Learning How to Love is as Easy as 1, 2, 3

by Fat Bandit

Saix and Xemnas meet in another life. Slash.

Learning how to Love is as Easy as 1, 2, 3

Written by Fat Bandit for Black Fungus (Webeheartless).

Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Square-Enix and Disney.

Warnings: Incest. Under-aged relations with significantly older men. Slash.

1.2.3.

Xemnas dies and, like most people are, he is reborn.

Saix watches from afar and sees that in this lifetime, Xemnas prefers to wear his hair short. His skin is darker than before. Instead of a light olive, it is the color of charred wood, dark brown like the mysteries of the earth itself are wrought into his skin. Like he had split open the ground and forcibly taken its power.

The aura of electricity still seems to surround him. It doesn't strike people with fear like it used to. Now it draws them in with a power that is irresistible. They gravitate towards him, distant planets around the sun, as if he had stolen their hearts.

The old Xemnas once used threats and deceit. This Xemnas still uses deceit, but it is written in the lines of his face. His tone is always gentle and coaxing, his words both sweet and persuasive. His threat is now in his smile.

This Xemnas is different. But at the same time, he is still very much the same.

His eyes give him away. Saix notes this the first time they meet face-to-face. They are the same as the old Xemnas, same as the man who once called himself Ansem, same as Xehanort, the young researcher filled with ambition and dreams of glory. They are eyes that Saix remembers from years and years ago.

Golden, beautiful. Entirely false.

"Father," Xemnas says, bowing his head slightly. The curve of his dark throat is bare and vulnerable.

Saix finds it very hard to resist choking him to death. And then he doesn't. His hands are gripped around the boy's neck and they squeeze even tighter by the second.

Xemnas' frail and thin child's arms push feebly at his hands. His mouth works in open gasps and his golden eyes open wide in semblance of shock.

This must be the most emotion that Saix has ever seen Xemnas openly show. It looks flat and dull on his face.

So in this lifetime too, Xemnas lacks a heart. The same Nobody then, reborn from the darkness into a different body.

"Do you feel pain?" Saix asks, "Are you surprised? Are you in fear?" He is fascinated by this new form. "Your heartbeat is steady. Why do you bother to pretend? You cannot feel anything."

All the emotion falls off of Xemnas' face and what is left behind is a statue, cold and still. His eyes flicker up to lock with Saix but there is no hatred or surprise.

Saix pauses, waiting for Xemnas to reply. But of course he can't, his throat is closed by two strong arms belonging to a man twenty-three years older.

He does not struggle.

Eventually, Xemnas' eyes close. He slips into unconsciousness as easily as if he were sleeping.

Saix lets go. Xemnas' body tumbles to the ground, and Saix stares in calculation.

"My son has fainted in the drawing room," he tells the maids on his way out. "Tend to him and escort him to his room. The one near my own, on the East Wing."

"Very good, sir," he hears in chorus behind him as the door shuts.

He has experiments to run. His notes on the heartless behavioral patterns were still being compiled. Still, the thought of Xemnas' reappearance stirs something within him, an anticipation that he cannot explain.

As expected, a quiet knock raps on his door just before nighttime.

"Enter," he calls out.

He sits at his desk, looking through papers. Household income and spending, taxes, papers on matters of government and politics. H sorts through those quickly and puts them aside. When he gets to his notes on the progress of his experiments, he pauses to pull out his glasses and studies the papers carefully. He does not bother to look up when he hears the squeak of the door opening, or the soft footsteps that pause just before him.

He does, however, look up when he hears Xemnas hesitantly call out to him.

"Xemnas," Saix says. If he looks hard enough, he can just make out the handprints around the boy's neck. There is a sheer oiliness to his skin around the mark, suggesting the use of makeup. It amuses him, as much as a Nobody can be amused. "I never knew you were one for such superficial aesthetics."

"My name is Alexander, Father," Xemnas says, voice hard. But the boy's expression changes very suddenly. His mouth works itself into brilliant smile, small and private in a way that is both utterly false and compelling. "It seems that you insist on calling me by something other than my name," Xemnas says, "What does it mean?"

"It was your name once. Along with Xehanort, and Ansem, Seeker of Darkness."

"I apologize for my insolence, but you are being foolish" -and here Xemnas gives a small laugh- "I have been Alexander for all my life. I would remember having nicknames quite so…striking." His tone is flippant, but Saix is able to detect the underlying current of tension. There is something hard in Xemnas' voice, something unyielding and intimidating.

"In this life, yes. I speak of another, in which you went by all these names. And possibly a few more."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that there is more to you than you yourself know."

