#because Vanitas deserves to hug a talking cat

[echodrops]

My KH3 Fix-It Dream

(Warning, long post is long because part way through I just started writing bits of the actual fic, oops.)

There’s a lot of people complaining about this and that with the KH3 plot, but I honestly don’t have too many complaints because the story we were given was about what I expected (did anyone realllyyy believe that Kairi was going to become a badass Keyblade wielder? Search your heart, you know you saw this travesty coming), except on one front: Vanitas was tragically under-utilized. After being hyped up so much in the trailers, you’d think that he would have at least had a go in the game that was worthy of his character. But KH3′s Vanitas was little more than a shadow of BBS’s, and that’s a darn shame.

So, I present to you: a fix-it fic plot bunny that fixes several things at once:

1) Vanitas doesn’t die. Okay, actually, it still works fine if he does die, but we’ll take his “I’m always with you” suggestion literally--Vanitas is a heart of Darkness wrapped in a body made of bad feelings, and that final battle was one brutal attack on the feels after another. The fear, anxiety, horror, and desperation the Lights, especially Sora upon witnessing what happens to Kairi, manifests as so much accumulated negativity that Vanitas--even though he actually wants to!!--can’t stay dead, and his heart, which naturally lingered with Sora and Ventus even after his defeat, gets shoved back into another body made entirely of other people’s suffering and pain, now even more unstable and dysfunctional than before.

2) The final battle happens. Kairi is saved, but Sora disappears. While the finally-reunited good-guy crew are busy coming out of shock planning how they’ll inevitably rescue Sora, they’re also struggling with another major issue: what to do about Vanitas, who is as comatose as Ven was at the beginning of BBS, a broken heart in a broken body.

3) Nobody wants to say “mercy kill”... The idea is there, but none of the gang is really willing to do it barring maybe Roxas, whose practicality is actually alarming (”You’re not going to be feeling so sympathetic when he wakes up and stabs somebody, you know. Don’t say I didn’t warn you”). Even Aqua, who knows as well as Ven how much of a danger Vanitas is, can’t really convince herself to attack someone who's completely helpless. But what to do, if not that? He isn’t waking up, and anywhere they leave him, he’ll have to be guarded around the clock--he still, technically, has the ability to trigger the apocalypse if left unattended to chase hearts of light, you know.

4) It’s Ven’s idea to take him to Destiny Islands. That was Master Xehanort’s plan for Ven, after all, when they were first separated: let Ven’s empty body waste away, forgotten, in a backwater world. Instead he’d made contact with Sora--and nobody wants to say that either, that maybe there’s the tiniest bit of hope: somehow, some way, maybe Sora can still be reached, maybe the call of yet another heart in need will be irresistible enough to make the unfailing hero claw his own way back from the brink...

5) What really happens is this: Sora’s mother has had MORE THAN ENOUGH. Spaceships start dropping out of the sky, the deserted play island is somehow brimming with grown men and women running around, she sees Kairi of all people wandering right back into town as if she hasn’t been inexplicably absent for months... So where is Sora? Where is Sora and why is he not coming home? Finally, after three days of radio silence from Kairi and Riku (Riku’s been gone for years, and now he’s suddenly here, without Sora? When has there ever been a such thing as Riku without Sora?), Sora’s mother prepares a scolding on the level of God casting humans out of the Garden of Eden and indignantly rows her way out to the play island. It seems there’s a whole crowd gathered at a bonfire down the beach, but she never makes it there. Because there’s Sora right there on the paopu island, there’s Sora, only everything’s wrong--who let him dye his hair like that, what is he wearing, why won’t he wake up--”Sora? SORA!”

6) It’s Riku who tells her the truth. That Sora is gone, in the wind, not even a body to bury except this one, this boy who’s wearing the face of the son she hasn’t held in her arms in ages--maybe never will again. This is what he looks like now, Riku says, but this isn’t him. (How? How is this not her son? Under his bangs there’s the same freckle at the edge of his forehead she used to give good night kisses to--)

7) They make several attempts to stop her (”Ma’am,” the man with brown hair and guilty eyes says, “Ma’am, you really can’t--he’s a danger to--”) but none of them stopped her son either and if they’ll stand by and let the light of all the worlds extinguish itself, let’s be honest, they’re just not that good of guardians. She takes Sora the boy named Vanitas home. In Sora’s old bed he looks comical, the only time, maybe, that he’ll ever look tall, and the shadow of the toys and clutter she hadn’t had the heart to clean (not after the day she remembered that the room up the stairs wasn’t just sealed up storage, that a boy had lived there, that his worn clothes were still strewn across the floor, that she’d had a son at all, Sora, for a whole year she’d forgotten the name, the sound, the jut of his lip in a pout--) falls over his face. They say he’s not her son.

