the sting of the sea, a kingdom hearts fanfic

Note: Apologies to all who had to read this without proper line breaks. FFN and its updates are ceaselessly questing to convert us all to horizontal line-breakers. But I won't conform, I won't do it!

the sting of the sea

"We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it." — James Matthew Barrie

Dear Roxas,

Let's be frank here because bush-beating is stupid and frankly, sort of got us into this mess.
These are the facts:

(i) You lost your memory as a result of being captured by some serious psychopaths who cannot quite seem to grasp the concept of your existence or think of anything but your Existence.
(ii) As a result, you don't even know what I mean by "existence".
(iii) I'm the best you've got, and it's a bitch to accept that you don't even know why.
(iv) I'm writing you because more than one person would love your strings around your fingers, and so it falls on me to tell you the truth of the matter.
(v) You will never read these letters so maybe I'm the psychopath for trying.

You should trust me, Roxas.
I would never lie to you.

(This is how it began, went,

ended.)

Dear Roxas,

The day when I remembered you.

So there was this mission in the Land of Dragons, and you were my partner.
This was your first strike, because I hated partners. I hated attachments and strings and reasons to look out for someone else that wasn't you. Shit, caring about one person's life was hard enough as it was.

So you could call it fate jesting or karma bitching or whatever the hell you want, but the fact of the matter was that I somehow managed to get partnered up with the scrawny new kid for some variant on Xemnas's torturous social experiments.
I thought it'd take me five seconds (maybe ten if I bothered with chakrams) to send you crying home to mama Xemnas,
but when I leaned down to make some sort of snarky jab at your height (presumably involving weather at differing altitudes or similarly nonsensical shit of that caliber), I was promptly and worryingly halted by your keyblade on my neck. Alarming since I didn't recall you standing behind me and because I was totally at your mercy.

"Don't fuck with me. I'm five-two and the fucking growth spurt hasn't hit yet," you said calmly, the first words you'd ever speak to me.

"Well, puberty is a fickle creature." I shrugged off the lingering sensation of metal tickling the fine hairs on my skin, striding on ahead like longer legs could defeat you. It honestly scared me to think that I couldn't. I was at your mercy, if you so chose. It was kind of hot, in a morbid way.

"Fuck you," you replied mildly as you somehow magically managed to materialize at my side. My legs were exponentially longer—so how—?

"In due time, friend."

"It's Roxas. Commit that to memory, friend." The mockery in your tone wasn't appreciated, but I let it slide in light of more pressing issues, philanthropist that I was.

"Well fuck me in the ass, that's my line." A moment of amusement on your face, to be documented for posterity. Gets his jollies from stealing other people's motherfucking thunder.

"Yeah, I know. They warned me about you."

You called up a portal, caustic as you please.

Dear Roxas,

The actual mission itself consisted of eliminating heartless, collecting hearts, the usual shindig. What was not usual was how it would unbelievably end up with us sharing the one cot in a cheapy oriental motel.

(In case you were wondering, you were so angry you stabbed right through the walls.)

(With your fist.)

And after that you were blowing on your hands and demanding to know why I wouldn't warm you up, and all perversion aside, I was still pretty pissed about the day before.

It was waking up next to you the next morning with you curled absurdly close, sun rising like a burnished disease through the crisp morning air behind every acerbic strand of hair shackled to your acerbic scalp, with all your worldly edges dulled, quiet and disarmingly luminous, that made me remember you for the first time.

My eyelashes stuck together, I could pinpoint your morning breath hovering in the air. The cot creaked and I felt my toes curl in the chill where they'd been sandwiched between yours in a last-ditch attempt by your subconscious to split particles of body heat.
It was just so indescribably and absurdly nonchalant, my first memory of you always.

It was one of those moments where watching you, I didn't feel nothing but everything, and my inexperience with such made it all the more inexplicable and unrecountable.

