stand-in heart
by Kaitsurinu (Raquel el Pillo)
"So you can't remember dying. Don't sweat that. Who would want to remember something like that?"
Even his voice is like a puff of smoke, biting and slightly bitter to the distant senses, a sign of impending danger and coming annihilation. But at the right distance, the right flames—warm and flooding. The reason he never says he fears death may be very well that he was never really human to begin with, only fire. Roxas wonders that to himself, while the eternal summer night drifts along around him, unaffected by anything he can muse. And in this moment, he can't seem to escape the attentions of Number Eight and, when his thoughts of escape dwindle, unreachable, he turns them towards the fire starter.
He's lying on the edge of an abyss of stars, stretching his arms straight up into the air, interlocking his fingers and holding them there. Lying, because he's at a ridiculous angle, barely held on the edge of the tall building. Gravity should pull him down. Even the moonlight should be enough to simply topple him over from that precarious spot. His body says no. As he continues to talk, he watches the leather over his knuckles shine. Like it's that fascinating, he won't tear his eyes away for the end of the world.
"It's really too bad that we don't have hearts like we used to, Kid," he says, "but you're looking at this all wrong."
His eyes glow beneath half lids, like the lit fuses to the black tattoos beneath them. They devour the yellow light of the misshapen moon as a wolf may devour it in his search for prey, then turning his praising stare towards it. There's also something ironic in the fact that they are spring green, the color of life in its first, most vibrant breath, and they are both little more than creatures that are dead and cannot find Death.
He continues to talk even without Roxas' response, who has put his chin on his lifted knee and watches the cold lights of this Nowhereland in silence. "You ought to embrace your nothingness. You know—the perks. You're just stuck to something you can't have anymore. It's just pathetic, really!" he says, in a fluid, virile voice. "Not that I didn't have my go of it, either, though." That voice of controlled fire roils into a laugh.
Finally, Roxas turns to look at him, the moonlight glowing gold on his already spun hair. "Sorry to interrupt," he drawls in sarcasm, "but has anyone told you that you talk too much?"
Red hair swept back from his face to accentuate the skeleton grin, he turns that face towards Roxas, grinning as if it were enough for the both of them. "Sure. But I never take it to heart."
Bad pun, but it's the first time he actually feels something pop in the empty passages of my body that reminds him of laughter in a long time. Yeah, I used to laugh. I remember that. And I guess it is better than remembering death. Better than remembering the exact feeling that it was when all feeling was ripped away and tracing-paper copies were left in their places. It's not like I'm ever going to get them back, or undo death. Just like taxes and Axel strolling after me, it's inevitable. So maybe I am looking on the dark side, trying so hard to remember.
Axel is still observing him intently, but now his chin has lifted in pride. Apparently, he has seen the internal effects of his fire, and his pride visibly swells against the starscape. It makes a little arrogant corona that only he can see and sneer at in disapproval.
"Don't fight it so much, Sour Puss," comes the purr of his voice, like the rumble of flames about to flicker into life. Roxas notes the addition of another nickname to the repertoire with little amusement. In the time of joining the Organization—after days of dizzying nothing and something—Axel has barged into his quarters eleven times, created seven nicknames in those visits, and spent immeasurable time trailing him, chatting at him, reclining and creating sparks in the air.
Roxas turns a glare on him. "Don't call me that."
He arches his eyebrows and his dark-rimmed eyes brighten with knife-like humor. Both his hands snap up in mock surrender. "I only meant, don't fight that smile. Please, oh, please, don't kill me, Babe," Axel says in a purposeful rhythm, the one that grates his nerves the most. "Or me, for that matter, I'd be toast!"
Just to show off, an orange and pink spark of fire curls out of his mouth around the word 'toast', like the Wonderland caterpillar. The Nowhereland caterpillar.
Roxas sighs and looks away. "Go away."
"No way. You're a newbie. You need guidance, and I happen to be just the somebody for the job."
"You're not exactly guiding much," Roxas' distant voice informs him. "Just keeping me awake. Go away."
Axel thinks he can hear the halfness in it, like a wolf can hear weakness and nearness of death in prey. Roxas thinks he can see the red of his hair start to shiver in excitement, like the spines of a blood-red hedgehog. It is the latter who chooses to acknowledge this by making a disgusted grunt and turns away, choosing to stare at the landscape below. Maybe it will be enough to send him back to his little nest, wherever it is that he conjures all this energy for solely for bothering him, it seems. And, for once, it is.
Axel considers the newly heartless for a moment more, and a moment more, before his angular body rises off his stoop. Roxas can't decide why his face burns at the imaginary touch. "Alright, Blondie." If Roxas himself were the wolf hearing halfness, his hackles would bristle at this. He issues the next piece of advice if it were not even a quarter of its true heaviness, just strolling away from it as it drops from his mouth. "Just remember that going after your heart is not a smart thing in your current state. You're a starving animal, and you'll tear yourself apart when you think you finally find sustenance. Well—see you again, you know."