"I see." Xemnas frowns, and Saix thinks this expression suits his true face far more, except that it is not harsh enough, not cold enough. "I must admit that when I set out to meet you I did not expect anyone so peculiar," Xemnas adds. "I will pack my bags immediately and leave at once tomorrow morning, it is clear to me now that you have never desired my company. I will impose on you no longer."

Xemnas walks towards the door and Saix turns back to his papers. Saix makes sure, however, to keep the boy at the edge of his sight. He catches the slight pause in Xemnas' steps as the boy reaches for the door handle, as well as the expectant look Xemnas throws back towards him as Saix continues pretending to be focused on his papers.

"If you are waiting for me to deny your leave, I'm afraid I have much more important things to attend to than the whims of a child who does not even understand himself."

Xemnas does not start, but his expression grows considerably colder, which Saix takes in with approval.

"If you would like to stop playing games with me, however," Saix continues, "then I welcome you to come back here at this time tomorrow."

Saix goes back to work in earnest after saying this. Five minutes later, he hears the door close. Until then, he feels the burn of golden eyes bearing heavy judgment. It takes him a moment of quiet silence to recover from the memories he can't help but recall.

The moon shines through the window directly behind him. It cries out to him violently, and he remembers, in turns, a boy with fierce red hair who was at one point his best friend and another boy, blonde, who Saix can remember almost nothing about except for feelings of hope and jealousy.

It is a long night for Saix, and a longer day when he wakes up.

The first thing he does is in the morning is check on his experiments.

It has become something of a routine for him to go down to the labs before breakfast and catch up on the progress of his research and make sure that none of the subjects –Heartless, Nobodies, and humans- have escaped.

Everything proceeds as usual. The Heartless sit quietly, only lunging every so often towards the group of people huddled in the nearby cage.

Saix documents the reaction of humans' hearts to the Heartless. Heart rate accelerates by roughly fourteen to sixteen percent whenever a Heartless hurtles itself against its cage and comes within proximity of at least twelve metres. Closer than five metres, and the heart suffers cardiac arrest. The humans themselves react quite peculiarly, clutching at their chests as if something is physically bursting out.

Suddenly the Nobodies become agitated as well, and Saix moves to examine them more closely when he hears a voice coming from behind him.

"What are these creatures?" Xemnas asks. He stands innocuously towards the entrance door and looks at the Nobody and Heartless with great interest.

"How did you get in here?"

"I heard voices calling me. They guided me here, the white ones. What are they?"

"How did you get past door?"

"It wasn't very hard," Xemnas says impatiently, "I just walked in."

It is most probably true. Saix generally keeps security lax. It gives him a thrill to discover that a maid had wandered into his lab and then use her for his next experiments.

"What are these things?" Xemnas walks right up to the Nobody, who crowd around their cages to get closer to him. He wraps his fingers around the bars of the cage and Saix thinks he sees him gently stroking the metal. "Won't you tell me?" Xemnas asks as he smiles smoothly back towards Saix, his expression sweet and coaxing.

"They are creatures of Twilight. Beings who have lost their heart and are now mere husks of the people they once were, incapable of feeling any emotion but pretending to all the same."

"I don't understand."

"I thought you were going to leave for home," Saix says, changing the subject.

Xemnas presses his hand against the glass cages and watches as the Nobodies fight each other to get closer to him. "I was going to," he says, "but these things told me not to; told me to find them instead. I don't understand why. Or how." He turns his head back to stare at Saix with wide, trusting eyes, "Fath- Mr. Rettison. Please continue telling me more about these creatures. I find myself most captivated by them."

Xemnas' expression of earnestness is jarring with the image of the Xemnas that Saix once knew. It fills him with disgust.

"You already know everything there is to know about them. We are both one of their kind. You may stop expressing all these false emotions. They will not work in deceiving me."

"What?" That hard nothingness in Xemnas' eyes flashes like a shadow for one brief second before disappearing once again into the murky gold.

"You feel nothing," Saix says, "You yourself are a one of those creatures by which you are so enthralled; perhaps this is why you are drawn towards them. You are a being without emotions, and we are the same creatures. We will be reborn forever, eternally searching for our hearts."

"How do you know this?" Again, all emotions slip off this boy's face with ease. Instead, his voice is strong and hollow, as empty as the Darkness.

He was always the best at being a Nobody.

"Xemnas. We knew each other once, in a past life."

"My name is Alexander. But yes. I do find it difficult to feel, I have never felt truly. This is correct."

"We are Nobody's. We have no hearts. We are not capable of feelings."

"No hearts? Then how are we alive?"

"We are not."

"I still bleed. My blood runs through my veins, red as any others'. You cannot tell me I have no heart; that I do not live."

"It is not the same thing. We breathe, we eat, we move, and we act as if we live day by day. But our existence is stagnant. We are stuck in a world of in-between and there is no freedom for us until we find a way to regain our hearts. There is no other way."

