"How old are you?" Roxas asked one night, lounging on the huge bed that the vampires had bought after Roxas, Demyx and one of the other humans had complained, loudly, about waking up with sore backs and stiff necks in the mornings.

They had even written up a rota of who could use it and who had to settle for the couch. There wasn't much to do in the daytime when their undead companions were sleeping.

"What?" Axel asked, lifting his face from the bite marks on Roxas' leg that had just stopped bleeding, red smeared all over his face and all down his neck. "Why do you want to know?"

"I just do, okay," he grumbled. "We've been together for 4 years, and I know barely anything about you except your name and the fact that you squeal like a little girl when I pinch your butt."

"How old do you think I am?" Axel asked, and he wriggled his way up the bed in an incredibly awkward manner, eventually settling down next to Roxas.

"I dunno. I'm shit at guessing how old people are. I thought Mama's new boyfriend was 20-something and he's actually almost 40."

"Guess," Axel encouraged. Roxas scowled at him but thought about it anyway.

After a few moments, he said "I reckon you're 25."

"Flatterer," Axel said, feigning bashfulness. "I was 24 when I got bitten, so you're close. But that was over 30 years ago, so I'm closer to 60."

Roxas pulled a disgusted face and gave the vampire a playful shove in the shoulder. "Perverted old man."

Axel laughed and buried his face in the soft junction between Roxas' chin and shoulder, and for a few minutes they just lay there on the bed.

"I have to get going," Roxas said eventually. "Sora will kill me if I'm late again."

"Jeez," Axel sighed, rolling away from the blond. "You'd think that after 4 years that stick up his butt might have shrunk a little."

"Nope, he's still totally paranoid about you. Riku told me once that he thinks you keep my brain in a jar."

Axel snorted and stood, stretching out at tall as he could before he joined Roxas in the search for clothes among the general chaos of the shared room.

"I can't find my shirt," Roxas grumbled as he shimmied his way into his slim-fit jeans.

"I think it's in the kitchen," Axel mumbled, pulling a loose, dark green shirt over his head. He shook his head to let the crazy spikes to red hair fall back into place and then he followed Roxas out into the kitchen.

Roxas was only an inch or two taller at 22 than he had been at 18, and still quite scrawny. Well, Roxas called it scrawny, Axel called it lithe. Sora, in one of his more bastard-like moments, had called him a runt, despite being just as small as his brother. Roxas had been more than a little annoyed at the comment and had punched him in the face and been swiftly clipped around the back of the head by their mother, while Sora crowed victoriously from behind him, something about "instant karma".

"Sunrise is in 20 minutes. I'll walk you home," Axel told Roxas once he was dressed and had recovered his keys from between the cushions on the dilapidated sofa and his book bag from by the front door.

"You don't have to," Roxas murmured, leaning up to kiss him, and after a long moment he pulled away and looked down at the ground.

"It's fine. Let's go."

xxx

He didn't see the car. He saw Sora on the other side of the street, waving, then there were arms around his shoulders and a crunch of glass and that horrid stinging sensation you get when you fall down on gravel and skin your knee when you're a kid and go crying home to your mommy, except on his face and all down his arm and his chest hurt and all he could see was red.

He blinked a few times, but everything was still red and then Axel moved, rolling off of him with a groan and now Roxas was staring up at the sky, still dark but with pink blossoming up from the horizon. Someone shouted his name and all of a sudden Sora was there, his usually smiling face sad and for a moment, a weird moment disconnected from reality, Roxas wondered why.

"Ow," he said eventually, his vision blurring with tears. He could feel them as they slipped down his face and then a brief sting on the side of his face that he couldn't identify.

"Roxas," Sora cried. His face was pink, Roxas noted, and he was crying as well.

"What happened?"

"Car," Sora gasped. "Out of nowhere."

Roxas laughed weakly and anger flitted across Sora's face. "You shit," Sora sobbed, and Roxas' eyes pinched shut involuntarily as pain surged across his chest.