"It's Roxas," he tries again quietly, tired, only half.
No more explanation is given before he backs up, flaunting all his smart angles as he bends down in a half, almost mocking bow, and disappears into the hungry black and purple portal.
When he is gone, Roxas unclenches his body from its position, which was the best he could find to reflect the flame of annoyance, and stretches out before the brimming, empty expanse, only watching it and hoping for some understanding. He doesn't understand why everything is some shimmery shade of silver and gray and he has to be black. White is much emptier than black, and he is barely more than the stone on which he sits.
---
Axel had expected it to happen, but he did not expect to be roused from a fruitful night's sleeplessness and contemplation of ceilings misty and gray so soon. He lifts his head from the pillow, feeling a spark of heat run up from the pit of his stomach, the guttural seat of his emotions, and crackle up into his throat and fingertips, awakening. It is Demyx who stands in the doorway with a message waiting in his mouth. And before a word can be said, Axel simply knows. It's something in the way a Nobody's eyes glow and ache when they think about their hearts, sincerely, truly remember their hearts. He can just see it.
A vile little smirk comes over him and he can see the discomfort it puts in Demyx's face. Sure, so it may be slightly sick to remember the night he had helped Axel himself rip a poison heart from his chest—like dying in neon lights and white-hot knife wounds all over again—and now knows it's become his turn to do the watching.
It's wrong to smile so wickedly at such a thought, but since his first halving, Axel supposes there has been a little damage to his humor, bruising and damaging it. And also, it's much easier to grin than it is to scowl in worry. Easier to explain as well.
"It's Roxas."
Axel is standing and getting dressed with measured speed and that unending, pleased smile. He watches the zipper intently as he pulls it to his chest and feels the metal heat instantly from the fire in his body. The fire that killed him in the first place. "Where?" he asks in a conversational tone.
Demyx shifts a little uneasily, glancing down the bone-white glow of the hallway for signs of unwanted company. In the way the memory of a heart, even a poisoned one, sitting in his holy cradle of a soul makes Axel grin in envious rage, it makes him nervous and withdrawn and frustrated. He looks back to his comrade and sees it happen again. "The same place," is all he says, before his emotions take him over and he wanders off, probably to be mysteriously inconsolable to Zexion.
And Axel is left to grin emptily at his own reflection, seeing himself on the night what seems like so many years ago—a boneless, screaming thing of doused fire and pain. It couldn't have been more than two years since he'd died, but he held out from the temptation to seek a replacement heart and ram it, poison and foreign as it was, knowing that as he did, into his chest, praying to whatever god had forsaken him that it would work. He'd lasted for months before death and destruction caught back up with him.
The kid had only lasted a week and a half. He'd barely learned his name, but Axel has found another suitable nickname.
Poor thing.
---
Axel half-expected a tragic little dribble of a blood trail to bring him upon some Shakespearean scene of emotional debauchery and clutching of skulls and wounds, but smiled even fiercer when he saw it. It's almost cute, Roxas, he thinks without thought. You tried so hard to deny it, but you crumble so quickly. You must hate it.
And I must say I love you for it.
There is a silvery splatter trail that is spilt Heartless blood, the shimmery residue of dreams and aspirations not yet achieved and stored in safe, warm places of the heart. Only visible to the eyes of a Nobody, and smelling like fresh air, Axel walks quietly into a small alleyway off into the bowels of the World that Never Was. The walls are glowing and empty but not unfamiliar to him, only a few moments' recollection away from being his own prison. And as he approaches the source of the shifting white-blue and blaze-red light flickering, he remembers a little more. He watches the reflection dance and jump painfully, beautifully with sharp poignancy as Demyx's fingers pull the poison, and the hope, out of him.
And then it is Roxas.
His face is buried in the broken and oozing corpse of a small, blinded Heartless like it is the body of a freshly lost love and his shoulders heave terribly around his face. Axel knows that there will be silvery blood lining the pink scowl of his mouth, flecked in his already spun hair, and running in parallel, and much more spectacular, lines to his tears. He can smell them from here, and he remembers doing the same with the same hungry emptiness. Back arched like a belly-speared animal and thin, weakening arms shaking from the simple exertion of holding a Heartless of nothing more than shadow and vile intentions, he is quite the vision.
The discoing neon lights of lurid pink and despairing white comes not from the whimpering and half-there sobs, but from the chest he is clutching with the other hand, blood pouring out from the burn wound of holding a heart that is not his, and never was. Crimson blood turns nothing white and pours away in winding little pools that do not stop and instead splatter onto Axel's boots in ragged patterns. He only stands there, considering how long he must have writhed in pain as silently as he could before Roxas lifts his chin from the long-dead corpse and lets its blood bathe his face.
