-o- CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO -o-

nearness

With the warmth of drink in our bellies we were able to find a touch of tranquility after a weird, long evening.

Launchpad was still maudlin, but as his beer flagon emptied it turned more into celebratory sadness. He lovingly told stories of his adventures with Scrooge. We laughed at his animated jokes, of which he was usually the punchline. I found Axel meeting my eyes often, like he was watching to see when I laughed.

It seemed to me a cruel tragedy, that this big beautiful world had finally been revealed to me, but only because of war. The Walls had been torn down, so the Worlds could know each other, but it was only because of the Heartless. We were united, only to fall to our doom together.

"It makes me crazy," I concluded aloud, my thoughts convalescing upon my third sip of my third drink. "The King tells us to wait, but for what? He tells us to stay away from Scrooge but won't tell us why? He makes it seem like he knows everything but won't tell us anything. We're supposed to be his elite team, he made it sound like we had something so important to do, and now we're just… waiting. Waiting on it all to make sense or something."

"Maybe waiting's not good enough," Axel cooed quietly into his glass. I watched his face carefully.

Launchpad's face had soured. He stared into his empty cup, lost in thought. "I think I'm gonna… I'm gonna hit the hay. I'll sleep up in Scrooge's place. I'll… see you guys around the castle tomorrow. See if anything turns up."

The uncertainty of the word "anything" hung heavy over me as I watched Launchpad walk away, toward the darkened staircase which led to Scrooge's abandoned apartment.

"Do you think I bummed him out?" I asked with a pout. I stared at my hands in my lap. "I didn't mean to upset him. I'm just… so frustrated."

"You're very sensitive to other people's feelings," Axel observed.

"Is there something wrong with that?" I squinted at him and sipped my pink drink.

He shrugged. "What would I know? Feelings are kind of a strange thing to me. I see them; I'm very good at seeing them in people, watching how it shapes their behavior. But I guess that's because I'm not invested in any kind of feelings. It's so much easier to see these things without being burdened by them yourself."

I gaped slightly as he spoke. It seemed like such a sad thing for somebody to say. But I realized, with an unsettling turn in my stomach, that Axel wasn't Somebody. For all the hours we had spent together, talking and fighting and feeling, I had come to think of him as an ordinary person. How was it possible, that someone so convincingly human could be something so… other?

"Is that why you're so good at pushing my buttons?" I asked airily. It was easier to make it a joke than reconcile the reality of Axel's existence. "You just… see my feelings all the time without any empathy?"

Axel closed his eyes and drank heavily. "Yeah. I guess it's something like that."

There was a quiet that fell. We had crept steadily closer to each other in the booth, and I hadn't even realized it until the talking stopped. We were so close that I could feel his breath on me. I was kinesthetically aware of the rise and fall of his chest. He felt so real, and so alive.

"I think I'm drunk," I said, squirming on the cushioned seat. "It's kind of weird. I've had some papou wine at celebrations before but I've never really been drunk."

"I know I'm drunk. But it's not that weird. I've definitely been drunk before."

Oddly, he smiled, and reached out to tuck a stray hair behind my ear. My body tingled at the warmth of his slight touch. For someone that had once imprisoned and terrified me, Axel had a surprising way of making me feel comfortable. I was shocked to realize that I wanted his hands on me, wanted his body closer. I blushed, thinking of the dream I had in the New World where he had held me, and I had liked it.

"He imagined you differently," he drawled, watching my face carefully.

"What?" I shifted in my seat, trying to dismiss the wave of heat passing over my body.

Axel continued. "The last time Cale saw you, you were seven years old. He grew up fast after that, became a man and a warrior almost instantly. When things were hard in the Garden, sometimes he thought of you. His betrothed. He wondered where you were, what you were doing. But this… what you really are… that's not what he imagined. He still kind of saw you as a princess. A delicate fantasy. Not a real woman."

I was still uncomfortable with the notion that someone had been my planned husband, let alone that Axel knew every intimate detail of that dead man's memories. He died, I considered with a shudder. Did that make Axel a ghost?

Despite my discomfort, curiosity probed deeper. "In the New World you gave me one of his memories. How did you do that— and don't just say magic. I want to understand it. Can you manipulate memories like Naminé?"

"Not nearly to that magnitude, but I know a thing or two. I told you before that there are levels of magic. Altering the physical world is just a different layer to altering someone's perception of the world. It's all stuff Cale learned growing up and fighting with the witches. You could probably do everything she could do and more, if you caught up with the training you would have had if the Worlds had stayed normal."

