disclaimer: Don't own Kingdom Hearts or the band Ocean Street. Actually, the fic has nothing to do with the band, but it seemed an odd coincidence.
author's note: Many, many confidence games and references to confidence games ahead. If you spot them all, you are clearly too good to be true. Ocean Street Games can be interpreted slantwise as a next-life story, and some have said that it makes more sense that way. Whatever works!

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Ocean Street Games

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There's an old joke that nobody's ever heard of. It goes, what do you get when you put ten con artists together in a room?

Answer: nine marks and one rich son of a bitch.

At this point, people tend to sigh and point out that the reason nobody's ever heard of the joke might be because it's not funny. And maybe they'd be right. Mostly, though, nobody ever hears the joke because they don't want to. Everybody's been conned at one point in their lives: by casual white smiles, bishops in jewelry shops, wet lashes stark on a porcelain cheek. The one thing a mark can cling to after the show's over is the idea that it could've been true. Take that away and, well--

Have you ever tried?

Axel figures it's going to be a bad summer when Demyx gets sent to prison.

He doesn't like the guy much, but Demyx can be quick when he needs to be and people often underestimate him, which is an advantage in their line of work. It's not like Axel has people queuing up outside his door, either, considering what happened to the guy before Demyx. Still, he does wish at times that his reputation hadn't taken such a hard hit after Riku's disappearance. He could do with a change of partners now and then. Demyx, for all his good qualities, has one critical flaw: he can't concentrate worth a damn. It goes a long way towards explaining why he's currently swinging his legs on a high bunk behind bars.

"It might just be six months," he points out, eyes bright. Axel slouches against the grating and wonders how short a courtesy visit can be without convincing Demyx to go solo. Not that the idea doesn't have its appeal, but winter's far from kind and two-man games work best outside of tourist season. "If the warden--"

"Warden?" Axel leans back, glancing over his shoulder. "What are we, extras in The Count of Monte Cristo?"

Demyx waves this off. "Whatever you call him. The head honcho in prison." His fingers twitch in quotation marks and Axel's brows twitch with them. "Anyway, if he writes me up for good behavior, the judge could shorten it to six months. That's pretty short, considering..."

"Considering you got caught running a melon drop? Or considering you got caught running a melon drop on a Harrowgate?"

A melon drop, of all things. It's the most basic trick, the kind Axel could have done blind and missing a leg, which he knows because he's faked both before on a whim. Guy collides with the mark while carrying mysterious package and drops it; the package shatters when the mark bumps him. Guy kicks up such a fuss that the mark is forced to pay off the ostensible cost before the guy reports him to the police.

It's a pretty good trick. Axel has a special fondness for it since it was the first one he'd ever pulled off on his own. Of course, he remembers, too, its most basic caveat: don't run a melon drop on anyone who's not a tourist. The trick has too many flaws to work on a day-to-day basis. It depends on the modern man's primary instinct to reach for his wallet in the face of danger. Given time and space, the mark could stick them with a check they can't cash, or he might offer to replace the item, and all the while he'd have a chance to get a good look at the conman.

There are two ways to foolproof a con, and one of them's not to do it at all. The other option is to make sure that the mark can't tell. Either the mark's got to be crooked himself or the con's got to be so simple - one point of contact with the mark, and no more - that the guy can't sing the story after it's over. Both are easy conditions to fulfill during summer in the city of Lamora, when the hotels flood with tourists eager to get to the sea - not to mention the hookers downtown.

And yet, out of a multitude of gullible and greedy tourists, Demyx manages to stake out the one guy that guaranteed him a one-way trip to jail.

Demyx curls his toes. He swings his legs harder and just misses kicking his cellmate in the nose. "How was I supposed to know?" he complains, palming the side of his head. "He didn't look like any of them. Just some kid. Distant cousin, maybe."

Axel snorts, scuffing a sneaker, and dismisses Demyx's excuse with a flick of the wrist. "Distant cousin, mother to the Harrowgate heir, who cares? You know what that bunch is like when it comes to family. And the Harrowgates just about own the city. You're lucky they didn't send a distant assassin after you."

"Do you--" Demyx pales. "Do you think they still might?" His gaze darts around the solid, thick walls and the iron bars. With a kind of inevitable dread, it settles on the brooding presence underneath his bunk.

Cruelly, Axel lets the tension pull tight on Demyx's thoughts before he cuts him loose. "I doubt it," he says. Just as Demyx starts to untense, he adds, "You've seen Prison Break, right? Relax. The other prisoners'll get you first."

He knows a good exit line when he says one; and so, Axel turns on his heel and walks out while Demyx mouths soundless and empty protests and his one-eyed cellmate leans away from another kick.

Outside, he slides into his ratty car, shucks his jacket and slings it into the passenger seat. The sun's boiled the air breathless, but Axel doesn't mind the heat. Deliberately, he lowers his chair and kicks back to do the math.

Six months.

It's not short for a con and - damn those Harrowgates - with his current funds, he won't be qualifying for the Fortune 500 any time soon. Skill and a few favors from Lady Luck are in order if he's going to make it work. He relaxes into the seat, narrowing his eyes against a loud flash of sun. Then again, summer's coming. In a few short weeks, the city will be awash in out-of-towners, fresh-faced and eager to be smoked out. A lone cardsharp won't arouse the same suspicions as two men in various roles fitting the same descriptions over and over again.

Sitting up, Axel drums an idle beat on the sun-warmed dashboard. Three-card monte isn't the stuff of legends, but it should be enough to keep him afloat for a season or two. That's all he's buying: time until Demyx gets out, until Axel can find a partner who won't pick the lock to his place and crash on his couch for a weekend that multiplies into five. That's all he needs.

He starts the car.

And, like every other conman on the make, like the redheaded kid who crawled out of the gutters and into the world eight years ago, he goes to Ocean Street.

In Lamora, they have a saying: "Easier to get world peace than find an honest man on Ocean Street."

This is a lie. Many honest men have visited Ocean Street. They just don't come back. What else are they going to pave the roads with over there?

Axel likes to think of it as Lamora's soul: filthy, brilliant, and sold to Hell. Nobody actually lives there - who'd want to? Convenience stores and old casinos jammed side by side, crumbling to ivy and grit; the pavement rough and the sidewalks crowded with beggars and starving magicians. In the winter, it's just a showpiece - Lamora theatrics on a smaller scale, used by the upper classes to goad their children into community service.

But, every summer, a thousand conmen descend on Ocean Street to lie, cheat and fuck their way into enough money for another year.

Why Ocean Street, Axel has no idea. Its current popularity, though, seems to have a lot to do with the travel guide released a few years ago: 300 Places To Visit, or some other cheesy name like that. Offers local color, the article on Lamora claimed, which - translated out of the idealistic jargon - meant something along the lines of: Always bustling with people willing to smile and con you out of every penny you own. And that's true enough.

What Axel finds amusing is the number of tourists who swallow those books down like facts and come pouring onto Ocean Street, begging to be bilked. It makes his half of the job easier. Because the essence of what the conman sells is a dream: he has to convince the mark that he has just what the mark needs. If his victim's already starry-eyed, then so much the better.

But a place teeming with cons like Ocean Street also attracts another kind of person...

Axel spots the kid while he's dealing cards to his last mark of the day.

It's just a gleam at first - bright hair in the sunlight, nothing special. Light is expected on a street whose language runs in coins and bargains and sleight of hand. Still, Axel's bored of three-card monte and he's always had a fondness for gaudy things, so he looks up while his fingers shuffle and snake their way through the familiar elaborate routine and pinpoints the source: a boy sitting on the sidewalk.

That'd be a clue - if he were two feet shorter, blonde and also a girl detective. Tourists on Ocean Street aren't left to drift - hey, it'd be like free money to the wind - and no conman is ever alone. The "I'm an angry puppy, take me home and feed me" shtick wore off centuries ago. These days, to catch the public eye, you need a little more. Needles. Kisses. Fireworks. Anything to hook the masses - though no one seems to have told the kid, who's sifting the rabble with the cool disinterest of a pro.

Somewhere to his left he can see Luxord giving odds on an 'impromptu' streetfight - Xaldin and Lexaeus, who always give an impressive display - and Zexion winding through the gathered throng. There's no flash of wallets disappearing up his sleeves, but Axel's been around for long enough to guess. Zexion never approaches people without reason. None of them do. It's gotten to the point where a smile feels like a con.

Slender arms curve around the mark's neck as a woman drapes herself over his shoulder. "Having fun?" Larxene smiles, wicked and gleaming, though the light doesn't reach past her lips. It clicks off in an instant. The mark grimaces in terror, the point of her nail at his throat. Casual and abrupt, she shoves him aside. "Scram," she snarls at his audience, and they do.

Annoyed, Axel watches as his mark disappears around the corner, though he takes care to mask it with a raised brow. Nobody shows weakness around Larxene, who senses blood like a hypersensitive blonde piranha. "Paying for my next meal? I didn't know you cared."

"Stow it." She marches to his side and squats. In the absence of any worthy audience, Larxene's expression is one of magnificent boredom. "I saw you."

"Saw me?" He touches his hair, at present a red that might provoke bulls into a stampede, and shrugs a shoulder. "Kinda hard to miss me, don't you think?"

"You sound testy, Axel," Larxene says, baring her teeth in terrible delight. "What's wrong? I heard you couldn't keep Demyx out of prison. Losing it, are we?"

"Not we. Just you." The words don't carry their usual bite; the boy's getting to his feet and starting to move. On instinct, Axel traces his path through the masses. Kid walks straight and quick, he notes. Efficient. He doesn't slouch, doesn't hesitate, doesn't stop to take in the fight or the cards leaping between expert hands, but there's still a sort of helplessness. Walking in circles. He's lost, all right.

"Aww. You know it only hurts 'cause it's true." Larxene tilts her head, following his gaze. She curls her lip. "Oh, that brat. Don't bother. He's a dud. Spent all morning lurking around the street like we wouldn't notice that he doesn't leave."

"Think he's undercover?" Thanks to a hefty sum delivered every New Year's, Lamora's police department doesn't bother much with Ocean Street anymore. Still, there's always some upstart with a misplaced sense of justice who decides to take downtown for his beat. So far, Lamora's underbelly has survived every siege, but a hovering cop puts off the tourists, which Axel can no longer afford. The kid doesn't look old enough to be undercover but, hey, what does he know?

Larxene gives him a glare fit to drill through his skull. "Please. I saw him on his cell." Her voice sweetens. "Probably getting Mommy to come and pick him up from the scary conman street. God, if I got my hands on that cell phone, I'd give his mommy a real scare."

"So? Why don't you?" The gossip on Larxene's last game is old news, but still hot enough to nettle her. "Oh, that's right. You're out of the business now. A changed woman. Well--" he flicks an insolent eye over her "--a changed something, anyway."

He knows he's got her when she withdraws, however briefly. Her cheeks flush as she lifts her chin in challenge. Everybody on Ocean Street's heard the story by now: how Larxene set out to play a badger game - the usual compromising photographs con - but fell in love with her mark instead and left downtown to live a wealthy and fulfilled life in a mansion.

Two hours after the news broke, Luxord opened bets on how long the affair would last.

He closed them again after a mere fifteen minutes when it turned out that nobody would bet on the prospect of Larxene in love. Everybody was sure that the whole thing was a scam to clean out the guy's life down to his last cent. Who'd buy the idea that Larxene, of all people, would turn a Pretty Woman and go straight? And, from the look of it, they might be right. Larxene has a hard time playing anything but a straight con. She doesn't plan for long-term games, never considers investments or the advantages of having someone clean to lie for you.

Then again, Axel doesn't think he'd have the stomach to finish off a badger game. They both have their weaknesses.

He lifts his head to find Larxene marching off, slipping between two people and vanishing into a sea of strangers. Bemused, Axel searches the crush for her, but she's disappeared... though not, he guesses, for long. As Axel waits, he catches sight of the kid again. He's come a little closer; Axel can almost make out features now. Solemn set to the mouth, and the way he leans on his knee tells Axel that he's been waiting for quite a while. Waiting? he wonders. For what, someone to swipe that cell phone? Now that Axel's looking, he can see the rich boy's distaste for filth in every stiff line of his body, open contempt in every step. He's seen that kind before - with friends. The idea that one would come alone is a little crazy.