Through all this, he still maintains a half-petulant expression and Axel almost has to laugh, until eyes the color of water in places far away fall upon him. For a moment, they see the corners of each other's mind, linked by their stares. Pain is discussed, arguments had, and insults thrown. But in an instant, they both arrive at truth. They are the same now, and it is Roxas who breaks and turns away from the fact, ashamed.
Axel feels it snap with pity and a flush in his vacated cavity. "Roxas."
Roxas shudders away from his name, only a faint echo of what it had once been, and corrupted by death, squinting his eyes close as he rides out another sudden knife of pain. Axel watches the rosy light from his breaking heart, sunken only halfway into his chest and the other half throbbing viciously, glow like love itself on the dribbling of white blood coming from his mouth. Sounds like a disemboweled lamb are choking their way out from behind the lump in his throat, and he spits out glistening white onto the already stained ground.
He's biting his tongue to cage the unbelievable assault of colored pain behind his face, letting no more pour out of him. And his empty, translucent blood rises in his mouth, beading on his lips in glassy shine Axel immediately regrets not kissing away. His lips tremble, but his brows draw determinedly together, and he swallows it. It goes down like nails.
So he never wants to appear weak? A little too late for that, Axel mutters only in his mind, unable to push it through the expression that is dawning slowly on his face.
"Roxas," the name comes gentle now, not the half-strangled and dramatic draw that had shied him away. Axel draws those electric blue eyes again and they rest on a very different sight, a quiet, wordless smile with no quirk of a smirk and a calm, knowing gaze. "It's alright. Take it easy."
With a mouth free of blood, the blonde does not answer him, and temporarily, the teeth of shame and fear transmute his whimpers into a stony, unhappy face and a set scowl. A clever, cute disguise, but they cannot fix his brows, which are keening together like two lovers adrift at sea, reaching up for a life raft that will never come. And the fact the silver trail from his mouth never quite disappears also lets Axel know the truth. He is being watched like a threat through a wounded animal's eyes.
Axel kneels down in a puddle in front of the newly heartless blonde, and wonders, before speaking, what his name really was. Or had been, rather. He's still waiting for some one to say it, to remember him as he used to be. Oh, but Roxas, that person is long gone. All you got now is here and me. And here ain't gonna help you. Or rip your heart out for your own good, for that matter.
"Listen, kiddo," he says, voice rumbling low into that birthing flame tone that Roxas cannot help but hear, "I know you're hurtin'. But you really just hafta trust me in this. I know what you need, and you're not going to like it, but you can't stay like this." He points to the half-submerged, the half-rejected heart throbbing between his ribs and in the open air, which glows furiously in the dark. Axel watches the gold-lined veins pumping hard into Roxas' unsuspecting mind and soul visions and sensations of a life that was not his.
Such a thing will kill a Nobody in their utter jealousy and loneliness.
Roxas tilts his head slightly downward at Axel's indication to stare at the foreign heart, his fingers clutched around its heaving mass as if it could dull the pain of incompleteness, and seems to have some coherent thought over it. But he will not lift his head again. His body seems to grow discouraged, and he shrinks slowly away from Axel in every respect, pulling away from the idea that he may be the same, now.
Axel doesn't let it happen. He reaches forward and pulls Roxas back into the light of the truth by the smooth curve of his cheek on both sides, one hand resting on his neck and the other just before his ear. "Roxas."
The pained, scowling look has gone, and Roxas only shudders in Axel's hold at the name and the implication and the touch. "Axel," he croaks, spilling a little blood out. "Aaax.."
The flame smiles gently at him, with all the embers of warmth he can muster. "I know it hurts, buddy, doesn't it?" When he doesn't answer, he prompts him by drawing closer, intending to tilt his head to keep their gaze linked. But Roxas does that himself, taking the free, bloodstained hand to clutch his wrist like a vice. "You can tell me. Our secret, cross my heart, hope to die. Seriously, can't wait to die."
Roxas chuckles weakly, and still with pain creeping in on his expression.
"What… what are you doing here?" he asks weakly.
"Silly," Axel answers, feeling Roxas sag within his grip, and readjusts one arm around his back, fingers curling softly into his panting stomach. Roxas folds like a paper drawing towards him, no resistance. "I told you this already, Blondie."
Blue eyes look dazed up at him, pain battling exhaustion in them. Maybe even a little relief.
"Huh?" he murmurs, his voice dying. "Don't remember…"
Axel smiles down at him, smearing the blood off his face and spreading it into the creases of his dark gloves. "It's just like you not to remember," he tells him, as he pauses to pull off one glove with his teeth. It drops to the ground and he touches Roxas' face with his simmering skin. "I told you that you needed guidance, and I'm the one for it. Got it memorized now?"
