Author's Notes: This turned out surprisingly genfic-ish, considering that I originally intended it to be at least T-rated. Strange, how those things work. Well, usual disclaimers apply - not mine, don't own, etc.

For a long time, there is nothingness.

Oh, there are things, that's for sure. Roxas is surrounded by stars, spiraling wild and out of control, twisting just out of his grasp on every side. In some vague way, Roxas knows it isn't real, because he's falling headlong into a vast abyss, wind ruffling his hair and whipping through his fingers. Things like that don't happen in the real world. He is alone. Despite the stars and wind, Roxas knows beyond a doubt that what surrounds him is nothingness.

He thinks back to his last (not-so-)concrete memory. There are flashes left, that's all : Wide smiles, the taste of ice cream. A flash of red hair and heat, overwhelming. A voice, but no words.

He is alone.

There seems to be no end to Roxas' downward journey. He falls for minutes – hours – days – years – centuries, forever, surrounded by stars and the vast emptiness of nothing.

When he lands, it is sudden and startling and not at all the bone-crunching, head-splitting end that Roxas had imagined. He opens his eyes suddenly and he is blind, or rather the opposite of blind, surrounded by white walls, white floors, white ceilings. There is pressure on his chest, crushing in its intensity, and as he gasps out a choked breath, a voice speaks from somewhere behind him and to his left.

The voice is too loud after so much silence, brittle and rough and warm in all the wrong ways.

"Took you long enough," says Axel.

***

For a long time, and despite Axel's best efforts, Roxas refuses to acknowledge him. Instead, he wanders around this white room, takes in the solidity of the walls, the lack of windows, the absence of doors. Eventually he decides that this must be Hell or something like it if he is meant to endure eternity trapped in this stupid white cell with only Axel for company.

From the opposite wall, Axel tracks his movements with sharp eyes. He says, "I was under some damn specific orders."

Says, "I didn't know what to expect."

Says, "Talk to me, man."

Says, "Roxas?"

To his credit, he stops trying eventually, instead leaning against one of the white walls of their white room and raking an impatient hand through his hair. Axel, Roxas senses, is not used to this – to being thwarted. There is some small vindication that Roxas gains from his seemingly-innate ability to frustrate.

They wage quiet war like this for a while. Axel sprawls across every horizontal surface he can find, and some of the vertical ones as well, and Roxas, having found a blue marker rolled halfway under a chair, amuses himself by drawing. He draws loops and swirls, abstract notions splashing color across the white wall. He draws flames and keys and heart-shaped moons, trying to put things into an order that he understands.

They do not sleep – it seems unnecessary, somehow. And they wait.

Eventually, Axel begins whistling, and the sound is high-pitched and grates on every one of Roxas' already fraying nerves. He manages to ignore it for several hours – more, in fact, than he'd given himself credit for – and then, his patience expired, he turns around in a fit of pique and snaps, "Shut up, Axel."

What he expects is a smirk and a refusal, coupled with the hollow, evanescent wisp of what might once have been annoyance. What he does not expect is the sudden and torrential rush of irritation, nor the subsequent waves of sadness, happiness, anger, desire, grief, as though his heart-which-is-not has suddenly opened the floodgates and decided to take him on the emotional equivalent of a roller-coaster ride. It hurts, dammit, and he clutches his chest, gasping for air through the sobs wracking his body.

"Right," Axel says, "there's that, too."

It takes Roxas a moment to understand the implications – that Axel had been anticipating this, that he had known. When he regains his wits and his breath, Roxas stands and stalks to where Axel is sitting. The intent is to punch that self-satisfied grin right off of Axel's stupid face, but the result, it seems, is his fingers wrapping around Axel's throat and tightening.

"What did you do," he snaps, and Axel bats the hand away.

"Nothing. You just got your heart back."

It's absurd. The very idea is iabsurd/i, that all it took was Roxas' death to gain the thing for which he'd spent his entire not-life searching. But in its absurdity, there is truth, partially because it's so stupid it could be plausible and partially because Axel has never lied to him.

