After everything is said and done you cannot tell me Ventus would not fall irrevocably in love with Sora, Roxas, and Xion.
This is the child who has constantly wished for friendships and connections and, bang, wow, looks like shattering your soul and going into a coma for ten years gives you like... your evil counterparts twin, your own twin, and the cutest girl ever? And all of your hearts are either connected or adjacent in so many ways that you may as well be family, may as well slap some definition on it that makes sense.
Ventus would love them. He would love them so unconditionally it would almost physically hurt. He would absolutely drive Terra and Aqua insane because if he isn't spending time with them he is sneaking out to harass his new family.
Going to Destiny Islands so he can spend time with his Second Chance. He gets Sora to show him everything he knows about the islands and then has him hop on his Glider so they can discover a fair bit more. Riku and Kairi can have the play island with him, that's their spot, but Ventus gets to have the skies with Sora, and that's better.
They eat traditional dishes and he teases Sora about paopu and sure, maybe he's got a different kind of education, but he throws himself into learning ahead of Sora so that he can be there when Sora feels stuck. He meets Sora's mom and she becomes his aunty, eventually she makes him a bedroom in the attic and he cries but uses it at least three times a week, if not more.
He helps Sora (and eventually Riku and Kairi) figure out how to lie with the truth when it comes to other worlds, so it feels more natural settling in around people who cannot know the full spectrum of their adventures. He breaks the rules because Sora needs him to, and sits down Sora's mom to tell her everything, to heck with the rules. He smiles when Sora comes home and his mom hugs him to her chest and tells him how proud she is, so proud, and when he tries to sneak out as Sora starts crying, he's shocked when he's pulled into the hug as well. No one leaves the couch cuddle that night.
And Roxas, gosh. Roxas is... he is such a challenge at first. And Ven really struggles to understand that, needs Lea to sit him down and explain Nobodies on a deeper level than the records that are on their Gummi Phones, until he gets that maybe Roxas really struggles with having the same face because he has had so, so little that really belongs to him, and him alone.
They struggle until Ven comes up with a plan. They struggle until he invites Roxas up to the clock tower with ice cream, and Ven talks. He shares what it was like to find out he was half a person and that being whole would just make him a weapon, all the powerful people who let him down even when they should've been protecting him. He talks about losing his friends and losing himself for ten years, he talks about struggle.
And when Roxas talks about struggle right back, he listens. He doesn't judge. He hugs him tight when Roxas cries and promises him he'll make sure none of that ever happens again and they will never, ever mention this conversation after this day but Ventus will never, ever forget his promise. He drags Roxas into doing things he knows Roxas has never done before and watches him relax completely when, once confronted about why he's so excited to do this, Ven admits he's never done these things either.
He doesn't try and skateboard, he never invites himself up to the clocktower again. He doesn't integrate himself with Hayner, Pence, and Olette. He finds something new for both of them, something neither of them have claimed, and sometimes they both hate it, sometimes Roxas isn't impressed, but sometimes they both love it and things go from new to theirs and that's all Ven needs. That's all he needs.
And throughout all of this Xion constantly tries to fade into the background and Ventus never lets her do that alone. A lot of their initial time together is just spent sitting quietly, and sure, Ven feels like he's vibrating quietly out of his skin the majority of that time, because he has so many questions and he wants to reassure her that his interest is to be there for as long as she'll allow him in the same breath.
But the payoff is the small smiles he starts to get when he goes out of his way to sit at the edge of meetings with her, when she shyly begins to share her interests and likes. The way she allows him to start giving her small gifts and ask about those interests and likes a little more often, until she's willingly sharing them with him. Until she starts to be a little more vibrant, a little more sassy (anyone who comes from him and Sora is guaranteed to be at least a little sassy), a little more herself.
That's all Ven wants, for her to be herself, and giving her the time she needs to see that makes their relationship such a soft and easy thing, but strong as steel at the end of the day.
Ventus integrates himself into their lives. He works for his connections with them with split knuckles and blood on his teeth, the first person to defend any of them, the first in the Wayfinder trio who admits his perception of Darkness is really skewed and he needs to fix that because his new family needs him to be better. As he gets better, he thinks of Vanitas and aches, because now he knows how different it could've been, if Xehanort didn't get to them first. He lost that chance.
But he won't lose his chance with the others. He becomes better, for them. He leaves behind his childhood and becomes an older brother for the first time, and he loves it.
amandla
gamechangershow
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
germansingergirl
areudirty
jimmyeatworldofficial
gracieabrams
