Every member of the Organization had his or her own little hobbies, the things they did to make themselves feel more real in the tattered remnants of soul, of self, left to them. Xemnas disapproved mightily of wasting time and effort, but even he had to admit that the single-minded pursuit of their goal lacked entertainment value as far as reasons to continue existing went. For a group of people lacking one of the major fundaments of humanity and possessing assorted personality disorders of an antisocial type, an alternative outside obsession or two actually improved their functionality.
Axel was privately convinced that, if he ever poked his unwanted nose in Xemnas' personal quarters, he'd find dozens of spiral-bound notebooks full of as-yet-unused names and lugubrious poetry that not even Demyx would like. Marluxia, when he wasn't busying himself with unacted-on plots against Xemnas, was engaged in a complex flirtation with his own demise by transparently lusting after Xemnas, all he was and all he possessed. Everyone politely pretended not to notice, then went to Luxord to lay bets on how long it would take for Saix to lose his patience and murder the Lord of Castle Oblivion in some deeply horrible manner. Saix, when he wasn't acting as lapdog in chief, tended to lurk around Oblivion's dungeon, not infrequently in the company of Larxene, with whom he shared a certain fascination for the physical and psychic mechanics of excruciation. Instead of working it out on each other, they constructed elaborate experiments starring whatever unfortunate they could get their hands on. For that reason, the entire Organization avoided the dungeon as a matter of self-preservation.
Axel was startled to discover that Xaldin did needlepoint and Lexaeus painted and both were better at it than they had any right to be. He never even hinted that he knew, principally because he valued his existence much more than they did. Demyx had the best puppy eyes in World and used them freely on Xigbar, who seemed to consider himself Demyx' bodyguard on his semi-frequent trips outside and was shamelessly used as a pack-bearer otherwise. They'd populated the conservatory with every species of instrument known to man at least twice. Demyx found the ones he liked, admired them for a few days or weeks, and then systematically smashed them to pieces. Except the damned sitar. Axel occasionally thought Demyx the most deeply damaged of them all, but kept those thoughts to himself.
Vexen and Zexion pretended to an intellectual standard higher than anything the rest of the Organization aspired to attain. Axel knew with absolute certainty that Zexion was full of it on that issue – he'd had occasion to find himself crammed under the little freak's bed and thereafter had great difficulty taking his coolly intellectually superior act seriously. Of them all, Vexen seemed to be exactly what he was: a heartless bastard who didn't even miss it and who lived primarily inside his own mind. He made Axel's skin want to crawl right off, which was no mean feat.
For his own part, Axel was an inveterate people-watcher, even of people who only barely qualified for the designation under the loosest possible definition of terms. Larxene, the only other member of the Organization aware of at least part of his little diversion, disapproved heartily, though not for the reasons Axel had expected.
"It's just not healthy, Axel," Asserted the woman whose favorite author had an entire unpleasant psychological designation named after him. "At best, it's taking that method acting thing a little too far. At worst, it's actively masochistic. Nothing you see, nothing you experience, when you're out there among them will make you human again. They can't give you your heart back. It's pointless to try! Besides, if you want to hurt that badly…"
She flicked her knives out, one by one, and the lazily contemplative look on her face suggested she was thinking about pinning him to the library wall and getting started right there. Axel couldn't help smiling – Larxene was predictable in her viciousness but occasionally amusing nonetheless, and he only resisted patting her indulgently on the head because doing so would give her unobstructed access to his ribcage. "Two thoughts for you, my charming nymphet. One: self-mutilation becomes significantly less about the self if you involve another person in it. Two: give the good Marquis a rest and some of the weirder transhumanist philosophers a read if you want some interesting insights into the spiritually transformative nature of suffering. Have you seen XIII?"
Odd how her eyes could light up and her pretty mouth scowl at the same time. "What do you want with that?"
"I'm bearing a message, oh my maiden of pain, or else I wouldn't abandon your pleasing company." He ran a fingertip over the point of one of her still-drawn knives; she licked it clean, then dismissed it. "Orders from the Superior."
Larxene rolled her eyes. "At least he's keeping it busy. Try the History and Geography stacks – it spends a lot of time down there."
"You're my savior, Larxene. Next book is your choice." He blew her a kiss and flickered away in a curl of darkness, because the library was large enough that he didn't want to search it inch by inch on foot.
He hadn't, strictly speaking, been lying. He had been summoned into the presence of the other person who knew about his pastime and was there given a single command: "Find the Key of Destiny." What he should do when that came to pass was not explicated and so Axel decided on the most obvious conclusion: surveillance. If XIII had outlived his usefulness – doubtful, given that he'd only been with them a fortnight at most – the order would have been completely unambiguous. And, since Xemnas rarely actually gave him permission to snoop and pry and spy on another member of the Organization, he decided to squeeze as much entertainment out of it as he could.
