They drive past 'the spot'. Roxas can't really stand to call it anything else in his mind since Axel left. As his car idles, he stares absently at the green grass of the median and the red of the stop sign until his vision blurs into an unfocused collection of colors.

"Rox."

The voice that comes from the seat next to him startles him with its sickly familiarity. Roxas takes in a gulp of quickly drying saliva. It clashes harshly with the simultaneous inhale he tries to take. He sputters, coughing, as a war wages in his windpipe.

"You okay, Rox?"

He looks toward the seat next to him and his eyes seize on the same familiar green and red. As his throat continues its onslaught of spasms, the rest of his body stills. Finally, his breath catches. His cerulean blues land on poison greens.

"Axel?" Roxas croaks.

"Roxas," Axel murmurs. "Roxas, Roxas." It's like he's testing the name out on his tongue.

Roxas gazes numbly back at Axel. His lip twitches as his mind tries feebly to grasp diction again. He's fighting through a current that is pushing, pushing, pushing on him. He's trying to hold steady, searching through the haze of crashing waves for words to anchor him. He feels hollow and leaden all at once. He wants to sink. He's trying to float.

Is he remembering to breathe?

There are so many things Roxas is yearning to say. He's a distended balloon, one scratch away from rupture. It's painful not to speak, yet his entire body remains cemented in place. In this moment, Roxas's own skin feels foreign, like it's pulsating to the beat of a heart that isn't his own. He doesn't budge an inch, for fear that Axel will vanish like a specter, evaporating into thin air.

"Rox," Axel says softly, a gentle hand moving to cup Roxas's cheek. Roxas is grateful for this. He can't help but feel that his rapidly spinning head would otherwise fall off without this anchoring touch. "Hey...Roxas."

"Listen," Axel murmurs.

"Roxas," he says, his tone rising in urgency.

A little louder. "Roxas."

Louder still. "Roxas!"

The steadying hand on his cheek begins to shake. Roxas flinches. He opens his eyes, finally finding the words to say to Axel.

Blue eyes, blond hair, and eyes full of fear are staring back at him.

Roxas blinks once. Twice. He's feeling disoriented and nauseous and he moves jerkily toward the window for fear that he's going to vomit. He's clutching the door handle when he realizes—his car is in the middle of the intersection.

Tidus drives after that. He takes Roxas back to his place. He wants to watch after Roxas after the whole unthinkingly-driving-the-car-into-the-middle-of-an-intersection-and-nearly-killing-both-of-them incident.

"You can sleep here. I won't try anything," he says simply.

Roxas half expects to hear a tacked on 'unless you want me to' murmured with a lopsided grin but he quickly banishes the thought. Tidus wouldn't. He was simple. A gentle man. Or a gentleman—he guesses that's where they get that word from. Don't quote him on that, though.

When Roxas shuts his eyes and thinks of Tidus he feels awash in calm, tranquil blue. Like the sky. Not so much like the ocean. No turbulence, no shifting sands. Just…afloat.

The next thing Roxas knows—his eyes are wide open with soft blue eyes staring back at him with what looks like concern. And Roxas's heart is racing. How long had he been asleep?

"You were screaming bloody murder," Tidus murmurs, rubbing one eye sleepily. He sits carefully on the edge of the bed, like he's afraid to take up space. His hand finds Roxas's shoulder. Roxas leans into him and Tidus rubs gentle circles into Roxas's back until a calm finally settles over him.

Tidus makes a move to stand, getting ready to head back to the living room couch.

"Stay," Roxas whispers. "Please." He places a halting hand on Tidus's chest. He can feel Tidus bristle at this for a moment but eventually Roxas can feel his chest start to relax into a steadily slowing rise and fall. A pulmonary metronome that lulls him back to sleep.

Roxas awoke slowly. He was disoriented twice over. He peered over his shoulder, half-expecting to see Tidus, but instead found that he was not in Tidus's bed. He was not in Tidus's house. He was in his own house, his own room, his own bed.

It was just a dream.

He blinked. Well, no. It wasn't a dream. He distinctly remembered spacing out at the wheel…and the aftermath—that was the first time he'd ever been in Tidus's bedroom. But that had been a long time ago…right? Before Axel came back.

Axel came back.

Roxas rubbed his forehead, trying to wrap his mind around reality. He sighed. His dream had set him in the antebellum. Before the warring inside Roxas's head.

He felt relieved to be back in the reality where Axel wasn't missing—where Roxas wasn't moving around in a fog, tracing the fingers of phantoms, following the vestiges of ghosts. But mixed in his relief was disappointment. His dream had placed him in simpler times—where people were proud of him for moving on in the wake of the scattered embers of Axel. Where it was just Tidus and Axel was but a pipe dream. Where he didn't have to make a choice.

