darkinferno | [narrations + overflow]

Entry tags:

*recolle

[narrations + overflow]

[A collection of narration bits that don't belong anywhere else from Dante/Riku's time in Recollé.]

[Or, a personal overflow.]

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"Silly boy, you're like a son to me. I only want you to be happy..."

Are those fingers he feels on his cheek, long and ice cold and sharp, pointed nails trailing over his skin?

"But of course. After all, your heart is steeped in darkness. You can only see those who exist in that same darkness..."

No...!

"Be grateful you have someone to keep you company. Your heart is empty. Were it not for the darkness it contains, you would be completely alone."

Dante wakes with a gasp, sitting bolt upright in bed. His eyes are frantic as he sweeps the room, looking for someone who isn't here, who was never here. He sags, running his fingers through sweat-slick hair, tugging the t-shirt he's sleeping in away from his chest in an attempt to cool himself as his heartbeat begins to slow. The clock on his bedside table reads 4:24, the dead of night, and there's a hint of moonlight that filters through the blinds to cast the room with a dim light.

He swings himself out of bed, padding across the room in bare feet to the hall and down to the kitchen for a glass of cold water. The moonlight seems to follow him, falling through the uncovered windows of the living room, lighting his way. Dante tries not to think about how cold it feels, casting the room with bright light and sharp shadows, isolating each plane in a way that sets it apart from anything else.

He'd been feeling despair, before he woke up. Dante doesn't know how a dream can evoke such potent emotions, but it feels like it's still caught somewhere in his chest, a feeling of despair and shame and hopelessness and fear all tempered by some sort of determined anger. This other him--the him that he once was, as all the proof seems to say--had ended up alone in the end, with only this witch of a woman to keep him company. He isn't sure how he knows, but it feels right: he's remembered dying, struggling along in this dark afterlife with no idea what had happened to the people he left behind, and then he runs into her, only too happy to tell him that he'd be completely alone if his heart weren't filled with darkness.

"I don't think you need me to point out that there is an on-going theme of 'darkness' with your experiences."

The silence is broken as Dante snorts, shaking his head. Yeah, he's certainly figured that out.

But the worst part is that he thinks she might have been right, talking about his heart being empty. After all, isn't that what he strives for now? Locking his emotions away, refusing to let anything get to him. It's something he has in common with his other self. Maybe this other him just didn't want to be hurt by anyone, either.

And in the end, he still ended up alone. In the end, he still struggled through the darkness, trying not to let himself fade away, tormented by only this strange woman who in one memory, tells him that she wants him to be happy and that she thinks of him as a son, but in another tells him that "of course" she'd be the one he'd meet in this afterlife, almost as if she's taunting him.

Dante puts the glass in the sink, wanders over to the couch and faceplants into it, letting out a groan of frustration.

He doesn't want any of these memories. He'd been doing good up until now, making connections tenuous enough that he wouldn't care when they were broken, yet strong enough that he has a number of people that he can hang out with from time to time. People he doesn't have to care about, people that are replaceable. But these memories... even that first one had warned him that this was going to hurt, from the moment he'd seen those two people and realized how light his heart felt, determined to leave their island and yet happy to be sharing the experience with... friends.

Friends.

Friends are a danger. He knows that. He's tried to make friends so many times, tried to get to know so many people in the years he was touring with his parents. He tried meeting the sons and daughters of other rich and famous figures, he's tried using the internet to meet people he could then meet in person, he's tried crawling the cities himself to meet people of his own accord. None of it works. The friends he makes are always left behind, left to their own lives as he and his parents moved on to the next city, the next event, the next rehearsal. So many promises of keeping in touch, of texts, of letters, of video-chatting and meeting in person again, broken. So many pieces of himself left scattered around the globe. Dante rests a hand against his heart, the movement made awkward by the cushions of the couch beneath him, feeling all that regret and broken hope trying to find a foothold in his heart to make him despair. He takes a deep breath, pushing the emotion away again. It's an old hurt by now.

