There have been a few small moments like this, in the time they've lived together and learned how not just to share space, but to navigate it. Perhaps it's a rude comparison to make but at times Vanitas is not unlike the alley cats he'd grown used to with Selina- the ones who come and go as they please, who follow rules of their own devising and take care to learn the ins and outs of places, of people. It doesn't matter that they've lived in this museum together for months now, that he has a bed here and the three of them have found a kind of rhythm around training and meal times. Vanitas enters rooms as if he owns all of them, but his eyes give him away. They're too wide. Too watchful.
Bruce doesn't know every point they land on because he's careful not to observe so closely- to make sure he doesn't feel hemmed in, or controlled. Instead, after his boots are settled beside Vanitas's haphazard pile- he stands again, reaches for his belt and begins to unthread it from the loops. "What's strange?"
His gaze comes up with the click of Bruce's belt, and he watches him pull the leather from his jeans. It's more the movement than the act itself, and Vanitas eyes only move as Bruce does, watching him undress with the sort of idle interest reserved for a person sitting on a park bench observing the world go by.
"Riku said you would come," Maybe its stranger that he could talk about Riku as his enemy moments ago, and now refer to him so casually.
"But I was." He pauses on the word, and doesn't look up. "Relieved. You were not there. You were not caught."
Like the other rooms, Bruce doesn't have a dresser. He'd been careful to build storage into the bedframes, to give them small spaces to call their own- and for Riku at least it'd been a start. He's added shelves and baskets, a few trinkets that make it look personal. But Bruce hasn't inspected Vanitas's space. The boundaries between them are- different.
At any rate, Bruce's room is likely to be the most spartan of them all. He spends most of his time in the makeshift study downstairs, or lately at the workbench along side Riku's pale profile. There's nothing glamorous or personal about his bed. The blankets are dark and nondescript, functional not beautiful. There's an overturned crate he uses as a night stand, hangers dangle from a water pipe they'd routed through the museum. That's where he goes now, as he reaches for not just one pair of soft lounge pants, but two. He tosses one across the space, knows that Vanitas will catch it without the word of warning. His hands return to his waist, to trade one pair of trousers for another. "Because you didn't want me to be hurt, or because you knew I would come for you?"
He folds his slacks, precise crease for precise crease. "Or both?"
He raises one hand, snatching the sweatpants out of midair without fumbling, or even looking up.
"I did not think about being rescued," He shakes his head. That had never been at the forefront of his mind. Riku had even said it, that Bruce would already be planning on how to find them, to get them out— but even then, Vanitas hadn't counted himself one of those to be found. Why would he, when that had never been part of his narrative? Even knowing Riku was right hadn't changed how his heart felt. The reality of it didn't hit him until Bruce reached into that cage when he was the only thing left, when he'd crushed Vanitas to his chest.
The soft fabric sits between his hands, dangling between his spread knees and touching the dark floor, because his elbows are rested on his thighs. Finally, he looks up, watching Bruce with the faintest furrow between his eyes.
Vanitas's head shakes and then it turns down towards the fabric in his hands. Bruce doesn't rush his way through the reply or press for more. Some things will always take time and Vanitas looks... worn. Fatigue clings to his features and alters the pallor of his skin. His reflexes are good but he's quieter, subdued.
Instead, he takes the moment to change his shirt, something looser, a chunky cable knit. He busies his hands with finding a spare, finds long sleeves and a scooped neck. It stays in his grasp as he turns around, as he finds Vanitas slowly raising his gaze, a crease between his brows. "Does it bother you?" He asks quietly, moving across the room once more. "That you felt that way?"
"You don't understand," He says, and it would sound more argumentative, maybe, if there was more fire in him. "I shouldn't feel that way."
Vanitas has been changing. He's felt himself changing, as time has worn on here. Back, before, he'd had nothing— constantly hungry for something he'd never had, he was like a gasoline fire burning hot and constant, ready to consume everything around it. In this place, he can have all of that. He's getting all of that. There are people here that care about him, and Vanitas doesn't count them in numbers. Even one would be enough to alter his whole reality. He gets to eat sweets. He has his own room. His own clothes.
Those feelings haven't gone away. He still has the innate impulse to destroy everything around him, bring it close and wreck it completely. He still wants others to suffer, some righteous vindication for the pain he's felt, knowing he can bring it out in other people.
