Destiny Blues
Author: Xanthos Samurai
Pairing/Characters: Axel/Kairi
Rating: R
Warnings: Het, spoilers.
Disclaimer: I do not own nor claim to own anything but the arrangement of the words on the page.
Notes: Oh my god, Xan writes het. This is admittedly not my best work and it gets a little cheesy at parts, but I still kinda like it. Axel/Kairi needs more love.
The Paopu Rind wasn't the only bar on the islands, but it was by far the most notorious. The tourists stayed away and the regulars were mostly old men hardened by long years of life and the occasional young man who had run out of hope for something better. The drinks were strong and the atmosphere reeked of hopelessness. It was dim and smelled of bitterness and cigars with a hint of sea salt. The outside was made of driftwood that had grown soft and grey from years of standing up to the strong ocean winds. The porch out back was lit by nothing but a single yellow bulb at night and faced out towards the lonely black ocean.
It was all but written in the official laws of the islands that children weren't allowed in The Paopu Rind. It wasn't dangerous, but nobody wanted their kids to catch the disease of hopelessness that seemed to seethe quietly in the old wood and old bones of the men who went there. Every once in a while, Tidus or Wakka would dare each other to go in and order something, but there was always a long list of convenient excuses that prevented them from actually doing it. They both probably would have been horrified if they had ever learned that Kairi went in almost every night.
The first time, the bartender had looked at her with as much surprise as such a world-weary woman could muster. But not much phased Lulu anymore… Long years and long heartache did that to a person after a while.
"I'd like anything without alcohol in it, please." Kairi had said to the beautiful dark-haired woman behind the bar.
"We don't get many orders for drinks without booze, as you may expect." Lulu remarked to the girl. The next youngest person at the bar was at least fifteen years Kairi's senior and already passed out in a drunken stupor.
"I know… But I don't like the taste. Even water is okay." Kairi answered.
"How about Paopu root beer?" Lulu kept some on stock just in case she needed to cut her patrons off
"I'd like that a lot. Thanks." Kairi smiled a little as Lulu bent down and grabbed one of the tall, dark red bottles out of the fridge under the counter.
"It's Kairi, isn't it?" Lulu easily popped off the cap with her strong hands and handed the bottle to the younger girl.
"Yes, Miss Lulu." Kairi sipped the fizzy, gingery liquid and licked her lips. She was a little surprised that someone like Lulu would know her name, but she didn't know that Lulu knew almost everyone on the island much better than anyone expected.
The bartender nearly smiled. "Just Lulu is fine. Well, Kairi, I have to ask. Why are you coming into my bar, even though you don't like the taste of alcohol?"
"I just… like it in here."
"You just like it, hm?" Lulu pulled a stool behind the bar and sat as she poured herself a drink. "You know, nobody comes in here without good reason. Not even you."
"I guess not." Kairi sipped the drink again and sighed. "I guess I feel like I belong here with all these other people."
"Everyone who walks in here got their heart broken," Lulu told her shrewdly. "They had their dreams taken away or their love melted. Most people would say that you're too young for that."
"Yeah? Well… most people are stupid."
Kairi's frankness made Lulu laugh. It was refreshing having her here, even if Kairi was out of place. But then…was she really?
"My heart… doesn't belong to me," Kairi said quietly. Lulu's expression fell instantly and she watched the girl closely. The color had faded from Kairi's eyes. "It belongs to someone else and they're very, very far away."
Kairi never offered any other information as to why she came into the Rind every night, but Lulu wasn't the type to ask questions. The two of them shared many conversations over the course of weeks and weeks. Eventually, it was as though Kairi had always been coming to the Rind.
One day, someone that Kairi had never seen before came into the bar. He was strong, but seemed hollow, like a tree that had had its insides burned out. That was how Kairi imagined him, with his wild mane of red hair serving as the flame that still burned.
"'lo, Lulu."
"Hello, Axel."
He picked up the bottle that Lulu had placed on the bar as he'd walked in the door and walked without another word over to the rickety and (Kairi had always assumed) out of tune piano that had always lurked in the corner of the bar. A few moments later, a lit cigarette had somehow appeared between his lips and beautiful music was beginning to waft from the piano.
"Who's that?" Kairi leaned over the bar to ask Lulu, still keeping a close watch on him. He was different from anyone else she had seen in the Paopu Rind.
"I don't know much about him, but his name is Axel. He comes in now and then, buys a drink and plays. I let him since it doesn't bother the customers and I like the music."
"It's pretty music," Kairi said quietly.
Lulu studied Kairi for a long moment before pushing another bottle across the bar to her.
"Take that over to him and introduce yourself. Talk to him."
Kairi gave the older woman a look, but curiosity always had been one of her weaknesses. She took the bottle and walked over to the man playing the piano and stopped to watch his fingers dance across the keys. They were nice hands with long, tapered fingers and Kairi rather admired them.
"Yeah?" The fingers stilled upon the keys and the music instantly faded from the gloomy air in the bar. Startled out of her reverie, Kairi looked up and into Axel's face.
"Lulu told me to bring you this. My name's Kairi. It's on the house," she added for good measure. She assumed it was, anyways. She certainly wasn't going to pay for it.
"On the house, huh? Well I've never turned down a free beer." Axel glanced over Kairi's head and raised his beer to Lulu, who nodded once with a secretive little smile of her own.
"So what are you doing in here, Kairi? You seem a little young to be in here with all the drunks and the nobodies." Axel tipped some of the beer down his throat, regarding her with a curious eye.
