Adieu

By: YukaiChick

Author's Note: This is what I like to call a "Coping Fic." It was inspired by a Real-Life Event. (Which doesn't happen real often, so don't get used to it. Usually I get plot bunnies from the creatures living in my head.) Anyways...

My French teacher died recently.

This Fic is written for and in memory of Mme. M, who would probably appreciate that I am using French references in a story.

WARNINGS: DeathFic, language, some inappropriate use of chakram.

PAIRINGS: This is NOT a Namixel. There is some Namixas, but no Namixel.

KEY: Anything in italics are Namine's thoughts. (Except for the little song excerpt in the beginning, obviously.)

DISCLAIMER: Nope.

Reviews = Love

Well, here you are.

I'll see you again

When the stars go out,

And the moon turns red

Over One Tree Hill.

-U2, "One Tree Hill"

"Sora…you're lucky."

The spiky-haired Nobody looked up at his slumbering brunet Other, floating in peaceful slumber inside the monochrome, flowery stasis pod he'd been placed in exactly one year previously. A thousand emotions were flashing through the Nobody's periwinkle-blue eyes, but all the determination, all the fight, all the hardness, all the Roxas…was gone.

The blond let his silver and gold Kingdom Key slip from his fingers and fall to the bright white floor with a sharp clank. A minute later, it vanished in a swirl of bright light and reappeared next to the sleeping Keyblade Wielder in another burst of light.

Roxas let out a dry, humorless chuckle. "Looks like my summer vacation is…over," he whispered. He knew what was coming now. Perhaps a part of him had known all along that this was to be his fate.

A pure bright light filled the entire room, blocking out Roxas, the pod, and Sora from view. When the light faded a moment later, the Key of Destiny was gone.

Namine watched the scene for only a minute longer from the window she'd created, similar to the portals of Darkness the Organization used to travel, only this one was too small to move through. After Sora opened his eyes, a shade darker than Roxas's pale blue orbs, then yawned and stretched, Namine turned away and closed the window with a wave of her pale arm. Huddling in the tiny corner of nothingness Riku had let her escape to, she closed her sky blue eyes tight and let the tears fall freely, staining her pretty little knee-length white sundress.

"R-Roxas," Namine sobbed, the words stumbling out over her tear-choked tongue. "I'm n-never going to s-see you again…I'm so sorry." And the last thing I said to you was that we'd meet again…Was that a lie too, like everything else in our lives? She threw her arm up over her face, blocking out the hateful whiteness of her surroundings, interrupted only by Nobody symbols floating up, down, back, forth-drowning her.

"Yo! Memory witch!"

Namine looked up quickly, pale blonde hair flying away from her face. How could anyone have found me here? Riku said I would be safe from DiZ and the Organization when he let me run away!

Hang on. I know that voice…

Sure enough, standing not three feet away was a very thin Nobody wearing the long black coat of Organization XIII, coupled with black boots and gloves. The silver tassels and clasps on the front shone dully in the pale gray light, and Namine found herself briefly mesmerized by them…until the Nobody threw off the coat's hood, revealing a mass of long, flaming red spikes, a pointed face, and poisonous green cat-eyes with little black tears tattooed underneath.

Axel… Namine stepped back to the nonexistent wall of her place, her turquoise sandals making no noise against the gray ground and her eyes wide with fear.

"I see you remember me. That's good. Glad to see you got it memorized." Axel's mouth twisted into a sneer, and in a burst of white-hot flames that Namine felt even on the other side of her little hiding spot, he summoned his chakram to his hands. Then he pointed the deadly tip of one of the wheels at her chest.

"I'm only going to ask you this once," he said, his eyes turning into hard emeralds and his mouth settling into a thin line. "Where. Is. He."

"R-Roxas?" Namine stammered, the threat of imminent destruction making it hard to think.

"Don't you dare play dumb with me, bitch!" Axel yelled. "It took way too long to find you for you to pull any of that! Where is Roxas, and remember that I could kill you in an instant if I have to, and DiZ as well! I'm a desperate man, Namine!"

