AN: You can take trans Axel from my cold dead hands.

No pairings, beyond Axel/Sleep. That's everyone's OTP, really. …Also some implied Axel/Saix, but that's very easy to read as friendship so it doesn't really count.

Enjoy!

Life Lessons

Axel was woken up by someone shaking him urgently. Being a responsible member of the Organization, his first reflex was to mutter something that vaguely resembled the words 'fuck off', roll over, and attempt to go back to sleep.

Whoever was shaking him did not fuck off, instead shaking harder.

"Axel! Axel, please wake up!"

Oh. It was Xion.

He still wasn't getting up.

"Ughhh. 'M tired. I's'not time t' get up yet… go 'way kid." He mumbled, burying his face in one of his pillows, and doing his best to ignore the younger Nobody. Friendship was great and all, but not worth waking up at ass o clock in the morning to answer questions. She could wait until he actually woke up.

"Axel, please, I think I'm dying!"

That was enough to get through the fog of sleep, and Axel bolted up immediately, eyes wide.

"Wha- dying!? What's wrong? Let me see, are you hurt?"

Xion froze for a moment, eyes flicking down to his chest. It took Axel a moment to figure out what she was staring at, before realising that he had gone to bed shirtless. Giving the kid an eyeful of his admittedly pretty unpleasant looking bare chest, scars and worryingly visible ribcage included. Oh boy.

Still less important than the current point of dying child.

"Xion. Where are you hurt." He repeated, hoping his voice was the right mix of calming and urgent to get her to tell him.

Instead, she looked embarrassed.

"I… I'm bleeding from my crotch, and I don't know why."

The urgency left immediately, replaced by deep sense of dread. Axel let his head drop back into the pillows.

"Oh sweet merciful darkness, why me? I don't want to do this! I refuse! Go as Larxene- no. Wait. Shit. Castle Oblivion. No more Larxene. Zexio- no, wait, he's gone too… Uh… Oh. Oh no. Oh, fuck my entire life, I have to be the one to explain this, why!? This is karma! This is karma for Castle Oblivion, I am the only one that can adequately explain this! Fuck!" He complained into his pillows. They were unsympathetic.

"Axel? What's wrong with me?"

He sighed, and reluctantly dragged himself out of bed.

"Nothing, kiddo. This is totally natural, and not something I wanted to explain, but you need to know, so I need to tell you! It's not you, it's me. Wow. That was a sentence I used. Alright, if anyone interrupts this explanation I will literally put one of my own chakrams through my fucking head, so we're having this talk in the girls bathroom. Meet me there, I need to grab something first." Axel explained, grabbing a probably not clean tank top from off of his floor and putting it on, before heading out into the Proof of Existence, wincing as his bare feet slapped against the cold ground. Behind him, Xion followed with an expression of anxiety and confusion, before he shooed her into the girls room.

Inside the men's room, he went into his area, and started rifling through drawers, searching for a particular box. Hair gel, toothpaste, comb, eyeliner, nail clippers, deodorant… oh. There. Tampons.

This was a thing. This was a thing and it was happening.

He left, and went into the women's room. Or, as it had lately become, Xion's bathroom. Despite having run of the place, she seemed to have restricted herself to just a single sink, mirror and tub, the second down the row. Although considering that the alternative was taking the now-dead Larxene's area… yeah. He would have kept his space too.

Xion was sitting on the edge of her bench, looking upset, although she noticeably perked up when Axel entered.

"Okay. So what's happening is you've started your period. Basically, there's two different sets of… private parts that people can have. The kind you have is capable of creating another person, or it would be if you were a Somebody. That's called pregnancy. Nobody's can't actually do that, but for some reason our bodies still think they can. When someone with this set of privates starts going through puberty – physically changing from a kid to an adult – eventually their body will think it's ready to make more people, and start preparing to make one, by lining the uterus – that's an organ inside you – with… I don't remember, some sort of tissue? Whatever it is, it doesn't hold for that long, so after a month of it being built up, your body will go 'hey, there's no person being made in here, this is useless', and dump the extra material. That's what's happening now. You're not actually bleeding, it just looks like you are. It'll last anywhere between a day to a week, and you use these to soak up the blood so you don't ruin your underwear. And pants. And anything you sit on. Make sure to use them, and clean up well if any of the not blood gets on things, it's not blood but it did come from inside you. That's biohazard. And yes, I know this wasn't a very good explanation, but I'm running on like two hours of sleep here, so the quick version is all you're getting tonight. You're not dying, these are called tampons, put one in you so we can both go back to bed and talk about this when my brain actually functions. Any immediate, terrifying questions?"

