Summary: Axel contemplates his name while the sun tells him secrets. AkuRoku, I suppose.

"Do you remember Before?"

"What," snapped Roxas, eyes narrowed slightly more than their previously peeved position. Axel sighed, stretching his legs out further, letting them dig deeper into the sand. The beach was surprisingly lovely at twilight, what with the sun playing off the water and what have you. And Axel, being the nice guy he was, thought Roxas would appreciate it… y'know, after they were all sweaty and exhausted (and in Roxa's case PO'ed) from running from some tribal people with Big Pointy Objects.

"From before your name was Roxas," Axel explained, searching the inner pockets of his coat to find a relatively un-muddied cigarrette. Damned tropical rainforests with belligerent life forms. How the hell could they make their sticks so Pointy?

He heard Roxas shift in something like surprise. "What," Roxas enuciated with eerie calm, "kind of question is that?"

The foaming white of the waves flecks onto the sand as gravity pulls it down to crash and Axel gazes sideways at his companion and near-whispers: "I remember mine."

Then Roxas looks at him full on like Axel just killed Saix and offered him a part of the nobody's liver. "…How is that even possible?"

"I made a deal," Axel replied, tired, tired, tired that his lips barely moved, stupid stymied cultures. What the hell were those tribal types going to do with them anyway? Eat them?

Roxas glares, and his lips tighten, and he snarls. Axel doesn't want to tell, it's not really his story anymore, but he remembers without his consent the filmy quality of the water above his head, dimly illuminated by the noon-time sun and the twisting shadows that promise him treasure greater than the sea. Of course, this is the price he pays for trying to make conversation.

Roxas is leaving the beach, leaving Axel, leaving footprints all over the nothing that is Axel's heart and Axel begins: "There was a monkey, a dog, and a bird." XIII stops, but does not sit, and keeps his back to Axel. Axel swallows back a mouthful of sand and a gritty kind of tired, and thinks that maybe, this won't be so hard to tell. "And they really liked dumplings."

He continues to speak: about the peach, the knife and the old woman. About the island and the battle, about the monkey, dog and bird. About the sea, and the shadows, and the wish he thought he almost felt. When he was done, his lips were chapped, Roxas was by his side and the sun was almost set. "They said my mother called me Lae, in her heart," he murmurs, in a sort-of ending. Fuck, he was going to sleep like the dead when they got back.

"The shadows?" Roxas asks, the first question in a long while.

"Yeah," Axel says, eyes tired and drooping, looking out to this sea, where no shadows lie. It's not his story to tell. He shouldn't have brought it up, but he did, because the shadows where his heart never was tell him Roxas will be here long after he is gone.

Roxas' hand touches his, buried in the sand, and Axel can pretend that the heat comes from the flesh, and not the sun.

Momotaro-san, Momotaro-san

Those dumplings on your waist

Won't you give me one?

I'll give you one, I'll give you one

If you come with me, I'll give you one.