Dear Roxas,

It was harder to not notice you then.
I could catch myself staring thricefold during mealtimes and meetings, trying to catch your eye and a glimpse of whatever it was that I'd spotted back in the Land of Dragons.
You never did deign to catch my eye and I figured that if I were any good at objectivity there would be something greatly amusing in role reversals and all your best-kept secrets.

Dear Roxas,

You did show me that side of you, but only once, because it was an awkward, bumbling, confused experience full of starts and restarts and lets-try-agains. I was sure of nothing and nobody and I think you knew that, accepted it.

I didn't mean for it to stain but it did, and I didn't know what to do with myself afterwards.
I left the castle for awhile, but the answers weren't in melting gray raindrops or skylines or pinpoints of stars.

I figured that they must've been in trickier places to find.

Dear Roxas,

Somehow, every time after that I still wanted

Dear Roxas,

We're getting there, I promise.
I didn't mean to jump ahead.

Dear Roxas,

The fact that we returned from the Land of Dragons with all of our appendages soundly secured astounded the majority of the Organization and put a sharp, you-shaped dent in my pride.
A member that I couldn't scare off? And a puny runtsicle at that? Axel, you're going to seed! Axel, you've gone soft! Axel, how completely homoerotic of you!

It was such a phenomenon when we both returned not only equally intact but days early, that Xemnas made us partners then and there, so smug was he in all his triumph that my era was over.
"Don't let me die," you said solemnly as we were slouching back to the mess hall, seemingly unperturbed and perturbingly unsurprised at our newfound matrimony. I was staring at your hair, wondering with varying degrees of revulsion where it got all of that luster. And seething, of course.
"Wouldn't dream of it," I muttered, sarcasm in it's element.
"You promise?" you asked, and the seriousness in your tone took me by surprise. I reorganized my gaze in the direct line of yours and I caught the crossfire of the intensity in your stare, bullets through my eyeballs that stacked themselves up in great heavy crates at the back of my brain.

I frowned, looked away. I found myself wishing you hadn't asked me that, only I can't remember why.

"Promises are funny things around these here parts, kid."

"Just promise me," you insist.

"Okay," I say. I reflect on this with regret. "Okay, I promise."

Dear Roxas,

I caught you in the library once. You might have been reading, but I didn't check since books and I were a total meh.

"So what exactly did they say about me?" The nice thing about the Organization is that everyone always knows who "they" is.

"That you're a homosexual rat bastard," you replied casually, flipping a crusty page in your book. (The Castle That Never Was, filled with a bunch of nobody freaks that slow-roasted kittens just 'cuz. Anything remotely educational was bound to be crusty and in advanced stages of disrepair.)

"Rat bastard? That's a bit harsh."

"And homosexual isn't?"

"Do you have a problem with fags? I hate to break it to you, Rox, but the Organization is no place to be coy about penises."

"I'm not really picky, if you want to know the truth." I let out a completely inappropriate laugh at this, a barbed sound, insouciantly short-lived.

"You looked like you wouldn't be."

You glared at me like what the hell do you mean by that, and I tried for a winning smile.

Dear Roxas,

I learned not to push your buttons pretty quickly. And I'm still repentant to this day for that trick with the shower and the blueberry bush.
(Not just for you, but for me too. My left testicle still contracts at the thought—I was two counts down, one for pilfering from Marluxia's garden and two for ruining Pie Friday for Demyx.)

You chased me from kingdom come to the high heavens and the seven seas, and sometimes when I dream alone I can still imagine the murder on your breath.
Sometimes it is alarming; mostly it is endearing.

Dear Roxas,

Mostly I am regretful that I did not catch you up and hold you steady while I could. Easy for me to say now, since I can't.

Dear Roxas,

"I don't want to do this."
"I hand-soaked Xemnas's underwear last week. I am sick and done with indirectly fondling his family jewels. Come on, Axel. Be a pal. Besides, I said I'd handle Family Dinner Saturday for you instead."
"You insouciant little wretch, you know we all end up passing all that off to Demyx and Demyx'll eat anything. This is real rich, being tried by you of all people."
"Say, wait a minute, I thought that the bounds of our relationship knew no labels. Or so the hand that groped my ass says."
"It was an accident, the cot was small, so sue me if my appendages developed a libido of their own and finally wanted to get some."
"Whatever, Axel. This is how you can repay me. Friends do friends favors, right? It's not like I'm asking you to marry me."

