It proved to be disappointingly easy to kill a Shadow. Once it was pinned down, it could only make panicked clicks with its antennas and scratch in the air. Sometimes it would have the ground absorb it elsewhere, but mostly, it put up a light and uninspiring struggle. Isa almost felt remorse when he cut through the front of the black figure. Shadows were meant to be frightening and threatening, but the suffocating anger, pounding in his chest, made the specks of black into nothing but sources of irritation that needed to be eradicated.

Isa couldn't tell how many times he had done this. His hands moved on their own, gripping the weapon that felt like an extension of himself, as if this had already become a habit. When the Shadows disappeared, so would the anger. That was his theory, but the effect was the opposite. Isa only needed to glance at the empty insides of the dead Shadow to feel the need to clutch his chest.

Things that were alive couldn't and shouldn't be empty. A shell couldn't move on its own, there had to be something pushing it forward, something that was hidden behind layers of protective armor, held together by a thin membrane that could so easily be cut open.

There were dark blurs of piles on the streets around Isa. He shuddered as he stood up and pulled his coat tighter around himself. His breath was barely visible in the cool air, but it was cold enough to maintain a thin crust of frost on every surface in the vicinity. The tall buildings in the area were a brownish gray without the white blurry spots for windows that Isa had seen before.

"Saïx, what are you doing?"

Dr. Vexen stared at him from a distance. His face was obscured by the brim of his dark hat. He didn't move from where he stood. No one in their right mind would.

The weapon that had seemed grand and powerful in Isa's mind had turned into a small silver dagger with tints of purple down the handle. He should have thrown it away, but parting with it didn't seem like an option. There were more Shadows out there. The ones he had encountered now had to be fakes. The real Shadows were surely anything but empty.

Isa slipped the dagger into his pocket. He walked past Dr. Vexen with certain steps, although he had no idea of where he was going. Dr. Vexen followed him. The clitter-clatter of their heels against the pavement echoed between the smudgy buildings. It was the only sound Isa could hear until they started to near the main road where the color spots swooshed by in high speed.

A car stood waiting by the end of the road. A man with gray-streaked long black hair stood leaning against the long hood of the car. His face was scarred and he wore a patch over his right eye.

Isa stopped in the middle of the road.

His hand fell to his side slowly and he slipped it into his pocket where he could feel the comforting weight of the dagger that his mind could turn into a much more destructive weapon.

There was something off about the man waiting for them.

"You better hurry, or you'll miss your chance, Chuckles."

Isa walked forward slowly, following Dr. Vexen to the car.

"Saïx, this is Xigbar. He's not usually your driver, but he'll be stepping in for the time being to keep you from doing anything against progress. He answers to Xemnas, not to you."

"Not that it will stop you from trying to boss me around, hey, Chuckles?" Xigbar sneered and held the door open for Dr. Vexen and Isa. He slammed the door shut after them and walked around to the driver's seat.

"Where are we going?" Isa asked.

"Take your hand out of your pocket." Dr. Vexen said instead and leaned back into his seat. He put his hat aside and brushed back his long blond hair with his hand. There was a dull look in his eyes. Isa took his hand out of his pocket reluctantly and gave the spacious car a quick look.

Was Dr. Vexen as empty as the Shadows Isa had killed just now? Did Isa have the same dull look in his eyes? The walls seemed to be closing in on him when he thought about it. Where had he gone? He was here physically. He could see that. He could touch the seat and know that there was something he was clenching his fingers around, but he couldn't distinguish the texture or feel the scent he knew came with leather. Was it because he was empty that all notion of emotions and sensation escaped him?

"Saïx, take your hand out of your pocket." Dr. Vexen said again.

Isa looked down on his hand, certain that he already had taken out of his pocket. It didn't surprise him to see that he hadn't.

"Why should I?"

"We've been through this." Dr. Vexen said with an irritated sigh. "You're falling too fast. We have to balance you out. That's why we're taking you to Axel."

"...really?" Isa breathed. He hadn't noticed the vice grip he had on the dagger in his pocket until he let go and felt his fingers pulsate. He didn't understand what Dr. Vexen was talking about, he rarely did, but he didn't worry about it. They were taking him to Lea.

