A/N: A second portion of the little wild plotbunny that won't leave me alone to other projects. This whole project is a bit rushed, but I'm feeling guilty for working on it at all instead of a different project I've already promised people. Rating is for the very yaoi content later on. 3
Disclaimer: Characters belong to Square Enix, Disney, or both.
Disclaimer 2: It's been years since I uploaded anything on and I'm very unaccustomed to what sort of document length constitutes a decent-sized chapter. This is further debilitated (that is my word of the week, i think) by this story's erratic set up, its original document being a series of periodic breaks and no real break in the story. To sum it up, I'm having trouble dividing this bitch into reasonable parts and apologize for any abruptness or shortness of chapter.
"Wake up! Wake up!"
He did, and irritably.
"What's your name… Axel? Get up!"
Flinging an arm at his assailant, Axel drew the line at anything so ambitious as getting.
"They're threatening to throw you into sunlight if you don't get up!"
Let them. He was too tired to care.
"Axel, please!"
That voice, though. His fellow guardian's voice. The city be damned, but not the kid that stupid old sorcerer had dragged into this.
"Axel!"
Not his friend…
"I'm awake, what?"
"They want you to get up, to go back to work. They can't protect the city on their own, and…" the boy hesitated. "I can't, either."
"They have fire, let them do it."
"It's not like yours! There have been more and more attacks… Please get up… I can't do this anymore, and I'll have to do it forever if they destroy you!"
Axel shook his head, for all his rest he was unable to see in the darkness at all. "I'm in no condition for that. I can't see."
"You've slept for two weeks!"
That would do it. Even demons had to take sustenance during long rests.
"Is there a moon tonight…?"
"I think so."
It won't be long before you know it's cycle like the beat of your heart, kid, Axel thought. "Get me out in it."
"Why?"
Axel leaned against him, surprised by the strength he drew from the warm, human body. "Because in two weeks, I haven't eaten a damn thing and I'm starving."
A full moon would have been better, but even the slim sickle of the new moon was a hot rush on his numbed, waning senses. Though still cold, he could feel the embers in his soul taking light again, coaxed slowly to a blaze over the nights of healing the boy fought for and won for him.
The final night of rest, he collapsed next to Axel on the Watch Tower, the pallid and passive human-fire rolling lazily just two stories over their heads. He was exhausted, panting and gasping after a long run and several fights along the Wall.
"Do you see? Your fire is a better ward."
Axel nodded, watching him. He'd shed his cloak of Darkness to reveal a pale-skinned blond with tousled hair and vivid blue eyes. Not all that different from himself, though he had a bit more brown to his pigment and his hair was a flurry of red spikes. For his pretty looks, the boy was an intense kid, an iron will lending those eyes a determined light.
Axel had little concept of the meaning of years, but discovered the boy had seventeen of them and was called Roxas. Beyond this Axel had learned nothing, except that Roxas was now his daytime cellmate. Axel was left to his suspicions; his rest and the boy's duty to protect and obligation to sleep left little chance for conversation.
At Roxas's insistence, the people of the City of Paper had agreed to allow Axel resting time in the moonlight and starlight. Reflexes left him aching to act and restless, responsibility falling to Roxas to keep him down and resting. Fighting all three fronts exhausted the boy and Axel guiltily tried harder to stay put, and when he got his senses back he persuaded Roxas to sit with him until his skin crawled to warn of approaching Nihilia.
This worked better for the both of them, and was a pattern they maintained after Axel was back on his feet and in full health again.
The city seemed pleased by their teamwork and allowed them to work as they pleased, rewarding Axel's renewed energies and Roxas's persistent reliability with beds and a few worn books for their small, shared space by day.
If Roxas missed the daylight, he said nothing and it was not evident. In the twilight before they slept and before they were released to protect the city they talked and Roxas taught Axel to read. In turn, the redhead taught his young friend the raunchiest bar songs he'd overheard on his vigils in the Depths. Additionally, Axel learned that, though it did not begin to rival moon and star light, human food improved his strength. He disliked eating and drinking unless it was necessary; using the chamber pot was a practice that still unnerved him. Roxas only laughed at him and opened a floodgate of questions, many of which Axel could not answer.
"Are you human?"
Humans did not fear destruction by sunlight, and Axel said as much. The boy smirked and retaliated with legends about creatures called vampires, asserting that things destroyed by sunlight could be human, even if only in the past.
Axel shrugged. "I don't drink blood," he said. "And I think that sorcerer created me."
Roxas shook his head. "It's well-known sorcerers depend on life to create it, didn't you know that? If he created you, he made you from someone human once, like me…"
Now he trailed off.
"Are you human?" Axel asked gently.
"I think I'm somewhere in the middle," Roxas said quietly. "Not quite human anymore, but not something else, either. If I'd been born this way, I think I'd have been a sorcerer. I think you would have, too."
Axel had little known the sorcerer that had created him, and shuddered at the slight, peripheral memories he had, usually changing the subject if the boy prodded too close. Roxas didn't commonly press, allowing the conversation to flow back to the books they'd been given, their cold fates, and strategies to protect the city. After many weeks of growing friendship and rapidly passing time, Roxas did finally persist, his curiosity about the sorcerer that had created them getting the better of him.