Life is much easier when you've wrapped your heart in a layer of snark and barbed comments. It's easier when people know not to look to you for emotional commitment or support, when all they expect out of you is sarcasm and arrogance. And he's very good at that. Dante's had several years of practice now, letting people only close enough to collide against his prickly personality, limiting those he lets any deeper. But now...

Now it looks like he's had the right idea all along. If his other self ended up alone in the end, even in spite of how close he'd been to those two on the beach, then what does that mean for him, cold and standoffish and rude in the best of situations? How could anybody care enough to see past that, to break past his thick outer shell and not use the weaker parts of himself against him? He's already dug his own grave; in protecting himself from the pain of people leaving him, he's also ensured that they won't hesitate to attack him should he ever show his own weaknesses.

And then there's the problem of the people he's met through the network. God, isn't he an idiot? For some reason he'd thought that maybe with common ground between them all, there'd be potential there. Maybe, since he won't be leaving Recollé for at least a couple years, it would be okay to let a couple people get closer to him than he normally might have. Maybe trying to look out for them wouldn't be the mistake it's always been in the past. But now Dante knows he was just kidding himself: his other self apparently managed to fuck it all up, even when he had a perfect setup, so there's no way in hell he isn't going to fuck it all up as well. Eventually he's going to drive them all away.

Eventually he's going to fuck everything up and drive everybody away from him, and it is going to hurt because he's already fucked up by thinking that maybe for once he could do this right, that for once maybe he could have an acquaintance somewhere between the areas of "drinking buddy" and "friend."

His mind keeps racing, running in circles as he drifts back off into sleep, dragging a blanket over his body and arms wrapped around a throw pillow, holding it to his chest. But as he's falling back asleep, there's one thought that overshadows all of the rest, reminding him of his eventual fate:

You'll be alone in the end. Alone, forgotten--just like him.

He isn't ready to deal with anyone the next day. The stress and the worry have only gotten worse since the night before, a constant refrain reminding him that he can't escape the inevitability that awaits him. How do you deal with that knowledge? How do you handle remembering an afterlife of solitude and isolation?

Your heart is empty.

It might as well be; it wouldn't be worse than feeling like he's being pulled in conflicting directions. A part of him's already resigned to it, but there's a smaller part of him, a more childish part, that wants to complain that it isn't fair and that he won't let it happen like that. But Dante knows what his child self did not, and that is that you can't control what other people do and what decisions they make. It isn't up to him if they want to throw him away.

Prompto texts him, and he doesn't know what to do. They're supposed to hang out, but there's no way he can handle that today. Not now, maybe not ever--Prompto's already made him feel guilty once, just by opening up to him. Somehow just by being himself he's able to disarm Dante, to make him care if he's being a dumbass getting himself into trouble. He managed that in less than a month and a half; how bad will it hurt when Prompto realizes that all Dante's got to offer is sarcasm and bad ideas and leaves him behind for people that aren't a waste of his time?

But Prompto just won't take a goddamned hint, and within minutes Dante is scrambling around his apartment, throwing together everything he'll need for the next few days. He can't do this, he can't stay here. People know where to find him here; they know how to get a hold of him and even if he turns off his electronics, Retrospec stays active. People know his address and could come and knock on his door if they chose to. And in Dante's eyes, if he's going to be alone anyways, he might as well start the process now. He'll escape out of here and run away, run to the woods and figure out what he's going to do. How to approach things. He just needs time away from everything, right?

He just needs to be alone.

He leaves Prompto lying on his back in the alley, simultaneously disgusted with himself and resigned to his options. Prompto hadn't even been able to defend himself, and he'd beaten him into the ground without even giving him a chance to throw a punch.

I warned him, he tells himself, navigating streets he doesn't truly see. I told him to quit. I told him what I'd do if he didn't. He didn't listen. And now he'll realize that he shouldn't waste his time with me.

He'll leave him alone.