For the first several hours, he prowled the World in methodical fashion. XIII had quarters and if he'd been in them, Axel would have been enormously disappointed. He wasn't and neither was anything else and so the hunt continued. (The room was empty, containing not even a bed or a blanket or a single cast-off piece of clothing, only palely luminescent walls and floors and the hint of shadows lurking in the corners. Axel found himself wondering where XIII slept, if he slept, if he did anything at that could be construed as weak or human.) It became apparent, eventually, that XIII was not in the World That Never Was and hadn't been for quite some time. He sampled the essence of XIII at his Proof – cold and bright as winter dawn, sharp as the edge of broken ice, so very strong, so totally alone – and opened a Door to Castle Oblivion, where he'd been recently enough that the taste of him still hung in the air, a taunting little curl of winter-cold and steel.
Axel followed XIII's essence-trail around the Castle and noted that its whimsical kinks and contortions seemed to be defined by an effort to avoid contact with anyone else. He even managed to evade Marluxia, a feat that Axel himself had never accomplished in Castle Oblivion and which ultimately consumed an annoying amount of time when he failed at it again. By the time he extracted himself from the Graceful Assassin's flytraplike company, the trail was fading and Axel was becoming just suspicious enough to wonder if that might have been the point. Marluxia didn't waste any of his barely-existent affection on the Organization's newest member, whose mere existence seemed to be a point of not inconsiderable frustration to him. Axel didn't think him suicidal enough that he'd actively try to do XIII harm, but absolutely knew him petty enough to torment the boy whenever possible. The Lord of Castle Oblivion excelled at that sort of thing.
Similarly, Larxene nursed a grudge based on XIII's publicly displayed ability to hit her about the head with impunity and without her express permission. And while she hadn't technically been lying, neither was she telling a truth of recent vintage. The mustier reaches of the Castle's enormous library were lit here and there with filaments of XIII's winter-steel essence, but all the traces were days old. Axel commended Larxene to a number of unpleasant fates as he prowled the stacks, running his gloved fingertips across dusty spines, considering what to do next. If he'd wanted XIII dead, he'd just summon his Assassins and give them their orders. "Bring him back alive" was not, unfortunately, the sort of instruction they usually got and he seriously doubted their ability to comprehend such a command given their basic vocational design. Still…
Axel found a suitably unoccupied corner and extended a call into the dark and nothingness that coiled where his heart had been. It manifested a moment later, sleek and sharp and sinuous. He extended a book on the geography of the Worlds that XIII had clearly handled more than once. "Find the one that's not me. Lead me to him."
The Assassin slithered away with the eye-disturbing speed and boneless flexibility that characterized all its kind. Axel followed closely, watching as it caught at traces too faint for anything possessed of higher-order intelligence to notice, but well within the sense-range of things that hunted primarily by instinct. Some of those traces looked to be deliberately diminished, forced to dissolve at an unnaturally accelerated rate. Which was not, Axel reflected, a trick within Larxene's power or, for that matter, XIII's or he'd have used it before this. Within his own, yes. And Saix, for certain, and possibly one or two others – which gave him a theoretical list of suspects should he stumble over XIII's fading remains but also raised more questions, the most important of which remained unanswerable.
Where are you, XIII, and what are you getting yourself into?
Keeping one eye on the Assassin, Axel flipped open the book. It was half excruciatingly dry geography text and half travel guide, the interesting bits being written in the margins in three different hands. He hoped that Larxene never saw that, or she'd start collecting writing samples. And then fingers. XIII's essence-impression was strongest in the water Worlds section – he'd lingered, in particular, over a full-page picture of a long moon-silvered beach, a bucolic village clinging to the bluffs in the distance, a cluster of low, wooded islands visible just off shore…
The Assassin raised the most headlike of its appendages and uttered the minor-key keen that meant it'd latched onto something solid. Axel dropped the book where Larxene was sure to find it and ran as the Assassin flowed away like a coursing-hound made of silvered darkness, down a staircase he had never seen before, out into a length of corridor that he had, and through one of the doors that lead to the outside. Beyond was a courtyard, bordered on two sides by glassed-in green house walls, in which a Door had been opened. Recently.
Axel opened it, too, and found himself standing at the edge of a precipice – the vantage point from which the picture he'd just been looking at must have been taken. He was looking down on almost the same view. Almost. It was late afternoon, not moonrise, though the heavy overcast gave the beach and the sea almost the same silver sheen. In the distance, the bucolic village was in the process of collapsing in fire and ruin, he could hear the screams on the salt-and-Heartless-stench laden wind. A hundred feet below, the beach was scattered with bodies – human bodies – and swarming with Heartless in breeds and numbers too great to count in a single glance. They were forming a knot around a single focal point and in the middle of it stood XIII.