The blink of an eye became endless in time when he was away from Lea. He had a vague memory of the vast sea of Shadows that had taken over a city out in the middle of nowhere. He remembered the sound of the barrier crashing down, but he couldn't remember Lea's face. Lea became a blurry spot of color when Isa tried to think back on it. It was frightening. How many times could he have passed Lea by on the street if Lea was a color spot amongst so many others?

"Yes, really. Convince him to work for us."

Dr. Vexen's voice was still a soft echo in Isa's ears when he reached for the door to step outside. They had stopped by a park. The tree crowns were drawn in smudge crayon. The wind made it seem as if their movements were cut frames, sloppily put together in a children's movie. Each blade of grass seemed one-dimensional, regardless of the angle it was observed from.

Isa walked down the small road made out of pictures of pebbles further into the park. The small spheres spread on the lawn caught Isa's attention. They glimmered in the dark, illuminating their surroundings with a metallic and soft light. On a bench of paper stood a jar of glass with a label on it:

Memories

Isa took it. They were supposed to collect the spheres and toss them in the Furnace. He remembered that much. The spheres weren't as heavy as they seemed. It felt like holding a cotton ball, only it was big enough to cover the palm of his hand, and dense enough to not have its shape altered when Isa squeezed his fingers around it. There were twinkles of light inside the sphere. It bathed in a luminescent cloud that twirled around inside like a current. It reminded Isa of a dark night sky he had seen turn into a cradle full of shining stars. He tossed it into the jar, along with every other sphere he managed to come across, until Axel cleared his throat to make his presence known.

"I'm here," Axel said sternly as Isa turned around to face him.

Axel was in a coat similar to Isa's. Isa's attention was first drawn to Axel's hair, much like the first time. He wanted to see flickering flames move about in the nearly unnoticeable breeze, but this was Axel, Isa reminded himself, not Lea. It became easier to deal with the look in Axel's eyes with that reminder.

Axel scratched the back of his head before he crossed his arms and turned his piercing glare back at Isa. The silence seemed to have stretched for too long. Isa blinked. The light hold he had on the glass jar grew tighter. He had put a strain on his eyes when he had looked for every detail on Axel that made him different from what Isa was used to, and only that small twitch by the side of Axel's mouth made Isa realize that he was staring.

"What do you want?" Axel asked finally.

"I can fix everything, " Isa found himself saying. "I'll make things right."

"What is everything, exactly?"

"I'll turn you back to Lea. You said that it was my fault that you're Axel now. I'll undo that. Just tell me what I did wrong."

"You cut the string." Axel said easily. "You cut it and made Fate lose track of it."

Isa was scared of what Axel might add to it. Fate wouldn't lose track of anything she'd made unless it was lost in the web of lies Isa had shrouded Lea in until he couldn't tell the lies apart from the truth. The knowing look in Axel's eyes made Isa gulp. He wasn't ready to hear that his desperate search for his other half had led Axel down a path of uncertainty and that it had paved the foundation of resentment in Axel that became painfully clear whenever he looked at Isa.

"...but, you found them, didn't you? You found the ones you were meant to be tied to...right?"

"Not yet. I know that they are alive. Bunny has been trying to help me."

"I'll help too. I mean, I know someone who can help." Isa took a deep and shaky breath. "Let's go before they see us."

Isa caught a quick glimpse of the black car waiting for him at the other side of the park as he and Axel crossed the street and got onto a large, gray tramcar. They sat down at the far back where there were two seats available. Axel rubbed his hands together nervously and opted to look out the window instead of trying to make small talk with Isa. Of all the places he could have been, this was probably the last of his choices.

There were other passengers in the tramcar with them. Isa could make out their contours and if he looked at them long enough, he could see their emotionless faces. No one was talking. They could only hear the engine of the tramcar and the occasional whinge from the machinery when there was a bump in the road. Isa looked over at Axel from the corner of his eye briefly. He could only see the back of his head. Whatever Axel saw outside was a whole lot more interesting than what was here.

As soon as they stepped in through the front door to Isa's apartment, Isa put the glass jar down on the coffee table and hurried to the kitchen to get a bowl. He wasn't going to bother with any pleasantries. This wasn't a home after all, and Axel looked like he couldn't get out of there fast enough anyway.

