dante "walking dumpster fire" rantanen | riku (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
darkinferno) wrote2017-03-27 10:26 pm
darkinferno) wrote2017-03-27 10:26 pm
Entry tags:
[narrations + overflow]
[A collection of narration bits that don't belong anywhere else from Dante/Riku's time in Recollé.]
[Or, a personal overflow.]
no subject
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.