Note: Rated M for not-very-explicit m/m smut.
Axel would like to say that they've been cat-and-mousing around the Castle for weeks. He would like to say that, except that even he can't pretend that he's the cat and Roxas the mouse. Not when Roxas has no fear of him, or anyone; not when he is drawn not by calculated intent, but magnetically, as if against his will.
He hates it.
He hates the way he feels alternately exuberant and despairing; he hates the way he feels bound, as he has never felt before; he hates that it curtails his freedom, clips his wings, keeps him close at heel—more hound than cat.
(He loves the way he feels as though he is feeling, as though this, for once, is something actually new and real rather than the echoes of old scripts, the endless repeated conditioned responses and instinct reactions remembered from life and puppeted in unlife. He loves it, and he hates that he loves it, the strength of that reaction stripping him down, making him vulnerable.)
He can't leave Roxas alone.
Axel's always there. That's the infuriating thing. He's never far away. It gives Roxas the sense that he's being watched—and he hates that feeling, the crawling in his skin, wondering where Axel is lurking.
"Why won't he go away?" he demands of Xigbar, and Xigbar's smirk is almost, but not quite, sympathetic.
"Because it bothers you that he stays," Xigbar says.
But Roxas thinks it's more than that, because he can see something in Axel's eyes, something behind the mask of contrariness, something as hungry as a fire. Something that wants to consume him, to swallow him up and render him to ash. He would be afraid, if he were capable of that feeling. Instead, he's simply angry.
When Axel is there, lurking, somewhere following him, sometimes he turns and summons his keyblades and demands, "Okay, you want to fight, let's do it."
Axel never backs down from this challenge. They fight to a draw, most days: fire and light are too much parallel to one another for anything else.
Away from Roxas he is calculating, independent, hot and bright and self-serving as fire. With Roxas he is something else again—by turns elated and sick with terror, and there is a thump and flutter deep in his chest like the wingbeats of a wounded bird.
Roxas seeks to drive him away with violence. He has no idea that he is most compelling with his keyblades in his hands: bright, cold, fierce, unyielding. If Roxas would concede, Axel tells himself, he would lose interest. (The uneven clench-beat in his chest says Liar when he thinks this, but still he thinks it.) But Roxas never, never, never backs down. Even when their combat ends in a draw, which often it does, the look in his eyes is not so much feral as truly wild: not an undomesticated beast, but an undomesticable one.
When he is away from Roxas, on a mission, wandering the worlds, elation and terror both level out, and the world goes thin and flat. The sensation in his chest fades away and vanishes, leaving a familiar empty gap that cannot be filled with fire alone, though he tries. He tries. He cannot readily accept that this is something he needs from someone else, although every evidence points to that.
"Why the fuck won't you leave me alone?" Roxas demands, after another battle that ends in a draw, with both of them pouring sweat and the air filled with ashes and light.
"I can't," Axel says, just as fierce.
"I don't understand you," Roxas says, and here finally his voice cracks, wavers, plaintive and pleading.
"That makes two of us," Axel says. "I don't know what I need from you. I just know that I need it." He bares his teeth, shakes his head, flickering like fire and shadow. "And I can't just take it, or I would have. I've tried. I don't know what it is, but you have something of mine, and I want it back."
"I don't have anything of yours," Roxas says. He almost says, I don't want anything of yours, but looking at Axel now he's not sure that's true. Something is burning beneath Axel's pale skin, and Axel has always been a fire to consume others but now it's like that same fire is eating him from the inside, and Roxas wants suddenly to reach inside and pull the fire out and hold it in his hands, and see it, see the vitality that drives Axel to madness, see the vitality that sets him apart from the other Nobodies.
"You make me see too clearly," Axel says, and for a moment Roxas can see the bonfire in his cat-green eyes, the way he burns himself alive.
Roxas has no idea what to say to that.
If he can't get what he needs by taking, he will get it by offering. If Roxas won't entrust it to him, this thing that he needs, then he must trust Roxas, and hope. He can't see any other way.
