IX.
I sleep better than I have slept in months, curled in a ball, Axel's chest pressed against my back. His skin is burning hot and under the blankets, I am a sweaty mess. I don't dare move though, not when his arms are wrapped so tight around my waist and his legs are tangled with mine. I hold my breath and for a moment, in my groggy state, I think of how Del never held me like this. And even if he did, I wouldn't have wanted him to.
Oh help me, I am a mess.
And rebounding. Probably.
Axel tugs me in a little closer and I realize that he is starting to wake behind me, because I can now feel his cock press against my ass.
"Good morning, Rueks." His teeth nip at my earlobe. I whimper.
"I told you, don't call me that." I remind him, but I don't stop him as he starts to grind his hips into my ass. His lips trail down the side of my neck and his hand comes away from my waist, sliding down my abdomen, lighting a fire on my skin. I shiver into his back and he meets my movements by holding me tighter, kissing my shoulder. His fingers dip lower trailing between my legs and I moan, wantonly as he starts to tease my clit.
"You're so wet already." His breath is hot on my neck, and he's right, I am. I feel his cock, hard and nudging at my cunt. I rock my hips a little and sink back onto him. Axel groans, grabbing my hips in his hands. He slams me back onto him once, twice, another time. I choke, my throat catching on a moan as I throw my head back, narrowly avoiding slamming my head into his. I rock my hips back into his and at the change in my rhythm, his fingernails start to bite into my skin.
"Axel." I whine, grinding my hips into his as he pounds into me. His breathes, hot and heavy, against my skin and I can feel his motions start to slow. I shiver violently, feeling his cock completely withdraw from me and then thrust back in. The sensation is exhilarating and wakes up every one of my nerve endings. His hands slide back down to play with my clit and I come, clenching around his cock.
"Fuck, Rueki." He groans into my skin, his release following mine immediately. He laughs and I feel him throw his head back, against the pillow.
"Good morning to you too." I giggle and once again, his lips return to my shoulder.
"We should wake up like that more often." He says and I have to admit, it certainly was not the worst way I have ever been woken up. I can feel him starting to go soft inside of me, but his arms are still wrapped around me and I'm not going to move if he isn't.
"Aren't you going to bitch about us being late for our mission or something?" I ask. Behind me, he snickers.
"Real sweet words for the man that just made you come." He teases.
"I'm sorry, would you like a prize?" I ask.
"I'll let you buy me ice cream today." He offers. I roll my eyes.
"What a joy." I reply.
I wake up one morning in a frenzy, because with Axel snoring by my side, it is incredibly difficult to pull myself out of bed.
"Shit, Roxas is going to be at the door in like minutes dude, do you even realize what time it is?" I ask, scrambling out of bed to grab my shirt. He looks at me, peeking one eye open.
"You afraid to traumatize the kid or something?" He asks and I huff.
"Dude, he's barely even coherent, I don't want his first memories to be us, naked in bed." I insist and he throws his head back laughing.
"Is that a hint of motherly instinct, I detect?" He asks and I roll my eyes.
"No, it's a hint of I like to keep my private life, private. Though your abundant lack of subtlety has mostly ruined that." I remind him.
"Says the girl who spent hours sitting outside my door." He teases.
"Only cuz you were being a dick and I don't tolerate that shit." I remind him, putting one leg through my shorts.
"Sweetheart, why'd you have to ruin a perfectly good morning by putting clothes on?" He asks.
"Because in case you missed it, we usually leave for missions around this time." I grumble. He snorts.
"Look at you, you'd think you're an honorary member the way you're acting." He grins.
"No, I'm just impatient. And you're still naked." I set a hand on my hip.
"Is this not how you'd prefer me?" He smirks. I roll my eyes.
"Not the point." I reply. "Get up."
"Now Rueks, why would I want to do that on my day off?" I freeze right there and then after a moment, turn to throw him some major side eye.
"Day off?" I ask and he shrugs, sitting up, blankets sliding down his torso and dear Twilight, I do not think I will ever get used to how beautiful he is.
"Yep. Every so often we get those, got it memorized?" He asks.
"And when, pray tell, were you planning to let me know that we have the day off?" I ask.
"Probably when you took off running down the hall to go wake Roxas up." He confesses.