"Axel," Namine swallowed hard, wracking her brains for a way to get what had just happened to the former thirteenth member of Organization XIII through to him, and in a way that wouldn't get her killed. Finally, she decided on the simple truth, and slowly stretched a thin arm out behind her, desperately trying to concentrate enough through the haze of fear to summon a portal like Riku had taught her to do. "Axel…he's gone."

"What?" Axel's voice was softer than Namine had ever heard it back in Castle Oblivion, and that simple word contained none of his usual smugness that she'd thought permanently engraved into the man. His eyes widened, and he lowered his chakram slowly back down to his side. "No…Roxas can't be gone." He shook his head wildly, as if that simple action would make it untrue. "You're lying!" He snarled, and in a flash the chakram was pointed back at Namine's chest, this time with a hint of flame playing around the tip.

Namine bit her lip, but hearing the sound of desperation in Axel's voice, coupled with the heavy, sick knowledge that she wouldn't be able to see Roxas anymore, caused the tears she'd been holding back to spill out of her eyes again. Closing her pale blue orbs once more and fully expecting Axel to decide at any moment that she'd outlived her usefulness and slice her in two with a flaming chakram, she opened another window with a wave of her hand.

"What the hell?" Axel swore, going to the window and looking in at Sora, Donald, and Goofy, standing together in the pod room and trying to figure out why they were even there in the first place. Namine saw anger, sadness, longing, and even a brief flash of joy go through his cat's eyes all in the same instant-before he burned the window in a flash of flames and turned to Namine with his face so livid that she flinched back against the edge of the nothingness in terror.

"What the FUCK did you do!?" He yelled. "How could you do that to Roxas? I thought you loved him! But I guess you were just a puppet all along, huh, bitch, just dancing along to what DiZ told you to do-"

"Shut UP!" Namine yelled, and Axel actually did, for a minute, his eyes going wide at the quiet girl who'd dared to talk back to him, now sobbing her nonexistent heart out.

"I can't love, Axel," Namine cried, looking at a spot on the ground which was infinitely more fascinating than some redheaded, annoying, loudmouthed Nobody. "I'm a Nobody, remember? I don't have a heart. How could I love Roxas without a heart?"

"Screw DiZ," Axel said, so quietly that Namine had to look up at him and strain a little to hear. "If you feel it inside, then you love him. That's that. Screw what anyone else says."

"Axel…" Namine murmured softly, not sure how to tell him what that meant to her.

"And you know, you should get out of here. If I can get in, the rest of the Organization can too."

Axel then let out a deep sigh and ran a black-gloved hand through his mass of spiky red hair. "Look, kid," he said. "I'm going to get Roxas back. I said I would, and I will. I'll come find you when I get him, OK?"

"It won't work," Namine said, shaking her head so that pale blonde hair flew around it in a soft cloud. "Even if you do somehow succeed in turning Sora into a Heartless, Roxas has merged with him now. He won't come out. You'll just destroy them both."

Axel laughed, a cold sound that made Namine cringe. "It'll work for me," he said confidently. He held his hand up against the edge of the nothingness, and tendrils of inky-black darkness sprung out of the ground, coiling around themselves and pushing out to create a thin portal. "And if you get in my way…" He slowly and deliberately lifted one of his chakram again, and again aimed a sharp tip of it at Namine's chest. "Well, you don't want to get in my way," he said with a dark smirk. "Got it memorized?"

Namine let out a high-pitched squeak and pushed herself up against the edge of the nothingness. Axel, still smirking slightly, stepped through his portal. The dark tendrils vanished a second later, and the Flurry of Dancing Flames had left.