Nobody can find him in the woods. Nobody will think to look for him in the woods--he's certain that the warehouse isn't a safe hideout, not this soon after the party, but the woods are quiet, a reprieve from the busy life of the city. Dante sets up camp, then drives back home, abandoning his car in its usual parking spot and changing into running gear to head back out. He's already abandoned his phone, left to run out its charge slowly on his bed. He sees the light indicating he's got new messages, but Dante can't bring himself to check them. If it's Ardyn, he might be tempted to unload everything that's bothering him, and if it's Ari, he's worried he might not be able to hold on to what little composure he has left. So he leaves the phone untouched, leaves his house, and sets off at a sprint toward the woods.

Dante isn't sure how long or how far he goes, trying desperately to outrun the anxieties weighing him down. The exertion does him good, pushing his body to go farther, just a little bit farther until at last he has to drop to a walk, gasping for breath. And then he pushes himself again, trying to run every last little bit of nervous energy out of his body before he finally starts back to camp.

He's exhausted by the time he gets back, the sun beginning to drop low in the sky and the temperature to drop. He builds a fire as night falls and reaches into his bag, pulling out one of the two bottles of whiskey he's brought with him. It's a dangerous, slippery slope, Dante knows, treating emotions with alcohol, but he doesn't know what else to do in this moment and if nothing else it will give him a reprieve for the night. So he drinks, the first couple shots doing little to ease what is rapidly becoming a spiral of self-deprecation and bitterness, the later shots warming in his veins and bringing a smile (at last) to his face.

He stands in the night, pacing and swinging and talking to himself as he circles the fire, laughing as he stumbles over his own two feet and watching the logs crackle and send up sparks into the night air. He stares up into the night sky, thinking about Ari and the time he's spent with her looking up at these same stars, and in that moment his heart doesn't hurt--Dante's too warm for his heart to hurt, too full of an artificial happiness that will eventually fade away.

When morning comes he's alone again, the morning dull and gray. Dante groans from his pile of blankets and sleeping bag, not ready to face the day, but soon enough nature's call brings him staggering out of the tent, up.

Monday is a bust by anyone's standards. He spends a lot of it sleeping, trying to avoid thinking about his problems by retreating to the safe world of dreams. But his dreams are now full of places he's never been and people he's never met, people who wonder how far a raft might take them and who ask what he'd do if he made it to a new land, places where he fights a darkness as black as night, an island he's only seen in his mind's eye and dark room he instinctively knows is in a castle, where a green-skinned woman tells him time and time again that his heart is empty, is full of darkness, that he'd be alone if not for her presence. "Silly boy," she says, "you're like a son to me. I only want you to be happy..."

His hand reaches for the bottle again and again, but each time Dante stops himself, some part of him recognizing the danger and refusing to fall prey to the temptation. The world is brighter when he's drunk, more vivid, a world where things are chaotic and messy and things aren't meant to fit together in perfect uniform order. That world is where he's safe to be himself, where he can laugh and grin and tease and play and not worry that anything he says will be taken as a sign of weakness or something to be used against him later. When he's drunk, he feels freer.

But Dante knows it's fake. And so he refuses to be swayed.

Eventually something drives him out into the open, and he brings with him the rapier he'd shoved into his bag. There's still a reluctance to engage with the memories that have been barraging him, but he can't deny that he likes the feeling of the sword in his hand. He wonders again what he used to fight with, letting his instincts guide him as he imagines the enemies before him. The Darkballs, the Invisibles, the looming Behemoths. Darksides, so human in their appearance and yet so alien with their heart-shaped holes. Why hearts...? Instinctively he reaches for her own, glancing down as though he might yet unravel the secrets of these monsters. But nothing comes to mind, and Dante's practice continues.

It's surprisingly relaxing, almost a form of meditation on its own. Dante falls into stances and forms, testing his explosiveness and remembering with a shout of exhilaration a powerful swing that perhaps he once used, an attack where he throws himself bodily over his right shoulder, letting his spin build up the force behind his strike. He works until the sun begins to set again, and this night is spent deep in thought, munching on the food he's brought with him and considering everything that he knows so far. There's a part of him that's surprised he isn't as conflicted as he was the night before, but he seals that thought away and refuses to touch it.

It's a quieter night, a night of reflection, and Dante turns it over and over again as he lies awake in his tent, staring unseeingly into nothing but darkness.

