AN: Hello world of fanfiction~! If you are reading this you stumbled upon this one shot, and hopefully, like myself, are a fan of kingdom hearts. If you like a bit depressing stories then this is for you. Hope you enjoy, and please review! Flames will be used to roast marshmallows.
Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts. If I did, Axel would have lived, Zexion would have lived to see the second game, and you would hear Demyx' name in the second game.
Rated T because of mild, very mild language, seriously, I think I only used one or two cus words, and character death.
We had been fifteen when I first met him. He had been sitting in the courtyard of the high school, face wide with a smile, and foot tapping to an invisible beat. He had been so unlike me, he was so exuberant, and wore his heart on his sleeve… while I was just plain, my hair side swept into my face, covering one of my eyes, and I was expressionless. There was no way we could have gotten along, he was sun, I was darkness… and yet, here we are today, in the hospital, me crying silently over his dead body… but I'm getting ahead of myself.
He had looked up then, on that fateful day, he had caught my eye, and that large grin had gotten impossibly bigger as he stood and danced (no, he didn't walk, because every one of his steps was like a well choreographed move to a song, so flowing, so beautiful) over to me, almost like we were been good friends that had known each other for years, and extended his hand, and he spoke, his words like a damn song, one that you could never get out of your head and got annoying every once and a while but you still loved it. "Hey! Are you new? You don't look familiar…hmmm…" He had paused then, looking me up and down with a raised eyebrow, as though trying to place if he had met me before. He shrugged then, deciding he had never seen me before, and grinned again, saying "Anyways~! I'm Demyx, who are you?"
"Zexion," I had said blankly, my voice almost void of emotion… almost.
"Zexion? That's an awesome name! Well, Zexion, where's your first class? Maybe I can show you around!" He had said, grabbing my hand and dragging me along, not even waiting for a response from me. Oh how I wish things had stayed that simple.
Three years later we were best friends, graduating high school together, and even planning to go to the same college… But, life had a different plan for him. His mother had died in a car accident, his only surviving family other than his little sister, Naminé. He was devastated. His sister was going to grow up alone, in some orphanage with a family not her own, and he would never see her again. I wish he hadn't realized that he was eighteen. I wish he hadn't realized that he could drop out of school and take care of her on her own… maybe then things wouldn't have ended up this way.
He quit school, apologizing curtly to me, and had sold the, well, it was his now I guess, house, and took his money and bought a small one room apartment. His sister had gotten the room, her being comfortable more important than his own needs, and he had slept on the couch. He got a job at the local music store, working the cash register and occasionally giving guitar lessons for some extra money. He got paid little more than minimum wage, and every bit of that money was spent on the rent for the apartment, and his sister… he rarely ate, always giving the food to his sister, so I would go over there on my break from school and buy him a week's worth of food, preparing an entire five course meal for him on the last day of my visit before I went back to school.
The last day of college, I went over there, Naminé was then sixteen, eight years older than when her mother had died, and moved permanently into his house, not being able to stand seeing him so malnourished, so underweight… so unhealthy, just for the girl who could take care of herself by now. I was twenty six, and he was twenty seven… he needed help out of the hell hole that his mother's death had put him into. So I helped him buy a larger apartment, one with two bedrooms and a larger couch, and I helped supply the food and the money he needed to survive comfortably. Things actually started getting back to a good time… If only things had stayed that simple.
I had been there for only three months when he had gotten really sick. He could barely walk, he was exhausted, his gums and nose was bleeding all the time… he was confused, his vision was starting to become bungled… I took him to the hospital, hoping that it was just a bad cold or something else… but, I hadn't spent eight years in medical school for nothing. The symptoms were matching perfectly, and, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew what was going on… I just couldn't admit it to myself. No, not Demyx. He's too nice for this, he hasn't done anything wrong in his life… he's just helped his sister his entire life, he never thought about himself, only her, so he can't have cancer, he didn't do anything to deserve it. Oh how naïve I was.
The doctors diagnosed it, gave him a year, maybe less… and he refused to take the chemo, he didn't have enough money, and he didn't want to be some person that sat in a hospital, radiation flowing through them, just waiting for the day he would die. I wish he had stayed and taken it… but I couldn't refuse him, he wanted to spend his last days like a king, and I was going to let him… because he deserved to live life without a worry in the world.
Now we get to the present. I sat there, his pale face, his lifeless eyes; they were like a shot to the heart. He's too pale… and his face is too blank. He should be smiling, he'd prefer that… he should smile in his death. I thought, the tears still flowing down my face. We had spent those last days like kings, we took a plane to Hawaii, we surfed with the dolphins, we scuba dived reefs… everything he had always wanted to do, even if we had only been able to do one thing a day, because he was getting weaker and weaker as the cancer killed him. I hated it, hated watching him die… but, I couldn't leave, I couldn't stand the thought of him being alone as he died… So I stayed with him on every one of his adventures, even when we went to England for a week, even when he broke his leg when he tripped over someone on the bus, even when he told me to leave because he didn't want me to see him as he died, and that he just wanted to do things alone so I didn't have to see him in his last days… I stayed, because I couldn't leave. I couldn't leave him, not when I loved him so much… and it all led up to his last days, when he fell unconscious to the ground in Texas, and I had carried him to the hospital, because it would have taken longer for the ambulance to get there.
His sister had down to Texas, she was hysterical, but I couldn't calm her, not when I was resorting back to my shell, the shell that he had crushed into tiny pieces on that first day way back in high school, the one where I had no emotion what so ever on my face, when really I just wanted to cry. Once his sister had left the room, though, it had all gone downhill. My shell shattered all over again, and tears slid silently down my face. His eyes slid shut very suddenly, not a word whispered, not a goodbye said, and, after a second, the constant beeping turned into a blaring tone. It took me a minute to register what had happened. He couldn't be dead. He was just asleep. I didn't even realize it when the doctors came rushing in, shocking him several times with no luck. Only when they left and I saw his face did I finally register what had happened. He was dead. Demyx was gone, forever, never to be seen again.
So many questions flew through my head, so many thoughts at once, that I had to sit down, my legs about ready to collapse. Why didn't I make him take chemo? Why didn't I make him stay in college? Most importantly though, why him?
I stood again, standing by the bed, and closed his eyes. He looked like he was sleeping now… like an angel, so pale and beautiful. Running a hand through his sandy blond hair, which, even in his death, was still perfectly styled into the weird hair cut that he had since senior year in high school, I muttered softly "I hope it was worth it, Dem… I hope you had the time of your life."
AN: Did you like it? Did you hate it? Did the sheer absurdness of me thinking it was good bring you to tears? Review and let me know! Critiques are welcome.