But.
How can he be Darkness if he knows these things too? He'd said it, back in that battle. I am the shadow that you cast. Sora and Ventus can be the light because Vanitas is the long darkness behind them. More than that— he was created this way. Just by his very nature, he shouldn't be able to feel these things, should he? His grip tightens on the lounge pants in his hands. Some part of him wants to fight this feeling. How can he be darkness if he can have those good things, after all? But he's so tired, and his head feels just a little fuzzy, like he's had too much to drink.
He can only see what Vanitas allows him to see- what Riku chooses to elaborate upon. The rules that govern their world and their lives are a far cry from the rhythms of Gotham City. Vanitas's darkness is more than symbolic, but he thinks that it is the symbol, now, that he's grappling with.
Bruce comes to sit beside him, a weight that tugs the thin mattress down for their combined pressure- for their nearness. He doesn't turn his head to look because he doesn't want to rob Vanitas of this contemplative process. When he says I shouldn't feel that way it doesn't sound like something he feels shame about, but instead like a capability he never considered possible. That he's struggling to reconcile the impossible. Not for the first time the questions surface inside him. What had Vanitas been told about himself? For how long?
His hands rest on his knees and with it, the long sleeved shirt is left in a folded pile on his lap. For a moment the silence lingers, acknowledgement, consideration.
"Before Beacon, you'd only ever known the desert."
Bruce isn't wholly incorrect in his assumption, even if he can't understand the minutiae of it. What Vanitas is, in his world, is nothing more than a fantasy. Vanitas knows that much, even if he knows very little else. He doesn't stop to dwell on it, how little he knows about the young man sitting next to him. Bits and pieces; the murder of his family, the name of the city he hails from, that he's fierce and intelligent and he walks like a warrior but speaks and conducts himself like a prince.
"That's where I was taken from Ventus," He agrees. Saying he was made there, isn't quite right. He'd existed long before Xehanort pulled him from Ventus' heart, after all. "It's where I stayed."
It's part agreement and part amendment. For all the time they've known one another, Vanitas's explanation of himself and his understanding of the world has always gone backwards. It's all come from the sliver he'd been given in his earliest experiences, in the circumstances that didn't just dominate his life but became his narrative.
"It's no wonder that you can't add it up. You left that place. You have more memories, more experience, and more people than you did before."
Is the answer that simple? It's a matter of experience, and nothing else? But it can't be so straight forward. It would scrub out the narrative of everything he's known. Vanitas' brow creases, not cross, but maybe disturbed. He's spent so much of his time and energy hating Ventus, being envious of everything he had, things Vanitas could never have. He'd steadfastly held to that belief that all he needed was to be completed, like he could gather up all these pieces, slipping inexorably through his fingers to be complete.
His head is starting to pound, and he exhales thinly through his nose, standing up from the bed, setting the trousers down on the mattress so he can free both hands to unclip his belt. It's noisy, in the relative silence, the shuffle of fabric as he peels off his pants. Any other time he might shed everything at once, but there's a chill that still permeates the museum, and he isn't wearing anything under his jeans and his shirt. He steps into the sweatpants, pulls them up with a military sort of efficiency before pulling off his longsleeve shirt. His wounds from the kidnapping are healing, but not unlike the attack from those spirits in the corridor, they take longer. He still has some bandages, still has some pink, tender looking skin.
His expression wrinkles and Bruce doesn't hold his breath but he does hold a kind of vigil. He waits in silence as Vanitas tosses this idea from hand to hand, examines it from another angle and can't quite find a place to put it. This too is not a great surprise. His body is still riddled with skin that's pink and new, stitches that had barely come together and been freshly removed by the time of his abduction. And now there are new ones, criss-crossing over his body, creating an all new roadmap. New cuts, new bruises. The exhaustion clings to him like a shroud, drawing his shoulders down and diminishing even his frustration.
But instead of shouting or lashing out he climbs to his feet and begins changing his clothes. Bruce waits through that too, ignores the puddle of clothing that Vanitas abandons beside his bed and pulls on sweat pants. Waits as he peels his shirt off over his head and ruffles his hair in the process. He reaches out just once, to touch at a bandage that's beginning to come loose at a single corner, his fingertip cool and dry on Vanitas's skin. "We'll need to replace this one in the morning."