Your heart is empty. Were it not for the darkness it contains, you would be completely alone.

Tonight, he's okay with being alone.

Edited 2017-03-29 02:02 (UTC)

Dante's up with the sun on Tuesday, leaving his campsite and setting off into the woods. He doesn't know where he's going, pack on his back with food and water and the rapier, which he feels compelled to keep close at hand for a reason he doesn't quite understand. He ventures through the woods, making turn after turn until he's gotten himself completely and thoroughly lost, and only then is his venture truly begun, a weight lifted off his shoulders to know that not even he could find himself right now if he tried.

Around midday Dante reaches the river that runs through the woods. He strips down to his boxers and t-shirt and plunges into the cold water, knowing he'll regret it but unable to find it within him to care. The cold is a shock to his system and he yelps when it hits him, but the yelp is almost immediately followed by a laugh, and Dante dives in without hesitation, as though he can let the river pull the thoughts he doesn't want to entertain downstream with it.

Is this the afterworld...?

I'm not ready. Not yet.

He doesn't climb out of the river until he's frozen with cold and his lips are turning blue. He eats lunch sprawled in the sun, letting it slowly thaw him, dozing a bit in the afternoon light. He dreams again, but this dream is more pleasant--"Hey! Aren't you forgetting about me?" his other self calls, and the two kids he saw in his first memory both turn to look at him, smiling.

Their words are full of laughter, a good-natured humor and a touch of flirting, and it's clear how close the three of them are by the way the girl starts the race before they've even agreed, how the two of them share one look and surge to their feet at the same time. He was close with these two, even though he can't remember their names, and he wakes with a pain in his heart because he knows what it feels like to be happy and carefree and filled with love for his friends, and it's a feeling he knows he'll lose out on in the end.

It's a double-edged sword, and Dante can't be sure if he's glad to remember something that takes the edge off the overwhelmingly dark memories he's had this month, or if that only makes things worse.

He works with the rapier a little bit after his nap, becoming all the more convinced that this is the wrong weapon for his hand. It still serves for now, but he's wondering what sort of a weapon he'd carried before, what sort of a hilt will feel like coming home. He fights against invisible enemies, practicing blocks and parries and combination attacks, his movements still not entirely fluid as he tries to remember what he'd once known. This memory hasn't come back to him in full yet, different from many of the others he he's had, but Dante can't hate the practice. There's something he relishes about the feeling of his muscles working, learning to move in different ways and the sense of strength that fills him as he fights.

Finding his way back to his camp is a little bit more difficult than getting lost in the first place; Dante almost has to leave the woods entirely to find a familiar building on the city's outskirts to figure out how to get back. Night's fallen by the time he gets back, cold and tired as he builds the night's fire and stares into it, wrapped in a blanket as he again sifts through his memories. He isn't sure if revisiting them so often is helping him or not, but there's no denying that the pain he felt when he'd first remembered the green-skinned woman's words, hitting him like a brick during Saturday's pageant... that pain has receded, replaced by a sensation of wrongness that can only remind him of jarring a healing wound.

It's an early night for him, exhausted from the long day, but it doesn't prevent him from dreaming.

"Are they that important to you? More important than old friends? Instead of worrying about them, you should be asking... about her."

She's slumped over, her eyes listless and dull. There's something wrong with her, desperately wrong.

"That's right. While you were off goofing around, I finally found her."

He'd left the both of them behind, hadn't he? Made these new friends that his other self references here, run off and abandoned them both...

"Why are you siding with the --------?"

"The -------- obey me now. Now I have nothing to fear."

Your heart is empty.

"You're stupid! Sooner or later they'll swallow your heart!"

"Not a chance. My heart's too strong."

But of course. Your heart is steeped in darkness...

"I've picked up a few other tricks as well. Like this, for instance..."

When Dante awakes, he feels nothing.

His heart is empty.

He stares at the roof of the tent for a long time, listening to the sounds of nature waking up around him. Today's the day, then. Today's the day he has to face all the memories he's been running away from, the truths that they're revealing about himself that he doesn't want to face.

