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The first time he forgets that Roxas is with him (inside of him), Sora worries that his heart must be desolate and vast, like a desert (but not like the magic deserts of Agrabah, always shifting, turning, breathing.). One night he pauses in brushing his teeth, lays fingers against the cool glass of the mirror.
“You okay in there?” he murmurs lightly. The face opposite his is blank. Sora drums fingers across his reflection, looking for a reaction. “Hel--ow!” he yells, and brings a hand to his mouth, having bitten down sharply on his own tongue, without motive or explanation.
“Alright,” he murmurs, “do not tap the moody Roxas, I get it.” He leans over the sink and lets the blood and toothpaste drip from his mouth. The face in the mirror looks oddly satisfied.
-
“He doesn’t remember himself,” Kairi says, “or anything about his life that wasn’t manufactured and stuck in his head. And now he’s trapped inside you. Do you really blame him?”
He’s not trapped, Sora tries to say, indignant, he’s whole and alive and he exists, but Roxas beats him to it; “I remember just fine,” he says sharply out of Sora’s mouth, and Kairi shakes like she’s afraid, like she’s hurt. She covers it up quickly, smiles and touches his shoulder, but it’s still there.
Sora has never really wanted to physically hurt himself before. It’s a strange feeling.
-
In dreams, it’s okay.
They stand on opposite sides of the blankness, the blackness (but not darkness, Sora thinks, because there’s a difference), and in all truthfulness, it doesn’t really matter who draws first. They hear the familiar sound of blades rushing through space and they both give a sadist’s grin, twist their feet a little tighter in the floor, waiting for it. This is how they have to be, now; this is how two people exist in one heart.
Sora taunts and yells, like he has since the start, since he was playing with wooden swords on the beach. It echoes emptily, and he feels silly when he hears Roxas’ even, steady breathing. He can feel Roxas’ frustration, growing even now, like a weight in the air pressing down on him.
Nine times out of ten Roxas wins, because he needs to. (Nine times out of ten, Sora lets him.)
In the blackness he sees faces. Riku, Kairi. The king and Ansem. He wonders who Roxas sees, if anyone. If he remembers so vividly, if someone’s features are burned into his eyelids; a smile, a hand, anything real. It’s so hard to read him, harder than it should be to know a part of yourself. Roxas’ chest heaves, his keyblades flash, his hood falls over his eyes. He’s a separate being. It stings at Sora’s eyes to think of it that way.
He asks him once, before sleep takes him. Roxas’ smile flicks across Sora’s face, brief and bitter. “No,” he says, “no one. Nobody.”
-
Some nights, though, they’re both too exhausted to yell and punch and kick (even if it’s not real, even if it’s just a secret to hide under the bed ‘til it’s needed). Those nights are the ones that Sora just lets go, loses his grip. Roxas waits, though it’s not something he’s good at, waits ‘til Sora’s limp and snoring softly before he lets himself fall asleep. He tries to go as long as he can without resting, without leaving himself vulnerable. He wonders if it’s habit, or if it’s something new, something that only happened with Sora.
Tonight, though, he’s tired, and his eyelids don’t want to obey his head. Cautiously, he lifts Sora’s sleeping hand (careful, careful, don’t wake him up) and lifts it to his chest. It beats soft underneath his hand, light and slow. He smiles with his eyes closed.
-
and he grins his Cheshire –cat grin and pushes Roxas hard and the doorway bruises the white skin of his back but it doesn’t matter because the mouth on his neck is warm and small and the tongue is sharp and there are warm hands all over, fingers pulling and wrapping and grabbing and Roxas hisses and throws his head back and hits the wall and hisses some more and he sees red red red
-
“Um,” Sora says, tangled in sticky sheets and looking bewildered with sleep in his eyes. “What the fuck was that?”
The sun melts through the windows, yellow scars of light landing on Sora’s leg, his hair, his mattress. Amongst the tiny particles of dust and early-morning sight is Roxas, made of light and shadow and nothing else, shivering in and out of focus.
“That,” Roxas says, though Sora can’t find his mouth to save his life, “was you being fifteen. Welcome to the sexually-repressed club.”
“No,” Sora shakes his head, ignoring the insult, “That wasn’t me. It was something else.” The other half of his heart is silent, and the room feels empty for it.
