author's note
This story is set after Kingdom Hearts 2. It ignores any games but KH1 and KH: CoM. It ships Sora/Riku and Roxas/Axel, and in fact assumes that Axel is Riku's Nobody. Of course the setting and characters do not belong to me.
prelude
post castle oblivion »
There was a sudden snapping feeling, like some stretched part of Ienzo's being had finally broken and returned to himself. Just the sensation for an instant; then flashes of memory, foreign but still his, burst starbright into his thoughts, pounding sharply at his temples.
There had been another part of him all along, linked only by the thinnest strand of the soul they still shared. The shell, Zexion…. They were alike, but different. Ienzo had become a Heartless, but Zexion was without a heart, not even a whole person, a Nobody.
Suddenly he was Ienzo, but with Zexion present inside him, in memories and in a cold voice curling at the back of his mind.
Zexion was curious. An image coalesced mist-like in Ienzo's thoughts: a white-stone room filled with thirteen markers, all glowing blue. And because Ienzo was curious, as well, he obliged. Darkness pooled beneath his feet, icy black tendrils climbing his legs, and in a moment the portal swallowed him. He traveled through the suffocating black in-between (the journey as uncomfortable as always, but something he was used to) until Zexion rang with the familiar resonance of the room in the vision he had given Ienzo.
The darkness loosed him into the stark white contrast of Proof of Existence. Thirteen stone markers stood melancholy testimony to the Organization that never should have existed.
They weren't all blue now, though. The markers of Vexen, Lexaeus, Larxene, and Marluxia were a dull red. Ienzo knew the names because Zexion knew them; he also recognized Vexen and Lexaeus as being to Even and Elaeus what Zexion was to him. Zexion's marker, however… it had turned purple.
Destroy it, Zexion whispered.
Ienzo nodded grimly and raised his weapon.
post door to the light »
"I've seen him destroyed twice," Ienzo mused. Axel stood in the alley below, lit harshly in neon glow and clearly struggling to regain his senses. The other three Wraiths were with him; Lourd and Vane lounged against the stone wall of the building while Braig stood rigid and thoughtful, watching Axel with the same intense curiosity Ienzo displayed.
"He isn't like us," Braig said. "Nor like the others."
"We still existed when our shells were destroyed," Vane pointed out. Dry laughter perpetually tainted his voice. He was so like Saïx, and yet so different; he was like a Saïx who only possessed the berserk half of his nature, not the reserved, serious part the Nobody had nearly always displayed. "The others' Heartless were destroyed long before their shells were."
Ienzo nodded. He had been thinking the same thing: for Axel there must exist somewhere another half, but it wasn't a Heartless. And if it wasn't heartless and it wasn't nothing at all, then it must be… whole. "He must be as Roxas was," he said. "But Roxas met his other half. Axel… hasn't."
Shadows began pooling around Axel, growing and forming into solid shapes. The effect was subtle, and Ienzo had to watch closely to be sure he wasn't imagining things; the blazing neon lighting of the city fluctuated, which made the shadows that were born where the light ended deceptive. But the darkness bloomed, and glowing golden eyes punctuated it, all of them fixed on Axel. It was all wrong.
The heartless did not come after nobodies. The only nobody that had ever interested them was Roxas. And that had been because Roxas bore a—
Axel readied himself to fight, but when he reached to summon his weapons—the chakrams, Zexion whispered, he had borne as the Flurry of Dancing Flames—he brought a keyblade to his hands instead. It looked like his chakrams joined together into one weapon, so much so that someone who knew less about keyblades than Ienzo wouldn't have been able to tell its true nature… but the heartless knew what it was instinctively. Their movement was jerky and erratic. They focused on Axel, completely intent but also hesitant. The keyblade was both alluring and repulsive to them. It had the power to destroy them, but with the keyblade came a powerful heart, one that might finally satiate them.
But Axel had no heart. He was a Nobody. The keyblade was a weapon of the heart, so how could it be wielded by a Nobody? Roxas had tormented Xemnas with that question, but the Superior never found the answer. Ienzo, though, was beginning to suspect what it might be.
There was more to keyblades than anyone had ever guessed. Ienzo had been playing with the hearts left behind from Xemnas' machinations, sure that they would help him figure out what he was missing. This encounter with Axel just brought him one step closer. He could feel that he was so near to understanding—it was the feeling of a word at the tip of one's tongue, so close, but just out of reach.
Today, he felt, he would find the answer.
author's note
I have one more chapter for this story written. I don't plan to continue it beyond that unless there is interest in it. So if you'd like to see where it goes, please review. And in case anyone was confused by the headings, the first bit took place just after Chain of Memories, the second shortly after the end of KH2.