Sighing slightly, Namine sat down and pulled out her spiral-bound sketchbook from a pocket of her dress. She flipped through it, looking at all the pictures of Roxas she'd drawn. Roxas in his black Organization coat, running through the empty, cold, wet streets of The World That Never Was, heading off to find the answers to his being that would result in his death. Roxas, Hayner, Pence, and Olette sitting on the Twilight Town clock tower. Roxas eating sea salt ice cream, which he'd loved to grab with Axel after a mission or eat with the three friends DiZ and Namine had created for him. Roxas's dirty-blond hair, which stuck up on one side and down on the other like he'd never even bothered to brush it, though he'd told Namine that once he'd attacked it with a comb for an hour and it still wouldn't look neat. Roxas's blue eyes, just a bit lighter than Sora's and so serious. While Sora's cerulean orbs were always twinkling with mirth and he always had a smile on his face, Roxas had been naturally withdrawn. Namine had felt it was an accomplishment to get those eyes to light up or to get him to laugh. Roxas in his street clothes, which Namine had designed herself in order to help throw off the Organization. (She thought fleetingly that she was better at doing boys' clothes than girls', and looked sadly down at her plain white dress, wishing she could pull off something with more color.) Roxas with Axel, his best friend and fighting partner, who was still searching for him even now…

And finally, Roxas holding Sora's hand, which Namine had drawn only two nights ago, intending to take it to Roxas and show him his fate. Perhaps then something could be done. But in the end, it was like she herself had said. "Some things…really ARE better left unsaid." And so Roxas had seen that particular picture only when it was too late, and had gone to his death ignorant, as far as Namine knew.

Namine thought of what Axel had said. "If you feel it inside…that's that." Did I love Roxas? She wondered. Then inspiration hit, like one of Larxene's lightning bolts. Namine pulled her pencil free of its spiral prison, flipped to a fresh page in her sketchbook, and began to draw.

She didn't know how long she sat there, hunched over the sketchbook, drawing and rubbing away. It could have been a few minutes, or a few hours, or even a few days. But when she finished, she sat back on her heels and admired her work for a minute before tearing it out of the sketchbook and dropping it to the ground. It would now forever be a part of the nothingness, a silent tribute to Roxas.

Namine then remembered what Axel had said about the other members of Organization XIII being able to find her here, and decided it would be best if she left. Quickly. She tucked her sketchbook and pencil securely away in her dress, then stood and held out her hand, eyes narrowed in concentration. Before long, black tendrils had sprung from a pool in the monochrome ground and had pushed out into the gray nothingness to create a portal.

Before stepping through, Namine closed her eyes and filled that corner of nothing with all her memories of Roxas. Then she whispered one last word (left over from DiZ's failed attempt to teach Riku French, which she had eavesdropped on) and stepped through. When the last black tendrils had vanished, the Memory Witch was no longer there.

No one ever came to that particular corner of nothingness ever again, but if they had, they would have seen a drawing on the gray ground of a tall clock tower, stretching up to the heavens and touching the clouds. Sitting at the top of that clock tower, a pile of sea salt ice cream at their side, was a boy and a girl, holding hands. The girl, wearing sandals and a short white dress with shoulder straps and scalloped hem, looked at peace with the world, serene and happy, her eyes closed in the picture of bliss. The boy, who had spiky, messy hair and was wearing a short-sleeved jacket, baggy pants, and sneakers, had a slight smile on as well, and his eyes looked like twilight.

On the bottom of the picture was written, in neat cursive: Roxas…Je n'oublie pas vous.

And if a person listened very hard in that corner of nothingness, they would have heard a girl's voice whisper one single word.

Adieu.

Author's Note: A few words of explanation about the French at the end for anyone who hasn't taken four years of French like me and didn't understand what just happened.

The sentence written at the bottom of Namine's drawing means "Roxas…I forget you not."

The word "Adieu," is also significant. In French, there are many ways of saying "good-bye." The most common is "Au Revoir," which means, literally, "Until we see again," or "Until I see you again." There's also "Ciao," which means "Bye," and "A Bientot," which means, "See you soon." But "Adieu" is a very final type of goodbye. It means, literally, "Before God." If you say "Adieu" to someone, it means you're not expecting to see that person again, ever. Which is why I used it in this Fic…because if someone dies, then you DON'T see them again.

I'm also assuming Namine can make portals. I mean, she portaled Kairi out of the cell Saix had trapped her inside in "Kingdom Hearts II," right? And the windows…well, it's only a step up from portals to windows. I'm making that bit up though, I've seen and heard nothing that would imply Nobodies can make windows.

So...how about a review?

~YukaiChick~