8) Well, she thinks, we’ll see about that.

And lol I know that was a million words but like that was the prologue and the actual rest of the fic goes like this:

Sora’s mom takes care of Vanitas’ comatose body because hey, she’s a pediatric nurse, that kind of thing is literally her job. Riku and Kairi try to bodyguard her for a couple weeks, but the longer Vanitas stays asleep, the less and less often they come around--they’ve got to find Sora, after all.

The longer she takes care of Vanitas-not-Sora though, the worse her loneliness gets, until the deep vein of Darkness sadness (she lost her son not once, not twice, but three times) resonates with the shattered remnants of Vanitas’ heart and she forcefully because Sora got his busybodiness from somewhere generously connects with him enough to wake him up.

(“Go away,” answers a voice without speaking.

“Why?”

“You’re annoying me. I’m tired.”

“You’re hurt.”

“That’s what I said.”

No it isn’t.

There’s a certain sort of sadness only people who’ve lived through losing the light of their lives will ever know. There’s a kind of kinship in surviving separation. Her heart aches, goes out of her all at once, reaching--

“I made my decision. Leave me alone.”

"Did you make that decision because you were alone?”)

Only, you know, Vanitas doesn’t want to be awake or even alive now that he has absolutely no purpose, no master, no X-blade, no mission, nowhere to go, and no chance of ever reuniting with Ven--so fuck off, he’s not going to eat those home-made muffins and he’s not going to go take a bath even if he does stink, and he’s not going to talk, and he’s not coming out from under the covers for anything less than the sweet release of a swift execution.

...But that’s so boring.

So he insults her instead. And threatens her and mocks her and knocks over the water glasses she brings and lets the Unversed chase her out of the room and picks out all the stitches on this ugly hand-sewn quilt and asks her why she’s got a room full of toys but no kid to go in it.

No sell: she’s a pediatric nurse and dealing with sick, miserable, screaming children is what she does every day. And anyway, from seven to eight Sora threw a year of temper tantrums that make this boy look positively mild.

There’s one more thing working in her favor: he’s still curious. She learns: he’s never had a fruit smoothie, read a comic book, or slept in sheets fresh from the dryer. Sora’s old action figures aren’t played with so much as dismembered in effigy (is it that Vanitas is vindictive or that he’s jealous?), but the new electric toothbrush somehow wins grudging approval. The vacuum cleaner startles him the first time she turns it on, but one night when she goes for a drink at 3am, she discovers he’s been teaching himself to use the TV. Finding out the water can come out of the taps already hot buys her a whole seven minutes of intrigued silence, but the existence of ice cube trays might as well be a mortal offense. (”Don’t tell me you people actually wait for the water to--?” Given that he then summons a block of ice longer than the dining room table out of thin air, she thinks on this occasion he might be right though when he leaves said ice block to melt, her charitable feelings dry up.) He has to watch her pick herbs from the garden and cook with them before he can be convinced that the “weeds” are food. In short, he’s barely half way back from feral, and if the man who made him wasn’t already dead, she’d happily go kill that piece of shit herself.

It turns out, with spit, polish, and proper motivation (read as: bribes, read as: hot pot and honey castella), he’ll do the things she asks (sometimes). When he actually commits himself to a task, he’s focused to an alarming degree, meticulous and self-critical, and he stubbornly refuses to give up until he’s content with the results, which means that sometimes on her way to work she finds him where she left him the night before, still glaring, bleary-eyed and bratty, at the broken stand-mixer or mantle clock or book spine that she hoped he could fix with magic. If he spitefully tracks mud all over the house after he relentlessly weeds the whole garden, well, she’d say the benefits still outweigh the costs.

The hoard of creatures that follow him around (”They’re my feelings,” he says, and kicks one without the slightest hesitation) take getting used to, but it’s easier to share space when they make themselves so useful--sometimes even when he can’t be badgered into work, he’s willing the boss the underlings into action: the crooked door on the backyard shed finally gets rehung thanks to a towering brute with a banana peel on its head, and once she opens a jar in the kitchen she doesn’t remember buying and finds it full of rich, warm apple pie.

He gets... better. It’s not linear. They have bad days, days when he breaks things without warning and won’t talk except through stinging barbs, one day so bad he let a flock of his worst feelings pound enormous holes in the living room walls, burns up her favorite rose bush--but they have good days too. Some days he laughs and it isn’t malicious at all; some days he eats with her at the table without even being asked; some days she comes home late to find he’s still awake, ready to poke fun at the tired way she toes off her shoes, and it takes everything she has to keep from saying You really didn’t have to wait up for me.