Isa wasn't sure what he was doing, or if his plan would work, but it was worth a shot. Bunny's efforts had proved to be in vain so far, but Isa knew someone whose powers were greater than Bunny's, and her promise about mending the wicked heart beating in Isa's chest had Isa hoping that this would work.

"Sit," Isa told Axel when he walked back into the living room. Isa reached for a sphere, certain that he wouldn't care which sphere he took, but the sudden skip in his chest told him otherwise. The sphere he held in his hand was the one with the starlit sky, and though Isa couldn't make out any specifics about the memory it represented, he couldn't quite bear the thought of parting with it quite yet.

With another sphere in his hand, he turned to Axel and put the bowl on the coffee table between them. "Take this."

"Why?"

"You can shatter barriers. The spheres are held together by barriers." Isa knocked on the surface of it to prove his point. "If you shatter it, the contents will run out and into this bowl, and with the strength in each of these, we'll summon the Moon."

"And then?" Axel asked, clearly doubtful.

"I'll ask her to make the string visible. If there's enough power, she might even mend it, but let's just hope to see the string."

Axel took the sphere in his hand and gave it a quick look before he clenched his fingers around it. The barrier cracked in the blink of an eye, and the liquid inside spilled into the bowl Isa had put between them. Axel repeated the process until there only were two spheres left in the glass jar Isa had found in the park.

"Alright," Isa said, slightly out of breath. He blinked slowly to rid himself of the darkish frame around his sight. "That should be enough. Put your hands on the sides of the bowl. Ready?"

"Yeah." He gave Isa a quick look of uncertainty, but remained quiet as Isa mumbled a chant under his breath. It was a chant Isa hadn't been aware of knowing. It was as if someone else was saying it through him, and given the way he had been feeling lately, maybe that someone else was him.

Dark the stars and dark the moon

Hush the night and the morning loon

What brings us together will pull us apart

Gone our ties, gone our hearts

The metallic liquid in the bowl lit up with a faint blue light that shifted into red and then into purple, much like everything they both touched did. Smoke rose from the bowl and danced around Axel as if there was a gentle breeze coming in from somewhere.

Isa got himself onto the couch and laid down on his side. He watched Axel through the mist of his own breath, and he shivered at the sudden temperature drop in the room. The sudden and hard double beat in his chest made him wince slightly.

"Can you see it?" Isa asked. "It's tied to your little finger."

Axel looked at his hands. "Shouldn't you be able to see it?"

Isa shook his head. "It's not for me to see."

Axel suddenly lifted his feet and looked down on the floor with his eyes wide. Isa assumed that the red string had been made visible. He exhaled slowly and closed his eyes that were heavy with sleep. He suspected that it could be the spell that had worn him out, but the purling water running from the leaking washing machine in his bathroom had always had a way of lulling him into sleep.

Always, Isa thought with certainty and drifted off to sleep.

~o~

The car Xigbar usually drove wasn't as long as the car Isa had seen him in the first time. This car, much like the other one, was black with shaded windows. Isa usually sat in the backseat, staring out the window until they reached Oblivion, where he worked for an obscure goal he always managed to forget by the end of the day. He didn't speak much. He was generally too preoccupied trying to decipher formless, distant and colorful dreams he didn't remember dreaming. The dreams proved to be like the horizon; the closer he thought he came to answers, the further away the answers were.

"Have you heard of the Lucid?" Isa found himself asking Xigbar on a morning like so many others.

"What's that, Chuckles?"

"The Lucid were perfect creations that were torn in half by a jealous God. They were given a cosmic punishment. They were forever doomed to search for their other halves, still tied to each other by the strings of blood and flesh between them."

Xigbar laughed and gave Isa a quick look in the rearview mirror. "That so? It's a bit different from the story I've heard."

Isa tore his fixed gaze away from the window and turned his attention to Xigbar. "What do you mean? That is the story."

"Says who?" Xigbar challenged with a smirk Isa wished he hadn't seen.

"...the, the Cactus did," Isa mumbled in reply and quickly perched his gaze onto his gloved hands.

