Disclaimer: I do not own any of the Square Enix/Disney properties mentioned in this story.
A/N: This is a short little drabble I came up with one night. Nothing really big. Let me know what you think.
What are sunsets? The beginning of the night, the end of the day, what are they?
Axel had spent a lot of time sitting on that clock town in Twilight Town pondering those questions.
At first he had sat there alone in solitude. Not even the wind to bother him. One would have thought his old friend Saix would have joined him there in quiet contemplation. Contemplation that others had seemed to think Axel incapable of. But Saix had changed, just as Axel had. So Axel sat there alone, without the company of his oldest friend.
He thought of the boy who he had once been, before he had come to this town, this place stuck perpetually in between. He had been young, happy, and perhaps a little fool hearted but it had not really mattered. Axel still considered himself to be young, but fool hearted would be the kind way to describe him. Stupid was the blunt description that Axel thought suited him quite nicely.
If he could, he would give anything to rekindle that desire to be the boy he once was, so filled up with dreams, and hopes, and feelings. But instead, he was reduced to a ghost sitting on a clock tower in a town that was perpetually stuck in between day and night.
So, on one of these days that Axel had been sitting on the clock tower, contemplating what twilight really meant, his mind briefly registered the fact that the organization would be getting a new member the next day. Someone who would be vital to their mission.
Axel was pretty sure that if feelings were possible, his hope would briefly register in his mind before being crushed by overwhelming cynicism.
Axel pushed forward, returning to the castle to sleep, like he did every other day.
Axel had thought Roxas' period of silence was a little… strange, but not entirely unusual. He took care of the boy. Not because of some lingering attachments to the boy he so strikingly resembled or the childhood memories Roxas managed to stir up, but because Axel just knew he should. So he did.
Roxas slowly started to obtain better control of his fine motor skills, including speech. Though in the beginning words were scarce, when he did talk, Axel found it quite hilarious.
Roxas would always ask bright-eyed questions about life's most basic experiences, like love and friendship. Axel did not know quite what to say, but he found Roxas' child like perception to be charming.
Briefly, in one of those moments of silence that had been so common in their early days, Axel wondered what it was like for Roxas to have thoughts without words. He knew Roxas would not remember, and probably would not be able to describe what that was like in the first place, so Axel never bothered asking.
Axel took Roxas with him to watch the setting sun, in a ruse of relaxing and eating ice cream. The reality of it was that Axel was hoping that Roxas held certain truths within him that could help him understand this place in twilight. Oddly enough, Roxas did.
It wasn't until long after Roxas had faded back into Sora that Axel understood what twilight really meant, at least for him. As Axel began fading away into nothingness, it all made sense. Twilight was being a Nobody. During life, the day, Axel had been somebody. He had accomplished things. He had dreamed, he had failed, everything. But a Nobody was somebody who was perpetually stuck in twilight. Neither dead nor what someone would truly call being alive.
As Axel faded away into nothingness he wondered if he was truly dying. He had some understanding that death wasn't desirable and he knew he should have been scared. But it just seemed so…
Looking up into Sora's eyes- into Roxas' eyes- everything just seemed so… trivial. If death and nothingness were the same, what did it matter? Axel was going to go either way, so he saw no point in being afraid. Axel made his decision, or perhaps the decision had actually been made a long time ago- maybe when Roxas first smiled at him- but that didn't matter either. Axel was slowly fading away into nothingness and all that would be left of him was the memory of a boy who didn't understand what he meant to him.
As he thought that, Axel wondered if he could feel anything, would he be feeling pain?
He had decided he would be.