InsaneJournal

[fic] Kingdom Hearts, "A Terrible Wanting"
A Terrible Wanting
KH-KH2
Xemnas and 'Ansem' focussed.
Safe for work. Spoilers for character stuff in KH2.

...for the record, I originally spelled that as 'wanging'. A TERRIBLE WANGING.



Truthfully, Xemnas wants nothing to do with him.

It is hard, with his background, not to be both fascinated and horrified by the concept of an imposter. If anyone, he knows, he is the worst of the imposters, but he avoids the stigma by changing his name. Admittedly, it’s based on the false name – but that is the name the other was by then, truly, the name he clung to as his most basic identity and it is less of a gesture if that is not the name he takes, then refuses.

But he is the one who is living when another died, for some definition of living; he has taken the soul and changed the person who holds it. His body is the one that walks around, his voice that speaks still.

But there is another as well.

Scientifically-speaking (Oh, how Xemnas sometimes loathes his automatic tendency to speak scientifically), it is the rarest of things for a Heartless to maintain some concept of identity. By rarest – he is the first. It seemed as though he would be the last; Xemnas is still not sure how to treat Sora’s case, given its brevity and the triggering of identity remaining via a Princess of Heart causing his body to reform.

This Heartless Ansem is very… noisy about his identity as well; it would be impossible to ignore his presence among the worlds for long. He has taken a body, after a long time bound into physical form only through the clothing he wears. Xemnas is moderately interested; he had to switch into the body by first removing the heart of the boy the matter belonged to.

Logically, Xemnas knows for a fact that he could not take Ansem’s heart, should the Keyblade master remove it, and put it into himself. The body he has formed is not meant to contain a heart. He would have to be rebuilt before he could fit such things into place.

Xemnas is a logical person.

But the heart is not a logical thing, he thinks, and though he does not have one he cannot seem to quite stay away. Sometimes he thinks this Ansem is aware of him, following around behind him in the in-between. He is much as Xemnas remembers Xehanort to be, but with less of what made Xehanort human. The soft spots, the empty spots, the desperation. This Ansem wants nothing but what is of himself. Of course, Xemnas reminds himself gravely, Xehanort too wanted things of himself. But Xehanort wanted what was lacking – memory, pride in his accomplishments, success, freedom. Ansem desires the only thing he truly has to be multiplied: Darkness.

Xemnas is from the twilight, himself. Dark creatures, Nobodies are, but not properly of the dark. Nor are they welcome in the light. They are pushed to the boundaries of the realms, the clinging unreal space where light and dark melt into each other and neither, for that moment, really exist. Forcing a claim to the dark has always been easier than one to the light; the darkness hides, makes invisible, is a place to fear the nonexistent in the way that light never is. Darkness is characterized by absence of light – and they have little light about them.

They still lack, however, in the power of darkness. They can use what can be made from the dark – the paths, certainly. Much of their own city. But that power, that ability to gain from the personal darkness that clings to the heart; of course they do not have that.

It’s all this Heartless has. It’s all this Heartless has ever wanted. It is not unlike Xehanort, but for being completely different.

What a truly dreadful person, Xemnas thinks as he watches Ansem. It is sad, perhaps, that Ansem is more of a person than he is. He supposes that he finds it ironic is good enough. He wonders who, or what, the Heartless bound to Ansem’s back is. If it was one of his companions, the men he cannot forgive, Xemnas cannot tell. He imagines that it may have been; Even who was so determined to make the experiments work, or Ienzo who casually tipped their mentor’s hand into providing them the laboratory they needed to make their plan work. With its great size and grasping arms, perhaps Elaeus. But this Heartless lacks sentience, and if it was once someone Xehanort had known, it didn’t matter now. The only ones who could be punished for their crimes are the remnants of them, their pale husks.

When Sora finally destroys Ansem – or, rather, disperses the darkness clinging around his heart because he is no more than a Heartless, after all – Xemnas gathers Ansem’s heart. He holds it between his hands, feels the warm glow of a freed heart, and then, without regrets – he is a creature that cannot truly feel regret – he releases it into the sky to join the others in their faint, small beginnings of Kingdom Hearts.