(Coquettish, what else did I expect from you?)

You marched on ahead of me to your room. I stayed behind, frowning at the connotations.

I made the report, sure, but the lesson here is something else entirely.

Dear Roxas,

The thing being, after your inadvertent declaration of love I'd experienced a series of consecutive out-of-body, out-of-mind episodes that led to an uncharacteristic determination to figure out what exactly being "friends" entailed. After all, I'd never had one of the sort and you were, if nothing else, a good place to start.

(And I only did this because I thought that curiously enough, I didn't hate you and therefore might actually end up liking you.)

This quest was noble at heart but in the end served only to further exemplify my incompetence at life in general.
(An admission which rotted the teeth as it blew out of the mouth and sank, miasmic, to the floor. You were, if nothing else, a humbling influence upon me. I was reminded every day of how lucky and unique I was of all Nobodies, of all people everywhere.)

As it was, my valiant efforts somehow ended up with the two of us pressed tightly together, limbs twisted into all sorts of potentially provocative positions in an attempt to not occupy the same space as each other, between throngs upon throngs upon throngs of prepubescent teenage girls shrieking until their lips turned blue.

I didn't even know that many people could squeeze into the one airtight concert hall. Surely it was some sort of fire hazard.

(Temptation reared its beastly but oddly seductive head at me.)

"Well, I mean, at least the one with curly hair is kind of cute, right?" I proffered inconsequentially to your stormy and crackling countenance, a meager offering in a pathetic attempt to appease the pagan god.

You turned your head to glare at me. Somewhere far away a playground of children burst into tears.

"Stop being such a fucking girl about this, God. I said I was sorry, do you need me to wipe the melodrama off of your ass before I'm worthy of your forgiveness?" I groused, trailing after you as you made your way to the library and the safe haven of the decaying astrophysics section and your favorite armchair between Antares and Betelgeuse.

"I think the point was that I'm not a fucking girl." You sounded bitter, and I thought that you were taking this far too seriously. "Why did you even bother trying to pretend that you wanted to do something nice? It's not like you actually care or have it in you to try." You were challenging me, daring me to say anything on the contrary.

"On the contrary," I said,

Dear Roxas,

I wouldn't remember this,
but I there would be this crinkle of your eyes that belied the scowl of your mouth when I told you that I wanted to take you somewhere special.

And I think I remember the disappointment, the reasoning behind why you thought I was playing you all along, but I wasn't, I really wasn't.

Dear Roxas,

We once visited this fortune teller in Agrabah because we made such a good team we finished our mission with just enough spare time to indulge your fancies and in your own reserved, intransigent way insisted that we go have our fortunes read.

She tickled your palms with pointed red claws and whispered tales of greatness and heroism and how the handsome prince might find himself a beautiful lady to marry one day and live happily, happily ever after.
She traced one line on my palm all the way across and told me that there was nothing to see here.

You stormed out of the tent, billowing waves of resentment unfurling behind you.

"It's all just a load of bullshit anyway," you muttered, grabbing my hand, and we were gone.

Dear Roxas,

"For god's sake, Axel, you really didn't have to throw her. That was unseemly of you. We'd be lucky to ever do business with them again," you scowled, pottering around behind me like an persistent tugboat bobbing in the wake of my wrath.

"You got me a fucking hooker for my birthday. Thanks but no thanks." I still don't understand why a naked woman bursting out of a gift box with tassels on her tits made me so angry, it just did. She wasn't even particularly unattractive, it was just repulsive in an alarming, split-second and revelatory kind of way.

"That's not really fair."

I paused.

"I mean, you didn't have to pay for her."

"What part of no thanks don't you get!" I burst out. "I appreciate you looking out for me or whatever the hell that was, but I'm not really interested." You're starting to get frustrated now too and I can almost understand, sympathize with you about my own premenstrual self.