Xion blinked at the box that had been dropped in her lap.

"I… don't know what to do with this."

Axel took the box back, and wordlessly opened it, removed a single tampon, took off the wrapper, and handed it back to her.

"The not-blood is coming from one specific hole. You put this into the hole, and it soaks it all up before it can get out. I refuse to help you find it. It'll be the bigger one with all the blood. Um. Not blood. It's easier to just call it blood, but it isn't really, just a force of habit. Uh. Get it all the way in, leave the string hanging out. The string is so you can take it out again. I know, it's kinda freaky, but once it's in you don't even feel it. There's external options for soaking it up, but that's just not practical with a high combat lifestyle, so better to just get used to this immediately. Now get yourself cleaned up so we can sleep, busy day tomorrow. Ugh. Like always."

Xion awkwardly shuffled into the stall area. There was rustling for a while, and something was knocked over at one point, before she came back out again, still looking unconfident.

"I… don't know if it's working."

"It's working. Go back to bed. We'll talk tomorrow. And seriously, don't worry about it kiddo. This is totally normal."

Axel shooed Xion back to her own bedroom, and staggered back into his own, sighing in relief at being under his blanket. After a moments thought, he scowled, and moved his alarm back by an hour, before letting his head hit the pillows.

He was out in minutes.

His alarm rang entirely too early for his own tastes, but that was his own damn fault. It took a moment to remember what he had woken up early for, and the thought almost made him groan, but some things had to be done.

He got dressed quickly, and made his way to where Saix usually was at this time in the morning. Specifically, eating breakfast. Alone. Because nobody else was crazy enough to be up at this hour.

Saix raised an eyebrow in surprise at the sight of Axel, as he flung himself into the chair opposite to him.

"Saix. My dearest, oldest, most wonderful friend whom I would love with all of my heart if that was a thing either of us had."

"What do you want."

"…Send Roxas on a really long mission today please, I need to give Xion The Talk and I refuse to deal with both of them for this. It's going to be complicated enough explaining one round of parts. I'm not giving them the full package. It's not happening."

"Why on earth would you need to give the puppet The Talk?"

"Because she started her period last night and woke me up to deal with it and in hindsight my explanation was piss-poor and unless I want to send her into a complete mental breakdown I'm going to have to give her a proper explanation as to what everything is and why it does what it does, and this is awful enough as it is I do not need you making it worse Saix." Axel practically snarled, doing his best to murder Saix with his eyes. It didn't seem to be working.

"Fine. I'll send XIII on something long and tedious, but you owe me for this."

"I love you."

"…No, you don't."

"Yeah, I don't, but if I had the means to, I would."

He ran through the rest of his morning routine slowly, taking advantage of the early hour to go for a more leisurely pace. It was pretty much the only upside to waking up at Too Fucking Early in the morning. This meant that he was just cooking breakfast when Xion entered the kitchen, immediately bee-lining for him.

"Aaaxel?" She started, voice mildly alarmed.

"Stop. Stopping you right there. Is this related to the subject we discussed last night?"

"...Yes?"

"Then let's take this elsewhere."

He grabbed Xion, and dragged her through a corridor back into the womens bathroom, and away from the other members who had been grabbing food, and probably would have had some comments about the subject matter.

"The thing didn't work, I woke up there was still blood coming through!"

"That's because tampons are made of cotton, and they can only absorb so much liquid until they start leaking. Then you remove the bloody tampon, and put in a new one. Throw the used one in the garbage. I'll give you a real explanation on the clocktower after work, but right now you've got to get ready, and I've got to get back to my breakfast before Demyx decides to try his luck stealing it. Got it memorized?"

"Yeah, I think so…"

"Good. Oh! And take a few with you to work today, you might need a new one, you might not, but it's never fun to get caught without one. …What's wrong?" He asked, seeing the confused look on her face.

"I don't think I have any tampon panels."

Axel snorted despite himself, an amused yet affectionate smile somehow ending up on his face.

"No, no, you don't need a panel, just drop a few in your backpack. They're tiny, they don't take up any space. And uh… don't bring this up with other members? We're the only ones that... have this set of parts, and people who don't have to deal with this are always weird about it. Just save yourself the trouble. Swear to god, I put tampons on the shopping list once, everyone acted like it was the end of the fucking world. And they brought home like, fifty different boxes, like I didn't write literally my exact preferred brand and kind on the list. Life lesson, Xion. Masculinity is very fragile, and you should absolutely take advantage of that whenever possible."