For an instant, he entertains himself with the thought of sidling up to make an introduction. It's crazy. He knows it. Kid would call him on his bullshit in a heartbeat, and then where would he be?

Before he can give it any more thought, Larxene appears again at his side, breathless and smug. "Here." She flings something at him. Axel catches it automatically, then fumbles to keep hold as he realises what it is.

"Jesus," he says, flipping it open and raking fingers through his hair. "If I'd known that you were this desperate to prove yourself, I'd have asked for something bigger."

"That's just you, Axel," Larxene snipes as he sets the phone to silent. "You wouldn't be yourself if you had vision."

Axel ignores her and tucks it into his pocket, feeling a sudden acute guilt - which is weird. He's built a life on bilking strangers out of thousands of dollars. Suddenly, someone steals a cell phone and passes it to him and he comes down with a case of the conscience? There is something very wrong with you, he tells his instincts, and frowns when the unsettled feeling refuses to leave. It isn't guilt. In fact, it feels almost like--

"Well," Larxene adds breezily, rising to her feet, "you'd better get out of here before he figures it out. Wouldn't want a matched pair in prison."

"Worried? About me? That uptown life really is getting you soft," he tells her, and is rewarded with Larxene's brutal glare before he turns away.

Truth is, Axel has no idea what to do with the damn thing. As soon as he gets home - a place defined as "attic-like space with hanging bedsheets for walls" - he tosses it onto his dresser and slumps onto his bed to stare at it.

Pawning it wouldn't work. He's tried the stolen goods route before, but - between the police and the ten different fences - decided that playing for straight cash was a lot easier than waiting for Vexen's cheap-ass conversion rates to turn a profit. Anyway, what self-respecting fence would buy a single cellphone?

Giving up, he leaves it on his dresser and crawls under the sheets. Quota's up; Demyx is in prison; rah rah rah. Sometimes it just isn't worth it to wake up in the morning.

He's halfway to sleep when a buzzing starts somewhere near his ear. Jolting upright, he knuckles the grit from his eyes. His other hand gropes for the phone, which seems to have been knocked into bed somewhere during his dozing. 1 NEW MESSAGE, it informs him. Out of curiosity, he flips it open.

From: Olette Ryan
ROXAS
HERE'S THAT PIC YOU WANTED

There's an attachment. Axel doesn't give himself much time to reflect, just opens it up. The photo blossoms on the tiny screen, and there he is - blond kid from the morning, no longer scowling but alight with laughter, caught in a headlock by a lanky bright-haired boy. A plump, shorter boy in a jersey and a red headband leans over them while two girlish green eyes peer from the lower half of the screen and - jesus, why does it matter? He starts to shut the phone down. Before he can make it, another message arrives.

"Popular kid," Axel mutters. Then he raises both brows.

The name in the sender's box is Saïx Harrowgate.

Now what would a Harrowgate want with some kid..? Saïx Harrowgate, especially. Everyone knows that he's no blood relative, that he got the last name through long and faithful service to the family (or Ocean Street defines it: "killed many enemies and disposed of the bodies"). The fact remains that, by Lamora standards, Saïx is a Harrowgate - and dangerous.

And here he is, texting some kid like a thirteen-year-old.

Axel grins, slow and delighted. "Wonder what those high-and-mighty Harrowgates'd think of their favorite assassin pulling a Senator Foley?" The thought amuses him for all of five seconds before he reads the message. It disappears again as its meaning sinks in:

roxas ryan
you have eight days to live
at 1:30 on the eighth day
you will die
by the mercy of the Harrowgates

It's probably funny that the first thing that Axel thinks of is: That must have taken a hell of a lot of time to type. Then, why is everything in that text uncapitalized except for Harrowgates? Last, inevitably: Shit.

Here's the thing about Axel: he's gotten people killed before.

His first partner died in a shooting. Something about a conflict between the Harrowgates and a neighboring family muscling in on Lamora territory. First and last time he ever tried to skim the top off anything that involved Harrowgates. It was the longest partnership he ever had and the last one he remembers with any kind of clarity. He hadn't liked working with someone else, had tried to fob him off with pigeon roles, and it was then that he'd discovered Aladdin's gifts for babbling and palming things when people weren't paying attention. Of course, Aladdin also had a Robin Hood complex the size of Manhattan, which was how Axel found himself messing around with things involving Harrowgates in the first place, but he'd been a good partner, for all that.

This is the part where his throat should go tight, where he should have to work to swallow down the salt and the memories. He even waits for it, lets his heartbeat count the time: one, two, three.

Nothing.

So Aladdin died and Axel went on to simpler games for a time - Spanish prisoner, pigeon drop, all with people he met once or twice and never saw again - before he found Leon. Leon never seemed cut out for the job - too straight-laced, too prideful to pull a scam - but he did the cons anyway because he was starving and it was a hand-to-mouth type of thing. He'd have starved if Axel hadn't picked him up and taught him the rudimentary tricks, same as he'd been taught.

Their partnership lasted a mere four months before he broke and went off to con the world with some dark-haired girl. What was her name? Cin? Bryn? Rin.

She hadn't been gorgeous - he remembers that, too - just exuded that small-town prettiness until she smiled, and then the world lit up around her. The kind of girl who'd never learned to see the bad in anyone, which means that she's probably dead now, too, and Leon with her.

Those who don't learn quick don't get to learn at all.

After that, he worked alone again until Riku. And Riku hadn't died so much as - disappeared.

He should have seen it coming. It was obvious that the guy was into something. In those last few months he hadn't so much talked as jabbered, feverish and sharp-mouthed, stirring up the marks with his own snapping energy. Despite everything, it managed to get worse towards the end. They started to fight, which - given Axel couldn't have cared less about Riku's personal well-being - was an accomplishment.

Then, one night, he disappeared - slid out of bed and into the darkness.

Rumors swamped Ocean Street for weeks, whispering of a quarrel over a con, a percentage, a mutual lover. None of them cared about the truth, which was that Axel hadn't seen him go and hasn't seen him since.

Now, there was Demyx, and Axel knows that he's just waiting for Demyx to die before he goes hunting for another partner. That's what he does: survives one partnership after another; lets them vanish, nameless, into the unknown; travels on with cards in his pockets and a new lie at every step. He should mourn; he should care. But he doesn't.

Which still doesn't explain why he's sitting on his bed now, reliving memories and staring at the cellphone screen as if he could get it to spell out a different fate just by staring long enough.

Roxas Ryan.

The name means nothing. Sure, it conjures up a stranger's face and the memory of an uncertain scowl. So? What does that get him?

Exactly.

He lets his fists fall to his lap. Then, because Axel's a masochistic moron with a nosy side to boot, he opens up the photograph again. Same cool smile - well, what was he expecting? It's a pattern of sparks buried in silicon; it's not like that's going to change - same ridiculous hair, same everything. Same boy set to die in eight days for a deed he probably doesn't even know about. That's the way of the world, isn't it? The Harrowgates win. Everyone else just hangs on and hopes for the best.

He spares the photograph one last glance. Roxas's smile seems emptier now - glass-like, delicate, meaningless. "Save your own ass," he tells the boy in the picture, then feels stupid. "Jesus, Demyx is away for less than a week and now I'm talking to some kid's--"

Still talking to it, as a matter of fact.

Clenching his jaw, Axel clicks the phone shut and sets it on the dresser. Then he turns his back on it and tries to sleep.

Five hours later, he claws his way out of the sweat-damp blankets. Everything's still as it was when he first closed his eyes: same rotting rafters, same filth-dark skylights, same dresser with the same cellphone leering in the exact same way.

Same lack of sleep, too.

Axel glares, picturing lighters, matches - hell, the spark from a loose wire would do it. "Keep holding out for your hero, Bonnie Tyler," he snarls. "You've got the wrong guy!"

Predictably, the cellphone makes no response. Because, Axel reminds himself, collecting what little remains of his brain, inanimate objects don't talk. It's basic knowledge on the same instinctive level as Don't screw with a Harrowgate unless your goal in life is to be buried in several very small graves. Except - hell - basic knowledge seems to have flown out the window.

Which leaves him with the nagging, persistent thought that he should - must - save a kid he's never met.

With a growl, Axel arches the cricks from his back - and topples off of the bed. Sprawled across the floor in a tangle, he grimaces at his dresser. Maybe he'd be better off being haunted by a cellphone after all.

Eight days to save someone who doesn't know that he exists.

Axel hates deadlines, has always hated deadlines and will hate them forevermore with the righteous passion of the criminally lazy. This - project, whatever the right name is, doesn't feel like a deadline. It feels necessary - as necessary as the smiling desire that brings him back to Ocean Street again and again. So he sinks into it, calls up forgotten contacts and drags at those strings until he feels like a puppetmaster, a shadowy hangman choking characters behind the screen.

All the while, the cellphone mocks him until its little screen fades. Even then its presence seems to conjure scorn. He can't call to report that it's lost. Everything cast into the public gets back to the Harrowgates, and Axel can't risk it. Saïx, for one, would not be too happy to find his little message gone astray, an unhappiness that Axel suspects would manifest in something much less neat than two bullets to the forehead. On the other hand, he can't go around it and do what comes easiest to his nature - namely, conning his way in and out of the school until he walks out with Roxas. The fact that he's aiming for a human goal seems to kick awry all the strategies he's ever drawn up.

Which leaves him with flat-out desperation as a plan. Then again, isn't that how he gets his best results?

He's counted down to four by the time he surfaces with concrete facts. Namely:

1. a full name (though what kind of a parent from hell names their kid Roxas Rodriguez Ryan? It just about begs to be mocked. Axel's struggling, and he's met the guy once.)
2. an address.
3. Roxas's school schedule in all its glory.

Shame, Axel thinks as he goes over the printout one last time, the stuff you can pull from the Internet. Of course, he's using it to save someone's life, so he feels justified in flicking that screaming conscience off his shoulder as he heads out the door. He borrows Vexen's car - since Vexen's the one person he knows whose car doesn't take eight kicks every morning to start up - and drives to the school's given address feeling surreal about the whole thing. Feeling like Vexen, who probably does roll around high schools in this self-same car - albeit for different reasons.

He drives past those ornamented gates twice before parking around the block. No need to be overt.

It's Wednesday now. Twelve o'clock. Roxas, he remembers, has chemistry in one of the lower wings of the sprawling, monumental excuse for a high school - which means that Axel has twenty minutes to get over those gates before class lets out for lunch and the courtyard is flooded with impressionable young things all ready to witness the obsessive, trespassing creep.

Fortunately, Axel discovers then that, with some difficulty, he can make it between the bars. This strikes him as fantastic for all of one heartbeat before he clues in and scowls. "I'm not that skinny," Axel mutters as he wriggles and hauls himself through. "What were these people trying to keep out, rampaging elephants? It's not like I'm a skeleton." With a last huff, he manages to dislodge his thigh from the gate's loving embrace - and tumbles backwards into a bush.

By the time he hauls himself out and manages to clamber into a nearby tree - the better to see him with, coos a fairy tale he wishes he'd forgotten - students have already begun to trickle into the courtyard. He perches on the thickest branch, ignoring how it bends and shakes underneath him, and keeps an eye out for a bright-headed boy who walks like a soldier.

As it turns out, Roxas is one of the last into the courtyard. Axel just manages to spot him. In school, he slows his pace, slides into the herd with such conviction that almost nothing betrays him. It takes a lift of the chin and those startling eyes before Axel spots him, stranded in the middle of the courtyard, marked by a shirt with a red collar. Standing with a book and a paper bag, alone, and all of a sudden the Little Red Riding Hood theme seems just a bit too appropriate.

Impossibly, he makes for the gathered trees where Axel is crouched and waiting. Luck has never seemed so crazy and out of place.

It strikes him, as Roxas sinks with a little sigh to the roots, that maybe a tree wasn't such a great hiding place after all. He's a conman, not a bird, and not even the slickest explanations can pry him out of the fact that he's sitting on a branch waiting to pounce on a kid he's never met. Yeah, Axel thinks, that'll come off great with the judges. They might even make him cellmates with Demyx if his partner's already talked his current one to death.

