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For the second time in Larxene’s life, all is darkness. It’s in her hair—her mouth—her eyes. It burns. It’s why they needed the coats: to shelter them from the slow-burning acid that prickled the skin like a thousand tiny teeth, searching for the slightest tear to force itself into, to decay and mold and make its own. The darkness is a ravenous beast, but it is not without its predilections—it does not take long for it to lose interest in her because she’s already been picked clean. No heart to be found in that cold body that couldn’t seem to remember how to keep its skin from sluicing off muscle and bone and dissolving into the black. If Nobodies do not exist, then surely it is the cruelest form of irony that they are forced to die. For the second time in Larxene’s life, she is dying.
Castle Oblivion is gone; the darkness is opaque and oppressive and she doesn’t know if her eyes are open—doesn’t know if she still has eyes. Is this what happened to Vexen?
It burns, but it is not fire. It is a deliberate, leisurely sensory overload, like a summer stroll across her skin where each footfall erupts in scorched flesh. Every inch of her prickles painfully as the darkness courses past her, through her, flowing endlessly as the Heartless move in these corridors between worlds. No. They are less like corridors and more like large, wall-less foyers that stretch terrifyingly on and on. There is nothing. There is absolutely nothing. She tries to put her hand to her face, to her hair, and she feels nothing. If time passes, she does not know, and she thinks that there is nothing she could have possibly done in both of her lives to deserve this. She is shackled to her own mind: cut off from the tangible, touchable world, left to rot in this void with only her own voice in her head and the feral whispering of the Shadows in her ears.
She supposes (having little else to do than wait for the darkness to slowly erode her until she, too, is nothing) she was happiest as a Nobody. Everything had been easier then; even though she had always known what the other members had thought of her, had said of her, she had been granted the enviable gift of not caring. She doubts any of them miss her now that she is gone, swept away by that stupid brat with the keyblade, and even now she Does Not Care. She only wishes she could have gotten back at them before she died—could have given them a real reason to hate her. And maybe that is her regret: that she could not incite a hatred so strong that they would not forget that twelfth member, that woman, who had joined their ranks and almost brought them all to their knees. But they’ve forgotten her, she thinks, and that’s that.
Then there is Marluxia, and the thought makes her want to smile, bitterly, had she been able. She supposes she liked him best out of the lot. He was quiet. Docile. Didn’t talk back to her and didn’t waste her time with boring things. Despite it all, she has no illusions about him: their relationship had been a symbiotic one, strictly business, nothing affectionate about it though sometimes she liked to pretend. But he, unlike her, had no taste for such things, did not bother playing at hearts or pretending he wanted anything more than the Organization in the palm of his hand. That, perhaps, was what she hated—hates—most. If they had met in their past lives, under their past names, she doubts she would have wasted a single iota of her time on him. But strange circumstances breed strange allies, and he had been good enough. For a short while she had entertained the thought of Axel because he was far more likely to play along, yet he had been nowhere near as indulgent as Marluxia.
Axel. He better pray she never comes back, she thinks, because she can come up with at least sixty-five things she’d like to do to him, and half of them involve some form of castration. If there is any justice in the universe—and she conveniently ignores her own moral shortcomings—Axel will get what’s coming to him. If there is any justice at all, she’ll be the one to give it to him. She’ll yank out his teeth one by one, doing the worlds a service by ridding them of that awful grin of his. She’ll slice his throat and pluck out his vocal cords with her fingers, tug them ‘til they snap off in her hands, and then she’ll dangle them in front of him so he can see just who he’s decided to fuck with. She had been playing nice with the Organization, and she regrets not having had the chance to show them just how cruel she could be.
She doesn’t notice right away, but eventually the burn brushing across her skin begins to fade, and just as slowly something resembling solid ground coalesces beneath her feet. When she feels it (when she feels), she immediately touches her face, revels in the sensation of chilled flesh against her fingers as they ghost over her nose and comb through her hair. She realizes her eyes are closed, and she opens them.
A beach is nestled in the darkness, and the waters glow coldly as they lick at the gray sands. There is no wind, yet what lies before her is not a placid lake but an ocean, and that, too, stretches on and on. Peculiar rock formations arc over the shore, and she thinks—without knowing why—that this is a cove, something quiet and secret tucked away from the constant, ominous presence of the Heartless. The waves make no sound as they wash up against the beach, and the grains of sand remain obstinate and still despite the constant tugging of the dark sea. It reminds her of Never Was. Close, But Not Quite Real. The relief is overwhelming: the comfort she derives from the simple act of clenching her fist, being able to feel her nails digging into her palm, is palpable. It finally hits her that she has a body, and she looks down to see that she is wearing what she had worn the night her world, her heart, had been taken from her.