And then he offers the shirt, holds it patiently aloft.
Vanitas doesn't jump when Bruce reaches out to touch him, he doesn't tense or flinch away in the same manner he did in the beginning, like every incoming contact was going to start a fight. His fingertip barely brushes his skin, flattening along the bandage, and Vanitas is aware of the touch from a wholly different angle. Even through the fatigue nuzzling up against him like a persistent, cozy animal, his skin feels like it tightens under his touch— a tingle that crawls, warm, through his veins.
He has the strange, unmistakable urge to step closer, to feel the wide press of Bruce's palm on his torso. The particular way his callouses catch on his his scars. He knows how it feels, now, because of how much time he's spent under his careful attention the last month.
"Soon," he agrees. And as Vanitas takes the shirt Bruce's weight comes forward to rest of the vert edge of the bed. Inside the crate serving as his nightstand there's a jar, and inside that jar-
The lid comes open with a small rattling sound, the tinkle of metal on glass. Bruce holds it up so that the mouth of it hovers near Vanitas's waist, perfectly within reach. There are small chocolates inside. They aren't perfectly shaped, but then- "I didn't have moulds to pour them into, so they aren't very pretty."
He's pulling the top over his head when he hears the rattling, and while it piques his curiousity it doesn't concern him in any way. That sound could just as soon be medicine as anything else, but Bruce has never given him anything that's come with a consequence he hasn't been prepared for. Even without knowing the full expanse of what might happen, the knowledge has been there.
So the smell hits him before anything else, the familiar cloying smell of chocolate. The shirt comes down and his hair is twice as mussed as before, and his eyes flick down to the open jar. A flush of warmth takes root in his chest, a tentative little thing. It's been happening on a semi-regular occurrence ever since that walk in the woods. He puts his hand into the container and pulls out a chocolate.
"It's fine, unless they taste like crap." But because nothing Bruce has ever been bad, he pops the chocolate whole into his mouth and pushes it into his cheek before Bruce can offer any kind of warning.
"Well if that's the case-" It doesn't occur to him that Vanitas won't take one, but then, that's the point. Putting sedatives in Riku's food had been a relatively easy task. But Vanitas hasn't been eating. Just like he hasn't been sleeping. He recloses the jar and sets it to one side before his weight shifts on the mattress once more. "Even if they're terrible just lie to me about it."
He's grown into his limbs different in the last two years, where he'd started to build muscle mass and learned to move more deliberately. Learned how to fold himself. Bruce slides back across the bed and draws the blanket up in the process. Even this is strange for how un-clumsy it is. "Come on."
That makes him smirk, an uptick in the corner of his mouth that makes even makes it to his eyes, one of maybe a handful that hasn't been put there for show. And Vanitas has been putting on a show: to everyone in Beacon, riding the high of anxiety from everyone while ignoring all the demands his body has been screaming at him for days. Since the whole ordeal started.
Bruce slides back on the mattress as Vanitas is sucking on the chocolate, tasting it melt. He puts it between his teeth, tempted to bite down and break it in two, but instead holding it there delicately, rolling the flavor around. Vanitas had never thought him clumsy, exactly, but there's a fluidity to him now that Vanitas recognizes because it's one he himself possesses. Like every movement is a smooth, casual choice. It's strength. Something hidden, otherwise, by his slacks and jumper.
He pauses only a moment, regarding Bruce for a moment. It occurs to him that up to this moment, he wasn't sure he'd really been thinking about how he had to leave to go back to his own room. This feels... natural. He steps forward and crawls on all fours after Bruce, into the empty space next to him.
This is a new element to their conversations- not just the verbal, but the language of movement and body and intent. Bruce makes the kind of remark he rarely does in company, and he's rewarded by the flicker at the edge of Vanitas's mouth. By the way his eyes come back around.
The less certain thing, however, is whether Vanitas will accept the offer. They've all shared a bed before and yes, that too was purpose driven- the result of a crisis and emotions running high. This is a decision that can still be made. Vanitas has the option to go back to his own bed, or even to make his way to the Invincible if he wanted. But in the same way Bruce has answered Riku's uncertain voice, the same way he'd lingered in open doorways to remind them of his presence and their safety- he offers the bed to Vanitas. Vanitas who lingers for just a moment, and then crawls into the space beside them. There's no pillow to fight over, but there's all the more mattress because of it. One arm lifts, to offer a place for Vanitas to rest his head, and he waits until he's settled to draw the blankets up.