I barely resist the urge to grab my shoe off the floor and throw it at him.
I lean against the guard rails of the clock tower in Twilight Town, an ice cream stick dangling between my lips, the sun setting, vibrant orange in the sky.
"Tell me a story." I say to Axel, who sits behind me, leaning back, staring more at my ass than the setting sun. I set my stick down on top of the guard rail.
"What?" He laughs and I turn to him, offering him a smile.
"About when we were kids." I try. He scratches his head.
"C'mon, Rueks, I dunno, what do you want me to say?" He offers me a sheepish glance and I turn to look at him, elbows resting on the guard rail. "Hey, you're blocking the view." He teases and I know it's not the sun that he's referring to. I kick his knee, but he catches my foot half way through.
"I dunno, I just wanna know about the past." I confess. "Before coming to your world, I didn't remember anything. I mean I still don't. But now that I know you, someone who does remember me…I don't know I just wanna know everything." I sigh, sinking down into his lap. He shoves his hands into my back pockets.
"Is it hard?" He asks.
"No, not yet, but I'll get it there." I grin, rocking my hips against his. He leans me back so that my head is dangling through the gaps on the guard rail and I can no longer grind on him. "Hey!" I cry out and he brings me back up.
"Stop being so thirsty." He kisses my cheek. I make a show of wiping my face. He removes his hands from my pockets and takes my wrists in his hands, pinning them up behind my head, against the guard rail. "Is it hard to not remember anything?" He asks. I roll my eyes.
"That's what you get for being vague." I remind him. "But no, not really. I mean, sure I want to know everything. But you can't really miss what wasn't there to begin with."
He keeps me there like that for a long minute, hands above my head, before seeming to decide he's punished me long enough. He releases me and we wrap our arms around each other, me with my head tucked under his chin, feeling the warmth radiating off of him.
"Is it hard having to remember everything?" I finally breathe.
He never answers that. Instead he plays with my hair.
"I used to want everyone I met to remember me." He starts and I nod, head still tucked underneath his.
"Inside other people's memories, you can live forever." Such an odd statement, I don't even know where it came from, but the words sound right as they fall from my lips. Almost the second I close my mouth, Axel grabs my face in his hands, bringing me up to eye level.
"What did you say?" His words are breathy and urgent. I blink.
"Just that if you make sure that everyone remembers you, you can become immortalized in their thoughts." I offer.
"No, the exact words." He urges, and to be honest, I'm surprised by how well I remember the words.
"If everyone you meet remembers you, inside other people's memories you can live forever." I recite.
He doesn't say another word to me the rest of the time we're on the clock tower, but he also doesn't stop smiling.
"Have you ever loved anyone?" He looks at me with intense eyes, head tilted to the side. I'm covered only in his arms and being chest to chest makes the weight of his question that much heavier. But I know the answer already.
"No." I say, flatly. "What about you?" Though I catch myself hoping for a very specific answer and I mentally chastise myself. It's way too early for that, and this is not going to lead to that. This is fun, this is easy, it's not love and it never will be.
"Nope." He says with the pop of his lips. "What about your boyfriend from home?" He asks and I scoff.
"Del was the best of a bad situation." The words are certainly a lot nastier than I mean them to be.
"Ouch!" He laughs, tapping my nose with his finger.
"I didn't actually mean that. I dunno, we were friends forever and he looked at me like the sun shined out of my ass, and he was cute. So when he asked me out, I was down, because it just seemed like that was the natural progression of things." I shrug.
"So what happened?" He asks and I laugh.
"You mean besides me catching him and Amaya tearing each other's clothes off?" I smirk. "To be honest, I think I realized I was outgrowing both of them a long time ago, nothing seemed to mesh right, especially after Amaya's accident. Everything in Del's eyes was all about her, he really wanted to play Doctor to her and thought it was our fault. But I'm not dumb or masochistic, we weren't the ones that attacked Amaya, it wasn't our fault. I guess he just didn't see things clearly and it started to drive me nuts. It kind of came to a head when Sora landed in my world. Damn kid got more of my boyfriend's attention than I did…And I think that's what the basis of our relationship was. He liked that my past was a mystery and I liked getting attention."