Sundress. Yellow. Low-cut boots with flat heels. No trace of blood or sulfur. They look like they did the day she bought them, and she pinches the hem between her fingers, face crumpling as she searches for anything—anything at all—to prove that she had lived and suffered and died in this godforsaken dress. But there is nothing. No smell, the threads clean and smooth—fresh off the assembly line. The boots are without scuffs or marks, and they glint dully in the light that streams in from across the sea. She draws breath—deep, chest billowing with the air—and releases the loudest, shrillest scream she can muster. Once it peters out, echoless, she breathes in again, preparing to release another. And she does this for she-doesn’t-know-how-long. If time passes, she does not know, and she thinks that there is nothing (nothing) she could have possibly done in her lives to deserve this.
There is a figure sitting against a rock ahead of her, though it is shadowed and she sees it only when it flinches. With purposeful slowness, it draws itself up, detaches from the darkness the rock casts and reveals itself to be a person. A woman washed out by the pale blue violet blue of the cove. An emotion (fear?) flickers to life inside of Larxene, and she balls her hands into fists and calls out, voice sharp as a knife, “Who the hell are you?” It cuts through the silence—too loud—and the woman flinches again.
The woman lifts a finger to her lips (slender, pale blue violet blue) and shushes Larxene. When she speaks, she whispers, words hurried and hoarse, “Be quiet, or you’ll draw their attention.” There is no question of “who”. Who else?
Larxene has never heard of a person living in the realm of darkness, and she is convinced that this person—this apparition—is a trick of the light, of her eyes, of the Heartless. Yet if she has lost both her heart and her body, then what is left with which to hallucinate? Why is she here at all? Is there no life-after but this? Is there nothing else but this? Is there nothing else but crouching in the shadows of rocks, hiding from the seeking slender claws of ink-black monsters that seep and ooze and well up from the earth like oil?
“Who,” she enunciates, stubbornness preventing her from whispering, “the hell are you?” She has heard of Heartless with human faces, heard of the world-devouring monstrosity that her leader had spawned, and she watches the woman carefully.
Hands (violet blue violet) raise, palms out, placatory. “It’s all right. I’m not one of them. Don’t worry.” Soothing. Like a mother. Larxene despises her mother. “My name is Aqua.” The name hangs between them, and when it becomes clear that Larxene is not going to provide her own, Aqua continues. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen another person here,” she offers with a weak smile.
Larxene’s suspicion hangs in the air like a veil—something to hide behind—and she gives Aqua a hard look. “Are you—” she begins, and she wonders if it is the desolation of this place or the distant hum of the Heartless that brings her to ask, to seek some common ground, “—a Nobody, too?”
The word is foreign to her—Larxene can read it on her washed out face, and she has no desire to explain how, when a body has been ravaged and left to die under the open sky, its wretched hands cling to life and force it to keep moving. “Forget it. Why are you here?” she demands, brusque again though now she has lowered her voice, aware of the way the darkness presses in around the two, breath baited as it listens to their every word. Aqua’s clothing is unfamiliar, of a world Larxene has never seen, though it somehow fits this deadened place—as though the darkness itself had molded it. Larxene feels ridiculous in her dress. So much has changed, and she is no longer the woman who first put it on.
Aqua hesitates, and there is tension in the way she is standing, half-cloaked in the shadow of the rock. “I—I was trapped here,” she finally says, and it sounds like a half-truth though Larxene could not possibly care enough to pry. It makes her think of the stories she had heard—rumors floating around the Organization, that the original members had killed a king by locking him away in the realm of darkness. Aqua hardly seems a king. “What about you?”
“My world was destroyed. By those monsters.” The lie comes effortlessly to her lips: it was true, once, a long time ago. Aqua seems sympathetic, and Larxene could have laughed in her face for her gullibility. A poor, lost girl in her yellow sundress, trapped here amidst black beasts with mindless yellow eyes. How pathetic and pitiable she must seem. “Name’s Larxene.”
Aqua nods, and she wears her relief on her sleeve though Larxene does not quite understand its source. “Looks like we’re stuck in the same boat, huh,” Aqua says with a wry smile. “They don’t seem to bother this beach, so I’ve mostly stayed here. It’s been…a very long time since I got here. I barely remember what it’s like. On the other side.”