Figuring out how to arrange himself is a more difficult task. Vanitas has shared a bed with both of them before, when the cold had bitten the feeling out of Riku's limbs. He's shared Riku's bed before now, too, though maybe neither of them really slept for it— exhausted and beaten raw by everything that happened in that medical centre.
But that isn't quite the same as this. For a moment, he lingers there on all fours, looking at Bruce like a particularly cautious cat, looking at the spread of his arm and the curve of his chest. After a lengthy pause, he crawls the rest of the way up, shoving his legs down under the blanket, and laying back with Bruce's arm under his neck.
He's hardly there a second before he rolls over onto his side, the way he'd done with Riku, giving Bruce his back. Maybe it would seem more vulnerable, when Vanitas is so keenly aware of who is behind him at all times, but the alternative— it makes him hot with some unnamed emotion, something kind of like embarrassment, that makes his stomach twist all over. This is safer, somehow, and just as comfortable.
Vanitas very rarely appears self-conscious- if anything he seems to carry himself with a kind of perpetual bravado, even and most especially when he's at a loss. There's an element of that evident now, in the way he climbs onto the mattress like a wary cat- scrutinizing the placement of Bruce's arm, in the shape of his body under the blankets and how easy it is to get to them. As if weighing his options on an invisible scale.
But he does make a decision in the end. He climbs over and under, kicking the blankets around them as he settles and laying still for maybe a second before he rolls over. Turns his back. There's a moment where Bruce considers it, because it does mean something, to have someone so familiar with pain and betrayal and hurt decide to bare this vulnerability. But growth has never come from the familiar and Vanitas has become familiar with this position.
So Bruce reaches for his shoulder and slowly rolls him onto his back instead, a steady, insistent pressure. He lets up only when they're both on their backs, looking up at the vaulted ceiling and the high windows, where the stars loom overhead.
He resists only for a moment, mostly because he's not sure what Bruce wants, before succumbing to the pressure of his shoulder and rolling over. His eyes don't go to the ceiling at first, though, his head turns so that he can look into Bruce's profile. This position brings them so close together that with his face turned his nose nearly touches Bruce's jaw, but the other guy isn't looking at him. He doesn't even say anything.
Finally, he turns back to look up at the stars. They're the only constant thing in this place, though they'd not seen them in that medical center they were being held. Vanitas isn't so romantic as to wonder after them in some poetic fashion, but— he slowly starts to settle. There's a heaviness creeping in on him, soothing out his muscles. Relaxing, he realizes, tracing the pinpricks through the window, a million tiny worlds out there somewhere.
This, more than anything, makes him believe that however dead they might be, they aren't so removed as everyone likes to say.
Bruce has always been preternaturally aware of what someone else's gaze feels like. The precise weight of another person's attention. He knows immediately that once Vanitas yields and allows himself to be tilted onto his back, that he doesn't stare upward. He knows that those inhuman eyes have landed on his face. But Bruce doesn't shift to look back. There's an offer of privacy in that too, the space that permits him to be curious. "I would fall asleep to my mother's voice, sometimes she would stay all night."
Instead his arm shifts and he catches Vanitas's head in the crook of his elbow, lets his body become a pillow.
"Once, she told me that the stars came from a big silver spoon. That they were tiny pieces of sugar that sprinkles all around us."
Weird, to hear this sort of thing. Not just because it's Bruce, who keeps the details smudged out and smoothly covered, but because Vanitas has never had a family. What is a mother, a father, or siblings? Sora and Ventus, he thinks, are probably the closest things, but even that isn't right. Their connection isn't so straight forward as that. Vanitas simply doesn't have any other comparison for the peculiar little triad they make up.
What would it be like, to have someone do something like that? To have someone stay with you because you were afraid. It isn't something he could have imagined, not before Bruce did those things for him. Not before Riku had done them, too.
"That's stupid." Vanitas says, practical, without any heat. "Stars are planets."
He knows already that he won't find a beat of commonality here. Vanitas has been alone longer than most people could ever imagine. The only figure that could ever have been a parent taught him pain, told him to cleave to rage and despair. Who would there have been to tell bedtime stories? Who would he eat dinner with, or to teach him to tie his shoes? To show him how to take care of a skinned knee?