"But you're a man." She pointed out, expression doubtful.

Despite himself, the words were enough to bring a small grin to his face.

"Yes I am, but things are a little more complicated for me. It's this whole thing, which we will go into later on the clocktower. Between you and me, I may or may not have called some favours in with Saix, so Roxas gets a ridiculously long and tedious mission. And I mean, sucks for him, but this isn't really a conversation I want to have with unnecessary participants. Roxas ain't invited. Got it memorized?"

Xion shrugged.

"Alright, alright, I won't tell him. Still, isn't it a bit… mean?"

"Yeah, very, this would be me being a bad friend. I'll buy his ice cream tomorrow to make up for it."

With Xion satisfied, Axel returned to the kitchen, just in time to hit Demyx for attempting to steal his breakfast.

Axel's mission was thankfully short and uncomplicated, and he was at the clocktower by mid afternoon. Xion had already beaten him there, and for some reason had a bag of chips instead of ice cream.

He raised an eyebrow in silent question, and she just shrugged.

"I felt like chips today. I don't know."

"Yeah, that happens sometimes. Period cravings. Basically, your body's stressed and working extra, so it tells you to eat extra to make up for it. In this case, you probably needed more salt or something. Follow the cravings. Your body knows what's up. Personally, I always go through like, an entire family sized bag of cheesies during that time of the month. Always have." Axel said, joining Xion on the wall, and stealing one of her chips. She narrowed her eyes, but let it slide.

They sat quietly for a moment, before Axel sighed.

"Okay, so, first point. I wasn't… completely honest with my description last night. Kind of simplified things, because I really couldn't handle the full explanation while that tired. The different… parts, are usually a gender thing. Most girls have our parts, and most boys don't. When babies are born, they figure out if it's a boy or a girl by the parts. When my Somebody was born, because of my parts, they thought he was a girl. So I was raised as a girl. When my Somebody got older, he realised that he was a boy. When someone is given the wrong gender, and need to fix it, they're transgender. You remember my scars last night? Well, the two big ones on my chest are from surgery. As a human teenager, I used a thing called a binder. It's like… a really, really intense bra, and what it did was flatten my… chest, to make it look like I didn't have breasts. Because the fact that I had them felt wrong, and I didn't want them. Er, that's called dysphoria, feeling unhappy with parts of your body. But a binder also really squeezes the ribcage, because obviously, and it wasn't exactly the safest thing for my health. I mean, I was fine, but I had to be careful not to be too active while I was wearing it, because it made it harder to breathe, and could have hurt me. But it was worth it to me. So, after I lost my heart and joined the Organization, I couldn't fight with the binder on, but I still couldn't go without it, because dysphoria's a hell of a lot stronger than just a feeling. Happens with or without a heart. So after like two weeks I just got surgery, which had them totally removed, leaving the scars there. I never had the same issue with my… other parts, so I left those. That's why yeah, I'm a man, but it's a bit more complicated for me. You understand?"

Thankfully, Xion seemed to get it on the first pass. Axel was rarely in the mood to explain his gender to people – or non-people, in this case – and he didn't feel like going over it twice.

"Yeah, I think I understand."

"Great. So, gender issues aside, let's properly explain this whole puberty thing. Normally a parent or someone does this part, but obviously that's not an option for you, so here we go…"

Honestly, giving The Talk wasn't half as bad as it was always made out to be in books and on TV. Mostly, it was just a bit awkward having to explain concepts that Xion didn't really have the context to grasp. What with not feeling anything, and all that.

…Come to think of it, The Talk was probably made easier by Axel not being able to get embarrassed. Little positives.

One way or another, they were done by the time Roxas finally joined them, and had gotten around to getting ice cream for themselves. And, as promised, Axel bought another one for Roxas.

"So how was your day?" Axel asked, holding out the ice cream as if he didn't already know exactly how terrible the poor kids day probably was.

"Fuck everything." Roxas snarled out, grabbing the ice cream and flinging himself down onto the clocktower. "Fuck everything, fuck missions, fuck Heartless, and ESPECIALLY fuck Saix and his goddamn vaguely worded missions. What the hell did he mean by 'eliminate the giant heartless'? THERE WAS LIKE SIX OF THEM. NONE OF THEM WERE THE TARGET. IT TOOK GODDAMN HOURS TO KILL THEM ALL AND THEN FIND THE REAL TARGET. I HATE EVERYTHING."