Roxas's eyes fall closed as their embrace becomes complete, his arm falling from his stand-in heart to go around Axel's back, clawing at his coat as the pain spikes momentarily. "Aa," he mumbles in confirmation.
Love seeps into Axel's smile and curls it into an improving grin. "Good," he says gently, noting the little face of pleasure he gives when his lanky fingers touch his temple and bottom lip. "Now, the nasty part."
Roxas responds to these words with little more than a parting of the scowl and a surly puff of air, a nothing noise, neither a complaint nor agreement. Neither living nor dead, neither heart nor soul. He grips tighter to Axel's back. If he finds solace in the comfort of a bony, empty body like a clothed corpse, and a ravished soul to match, the better, and arches quietly into the hand that pushes the bangs—the spun gold stubbornly retains its hawkish wave, scattered across his closed eyes. It's only polite that Axel honor the action with an awkward mirroring action, his angular, gangling body, pushing forward to catch him.
The whirling lights of a bloody nose and drops of sweat now begin to melt in on themselves through their frantic twirling, turning an ocean blue that bodes like ill news on the high, graffiti-stained walls around them. The remains of the Heartless erodes slowly away from his heat, as the stand-in heart begins to rapidly deteriorate, half-exposed to the nothing-air. Axel knows its soon to the point of no return, and if he does not push through the vulnerable thing in his arms, he will be carrying a dead one back to headquarters as it evaporates in his grip.
"Okay," Axel eases him, moving the hand gripped on his wrist. "Roxas, are you with me?"
"Yes." He manages one, perfectly even word, eyelashes still determinedly embracing each other, letting the flames beneath Axel's bare hand warm him slowly to the core like a campfire heats and changes a vulnerable little marshmallow, speared by unforgiving spears.
For a moment—
(What, you haven't heard of a s'more? Come on, try it—Sor—)
Then it is Axel's mouth on his forehead, kissing at skin in a fleeting, thieving touch between his bangs. He's positioned Roxas' other hand on top of the other, caging himself in the Nobody's grasp. "Alright," he warns him. "Just trust me. And hold on to your britches, kid."
The slightest laughter comes ghosting back, a quirk of his mouth brightening his face. "Britches…? Who says britches…?"
Then pain.
Roxas cannot tell if he's making noise, but his lungs are heaving like a fist is crumpling them. Axel's fist—driven, blistering, alien, into this chest, which is so empty already, and making it emptier. Blooms of red and white, littered with blue-hot spots that now represent a pain too great for nerve cells' processing, and his mouth is yawning open, tasting skin. Above him, distant, the voice of flickering, dying flames. "I'm sorry, Roxas." Colors so bright they are daylight in a midnight cage burn him, burn him as if he's dying again, memories not his own that had half-settled into him being torn away.
He's being halved again.
Axel presses him into his chest, mouth firmly above his brow, and one arm arches backwards, flinging a hot coal of dripping childhood, memory, regret, laughter, and piled love, a poisonous replacement, and it splatters in an ominous splatter and hiss of steam. The fire starter does not care, but can only turn to the screaming mass in his arms, who promptly crumples onto and into him, his teeth running along his collarbone as he claws and is lessened.
"No," Roxas keens at him, his fingertips drawing equal amounts of blood from his back, puncturing fabric and diving into his flame-imbued skin. "No, put it back…"
Axel takes both arms and wraps them around his head and bows his chin so that it nearly touches the nape of his neck, smelling the halfness a wolf would know in a dying animal and the tinny, and slightly citrus smell of Nobody blood, both his own and the decorative puddles around them. He burrows his nose into that blonde hair and decides to wait it out. "Roxas," he groans. "I can't. I'm sorry. It isn't yours."
He pants in return, unable to dredge up the words anymore.
Axel readjusts, folding his spidery legs beneath him and making a bony, skinny cradle of arm and crimson hair and knobby knees for the newly initiated. "It's okay to be upset. We have all gone through it." When Roxas seems to want to sob again, Axel shushes him with a smalls smile and starts humming at him a song. It lilts beautiful within his soul—a song his absent heart had briefly remembered, communicating with him across an eternal distance while he lay in a similar situation, with Demyx braving a hand into his chest to pull out his poison—a song from life that was so far away.
"Don't worry, Sour Puss. No one expects you back at work tomorrow, anyway. Take a day off."
There is no Roxas to respond to this with a little scowl and a huff, for he's fallen asleep, held into a little, fiery nest of body parts and drifting off to dream. Axel watches the lights dim as the splattered heart finally dies and shift back to night. And he holds Roxas until he feels like getting up. Which, after such a long night, is not for a while.