"The what now?" Xigbar asked, clearly amused. "The Cactus? Is that a nickname you have for somebody? Is it Axel? Because of the spiky hair? Yeah, I get it." Xigbar laughed again. "He's got a thing for morbidity, doesn't he? But tell you what, Chuckles, you've been hoodwinked. That ain't how the story goes. You wanna know the true story?"

Isa struggled to keep himself from nodding eagerly. Fortunately, he had grown accustomed to sitting still to the point that any movement that was too sudden made the muscles in his neck ache. He fiddled with the loose fabric of his glove between his thumb and his index finger and hoped that Xigbar would tell him the story despite his silence.

"For one, it ain't as bloody as people having been ripped apart. It's a lot more subtle. I'd go as far as to say that it's romantic, even. And did you know that only a selected few are tied to each other with red strings?"

"What selected few?"

"Those who matter, Chuckles. Or rather, those who are prone to light." Xigbar paused to let that sink in before he continued. "Not all strings are the same. Someone that's bound to help you or accompany you, will be tied to you by their ankle. If someone's meant to be your 'other half', they'll be tied to you by their little finger."

"Who makes those decisions?" Isa clenched one hand around the other absentmindedly. Those who matter. Isa had heard that before. Not in those words, but in that meaning. There was a scale of importance, and he had a feeling that he was at the bottom.

"The Man on the Moon."

"You mean... Bunny?"

"I don't know if the Man on the Moon is a Bunny, Chuckles. I'm just telling the story, and the story says that the Man on the Moon calls the shots. He binds people together and he can cut them loose. The string is invisible to everyone though, just to spice things up a little."

"What if you can see the string?"

"No one can see the strings. Those are the rules."

"But what if?"

"Well, only Heartless can see what binds those with hearts to each other," Xigbar said with a thoughtful tone of voice, but the look Isa caught in the rearview mirror clearly told him that he was reaching a conclusion Xigbar had been trying to get at long before this conversation took place.

"I have a heart."

"Do you, Chuckles? How do you know for sure?"

"I can feel it beating."

"Have you heard of phantom pains? I bet the Shadows run right past you, too."

"Why would you assume the beating is an ache?" Isa found himself gritting his teeth. The dark swirl of black dust he had grown accustomed to wasn't so much a swirl of dust as it was a growing horde of pebbles with sharp edges.

"Because it is, isn't it? Like having a batshit crazy kangaroo going at everything it can get at in your chest. Your lungs feel bruised and you swear that the kangaroo's kicking is your heart beating and that the hurt is the proof that it's still there, but it isn't, is it, Chuckles? It's been gone for a while now. It's just that every time you realize it, you'd rather reset yourself and forget that you know the truth. Instead you make up other worlds that crumble one after another until there's nothing left but this one."

"Shut up."

"Listen, no one feels for you like I do, but between having you act like numbskull who knows nothing about everything and having you at your full senses, I'll go for the latter, Chuckles. You ain't no good to us with your mind up in the clouds. You've filled four diaries with bullshit. Bullshit that Vexen has been forced to deal with, and honestly, that's slowed us down a great deal."

"Take me to Lea. Now."

Isa didn't even want to breathe so as not to let Xigbar in on the emotions coursing through him. He didn't know what was keeping him from taking a crushing grip around Xigbar's throat and breaking his neck against his seat. He knew that he was strong enough.

"What damned Lea, Saïx? There is no Lea! There's never been a Lea! You made him up. You want me to take a left onto the expressway to Loonsville? Maybe Lea's there? Oh, sorry, the road is closed for those who aren't mentally challenged, so that's a trip you'll have to take yourself!"

The anger that ripped through Isa at that moment burned with a searing white light. It made him blind and deaf to everything around him. It was all there was until he was brought back by the distant panicked yelling and the car coming to an abrupt halt.

Isa held the dagger in his hand. The sharp blade was buried into Xigbar's thigh, and judging by the multiple puncture marks on Xigbar's dark pants, Isa had stabbed him more than once.

By the time Isa felt his hearing come back, he was running down an unfamiliar road with a tight grip around his dagger. Somewhere in the back of his mind he could hear a soft reminder that he should be appalled by what he had done, but that voice was drowned out by the strange curve of his lips that encouraged him to let out a sound that he hadn't heard from himself in what seemed like forever.

He was laughing.