"So she's your fag hag, big fucking deal. I thought you were supposed to like this kind of shit on your birthday." You snort derisively. "You can undress your morals right along with your tighty-whities, as far as I'm concerned."

My hand twitched and for a second I wanted to put your face through the wall. Maybe that would wake you up.

Dear Roxas,

Because you liked sunsets so much, you really liked Twilight Town.

Our first mission in Twilight Town in a long time had you about excited as you got. And I was happy that you were happy, because a happy Roxas meant a marginally less lethal excursion.

However, through a series of malignant twists of fate and the passage of inopportune air masses, Twilight Town was hovering on the edge of a thunderstorm-cum-tornado when we arrived.
This displeased you, and thus our mission was as brief as it was miserable and violent, with you scowling around every corner like each Heartless had done you a personal wrong, gutting each one with a little bit of personalized shameless dispassion.
We returned; you continued to mope for days on end, speaking to no one and arguably suffering a serious bout of something frighteningly akin to teenage angst.

Eventually, though, enough was enough. Action had to be taken lest I never receive the whimsical Roxas I knew back.

You come ambling into the library with that apocalyptic look on your face and I do need a half a second to steel up my balls for this one.

"C'mere, Rox. I wanna show you something." You glance up, glance away with an irritable expression on your face.

"Make it fast." Eerily acquiescent. Perhaps telepathy or precognition on your part?

"Okay, but you gotta close your eyes first." I cleared my throat uncertainly—I could only imagine how this was going to sound to you. You shut them obediently but cracked one open to threaten,

"This better not be some sort of stupid prank because if I open my eyes to Vexen's dick or anything sick like that I swear to god you will wake up with a vagina."

"O ye of little faith!" You rolled your eyes but let them slide shut again with one last menacing glare and I took hold of the skin of your elbow and steered you into the portal I'd called up.

We walked, and the end of the corridor burst open in dulled reds and surly oranges.

"Okay... open your eyes, kiddo." I took a step back and let you blink open and gaze out in what I crossed my fingers was wonderment. If you thought you'd liked the sunset before, it's nothing compared to seeing it atop a clock tower hundreds of feet above the ground. Or so I'd hoped you'd think.

"What is this?" Your voice sounded maybe a little higher than normal, but otherwise level and composed and so far away. I wilted a little.

"Oh, heh heh... I don't know, I just thought that since it was raining the last time we were here and you missed a chance to see the sunset and stuff, we should come back but do something kinda special to make up for it. And I thought that it'd be cool if we could see the sunset from the clock tower, since it's so high up and all. Or whatever," I added for good measure. I took a cautionary step just out of range of your flailing hands, if you so chose to whip around and throttle me right there. I could never be quite sure with you.

You finally turned around so I could see your face, but it was aggravatingly equal parts thoughtful and intense and I could read it no better than I ever could.

"Uh, Rox? Are you going—" and if I could remember what I was trying to say before you stalked forward with fierce intent, leaned inwards, and stuck your mouth on mine I probably would include it here.

I swear, if there were a little man inside of me, he would have screamed and died. As it was, I screamed and died. Metaphorically. I don't remember what I did with my hands but I hope I wasn't a loser about it and let them hang there like retardedly or whatever. I'll tell myself I put them around your waist like a good monsieur, okay?

So there was no movement, no attempts to make french with it, just your lips, soft and creased with worry against mine.

(That moment sank and swam like a piece of nothingness in a vacuum traveling at the speed of light until I felt like every particle of my soul had been sucked clean out and Jesus I was delirious with wtf.)

Eventually my lungs started to cave under the mountainous pressure of sheer shock and I found myself unwinding from you, lips sticking, until I was far enough away to make out the flush on your face like nothing I'd seen before. I wanted to speak but I was, retardedly, gasping for air and reeling at miles a second so I just kind of floundered, my gaze darting up to meet yours and flicking away as soon as it did.

It took a very, very long time for you to speak.