One day he smiles for no reason at all, and she thinks: The boy’s going to be okay.

(But how in the world is she going to explain all this to Sora?)

And there’s sooo much else I want to write but I can’ttttttt, I don’t have time, so here’s a bullet list of “also featuring:”

Vanitas being a natural Heartless deterrent because none of them want to mess with the biggest Darkness on the block.

Ven, Terra, and Aqua sniffing around trying to figure out whether they need to take Vanitas back (just to make sure he’s properly under watch, of course); Sora’s mom giving them the politest “Fuck you” this side of the universe.

Kairi and Vanitas friendship. Vanitas doesn’t even know it’s happening. Kairi is devious. Vanitas taking over Kairi’s training even though they can’t physically spar because they’ll literally end the world if they fight lol. Kairi taking advantage of Vanitas’ lack of interest in social cues to get him to do things none of the other boys will do with her like clothes shopping.

Kairi and Axel friendship with Roxas being the weird middle man who doesn’t know why they can’t just text each other instead of sending handwritten letters back and forth through him of all people.

Vanitas and Roxas reaching grudging levels of respect because sarcastic bitches gotta support each other.

Roxas and Sora’s mom being hilariously awkward because Sora’s mom doesn’t know if she should also be claiming responsibility for this child too and Roxas is absolutely clueless about the concept of having parents in the first place.

After many chapters of redemption arc, Sora’s mom taking Vanitas with her to work at the hospital so he can turn the sick children’s negative feelings into Unversed and then defeat them. She doesn’t know this hurts him and he sure as fuck isn’t going to tell her.

Everything going to shit when Chirithy shows up, insisting Vanitas is its master and calling him “Ven.” Vanitas was getting better--he was getting over the fact that he’d never be “Ventus” again--

Discovering memories of Daybreak Town and the first Keyblade War with Chirithy’s (and Namine’s!) help. Remembering the existence of old friends--Ephemer, Skuld, the other Union leaders--and the realization that they might still be alive, trapped in a timeless world of sleep.

Vanitas and Riku teaming up after someone (Mickey? Yen Sid?) suggests that Sora’s heart may have returned to the place where all hearts eventually go--the core of light that lies sleeping in the deepest depths of the realm of Darkness. Realm of Darkness road trip! (This is just my excuse to wax philosophical about how being made of Darkness doesn’t actually make anyone evil.)

Finding out that saving Sora will mean finally, actually opening the door to the true Kingdom Hearts, which can only be accessed via Scala Ad Caelum, or, more specifically, the ruins of Daybreak Town that lie beneath it.

Insert some Nomura-esque convoluted plot here about how the clock of Daybreak Town isn’t actually a bell tower but the mechanism for protecting the original X-blade and the door to Kingdom Hearts, and Daybreak!Ventus’ very existence was somehow tied to this clock tower--that’s why Ventus’ and Vanitas’ Keyblades form the two halves of a broken gear: they’re maybe literally the gear that turns the hands of time in the world that once lay closest to the heart of all things. The bell, the sword, the door--they’re all linked, and the only way to save Sora--to save everyone, including the sleeping Dandelions--is to reunite (to wake) their fractured dream of Daybreak with reality, restore the X-blade, and retrieve Sora’s wandering self with the power of Kingdom Hearts’ connection to all worlds and all hearts.

In short, like Nomura, I don’t actually know how I’d ever make it make sense, but the X-blade would get forged by Ven and Vanitas in a safe and sane way (this is just my excuse to give Vanitas a scene where he finally recognizes that he is content to be a separate being from Ventus; that he wants to stay his own person)... Kairi wields the X-blade because fuck you KH3, and everyone gets the damn happy ending they deserve--but most especially Vanitas, who gets to be the big damn hero to finally bring Sora home safe to their mother.

Like guys, I just need Vanitas’ narrative arc to feel coherent and complete. I need to know why he and Ven have a gear motif. How they’re connected to the Dandelions. Whether or not Ventus and Vanitas could ever both simultaneously be at peace despite remaining separate people. Whether Chirithy would have recognized Vanitas. Why Ventus alone had the power to forge the X-blade by reuniting with his other half when it would otherwise have taken 13 Darknesses and 7 Lights. What Sora’s mother would say finding out her son has like five clones now. If anyone would ever recognize that Vanitas had never been shown basic fucking human kindness.

Nomura. Plz.