So maybe he twitches a little too hard or kicks the trunk by accident or, hell, the tree grows a brain and decides that it hates him. (Stranger things, and all that. Axel, unfortunately, knows from experience.) For whatever reason, his perch quavers. A few leaves shake and flicker in the sudden force before drifting off in an unraveling whirl to scatter about the boy on the ground.

Who looks up, up and with a single knifing stare, at Axel.

It's not the smile in the photograph. There's no trace of such kindness in the cool-eyed creature twisting up to glare at him, rising to his feet. In a flicker, Axel knows him - knows that he's exactly the Roxas that Axel's been searching for and, at the same time, a total stranger. He spares a moment to let his sanity rail - what the hell is he doing and why the hell is he doing it? - before he sweeps it away and begins.

"Roxas," he says. The name sinks in, two syllables split into a thousand unseen hooks. Curiosity snags him. Roxas stills, mouth bitten small with questions. "All right. Listen. We haven't got much time, so just hear me out, okay?"

Thirteen minutes later, Axel sits up on the branch with a curse. He should have brought the phone, should have come prepared. What good's a conman without his props? And it'd help, he thinks, words darting through his veins in a feverish rush, to show Roxas the message and have absolute proof - God knows what's going through the guy's head, coming with him on a half-baked story of "you're going to die in-- wait, no, I didn't mean that I was going to kill you!" - but the whole thing seems to falter around the edges. If he steps outside the boundaries of the plan he's defined, wouldn't it shatter, or take off without him?

This is not how a con feels, Axel knows, and wonders why the sensation's familiar anyway.

He unravels the idea and leaves it; he doesn't have the space. Too much of him is focused on Roxas with an obscure intensity whose reasons remain in darkness.

Close-up, Roxas doesn't fit so much the rich kid's role. Long fingers, yeah, not delicate; the knuckles are large and oddly-shaped. And Axel should be the last person trusting the tale floating in anybody's eyes (because if it was theirs, then what were they doing letting their secrets drift like that?), but Roxas does look like he's seen it all. There's a scathing confidence to him, the steady kind that says it all flat and clear. He could flay the world open, lay waste to its bones and politics and let it burn without turning a hair.

Just the kind of batshit psychopath that you would like, he tells himself, then pushes that thought aside: it's too true to consider.

"So," he says, just as Roxas bursts out, "Aren't you going to say something?" His gaze is flaring, indignant, a boy in the sunlight with no trace of the personality Axel built up for him just a few heartbeats ago.

Axel stares.

Concept-Roxas splinters into a wreckage of bad analysis, which the actual Roxas unwittingly sets on fire by adding, "You promised that you'd explain."

Axel twitches. He wishes for a cigarette - anything to keep himself busy, to delay while he spins out a story that stands a chance of working. I should never have promised to respect you in the morning, he thinks at his lungs. "Yeah, well," he says, then decides to tell it the way he always tells things: roundabout and inside out, details scattered across the haphazard narrative.

The best way to make sure that people don't ask questions, he remembers, is to give them a story they're sure they understand. If this is going to work, Roxas can't be given the space to figure out how illogical Axel's impulsive rescue is.

There's one way to run a con, a long-ago lesson reprimands him, and that's five steps ahead of the mark at all times. Just by taking the risk, inverting his plans, he's breaking every practical rule. You better know what you're doing, his instincts say, because we have no clue. He ignores them and gestures instead to clear his head. "You know about the Harrowgates, right?"

Some unnamed expression - memory, thought, emotion - twitches through Roxas's frame before he says, "Sure. Everyone in Lamora's--"

"Right, right." Axel flicks the rest of his sentence into oblivion. "Well, Saïx Harrowgate - heard of him? - texted you about four days ago. Wants to kill you." He cocks a brow, waits a beat as if he's finding breath for the next words, and reads Roxas's expression. Shock. Confusion. Fury. He counts the emotions as a miser counts coins, sifts through them for a discrepancy, for the same jump in logic that's sending him barreling into Harrowgate business again. When Roxas makes no response, he goes on: "If we go by the original, you should be dead in--"

"You're lying."

Axel blinks. The rest of his (incomprehensible) narrative structure flies off the rails. "Uh-huh. Sure," he says. "Here's the truth: I came here on a joyride, looking for a kid I could roll. Just a coincidence, that stuff about knowing your name. The prison sentence they slam on trespassers around here? I'll get off on it. And hey, the part where you turn up dead in four days, that's just a bonus."

"But, that's..." Roxas thumbs a line across his forehead. Axel watches him, the way his fingers curl and his clear, sad uncertainty, and wonders about good deeds. He'd better be getting a lot of good karma out of this, because it's sure as hell that he isn't getting anything else.

He came to Roxas imagining, somehow, that once he got here he'd be able to explain it all.

He'd been wrong.

Tiredly, Axel scratches his neck. He's given Roxas the warning; he's done his bit. There's no reason for him to stick around and go through just how wrong he was, especially not with Roxas giving him a fishy glare every few seconds. "Listen," he says, "You've got bodyguards, right? I'm sure they'll do a great job. Can't spot 'em around here at all."

"So what's your idea?" Roxas says, like he should care, like he's involved in this. Axel gives him a stare, then changes his mind.

"Got any out-of-town relatives?"

"Didn't you say that the one who's after me is a Harrowgate?"

"Yeah, true." Axel shrugs a shoulder. His survival instincts are, apparently, elsewhere on vacation, because he isn't getting a single vibe telling him to leave. It's easier to be near Roxas than to drag himself away. Oh, for god's sake, he thinks irritably. Roxas isn't even good-looking. He's honest, and bound up in Harrowgates to boot. "So find a friend your crowd doesn't know about and disappear for a while."

This seems to annoy Roxas. Thoughtlessly, he drags up tufts of grass. "I don't categorize my friends like that," he says.

Axel hooks his thumbs into his pockets and cocks his head. "Ocean Street," he says. "You telling me that you ended up there alone by accident?"

"It wasn't a thing about friends! I - there's someone I have to..." He considers his options with care. Presently, his transparent expressions turn illegible. "I was trying," Roxas says at last, "to hire someone. To help me."

"Think that might be why the Harrowgates are after you?"

"N-no!"

"Ohh, convincing." He grins. "Convince me harder, Roxas." It has the desired effect; Roxas reddens more. But instead of tripping him up, he goes quiet, leans back with furrowed forehead and thoughtful eyes, and leaves Axel to look at him - really look - for the first time.

Observations pour into his head in a torrent, small things building up to frame a guy he doesn't know at all. Roxas isn't tall, though there's potential for it in the bony, unfinished legs and the awkward, lanky way he holds his arms. His hair's that fair poetic gold, the kind Axel tends to imagine for cliches. And then there are his nails, round unbitten curves; his wrists, dusted with hair; his shoulders giving way to every expression while his impassive face holds truth at bay. (Although a lot of people guard the stories that their eyes tell, most have a tendency to forget some other aspect - usually shoulders, which stiffen or slump or hold with surprising accuracy.) And his eyes are--

Familiar. Alive. Beloved?

--pinning him to the branch, electric with a pulse so fierce as to be unnatural.

"Why are you here?" Roxas demands, cutting to the heart with a single question - the one that Axel can't answer.

When in doubt, misdirection's always a good choice. "Question is," Axel says as he turns, "how're you getting away? Or are you stupid enough to wait and see if it all comes out like I said?"

But Roxas is already standing, face tilted up towards him. He has one hand on the trunk and he's casting glances over his shoulder. With a start, Axel realises that the rest of the students are already filtering into the building. They'll come for Roxas if he doesn't go in soon.

Roxas shrugs. "I'll figure something out."

"Really?" Axel folds his arms. "And what'll you do when that something happens to be 'I'm gonna die in less than a week, shit shit shit'? I know, I know." He lifts a finger before Roxas can speak. "You don't swear. Call it an approximation, all right?"

The sling of his shoulders tightens as he turns back. "Just because you don't have any ideas doesn't mean that I don't," Roxas says. "This has nothing to do with you."

"Doesn't it?"

"You're an Ocean Street conman, right?" Roxas's tone weighs the sentence with a curling scorn he probably doesn't even know he uses. "I don't know why you're here--" He hesitates, on the borders of a name.

"Axel."

"Axel," Roxas says, and the note in his voice strikes strange bells in Axel's mind - something about memories and the tangle that lives make... "Thanks for the warning, I guess. But I can take care of this."

Maybe it's that fleeting quaver, that loss of dignity and certainty. Maybe it's just the fact that Axel's never known when to stop pushing. Either way, he slides out of the tree - and into an ungraceful heap, though that's not the point. Getting to his feet, he seizes Roxas's wrist. "Forget it," he says. "You're coming with me."

Roxas, predictably, struggles. Axel hangs on in spite of him. "What is this?" he snaps, no longer stilted and wary but alive with incoherent annoyance. "Are you trying to kidnap me or something?"

"You're gonna get yourself killed. I've come this far. Might as well see it through." He tugs on Roxas's hand; stiff and reluctant, it refuses to yield. "C'mon. Or are you gonna tell me that you've picked up suicidal tendencies in the last minute?" Roxas mutters something under his breath. "What?"

"I said," Roxas repeats, eyes sliding away, "thanks."

"Uh huh." Spark-quick, Axel adds, "Look, I know I warned you. That might've given you the wrong idea. I'm not in this for you."

"You're planning to get something out of protecting me from the most powerful family in the city?" His even smile flickers to life, all teeth and wry humor. "Like what, a bonfire to be tossed into?"

"Sure," Axel says. "I have to work on Ocean Street, you know. That doesn't exactly give me the money to build my own. Now, come on. We've gotta get out of here before--" He stops again at the sight of the narrow bars barricading them from the world. Roxas, being somewhat thicker in frame than a walking skeleton, can't squeeze through them as Axel did. And, having gained entrance to the school through illicit means, he can't even resort to trickery to get them out.

"Is this your big plan?" Roxas asks. Following his line of vision, Axel gives the tree a once-over and spots it. One of the higher branches stretches just far enough to swing them over the bars. If they were birds, or Chinese acrobats in a high-grossing heist film.

"Got any better ideas?"

Roxas cocks his head. In the fierce sunlight, his grin is small but dazzling. "You're a scam artist. Right? So, scam."

In reality, when push comes to shove, it's Roxas who does most of the scamming. Axel just shuts up and tries to look like a bodyguard as he lounges outside the office. Knowing when to keep quiet is one of the best instruments in a conman's repertoire, falling somewhere between having connections on the inside and being in the right place at the right time, ready to, say, press one's ear to the door of opportunity.

Bodyguards are allowed to be protective of their charges. It should make a valid excuse if he gets caught.

"...quite unorthodox," the principal is saying by the time Axel's adjusted his posture for minimal exposure and maximum eavesdropping. "Even for a--"

"I understand, sir," Roxas says. "...Sorry for interrupting you. But the circumstances are a little unusual, and I have to look out for my - siblings."

"Your family sentiment is quite blah blah blah," the principal answers. Okay, not the 'blah blah blah'; Axel stops listening around that point. Instead, he slouches and reflects, leaning into the muted halls. The fact that the principal swallowed the lie without thinking twice means that it wouldn't be unusual for someone like Roxas to turn up at the school with a bodyguard in tow. He doesn't see any other bodyguards around, and any decent guard worth his pay would have checked the tree for a sharpshooter anyway, which means that the Ryans must be something pretty damn special.

Which brings anew the thought of what he's fishing out from the deeps.

Roxas knows why the Harrowgates are after him; Axel's sure of that much. Nobody attracts a Harrowgate's attention by accident. The fact that they're sending Saïx means that it must be pretty dangerous. The question that remains is: what business brings Harrowgates to the door but no allies except a passing conman?

He's still trying to puzzle it out when the door opens. As Roxas steps out into the hall, Axel straightens and tries to look like a man who'd never eavesdrop on someone else's private conversation. By the glower he gets, he guesses that he's missed his mark. "Thank you, sir," Roxas says to the principal, a last time. Then he's walking down the hall, each step precise and careful.

Axel falls in line beside him. Vaguely, he tries to conjure an air of power and dignity to go along with his role.

At his side, Roxas winces. "Could you - stop that?"

"Stop what?"

"Making faces. I told them you were a bodyguard, not a clown."

