Title: Clarity of Distance

Rating: totally and completely worksafe

Disclaimer: Kingdom Hearts and its characters are all property of Disney/Squeenix. Trust me, if I owned them there'd be an adult version (both that all the characters would be legal age and that it would be rated Adults-Only) that might include DatingSim-like side quests. Maybe an OAV. And the Organization 13 really would have an orgy.

Written May 2007

Out of all eleven members of the Organization, Demyx could almost consider Axel a friend. In as much as any of them were friends. Excluding, of course, the Original Six, because they were thick as thieves and Demyx sometimes wondered why the rest of them were even here… and why they were still looking to add to their numbers. But Axel was a friend. Yes. So that meant that Demyx could talk to him, right?

Right. And it was with this thought firmly in mind that Demyx flopped himself down on the balcony next to Axel. The red-haired Nobody offered a lopsided grin before going back to twisting a multicolored object in his hands. Demyx immediately found himself distracted by it.

"Hey, what's that?"

A twist. Then a turn. "Guy called it a 'Rubik's Cube'." Another turn.

Three twists and there was now a row of red squares on one side. Demyx leaned over and saw there were more red squares scattered on the other five sides. "Um…"

"The object," Axel declared, "the guy told me, is to get each side of the cube to be just one color."

Demyx nodded, watching Axel twist and turn the pieces of the cube, inevitably losing his line of red and unable to get it back. "Could I try it?" he eventually asked, peeking up at his friend. The redhead didn't answer at first, green eyes narrowed as his hands twisted and turned furiously for a moment. Then he thrust the cube at Demyx's chest with a growled, "Sure."

The Water Elemental studied the colorful cube for a few seconds, merely turning it in his hands before giving it an experimental twist. "Hey…Axel?" Demyx settled into a 3/4-time rhythm of twisting and turning the cube. The Fire Elemental looked over briefly from making what looked like a star out of a small flame.

"Need help already?"

Demyx smiled a little, then let his expression drop. He felt the heat of the flame dissipate as Axel let the little star die. "Can I ask you something?" And then the taller Nobody turned to face him fully, one leg up on the marble, the other continuing to dangle over the edge.

"S'not like you to ask to ask a question. You usually just blurt out whatever's in your head," Axel leaned a little forward, hands on his knees. He frowned when Demyx seemed to hunch in on himself. "What's up?"

The blond stumbled his rhythm slightly, continuing to twist and turn the little cube in his hands. He was afraid to look at Axel when he asked, "Do…do you ever think that maybe they're…wrong?" Demyx's voice dropped low on the last word, as though there might be someone listening in.

"Huh?" Axel gave his friend a strange look. "Who's wrong about what now?" He began to feel a little concerned when the musician hunched even further in on himself, so that Axel seriously worried his might pull something in his back.

"The," the blond started, then abruptly lowered his voice furtively, "the Original Six." Demyx kept his eyes on the cube in his hands, his grip tight and tense to keep from shaking. He saw Axel lean back out of the corner of his eye. He felt his own lips pulling down into a frown and suddenly felt it very important to keep Axel from pulling away completely.

"I know I'm not smart like they are," he said in a rush, "but I don't feel like I can't feel, you know?"

Axel relaxed next to him, his knee gently nudging against Demyx's hip. "You don't feel like you don't feel?" he asked with a smirk.

Demyx huffed a frustrated sigh, giving the little cube a hard twist. "You know what I mean!"

But Axel merely leaned his weight back and raised an eyebrow. "No, actually, I don't. We're Nobodies, Demyx. No Hearts. No emotions."

Demyx paused, resting the cube on his left knee. "Yeah… no Hearts. I'm not arguing that point. I can tell that part." The sitar-player stared out at the blank sky, gathering his thoughts together. In his head, the conversation had gone so much simpler because the Axel there had known exactly what he was talking about. There wasn't all this explaining it out first.

He slowly began twisting and turning the cube again. He had two lines of blue and a line of red on opposite sides. "Yeah, I'm not smart like they are… but I'm not completely brain-dead or something. I never studied Hearts, or Heartless, or even Nobodies—hey, you think they're studying us? —Ah! Never mind, not the point. The point is—"

"You mean there actually is one?"

He paused with the cube long enough to give Axel a swat on the knee. "Jerk. The point is that just now, you made me angry. See? The point is that it's not just my hand that hurts right now."

Axel stared at him, a peculiar look in his eyes, but he said nothing. Demyx took a deep breath and kept on.

"There's three things that make a person and person, right? The Heart, the Mind, and the Soul. That's what they said, right?"

"Yeah."

"'Cause you're still a person even if you're dead and don't have a body anymore," Demyx continued as if Axel hadn't spoken, "which makes it odd that we're called 'Nobodies' when you think about it. We have bodies after all…" Demyx paused again, staring at the row of yellow that replaced one of his blues. "Stupid tangents."

He gave another twist. "Okay. Mind and Soul. You don't think either of those things can feel?"

"Well… but it's the Heart that has all the emotions. You give your Heart to the person you're in love with. Not your mind. Though certainly your body," the redhead smirked. "But you don't think love. You feel it." Axel was leaning back on his hands, body still relaxed. He was sure of himself, but something made him want to keep listening, see where Demyx would go.

"Love," Demyx echoed. "Yeah… love has a lot to do with Hearts. But I don't think it ends there. Don't think it even starts there. I think you can love without a Heart." Demyx turned the cube twice, looking at the two red rows at right angles to each other.

Axel rolled his eyes and Demyx finally looked up into stare the Nobody he considered a friend full in the face. "'Love is the Soul's recognition of its counterpart in another person.'"

The Fire Elemental finally dropped his air of casual disinterest and sat up a little straighter. They held each other's gaze for a moment. "Where'd you hear that?" the older Nobody asked, a strange combination of familiarity/recognition and the knowledge of a Truth rushing through him.

Demyx dropped his eyes again, running his fingers lightly over the colorful cube. "I know I'm not smart," he repeated, and Axel had the feeling that this was something people had been telling Demyx since before he lost his Heart. "But I know some things that even those Six don't know. I know that 'Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.'"

He gave another twist to the cube and stopped again. Axel was now leaning toward Demyx, elbows resting on his knees. Demyx's voice was slow and measured as he made sure everything he spoke was what he wanted to say.

And now Axel found himself re-evaluating the Water Elemental. True, Demyx wasn't the educated type, like Xemnas or Vexen who liked to drop six and seven syllable words into every sentence. But Demyx knew his limits, and knew how to work with and around those limitations. There were very few people in the universe that could make that same claim.

"You can give your Heart to the person you love, sure. And a Heart can be filled with love. But a pitcher can be filled with water, you know, but that doesn't mean that the pitcher made the water." The blond gave the cube another twist. "And I can give you the pitcher, or I can get you some water right from the taps. Or river. Or wherever it came from."

Demyx handed the cube back to Axel. The Fire Elemental stared at it blankly before reaching for it. The shorter Nobody stood, brushing non-existent dirt from the seat of his black coat, and turned to go back inside.

"So what if they're really smart? It doesn't mean they know everything."

Axel watched his friend walk into the castle, the shadows inside seeming to swallow him up. He looked down at the Rubik's Cube in his hands, turning it this way and that, admiring the colorful six sides—each one solid in its color of white, green, orange, yellow, red, and blue.