He'd a Keyblade in each hand, one a blaze of wintry silver radiance, the other a flicker of purple shadow, and between them he destroying Heartless by the dozen without making any visible headway against the rising tide. Literally rising – they were coming out of the surf and out of the sand and boiling down out of the surrounding bluffs and Axel could feel them becoming aware of his own presence, as well. He called his weapons, eyeballed the range, and threw. One chakram scythed through the horde forming up at XIII's back, carving a wide arc. The other skittered points down across the ground in front of him, striking sparks from the exposed rock of the bluffs, which exploded into a white hot sheet-wall at a silent flick of will. XIII threw a narrow-eyed glare over his shoulder as Axel came to rest at his back, a weapon in each hand, and parried it with a grin of his own. "Having fun?"
XIII's pretty bow of a mouth tightened. "What are you doing here?"
"It's not polite to answer a question with a question." Axel threw, and a couple acres of prime oceanfront real estate became abruptly uninhabitable. "I was looking for you, actually."
XIII made a noise in his throat that might have been indicative of disbelief or just rank indifference and struck for himself, his dark Keyblade punching through the wall of fire Axel had yet to release, sending a half-dozen Heartless back to where they came from, and arcing smoothly back to his hand. "Really."
"Yes. I was afraid Marluxia might have fed you to a few of his more unpleasant plants. We can't stay here." Axel flicked a glance up at the precipice he'd leapt down from and XIII nodded in agreement.
They moved almost as one, Axel bringing his chakrams around in a wide arc, catching the flames he'd already summoned and redirecting them, clearing a length of beach to maneuver in. XIII darted past to take advantage of it.
"Watch your – "
Axel swallowed what he'd been about to say, as XIII automatically checked his back swing, a little smile curling his mouth. XIII was used to fighting with someone at his back. Good to know. Also good to watch, all vicious quicksilver grace and lethal precision, with one weapon in the air and the other in his hand at all times, his face set in a tight-lipped smile, eyes wide and bright and fierce. Completely real and totally alive.
Axel laughed and called down more fire.
They made the bluff in two quick stages, wiping it clean of anything but themselves, though XIII did most of the hands-on work. Axel could feel his bone-weariness, though he refused to show it, standing on guard with Keyblades at the ready as he opened the Door. Axel reached out and caught him by the shoulder. "Come on. This – "
The first Door opened into a place Axel had never actually been before – high buildings and a teeming mass of people that seemed thoroughly shocked when they appeared out of thin air in front of them. XIII staggered back a few paces and Axel held on tight to his hood, opened another Door –
" – is going to take – "
Deep woods, quiet and still, the air thick with the scent of loam and fresh rain. Another Door.
" – a few minutes – "
Darkness. Dark sea breaking on a dark shore, a cold blue moon hanging low over the water, never setting, never rising further. Another Door.
" – so they can't follow us right back."
The World That Never Was. Axel let go of XIII's hood before he decided to object with the edge of a Keyblade and stepped back out of easy striking range. XIII spun, his face lit by the radiance of his weapons, looking very much as though he were considering the odds of landing a hit at not-so-easy striking range as a gesture of his displeasure at being dragged across three Worlds by the scruff of his neck. Axel waited and, with an audible sigh, XIII let it go, dismissing his weapons and slumping against the nearest wall. It was interesting, Axel decided, watching how much that simple act changed him, altered the substance of him, reduced him somehow. Except the glare. The glare was still there, but even that was starting to lose its edges.
"So. XIII." He smiled, and watched XIII's glare go from semi-hostile to somewhat wary. "You can call me Axel."
"Why," XIII asked coolly, "would I want to do that?"
"Because I'm no more a number than you are." Axel turned, flicked a glance over his shoulder. "Coming?"
"Roxas." Softly. "My name is…Roxas."
"Roxas." Axel let his tongue caress the syllables of that name as much as it liked. "Come on. You look like you could use a few hours of not killing anything."
Wary slid away and weary crept up underneath it. Roxas pushed himself away from the wall, submitted to a hand on his elbow to guide him and, a few minutes later, to a room with a real bed in it. He was asleep in seconds, curled up with his back reflexively toward the nearest wall, looking dangerous and half-feral and far too young, particularly in his sleep. Axel kept watch and thought about what he'd learned for certain today and what he could easily surmise and what more he had to uncover and how much fun that was going to be.