Note to self: air of power and dignity needs work. "Just tell 'em it's multi-tasking for the new millennium," Axel says. "Stops bullets and does stunts with cream pies. They'll eat it up. Relax," he adds, because Roxas isn't. "Once you feed someone a story, they'll keep believing no matter how much the evidence contradicts it. First impressions are everything."

"Oh. Is that why you made sure I saw you while you were stuck up a tree?"

Axel scratches his head. "So, tell me, have you been talking to Harrowgates lately? 'Cause that'd go a long way towards explaining why they're after you."

Roxas makes a weird noise. More a chuckle than anything else, Axel supposes, but it carries the sincerity and flaring warmth of a laugh. Still, he notices, he doesn't answer the question.

Their first fight comes just after they leave the school.

Lunch-hour traffic snares them just as they turn onto the street into downtown, leaving them stranded and inching forward on a street Axel knows like the back of his hand; though, as far as he's concerned, the back of his hand is a lot more interesting. At least it's been places, whereas the street's lucky if it's been spat on. Most of downtown's like that, now that he thinks about it: grimy little backstreets - each more alley than road - that, often as not, lead to the best dive bars and clubs.

It's at this point that Roxas speaks up. "Where are we going?"

"Home," Axel says, then glances over. "I live in an apartment. It's about five blocks away from Ocean Street."

"Ocean Street."

He sounds thoughtful rather than contemptuous. Axel defends his property anyway. "Downtown, that's prime real estate. Just far and high enough to stop anybody from breaking in, but just close enough to get a good view on Saturday nights when girls are breaking up with their boyfriends and chucking their stuff out the windows."

"That's great, but..." Roxas fiddles with the cuffs of his school uniform. "I mean, where am I going?"

Axel stares. "Home," he says again, drawing out the syllable to an exaggerated point.

Now Roxas is staring too. "You want me to - I thought you were just going to get me out of the school unnoticed!"

"Told you I was going to see this through," Axel says, exasperated. "How else am I going to do it if I can't keep an eye on you?"

"There's a difference between keeping an eye on and moving in with," Roxas points out, sounding unreasonably cross for someone whose life Axel's just saved.

"What'd you think I was gonna do, dump you in a hotel and make a break for it?" When Roxas lowers his head and goes back to fussing with his shirt, Axel feels the import sink in. "You serious? You thought I was--"

"It makes sense," Roxas mutters. "More sense than some stranger who comes out of nowhere and tells me that my life's in danger and, oh, by the way, I'm moving in with him."

"I didn't go all the way into uptown just to find myself a new roommate," Axel snaps. "Your maiden virtue's safe from me."

Roxas makes a strangled noise. "Maiden virtue?"

"That's what uptowners call it, right?"

"Where have you been, the sixteenth century?" With a sharp huff, Roxas unsnarls his arm from the seatbelt and fumbles with the door.

Axel's about to reach over to stop him when he remembers that, hey, it's not his ratty car they're driving. Apparently there are some advantages to knowing Vexen after all. He hits the child-lock; Roxas's door goes dead. "What are you doing?"

"Getting out of here. What does it look like--" Clawing at a lock that refuses to budge, Roxas snarls at the mirror. "Open the door!"

"Nah. I don't think so." He can see Roxas's reflection, jaw tense and fists tight against the window. Rage resonates from his skin, an echo of all the things locked between his teeth. He seems to have sharpened, outlined by filtered glassy sunlight into detail: tousled hair like spun gold, face full of shadows. Untouchable, almost, except Axel's pretty sure he can prove that one's wrong. Ideas jumble in his mind, and the only clear plan that comes to him is to keep pushing, further and further, a little more each time until--

Until what?

"Let me out," Roxas says, hard and pale as glass, "or I'll break the window."

Axel grips the wheel and drags himself out of the daze. "All right, all right. Just lemme get out of traffic first." He thumps the wheel and hits the horn twice, scowling at the slug inching up the lane before them. "So where're you gonna go?"

"I can take care of myself."

"Sure. That's how you got yourself into this mess, right? By taking care of yourself."

"Leave me alone."

"Way I see it," Axel says, ignoring him, "you've got three options." Seeing that the traffic is unlikely to move any time soon, he settles back onto his seat to count the choices off. "First: you could stay with a friend or at home. We've already established that you can't do that. The Harrowgates probably got your friends staked out. Didn't spot anybody tailing you at school, but we'll call that underestimation. Second: you could check into a hotel... except you didn't bring cash, did you?" Roxas unearths just enough energy to shake his head. "And they'll be on you like tentacles on a bad horror movie monster if you use a credit card. That leaves number three." He wiggles three fingers at Roxas. "Staying with me. It's not the best, but it's gonna have to work if you want to keep breathing past the next four days."

"Why..." Roxas starts. He clears his throat, shakes his head and tries again. "Why are you helping me?"

"Told you before," Axel lies. He'll take a guess and say that at this junction, my instincts told me to wouldn't go over too well with the audience. "Not my problem if you can't remember it. Ha!" He lunges forward, bolting upright as the car before them takes off in a smoggy roar. "Finally. Naptime's over." He hits the pedal - a little too hard, maybe, but he has a subject to avoid - and grins as Roxas flies back into his seat.

This is the story of how Roxas Ryan disappears.

For three more days, Axel drives him to his house, borrowing a different car each time in order to avoid suspicion. (Even Larxene's, though this is an accident and they return it to its snug garage-house before she has a chance to discover its absence and come after them with a taser.) With each visit, they take a few more things from the house - clothes and binders and credit cards. Axel protests this last until Roxas uses it to buy himself a very conspicuous plane ticket to Africa, which he gives away to the first person who asks. "Should keep them busy for a while," he says, sliding into the car, and Axel wonders about this stranger with the sidelong smile and the face he could have sworn was too transparent to scam.

On their last visit, Roxas walks into the house carrying a note. He emerges with empty hands and his shoulders bowed. They don't speak for the whole drive back to downtown.

The good part is that Roxas lasts the four days. Sooner or later, though, they're going to have to talk about when he's going back. He doesn't belong on Ocean Street. That much is clear from the books that start to turn up all over Axel's apartment, sprawling over the shelves he's never used and gathering in heaps on either side of his desk. They're not even good books - or, at least, not good by Axel's definition. The ones in actual language talk about things like "theo-logico-metaphysical senses" and "time's nerve in vinegar", philosophy and poetry for classes Roxas isn't even taking anymore.

Axel doesn't ask whether he's going back. The way he figures it, they're not involved in each other's personal lives. Not really. So Axel breached the boundaries in letting him know that he was going to die. Doesn't change the fact that they're strangers. As long as Roxas isn't calling the police on Axel's cons, Axel's not going to be the one to push it. Besides, Roxas does chores and everything, so it's not like it's much of a losing situation.

("It's not that I do laundry," Roxas says, hands on his hips. Axel wants to point out how girly this makes him seem, except he suspects that this would stick him with five baskets' worth of unfolded clothes. "It's just that it's kind of hard to get a drink of water in the middle of the night without tripping over your shirts. Could you stop throwing them all over the floor?"

He'd been wondering how Roxas had stopped crashing around his apartment in the dark. Of course, he figured that the guy was just clumsy. The bit about the clothes hadn't occurred to him. "Why?"

"What do you mean, why?"

"They're dirty anyway, right? Isn't gonna hurt them if they marinate in the dirt a little."

"Yeah, well, it hurts me. I almost cracked your desk-- where're you going?"

"Away from the nagging, mom."

Calling him 'Mom' was been pushing it a bit, Axel admits later - seventeen-year-old boys and their painstaking dignity and all - but he feels that the laundry basket over the head was undeserved.)

What he doesn't admit until the middle of the third week is the fact that Roxas fascinates him.

Axel's used to living with Demyx, whose simplicity is one of his strongest traits. Demyx, Axel knows, has an approach to cleanliness best summarized as, "If it hasn't grown sentience and started throwing tea into the harbor, it's not dirty yet." He set out to be a rock star but fell down somewhere along the way, and although Axel's never asked, he can guess that the story involves heartbreak, because that kind of story always does. Demyx likes to talk, eats sugared fruit on a daily basis, and owns the largest David Bowie CD collection in the country. At this stage, Axel doesn't even have to consult Demyx anymore about the kind of cons they do; he knows. (Not that he ever consulted Demyx even when he hadn't known, but that was beside the point.)

Roxas, on the other hand, cleans and is generally buried in a book by the time Axel gets back from his day. It takes a certain ratio of tugs and leers to drag him out of it, and Axel has it down to an art by the end of the second week. Even so, Roxas keeps to himself. He's gentle and wry without bite, always smiling that vague, maddening smile and taking the easy way out of every answer. He's not the guy Axel remembers, crackling with rage in the car, or the one he saw in that first fierce moment before he recovered.

He begins to think that maybe he dreamed it all when he comes home one day to find Roxas gone. Everything's still in place; Roxas has just disappeared. Axel finds a note pinned to the door: Gone to print things out. Back at 5.

Axel, being Axel, finds certain advantages to this. Unfortunately, two hours isn't enough for him to replace everything; and so, when Roxas returns, it's to an apartment in chaos. Folders spill their wrinkled, inexplicable graphs across the floor. File after file on the computer have been opened and skimmed. Books are piled up on the coffee table and the kitchen in random order as Axel sorts through them all for something interesting, something to explain why Roxas is reading them all the time.

As it turns out, Roxas explains, the reason he reads them is Axel - more specifically, to get away from him. Then again, Axel might have remembered wrong; he'd been a little busy at the time, what with ducking the books, CDs and coffee tables that Roxas was hurling at his head.

Roxas learns that day never to leave his things where Axel can get at them, and Axel learns that Roxas is much stronger than he looks, a lesson drummed in by the twenty-one bruises he discovers in the morning.

He knows that things are working out when Roxas runs out of clothes and goes straight on to steal Axel's.

For the most part they go on in confusion, learning and fighting and - well, mostly fighting. He still has no idea what Roxas is thinking. By the time Axel's ready to contemplate and all that crap, they've already settled into a routine - Axel goes out, to bars and casinos and Ocean Street - and Roxas does whatever he does to while away the day inside the apartment: cleaning, studying, all that shocking stuff. The problem with the routine is that it makes it impossible to ask questions, as if the pattern might break if either touches it.

Then again, this is not a pattern meant to hold. He shouldn't be as surprised as he is when it shatters.

When he returns, he finds Roxas staring at the television. Axel picks up on the vibe as soon as he steps into the room: the way Roxas's arms hang loose at his sides, his whole body slack and without defense. "Roxas," he says. It comes out sharper than he meant, but that doesn't matter just now. Roxas doesn't look up. Axel strides into the room, down the steps and across the floor, dropping to his knees before the chair to shake Roxas's shoulders. "Roxas!"

It's as if he comes awake in a single instant. Seeing Axel's face, he starts to speak, but chokes down another breath instead.

"What happened?" Axel demands.

"Nothing." He blinks, eyelids falling and lifting; his gaze is still focused somewhere past Axel's ear. Axel whips around, and there's the news report, where a dark-haired woman is mumbling something about an airplane crash. Sabotage suspected, she adds, and it all comes clear at once.

"I bought that ticket," Roxas says suddenly, low. His voice cracks on ticket and it comes out less like a word than a hiccup. He's trembling, eyes whittled down to slits. He laces his fingers together until the knuckles show white, but Axel can still feel him shaking. "I wanted to throw them off my trail. And it - crashed." It's not fearful, the way he says it - not mourning or stoic. Roxas grits his teeth, and the viciousness in him comes clear as he hisses, "He killed a whole plane full of people to get to me."

"That's a Harrowgate for you," Axel answers, after a moment. Nothing else comes to mind. Inspiration, being the bolt that it is, has apparently decided to strike everywhere but with him. Jesus, what's he supposed to say? He can sell lie after lie, but he can't fix this. There's no line in the world that can contain this. "Spare no expense for revenge."

At this point, he realises that he's still holding onto Roxas. He starts to let go, except Roxas sort of shrinks into himself when he does. So he holds on and waits.

Eventually, Roxas untenses. "Hey," he says in a more normal voice, "you're cracking my shoulders."

"Just wanted to make sure you weren't gonna fall to pieces without me," Axel says. His hands fall to his sides, unclenching as Roxas looses an unsteady laugh. Something winks out in his head, and Axel feels himself drop from a choking tension he hadn't even noticed. He shuts it down and tries to think.