His heart is steeped in darkness.

He gets up and stokes the fire, enough to provide warmth while he grabs something to eat for breakfast, putters around going through the motions of a morning routine. Inside his tent, he finds a pair of gloves, black with white edging. They're both familiar and strange all at once: they're his, a fact that he knows instinctively, but he doesn't remember ever buying them. He certainly doesn't remember packing them! And yet he knows without a doubt that they're his, and when he slips them on over his hands, the gloves ending before they've fully covered his palms, they feel right. He's meant to be wearing these.

Once everything's done, he sits, taking a deep breath... and begins.

"I grew up on an island with two friends. We were going to build a raft to leave our island and go somewhere else. We didn't know what else was out there, but obviously something was, because he apparently made new friends and left me and her behind..."

Dante talks through everything he knows, everything he doesn't know. He says the words aloud, letting his mouth shape their truth and put it out there for the world to hear. "She said my heart was empty, and that if it wasn't for the darkness it contained, I'd be alone." Facts, voice bland, inarguable for now. "I made some sort of motion and this shadow copy of him came up out of the ground, identical down to the spiky hair. I did that."

Once he's through the objective, he starts on the subjective. This part is harder--he doesn't like admitting to his feelings in the best of times, much less putting them out there for the world to hear when he's vulnerable. But nobody else is here, and he pushes through.

"I think the other me felt the same way. I think... he was hurting, too."

When he'd remembered the ship, he hadn't been able to tell whose emotions he was feeling, whether the hurt and the resentment and the desire to inflict that same hurt on someone else was his or his past self's or some emotion brought on by the combination of everything happening at once. He's still not entirely sure today, but it's a lot easier to pick it apart when he's not having to deal with anything else at the same time. Here, alone, he can detach himself from the situation, pick it all apart to his satisfaction and then shove it all behind the walls he puts up in his heart.

And Dante's very good at blocking out the emotions he doesn't want to deal with.

Wednesday is the longest day, but as things go, it's also the most productive. By the end of the day he feels almost normal again, though everything is tempered by a thick layer of resignation. In the end, he'd been correct. If even the friends closest to him would leave him for somebody better once they'd left the island together, what hope does he have now in this life? He'd thought the three of them were good friends, based on the lightness of his heart, the ease with which they'd interacted, the unrestrained nature of their race. And yet, for some reason, that had all fallen apart once they'd left. The boy had made new friends and left them behind, and he doesn't know what happened to the girl, only that he'd lost her and then found her again.

The people here can leave him a lot easier than that. And why won't they?

The only way to avoid it is to not let them close in the first place. To try harder, to not be an idiot, to let nobody closer to him and his weak heart. Dante knows there's a lot in his heart that he doesn't acknowledge. His heart isn't empty, even though it might be easier. But with all the walls he's shoved up against those emotions... it might as well be.

The first bottle of whiskey is finished that night, but it's not an escape that Dante's seeking. His escape will be into his own heart.

Thursday morning he decides it's time to head home. Whether or not he'll talk to anybody, he's unsure, but he's at least in a more stable place than he was when he'd fled out here Sunday afternoon. Dante makes another trip to the river (quicker when he doesn't intentionally get himself lost along the way), taking a brief plunge into the water to ensure he looks somewhat presentable for the walk home to get his car, and then begins making his way out of the woods toward Birch Hills.

"Not a chance. My heart's too strong."

What a joke.

Edited 2017-03-29 14:19 (UTC)

[Overflow for the Borrowers event!]

[[continued from here!]]

Yeah, no problem. [Blade clean, Dante's resheathing his sword in its little cardboard sheath.] After all this, I don't think I'll have second thoughts about smashing them ever again.

[As Kiyomitsu gets closer, Dante notices the sword he's holding.]

Whoa, nice. Was that sword sent to you, or did you just happen to have it lying around?

3/26 - 3/29

no subject

May 2017

Kiyomitsu

Kaiba

Ardyn

Arlene

Sora

Aria

Malik

July 2017

Alison

Togusa

Juzo

Ardyn