"You are irrational."

Of course he would say that. So they are back to the games, then.

Saix is about to reply with a cutting retort but he is cut off as Xemnas continues, muttering, "There is always another way."

The look on the boys face is one that Saix has not seen in that last one hundred and thirty-eight years.

It seems an odd look the face of boy who is supposed to be his son. Like he has been possessed and an outsider has taken over his skin.

Xemnas does not speak after that, but he looks at the Nobody in the cages now and then. His gaze curious and thoughtful.

Saix notices that Xemnas' old personality shines through much stronger every day. The frail young boy persona subtly shifts into something more dangerous, more distant and refined.

After about three weeks, Alexander is almost no more and Xemnas is reborn in his skin. He no longer objects to being called his old name.

Saix looks upon this with favor; his son is beginning to transform into the man he once knew from Before.

But he never liked that man, something sleeping within him seems to say, and this new Xemnas was so much more interesting. He ignores this. Feelings such as like and dislike are irrelevant to a Nobody.

But it is not only Saix who responds to the boy's new personality. The maids who had come to adore Alexander, finding him both charming and sociable, become confused at his new disposition. They also become prone to avoiding Saix more and more often as he finds himself increasingly susceptible to the influence of the moon. The golden sheen of the moon talks to him with a silky voice, lulls him into Berserker mode in a way that he cannot control.

At these times, Saix wants very badly to grasp his son's body. He would tie him up, ropes that would cut and dig into skin and hurt until blood ran free with every movement of struggle; he would hold him so he couldn't fight back, squeeze his neck until the boy's eyes started bulging, and then he would-

This has never happened before. Something inside him is changing.

"I have a theory," Xemnas says one day. "Perhaps we do not have a heart right now. But who is to say that we cannot create them, that we cannot make our own?"

Saix listens while noting changes in the subjects' behavior. It is becoming harder and harder to control the Nobody; it has also become a struggle just to command the mid-level Heartless to do his bidding. Sometimes, the Heartless seem to make abortive movements towards Saix and, for a moment, he feels something in his chest being squeezed. He does not understand what is happening.

"You speak nonsense," Saix says, watching a Heartless pluck into the body of a young girl and steal her heart. The heart seems to disappear in the air, soft red lights that glitter into nothingness. The girl's Heartless lunges after it and crashes to the ground. Her Nobody –a Dancer, Saix writes down- sits peaceably with a listless stare.

"Hearts are one of a kind," he continues. "Once they disappear, the only way to get them back is to find them again, and that is-"

"Be quiet and listen!" Xemnas interrupts. "I am saying, if we could feel even the miniscule amount of emotion –fear, lust, hatred, anger, it doesn't matter which- if we could feel this and harness this, this power-!"

Against his better judgment, Saix finds himself intrigued. This is not a conventional approach; it is scientifically unsound and untested. But it is something new, and perhaps the most fascinating idea since Kingdom Hearts.

"But how would we begin this process? How could we create something from nothing?" Saix asks.

"That is…Let me see. We must use our memories. If we can remember how it used to feel, having a heart, then we can certainly recreate it."

Saix watches the Dancer Nobody. It picks itself off the ground and walks towards its body, coming into a crouch right in front of the girl's face. They touch, nose to nose, and then the Nobody breaks away with a spin. It starts laughing, hips swaying to some unheard music as it dances around the glass room.

It is curious how the instinct of almost all Nobody is to fake emotion.

Saix had always thought that this was habitual, the effect of muscle memory unconsciously acting in conjunction with signals from the brain. A learned habit, almost.

But perhaps this came from something more than that. What if this phenomenon were part of an instinctual reaction to innate knowledge? Knowledge about how to recreate hearts?

"Very well," Saix finally says. "I believe the humanoid Nobodies would be the best subject for this, as they express emotion far more often than the others. It will be difficult, however, to find such subjects with strong hearts enough hearts to create these Nob-"

"Don't be ridiculous. We will use ourselves."

"That would be a completely misguided-"

"Saix!" Xemnas says, and Saix is captivated by the gleam in his eyes that shines with the light of the moon, "You will not disobey me."

His voice sounds exactly like the leader of the Organization and Saix finds it difficult to raise an objection.

The first emotion they try out is greed. But Saix does not care for money, for woman, or for power. There is nothing that Saix wants beyond his own heart.

He tries to focus on this, tries to narrow and intensify his desire for his heart into a solid emotion that he can remember, briefly, from his life as Isa, who would at times stare at Lea with the same feeling.

This does not work. Instead of imagining red, Saix thinks of gold, gold, gold.

He gives up, blaming lack of success on his wandering mind. Proper results would have been more likely from a blind experiment, one in which the subject was unaware of the consequences of the test. It is too easy to become distracted during important experimental thought processes .

