Really, he was just like her. At first she thought he was like the others, who all exemplified the meaning of 'heartless' with acts of cruelty and betrayal amongst them. Soon she started to realize that he didn't really want to be here either, that he too was just a pawn in bigger plans.
Sometimes, Marluxia would leave him in charge of the watch, leaving them alone for hours on end. At first, they'd just sit silently in the room, her immersed in her drawings and him in his musings. Then, one day, he actually spoke to her.
"I feel empty, Namine," Axel said, sitting at the chair across the room. Looking up from her sketchbook, she met his eyes, a look of thought on her face. "I've tried... But I can't adjust to this." He tapped his chest, right where his heart should be.
"It depends on how you look at it," she said softly after a moment of hesitation.
"What do you mean?"
"Well..." she said, folding the book closed in her lap and shifting on her seat to sit straight up. Little things like this made you want to trust her. Right now it was the childish way she would mock a teacher giving a lecture. "If you think of it like that, as something missing from the bigger picture, then you are missing something."
"But that's all we are, aren't we?" Scratching his head, he scrunched his face up in thought. "We're just leftovers."
"See, you just need to be optimistic." Sighing, she smiled at him. "We're not something taken away from the bigger picture, we're small pieces that compose it. In a landscape painting, the artist will always leave an open space, because it gives the eyes a place to rest. Otherwise it gets too complicated."
"Too... complicated?" Blinking, he waited for her to continue.
"Yes. You see, if you fill in every space of the page, you don't know where to look first. But with us, we just have an empty space for people to appreciate the rest of us. A heart itself can be complicated, mixed up in the morals of right and wrong. If you can see past that, you'll find there is so much more to the work."
He seemed to mull it over in his head for a moment, looking away from her. "Is that how you've gotten used to it?"
"Yes," she said, not moving in her chair, eyes still fixed on him. "Sometimes, everything is too much to take in, but I can look around and find that blind spot, and it helps me to relax. I can put whatever I want there. There is an empty space in my chest I've decorated on my own, and it's comfortable for me."
Axel was quiet for a while, and when he finally spoke, Namine took his 'I'm Sorry' to mean that he understood.