It was a dark night when he did. The moon was waning down to almost nothing again, and the Creature of Darkness seemed to be getting a better feel for his nightlife, no longer tossing and turning long into the day with restless instinct to rise with the sun. They had taken to sitting outside the city Wall, on the barren plain stretching into the vast, dark horizon. Axel had been calling fireflies and scattering them about like bits of smoldering parchment adrift on a breeze, the tiny bobbing lights lending gentle warmth to an otherwise chilly evening. Even Axel's fires seemed dimmer.
"What do you think will happen now that he's gone?" Roxas asked, fiddling with a pentagram shape dangling from one of his Keyblades.
Wrinkling his face, Axel let the fireflies go and they bobbed over the wall in search of the bonfires.
"Come on, Axel, you don't think they expect us to do this forever, do you?"
"What if they did?" He countered, averting the boy's curiosity. "What if, two hundred years from now, you and I are still sitting here, waiting for the Nihilia to attempt the Gates again?"
Roxas chuckled. "I'm not going to last two hundred years, Axel."
"Can you really be so sure about that?" Axel prodded, enjoying the way it made the kid squirm. "You're not any more human than I am, Creature of Darkness."
Face scrunched, Roxas was pensive, staring down at the Keyblades resting next to his drawn up knees. Axel leaned back against the wall, tilting his head for a view of the scattered stars. Vague memories drew up shapes between them, finding dragons and warriors, fish and elk captured among many others in the soothing silver lights of the night sky. Something warm wrapped around his arm, the constellations sliding away as he looked down at Roxas clutching his limb, face buried in Axel's upper arm.
"That's almost worse than death," the boy muttered. Axel blinked, surprised by hot liquid rolling down his skin. It was easy enough to shift his arm free and wrap it around the kid's shoulders, pressing the boy's tear-streaked face gently into the crook of his neck.
"It's not worse than being alone," Axel murmured. "Nothing is as bad as that."
Roxas only wrapped his arms around Axel's torso and wept into his shoulder.
After that night Roxas cheered up again, their conversations shifting again to lighter subjects, but the sorrow never quite left his eyes. A part of him still mourned his missing future, and this reflected clearest in his fighting style. His body became more relaxed and loose, his strikes braver and risks greater. Axel did not remember being human like Roxas did but understood what it looked like when a person threw himself carelessly into the jaws of death. Old memories tugged again, telling him it was a natural reaction, if a little hazardous, that the kid would probably burn himself through.
Providing he doesn't get himself killed first, Axel mused sourly one bad night. It had begun to rain two hours after the fires were lit, and the flames by then were strong enough to be self-sustaining, but for one bowl on the western length of Wall. While Axel swore and coaxed flames up from the diluted fuel, Roxas threw himself in and out of the attacking Nihilia's grip nearby.
Long ago, Axel had grudgingly admitted the kid could see forms he could not, always striking in places to make them scream where all Axel could see was impenetrable shadow, a wall of darkness blotting out star and moon and flame. So he left Roxas to the fight, persisting with a stubborn Watch fire under a dripping eave.
He left the bowl when a human scream pierced the night.
Roxas!
He leapt to the Wall with fireballs in his palms and threw them on top of the tall Nihilia, hoping to scare them away long enough to find his friend's body—
There.
Sprawled and bleeding on the soil near the foot of the Wall, Roxas was unmoving.
Axel didn't even hear his own scream.
Fireflies the size of his head came to his call now, the flames spiraling down his arms in searing ribbons tore at his clothing and took bladed form at his palms. Chakram. They sliced through the Nihilia, leaving tattered slivers of night in their wake before the darkness screamed and filled in again, raging and circling in around him. He tripped over Roxas's body and found it shrouded in Darkness, a weedy little monster feeding off the blood seeping from the wounds there. He was just as surprised as it was when it exploded into a livid burst of flame. Fear crept up next, threatening his carefully garnered stores of night-light energy. But instead of diminishing his strength, the exertion only brought him more power, hand in hand with the knowledge of how to use it. It was as simple as jumping rooftops, and for the first time in his miserable service to the City of Paper he witnessed the Nihilia retreat, burning shadows vanishing in wisps and curls of grey smoke. Laughing, he jeered after them until he remembered Roxas.
The boy lay yet where he'd fallen, two wide-eyed guards now at his side. Axel read the fear in their faces with more than a little twinge of regret. As if the rumors weren't enough, now there was proof he was an inhuman monster, capable of combusting his foes without even breaking sweat. They had no reason to fear, Axel's power had dwindled to smolders at the sight of his fallen friend.
Finding no help in the frightened guards, Axel used his shirt to bind the wounds across the boy's chest, slash marks bleeding in thick gobbets. He received no help moving the Creature of Darkness to their shared cell, either, or with extinguishing the fires when dawn crept grey along the distant horizon.
Exhaustion precariously at bay, Axel argued with his guards the whole distance back to the cell, doing his best to convince them that the boy was human enough to need bandages.
Once the door was locked behind them, they did not return.