Crashing a plane isn't the kind of thing that Harrowgates do. Harrowgates work inside Lamora, sidelong and deep in the hierarchy, but what doesn't change is the fact that their business stays inside the city. They draw up their borders and never cross them: their city is their own, rest of the world be damned. This gesture sweeps out well beyond Lamora. Most importantly, it doesn't feel like the Harrowgates. Axel knows them, knows his world down to its raggedy bone-pickers and filthiest corners. The Harrowgates wouldn't do this.

An assassin taking sudden liberties might.

Saïx, for instance. Saïx, who was never known for subtlety and would have been in a position to find out just what ticket and seat Roxas's credit card bought.

What kind of business gets so dirty that Saïx can't even call the family to back him up?

"Saïx Harrowgate," Roxas says, startling Axel out of thought. He angles his head up. "You said that he's after me, right?"

"He was," Axel corrects. "With the plane crash, he won't have a clue. I know a guy who can get you new identification - Social Security, tax numbers, you name it. Give it two more weeks and you'll be out of here."

"You know a guy," Roxas says, doubtful but distracted.

"Hey, half of business is getting a hold on the right guy."

"I thought your business involved lying to people and running away before they figured it out."

"I'll have you know that you're slandering the oldest profession--" he stops, seeing the grin ghosting along Roxas's mouth, "--one of the oldest professions known to man."

"Selling attack jelly insurance?"

Axel twirls a hand. "Lying," he says. "And that was just the one time, okay? Geez, you've been here three weeks. Think you could've figured it out already."

Roxas laughs, though his smile's already dissolved. "Axel..."

"Yeah?" Axel tenses. He can't help it.There's a soft, coaxing lilt to his voice - the kind that never means well. Roxas probably isn't even aware that it's changed, that his tone's softened, dreamlike, but Axel is and he knows that whatever comes next, it can't be good.

"When's the last time someone conned a Harrowgate?"

There it goes.

"Are you kidding me?" He leans forward, seizing Roxas once more. Roxas lifts his chin. In spite of himself, his breathing quickens. "You can't con a Harrowgate!"

"Has anybody ever tried?"

Demyx, Axel remembers, but that was an accident and bad luck, to catch a Harrowgate who'd let himself be conned. Saïx is no distant cousin. He's worked his way up through the ranks. Every kid and grandfather in Lamora knows his story - and knows, too, that he'd never fall prey to something so simple as a melon drop. "If you're gonna con a Harrowgate," he says, deliberately spacing out the words, "pick someone else. Not Saïx. Can't be done."

He jerks away, facing the window - where he can see Roxas's thoughtful face in the glass. Great idea. Axel turns to the wall instead, looking at the corner. Behind him, he hears Roxas say, "Axel. Please. I've got an idea but... I need your help." Before Axel can answer, he adds, "It wouldn't just be for me. I've been doing - research. Talking to people. In the event of his death, Saïx has contingencies--" and he springs to his feet, flying all across the room to bring papers and folders out of nowhere. He scatters them over the table for Axel to read and darts off again, carrying binders full of data like it's nothing.

By the looks of it, Roxas must have hardly slept for planning all of this - investigations into various people, their relevance to Saïx highlighted in pink; schedules for the downtown train station; reports on the locations where Saïx's jobs have taken place. It's thorough and just disconnected enough to prevent suspicions from arising that someone might be taking undue interest in one of the Harrowgate assassins. Axel frowns down at a report. This can't just be about the dead passengers. "You're hiding something," he says, and sees the truth of the statement jolt through Roxas, though his face is still cast in shadows. "Why're you really going after Saïx?"

Roxas turns. "I can't--" he starts, but cuts himself off before he gets too far. At length, he sighs. "There's someone I have to protect. And if he's going to be safe from Saïx, I have to make him disappear."

"Him?" Axel says. The word catches in his throat.

Naturally, Roxas takes it the wrong way. "Not like that," he says, flushing as he shakes his head. "Sora's-- It's better if you don't know."

"Weren't you just asking me to con somebody for you?" He lifts a brow. "Can't con a thing if I don't know all the facts."

"You don't need to know! Just trust me!"

The words echo louder than words should between them. Roxas's eyes are wide and uncertain, caught at last in a place he can't predict. In the background the television is still mumbling about the usual tragedies of suicides and savagery, and Axel's not thinking at all. Not anymore. He made his choice when he fell out of that tree, when he slipped between those bars, when he read the text on the cellphone and thought, Not a chance in hell.

"All right," he says, and the way Roxas looks - relieved, ecstatic - is almost enough to chase down the questions. "So tell me what I come in."

Roxas stares.

"--Where," Axel says after a beat. "I meant where."

He just about catches that grin again, cool and faint as winter beginning, before Roxas turns the subject towards the game they're going to run. Which is fine. He has time enough to wait.

Problem is, this is Roxas's first con. And so, like any newbie, he forgets a few basic rules of thumb. (Rules of thumbs? Rule of thumbs? It's one of the dumbest sayings Axel's ever heard of, and the worst part is how he can't stop using it.) Axel points them out to him after he's finished picking himself off of the floor:

1. Don't involve anybody who doesn't know what they're getting into, especially close friends and family
and
2. Don't base the whole plan around the way that somebody's going to react. Trying to predict Saïx, in particular, is a surefire way to leave everyone involved dead by way of bullet to the brain.

This information leaves Roxas, resident heartless bastard of grubby-nameless-track-five-blocks-off-of-Ocean-Street, unmoved. Hours later, they're still standing where they began: on opposite sides of the table, quarreling over a ragged sheet of paper covered in notes and arrows indicating where the footnotes should align. One sign of a great plan, Axel thinks in disgust, is a total lack of footnotes. "The whole plan," Roxas says, rehashing the same tired argument, "depends on--"

Summer gusts fresh air through the cracks in the windows; it tastes like used breath in Axel's mouth. "You want to sacrifice all of your friends so that you can protect this one?" he snaps. "This is not the way to save anybody. It's a suicide mission. We're not going up against the drama queens of Artsville Academy, you know."

"I know--"

"We're talking Harrowgates. These people can find more uses for your kidneys than you can, and you want to mess with them?"

"I know that!" Roxas shouts back. Sweat's dripping down his jaw, gleaming in the hollow of his throat like a promise, and Axel's torn between frustration and - something he doesn't want to think about, something that coils in his belly and strokes heat through his veins. "Do you think I don't? But we've got to take some risks. Olette knows that I have to--"

He talks and talks, and Axel stops talking to pay attention for five minutes. Not to the things that Roxas is saying - since when have people ever told each other the truth? - but to the words in his gestures, buried underneath his shouts. With a little patience, the language of quick, flying hands and wild motions comes clear to a single simple fact: whoever Sora is, Roxas is desperate to save him. That much is beyond doubt.

So the question changes: it's not why Saïx would come after Roxas, but why he'd be after Sora.

And that's not something that Roxas is going to answer.

"--she'll be safe," Roxas finishes. He bites his lip. His raw-boned hands loosen, frail against th

e dark of the table. "I know she will. She has to be. I can't..."

Roxas calculates loss and risk like a child - without believing in either, as one might trust in a distant religion to damn and deliver. Sounds pretentious, but it's true, though it's not something Axel can dissect in words for Roxas to see. Risk is learned by bones, by shock and failure. The only hope left is that Roxas won't have to fail. Because Axel knows without a doubt that if Roxas fails, he will crumble. And Axel's no longer quite sure of what he'd do after that.

He'd go on, of course, he tells himself, but it doesn't ring quite true. So when Roxas finishes, when he glances over, Axel knows what he has to do.

"All right," he says, and lets a slow grin twist the edges of his mouth. "Let's do it."

It's the stupidest thing he's ever done but, hey, he's still young.

They keep it simple. A newbie's first mistake is to think that everything has to be an epic heist. Roxas, surprisingly, doesn't stumble over that particular block. Instead, he gathers it all into a neat and organised handwritten list, with Axel in accompanying footnotes.

-

-

FACTS:

1. Saïx is not working with the house on this one; that much is clear. The resources available to him must be his own, as Saïx rather than a Harrowgate agent.

2. Saïx will do anything to eliminate the threat that I present. (In Axel's spidery, jagged writing: What threat? Why can't you explain like a normal b-- The rest of the line dissolves into a frazzled dark line, as if the writer is being punted away from the desk.)

3. Sora is a matter of importance to the Harrowgates, and to Saïx in particular. His disappearance will open a weakness in Saïx's defenses.

4. Despite my apparent death, Saïx is still making routine inquiries about me.

(In Axel's hand, tiny scratches at the bottom of the page: 5. Saïx is a cunning, vicious bastard whelp. Roxas: This doesn't help us much. Axel: Does too. Obviously you've already forgotten. And why're you scrawling at me? You're right across the table!)

-

-

PLAN (written, then burned by the first successful match in Axel's kitchen):

1. Axel meets Saïx to inform him that Roxas is alive. They assume that he doesn't kill Axel for knowing about Harrowgate affairs. He gives Saïx what should be Roxas's "last known address" - the empty apartment two floors below Axel's, reachable by use of the fire escape.

2. Saïx takes the bait. There might be a stakeout period of up to a week and a day to ascertain that he lives there but, Roxas says, when the assassination comes, Saïx will do it himself, which should buy them some space.

3. One day after first contact with Saïx, Olette arrives under the pretenses of visiting Roxas. Axel will guard her in his apartment while Roxas spirits Sora away using Luxord's money.

4. Roxas will meet Saïx to inform him that, in the event of his unexpected death, articles will surface on Sora's disappearance, theorizing as to how they might be tied to related inquiries from a certain Harrowgate agent.

5. Blackmail.

-

-

He all but chokes at the last one. "You want to con a Harrowgate, and then you want to blackmail him? For how long?"

"If we make it last long enough," Roxas says, sounding thin and determined, "they might not come after us."

Axel snorts. "Yeah, because everyone knows that grudges dwindle over time."

"I meant... If they think that we might expose them, expose the whole thing, they'll have to let it drag on. And the longer it goes, the longer we live."

"Oh, you've gotta be kidding," he mutters. "Forget the grudge. You expect us to survive on their goodwill?"

"On Saïx's," Roxas corrects, sharp but sure. "The whole city knows how he became a Harrowgate. He's not going to give it up just like that." Very slowly, Axel puts his head into his hands. He hears the soft laughing curve to Roxas's breath as if from a distance, "If it'll make you feel any better," he adds, in that lithe, dry tone that means he's joking, "I could blackmail you, too."

"With what?" Axel says. Roxas cocks his head and makes a horrible attempt at a smirk, at which point Axel falls off his chair laughing. In the ensuing chaos, the thread of that particular conversation is lost.

Considering the plan breaks two of Axel's principles on cons, it's not bad. Now all they have to do is make sure that they don't get killed.

It takes them two weeks to prepare.

The hardest part is winning enough money from Luxord's orchestrated fights. Axel's always been aware that the guy cheated. He just hadn't realised to what extent until he tried to cheat back and discovered that the nebulous and dishonest system Luxord employs only allows for one maestro. Everyone else gets shuffled into the symphony of suckers. What puts them just over the top is not, in fact, luck but Roxas masquerading as an undercover cop to demand a share of Luxord's crooked money.

("Great," Axel says when Roxas returns, pockets angular with bills, "We're already working to get the richest family in town on our backs. Why not make a collection of pissed-off millionaires?")

By comparison, Olette's a lot easier to slot into place. All they have to do to contact her is trek through the impossible forested expanse that Roxas claims is her backyard, climb a tree and fling a missive through her window. Actually, Roxas has nothing to do with this process - Axel's the one who gets lost three times and nearly eaten by what he suspects is a bush with human intelligence. In return, Roxas refuses to let him near his computer - that's to say, Axel's own computer - as he programs it with all the necessary articles and proofs collected over five weeks about Saïx's activities.

Her reply arrives in the form of flyers pasted to the wooden gates that line the boardwalk along Ocean Street. Roxas laughs when he sees them and beckons Axel to read them too. To all appearances, it seems to be a flyer like any other, promoting the addresses of various soup kitchens and homeless shelters throughout the city.