Axel looks over me for a long moment, his fingers finding my hair, twirling through the ends.
"Does that make me a bad person?" I ask and he laughs.
"I don't think I'm allowed to be the judge of that, Rueks."
My limbs ache. My body is heavy. I'm bleeding and my head is throbbing. Axel isn't in much better shape, hunched over with a dislocated shoulder and a tear in his coat. Roxas, however was in the worst shape and it took quite few potions to even get the kid comfortable enough to lay down in his own bed. Now, in the safety of Axel's room, we have our own injuries to worry about.
"Lay down on your back." I order him, he doesn't even have the energy to disagree. He lowers himself onto his bed.
"Now might not be the time for any funny business, sweetheart." He offers me a weak smile. I pout and grab his hand, rotating his arm out before pulling. "Ahhk!" He cries out, but I can't get a proper amount of traction. I prop one foot up on the bed and use that leverage to yank a little harder until I feel his joint click back into place. He cries out even louder as it settles fully and I heave a sigh, throwing myself down onto the bed next to him.
"You're welcome." I grumble.
"I didn't say thank you." He reminds me.
"The hell did we have to go back to Oz for? We already learned that the Wizard was a fraud." I mutter, assessing the cut on my arm. It's big, but not terribly deep and is only bleeding a little bit still. It won't need stitches. Probably.
"You saw that witch though, she's a nasty piece of work." He sighs and I whimper.
"That's putting it lightly." I lean into him, resting my head against his shoulder.
"You know, that's probably gonna get infected." He nods his head towards my arm and I nod back, head still against him.
"I know, I just don't want to have to move anymore." I confess. He sighs, scooping me up against the side of him that didn't sustain an injury. I snuggle in a little closer to him, closing my eyes.
"Can we just stay like this for the rest of the night." He asks and I smile.
"Please."
It doesn't dawn on me until much later that you can't be casual fuck buddies unless you're actually fucking.
"You know, I might actually miss you if you weren't such a pain in my ass." Pretty ballsy to say to the girl whose stomach he just covered in cum, but being that I have to wait for Axel to wipe me off, I refrain from hitting him. For now.
"For the five minutes that we aren't literally glued to each other's sides? You're sweet." I say, with the obvious roll of my eyes. Axel's got a dirty sock at hand and I huff, an eyebrow raised. "Seriously?"
"What do you want, princess? A maid service?" We make eye contact and my stomach backflips as I feel the brush of fabric wiping my abdomen clean. He leans in, setting an arm beside my head and I meet him half way, my lips pressing against his. I inhale, breathing in his scent before wrapping my arms around his neck. His lips pull away from mine, but I still hang on. Wrapping arms around my waist, he scoops me up and carries me with him. I bite my lip to hold back a giggle, he doesn't need to know how delighted I am. "I'm leaving in a few days." He confesses and I nod, a smirk playing upon my lips.
"Right, and you're taking me with you. We're going somewhere where your shit coworkers can never find us. But like somewhere big enough where I don't need to talk to you unless I wanna bang it out." He drops me to the ground and I land right on my tail bone. "Fucking asshole."
"And that, Rueks, is why I'm not going to miss you." He leans down, tapping my nose with his index finger. I climb up off of the floor, brushing myself off before I elbow past him, striding towards my clothes.
"You know what makes you sound like an even bigger douche bag than you already are?" I ask. "Talking in riddles."
He snorts.
"The Organization, we've got another Castle in another In-Between World—Castle Oblivion. A few of us are being sent there." He tells me and my brow furrows.
"When were you planning to tell me this?" I snap and I catch myself. I'm being rude, and a little bit dramatic, but isn't this something I should've known a little more than a few days ahead of time?
"Rueki, I just found out today." He sighs, knowing full well what is coming, and I do too, because I love fighting with him, the sex is always amazing afterward.
But there's more to it this time. A lump forms in my throat.
"What's going to happen to me?" What am I supposed to do without you?
"I think you'll probably be paired off again with Demyx, after all, you were such a good Heartless wrangler." He grins at me, but I glare.
"You didn't think to maybe discuss this with me before agreeing?" Don't you realize I need you?