Beside him Bruce smiles, it's as small as his other tells- a subtle, quiet thing. "I didn't know any better." There's no shame in his admission either, no beat of reluctance. "But you know, where I'm from only a few of them are planets. Just nine and we can't even see all nine with the naked eye. The rest are balls of gas, like the sun."
"Just nine?" That's naked incredulity, and Vanitas doesn't look away from the stars up above. The window makes a cut out of them, like a cookie stamp. The stars like a scattering of sugar from a spoon. He can see the comparison— only he'd never been so naive enough to believe it. Or at least, if he had, he doesn't remember it.
Vanitas reaches down to pull the blanket up under his chin. The seasons are turning, but he gets cold easily.
"That's not right," He decides, as though whatever Bruce's lived experience might be is inconsequential. "The hearts of your worlds are probably just locked."
Vanitas pulls the blanket up, all the way under his chin and there's something very small about the sight. It's easy to picture him as a child, arguing with a bedtime story as he tucks himself in. Bruce stretches his fingers without moving the arm behind Vanitas's neck, and he takes hold of the edge of the blanket, draws it around him on the far edge as if he's helping stitch up a seam. To keep the warmth trapped beneath.
"How many worlds have you seen?" It isn't a heavy, overly serious question so much as it is a quiet piece of conversation. "If there are so many, maybe there are worlds out there where the stars are just sugar."
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Bruce doesn't know every point they land on because he's careful not to observe so closely- to make sure he doesn't feel hemmed in, or controlled. Instead, after his boots are settled beside Vanitas's haphazard pile- he stands again, reaches for his belt and begins to unthread it from the loops. "What's strange?"
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"Riku said you would come," Maybe its stranger that he could talk about Riku as his enemy moments ago, and now refer to him so casually.
"But I was." He pauses on the word, and doesn't look up. "Relieved. You were not there. You were not caught."
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At any rate, Bruce's room is likely to be the most spartan of them all. He spends most of his time in the makeshift study downstairs, or lately at the workbench along side Riku's pale profile. There's nothing glamorous or personal about his bed. The blankets are dark and nondescript, functional not beautiful. There's an overturned crate he uses as a night stand, hangers dangle from a water pipe they'd routed through the museum. That's where he goes now, as he reaches for not just one pair of soft lounge pants, but two. He tosses one across the space, knows that Vanitas will catch it without the word of warning. His hands return to his waist, to trade one pair of trousers for another. "Because you didn't want me to be hurt, or because you knew I would come for you?"
He folds his slacks, precise crease for precise crease.
"Or both?"
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"I did not think about being rescued," He shakes his head. That had never been at the forefront of his mind. Riku had even said it, that Bruce would already be planning on how to find them, to get them out— but even then, Vanitas hadn't counted himself one of those to be found. Why would he, when that had never been part of his narrative? Even knowing Riku was right hadn't changed how his heart felt. The reality of it didn't hit him until Bruce reached into that cage when he was the only thing left, when he'd crushed Vanitas to his chest.
The soft fabric sits between his hands, dangling between his spread knees and touching the dark floor, because his elbows are rested on his thighs. Finally, he looks up, watching Bruce with the faintest furrow between his eyes.
"I didn't want you to be hurt."
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Instead, he takes the moment to change his shirt, something looser, a chunky cable knit. He busies his hands with finding a spare, finds long sleeves and a scooped neck. It stays in his grasp as he turns around, as he finds Vanitas slowly raising his gaze, a crease between his brows. "Does it bother you?" He asks quietly, moving across the room once more. "That you felt that way?"
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Vanitas has been changing. He's felt himself changing, as time has worn on here. Back, before, he'd had nothing— constantly hungry for something he'd never had, he was like a gasoline fire burning hot and constant, ready to consume everything around it. In this place, he can have all of that. He's getting all of that. There are people here that care about him, and Vanitas doesn't count them in numbers. Even one would be enough to alter his whole reality. He gets to eat sweets. He has his own room. His own clothes.
Those feelings haven't gone away. He still has the innate impulse to destroy everything around him, bring it close and wreck it completely. He still wants others to suffer, some righteous vindication for the pain he's felt, knowing he can bring it out in other people.
But.