“Roxas?” Sora is quieter, because he knows he’s intruding. “That was a memory, wasn’t it? That was yours.”
In the light, there is only dust floating on strange seas of sun. Sora falls back against the bed and groans, pulls the blankets over his head.
(In retrospect, he really should have changed his sheets first, at the risk of losing dramatic effect. Or at least taken a shower.)
-
His feet move fluid across the shoreline, and he spins and bends and twists with Riku; almost like dancing. Way to Dawn is slick and smooth and cuts through air like butter but Sora grins and parries while Riku grunts. His feet are slipping and sliding all over the place; his mind is elsewhere, Sora can tell. He doesn’t go any easier on him for it. A special little flick of the wrist (he doesn’t even know when he learned how to do that) and Way to Dawn is flying in the air, its owner on the ground, winded.
Sora smiles good-naturedly and rests the Keyblade on his shoulder, reaches a hand to pull Riku back up. Riku smiles and takes it, brushing sand of his pants as he rises.
“You know,” he says carefully, “I’m never quite sure who I’m sparring with anymore.”
Sora isn’t sure what to say to that, exactly, so he laughs (if a bit forced) and bumps Riku’s shoulder with his own. Riku smiles back and locks eyes with him, cool and green and
-
“you’re not half-bad,” he says, eyes glinting emerald and head cocked defiantly and someone else’s blood caked in his hair (like anyone could tell the difference) and roxas leaps jumps pounces like he’s still fighting and bites down on those thin lips hard and he tastes iron feels fire crackle underneath his fingers
-
“Damn it, Roxas,” Sora whispers furiously, jerks himself awake, “stop that.”
“I didn’t do anything,” and suddenly he’s sitting cross-legged on Sora’s bed, leaning against a wall like he’d been born there, “You dreamt it.”
“Because you remembered it,” Sora counters, not even bothering to sit up, just closes his eyes tighter.
“Like you weren’t enjoying the show,” Roxas mutters, and worms his way under the covers. His hands graze Sora’s arm, his stomach and the scars of sins that rest there before dipping down lower, resting on the front of Sora’s shorts, where he is still embarrassingly, painfully hard.
“What,” Sora sputters, before Roxas puts a hand over his mouth firmly and rolls his eyes.
“Shut up,” he says fondly, though he winces and removes the hand when Sora bites at it.
“If it makes you feel better,” he offers, “you could just pretend you’re doing this to yourself.”
“I mean,” he says, fingers sliding down, barely touching skin in a way that make s Sora bite his tongue, “It’s not a total lie.”
“You--” Sora starts to say, but the rest of his sentence is lost in his sigh and Roxas’ smile.
-
Kairi sees the imprint of teeth on his index finger the next morning. She asks him what happened and he smiles and says nothing.
-
“’It’s always ourselves we find in the sea,’” Kairi quotes at him, pitch-perfect, just like they were taught in school. Sora just smiles as she moves against his shoulder, shifting the sand underneath them.
“It’s good not be missing something in the first place anymore, though. Right?” Kairi makes a contented noise that he’s sure is an agreement but it sounds like a lie coming out of his mouth, hollow and ringing. He threads his fingers through Kairi’s hair and watches the sun roll off her skin in waves, like water; skin pale and warm in its wake. Sometimes he thinks he sees it reflected on her clothes, her mouth, bleaching everything a whiter shade. But the hair beneath his fingers is a pretty hue of red, not fragile white-gold, and it’s only his eyes playing tricks on him.
-
“and milly befriended a stranded star whose rays five languid fingers were,’” Namine says, and she sounds proud and satisfied so Roxas drums his fingers along her spine in a muted sort of applause. She lays her hand on his chest and spreads small fingers out, listening with eyes closed. “I never get tired of feeling that,” she admits, “not really.”
“Me neither,” Roxas agrees, and slows his breathing to match hers.
“It’s not really fair, though,” she says thoughtfully, “that we get to be whole, and all the others—that they just faded.”
Roxas looks down at her quizzically. “You can’t be serious. Even after all they—“
“I’m the only shadow of a pure heart,” Namine says (not wisely or contemptuous; just very simply, in her own way), “I think sometimes I’m allowed to forgive.” She cocks her head and locks eyes with him. “You wish things had ended differently, too. Don’t you?”