"Well." I think you must have drawn the wrong conclusions because as if something magical and weightless has transpired, you were suddenly animated again, clapping your hands together with a professional cough that did nothing to hide your totally buttraped dignity.

You called up a portal and had half your ass inside before I could even begin to respond.
(Because if you left it would all be over without any closure and if I had no answers to take to bed at night, how would I know that it hadn't all just been a dream?)

"What the hell was that?" I demanded, voice ringing like the very sky echoed with everything I couldn't contain. It came out harsher than I meant, confusion adding layers I hadn't intended. It took me a moment to realize that you were every bit as scared and shocked as I was about what had just happened.

You paused for tremulous moments at the sharpness in my voice, frightened for the first time I had ever seen.

"I don't know," you whispered at last. "I think I meant—I think I wanted to—" but your hesitation gave me hope and the balls to do what I couldn't before. It took three and a half grand, sweeping steps to reach you, yank you out of the portal to send you tumbling into my hold, and kiss your chapped lips like it was going out of style.

We stayed like that for awhile. You lounging around in my arms and your tongue lounging around with mine. It took me a moment to realize that you were every bit as tentative and hopeful as I was.

You sucked in a little breath through your nose—and I felt a rush—this burning—oh, this burning, it was almost too internal to be physical. I could pinpoint no logical cause and this time the moment was inertia-free and delicate, and we were hurtling forward in continuums, not stopping until we'd left gravity behind.

Dear Roxas,

Sometime later you would find yourself in a Twilight Town that had a clock tower with a shamelessly weak security system consisted of a rusted padlock superior in strength only to passing butterflies.

And you would find yourself atop the sun every day with your best friends and your sea salt ice cream, your world peaceful and benevolent and whole.

Dear Roxas,

In the days to come things kind of seeped into one another through the cracks in my memory, runny paint that trickled from one golden day into another, yellow memories that congealed and couldn't be separated if you tried.

One day oozed into the other until I couldn't remember the date of when you first clambered wordlessly in my bed late at night and stayed there until morning, or when your toothbrush starting making regular Saturday (Wednesday Sunday Thursday) night appearances next to mine in the cupboard, or when I started spiriting away two slices of chocolate cheesecake from Marluxia's late-night baking binges instead of one. Dates lost significance—what mattered when you had a hot blonde to fuck from 9 to 5 every day? Or so I told myself, except

"So what, are you and Roxas dating now or something?" Larxene sniggered one day, biting down on the word 'dating'. "God, it's like high school all over again. All the faggots are here, at any rate."

"No, we are not dating," I snapped a little more quickly and harshly than the situation called for, stabbing into my mildly fetid fruit salad and swirling together the blueberry guts with the strawberry blood. I sincerely wished you weren't out on a mission right now—there was no way in hell you'd have let anyone entertain the notion that we were going out, least of all Larxene.

(I suppose I should have felt one way or another about that, but I was pretty much used to it by now.)

"That's not what I heard," she sing-songed, followed by the sadistic little giggle that inspired in you a desperate urge to knock her head off.
(You could almost hear her hair crackling with the vengeful delight of potential blackmail material, miniature electric shocks of pleasure vibrating throughout her entire person.)

Truth be told, I hadn't considered to what level our relationship had progressed. Putting a label to it gave me a headache trying to sort through all the stipulations.

"Well, you heard wrong. Roxas and I are..." I paused, wincing at the complete failure of my vocabulary to supply a proper word for it at my mouth's behest. "We're..."

"Do tell. This should be good."

"We're..." There was a lion in my stomach telling me that we probably shouldn't be tempting fate like this, but I was stronger than that. "... friends, okay?"

Dear Roxas,

Just because the act itself crashed and burned doesn't mean I ever had any qualms about palming your cock or sucking you off whenever your desperate teenage hormones coincided with my ubiquitous desire to pin you up against the door or wall or whatever firm, flat surface I could get my hands on (re: every second of every treacherous and agonizing day).
You liked it,
at least that's how it sounded, garbled death threats that morphed into something
else.

