Zexion's already tenuous hold on that very same existence is no longer on Xemnas holds. But that is cold comfort - he has ever been more dangerous than that simple trick, and Dilan and Aeleus are unlikely to be close enough to intervene should violence break out.

But for now, he holds. Merely exists, patient and unhurried, as if how this should unfold is merely something he's choosing to observe, and not something he has an active part in.

(This, at least, is not surprising. He's always been like this, after having cast off his heart.)

"And yet... here you are, answering, even without that obligation. Could it be that there are yet ties that bind us together?"

He knows there are, despite the question. Stretched and fragile though the bonds may be now, they have both once walked these halls. Have both once shared a desire to know, to learn, even if all they managed was to bring darkness down upon their heads.

[radiantlegacy]

Ienzo's lips press together, fingers curling slowly toward his palms without forming a fist. His thumb shifts across the tips of his other fingers, almost as if silently checking each digit is still there.

Is he teasing at the absence of Even, of Braig? Of memory and mind and... all else that's been steeped in Xehanort's influence over the years, stained.

It's infuriating, that doubt should be allowed to take root. That silences can only stretch out for so long, and that the ghost at his back does not simply vanish as soon as he came.

"A fascinating conjecture." Ienzo finally replies, clipped and curt, teeth connecting. The air seems stale and thin, and it tastes faintly like ozone under his tongue.

I will never go back. No, I will never be yours again.

He wishes he had more physical resolve, more weight to plant into the floor, more solid firmness to his limbs. That he was built like his compatriots, sturdier stock, unmovable.

His heart feels so terribly fragile, and so wildly over-responsive, stuttering hard against his ribs. There's so much he dares not think, lest Xemnas reach in and pluck his thoughts clean out of air, unveiling plans.

Shaking his head, the edge of Ienzo's lip curls beneath his bangs, contemptuous. "How could there be?"

[letxequalnull]

A worthy question indeed. There is certainly no doubt that he's teasing at something, yes. But the true nature of what he's teasing at he leaves Ienzo to wonder at. It could be either of those things. Or both, or neither; he says nothing and simply lets the doubt grow. Lets that trace of darkness worm its way in, for all that he has neither desire nor inclination to return Ienzo's heart to darkness. Merely to... suggest at it. At what he has once held; another ghost of the past to stand at Ienzo's back just as he is.

Ienzo's response, when at last it come, prompts a smile out of Xemnas, thin and sharp and not at all friendly. True, he cannot - and never will be able to - pluck Ienzo's thoughts out of clean air. But at the same time neither does he need to. Ienzo's fledgling heart is telling him all he needs to know, as it prompts Ienzo into a whole host of emotions, the cold clipped tones of what might be anger, the almost restless motions of someone halfway nervous besides, who knows full well that they are at a disadvantage should the confrontation take a turn to the physical.

And perhaps that is why he is here. Why he's not lingering in Aeleus or Dilan's dreams, for all that they too have had their time in the darkness. Why he is worming his way into Ienzo's dreams, even despite the fact that there is not a single place for Ienzo in his reborn Organization; a fact he keeps in reserve should he need something that can bite deep into Ienzo's new-born heart. Ienzo is more fragile, more... malleable, more given to hearing him out than he suspects the others would have been.

"Come, Ienzo," he begins, voice curling low and dark around what is unmistakably meant as a gentle rebuke, "have you truly forgotten where we first began? What paths we once walked in search of the heart's true nature?"

[radiantlegacy]

Come.

It's such an evocative command, no doubt intentional, that Ienzo strains not to squirm in place from the faintest tickle of air against the nape of his neck, too much familiar, sonorous velvet on the ear. He clutches his elbows and glowers at the screen before him, a new entry field and the slow emergence of text that seemingly no one is typing in- Xemnas doesn't have his hands on the keys, nor is Ienzo touching them himself.

A N O T H E R

The young man heaves a sigh at the blinking cursor.

"In search of your memories. Of your past. Whatever happened to that? I don't know how we ever got so tangled up in trying to unlock so many of the heart's other secrets, but amidst our curiousity we lost our way, experimenting with the darkness. We railed against our Master's limitations and crossed boundary lines of what we had thought possible. We created monsters out of the shadows, and they would someday ravage all we knew."

He's spooled this narrative out to himself a hundred times, trying to tell a story where the pieces fit right. Where he's no tragically flawed yet sympathetic orphan hero, where he's not the worst villain of the bunch either, where the facts are naught but a string of subjective truths in his own lens. There are days the story's almost polished, and days when it's complete and utter rubbish, detestable and inexcuseable from every angle. He's told them all, in essence the same root tale every time.