“Of course not.”
“Roxas, Roxas, Roxas,” she murmurs, in a way that is not sweet or kind at all but mocking something (nothing) that is very different from herself, “fight, fight, fight.” She feels him tense underneath her arms and smiles sadly. “Ah,” she whispers, “caught you.”
“Please,” Roxas says faintly, “please don’t do that again.”
Namine nods, and he can feel her retreating, feel her body warming to Kairi’s not-quite-familiar temperature and her heartbeat (her heartbeat, how about that) speeding up a little, but she looks up at him one last time; says, “You made a promise, you know,” and really, he should be shocked that she knows about that, but honestly, it’s Namine.
“Promises like that, they don’t always follow the rules.” Her fingers clutch at his chest, not desperately, just cataloguing the way it feels under her palm. “They can break through worlds, if they need to.” Her hand curls, suddenly, and he feels the sharp edges of her nails graze his skin.
“You’re waiting,” she mutters, “so he’ll come back. You won’t be whole again until he does. Not really.” And the hair tangled in his fingers, it’s not just red or blonde but this strange pink color; in fact the whole island seems drenched in the same tint. Their eyes are always the same, too, so it’s really quite impossible to tell who is speaking with him.
-
It’s funny, Roxas thinks (before Kairi wakes up completely and realizes that he’s not entirely Sora), how adding more can somehow turn you into less than what you were when you began.
The girl draped across his body stirs, so he dives deeper into his mind until he hears Sora's light snore from the outside.
-
let’s meet again, in the next life.
yeah. i’ll be waiting.
-
The moon is bright and whole in the sky when Sora squints his eyes open. Kairi is asleep beside him, rolled over with her back to him, legs tangled in his. He shakes his head and rubs at his temples, thinking about the last time he fell asleep on the beach (and the time after that when he said he’d never do that again, Kairi, the sand). He looks up at the black sky and says, “Hm.” There’s a sadness in him, one that kind of wrenches and pulls every time he inhales. He doesn’t know why it’s there or where it came from. He holds his breath.
The Shadow contemplates him from afar, bobbing gracelessly in the pale water of the spring. Its eyes grow brighter, twice-reflected light shining off them (but never in them, it should be noted). The boy sees it and tenses, fright and anger distorting his face. The Shadow bends its neck a certain way before it slither glide crawls into the secret place, the keyhole within it long sealed.
Sora keeps his jaw clenched as he works himself free of Kairi’s relentless limbs. If Riku were here, he’d tell him to wait, think it through, it’s probably just a fish or the trick of the light or his paranoia or something. Riku is not here; he’s at home, most likely asleep, and anyway, he’s got his own problems. He feels the cool, smooth metal of the Keyblade in his grip, right and whole and real.
He steps lightly across the sand, like he’s trying not to disturb anything; it’s debatable as to whether he breathes at this time. He swings himself over the ledge, feels the damp blades of grass underneath his hands as he pushes himself up. Then at the entrance of the cave, he stops. He wouldn’t describe it as pain, not really; just an intense discomfort that doubles him over, little pinpricks like fingernails clawing underneath his skin. He bites on his lip and focuses hard on his knees, so that maybe his vision will stop blurring.
I’m not playing sidekick.
And suddenly there are twin blades in his hands, Oathkeeper and Oblivion crossing in front of him, with the sharp hiss of metal glinting off metal. “It’s not your decision,” Sora says through clenched teeth, and wills Roxas back deeper in his mind.
I’m the better fighter.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” but a sound from inside the cavern catches Roxas off-guard and Sora forces him back. He wins this round.
He trails fingers along the damp, familiar walls of the cave, bumps and cracks and mosses he knows well. The Shadow just stands there, dancing out of rhythm in the middle of the enclosure. Sora tightens his grip, blade still and ready. The Heartless twists and pauses for a moment and Sora bends his knees, prepares to leap--
The flames burn hot and unforgiving. Sora is thrown back, Keyblade knocked from his hand, and his head collides smartly with a rock. He groans, as he sits up, rubbing his forearm where the skin is raw pink and blistering. The cave smells like a doused fire, and in the middle--
He’s dripping wet, from the hem of his coat to his hair, hanging damply around his face and he kind of looks like Saix Roxas thinks, and he laughs, pitiful and helpless and desperate; it rings in Sora’s ears.