"C'mon sweetheart, you think I had a say in any of this? It's more of a pain in my ass than anything." Axel rolls his eyes and I start to put my clothes back on. "Rueki, c'mon." He groans, coming to wrap an arm around me but I shrug him off.
"How long are you going to be gone?" How can you be so okay with leaving me?
"I dunno, a couple months I guess." He murmurs, watching me dress with a stony expression. I pull on my shorts, shirt and shoes in complete silence and once my boots are finally zipped, I turn my back on him and offer a curt wave of my hand.
"Have fun." I'm going to miss you so fucking much.
The sound of the door slamming behind me makes me want to scream. I stomp to my room all the while, hating myself, my stomach twisting. This wasn't supposed to happen, there weren't supposed to be any feelings involved. I'm not supposed to miss him even a little.
I'm not supposed to fall for him.
I don't even wait long enough to see if he'll come running after me. I sprint back to his room, burst through the door and throw myself at him. His hands tangle through my hair, I wrap my legs around his waist, he kisses me with so much intensity that I think his name may be seared into my mouth
"We'll have to make up for the time we're missing." I breathe between kisses.
"A few months is a long time." He agrees.
"You're awfully attached." Luxord says, in the middle of a chess match and I snort.
"Not really." I try, even though he's right, I know he's right and it's embarrassing because this is not how things were supposed to happen. Axel is annoying, Axel makes me want to pull my hair out frequently, Axel can have me on my knees begging him to fuck me one minute and in his face, threatening to slap him the next. Much as I hate to admit it, I feel more for him than I have felt for anyone in my entire life. And that is exactly the problem.
"Love, you're about as transparent as they come." He insists. "Most women with hearts are."
"Talk to my ex. He says I'm a heartless bitch." I reply with the wave of my hand. "Besides, I've got Axel eating out of the palm of my hand. Ego or no, it's only a matter of time before he professes his undying love for me." And then I won't have to pretend I don't feel the same anymore. Luxord's face is still poker straight.
"Not likely." He says, blithely.
"And why's that?" I ask, leaning forward. He meets my gaze with a quirked eyebrow and a twisted mouth.
"Do you mean, aside from the obvious?" He asks me and I tilt my head.
"The obvious?" I ask. "You mean his pigheadedness?"
He stares me over for a very long moment, his fingers resting on a chess piece. I try to hold his gaze, because part of me is starting to wonder if this is a challenge of some sorts, but finally he blinks and leans back, regarding me almost the way one might a stray dog.
"You don't know, do you?" Which is annoying an unspecific and I swear can no one here talk straight?
"Dude, come on." I groan.
"Do you know why we have assembled in this here Organization, in this world?" He asks.
"Because you hate yourselves and are content having the worst jobs ever?" I'm starting to get uncomfortable, my skin itches and it takes all of my willpower to not start picking at my cuticles.
"Rueki, do you know what a Nobody is?" He asks me.
"Of course. Demyx and Axel have both summoned some. Dancers and Dusks." I nod, but his hand falls away from the chess piece and I know instantly that I am in trouble.
"When a person loses their heart to darkness, do you know what happens?" He asks. I frown.
"They die?"
"Not quite." Which makes me feel incredibly stupid. "When a person loses their heart to darkness, the heart itself becomes a Heartless. A being purely based on its own instinct."
"What happens to their body then? Their soul?" I ask.
"The soul is another matter altogether." He says with a quick nod.
"And who is to say one even exists?" I shrug. He smiles, but only briefly.
"Who indeed. The body of a person who loses their heart to darkness becomes a Nobody." He informs me. I nod, though the pieces aren't quite connecting.
"So Heartless actually aren't without hearts and Nobodies actually do have bodies.." I am trying so hard to keep my facial expression neutral, but really, there is a feeling of dread washing over me, and I can't quite pinpoint why, but my heart is hammering in my chest.
"Delightfully confusing, no?" He counters.
"Well at least it explains where the Dusks come from."
"Among others. There are plenty of different classes of Heartless. You've seen Demyx summon Dancers, I myself can call upon a group called Gamblers." He says.
"But where do the different classes come from?" I ask. He makes a face, though I can tell it's taking all of his effort to even respond to me without that hard, blank expression.