"We explored the heart together." Ienzo swallows, and there is so much he cannot will himself to regret about the thrill it once gave him, despite some sense of moral gravity ever-so-slowly wrenching him apart by the bones, like some torturous punishment of social engineering. "We put forward difficult questions, challenging notions, and we dared to seek answers. My mind was so restless and open and growing, then." I was so young and eager, so ripe for change. It should have been my hour of blooming, and instead you uprooted me completely and hid me away where the light couldn't reach. Anyone could say it was a vicious thing to survive through.

And it's... intimate, when it comes to Xehanort, in ways he isn't bold enough to tell out loud. Not while he's still weeding through the lies and betrayals and deceptions and feeling so sick to his stomach about it.

"Surely you don't expect me to feel the same way now about it, as I did when I was a foolish, yearning child?"

[letxequalnull]

It is very much intentional. That Ienzo still manages to resist the urge to move from where he stands is... impressive, certainly. But even despite that Xemnas still notices the effort it takes him, the way he holds himself close and focuses in on something else in lieu of that one, single, command. And if that something should be the slow entry of text into an entry field that neither of them is doing anything with than so be it.

He knows that command, too. Knows that it would take only a handful more keystrokes to open up the hidden paths underneath the laboratory, to rows of cells hidden away in the darkness and a room that held all that he once had to explain his past. The single clue to who he might be, though he has since reclaimed more of past. More, indeed, than Ienzo might imagine, although the full truth of that matter is something he hardly cares to mention. Not if it isn't relevant, and here on the eve of battle he cannot see a need for Ienzo to know just how much he had reclaimed in those final moments before Radiant Garden had fallen to the darkness.

"Nothing 'happened to it'."

There's a faintly disapproving tone in his voice, as if he would have expected Ienzo to have realized that, despite the fact that he has not been, and likely will never be, particularly forthcoming about the true nature of any of his plans. True, there is now little denying that he, like his other selves, seeks nothing more or less than to recreate the Keyblade War of old. But even that secret is one that had only been revealed when it was on the very cusp of being too late to truly stop. That Sora had been wrenched free of their clutches at the last moment had been an unfortunate setback, yes. But little more. Especially when a suitable replacement had hardly been difficult to find. But he says no more on that topic, and when he speaks again, his voice has settled into the familiar tones he adopts when he has something important to impart.

"Hearts and memories are intertwined. After all, can it not be said there are specific memories, specific moments, who define who we are? Those memories, and others, leave their marks on a heart, even long after the memory that created them has faded into nothing. Thus, by traversing the depths of a heart, we gain a path into memory itself. Perhap, even, to a past that has long since been forgotten."

Like his had been, out of reach and forgotten for reasons that he'd only later come to realize; memories of the body he had inhabited overwritten by the heart of another. But that, too, is behind him now. Though he might never have more than decade's worth of memories to call his own he know enough of the plan that is now in motion to be able to see it through. And that is more than enough. After all, what need does he have of memories, when there are so many other versions of him as it is? Versions who can, in their own way, do all the remembering that he might not be able to - and though he isn't likely to mention it now, he remembers more than Ienzo might expect.

Unbidden, without either of them having so much as touched the keys, the blinking cursor on screen pauses for a moment, as if someone has pressed the key to confirm the text that's been entered; it blinks away a moment later, the password apparently accepted as six new entry fields appear, arranged in a loose circle.

"Why else do you believe I would have so willingly offered myself as our first test subject, if not for that?"

True, there had been setbacks. Ones more disastrous than any of them could have truly imagined. But to know that the bonds between heart and memory could be broken without sacrificing both in the process had proved useful even so. As had the later revelation that one could, over time regrow a heart, after having been separated from it.

[radiantlegacy]

"You were once, willing to turn your heart inside out for answers." Ienzo nods tiredly, holding up his hands as if to concede to that point- No one would ever dare argue that Xehanort had been any less than eager to forfeit all for the sake of knowledge. He used to believe that was so noble of him, much more noble than Master Ansem, playing it safe and sanctimonious.

His eyes narrow on the password screen, daring that cursor to move, to fill in those damning names. No, that shouldn't even work, they've changed all the passwords. Ienzo tells himself, holding onto that awareness like a talisman against illusions, against the mutable rules of dream-reality.

He resents being spoken to like a child, in that laboriously noxious, inculcating tone, talking round in circles about the same universal mysteries. Never did they manage to close in on Xehanort's forgotten past. The darkness only ever darkened, obscuring their vision, wrenching them apart. If not for the others, if not for Lexaeus keeping him grounded, Zexion may have wound up just as ephemeral and vacant as their leader... and that's not a divergent path he's particularly interested in exploring any longer.

"But after you lost your heart, you lost all interest in recovering the missing truth about yourself." Ienzo continues, still faintly accusatory, tucking his arms in tightly against his body. "Our organization began to revolve around other lofty, inscrutable plans. Worlds lay before us, in diverse fragments, yet all sense of wonder in them ceased. You set yourself apart from us, called yourself Superior, and allowed that distance to become empty space, dividing what we once had."