“You’re not missing much.” Larxene is rough in her dismissal, and she can feel the way her own bitterness curls over the words. If this woman has been here so long that she cannot remember what it was like before, then what did that say for Larxene? What would become of her now that she has truly lost everything? She strides forward, passes Aqua and heads for the shoreline, where the dark waters begin and the rest of the world ends. She can feel the stiffness of the sand beneath her boots, how it refuses to yield and leave behind footprints. She wants to scream again.
It is clear that Aqua does not know what to make of her, does not know what to say. It is Larxene that is the problem, or perhaps it is how Aqua has lived here for time immemorial and can no longer remember how she would react to raw aggression. Larxene is and has been many things, and none of them are nice. But her anger is fast-fading, and she is left with the weight of all she has done—of what has brought her here, to this fucking beach. She lifts her hand to the water, bids the darkness take heed and open wide a portal to somewhere—anywhere. A few tendrils lazily flicker to life and vanish just as suddenly. She tries again and gets even less of a reaction. “What are you doing?” Aqua’s voice comes curiously, and she is standing beside Larxene without her having noticed.
“Nothing, apparently.” Larxene’s frustration is palpable, and she rounds on Aqua. “There’s no way out of here? None at all?”
“…No. The realm of darkness is like…it has a door, but there’s a trick to it. It can only be opened from the outside. I’ve tried everything I can think of, but without my armor…” she trails off, eyes falling to her own hands, helpless. Larxene is beginning to understand the feeling. “There was a man here. I don’t know where he went.”
For all Larxene knows, that man could have been one of her own organization; sometimes they lingered here, she knows, in this forsaken realm. Particularly Xemnas. But the portals had been perhaps the only thing she used judiciously; she never lingered, using the corridors for her means and then leaving them alone. The Heartless unnerve her still, and the memory of her first death is one she carries with her. Aqua sits down, then, tucking her legs against her chest and wrapping her arms tight around them, as though folding herself up into a smaller shape would convince the loneliness to pass her by. It makes Larxene want to scream again.
“My world,” Aqua begins without preamble, grateful perhaps simply to have someone to talk to. A simple thing to have in a situation of such desolation, “was full of floating islands, all tethered to one another by these huge golden chains. And they all seemed to circle the biggest island of them all, which was where I lived. Sometimes I would look over the edge, to see what was below us. It was nothing. There was nothing down there, and I would strain my eyes trying to see through the darkness. But there was nothing.” She laughs. “I used to imagine what it would be like to fall off. I suppose there’s no need for that anymore.”
Larxene looks down to her, but her eyes are far-flung—cast to the distance, to the edge of the horizon where it meets the gray of the sea. She cannot bring herself to care for small-talk; her anger still burns on, a slow simmer, something sharp and gnawing in her chest. Aqua is drowning in her sadness while Larxene burns alive in her own fury. “There has to be a way out,” she says through gritted teeth. “There has to be. I can’t rot here. This isn’t happening.”
Aqua’s look is full of pity, and for a split-second Larxene considers throttling her, wrapping her fingers around that violet blue violet throat and squeezing until she can no longer feel the pulse beneath her hands. “I’m sorry,” is all Aqua says, and just like that the violent flash passes. Larxene slowly falls to her knees. The sand abrasive and rough against her bare skin as she sits, legs splayed.
“It isn’t fair,” Larxene spits bitterly. “There’s too much I have to do. I can’t be stuck here. What do you even do? Sit here and mope all day?”
“Sometimes I hide.” Her smile matches the bitterness in Larxene’s voice. “There’s too many of them to fight… All we can do is have faith. My friends…I know they’ll come for me. Then the both of us can escape.”
“Friends,” Larxene scoffs, but she says nothing more. Last time she checked, Larxene is running frightfully low on friends. She doubts—no, she knows Marluxia will not come for her, if that Sora brat has not already offed him too. It’s nothing personal; she knows she would have left him to rot, too, if their situations were reversed. “Friends might be nice right about now.” She hates the way her voice sounds as she says it: soft, vulnerable. She has never liked the dark, not since the day her chest had been torn open by black claws, scoured by black teeth. Is she afraid? Fear is a harsh tang, a harsh reminder of something she has gone without for so long.
“What was your world like?” Aqua asks, and she isn’t looking at Larxene anymore. “Before.”
Larxene scratches idly at the sand; it is ice cold under her nails, and it yields only reluctantly beneath her. “Warm. There were cities everywhere: metal and concrete as far as you could see. Neon signs too.” Never Was had always been a bitter pill for her to swallow—her own personal mockery of what she had lost. “Most people weren’t entirely human either, you know? Everyone was augmented somehow. A technological paradise. I knew this one guy, his eyes were all silver and metallic. It was so creepy when he looked at you.” Talking about it hurts, she realizes. It hurts in a way that is like an old friend—an old, familiar face that has come for a much-needed, much-delayed visit. She has more to say about her dead world than she thought, and the time stretches on until she forgets the space between silence and when she had begun talking in the first place.