If the Worlds had stayed normal. It was so difficult now to fully imagine what normal looked like. I instinctively pictured me and Sora and Riku going to high school together on Destiny Islands, because for so long that's what I assumed normal was. But if the Doors had never opened, I would have grown up here. I would have been trained as a witch. I would have known my parents. I would have been Princess Kairi.

If everything stayed normal, you and I would be married, I told Axel with a twinge of red in my cheeks. And when I saw the surprised smile on his face, I realized it was because I had not spoken the words at all, I had sung them right into his consciousness, the way witches did.

"Not bad, Princess. But you're only partly right. You would be married to Cale, not me. You would be in blissful human love." There was suddenly a bite to his words. His face contorted in dismay. It reminded me of the sad way Naminé told me she didn't know what love would feel like.

"But I'm not him! I'm not! I'm me, I'm someone else... someone I wouldn't give up for anything. It just makes things complicated, having his memories."

He was so rarely serious, I felt uncomfortable watching him speak so emotionally, and moreover, about himself. It was too confusing how he could seem to be real, to me and to himself, and yet somehow not be. There was something else that bothered me about the strange complexity of Axel's existence: if the worlds had never opened and the Heartless never came, Axel wouldn't even exist. I didn't like the thought of that.

I changed the subject. "So if you can mess with memories… that was you then, who made Sora forget his story mid-sentence? Back in our meeting, he just kind of went blank, and you laughed. Why would you do that?"

Axel took a drink, disguising his blushing face with his highball glass. "Ah, so you noticed that? Very perceptive of you. I was just having some fun. I could tell that story was going to be boring. I don't know, I guess something about Sora irks me."

"Irks you? Sora is unirkable. He's the nicest human imaginable." And yet I'm here alone with Axel, I thought worriedly.

"Don't get me wrong, I have a healthy appreciation for Sora. He reminds me of Roxas, who is basically the nicest Nobody imaginable." Sadness hit his eyes and he stared at the glass, not at me. "I guess maybe I feel differently about Sora after spending so much time with you. It's hard to put into words, but it's like I can't stand to watch you give him your attention."

My stomach did little flips. It was such a blunt and unnerving statement. How could he say something like that to me? "What do you mean by that?"

Axel stared thoughtfully at his newly empty glass and shrugged. "I don't really know. I don't know what that means at all. It's complicated, you know? I'm not supposed to feel… but I do feel… I, um… I want to be around you. I don't know why. I just kind of… crave it."

He placed his hand on top of mine and it wasn't cold, like a ghost's. It was hot like fire.

"So where have you been these past few days?" I was shocked to hear the whimper in my own voice. "After everything we went through in Mesoamerica, and the New World… you just disappeared. We had days in the Coliseum where you could have seen me…"

What was I saying? Days where we had no trauma, no monsters, no obstacles… days that we could have spent together. Alone.

My words were trapped in my throat. I could only look at the glimmering green of Axel's eyes and breath heavily. So he kept talking.

"I kept to myself to try and figure out why I wanted to be around you so badly. I tried to ignore it. But I can't seem to make it go away. When I teased you earlier, about hitting Lulu… it was only because I felt like you were about to leave, and I wanted you around. I knew if I provoked you, you'd feel like you'd have something to prove, so you'd stay. And I wanted you to stay."

His pink lips pouted at me and the pink wine electrified my nerves and I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to kiss him so bad.

I pulled my hand out from under his and folded it alongside the other in my lap. I turned away from his burning eyes. "I think that… I think that Sora wouldn't want me to be here. I think that I should go home now."

Even as the words escaped my lips I felt a flutter of dissonance and confusion- you were never home, he had said. There was no home. I didn't know what home meant anymore.

A regular drunk boy may have reacted differently; but Axel was not regular. He was Other. He smiled calmly and nodded. "Makes sense. Can I walk you back to the castle?"

I closed my eyes and shook my head. I had started feeling too drunk, spinny. "I don't think I can walk that far right now."

I felt Axel's hands on me again and I shuddered a little, but I followed as he guided me out of the booth. I walked up the stairs in the back of the pub, eyes half-lidded, and I was guided into a cozy, dark place and eased onto a squishy couch. Axel left me quickly, as my head hit the pillow, and even though I wanted him to go, I felt a stinging pain at his absence.