Chapter 13: Ultimatum
"To hide in plain sight is the best way to remain un-detected," the reply came in a voice that reminded Roxas of the one belonging to a man with a bandage-covered face… Diz.
Now that Roxas thought about it, Xemnas and Diz had never been seen together during Diz's time within the organization.
"So, you played around with your name, added a letter and scrambled the rest, changed the way you looked and acted and just played along for, what, ten years?" Roxas said, staring at his hands lying in his lap. "Waiting for the next key bearer to show up as the perfect tool for your plan. You made up yet another personality and spied on me to make sure I was cut for the part, and then put the whole thing into active mode by attacking me before I figured out who you were."
He looked up at Xemnas, who didn't change his expression at all.
"You planned to wake me up yourself when the memory transfer was completed, but Axel found me faster than you'd expected. You called us up here to come and see you as soon as possible after I woke up, to see what we both knew and to find out just how much of the memory transfer that had been successful…That's when you decided to silence Axel, before he figured it all out and blew your cover, before you could put the next part of your plan into motion", Roxas continued, his eyes narrowing. "In dealing with him, you also found a natural excuse for the defense to come to a low point, both within the organization and in the programs protecting the Heart. Now all you need is for someone to lock up the remaining walls, and you believe you can convince me to do it for the sake of saving Axel. Have I missed something?"
Xemnas smiled viciously at him.
"Oh my, the code breaker finally made it. Well, I do believe you've only missed out on one little thing."
Roxas dared himself to turn his eyes to the golden ones of his enemy. What he saw in the man's face was nothing but the satisfaction and self praise of a person who knew he would win.
Disgusted by it, Roxas gritted his teeth and stood up from the chair, but kept looking straight at him nonetheless.
"And that is the simple fact that I will force you to do this if you don't do it freely. I simply prefer you do it on your own accord, since it's a lot easier to do it that way," Xemnas continued and gave Roxas' shoulder a harder squeeze, making the blonde quench.
"What have you done to Axel? Where is he?" Roxas asked, his voice pregnant with his mixed feelings of humiliation, guilt, worry and rage.
"Oh, don't worry, he's alive," Xemnas said in a chuckle. "I've simply put his mind on a task he can't ignore, which sort of helps keeping him off my back. Let's go see him, shall we?"
Xemnas didn't wait for an answer, but forcefully shoved Roxas backwards into one of the bookcases that covered the walls of the room.
A stinging, piercing pain shot through his head as it hit a sharp-edged shelf and he cried out as he fell to the floor together with a number of books that rained over him.
The head man of the organization was like a shadow in the gloom, dark and blurry at the edges as Roxas looked at him through half closed eyelids as he tried to think through the pain. What had gone wrong and when?
Xemnas made a movement above him and the bookcase silently slid to the side, revealing a secret passage.
Roxas tried to get up on his feet, but Xemnas just grabbed him by the neck of his shirt collar and roughly dragged him into the darkness of the new passage.
When he finally managed to see clearly again, Roxas' mind was instantly filled with memories he didn't want.
The passage was familiar to him, but he hadn't been there before. The memory he had belonged to Sora, but what Sora knew in the past and what Roxas was experiencing in the present was scrambled up into one blurry haze, together with the pain in Roxas' head. He was still being half dragged, half stumbling down the stone stairs.
At the end of the spiral staircase, Roxas was for a few minutes having some trouble with remembering just who he really was. This was instantly cured, however, the very moment he spotted the third person present in the room which they'd entered.
"Axel!" he called out with a voice of mixed relief and worry .
The red-haired man was placed in a chair similar to that in a dentist's office, only this one was equipped with restraints and a mass of technical wires that were connected to the man placed in it.
It was a sight for nightmares to come, the scenery lit up by a number of turned on screens of various sizes on the left side wall. The pale blue and eerie green light made the shadows sharp at the edges, looking like horrible monsters clinging onto everything with long, sharp claws, made to look alive by the flicker of the screens.
Roxas felt that he was released and instantly he shot forward on his still unstable legs, desperate to see if his friend was still breathing as Xemnas had promised.
Axel's eyes were closed and his body was next to motionless, but he was breathing.
Putting a shivering hand on Axel's cheek, Roxas noted it's coolness and pulled away slowly, turning to look at Xemnas.
"What are you doing to him?"
Xemnas only nodded towards the screen wall and Roxas followed his eyes to the source of the flickering lights.
The code strings mingled all over the wall in a familiar pattern, sometimes in blue, sometimes in green, always shifting and changing places. That one look was enough for him to understand that he was looking at the one thing he had been hoping to not ever see.
There, in the midst of what he recognized to be the defensive virus system surrounding the outer rim of the Kingdom Heart, was a single string of consistent coding that he for some reason had recognized, a part of his own lost memory jumping forward to get through the wall of intruding memories.
"Take him out of there!" he screamed in a panic stricken voice as he turned back to Xemnas.
"Why would I?" Xemnas said with a purring voice, smiling a wolf's grin, certain of his triumph.
Roxas swallowed and shut his eyes hard, clenching his fists as he made the decision.
Those defensive viruses were called "the heartless", and they had only one thing programmed into their meaning of existence: attack the minds of those who dared to enter their reign, and delete them. Once fixed on a target, the heartless were relentless, multiplying in an endless loop until the attacked caved in. When that happen, they take the attacker's self awareness and soul, also known in hacker surroundings as "the heart" of the hacker, making the remains in the digital world turn into one of them, while the body out in the real world was slowly dying away, forever lost. This was a horrible, but effective process, leaving the Kingdom Heart un-touched up to this day.
Sora had somehow got himself past the horde of heartless, all the way through to their inner circle of protection, and now Roxas was almost certain that he knew just how he'd done it, a knowledge that could save Axel's life…
Roxas looked up at Xemnas, his icy blue eyes wishing to pierce the other's golden.
"Because if you do, I'll hack the Heart for you. I'll get you through all the way, 'cause I know now how Sora did it. But I won't do it unless I know that Axel will be safe. And I can tell you this; Sora's way of progress won't work unless I can do it all on my own accord."
The last part was true; Roxas knew that.
Sora's success against the heartless had been his heart's strength and his ability to operate freely, to improvise and go on instinct.
Xemnas slowly clapped his gloved hands at the offer.
"Good boy," he said with a silky smooth voice. "I have to admit that I was a bit worried to begin with. Sora was way easier to catch."
Not moving his eyes from Xemnas, Roxas crossed his arms over his chest, feeling a strange urge to growl at his opponent, but forced it down.
"Now, I will free him, since you ask so nicely, but I can only do so if someone on the inside pushes him out of the shadows. Otherwise, my try to bring his mind back to his body will be like either pulling the plug on him, or splitting his mind in two."
Gritting his teeth with frustration, Roxas unfolded his arms.
"How will I know you'll keep your word?"
Xemnas only smiled approvingly at his skepticism.
"I will let him send you a message himself through outside sources."
Roxas didn't want to do it, but he had to accept this, simply because there was no other choice.
He nodded.
"Plug me in, then."
Xemnas directed him to a chair similar to that which Axel was placed in, standing only three or four steps away from the other.
Once all the wiring was in place, Roxas turned his head to give Axel's close to lifeless body a last look.
The feeling rising in his chest told him what he should have known already and with a heavy sigh of regret, he placed his head into the extended arms of the headrest, designed to keep his head in place while logged in.
"Do it," he said and as Xemnas flicked the switch on the control board, Roxas' eyes closed and he awoke in a different world.