"Just because I'm young doesn't mean I don't belong here," she said a mite defensively. "And what about you? You're young too."
"I'm older than I look," Axel smirked.
Kairi turned her attention to the piano and the hands still resting upon the keys.
"You play really well."
"Me? I'm nothin'. You should see the guy who taught me how to play. Luxord's amazing." Axel studied Kairi for a few moments, then moved over on the bench. "Sit down and I'll show you."
He was charming and sarcastic and abrasive and sweet and a prince and a bastard all at once. And when he asked Kairi if he could walk her home, she could no more say no than she could not be taken in by his charms.
"You remind me of someone," she told him as they walked along the beach. The moon and the stars were high in the sky and their reflections were deep in the water. They had left their shoes at the bar so their footprints followed them in the sand.
"I do?" Axel grinned. "Who's that?"
"Actually you remind me of two people. My friends Riku and Sora." Kairi grinned up at him, not noticing that Axel looked somewhat discomfited.
"Oh yeah?" he asked. "Where are they?"
Kairi's face fell and for a moment, Axel wondered if she had lost herself in silence.
"They're away… but they're coming back." Her voice was confident, but there was the tiniest sliver of uncertainty in it. It made Axel's chest ache a little to hear it. He would never feel anything like that again. But his emotions had always been simple. Few things were more complex than a young girl's heart.
"Don't lose hope, baby. If you do that, then everything's lost." Axel put an arm around her, his hand settling at her hips.
Without fully realizing what she was doing, Kairi leaned into him.
"I know… But it's hard… Especially when I seem to be the only one who remembers them. You have no idea what it's like to be the only person to remember something and feel something that you know should be there, but isn't."
"You have no idea," Axel said softly.
He turned his eyes up to the sky over the ocean horizon. The moon was huge and glowing silver in the night. Axel could hardly remember ever seeing a moon that large before, not even in the World That Never Was.
Kairi pulled Axel down onto the sand beneath a tall palm tree. He fell smoothly, although it was obvious that he hadn't been trying. He leaned back against the trunk of the curving palm tree and looked up at her.
"Kairi?"
"I'm glad that you're here," she told him quietly. "I'm glad that you're here to remind me of them… I was afraid that I'd forget too."
"I doubt you could ever really forget," said Axel.
"Maybe. But… I was still afraid of forgetting." She paused and glanced up at the leaves of the tree. "I wanted to share paopu with them before they left. Now I guess I have to wait until they get back. Is it possible for three people to share one? I've never heard of it happening."
"I never believed in paopu," Axel said. She looked over at him with surprise. Everyone believed in paopu…
"It's just… stupid," Axel continued. "So two people eat the fruit of one and their destinies are bound together. But what about what's left? Just because the fruit is gone, there's still the rind… and the pit." He stared out at the ocean. "What if all you have left is the pit? If you offer it to someone, will it still work? Or would they even take something as ugly and useless as an old paopu pit?"
"…I would."
Axel turned and looked at her carefully. Kairi was gazing out at the ocean too, smiling a little bit.
"I'd take any part I could get. As long as it's offered to me and they meant it… it shouldn't matter, right?"
"No," Axel said quietly. "It shouldn't."
Kairi turned and looked at Axel for a few moments with her strangely-serious eyes. A moment later, she straddled his legs and gazed into his face. Her body trembled a little but she didn't feel afraid, not even as she pulled her dress over her head and left it carelessly on the sand beside them. He couldn't take his eyes off her. The moonlight shone brightly on her bare, pale skin and her hair blew gently in the warm night breeze. Kairi's eyes stared into Axel's and she reached slowly for his hands.
"It doesn't feel wrong, being with you. Not even when I'm thinking about them."
She placed his hands on her body and he drew her in close and closed his eyes as she kissed his neck softly, then his jaw. Axel opened his eyes again as she moved to draw away and caught her hand. A little smile curved her lips as he kissed the palm of her hand, then each of her fingertips, sucking a little on each one before he let it go.
"You're missing someone too," she told him quietly.
Axel rose his gaze and looked right at her for a long moment before answering,
"Yeah. I miss someone a lot."
"Did he like that? What you're doing to me right now?" She wiggled her fingers against his lips. Axel smiled a little and bit one.
"I never did this to him." Axel watched as her fingers trailed across his lips, down his throat to his chest and began to slowly unbutton his shirt. "We weren't like that. He wasn't like that, anyways."
"Oh." Kairi paused. "I'm sorry…"
"It's all right." Axel placed his hands on hers and began to help her unbutton his shirt. "We were friends and that's good enough for me."
Kairi eased his shirt off and kissed his collarbone softly. "That must have hurt you a lot."
"Not as much as you might think," Axel murmured.
The two of them were silent for a moment. Then Axel wrapped his arms around her and kissed her twice, once soft and once harder.
"You feel familiar too," he said into her hair. "I don't know what it is… the feel… the smell… something…"
The two of them stayed there the night, their souls and bodies twining together in ways that Kairi had never before experienced. The only witness to their union was the silver face of the moon, which soon faded into dawn.
Kairi woke with the sun shining on her face. Axel was gone, as she knew he would be. She was not upset by this. After all, she and Axel carried the same pain within them. As she stirred to face the strange sight of the endless blue of the sea and sky, her hand brushed something unfamiliar and she looked down.
The rind and the pit of a paopu fruit lay under the tree beside where she had slept. Beside the pit was a message drawn in the sand: Because it's all we have left to give.