"The strength of ones heart before they lose it to the darkness. Dusks being the weakest of heart." He says the words as though they weight a ton. "Would you care to wager a guess as to which beings had the strongest of hearts?"
I really don't understand what he's getting at. And I know that I look stupid because I feel stupid, but I sit there and blink at him until he sighs, looking away from me.
"I'll offer you a hint, only a very select few had strong enough hearts to retain their original bodies. And thirteen of us have assembled with a purpose."
The world sinks immediately down onto my shoulders and I have to grit my teeth and clamp my mouth shut to keep myself from getting sick. I stand up, my entire body ice cold and numb as I push away from the table. My limbs feel heavy as I stand, as though they might drag me into the ground.
I will not cry. I'm not going to cry. I'm not going to fucking cry over him.
"Rueki, love." He tries, though he very clearly doesn't know where to begin, and I can't fault him. It must be hard having to sit here and feign emotion for my benefit. It must be difficult pretending to have a heart when you don't have one. "I was under the impression that you were aware, I'm sure Axel was as well—"
"Don't." I shake my head, though the words sound like they are coming out of a stranger's mouth and not my own. "This isn't your problem, it's mine."
"Yes, but the last thing any of us need is you beating him to the point that he's useless on missions." Luxord offers me a half smile, and I can tell he's trying to lighten the mood, but I feel no lightness.
"Sounds like the Castle Oblivion crew will have to make due." I trudge out of the room, my ears ringing, the light feeling too bright. I ball my hands into such tight fists and am not satisfied until I feel my fingernails biting into my palms. Not for the same reason I wanted to feel the wind whip my skin when I caught Del and Amaya in the act though. I don't want to prove to myself that I can feel something, I want to inflict so much physical pain on myself that I don't feel anything.
I don't even know what I plan to do, half of me wants to go to my room and break every promise I made to myself, to sink down onto the floor of the shower and cry, in heaves and gasps and sobs, to cry until my body is more broken than my heart. Part of me wishes I would've been smarter, more manipulative, told Luxord to open up a portal back to Transmute City and just let me go, that he owed me that much. But he has no heart to cloud his judgement, it probably wouldn't have worked on him anyway. And I don't want to go back to Transmute City. Even though I miss worrying if I was broken because I didn't feel enough.
Part of me though, apparently outweighs the others. It is the part of me that needs to see him, to have him look me in the eye and tell me that this is true. Because until he does, I know that every fiber of my being will hold onto hope that he is the exception and does have a heart.
I find his room mechanically, not even thinking about the path to get there and I open the door without knocking. It's not an out of the ordinary gesture, so when I do walk through the doorway and close the door behind me, he barely looks up from the potion that he is knocking back.
"Hey, sweetheart, I was wondering when you'd come back. I might need you to play doctor for a little while, you missed out on a real treat of a mission. Some damn Heartless knocked me around a little better than I thought it could." He smiles at me sheepishly and I grip the side of his dresser, trying to keep my knees from buckling. Because that smile looks so real, the way it lights up his emerald eyes sends sparks to my heart. Sparks that he cannot feel.
"When were you going to tell me that you didn't have a heart?" The voice that comes from my mouth still sounds hollow, wet, almost as though I have been crying, despite my still refusing to shed a tear.
Axel's face suddenly grows serious, he sets the potion aside and looks up at me, gauging my expression for a minute.
"Demyx said you knew." He replies in a voice that is barely flickering, like a nearly extinguished candle.
"How the fuck would Demyx have known?" I don't yell, I don't raise my voice, I don't even sound mad, just tired. Miserable.
"He said he mentioned all the time that we all didn't have hearts." He offers; I wrack my brain and I do recall him mentioning it in certain circumstances, but always lightly. Always in a way that I thought was a joke.
I'm so fucking stupid.
"Why didn't you ever say anything to me?" I breathe. He stands up, moving away from his bed and toward me.
"Because I thought you knew, Rueki." My skin crawls, hearing him say my name.
"Don't." I shake my head, holding my hand out to signal him to stop. "Didn't you ever…I mean didn't you question for a moment…?"
"Yeah." He murmurs, looking away from me. "But we were friends with benefits, it was just supposed to be sex, all physical, nothing else." As if I need the reminder. I can't meet his gaze.