How can he be Darkness if he knows these things too? He'd said it, back in that battle. I am the shadow that you cast. Sora and Ventus can be the light because Vanitas is the long darkness behind them. More than that— he was created this way. Just by his very nature, he shouldn't be able to feel these things, should he? His grip tightens on the lounge pants in his hands. Some part of him wants to fight this feeling. How can he be darkness if he can have those good things, after all? But he's so tired, and his head feels just a little fuzzy, like he's had too much to drink.
"I've only ever... hurt."
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Bruce comes to sit beside him, a weight that tugs the thin mattress down for their combined pressure- for their nearness. He doesn't turn his head to look because he doesn't want to rob Vanitas of this contemplative process. When he says I shouldn't feel that way it doesn't sound like something he feels shame about, but instead like a capability he never considered possible. That he's struggling to reconcile the impossible. Not for the first time the questions surface inside him. What had Vanitas been told about himself? For how long?
His hands rest on his knees and with it, the long sleeved shirt is left in a folded pile on his lap. For a moment the silence lingers, acknowledgement, consideration.
"Before Beacon, you'd only ever known the desert."
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"That's where I was taken from Ventus," He agrees. Saying he was made there, isn't quite right. He'd existed long before Xehanort pulled him from Ventus' heart, after all. "It's where I stayed."
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It's part agreement and part amendment. For all the time they've known one another, Vanitas's explanation of himself and his understanding of the world has always gone backwards. It's all come from the sliver he'd been given in his earliest experiences, in the circumstances that didn't just dominate his life but became his narrative.
"It's no wonder that you can't add it up. You left that place. You have more memories, more experience, and more people than you did before."
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His head is starting to pound, and he exhales thinly through his nose, standing up from the bed, setting the trousers down on the mattress so he can free both hands to unclip his belt. It's noisy, in the relative silence, the shuffle of fabric as he peels off his pants. Any other time he might shed everything at once, but there's a chill that still permeates the museum, and he isn't wearing anything under his jeans and his shirt. He steps into the sweatpants, pulls them up with a military sort of efficiency before pulling off his longsleeve shirt. His wounds from the kidnapping are healing, but not unlike the attack from those spirits in the corridor, they take longer. He still has some bandages, still has some pink, tender looking skin.
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But instead of shouting or lashing out he climbs to his feet and begins changing his clothes. Bruce waits through that too, ignores the puddle of clothing that Vanitas abandons beside his bed and pulls on sweat pants. Waits as he peels his shirt off over his head and ruffles his hair in the process. He reaches out just once, to touch at a bandage that's beginning to come loose at a single corner, his fingertip cool and dry on Vanitas's skin. "We'll need to replace this one in the morning."
And then he offers the shirt, holds it patiently aloft.
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He has the strange, unmistakable urge to step closer, to feel the wide press of Bruce's palm on his torso. The particular way his callouses catch on his his scars. He knows how it feels, now, because of how much time he's spent under his careful attention the last month.
Instead, he takes the shirt out of Bruce's hand.
"Are you going to bed, then?"
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The lid comes open with a small rattling sound, the tinkle of metal on glass. Bruce holds it up so that the mouth of it hovers near Vanitas's waist, perfectly within reach. There are small chocolates inside. They aren't perfectly shaped, but then- "I didn't have moulds to pour them into, so they aren't very pretty."
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So the smell hits him before anything else, the familiar cloying smell of chocolate. The shirt comes down and his hair is twice as mussed as before, and his eyes flick down to the open jar. A flush of warmth takes root in his chest, a tentative little thing. It's been happening on a semi-regular occurrence ever since that walk in the woods. He puts his hand into the container and pulls out a chocolate.
"It's fine, unless they taste like crap." But because nothing Bruce has ever been bad, he pops the chocolate whole into his mouth and pushes it into his cheek before Bruce can offer any kind of warning.
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He's grown into his limbs different in the last two years, where he'd started to build muscle mass and learned to move more deliberately. Learned how to fold himself. Bruce slides back across the bed and draws the blanket up in the process. Even this is strange for how un-clumsy it is. "Come on."
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Bruce slides back on the mattress as Vanitas is sucking on the chocolate, tasting it melt. He puts it between his teeth, tempted to bite down and break it in two, but instead holding it there delicately, rolling the flavor around. Vanitas had never thought him clumsy, exactly, but there's a fluidity to him now that Vanitas recognizes because it's one he himself possesses. Like every movement is a smooth, casual choice. It's strength. Something hidden, otherwise, by his slacks and jumper.
