Disclaimer, et al: Okay, so I finally bowed down to the need to write this, even though I avoided it for about a week since it's a) very self-indulgent, and b) probably been done a million times before. There's sex in there if you squint really hard, jump on the spot three times and quack. It's introspective, full of cheesy metaphors and generally my usual fare. It's also un-betaed, which means I'll have to get him to red-pen it later. Unfortunately I don't think he'd be able to remove all the pretentiousness. The person talking to Axel in the first and fourth parts is Saix. I'm not all that sure about the sheer amount of OMGZ repetition, but that's the way it is, and it's telling me not to mess with it anymore. That third part isn't just shoved in there, although it really feels like it since I'm a hack. Anyway: angst Axel, angst!

sum'thing

I.

Axel doesn't know much about echoes. He knows that in certain empty hallways of the World That Never Was you can scream, or utter a single word and it will return to you, slightly different from what it originally was in the sense that it is quieter, less insistent, and eventually becomes smaller, sentences becoming fragments and words slicing themselves into letters. He knows more about the stone, black and white, that makes up the walls: how much fire it takes to char the white blocks, how long you can hold gloved hands against the blacks before you start to convince yourself that you are just another part of the wall, what the brick feels like against your back when you're pressed up against it with nowhere to go.

He doesn't know why echoes happen. He doesn't really care (because he cannot care.) But Axel knows that there are empty spaces where something can come back to you. There is nothing to tell him why he continues to indulge in it, but from what he's been told he assumes that a habitual, pointless process can be equated to liking something, so when he finds himself in the Hall of Empty Melodies he screams and doesn't question why he listens for his voice coming back to him, even when all he hears is guttural nonsense.

--If you had a heart, I'd say that was a scream of pain.

(Axel laughs.)

II.

Roxas digs his fingernails into the backs of Axel's hands: stippled, bloody marks outline his bones, because his hands have always been skinny. He doesn't remember how thin he is until Roxas sketches round the bones. He stands in front of the mirror and follows the lines on his ribcage, and wonders how he always ends up bloody when he has no heart to pump blood round his system. He checks for a pulse.

When he lies down he wills himself to go to sleep and forget about Roxas' hands, the fact that they draw blood, and the fact that Roxas seems to be able to make something out of nothing. Axel laughs.

(Because he must be going mad.)

III.

DiZ is making a cage for something empty.

IV.

Twilight Town is just a skeletal structure--with malignancies, intruders--trying to keep immunity. Axel tries so hard to break through, and when he does he watches Roxas, who doesn't look empty at all. The only empty thing is the space beside him, or the place in his memory, where Axel should be. Axel (if he could be) should be happy that Roxas doesn't know that this isn't supposed to be, that everything is just ones and zeros. He tries to force the memory to come back, and he screams in Roxas' face and waits for an echo. It doesn't arrive. Even in a fake town, with fake people and Roxas' beautiful, machine-code heart, Roxas doesn't feel Axel.

Axel knows more about concrete things. He can feel the scratches Roxas used to make because they're physical, but he can't figure out why he thinks it matters that Roxas is gone. He is zero, Roxas was zero, and zero minus zero still equals zero. To fill an empty space with nothing still means it's unfurnished. He can't figure out the intangible things, but this much he thinks he knows: if he could feel happy that Roxas was happy, he wouldn't.

--If you had a heart, I'd say it was breaking.

(Axel laughs, because he must be going mad; after losing nothing, he thinks he wants it back.)