(Which isn't to say he's never danced around details or avoided topics, but that's beside the point.)

Roxas jerks back as though he's been burned, his eyes going cold and hard as he stares at Axel. "You're serious," he says, and it's not really a question as much as it is a half-formed plea. "My heart."

"Heart. Corazón, couer. You got it." Axel is frustratingly nonchalant about the whole thing, that stupid smug smirk playing across his face. "Funny, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Ha, ha. Funny." Roxas scowls and pulls away, leaning against the opposite wall and rubbing his fist into tired eyes. This is beyond him, he thinks, wildly and somewhat disjointed. This is not something he knows how to handle. When he looks up, Axel's just standing there, his smirk fading – and it's with a significant sense of horror that Roxas realizes he's crying.

"Whoa, Rox," Axel says, his voice still brittle but now tinged with apprehension. "That's heavy shit."

"Shut up," Roxas says again, and cringes when his voice breaks and blurs the last syllable.

The silence that falls between them is tense, pregnant with words unspoken and a mutual lack of understanding. Roxas digs his fingertips into his hair and tugs, trying to ground himself, to give himself an anchor. And Axel just stands there, watching him with an unreadable expression on his face.

"I'm not sure I'm okay with this," Axel says after a long moment. "This heart thing, it seems pretty overrated so far."

It seems to be the only thing that Axel has said so far that Roxas agrees with.

***

Things are tense after that. They circle each other like planets in opposing orbits, or magnets with the same charge – the static between them is almost tangible, and it snaps like sparks across their skin whenever they get too close. Roxas is still angry. It seems that he'd underestimated his ability to hate Axel, possibly because he had no frame of reference on which to base the sensation of hate; plus, Roxas had always sort of figured that the only reason he and Axel got along nearly so well was because they were incapable of dissonance.

Now, though – now, they can rage and hate all they want.

The thing about Roxas, though, and the same can be said of Axel, is that they're mutually too lazy to want to maintain so much negativity. They just simply can't be arsed to waste so much energy on hatred when apathy is so much easier to achieve, so the hate lasts only a short time before it dissipates into the atmosphere.

Roxas has no concept of time in this white room. It passes quickly and slowly and around in circles, and he has no way of measuring it (no clock, no watch) and no way to keep track. He's been there hours, or days, or years, he doesn't know. They don't sleep; there is no night and no day. There is just time, and the brilliant blinding whiteness of their room.

When Axel apologizes, Roxas thinks he must finally be going crazy. "I'm sorry, I think I just hallucinated," he says, staring at Axel. "What?"

"No need to be a dick about it, Rox," Axel says, clearly affronted. "I was just saying."

"So – wait, you really said that?" Roxas brushes his fringe out of his eyes, just so he can stare at Axel with greater accuracy. "You just apologized to me? Are you finally losing it, Axel? Is this room getting to you?"

"God, fuck off, I'm sorry I even said anything," Axel says, irritated. He kicks back against the wall and avoids Roxas' eyes, and they are at a stalemate.

***

"It's okay, you know," Roxas says, after a long, long time. "The whole – thing. You know."

Axel hesitates, then turns to look. "Okay?"

"Yeah. I mean – it's not like I didn't know what you were doing. Okay, well, at first I was kind of in the dark, no thanks to DiZ and his memories, but at the end .. yeah, I knew what was going on. I figured you wouldn't just kill me because you wanted to." Roxas shrugs, watching his fingers twine in his lap. "There are always orders."

"You're not pissed?"

"Hell yeah I'm pissed." Roxas half-smiles. "But that doesn't mean I don't understand."

He looks up and matches Axel's gaze, and there is something that passes between them in that moment, something quiet and calm and unspoken that lingers like butterflies in the air. And Roxas thinks, maybe, just maybe, in this white room with its white walls, no windows and no doors, maybe – things will be okay, after all.