You certainly weren't the first person to get me on my knees,
but you were by far and away the best and most beautiful when you threw you head back and whimpered, shoulders shuddering, tremors into my grinning mouth.

In the end,
I never missed an opportunity to prove to you,
whatever it was that I absolutely, unconditionally, unquestionably had to prove to you.

Dear Roxas,

The nice thing about this whole brief era in our lives was the way you traded a moment of vulnerability with the setting sun gouging tigers into your back for a somebody to clamber into bed with, even if you didn't like our wrists to nudge or our ankles to twine.

(It made me feel like I was worth something for a good while, that I had a purpose, even if it was only to rub the warmth back into your soul late nights in the middle of nowhere when your shoulder blades felt like frozen paper sails, thin and fragile and mine to hold.)

The nice thing about this whole brief era in our lives was the way that even though you didn't like our wrists to nudge or ankles to twine, I knew that if I waited out your struggles and tensed complaints, once you relaxed, defeated, into my hold, it felt right. Not necessarily a match made in heaven, but relatively close.

The nice thing about this whole brief era in our lives was the way that you'd sometimes (if lonely or cold or just because these impulses sometimes leaked out of the cracks you forgot to seal) press close. Nothing else, just you there, me here, no time warps or light particles to separate us.

The nice thing about this whole brief era in our lives was the way that I never had a chance to tend my own bang-ups and scrapes after a free-for-all with the heartless.
(In what I reflect was a sordid attempt to save face I would both insist that I had been neither trying, keeping my eyes open, or even using my chakrams amidst all of the shenanigans. I suppose that some part of me believed that you would buy that I had been fighting barehanded with my eyes shut like a fucking faggot. I supposed you were beautiful because you would at least, for a little while, humor me in such respects.)

The best thing about this whole brief era in our lives was the way that I and only I managed to (a piece of windblown serendipity come to rest in my palms, to be sure) squeeze a true curve of a smile out of you, when the bluest moon shone and I could count forever the stars blinking into existence everywhere.

Dear Roxas,

I still can't believe how distanced reality and I became, how under the influence I was.

I should have seen what was coming eons before it hit like a stray metor... a little bit of "I-told-you-so."

Dear Roxas,

And by that I mean,
I always knew all good things must come to an end.

Dear Roxas,

The word of the day is fuck. Let's just keep that in mind while we just dive right into the thick of things, shall we?

So you come raging in, storming through the door because that can be slammed off it's hinges in ways portals can only dream of, spitting flecks in my shuttered face that taste like "who the fuck is Sora!"

"What are you talking about?" I am conveniently present and playing dumb. Supposedly, I was good at this, but as you'll see in a moment, I sucked at everything, even being stupid.
"Fuck you, Axel. Don't try to hide this shit from me anymore. I can't fucking believe you."
"What the fuck! What're you even talking about?" I start to get agitated, I am almost afraid of where this is going. Call it a premonition, if you will. Call it instinct, future me ringing home.
"Don't play dumb. It's not very fucking becoming of you, you know."
"Roxas, please, just tell me what the hell you're talking about. I swear I can explain anything you—"
"Fuck you. Just stop-fucking-lying to me. You've been using me all along, haven't you? I don't mean anything to you, so just shut the fuck up!" Even your eyeballs seem to bulge and swell with fury like some cat-like instinct to puff up and every word you grit out like venom in your throat, and my silence is a yes, a very silent and very dirty yes. "I don't need your shit anymore. I never needed any of this."

It only takes a second for me to gather my wits up but it only takes a second for the conversation to evaporate and you to disappear, sucking air and light and motion from the room with you.

But the truth is that I didn't mean that I had no answer because you meant nothing to me, rather, I meant that I had every answer in the world and I was having a hard time gathering them all into words.

Dear Roxas,

I thought you would come back home eventually but you didn't and when I went hunting you down I didn't have to go far.