Aqua listens, laughs, interjects with questions and comments and personal anecdotes. Time is strange and nonlinear here: at times, Larxene feels as though she has only just arrived, and at times she feels as though she has been here her entire life. The more they talk, the more the line blurs and mutates—all the while, there is the ominous hum of the Heartless as they move, a single-minded swarm, through the darkness at their backs, with only the light of the false-moon to keep them at bay. Aqua is eager and readily keeps the conversation going when Larxene peters out; it is painfully obvious how the days months years of her time here have taken their toll. She is desperate for Larxene’s company, and such an earnest thing is unfamiliar to Larxene. How had she come to be here? Something about a boy—two boys?—fiery red hair. Axel. Everything is washing away until all that remains is the steady ebb and flow of the ocean at her feet.
Aqua is telling a story about her friends—two boys who, along with her master, mean everything to her. But Larxene is only half-listening. There is a familiar sensation washing over her, not unlike when she faded during her second death but so much slower. A gentle loss of corporeality. She does not remember when, but at some point Aqua takes her hand, and she can feel her warm fingers curling tight around her own. It is something concrete to hold on to, something that is not saturated in darkness and glowing yellow eyes. There are no wisps or black tendrils this time, but the ground beneath her no longer feels so solid. Larxene looks to the side, to Aqua, and she is smiling gently, still talking though there is a profound sadness in her eyes—something that has not left them once during this endless, ageless conversation. “You’re leaving.” Aqua’s voice sounds thousands of miles away, though her hand grips Larxene’s firmly, anchoring her.
“What?”
“You’re fading away.”
“Where am I going?”
“I don’t know.”
Thrumming in the back of Larxene’s head is the sound of cars—something she has not heard for quite some time. Squealing tires, the murmur of crowds and the pounding of many pairs of feet as they move. Someone is shouting, though she cannot make out what they are saying. The sand beneath her is no longer icy and stinging against her knees, and even Aqua’s hand is beginning to slip through her fingers. Larxene is afraid: she recognizes it clearly now, more afraid than she has been before, when the darkness had gnawed at her and then dumped her at the beach. She tries, desperately, to cling to Aqua, but her voice has been lost in the crowd that fills Larxene’s ears. When Aqua finally fades away, Larxene begins to fall, and when she tries to scream her voice is whipped away from her, up up up and out, away from her ears so all she can hear are the cars and the crowd and the pounding of feet on concrete.
She thinks of Marluxia. Of Axel and Sora. But even her hatred—her rage—is spirited away from her before it can begin to flare back up. Suddenly, she is sitting, propped up against something hard and hot, and the fluttering of her—heart—begins to calm. The darkness presses in close, and it takes her several minutes to realize that her eyes are closed. When she opens them, she finds herself slumped in the doorway of a barber shop. To her right, crowds of people move in either direction, and only a handful of them spare her a glance as they pass by. She can still feel the specter of something clutching her hand, but already her memory has begun to cloud over. All at once, the sound of the crowd is deafening, and she is once more within herself. She jerks forward, hand immediately—instinctively—clutching at her chest, at the front of her dress, where a heart beats.
“Miss, are you all right?” Someone has noticed her, finally. A man in a suit, looking vaguely contrite—as though he immediately regrets having stopped to ask at all. It takes much too long for the words to make sense to her, and she blinks—wild-eyed—up at him. He glances down at his watch.
“I’m—fine. Fine,” she says, and her voice comes out quiet and hoarse. She realizes her throat is painfully dry, and she gingerly touches her neck, and she can feel the heartbeat once more. Her heartbeat.
“Are you sure?”
She manages to have energy enough to give him a withering look, and he ducks his head as he leaves. There is an emptiness in her head—something is missing, on the edge of her memory. Something violet blue violet: a shadow of a someone, and she can remember stories and laughter and friends and all the makings of a person. But there is no face or name or substance. Perhaps it is something she has made up. What she does remember is Marluxia. Axel. Vexen and Zexion. Sora and his cutting key and the biting darkness as it ate her away. Yet, inexplicably, she is here, heart-full and heart-aching from two bitter lives as she stands upon the precipice of a third.
Hands clenched tight into fists, she gets to her feet and faces the crowd.