Death of a Nobody
At the end, Axel smiled. Born of darkness, nursed on darkness, the abyss before him was more a familiar comfort than anything to fear. Fragments of himself fading into nothingness meant little to him. He was a Nobody, after all. He had never been much of anything to begin with.
He would have liked to imagine that Sora's kindness, his foolish optimism, would have touched him, if only he had a heart. The thought stirred him a little. Roxas had made him feel the same way. It was the only reason he had begun to work against the Organization. For the off chance that Xemnas was off his rocker and had no goddamned clue where he was leading them and that Axel could find a way for them on his own. Roxas always had that effect on him, making him say and do things he normally would never have dreamed.
"It looks good on you," nodded Axel as Roxas ventured out of the bathroom. The blonde inspected his sleeves and tugged at his hood, a vaguely disgruntled expression on his face.
"Yeah right. It only looks good on you because you're almost a foot taller than me," he grumbled, stopping a few feet away. He looked up in surprise as Axel closed the distance between them, sliding two gloved fingers beneath Roxas' chin.
"No," insisted Axel in a quietly firm voice, "I mean it. It looks good on you."
The memory made him ache, longing for the distant days when he and Roxas had been together side by side. When Roxas was with him, Axel had always felt something. It might not have been the same as having a heart, but having Roxas made him feel real. Having Roxas made him feel attached to the world, as though he belonged as no Nobody had any right to. And when Roxas left, Axel found himself completely hollow, empty of warmth and robbed of his joy.
Had it really been an entire year now? Longer? Had that many sleepless nights already come to pass? And then again, had it only been so few? All this time, he had been so sure--so sure--that he would see Roxas again. That, as long as he gave it his all, he could bring them back together. After all, that was what Sora had done, right? Sora had persevered and was reunited with his friends. Sora was only moments away from his happily ever after.
But Axel was done. He had given his search everything, to what end? He was spent. He had nothing left. (That is, if he ever had anything to begin with.) Was that the difference of having a heart? Did being a Nobody mean he could not hope to be anything more than a helpless puppet, straining against his inevitable fate?
His gaze focused back on Sora's face, only then noticing the rapidly deteriorating corners of his vision. Axel waited, almost expecting something profound to happen in his last moments.
There was nothing.
It was then, as the last of his vision gave way to the darkness, that he came to a sickening, horrifying realization. He would never see Roxas again. His long search had come to a fruitless end.
Despair set in, the nothingness within him becoming a great, gaping maw waiting to consume him. He felt himself slip toward it, steadily falling faster. At the edge of his consciousness, something caught Axel, pinning him to the world a single moment longer.
Pain, sharp and bright, speared into his chest, filling the emptiness within him, pouring itself into the place his heart was supposed to be.
For a moment, Axel felt whole.
And then he felt nothing at all.
-end-