"She probably got it written off as volunteer work," Roxas tells him, flashing that photograph grin for an absent friend. He runs a finger along the inky, tangled borders - where, he claims, her message is coded, though Axel can't see it. What he does catch is the moment when Roxas is totally relaxed, breathless tension eased from his shoulders and the sharp lines at his brow smoothed out by remembrance.

A sour note thrills through his nerves.

Roxas lowers the paper. Already the smile's started to slip from his mouth, though his eyes are still bright as if reflecting storms, fevers, light. "We're ready, aren't we?"

What Axel needs to say most is what he can't: that he has misgivings about the project. His brain's been running the show, and according to logic every piece is in place and awaiting the siege. It's instinct that still setting off the sirens, instinct hauling on every brake he's got, telling him that there's something wrong about the plan, something he could spot if he gave it a few more moments' thought--

But Roxas is there, waiting for an answer, giddy and grave with the proximity of his first con. And, well, when was the last time instinct did anything good for him, anyway?

"Just about," he says, and lets his own sharpening grin give the rest of the answer.

Then it's Axel's turn to perform.

He picks Ocean Street because it's what he knows; because it's out of Saïx's element and he likes it better that way. Best to take his advantages where he can, while he can. It's the kind of thing that a scared informant would do, and so he's not surprised when Saïx accepts. What does a Harrowgate have to fear out of Ocean Street, after all?

It's a sunny Wednesday, pleasant and ordinary. The street's packed with more people than usual, and a few of the regulars are ringingly elsewhere. Luxord, always the weathervane, has taken off. In his absence, Xaldin broods alone on the sidewalk, just short of hanging the MUSCLE FOR HIRE sign on his neck. Axel spares a quick second of pity for whoever takes him up on it. Xaldin's no fool. Anything that requires muscle tends to involve money, and Xaldin has a bad tendency to cut out the middleman - known to normal people as 'patrons' - and seize the profits whole. Turning his head, Axel spots Larxene weaving through the throng. Idly, he cracks his knuckles. No rumors have been swirling about her return, and Ocean Street's always the first place to find out about its own, without exception. Which leaves two possibilities--

His theories are cut short by the brusque, purposeful sway of another shadow engulfing his. He spins around.

If Saïx does not touch him, it's because he doesn't deign to greet Axel with that honor. He's that kind of guy - Axel knows him in a split second. It's not hard to see how Saïx wove his way through the hierarchy with that blind, cultured pace.

"You are Axel Tarr?" he inquires - and he really does inquire. Apparently men of Saïx's status don't just ask anymore.

"Heard you were looking for a kid," Axel says. He holds out a hand to shoulder-height. "Yea-high, moved in about a month ago, doesn't look like he gets fed much--"

"Enough. Where is he?"

Saïx is too easy to bait, but Axel's in the mood for sport and he's always carried that torch for danger besides. He leans forward. "I heard there was something about getting paid, too. A reward?"

"You were mistaken. Tell me now or I'll make sure that you suffer the consequences for crossing a Harrowgate."

Saïx, Axel thinks lazily, would never make it as a conman. Oh, he's got the poker face to carry him through daily affairs, but under the scrutiny of a professional the masquerade melts away like so much vapor. He's too self-conscious about the way he makes the threat; when he speaks, he stands a little taller, chin lifted as if he believes every word - which is giveaway enough. Worse, he's descended to threatening his one lead. He's got to be pretty desperate if he's making gestures like that.

"All right, all right." Axel lifts his hands. "He lives in my apartment building--" and he rattles off clear, concise instructions, "--on the eighth floor. Got it memorized?"

Without a flicker to change his expression, Saïx steps forward. "I do not need to. You will take me to him immediately."

Axel freezes. It should be kind of funny that, of all the contingencies they've ever planned for, they didn't even consider this one - the choice that could toss everything else awry. Outwardly, he doesn't twitch, though he does babble something along the lines of, "I don't know much about his schedule - can't tell you if he's in there right now--"

"It doesn't matter. I will wait for him." Saïx lays a gloved hand on his arm. As his tone deepens, he tightens his grip and Axel feels a gun dig into his side. "This is the last time I ask: where is he?"

Together they stumble back to his apartment building. Axel doesn't struggle - the less he fights, the more likely it is that he'll be able to catch Saïx off-guard when the crucial second arrives. (Also, Saïx's grip carries a certain implication of being able to cut off blood pressure at will.) He gave Saïx the wrong floor as they'd planned, but even if he pretends to stumble against that parking meter, kicks Saïx's legs out from under him and manages to make it into the building without getting shot, it doesn't buy him enough time to get away with Roxas.

Roxas, he thinks wildly, who's still in the apartment, waiting to hear about how the meeting panned out and whether they need to adjust their plans. Little does he know.

If he keeps the conversation up all ten flights, Roxas might stand a chance of making it down the fire escape. Still leaves the question of how Axel will be making his getaway from the crazed Harrowgate today, but one thing at a time.

"So," he says, clearing his throat. "What's the kid done to the Harrowgates, anyway?"

Saïx doesn't even spare him a glance. "A private matter," he answers, striding up the sidewalk to the point where he's basically hauling Axel along like a bony dead weight. Not dead, he amends. Not dead, definitely not dead. "It is not of your concern."

They pass a row of parked cars, one still running, though Axel can't see anybody in the driver's seat. What kind of moron leaves the keys in their car downtown, less than a mile away from the daily conman convention? Not that anybody'd steal it; it's a sloppy junkyard piece that--

--looks a lot like his own car.

He keeps walking - doesn't freeze, doesn't acknowledge the sea-dark gaze following them in the mirror as they drift past. The window's open five steps away, he sees, glass rolled all the way down and - oh, hell. He trips ostentatiously over the sidewalk. Just as Saïx's grip starts to tighten, Axel jerks down and twists. Saïx, still holding onto his wrist, stumbles, and Axel seizes the advantage to crash them both into the nearest wall. Before the former can recover, he's off in long strides, making for the car. Roxas's head is visible now, tousled hair gleaming, and Axel feels relief tighten in his chest.

Then a crack resounds through his ears. Something hits his leg, but Axel's already flung himself through the window by then and they're off.

For an instant, the world shimmers out in a burst of blinding pain. Then he's back to consciousness, just in time to realise that half of his body is hanging out of a window in Lamora traffic.

"Shit--" He bites off the litany as they blaze past another car. It swerves to miss them, just grazing his sneaker. The shoe goes flying just as Axel wriggles the rest of the way into the seat, and they drive off to the familiar Lamoran soundtrack of Enraged Honking in A Major. "Shit, shit, shit." He collapses into the back seat. "Thanks," he croaks when he can manage full words again. "Thought he had me back there."

"He almost did. What happened?"

"Bait failed. He took it too fast." Axel grimaces. Pain electrifies his leg and he arches with a low curse. "Shit. This screws with everything."

"So why didn't you run?"

"Are you kidding me? Why didn't I run? Maybe it was, I don't know, the high school drop-out with housewife habits and a lousy haircut who's been living in my apartment?"

"...Oh," Roxas says, very carefully.

"Yeah." Axel settles against the seat, then winces again. "Shit. What the--" His jeans are stained at the calf, puckering around a ragged hole. When he touches it, pain flares white through his veins. His fingertips come away slippery with blood.

He hisses between his teeth, which gets Roxas's attention.

"What are you--" He gapes. "You're bleeding!"

"Does tend to happen when you get shot, yeah," Axel manages. "Turn left."

Roxas shakes his head. The light flicks to red just as he pulls up. "There's got to be an uptown hospital that can--"

"--turn our asses over to the Harrowgates? Good idea."

"What makes you think that a downtown hospital won't?"

"We're not going to a hospital. We're going to Ocean Street." The car jounces as Roxas eases it forward. Fire roils in his leg; Axel digs the heel of his hand into the wound and tightens his jaw. "Looks like we're gonna have to spend some time in a motel."

Throughout the years, people have listed various reasons to hate Ocean Street motels. The fact that some of them assume that leaving dead cockroaches on the windows counts as interior decorating, for one. The Lee-Jones tapes, for another, through which newspapers exposed local motel management's installation of secret cameras for personal use. And there's always more - the exorbitant rates, the maids' low standards on cleanliness, the frequent burglaries of the ground-floor rooms.

Yet the motels are still in business, decades after opening, for two good reasons:

(1) Incredible discretion.
(2) Proximity to the cheapest liquor store in town.

By the time Roxas returns with gauze, cloth and bandages, Axel's kicked off his jeans and sprawled across the bed. He's managed to bribe the front desk into making five trips to the liquor store, too. Sky-high prices, but what else can you expect from an Ocean Street motel? He salutes Roxas with a bottle as the latter shuts the door and lets a hand fall off the side of the mattress. "Good, you're back. Was getting worried that you'd got yourself shot."

Roxas eyes him. "You think you're funny."

"Hilarious." Axel flashes a grin. "Try a few sips of this." He flicks the green bottle nearest to his hand on the desk. "You'll think so, too."

"Nope. One of us needs to be up to surgery tonight, and I'm guessing it's not you. How much have you had?"

"Not much."

"For what, an elephant?" Ah. Roxas has discovered the evidence: a lonely bottle lolling along the floor, three feet from the waste basket. He frowns as he picks it up. "Your aim sucks."

With a little difficulty, Axel rolls onto his stomach. He leans on his elbow as Roxas drops the bottle into the garbage. "What, did you want me to walk or something?"

"Not really. Might be nice if you stopped drinking, though. Why'd you even buy all that? I didn't think you..." He trails off with a general gesture that could mean anything. Axel considers giving it a dirty spin, but it's been a long day.

"My leg," he says instead. He motions back to the wet towel wrapped around his bare leg, currently working its way from white to red. "Had to disinfect it, right?"

"I bought antiseptic."

Another grin. "This was faster." Axel shifts his hips deeper into the mattress as Roxas steps forward. "Hey, hey, what're you doing?"

"I have to take the bullet out," he explains, sounding patient. "Unless you want me to buy a cane instead. Here." He plants a little plastic bottle beside Axel's hand. The labels are unmistakable. Vicodin - a type of pain-killer. Also known in this particular room as Gift From The Heavens but, hell, Axel isn't picky about names.

The knots between his shoulder-blades loosen, then seize up again as pain knifes through his leg. Unscrewing the bottle, he shakes two into his hand and pops them. "How'd a kid like you get your hands on vicodin?" Caught off-guard, he makes a face at the taste. "Augh. Forget I asked."

"Ocean Street," Roxas reminds him. "Let me know when it kicks in."

He says a few more things, too, but Axel doesn't hear them; his voice thins as bliss sweeps every sensation away, leaving only exhaustion heavy as a wave. It's all he can do not to fall asleep on the spot. "Mm?" he mumbles, leaning his chin on the mattress. "You say something?"

"Nothing. Hold still." Roxas kneels between Axel's feet, bracing his ankle with a hand. It feels not a little weird, and Axel swears that he glimpses a flush on Roxas's cheeks before he turns his head. Out of the corner of his eye, he keeps watching as Roxas rolls a cotton ball and dips it into a smoked bottle. He doesn't see the moment it runs along the wound, but he can feel it as if through a cloud. "Does this hurt?"

"Not so's you notice."

Next come the tweezers. He doesn't catch Roxas disinfecting them, but he must have, because the next thing he knows, he can feel it skirting the lip of the wound. If it stings, Axel doesn't notice. "Last chance to go to the hospital," Roxas mutters.

"I take it you're not a med school kind of kid."

"Mmm." He flexes his hands as Roxas slips the tweezers in, instinctive reaction to a pain that... isn't there. "I don't think it's too deep..."

"Must've caught me at an angle."

"Still. You're lucky. I almost decided not to go out today." Roxas exhales through his teeth, and he feels the tweezers clink against something closer to surface than bone. "Hold still."

It's not as slow as Axel would have imagined, he'll give it that. As soon as the tweezers close on the bullet, Roxas draws it out. He stoops to drop it in Axel's palm just before he sinks onto the bed, leaning against the headboard. "Done."

Pinching it between thumb and forefinger, Axel holds it up to the light. A .22 round - just small enough for simple home surgery to work, though he kind of has to wonder how low Saïx is sinking if he's using .22 rounds in a handgun. After a second's thought, Axel hurls it into the corner - where, he hopes, it will grow dusty and forgotten. He starts to roll over, but stops when Roxas makes a disapproving noise. "What're you doing?"