A choice. Inevitably a choice.

Simple and calm, reassuring and blue, coasting on contentedness.

Or racing hearts and frenzied fire, the known and the unknown, teetering on the edge but savoring the wind in his face.

Inevitably a choice.


Roxas needed a distraction. So he decided to do the one other thing he'd been dreading. The lesser of two necessary evils.

Roxas sucked in a breath. He'd avoided rehearsing this because he wanted it to be genuine. Maybe that had been a mistake. "I could tell you the story of why and how I did what I did, but I don't want to make excuses anymore. The point is, I entangled you into my own messy web of lies. And I used you. My actions sucked, they were hurtful. I'm sorry. Being sorry isn't enough, but it's all I have."

Naminé smiled a meek but rather gracious smile. "I have something I want to show you," she spoke softly. She rose—something strikingly ethereal in her posture and the smatterings of paint on her hands—and retreated from the room.

In her absence, Roxas sat awkwardly in her living room. She'd taken that…well, he thought. Unless she was leaving the room to vent/cry/scream/puncture her Roxas voodoo doll in privacy. It was always hard to tell with the quiet ones. He really hoped the 'something' that Naminé wanted to show him wasn't a voodoo doll of him. He personally believed he had experienced more than enough misery in his short life without dark magic getting in on the fun of antagonizing him.

She returned and wordlessly handed Roxas a notepad. He took it in his hands, still quite a bit disoriented by her reaction to his apology. He blinked down at the notepad. He squinted, gliding his fingers over the details on the page before him. It was so incredibly detailed that Roxas almost mistook it for a photograph. It was a drawing of him and Axel.

"You drew this?"

She nodded. Roxas thought he caught a semblance of a smile on her face.

He scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. "I guess you deduced our relationship from that scene at the coffee house?" he asked, his voice a little sheepish.

"Well, yes and no. I figured as much, but when I saw Axel that day, these alarm bells started going off in my head. It took some digging around, but I finally found this. Check the date on it."

August 13th, 2011

"What? I think you're mistaken. You must've put a date on this retroactively."

She shook her head. For a moment the light formed a halo that danced across the crown of her head. In the next moment, it was gone. "This is definitely an older work of mine. I've improved and changed in style quite a bit since then. And I always date my works on the day that I finish them."

"I don't understand. I hadn't even met Axel until January of this year."

"Yeah. I'd never seen him until that day in the coffee shop," she admitted.

"And you drew him to a T before ever laying your eyes on him," Roxas deadpanned, his skepticism evident.

"Mm. Well. I used to wake up in the wee hours of the night from these strangely vivid dreams. Some people keep dream journals. I do the same thing but with drawings. It was the only thing that seemed to help me fall back asleep. I actually...I don't want to freak you out, but..." she trailed off, reaching forward to flip the page of the notebook.

Roxas stared. He rubbed his eyes. He touched the drawing again, feeling the indentations and the dry, smooth lines of graphite. It was a rendering of Roxas and Axel at the old clock tower. Roxas was speechless. He merely stared at the picture. He felt confusion, fear, nostalgia, affection, sadness, mystification. An entire barrage of emotions were undulating inside him.

Wordlessly, Roxas turned the page. "God," he murmured. Axel and Roxas at the cemetery. Another page. And another. The notebook was filled entirely with images of them. Some of them he recognized—the so-called ghost train, the coffee shop, the dripping sea salt ice cream—but some of them he didn't. In some, they're dressed in strange, cult-like black robes. In others, a girl who looks like Kairi is there, her hair jet-black. A few have Demyx and Zexion in them. Roxas and Axel battling. Roxas and Axel kissing. Axel surrounded by flames.

He had to set the notebook down. He could barely breathe. "I don't—even if you had drawn all of those yesterday…I mean...some of those things...you couldn't possibly have..."

"I don't even remember the dreams, to be honest. The drawings are really the only traces I have. I can't say that I know what any of this means, but I felt that you should have this." She bit her lip. "I like you, Roxas. But I can't be mad at you, not really. You can't argue with this." She gestured to the notepad. "You and Axel."

"Yeah," Roxas breathed. Was he dreaming right now? This made no sense.

For reasons he still can't explain, Roxas flipped to the last page of the notebook. He recognized the scenery, the brick walls and primary colors. It was his elementary school. And there was what appeared to be an elementary-aged Axel. His hair was a calmer shade of reddish-brown, sticking up in some places and lying flat in others—a modulated version of the spikes he had now. But those poison green eyes...

It was Axel, alright.

He was reaching into a cubby labeled as Roxas's. Stealing something, maybe? He was holding some sort of envelope. The decoration on the exterior...the hearts.

Roxas began to taste the sickly smack of peanut butter.

Envelope. Note.

...Axel?