“So, I might have overdone it,” Axel (axelaxelAXEL) says, and shivers. “Don’t suppose you’ve got a towel?”
-
Axel bends down when he comes through Sora’s door (he really didn’t need to; Riku’s just as tall as he is now, and he makes it just fine), rubbing his hair and shaking it out, like a dog. There are black smudges of sleeplessness around his eyes, and Sora wonders for a moment how long he’s been, well, not--
“Nice place you’ve got here,” he says dryly, fingering the edge of a comic book on Sora’s nightstand, black glove coming back with a hint of dust on it.
“Stop doing that,” Sora hisses, twitching against his will, and Axel smirks, maybe against his.
“Doing what?”
“Touching things when you’re supposed to be dead!”
Axel clutches at his chest like he’s wounded, limbs wilting a little for the sake of drama. “Now that hurts. Surely you don’t want me to go back to the dark abyss from whence I came, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
“I watched you,” Sora says, his tone growing more and more indignant, “I saw what you did to yourself, saw you fading—“
“Yeah, well,” Axel shrugs, nonchalant. “Call it a selfless act. Heartless, too,” he adds, smiling, like he just can’t help himself.
“You gave yourself up for nothing,” Sora continues, “like—“
“Not nothing,” Axel corrects him sharply, as though he’s offended, “It wasn’t for nothing at all.” He looks away for a moment, gaze fixed studiously on the floor. “You got a point to make, O Mighty Keyblade Master?” he drawls finally, cracks his neck and looks anywhere but Sora’s face.
“Bastard.” The word makes Axel grin, feral; he throws his head back and laughs. He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, and when he opens them, there’s a severely pissed-off boy in front of him, two ornate blades splayed out at his sides.
Two.
“Sora,” Axel says warningly, and he thinks he can feel the vein throbbing in the other boy’s neck, all the way from across the room. “Someone will hear you. You’ll wreck your room.”
Sora snorts. “Let ‘em hear.” His grip tightens on the Keyblades, waiting. Axel shakes his head, crosses the room in a walk quite different from his usual, confident stride.
“Sora,” he says, and then again like a mantra, repeating the words over and over until the syllables are lost on his tongue. He is dangerously close, and Sora’s glare is unwavering. He tenses visibly when Axel touches him, hands grasping his wrists and whispers hot against his ear: “Roxas.”
The weapons are gone now, only because Roxas would prefer to do this with fists; a punch to the cheek that lands with a satisfying crunch, a kick to the shins that is completely unsportsmanlike, and torrential fists on a wiry muscled chest that refuses to break.
“You bastard you bastard you bastard,” Not-Sora hisses, until his hits become desperate clutches and his insults a single word: “you,” whispered into Axel’s skin; an accusation, a plea.
“I know,” Axel says, hands on his shoulders and then once more, a sigh across lips: I know.
Sora (or maybe not) pushes back, all fury and indignation and Axel doesn’t much mind. Is almost pleased, even. Doesn’t mean he’s not gonna put up a fight, though, he thinks with a grin, and shoves maybe-Sora-maybe-not down to the floor.
-
(He hums and trails his fingers down the other’s chest, pointing out landmarks and whispering their stories while Sora-or-not-who-knows-anymore shudders and gnaws on his lip, nodding. Axel makes a pleased noise in his throat whenever the body underneath his hands matches up with the old familiar one, the one he knows backwards and forwards. And when it doesn’t, oh well, it’s not so bad; he just traces a new map on this uncharted geography, marking new and curious scars like mountains with the precision of a master cartographer.
This is not a dream; maybe only this is certain.)
And when Roxas (there’s really no use denying it anymore, and it feels so good to let the name roll off his lips) dares to ask that huge, terrible question--how--Axel just mumbles something nondescript and pulls him in a little tighter, closer, until this strange and comforting half-sleep takes them.
Later on:
baby, from dry, thirsty, dreaming lips that are in desperate need of a tongue to quench them, it was raining hearts.
And maybe:
i know; i was there.
But who can really tell what happens in the grey hours, not quite morning and not quite night?
-
And Sora wakes up to Riku sputtering madly in his doorway.
After the initial howwhywhat, Sora pulled on a pair of shorts and ushered him into the bathroom, where he quietly exploded: “You’re fucking Axel?”