"Ow," he repeated, unable to think of other things to say. He could feel, in a detached, not at all his own body sort of way, his lungs burning for air and his foot twitching erratically. He kept his eyes closed for a moment, then there was a cold hand on his check and he opened his eyes to look back up at his brother.

"Sora?"

"Yeah?"

"Call an ambulance, you fucking moron," he grumbled, watching as his brother sniffed hard and laughed himself.

"Someone already did," Sora told him. "You drew quite a crowd."

He tried to turn his head to look in the direction that Sora had cocked his head, but his body was refusing to listen.

"Good," he said, and for a moment he listened to the sound of his own breathing.

Sora scrambled away somewhere, and when he came back Roxas was still staring vacantly up at the sky as it lightened. He started to talk, saying things that Roxas couldn't understand or couldn't hear. It was getting so difficult to keep his eyes open and concentrate on what Sora was saying, so he just stared up at his big brother, looking at his sad smile and the tears that were dropping down onto his own face.

Eventually, he said his brother's name softly, and the brunet lifted a hand to his cheek.

"Am I gonna die?" he asked, and he noticed how his words ran together and his breathing hitched strangely.

Sora just stared at him, and after a moment his face softened. "Of course not, Roxas."

The way Sora started to cry before he'd even finished the sentence didn't fill him with any confidence whatsoever, and Roxas tried his best to glare, but it just made his face sting, and when he flinched the pain in rest of his body reminded him that it was still there.

"Tell me," Roxas gasped, his chest rising and falling rapidly, "how bad is it?"

"I'm so sorry," he said, and all of a sudden everything was dark and there was a sharp pain in his neck, and he was spiralling down into nothing.

xxx

Axel lay there and watched as Roxas tried desperately to breathe, barely moving and whimpering in pain as his brother talked softly to him. Just lay there and watched as his lover died in stages. Eventually Roxas said something and Sora smiled softly and Axel sat up slowly, brushing the dust and gravel off his hands, not really caring about the blood that seeped sluggishly from the large wound on his forearm.

"Tell me, how bad is it?" Roxas asked, and after Sora mumbled something back, he laid a hand over Roxas' eyes and leaned down, sharp fangs just visible in the early morning light.

"What are you doing?" Axel barked, just as Sora bit down on his little brother's neck and Roxas let out a strangled cry of pain, totally different to anything Axel had ever heard from him.

"Shit," he hissed, and he scrambled over, lifting his wrist up to his mouth to tear open a new wound beside the one that was closing up slowly. He spit out the blood that had pooled in his mouth, acrid and dead, and reached over the quivering spikes of Sora's hair to ease Roxas' mouth open as gently as he could, lowering his bleeding arm to his lips.

All too soon the wound began to dry up and he made quick work of biting into his other wrist.

Sora looked up eventually, his eyes still brimming with tears and blood streaked down his face.

"Will it work?" he asked, his voice weak and thin.

Axel looked at him, trying to keep his face impassive. "I have no idea."

Sora sniffed and just stared at him. "It has to work."

Axel looked down at Roxas, who had fallen still and silent. His legs were splayed out at odd angles to one another, and there were raw, bloody cuts on his face and arms from where they had slid across the tarmac of the road. Big, angry purple bruises were blooming across his chest and Axel stared down at them with a heavy feeling in his heart. Even if this did work, he would be in pain for a long time.

He could hear the wailing of ambulance sirens from not too far off, and he reached out and took Roxas' hand, wrapping his fingers around his skinny wrist, then he laid down beside him and closed his eyes. He could feel his lover's pulse becoming slower, and he lay there as he felt it grow weaker still, and for a while after it stopped and the ambulance eventually arrived and Roxas was pulled away from him he was content to just lie there and let the first light of the day fall upon him.

xxx

There were a lot of awkward questions and uncomfortable silences as Sora tried to explain to the hospital staff exactly what had happened – why both he and his brother were covered with blood without any gaping wounds, and why they couldn't declare him dead, not just yet.

Their mother burst into the ER crying and barely able to breath, clutching the fabric over her heart desperately as she searched for her sons, who she eventually found in a darkened room, her older son pale and edgy, but gloriously sentient, while her younger son lay on the hospital bed, for all intents and purposes dead.