Axel patted him on the back consolingly, and then shot Xion a warning look. Immediately, the younger Nobody switched her expression of guilt into a perfect poker face.

…Really, between the swearing and the lying, Axel was turning out to be a terrible influence on the two.

Saix's favour was called in the next morning, in the form of a long, tedious mission. Except 'long and tedious' for the well experienced assassin meant something very different from 'long and tedious' for a rookie keyblade wielder.

In this case, it meant a two week mission undercover, posing as a local inhabitant of a world in order to get close to some scientist, find their research, then kill them and take it all.

Two fucking weeks.

It was not made better by his period starting on the second last day.

And it was a goddamn miserable two weeks, working his way around everything, well aware that any fuckup would ruin the whole thing. If it wasn't for the dark corridors, he never would have pulled it off. The entire thing was because the various Assassins spying around the worlds had heard rumours that some guy built himself a new heart, and that at least had given Axel some motivation to find out if it was true.

Spoiler alert. It fucking wasn't. Turns out the guy in question had just made some device to keep his heart running after getting some shrapnel wounds or whatever the fuck. Upon finally getting his hands on that information, Axel had given up completely. In this case, giving up occurring in the form of killing the guy, forcibly removing the entire set up, throwing it in a stasis cube, and then physically throwing the cube at Saix's head.

After that, he'd gone for a shower. A very long shower. Killing people was admittedly unpleasant. Gory killings were extremely unpleasant. Dissections were fucking disgusting.

He'd only had to do one once before, when some guy investigating the Organization had put all his research on a memory stick, and then swallowed the memory stick before Axel could kill him. That had been equally disgusting.

And then after that, he went to bed, fully intending to sleep a glorious fifteen hours, and violently murder anyone who tried to stop him from doing so.

A glorious sixteen hours later, Axel woke up, fairly certain that he had died in the night and his ghost had awoken. This was a normal feeling for whenever he slept longer than five or six hours at a time. Chronic sleep deprivation and all that.

It took him a while to be coherent enough to process it, but eventually he realised someone had entered his room while he was asleep, and left something on his desk.

As his Assassins would only allow Roxas, Xion or Saix in his room, the suspect list was small.

The fact that it was a family sized bag of cheesies made the list smaller.

On top of the bag was a post it note, with Xion's handwriting.

Thanks for giving me the talk. Figured you'd be needing these at some point, since they won't go bad in a month. Preparation and all that. Welcome home!

Despite himself, Axel found a soft, fond smile appearing on his face, the kind of expression he would firmly deny being capable of making.

Well. Maybe his stupid kids were turning out alright after all.

AN: Yes, that person with the fake heart but not really was Tony Stark, and yes. Axel killed him. And then took the arc reactor, and the casing it was in, and the actual heart for good measure, because this isn't about the power source, this is about the heart. Does Axel feel bad about it? …Not really. Tony was just some guy as far as he cared.

Look, I love Axel and I love Tony, but I needed some guy for Axel to kill, and that was the best idea I had. I'm not sure if the rest of you noticed, but Axel is kind of a terrible person. And a literal assassin. I love him, but the dude is really fucked up, and I feel like more fanfic authors need to acknowledge that fact when writing him. His status as the fave does not absolve him of any crimes here, and he has a lot of them. HE MURDERED TWO PEOPLE IN COLD BLOOD IN THE FIRST GAME HE APPEARED IN. HE EVENTUALLY BACKSTABS LITERALLY EVERY SINGLE PERSON HE SIDES WITH. I LOVE HIM, BUT HE IS AN ASSHOLE.

…Fandom misinterpreting faves aside, I heavily encourage more people to write trans Axel because that's a headcanon I'm never letting go of. For gods sake, his Other's name is Lea. That is an exclusively feminine name. I headcanon his deadname being Lea but pronounced like Leah or Leia, while he didn't bother to change the spelling and just altered the correct pronunciation to be Lee.

Also, Xion is 100% nonbinary, I just couldn't think of a way to fit that in here, considering she's a little wrapped up in the whole period thing. Now that she's gotten the 'gender is fucking weird' talk, she's thinking it over, and will eventually work out that she's genderfluid. Or maybe she dies first, I don't know, this does take place during Days so everyones time is limited. Xion gets erased from existence because the writers are assholes, Roxas gets absorbed into Sora and then basically vanishes because the writers are assholes, and Axel kills himself on-screen before making a comeback as Lea. Either way, everybody's days are numbered.

Haha. Days. Numbered. Because of how time is framed in Days.

I like to think I'm funny.

Please leave reviews, provided they're not transphobic ones!