When Saix suggests to Xemnas that they switch emotions, he agrees readily enough.

"Greed is difficult," Xemnas says, "I remember what it feels like to want- I find that I once wanted very much. But the actual emotion escapes me."

"Yes. I too can remember feeling greed. But I cannot focus the memory well enough to understand how it works."

They sit in thoughtful silence for awhile. A maid comes in quietly to offer them both tea, a steaming brew that tastes strongly of cinnamon.

Xemnas takes a sip and makes a face of disgust. "This is repulsive," he says.

"It is the same tea you have been drinking for the last two months. You have never complained before."

"My tastes have changed. But why do we even waste time drinking tea? We should be in the lab."

"Of course," Saix says. "But taking breaks is often necessary to ensure clarity of mind."

"We do not have emotions. There is nothing we should need to clear our mind of."

And that is true enough, but Saix still finds it hard to concentrate.

The next emotion they try is hate. But there are few things Isa hated. Even memories of that emotion slip through his fingers like fine grains of sand.

Joy is impossible. Saix can remember joy, but the mere concept of being happy seems ridiculous. A pointless and frivolous emotion.

Hope is blonde and brunette. It is sky blue and a bright smile. Saix cannot understand these memories, they are blurry and fuzzy images that have been smudged and distorted.

All other emotions fail as well. Saix can barely get the impression of gold out of his head long enough to focus.

During this time Xemnas slowly, slowly begins to remember. Things about his past, things about his life as Xemnas, his life as Xehanort. Every memory makes him colder.

At nighttime, when the moon is out and quiet in a way it usually is not, there is a strange sensation in Saix's chest. Something awakening that feels both foreign and new, and yet, at the same time, so very old.

Eventually, Xemnas turns to Saix in the lab one day after yet another failed emotion and looks up at his face.

"What is it?" Saix says after a moment.

"We will use lust next." Xemnas' voice is firm and decisive.

"Why?"

Xemnas says nothing, but his eyes flash a brilliant golden hue that makes Saix's nonexistent heart skip a beat.

"No, you are correct," Saix says. "We should use lust."

Xemnas laughs, something was once breathy puff of air when it was Alexander. Now it is a dead sound, an empty skeleton of emotion. "We will test this one now," he says.

The hand that reaches for the side of Saix's face is cool against his skin. It feels like ice against the heat that comes upon his body from what seems like nowhere.

Saix quivers at the light touch and tries his best to not let his reaction show.

Xemnas tilts Alexander's head up toward Saix's own, their lips touching with the lightest of pressure. His son's lips are soft and smooth, not chapped like most boys his age, and the taste of him is a mingle of the sweetness of youth and sharp cutting metal. Cold.

Saix feels the electric aura of Xemnas pulling him in; he feels that if he is not careful, he could drown in a sea of emptiness. He does not care.

He looks into Xemnas' eyes; the moon is not only calling at him now, it is pulling and pushing, demanding in a loud harsh voice that hurts. Saix listens to the moon, helpless as the water that turns in the motion of waves.

He pushes Xemnas' body against his own, his arms reaching around his body to grasp him close and then he moves.

He is not gentle. Below him, he hears Xemnas laughing his empty laugh. It is a ceaseless sound that Saix tries drowns out with his yells.

He touches and is touched; he bleeds and causes bleeding. When it is over, he is exhausted. He pulls away and moves to the side, turns his head and squeezes his eyes shut.

"Do you feel anything?" Saix asks afterwards. They lay on the cold tile of the floor, side by side.

Saix looks toward the glass cages, the Heartless are restless; they throw themselves against their cages as if making for something out of their reach.

They move towards Saix.

"No. I feel nothing. What about you?" Xemnas says with affected interest.

Fear, Saix wants to say. Fear and awe and joy and lust. Breathless as if the very air around him were heavy, cloying, chocking him with its oppressive weight.

He glances at Xemnas, at Xehonart, at Alexander, at his son. All the images of this man blur together, all personas mixed into one being, this being, this creature who steals and steals hearts and yet never manages to find his own.

The moon strikes Xemnas' face, lighting up his feature in a bright wash of color that suddenly seems alive.

His eyes are beautiful.

Golden.

The thing in Saix's chest stirs.

It is something sweet at the same time as it is horrible. A terrifying new truth awakens in his mind, something that was perhaps there all the time but has just now become both solid and irrevocable.

"…I feel nothing as well," Saix says.

His heartbeat is erratic in his chest, one of the many new experiences he finds thrust upon him so suddenly, and its rhythm thumps loudly like the hollow drums of war.

1.2.3.

THE END.

Fat Bandit: What was that, Black Fungus? You wanted something funny? You wanted some crack?

Opps, my bad ;-O