Or had that been a fallacy too, that energy they'd shared, churning hairbrained theories together, sitting up late into the night collecting ideas, scheming up possible tests, opening up the narrow focus of their disciplined learning.

Who would have known the endless void could still feel so small, on the other side?

Collecting up his nerve, biting at his lower lip, Ienzo finally lifts his eyes in defiance to meet Xemnas's face again, his reflection in the glass.

"But Xigbar said you still came here alone, quite often, to speak with someone else."

Cat's long been out of the bag about those napping habits, murmured about. Everyone knew it- even if they didn't really know why anyone would seek out that sort of solitude. Why chase ghosts down in that basement, if not to conclude a path of inquiry alone, in secret? That should have been when he'd suspected that critical information was being withheld, even if he could have never fathomed the weight of it.

"I thought it might have been your other half that you would rather confide in, down there, than any of your old colleagues." The apprentice snipes sullenly, through heavily hooded eyes. He frowns, the softness of his features sharpening in focus, skeptical.

"So why now, having already cast us off?" It's a rather insolent demand, from a follower who had always been unfailingly polite. Ienzo has none of Zexion's cooled and removed temperment, he is swollen with hurt too-long tampered down, buttoned up, stuffed beneath a pile of to-dos to be dealt with later.

He's got to deal with this now, or else never.

"You will not anchor yourself in me again." Ienzo articulates plainly, firmly, more assertive than he can ever remember being, to anyone's face. "I have given you too many of my years already, in pursuit of your aims."

[letxequalnull]

"For more than just answers. To find a truth."

It's a correction, but a gentle one. The answers had been part of it, but in many ways, he had hardly known himself, at first. He had been an unknown. A problem to be solved, a yawning void in the shape of a person; something that had only become all the more obvious after he had lost his heart; the one thing that might otherwise have kept him grounded.

Not that he had ever been entirely so, even then. But more so, perhaps. More present, more able to be pulled down to focus in on the immediate problem rather than the grand and lofty goals that Ienzo accuses him - and rightly so - of following. Goals that have been both his and not his, throughout those long years. Still, even now he doesn't address that. Doesn't shed any light on the darkness of who and why and how - those mysteries are yet too close to the heart of their ultimate goal to be spoken of so freely even in the dark depths of dreaming. Too close to the answers that Ienzo is no doubt seeking.

(Riku, perhaps, may know more of the answers. But neither is Xemnas going to suggest that it might be in Ienzo's benefit to speak to him. Too, there is a reason he had left behind his desire to find himself when he had left behind his heart, one that he likewise doesn't care to mention.)

"Stale wonder, at best. Echoes of that which had once had, before all had been shattered." It's not, quite, a denial that there had been changes. But neither is it the conformation Ienzo might have been seeking either. "Is that truly what you would have wanted? To seek and never regain that which had been lost? To evermore be little more than a shade, an illusion ghosting at the surface of what could have truly been?"

As ever, his words are very deliberately chosen, hinting at the abilities Ienzo had once had, if not necessarily his deeper fears. But he doesn't linger long on them either; there's the space of a breath, no more, and then he's continuing right along.

"As to the matter of distances... I do not believe even you would have been so willing to bring Axel and Saïx into that fellowship we had shared. Thus, could it not be said that our Organization was sundered from the very beginning?"

It had been a deliberate sundering, of course. One designed to pull at the fabric of what they had been, arguments and tempers flaring more sharply without the weight of sympathy and guilt to pull them back in line. One, too, that could have fallen along very different lines, had Xemnas wished it to. But then Ienzo lifts his gaze in defiance, and rather than shrink back, Xemnas' expression becomes almost intrigued.

"I am not surprised that it would be he who spoke of that. However, that assumption would be incorrect. I have rarely had any need to speak with my other self - our goals have by and large been similar, though we may have pursued it through different means."

Kingdom Hearts, recompletion, the plan currently in motion... which goal he's speaking of is unclear.

"Nor would I have chosen to do so here." A pause, and the faintest curve of a smile graces the corner of his lips. "Still there is yet a secret that rests here, should you have the will to seek it out."

There's an almost goading note in his voice at that, one whispering that perhaps Xemnas has been right to deem Ienzo unworthy, naught more than a piece to be picked up and discarded at will if he is unwilling or unable to pry out this last secret from the depths of the Garden; unbidden the cursor slowly begins to pick out a name in one of the password fields - five letters, blinking almost damnably despite being hidden. Despite the possibility that they *could* be two other names besides, and yet... and yet, why would they be anything other than Ienzo's? Anything other than one more curling temptation, damning though it is.

(It shouldn't work, not with the passwords changed. Yet here is the suggestion that it might, that it could, if only he can bring himself to type in the others that it can't possibly be anymore.)