For the first time in his unlife, this is something too important to fuck up with too much pride.
Axel stays away for two days, four days, six, a week, ten days, twelve—and when Roxas is beginning to think Axel has gone, is beginning to wonder if he misses that heat, so like and yet so unlike the cold light that is his constant companion, Axel is back.
"Couldn't leave me alone?" he demands, cold, cold.
"What can I say," Axel says, with a long cavalier shrug that pulls the line of his lean body. "I'm a glutton for punishment."
Roxas pulls his keyblades from the air and readies himself for the air-sucking fire as Axel summons his chakrams. But Axel does no such thing. He bends his head; as if in agony, he holds out his hands. His palms are up, long fingers unfolded, long wrists milk-pale with blue-fire veins beneath the surface.
"I don't understand," Roxas says.
"Neither do I."
"I don't trust you," Roxas says.
"Then don't trust me."
"I don't like you."
"You don't have to."
"I don't know what you want from me," Roxas says, and then he realizes that he does know, he does know, he knows perfectly well the only thing that could be eating Axel apart from the inside, even before Axel says:
"A heart."
"I can't," Roxas says, the only thing he knows, the only thing he knows he knows.
"You can," Axel says. "In fact, I don't think you can help it." He turns one of his hands over, very fast, and snatches one of Roxas' wrists. Roxas reaches for his keyblade with the other hand, but it isn't necessary, because all Axel does is put Roxas' hand over his narrow chest, covering it with his own long fingers. "Here. Feel that."
Roxas doesn't know what he feels, or if he feels anything, but the intensity in Axel's eyes is—"It's not—"
"When I'm near you," Axel says. "And no other time. I wanted to take it from you, but I can't. I can't. So I'll give it to you, if that's the only way."
Roxas stares at him.
"Please," Axel says, and it's that word that does it, because he's heard Axel rage and demand, cajole and manipulate, sweet-talk and savage. But never ask.
Roxas doesn't know what to do. He has no memories to guide him. But he tightens his hand where it's flat over Axel's chest, makes a fist of his robe, drags him down so they're eye-to-eye. Axel's breath catches, and he closes the gap, and then Roxas is kissing him. Axel's mouth is hard, and he parts his lips and sucks Roxas' tongue in, searingly hot, scorchingly hot.
Axel breaks the kiss and says, "More," fierce and demanding. He sheds his own robe, boots, gloves, and the look he gives Roxas is almost desperate.
Roxas doens't know what to do, so Axel shows him. Roxas doesn't know how to be gentle; or perhaps he simply doesn't want to. Axel doesn't care. A little pain just means you're feeling—and emotion, unfamiliar to him by now, is so overwhelming that he almost can't feel the pain anyway. As soon as Roxas is inside, the first thing he says is, "Can't you go any faster?"—but after just a minute he's out of words, he cannot speak, he cannot taunt or mock. He is burning beneath his skin. He aches, but not the empty ache: too much pressure, unfamiliar weight in his chest, each beat of his heart like a knife to the chest.
"Roxas," he says, desperately, "Roxas, Roxas, I can feel—I—"
Roxas moves hard and fast, untrusting, untrustworthy and yet Axel trusts him anyway, because this is important—it's too important. And Axel's world fills with dark heat, the low red of embers, the bright coruscating spiral of sparks. Roxas says, breathless, eager, on the edge: "Is this what you wanted?"
"Oh," Axel says, "oh, fuck, Roxas—"
It ends in light and heat, for both of them.
Afterwards Axel looks at him with long, sleepy eyes, and says, "You do have what I need. You won't be rid of me now, you know."
"I know," says Roxas. He feels resigned.
Axel takes his hand again, presses it to his chest. Something flutters there, crookedly. Roxas looks up in shock, into Axel's crooked smile, and Axel says, "Even less can I be rid of you. I could almost hate you for it, except that you make me feel—"
"Don't," Roxas says.
"No," Axel says. "It's hope, and you can have everything else, but you can't take that from me."