"What happened?" she wailed, and Sora rushed around the bed to hug her.

"They were walking home and all of a sudden there was this car and it just plowed into them," Sora said tiredly. His face was vaguely pink in patches, and his eyes were bloodshot and watery, and he looked on the verge of either collapse or tears.

"My poor baby. Thank god you were there, darling," she said, stroking his hair down as soothingly as she could. "All we have to do now is wait, right?"

Sora sighed against her and he seemed to deflate a little in her arms. "I hope so, mama."

She stood there for a few more moments, holding him like she had when he was young and had fallen down and skinned his knee, and she waited for him to cry like he had as a child too.

They stayed at the hospital until the evening fell and there was still no sign of Roxas waking, and just before the sunset, a tall, slender boy with hair a little darker than Roxas' edged cautiously into the room, staying close to the wall. Sora's mother had left the room a few minutes before to find some food and some coffee for herself.

Sora looked up eventually and watched the blond carefully as he offered a weak smile and stepped a little closer.

"Who are you?" Sora asked sleepily, rubbing at his eyes. He hadn't slept yet, and he had become vaguely nocturnal since being turned, and he should have been sound asleep by this time of day, but he couldn't bring himself to close his eyes for too long.

"My name is Demyx. I came from Axel's den," he said. He seemed to remember his manners all of a sudden, and he walked up to the chair where Sora was sat and thrust out his hand for him to shake. Sora caught a brief glimpse of bite marks around Demyx's arm before he pulled his hand away and tugged the sleeve of his shirt back down. "I came to see how Roxas is."

"No different than he was this morning," Sora told him, and then he sighed again.

"Zexion was talking to me about it," he whispered conspiratorially, dropping down to sit on the floor in front of Sora. "After midnight, if his spirit is strong enough, he'll come back to us. We just need to wait until then to see if he makes it."

The blond in front of him looked so serious and so convinced that Sora couldn't help but smile.

"Thanks, Demyx."

He nodded, and turned around a little to look at Roxas.

"He'll make it though," Demyx said, his voice sure. "He's far too stubborn to die."

Sora laughed. "That he is."

Demyx turned and looked towards the doorway, and Sora watched as he hopped to his feet and trotted out into the hallway, before he scurried back and sat back down in front of the brunet.

"They'll be here soon. It's past sunset," Demyx told him with a wide, vacant smile on his face.

"Who?" Sora asked.

Demyx shrugged and turned to look at the doorway, seemingly content to sit and stare at the empty doorway for a while.

It was about 20 minutes later when the hallway outside the hospital room fell into silence, eerie and unsettling compared to the sounds of shuffling feet and general business that had filled the rest of the day, even the quieter, early morning hour after they had first arrived.

A few moments passed before a group of people filed into the room, silent and pale in a way that put Sora on edge. They didn't acknowledge him, but instead filled up the empty space in the room. Sora looked around at them all as the last few passed through the doorway, counting up the number of them he saw.

In total, there were 12 of them, and they could have all passed for mortals, except that Sora knew without a doubt that they were the same as him. One of them, with slate coloured hair that fell forwards into his eyes crossed the room to help Demyx to his feet, then stepped back to the place he had vacated, the human standing beside him. Sora could see a familiar shock of red hair and he almost smiled.

"Why are you here?" Sora asked, getting to his feet slowly. The effects of sleep deprivation were slower to hit him than a human, but he was still young by vampire standards and he was definitely feeling it now. He felt shaky and weak, but he stood to face them nonetheless.

"We came for your brother," said a girl with vivid blonde hair. It was mostly plastered to her head except for two antenna-like strands that arched up and back down again. "He will be one of us if he makes it through."

"What?" he barked. The blonde just stared at him with a look of disapproval.

"He has the blood of our brother in him, so he is one of us now," she explained, her voice slow and dripping with disdain, as though she were talking to a child she despised.

"You can't just decide that for him," Sora cried. In the brief moment it took him to look down at the pale and impossibly still form of his brother, then back up at the group, the blonde vampire had crossed the room and was less than an inch from his face.