“Not, y’know, technically,” Sora says, leaning against the sink, at which Riku grimaces. “I didn’t mean that,” he protests, and runs a hand through the mussed brown spikes. “I just meant it was Roxas!”
Riku doesn’t look convinced. “All Roxas?”
“Yes!” Sora throws his hands up in the air, exasperated. “Mostly.” Riku looks dangerously close to sputtering again, so Sora grabs his wrist and pulls him close, because that’s just what Sora does.
And Riku kisses him, quick and hard, because that’s just what Riku does. Sora looks at him quizzically for a moment, but Riku just shrugs and smiles weakly and Sora decides to leave it at that.
“You know,” he says later, when his mother comes up to ask why he’s taking so long in the bathroom and does he know if Riku left yet, “I don’t remember the island having this much sex before we left.”
“Huh,” Riku says, “I’ve got this strange feeling that it’s just mostly us three. Five.”
“Six!” comes a drowsy yell from Sora’s bedroom. Riku’s mouth presses itself into a straight line and his brow furrows, ever so slightly.
“Right,” he says, “I’m just gonna—“
“Yeah,” Sora agrees, and claps him on the back in farewell. He watches his friend run down to the beach where someone, maybe Kairi or Selphie or Tidus, is waiting, without a doubt.
Axel, smelling kind of awful and with worse bed-head than Sora, comes up and leans his pointed chin on Sora’s shoulder. Sora smacks him away and pushes him back into the bedroom before his mother can yell up the stairs again.
-
Despite Axel’s protests, Sora’s argument that it is entirely unpractical (and lame) to walk around an island in a long black coat proves valid, and after a good amount of digging, Sora finds a pair of too-long khaki pants and a plain button-up, never worn. Axel makes a ‘tch’ noise, but he obliges, mostly persuaded by Roxas whispering something about nothing in his ear while Sora is busy not watching Axel change, nope, no sir.
“You wanna know something funny?” Axel says, rolling up his sleeves so his forearms show, pale and wiry.
“What?” Sora murmurs, flipping through a pile of discarded comic books he’d found beside the khakis. There was some good stuff in there, as it turns out.
“I always kind of thought you were the bad guy.”
This catches Sora’s attention. He crosses his legs Indian-style in front of him and leans back on his hands, looking at Axel from a mostly upside-down angle. “How do you figure?”
“I’m not saying the Organization was a troop of girl scouts,” Axel explains, rolling his shoulders ‘til he hears the cracking of bones, “I mean, there were some seriously sick bastards in there, myself included.” Sora’s starting to look skeptical, so Axel’s tongue trips over his next words. “But we—we weren’t looking for anything we didn’t deserve. I--we just wanted to be real again.” Axel’s lips twist up fleetingly. “Pretty stupid, huh?”
“Worked out okay in the end, though, didn’t it?” Sora’s words are kind, and Axel fights the urge to roll his eyes.
“Guess so. I shouldn’t have bothered trying to find my heart, anyway.”
“Why’s that?”
“Somebody else had it the whole time.”
-
“Your hair,” Axel says to Roxas, leaning against the paopu tree, “is the exact same color as that fruit.”
“Is not,” Roxas protests, and god, does it feel good to act his age again. “It’s blond, not fucking yellow.”
“No, I mean it,” Axel assures him, but Roxas’ lips cut him off and it’s one battle he can afford losing.
Kairi clears her throat loudly as the afternoon sun falls over the island, and it’s Sora who looks up, sheepish and swollen-lipped. “This is not really what it looks like.”
Kairi snorts. “Sure. Neither was that thing with Riku, either, huh?”
“You knew--?”
“Duh,” Kairi says, with a smile and Sora rubs the back of his neck. Something in her face changes, though, and she approaches Axel, two fingers to his face, light as a feather.
“Hi, little witch,” he says, and tilts his head in what is almost an apology, and Namine smiles. “Hello, Axel.”
“It’s been awhile,” he starts to say but she shushes him, and the words that leave her mouth aren’t directed at him.
“Told you so,” and she says it with so much of Kairi in her voice that Roxas can’t help but smile. She waves, each of her little bird-fingers moving, and climbs down, starts to swim back to shore. Axel shakes his head, and Roxas thinks that maybe he looks nice in the light.