"Did you realize that it wasn't anymore for me?" I can barely speak, my voice shakes with the effort to repress the tears. He takes a step closer to me and I turn away, wrapping my arms around my middle, in an attempt to hold myself together.
"Yeah." His voice comes out barely audible and I throw my head back, snorting, because it's the only thing I can do to keep the levee from breaking.
"Then why the fuck did you let it continue?" I ask, running a hand back through my hair.
"It was just supposed to be sex. I thought you knew, I really thought you knew." He repeats himself.
"That doesn't somehow make it better." I murmur.
"Rueki if I thought this was anything more than a rebound…" He tries before shaking his head. "I thought it was something you'd get over easily. I didn't want to fault you for having a heart. Just because I can't doesn't mean you didn't deserve to feel—"
"Fuck you." I sneer, my breath trembling. "The only emotion I will ever feel toward you is complete and utter loathing. It doesn't matter what I thought I felt before. I fucking hate you." It doesn't matter that he has control over fire, my tone is subzero.
"Listen Rueki, if you don't want to talk to me, that's fine, but don't start—"
"No, fuck you." The words come out in a blizzard. "I don't just not want to talk to you. I hope you fucking die in Castle Oblivion."
I don't give him the chance to say another word to me. I tear out of the room, praying that I will never see him again.
I find my way not into my room, but outside of the Castle. It is pouring rain, hammering down onto the streets, onto me. My shirt it drenched almost immediately after stepping foot outside, because as much as I wanted to wrap myself in Axel's coat, in his very essence, or to run back into his room and take back everything I said, my stubbornness wins out. I will not crack, I will not falter. And I am still not going to cry.
I open my palms to the sky and stare up at its blackness with squinted eyes.
How unfair that I even crash landed in this world in the first place.
I take a step out into the world and then another, listening to the sound of my footsteps against the soaking pavement, and something about it is cathartic, therapeutic even. I laugh, a hollow, distraught sound. How twisted and karmic, I was so worried that I was cold, that I was emotionless, that I was heartless and hollow, that I had to run away from the only friends I had ever known. And then I end up here, in a world where the inhabitants are actually Heartless. I place my hand over my own beating heart and tear it away just as quickly. What I wouldn't give for one of the Neo Shadows to appear and rip it straight out of my chest. Perhaps falling into the darkness won't actually be painful. I remember hearing at one point in time that drowning was the most peaceful way to die, that after the initial struggle, when your brain loses oxygen, it starts to feel similar to falling asleep. I can't imagine that submitting to the darkness would be too much different.
I find myself wandering the city, wandering alleys I have never been down, fingertips skimming the sides of buildings. I have sunk down against one when I hear a portal open to my left. I don't even look up to see who it is.
"I don't know what the fuck you think there is left to say but whatever it is, I don't care. I don't want to hear it." I snap over the roar of the rain.
"Sorry, you've got the wrong guy." Demyx's voice sounds off and I snap my head up, my wet hair falling into my face as I look to him. The portal closes behind him and he treads over to me, crouching down in front of me.
"So does everyone in the castle know now?" I ask, lifting an eyebrow. He offers me a very weak smile.
"Pretty much." He nods.
"You know for a bunch of people without hearts, you guys sure do care a lot about the affairs of one." I roll my eyes and he cackles.
"What can I say, you make us all feel alive again." He teases. I grimace. "In all honesty though, Rueki, I did tell you."
I don't bother arguing with him, it's not worth it and I am so worn.
"It is what it is. You're not the one I'm pissed at." Because he's not the one I was fucking.
He's not the one I was starting to…
"You know, I didn't come out just to…you know, let you know that the news had spread around the castle." Demyx confesses.
"No, I guess not. Sympathy requires a heart, hmm?" I raise an eyebrow. He offers a half smile.
"You got it." He nods. From his cloak, he produces a notecard and hands it over to me. My mouth twists.
"What more could they possibly fucking want for me." I grab the notecard from him. "Can't you guys just kill me and get it over with?"
He doesn't seem to know how to respond to that.
The rain pounds on me as I unfold the notecard, I don't take it as a sign. I'm beginning to wonder if I should start being a little more superstitious.
'Accompany the group going to Castle Oblivion. The Keybearer awaits you'.