Nothing will make you feel more alive than going to a funeral.

The feel of your soul splitting, your heart shattering, your mind shredding, and your body sinking is so painful that you could swear someone was ripping your ribs open, stealing your heart, and crushing your skull beneath the iron-toed boots of Death himself. It beats you down to rubble and burns the ruins to ash, only to sweep you under a rug that used to be a living human being. You feel the weight of that death on you, a stone in your chest, and it haunts you. Ghostly mirages purge your mind as phantom rats gnaw off your heart strings. You're left as a shell. A shell full of nothing but ash that has been pressed so hard that it turned into a black diamond.

And then you move on. Just like that. You press play and the world shoots back into speed. A coffin is dropped and covered in six feet of muddy dirt that your tired, blistered hands shoveled in on their own accord. You buried the one person that you melted your ice heart for so low in the ground that they could be at hell. Flames could be licking their casket and Lucifer could be spinning his web of lies and you wouldn't know. You moved on, after all. Your heart is solid ice now. You can't care. All of the tears in the ocean of your eyes has been dry, leaving nothing but sand that blows in the wind. But buried under that sand, miles below, is more water. More tears.

Just because it's over doesn't mean it's over.

Someone can sneak their way back in. Someone can slip in through your eye sockets, crawl through your skull, slither down your throat, and somehow end up curled around your heart so fucking tight that it hurts. They sprout a million little fibers, sewing your heart strings back and tying themselves around your fingers. Your entire being shakes and trembles, fighting against that feeling that hits you like a truck falling from an airplane. It's useless to fight it. That thing has got you by the roots now. You have no choice but go along with whatever it's got planned for you. You're a puppet, someone controlling your head and wiping all memory of that lost one from your mind.

That was the situation I found myself in.

Saïx meant the world to me. Since we were in preschool and he was making sand castles with architecture to compete with ancient Rome and I was role playing a toddler-sized Godzilla, destroying his grainy fabrications in a fraction of a second out of the hour it spent him to build them. Childish creations and destructions turned into the bullied and bullying the bullies that bullied the other. The vicious bully cycle of elementary school and middle grades was replaced by being sorted into the demanding cliques of high school. I was sucked into the class morons, pyros, and druggies. Saïx went towards the Honor Roll kids. We drifted apart.

It was like my fucking world split right on the equator without me even noticing. We talked less and less and saw each other even less frequently. It wasn't until Roxas threw a punch at Zexion until I realized how very far apart Saïx and I had drifted in our separate groups. We were once the same kingdom, but an ocean had split us apart. When I saw him on graduation day with horn-rimmed glasses and an air of someone who clearly thought he was the best thing to walk those grimy halls of some Harlem school, I almost had no clue who he was. He hadn't gotten a haircut in forever and his eyes had long lost the light I used to put in them. Then I walked right up to him and struck a conversation.

It was like those four years hadn't ripped us apart at all.

We wound up going to the same college the following fall, which was crazy. We had moved out of New York, going straight to Michigan State University. He wanted to be a doctor and I was there on behalf of a full-ride scholarship due to my basketball skill. We shared a dorm and, on my nineteenth birthday, we went to a tattoo parlor. I got three; two triangles under my eyes for the shit of it and a small black sun on my hip. Saïx got a matching moon on his own hip and we were closer than ever. Nights were spent in the same bed, entangled in each other's arms, stark naked or covered in homework that never got done. I was the sun to his moon and he was the calm to my storm. We found a happy medium to my crazy life and his strict ways. We settled.

Then he died.

My heart was torn from my chest and I was left to bleed to death on the floor of our dormitory, surrounded by his memories as he was carted straight from the rubble of the car crash to the morgue. He had been so mutilated that the casket was closed at the funeral. When I gave my two cents in front of a room filled with his high school nerd friends and his somber family, I couldn't get anything else out other than "I loved him", but that was a lie. I shouldn't have said it in the past tense.