He pauses only a moment, regarding Bruce for a moment. It occurs to him that up to this moment, he wasn't sure he'd really been thinking about how he had to leave to go back to his own room. This feels... natural. He steps forward and crawls on all fours after Bruce, into the empty space next to him.
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The less certain thing, however, is whether Vanitas will accept the offer. They've all shared a bed before and yes, that too was purpose driven- the result of a crisis and emotions running high. This is a decision that can still be made. Vanitas has the option to go back to his own bed, or even to make his way to the Invincible if he wanted. But in the same way Bruce has answered Riku's uncertain voice, the same way he'd lingered in open doorways to remind them of his presence and their safety- he offers the bed to Vanitas. Vanitas who lingers for just a moment, and then crawls into the space beside them. There's no pillow to fight over, but there's all the more mattress because of it. One arm lifts, to offer a place for Vanitas to rest his head, and he waits until he's settled to draw the blankets up.
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But that isn't quite the same as this. For a moment, he lingers there on all fours, looking at Bruce like a particularly cautious cat, looking at the spread of his arm and the curve of his chest. After a lengthy pause, he crawls the rest of the way up, shoving his legs down under the blanket, and laying back with Bruce's arm under his neck.
He's hardly there a second before he rolls over onto his side, the way he'd done with Riku, giving Bruce his back. Maybe it would seem more vulnerable, when Vanitas is so keenly aware of who is behind him at all times, but the alternative— it makes him hot with some unnamed emotion, something kind of like embarrassment, that makes his stomach twist all over. This is safer, somehow, and just as comfortable.
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But he does make a decision in the end. He climbs over and under, kicking the blankets around them as he settles and laying still for maybe a second before he rolls over. Turns his back. There's a moment where Bruce considers it, because it does mean something, to have someone so familiar with pain and betrayal and hurt decide to bare this vulnerability. But growth has never come from the familiar and Vanitas has become familiar with this position.
So Bruce reaches for his shoulder and slowly rolls him onto his back instead, a steady, insistent pressure. He lets up only when they're both on their backs, looking up at the vaulted ceiling and the high windows, where the stars loom overhead.
no subject
Finally, he turns back to look up at the stars. They're the only constant thing in this place, though they'd not seen them in that medical center they were being held. Vanitas isn't so romantic as to wonder after them in some poetic fashion, but— he slowly starts to settle. There's a heaviness creeping in on him, soothing out his muscles. Relaxing, he realizes, tracing the pinpricks through the window, a million tiny worlds out there somewhere.
This, more than anything, makes him believe that however dead they might be, they aren't so removed as everyone likes to say.
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Bruce has always been preternaturally aware of what someone else's gaze feels like. The precise weight of another person's attention. He knows immediately that once Vanitas yields and allows himself to be tilted onto his back, that he doesn't stare upward. He knows that those inhuman eyes have landed on his face. But Bruce doesn't shift to look back. There's an offer of privacy in that too, the space that permits him to be curious. "I would fall asleep to my mother's voice, sometimes she would stay all night."
Instead his arm shifts and he catches Vanitas's head in the crook of his elbow, lets his body become a pillow.
"Once, she told me that the stars came from a big silver spoon. That they were tiny pieces of sugar that sprinkles all around us."
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What would it be like, to have someone do something like that? To have someone stay with you because you were afraid. It isn't something he could have imagined, not before Bruce did those things for him. Not before Riku had done them, too.
"That's stupid." Vanitas says, practical, without any heat. "Stars are planets."
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Beside him Bruce smiles, it's as small as his other tells- a subtle, quiet thing. "I didn't know any better." There's no shame in his admission either, no beat of reluctance. "But you know, where I'm from only a few of them are planets. Just nine and we can't even see all nine with the naked eye. The rest are balls of gas, like the sun."
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Vanitas reaches down to pull the blanket up under his chin. The seasons are turning, but he gets cold easily.
"That's not right," He decides, as though whatever Bruce's lived experience might be is inconsequential. "The hearts of your worlds are probably just locked."
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"How many worlds have you seen?" It isn't a heavy, overly serious question so much as it is a quiet piece of conversation. "If there are so many, maybe there are worlds out there where the stars are just sugar."
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