Axel raises a brow and sits up, causing Roxas to sink back against the headboard. "C'mon." He tugs idly on his wrist. "You'd rather collapse on the floor?"

"I--"

"Or maybe sleep on the headboard. I hear that's fun."

Roxas makes a few more incoherent noises before he gives up. "You're going to have to move your legs if you want me to sleep on the bed." Axel complies. As he stretches out along the bed, Axel sees that his hands are shaking. "We'd better sleep," he says quietly, or something to that effect. Axel's trying to concentrate on anything but the fact that Roxas is warm beside him, smiling that tiny, languid smile. "Saïx's going to be after us."

This reminds him of a subject that's been bothering him the whole afternoon. Wrenching his mind back to business, he asks, "Why didn't you think he'd take the bait on the spot?"

"Huh?"

"We planned for everything but this. How come you didn't--" He sounds accusatory - more so than he means to be. With a wave, Axel laces his fingers behind his head. "Nah, forget it. Get some rest."

Vicodin is apparently good for more than a few things. The minute Axel closes his eyes, sleep drags him down. In the distance he hears Roxas saying, "It's okay. I can take it from here..."

He wakes to a dry mouth, a throbbing leg and, most significant of all, an empty bed. He reaches out. When his hand finds nothing but air, Axel lifts his head. The room is still covered in grime, walls still stained and hung with cheap frames. The only differences are the bandages wrapped around his calf, the breakfast tray on the far table, and the noticeable lack of Roxas in any dimension. Axel checks the clock - but, being the cheap motel it is, there is no clock. Instead, his fingers encounter a note:

I'll be back later. Wait for me.

Roxas

P.S. Don't order breakfast here. My biscuit had a cockroach underneath.

"Better be a euphemism," Axel mutters before the full import strikes him. He sits up violently, swinging his legs over the edge, at which point his desert-parched tongue, his wound (which has been bandaged sometime in the night), and his head unite in a brutal protest that knocks him back onto the mattress. As soon as his head clears, Axel runs himself a glass of water and tries to sift through his memories for something - anything - to explain where Roxas could have gone.

Roxas, like half the people in the world, lies by omission, since it's more effective than waiting for his poker-face to kick in. He's not stupid enough to go wander the city on a small errand the day after a close brush with Saïx - who must still be tracking them. This leaves few options. Axel gives them all due consideration:

(1) He's out buying breakfast.
(2) He's gone to finish the rest of the con by himself.
(3) Having realised that he can resist Axel's charms no more, Roxas has fled into the city in search of an anti-love potion, only to-- wait, no. That was the B-movie they'd watched the other night.

Number two sounds like Roxas's kind of option, because he's a stupid ass who doesn't know that when the hiding part should happen as soon as the guns come out. Axel closes his eyes and pops another pill, crunching it down as he stumbles to his feet and looks for something to wear.

Where would Roxas go? But it's not all that hard to figure out, really - all along, there's been one thing on Roxas's mind. Sora.

The original plan had been to get Sora out while Saïx was distracted with stalking Roxas. Roxas wouldn't be stupid enough to try another plane. Cars are out for the same reason and, really, considering the few documents he remembers, the answer isn't that hard to find. Of course, none of it applies now. They discarded that plan. They had to, since Saïx is no longer stalking an apartment of nebulous contents but two easily identified people. And since there's nothing to distract Saïx, Roxas can't--

Or can he?

Scrambling to his feet, Axel limps over to the window and jerks the curtains aside. His car gleams untouched in the space where they'd parked it the day before, and all at once Axel feels much less safe, holed up in a tiny motel room with a car whose license number Saïx has probably committed to memory by now. And Roxas - Roxas must have been planning this from the moment they'd been discovered. Using Axel as the replacement for the original plan - as bait.

Well, two can play at that game.

Unlike the apartment, there are no convenient fire escapes by the window. What there is, Axel discovers after flirting for ten minutes with room service, is a staff door that feeds into an alleyway. If he follows it, it should take him to the mouth of Ocean Street.

Axel grins. The one thing you can count on with Ocean Street motels: there's always a back door.

Even after Ocean Street, Axel takes the long way just in case, cutting corners and wending through the intricate passages between buildings secret to downtowners. He emerges four blocks from the train station.

It doesn't take long to sort through the platforms - he knows Roxas's profile now; the knowledge is woven into him, sure as his bones - and he soon spots the two heads bent together, brown and gold. One is carrying a suitcase, and Axel's pulse twists in his throat before he realises that it belongs to the shorter of the two boys: the one he doesn't recognize.

Relaxing, he lopes towards them. "Left something behind," he says, and feels glee flash through his veins at Roxas's fleeting expressions: surprise, fury, a few things that Axel can't read but still feels gratified by. If he can provoke Roxas into a reaction, it's a good day.

His features eventually cool into a mask. "Oh, yeah?" Roxas nods as if he's a stranger. "What?"

Axel shows his teeth, crisp and without mirth. "Me."

"I'm Sora," the boy pipes up. Axel turns to him, intending to say something sarcastic and not at all subtle, like, Nice to meet you, Sora. I take it you haven't been through puberty yet? Nah, it wasn't a guess - it's all in the voice. Before he can get the first word out, Sora's face lights with an easy, delighted beam. It's an expression Axel knows all too well, the smile he's been thinking of as Roxas's real smile.

Now that he knows where Roxas learned it, the latter seems a pale imitation. In the space of a single heartbeatm, Sora manages to convey that he's happy not just because it's a good day, but because you're here and his day wouldn't be quite complete without you. Somehow, it reminds Axel of summer. Not this one, and not like any summer he's ever experienced, but summer as it should be: skies scorched gold at sunset, lemongrass weaving in the wind, hide-and-seek and all that junk.

"It's good to meet you," Sora pauses, at a loss, "uh..."

"Axel," he says. "Whoa. Watch the leg."

Sora shifts his luggage back and shuffles his feet. "Sorry. Guess I got a little too excited. I--" His excited beam wavers. "You are Roxas's friend, right? He told you everything?"

Two ambiguous questions from the least ambiguous boy in the world. Axel musters a grin. It's more ghost and illusion than actual smile, but Sora won't see past it. He doesn't want to. Joyous people never want those they meet to be anything other than perfectly happy. One of the reasons why tourists are the easiest to con. They're always seeking thrills, expecting the next adventure to be lurking just around the corner... "Guess I must be," he says.

"That's good. Roxas doesn't hang out with that many people."

Roxas elbows him in the ribs. "Neither do you," he points out.

"Hey! Th-that's different!" Sora protests, clutching his abdomen. He laughs anyway, though this seems to remind him of something. Turning to Roxas, he says, "You told him, didn't you? That I was coming?"

"Today," Roxas assures him. "Her, too. I gave you a list of trains to take. Stick to the schedule and you should be there by tomorrow." He offers a paper. Sora waves it away.

"I've got it covered," he promises. "I'll write you--"

"No, you won't." Roxas raises his brows, and Axel has a moment of stunned familiarity before he remembers where he's seen it before.

Sora places a hand on each of Roxas's shoulders. "I'll write you," he says firmly. "Promise. You're my--"

"You don't have to say it."

"Do too. You don't hear it often enough." He subsides as the train pulls up to the platform. Roxas steps back to Axel's side and together they watch as Sora boards. He pauses by the door, keeping still in thickest part of the drove, and cups his hands over his mouth to shout, "I'm not going to say goodbye 'cause I'm gonna see you again! Both of you!" A last wave, easy as if he believes his own words, and then Sora disappears into the train.

Roxas waits until the train disappears into the distance before he turns and starts to walk off. "What's the matter?" Axel calls after him. He follows at a good pace; Roxas is angrier and moving faster, but Axel's had more experience making his way through crowds. "Cat got your tongue? No, wait! Wrong metaphor. Should I say worm? I mean, you were using me as--"

Abruptly, Roxas wheels on him, and this is the real Roxas at last: eyes sliced dark, fists shaking at either side, uncontrolled in a way that Axel has been trying to provoke since the beginning. "Why did you have to come? You weren't supposed to be here!"

"You told me to trust you," Axel said, cut down to raw honesty by a lack of other things to say. Around them the throng thins. Their voices are spiraling out, carrying in the post-train lull. "And I do. I tried, Roxas. But you left me to be bait. You didn't even tell me you were gonna--"

"I didn't think you'd leave!"

"You thought I'd stay there? After you left me a three-line note about breakfast and cockroaches?"

The argument is teetering into obscenities - Axel, for one, is working up several witty remarks about Roxas's mother - when the pattern is splintered by a gunshot.

Perfect silence overwhelms the station - but only for a second. Then the remaining tides of people build into tsunamis, swarming out of the station. Axel thrusts Roxas into the tide, where he's quickly carried away. Before he can make his limping getaway, however, he catches sight of the gunman, standing atop a bench, hands at rest.

Saïx.

He leaps down, ignoring the people fleeing from him on either side. In two strides, he catches up with Axel and drags him up by his lapels When he speaks, his voice is guttural with rage: "You escaped me once. Believe me when I say that it will never happen again." Axel kicks, to no avail. "I will ask you one last time, and if you answer falsely, I will raze down all of Ocean Street for the Harrowgates." His fingers close about Axel's throat. Axel almost laughs because he's still running on pain-killers, except his vision is shimmering and the clockwork world seems to be winding down.

Saïx forces his chin up. The gun rests, icy and smooth, against his temple. Into his ear, he whispers:

"Where is Sora?"

Axel thinks about pointing out several things: how a death-grip on someone's larynx can sometimes impede answers, and wasn't Saïx looking for--

"Gone," Roxas says.

Instantly, Saïx's grip slackens. Axel drops to the ground, wheezing and feeling a distant throbbing in his leg. Saïx plants a foot on his back and ignores him. "So he was successful in his mission after all," he says, sounding adrift for all of a second before his voice resumes its usual monotone. "I had not thought him such a fool as to stay after the fact."

Him? Why the hell, Axel wonders, is Saïx talking in third person? More pretensions? "You can find Sora again if you have the time," Roxas says, and his words leave Axel's concentration in splinters. "You know that. Now, give me your gun."

Saïx hesitates. His booted heel grinds down on Axel's spine. "Did you mean to dispose of him all along?"

"What do you think?"

"I could have done it yesterday, had I known your intentions. Ocean Street is a fitting place to execute a traitor."

"This is something I have to do," Roxas says. This time, Saïx passes him the gun without comment.

Roxas cocks it with cruel efficiency; the sound echoes in the station like a crack.

Then, he pivots on one foot and shoots Saïx.

Later, they discover the body of a girl in Axel's apartment. Axel doesn't recognise her, but Roxas does. No. He halts at the top of the stairs for an instant before leaping over the banister, stumbling towards her fallen form. Her limbs don't move when Roxas seizes them, but the skin underneath her arm is just starting to darken. Still fresh. Saïx couldn't have killed her more than a few hours ago, Axel thinks, but none of that matters to Roxas, who is kneeling at her side, shoulders bowed and shaking. As Axel crouches at his side, he whispers her name.

Olette.

Axel's never known her, is never going to know her, and frankly doesn't care about her hair or anything aside from the fact that she's in the middle of his apartment, but something still knots inside him at the sight. Maybe it's the knowledge that Saïx, despite his death, can still reach out to wound them. Maybe it's that Roxas - who can keep his temper even until Axel reads over his shoulder for the thirteenth time - is all but curled up on the floor, rage and sorrow clutched in his throat.

He pats Roxas gingerly, at which the latter starts up. His expression is fierce and empty at once, mouth arching and shaping word after word, but nothing comes except his ragged gasps. There's nothing to be said. Everything is understood in the tightening of Axel's fingers at the small of Roxas's back, the low watchful light in Roxas's eyes, and suddenly the distance is closing between them.

They almost make it. Roxas leans in, and Axel thinks that he must have known for a while, because there's a deliberacy in the motion that speaks of a long goddamn wait and--

--and Roxas's hand slips back to his side, and he lets go. Slowly, he gets to his feet. Axel rises with him and, after a moment, slings an arm around his shoulders.

Whatever the reason, he tightens his arm around Roxas and waits. It's not going to be okay, but they'll make it in spite of everything.