It took me a year to finally start talking correctly. It took a year for me to go back to that dorm at college, leaving under the wing of my parents. It took me a year to eat again. It took me a year to brush the cobwebs off of myself and face the world how he would have wanted me to. I got a crescent moon on my opposite hip, having the sun still on the other. I stayed locked in my dorm, not wanting to go into that cold, dark place that was the real world.

Sixteen months later, I went to my first social gathering since I buried Saïx's closed casket in some shitty Harlem cemetery.

When I came to from such a night of partying, every breath felt like I had to work for it. My head was spinning and throbbing, flashing red lights at me to get the fuck out of bed and go vomit in the nearest toilet. I didn't move though, still trying to get my eyeballs to stay in my head and to keep my lungs from inwardly collapsing. The stench of sex, drugs, and alcohol were heavy in the room, pressing down on my nostrils like a blanket. More red lights went off and a mini siren sounded with buzzing in my ears as I registered that I was naked. Even more lit up when my hazy green eyes traveled down to see a little blonde head on my chest.

The world suddenly caught up with me, slamming me in the chest with the force of a sledgehammer busting up my ribs and forcing me to drown on my own blood. I hadn't just gone to some fucking college party and woke up in a room full of male and female peers. I hadn't just gotten shitfaced and higher than a goddamn kite during a raging tornado. I had slept with someone in the sexual sense. Such a sexual sense that it made Saïx flash through my mind, scolding me and accusing me of cheating on him.

I got out of bed like I had been stabbed in the face, stumbling over the unconscious bodies that littered the floor. I kicked open a door and was fortunate enough to find myself face-to-porcelain as I dumped my putrid guts into the sterile water. I chocked and gagged, vomiting as if that was my sole purpose for existing. I hadn't thrown up so violently since I had been in high school and went on an alcohol binge. I was so busy discarding vital organs that I hadn't registered fingers holding back my sweaty red hair, a hand rubbing my back as a soft voice urged me that I was alright.

I pulled my face up from where my personal hell had been dispatched, reaching with a shaking hand to flush it down. I saw someone crouch down next to me out of the corner of my eye, fingers pushing through my hair to keep it out of my face. "Hey," the voice of the blurred figure murmured, sounding like he was on the other side of a tunnel blocked with cotton. "You okay? You really overdid it last night…"

I recognized his hair from the head that had been on my chest and groaned, turning my head and spitting up my guts again. Flush, and I looked over at him again.

"You probably don't remember anything about last night, huh?"

"I remember I fucked you senseless," I choked out, unbelieving at how difficult that was to say, "Other than that, no, I don't remember jack shit."

He forced a laugh, still running his fingers through my hair in a way that was oddly comforting. "Let's start with this: My name's Demyx and I invited you because I heard you could sing. My band was performing. Well, we wound up drinking ourselves into oblivion, but you get the point."

"Fuck me," I groaned, turning back to the toilet that had put up with me as my stomach churned.

"Your name's… Axel, right?"

"Unfortunately."

"Well, Axel, to be frank, you look like hell."

Narrowed eyes looked him over. Small gauges. Just big enough to fit a thick Sharpie pen. Blonde mohawk that was nine degrees of fucked up. Perfect blue eyes that were a little worse for wear with a forming black eye on the left and bloodshot pupils on both. Skin that looked like he had been sun burnt, but it had peeled off to give him a light tan. His slightly chapped lips were twisted into a goofy grin, his hands finally leaving my hair as he sat Indian-style next to me, just as naked as I was. Not to mention that he had a really nice-

"Funny enough, I feel just how I look."

He snorted, fingers drumming on his knees. "I can bet. You wanna get some food before everyone wakes up? This place is gonna turn into hell pretty damn fast, 'cause I know you're not the only one that drank a whole goddamn bottle of vodka."

A forced laugh came through my lips, along with a bit of vomit-tainted saliva. "Food. What's that?"

He smirked and stood up, holding a hand out to me. "C'mon, let's get some grub."

You betrayed me. How could you?