"It is not for any of us to decide," she hissed, her thin face suddenly twisted and angry. "You think I like living with these slobs? I only stay because I have to."

Sora tried not to laugh, but it was no use. The girl looked down at him in disgust once more, and then stepped away, leaving him to giggle to himself for a while.

"So," he said after a while, looking around at them all. "Now what?"

A tall, brown haired man raised his chin slightly, and said, "Now, we wait."

"Is there nothing we can do?"

The man shook his head, and Sora sighed. He sank down into his chair and pulled out his phone to check the time.

Instead of seeing the small clock that was usually on the face of the phone, he saw a list of the missed calls and new messages that he had ignored for the whole day.

"Shit," he hissed as he scrolled through the messages. There were some from Riku asking where he was, and some from Roxas' friends asking if he'd seen him today.

"Shit shit shit," he whispered again and quickly typed out a message to all of them telling them they were at the hospital and that they could come down if they wanted to, which he was sure they would. While all of their friends had moved away to schools in different parts of the country, they were all home for summer vacation, so they would be in the area. How had he forgotten to tell them?

"Sora?"

He looked up to see his mother moving between the assembled vampires in the room, clutching a paper bag and a paper cup of what he assumed was coffee.

"What's going on?" she asked in a hushed tone as she looked around at them all. "Who are these people?"

The only other human in the room stepped forwards and offered Sora's mother a large smile. "My name is Demyx," he told her, reaching for her hand. "We're here for Roxas."

The small blonde vampire flashed her a wicked smile, her delicate fangs catching the light.

"You're vampires?"

"I'm not," Demyx told her gently. "But they are."

"Why are you here though?" she asked. "Is there something you can do?"

"No," Demyx told her. "We just have to wait."

She sighed and sat down on the very edge of the bed. "So we just have to sit here and see if he ever wakes up again?"

The blond nodded and offered her a sympathetic half smile.

So they waited. Sora and his mother sat next to one another on sparsely padded seats the nurses had brought in that morning, hands held together between them as they checked the time every few minutes. The vampires all remained standing, but Demyx was content to sit down on the floor between Zexion and Marluxia.

At about half an hour until midnight, the vampires turned, almost as one, to the doorway and a few seconds later a group of young adults came running down the corridor towards the room, flushed and uncoordinated. The group of vampires split into two and parted for them to move through the room, but they barely noticed, instead rushing towards where their friend lay on the bed. Naminé, Kairi and Pence headed around to the other side of the bed, pale and shaking, while Olette, Hayner and Riku stood beside Sora, who had gotten to his feet once again.

"What happened?" Naminé cried. She was the first to get her voice back after seeing Roxas pale and still and broken.

"There was an accident," Sora mumbled. "He got hit by a car."

For a moment they all stood, looking around at each other, before Kairi asked what they had all been thinking.

"Is he dead?"

"Yes."

Naminé and Kairi wrapped their arms around one another but neither of them cried as Sora had expected them to.

"I don't get it," Hayner said eventually. "What are they all doing here?"

His disdain for vampires had not lessened, and he knew from seeing Axel standing by the door that that's what they all were.

"We attempted to turn him," the red haired vampire said, the first words he had spoken since they had arrived. "We won't know until after midnight if it has taken."

"You did what?" Hayner shouted, taking a step towards him.

"Would you rather he be left to die?" the blue haired vampire asked, his voice steely and cold.

'Watch yourself, Hayner,' Sora thought to himself, but it was no use.

"Better dead than one of you," he spat.

The vampires all smirked and looked down at Hayner with looks of derision and amusement.

"Alright," Riku snapped. "Out. Everybody out."

When no one moved, he fixed first his friends and then the vampires with a stony stare.

"Out," he growled.

The humans wandered out of the room slowly, Riku in the lead, and they were followed out by the vampires, who fell into line almost automatically. Sora followed them out and left his mother in the room alone, he looked up at Riku and sighed.

"Keep them in line?"

"Of course," Riku promised, and leaned down to kiss Sora on the forehead.