In the aftermath of what comes to be known, cleverly enough, as Harrowgatesgate (hey, he's not the one who coined it), Roxas takes to disappearing. Not for long - a day at most, and he always returns exhausted, arrowing straight for bed, usually without noticing that Axel's already in it.

At first, Axel doesn't mind. He has things to sort out. The plan that Roxas gave him and the events that played out are so far from each other as to be impossible, and he can't figure out how the estrangement could have happened. He knows that Saïx thought, for whatever reason, that he and Roxas were in cahoots (jesus, what a dumb word); that Saïx probably went upstairs after losing them the first time, found and killed Olette as an accomplice to the con, then traced them to their motel; that it was Axel he followed to the train station. What still doesn't make sense is why Roxas would spin it out like that - because it's clear now that Roxas was the one in control all along.

When the weeks drag on and Roxas remains mysterious about his new arrangement, Axel tries to follow him. So much about their last meeting with Saïx is still unexplained, and by this time he's sure that Roxas knows more than he claims. They don't even have a crazed assassin after them anymore; there's no reason for him to keep it secret any longer. But Roxas persists. As his preventative tactics escalate - itching powder in Axel's favorite pair of jeans, which is low - he lets Roxas go on to his clandestine rendezvous, or whatever it is he's doing with his days.

After all, there are other ways to find things out.

The thing about conning is this: it's like painting a dream. People can carry it away with them and hold onto it forever, or they can scrape away the paint to see what lies underneath.

Whatever else, once the veneer is off, there's no return. And sometimes the truth can mean less than the lie you paid to hear.

The apartment is dark when Roxas returns again. He unshoulders his satchel and lets it drop to the floor. In the moonlight his skin gleams, secrets alive in the lines and his eyes inky with shadows. "Axel?" he says, careful, to the outline sitting bowed in the chair.

"You lied."

He watches Roxas flinch, stiffen. The floor creaks as he shifts his weight. "You know I had to," he says, quick and bright. "That was part of the--"

"You think I'm talking about the con?" With a brutal flick, Axel lights the lamp. It flares. At this, Roxas starts away, hand flying up against the sudden light. "Think again. Can't be too hard, right?"

"What's going on?"

"All along," Axel says, voice flat. Roxas's eyes have started to glitter strangely. Color flushes his cheeks. "The cellphone threat. Meeting you just like that. Taking Saïx out. Any con that seems too easy to be true probably is. You planned it all from the start, didn't you? You set me up."

He can see Roxas think about covering again; it's in the way his body doesn't speak at all, how it stills and his head lowers, cast deep into thought. At last, he surfaces, and it's the cold dictator Axel saw in the first day. He should have trusted his instincts, he thinks savagely. That feeling of familiarity when Larxene had passed him the cellphone - he should have recognized it, considering how often he'd instilled it in others.

That half-dreaming sensation of being conned.

"How'd you guess?" Roxas asks.

"Olette wasn't supposed to die," Axel continues, ignoring his question. "'Cause you didn't bring her family into the con. I knew there was something wrong about her obituary. Couldn't figure it out until today." He slaps it down, the clipping, choppy lines underscored with an incongruous pink. Olette J. Ryan, only daughter of business moguls... passed away after a tragic accident... Surviving are her parents... wide circle of friends...

"Doesn't mention her brother Roxas. Weird omission, don't you think?" He keeps his tone light. Savagery strains through anyway, and he can see his own sharp fury reflected in Roxas. "Looked you up after that. Simply amazing, the Internet these days." Axel's voice curves thin along a sneer. "Though I should have figured it out, Roxas Harrowgate."

There's a moment when he teeters on the wild edge of uncertainty, when he sees denial flash like a wave through Roxas's expression, when he thinks that maybe he's got it backwards and somehow, Roxas can explain it all.

The delusion ends, quick as it came. Roxas says, "Do you remember Sora?"

This takes Axel aback. He stares at Roxas and is aware for the first time of the fight's toll on him. His breathing tears ragged strips out of the silence, its rasp like steel sawing bone. "Let me guess," he says. "Another Harrowgate."

"Not by blood, but yeah. He's the one your partner conned three months ago." Something underneath his words writhes with the recollection. Roxas exhales before he goes on. "A melon drop. The whole family heard about it. It's the most basic trick in the book. And Sora fell for it. You know why? Because he trusts people. He doesn't think they're bad at heart. And your stupid partner--!"

The sudden sharp rise in Roxas's voice strikes him. Axel grits his teeth into a grin. "Demyx," he remarks, "is kind of stupid. It's why we keep him around."

He says it in part because it's true and in part to see that startlement leap through Roxas's face again. Catching him off-guard is something he can still manage, and it's good to remind Roxas that he can't be in control all the time, Harrowgate or not.

"We couldn't just let that go," Roxas says, as if it's an explanation, as if Axel can hear anything but, I was lying - all along, I was lying about everything. What a guy! What an abandonment complex! "Everyone in Lamora heard about the Harrowgate who got conned. We had to fix it."

It's the kind of expose that he has to participate in, so Axel takes up the thread. "So you landed Demyx in prison and you came after me."

Roxas doesn't turn away, but something in his expression closes down, reduced to shadows and mazes. "That wasn't the only reason. The whole family knew that you weren't involved in Demyx's mistake. But they couldn't--" He lapses into silence, which shouldn't tell him as much as it does. Axel doesn't even know how he figures it out. It's in the way he stops, how Roxas lets his head fall to look at his wrists.

"You," Axel says. He throws his head back. Fox's laughter rattles in his throat, a wild ringing that lashes like fire. "All that time. Trying to figure out why Saïx was after Sora, why he wasn't working with the Harrowgates - and here I had the Harrowgate heir hiding in my apartment all along." He can't seem to stop laughing. Roxas stands without speaking, lets him wear himself out with shaking and roaring.

It takes a while.

When he recovers, he finds himself collapsed into the chair, arms lolling over the back. He cocks a brow and says, "So, what was this? A big game for you? Slumming it in Ocean Street, taking up with some--"

"It wasn't like that."

"Oh, it wasn't?" Instinct tells Axel that he's not lying, but instincts got him into this in the first place. Then Roxas looks at him, fledgling glare glittering full with winter, and he loses his breath.

Roxas says, rapidly, into the space, "Do you know what it's like? Being the heir? Everybody in the family wants favors. They get angry when someone seats them in the wrong place at a dinner party. We draw the line so carefully, but..." His eyes don't fall. He's every inch the Harrowgate heir, jaw tense and body straight, speaking with the calm, imperial grace of a young king. "I wasn't even supposed to inherit. They gather us together, so many of us, and then they train us. The best rules after the head of the family dies. Everyone else serves him. And everyone always wanted to serve Sora. He made it so easy to want. But..."

"Demyx," Axel says.

"When an outsider does something like what Demyx did--" Roxas swallows. "No Harrowgate can forgive that. Sora couldn't be heir anymore, not after what happened. Everyone said we had to take care of Demyx, too. They were going to send someone else. And then - they gave Sora to Saïx. They told him that if he could train Sora to be a good heir, he'd be honored beyond all Harrowgates. And I couldn't--" His hands are shaking. For a moment, Axel thinks that he might fall. But Roxas clenches them at his sides and continues. "Being the new heir means that you don't get much power."

"But Sora escaped," Axel drawls. "Right? And, lemme guess, they cast Saïx out of the family."

It isn't hard to see in the aftermath. When someone like Saïx doesn't use a resource, the only logical conclusion is that they don't have access to it. Not surprising that word never got around the city, though. Who'd risk spreading the news? After all, Saïx never failed. He could return to power, and then where would the gossips be?

In answer, Roxas nods once. "Xemnas - the guy I'm succeeding - told him that he could come back if he finished the original assignment. But Sora - I knew he couldn't go back. And then they gave me your assignment."

"Two birds," Axel remarks. "And one red-headed stone with conning experience. I get it." He curls his hands over the ribs of the chair to keep himself from leaping at Roxas. With every word he becomes just a little more the stranger, a little less the Roxas that Axel knows. He can't know anymore whether those months or this moment is the lie. Whatever it is, he wants to know, craves the weight and meaning of that knowledge in his bones. Which is suicidal and stupid, of course, but Axel's never wanted anything safe. "So, Sora escaping..."

Memory stirs: the boy who smiled not like a stranger or an idol or a Harrowgate, but simply, as one friend to another. It's the closest that Axel has come to honesty in years.

"Everybody blames Saïx for helping him get away," Roxas says, quick as ever. "Saïx thought he had Sora's phone. I texted it under your name. He thought that you were helping Sora get away. The first time, he came here looking for Sora, not me."

"Sora didn't know?"

Roxas shakes his head. "Not about Demyx. Not about you, either. He thought that you were just part of the plan to help him escape." He lets his lips crook up slightly, just at the edges. "That's Sora for you."

"Right." When Roxas doesn't say anything else, Axel nods once. "And now we're done with that heart-warming little story." He slouches and props his chin up on his hand. "So when's the assassin coming?"

He sees Roxas's eyes widen. In spite of himself, how he'd expected it, his pulse skitters.

So it's true.

"You keep thinking that I'm stupid," Axel croons over the icy knot that fear makes of his throat. Blood pounds in his veins like a tempest. "There's no reason for you to tell me all of this now. Not unless you're delaying. The story's almost done, right? Saïx is out of the way without disgracing your family. Sora's safe. Which leaves your family's loose end: me."

"It wasn't my idea," Roxas starts, but he sounds lost. Axel musters a smile, stark and grim with lies.

"Well, well," he says, yanking the words into a hard, smooth pace: the same pattering tone he'd used to sell his stories on Ocean Street. So Roxas was a lie after all - Axel's damned if he'll let him see that it matters. Die with a little dignity, he tells himself, which is stupid. He knows it's stupid. Since when has he ever had dignity? "Who'd you call? Us Ocean Street-siders, we don't get that much gossip about the assassin lineup at Harrowgate House. Or maybe you hired Larxene again. I hear she's done some great work on that side of the line. You hired her that first time, right? To get me the cellphone." Roxas doesn't speak. Axel widens his grin, brittle and sharp with confidence. "What's the matter? No parting potshots at the dead man?"

"You could run," Roxas says, turning his head to the window.

Axel barks a laugh. "From Harrowgates? You've gotta be kidding me. 'Sides, I'm an Ocean Street kid. Born and bred in those gutters. Sorry if you wanted a little chase to spice up your--" He misses Roxas's mutter, but it doesn't really matter, does it? Somewhere in the world, the sandstorm is emptying out of the hourglass. His time's running out. "What's that?"

"I said," Roxas snaps, "you moron."

And Axel glances up. It's the first time that he's really looked at Roxas since he figured it out. Looked at him as a whole instead of in parts, at lying eyes and expressive hands caught in motion. Roxas stands stiff in the lamplight, leaning hard against the windowsill, all crooked angles and vicious gold lines. His fists are knotted tight, braced along the edge as if he expects to be attacked. Axel's shirt is still too big on him. He has the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, but it puckers over his shoulders and gapes open at his throat when he turns, exposing the delicate points of his collarbones.

Being a moron, only one thought occurs to Axel: He didn't change. He went home, he saw his family, but he didn't change out of my stupid shirt.

"You could run," Roxas repeats, gentle and deliberate, and at the back of his mind Axel thinks that he might almost understand the story that Roxas is trying to piece together out of all the wrong words. It's been so clear all along that he has no idea how to make this kind of thing work... and Axel can't think of a stupider mark than himself, scrambling to find ways to make the story fall together when it's so obvious--

"Forget it," he says with a wave. "I'm not buying that again."

"Not everything's a con, Axel!" Roxas bites out, but Axel can hear the footsteps sounding up the stairs. Professional. Efficient.

Too late.

He gets up from his chair. His hands slide into his pockets. Roxas says his name again, voice rising. He sounds almost livid now, out of control. Tough, Axel thinks, and maybe there's some part of him that's still mindless with fury, that can't let it go to figure out a compromise. Axel's problem is that he's always listened to his instincts, and every instinct is screaming to go out in a blaze.

The front door crashes open. Axel stands with a lighter in his left hand and a knife in his right, and waits for the story to end.

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fin

reviews: Yes, please?