"Sora?" his mother called, and he reluctantly stepped away from his boyfriend. He heard his name again, but this time it wasn't a shout, it was a scream, and another accompanied it.

He dashed back into the room to see his mother standing beside the bed, her hands raised over her other son's writhing body, her son who was crying and bleeding.

"Roxas!"

He didn't seem to hear, but instead dissolved into tears, laying on his side and clutching his chest, breathing hard and fast.

"Roxas," Sora called again, reaching out to untangle one of his brother's hands form the front of his torn and dirty shirt. The brunet had refused to let them remove his clothes and replace them with a hospital gown, even though he was technically dead.

His younger brother's blue eyes opened, and all of a sudden Sora was back on the road in front of the battered car, the sun about to rise behind him, about to drain the blood out of him.

"It's okay, Roxas," he said as soothingly as he could, but it was lost over the sound of his pained sobs. "It's okay."

"It hurts," Roxas cried, and Sora noticed a small patch of blood on his pillow from the wound on his face that seemed to have reopened.

"What hurts?" their mother asked desperately.

"Everything," her son answered, his voice thin and halting.

"It'll be okay," Sora promised. "We're here."

Roxas closed his eyes again and turned his face into the pillow and wept.

xxx

"You have to go in there," Naminé told him fiercely, her blue eyes sharp and dangerous. "He needs you to be in there with him."

Axel didn't know why but this small, delicate little girl scared him a lot more than she should have. She seemed only half his size, but something about her presence scared him and he felt on edge around her.

"I can't," he told her in a hushed voice.

"And why not?"

"You wouldn't understand," he told her, and she glared at him again and he was almost sure he would explode soon if she didn't stop.

"I did that to him," Axel hissed. "I should have seen the car, and I should have done something to get him out of the way."

"It's not your fault," Naminé assured him, reaching out for his hand. "It was that stupid driver."

A strangled cry came from inside the hospital room, and Axel winced.

"I can't."

xxx

Larxene was standing right outside the main entrance to the hospital, a slender cigarette with a red filter clenched between the tips of her fingers. She didn't even turn to look when Axel sidled up beside her and reached over to take the cigarette from her. He took a deep drag from it, then passed it back to her. The smoke curled up into the air until it vanished against the dark sky.

"You're such a pussy," she purred, and he shot her a dirty glare. "Your little human is all sore and weepy and you're hiding out here. Coward."

"I can't go back in there, Larxene."

"Yes you can, you're just being a little bitch."

"I'm serious. I did that to him, I shouldn't be in there."

She snatched the cigarette back from him and dropped it to the ground and turned to face him.

"Listen," she hissed, placing the tip of one of her finely manicured nails on his chest. "He is your human, so he is your responsibility. And he is hurt, and he needs someone to hold him. You need to be in there, because this is hard enough as it is without being injured as well."

Axel stared down at her before he sighed in defeat. "You're right." He walked back through the door, and just before it closed he looked at her and said, "Geez, Larxene, when did you get so soft?"

He wandered back through the corridors and towards the room tucked away at the back of the hospital, and worked his way through the surprisingly large crowd waiting outside the door.

It pained him to hear Roxas crying like that, and despite every instinct in him telling him to run far away, he crossed over to the bed and after Sora looked at him warily, he knelt down so as he was at eye level with Roxas.

Axel reached out gently and pushed some stray hairs out of his face.

Roxas looked over at him curiously, his breathing easing out a little, and Axel smiled a little.

"Hey," he whispered, and Roxas sputtered unattractively right in his face. He grinned widely, and Roxas attempted to do the same, but instead set off a fresh wave of tears, which made Axel snicker slightly.

He clambered up onto the bed next to him, totally unconcerned with the fact that his feet were dangling off the end.

"It's okay," he murmured, and Roxas buried his face into the vampire's shirt. He kissed the top of Roxas' head delicately, and wrapped his arms around him as best he could without jostling him too much, and they lay there, together, until Roxas cried himself to sleep.

xxx

This is part 1 of the 2 part finale of Thrall. The next part will detail Roxas coming to terms with his new vampire-y nature :)

Let me know what you think :3