What most people don't know is that I found you multiple times in a variety of places over extended periods of time. I managed to steal one last kiss somewhere between Pride Rock and a very hard place to be.
When I did, you deflated, sinking into the touch like I had some sort of hold on you.
(Did I want to? Did I have it or)

"It's my fault for ever thinking I could trust a Nobody," you murmured against my mouth when I was done. It soured what would have been a reasonably decent bid for farewell.
"You can trust me. You just haven't given me a chance to explain myself," I whispered, frustrated, helpless. I couldn't believe that I'd resorted begging for your forgiveness. My pride was clearly on maternity leave with your babies.
"No, I can't. And you can't trust me either. That's why the Organization is never going to work." There it is. I didn't need to be an idiot or even a genius to figure that one out.
"They work well enough to kill a man." My voice was bitter; I was asking you not to go.

(It occurs to me at a later date that it is probably of interest how at this point, the Organization is the "they", no longer the "we". Polarization is so specious and many-faceted.)

You pulled away, because you know where I was headed with this, backing off and plodding back on down swirling black corridors. I followed, because I could, because I had to.

"They'll want me to get you back, you know. Maybe even kill you, depending." I told you this when we appeared atop Big Ben. A clock tower inferior to ours.
"So kill me," you responded dispassionately.
"Just like that? You're going to give everything up just like that?"
"'Everything'? What do you mean, 'everything'? There is no 'everything'. I don't have anything."
"You have me." Petulant to the last stand. That's me for you.
"And look what good that did me," you sighed, voice escaping on the breeze.

I spun around to face you and tell you just how much good I have done you (and if it came out the other way around I don't suppose I should be surprised at all) but you were gone again, like you didn't want to take any of my shit anymore.

This last time, it wasn't so hard to find you.

I toyed fondly with the idea that you were waiting for me to arrive so at least we could part with our unsatisfactory and overdramatic goodbyes,
but I knew you better than that, or so I thought.

I think that the weather was appropriately grey and overcast, I think the world was appropriately pointless and nonexistent.

You stalked ahead; I waited because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know why you wouldn't see reason, why you wouldn't listen to maybe the one person who sounded like advice. But that was always part of your mystique. To think I could have changed you!

Somehow, I was still insane enough to half-hope that when I asked you, you would tell me that you were just joshing. A stupid joke, but that was part of our charm.
But you spat in my face and even I, a lovesick fool, the meanest man alive, still had some pride.
You are either the bravest motherfucker I've ever seen or just That Naïve Kid that thinks he can touch the sun if only he flies high enough.

"No one would miss me," you said and the thought suffocates under a high tide of irony, until the very last wave breaks onshore.

And what for?

You were testing me, I knew it. Daring me to say otherwise, your tone curling with disdain, but you were just so misinformed.
And I wish I was strong enough to keep my mouth shut for once, to tell you just how little you know and just how long this freedom will last, taste of your own fucking medicine, but I was always weaker than you and I found an admission that was strangely raw in it's honesty ghosting out like imaginary breath five, ten seconds too late.

Dear Roxas,

You'd think that once you left it would have been a relief, if only on small scale blender bits.
You know, finally I could pee with the door thrown open to the elements or finally I could eat breakfast in peace without you hogging all of the whipped cream, or
finally I could brush my teeth without having to scrounge around my dingy bathroom counter for where you knocked my toothbrush to the last time you were flailing about in that traumatic episode you call mouth-washing.
(Yes, I know the motherfucking mint flavor stings.)
You know, blah blah blah, all those complaints people have about their housemates like leaving crusty hairs in the drain.

You'd think, but that's not really the case.

You went on a mission by yourself the first time and I was in the bathroom, not pining or moping or doing anything in particular besides being bored.
But when I tried to brush my teeth my hand went scrabbling across the counter like some precognitive spider completely devoid of conscious effort, and it was only when nothing came up in my hands that I even realized that my hand was moving, and a split second after that I realized my toothbrush was still perched at a perfect thirty-degree angle on my cup because you weren't here.

And it was weird because I hadn't really cared about you being gone before,
but staring at my hand, barren and unfriendly, gave definition and acuteness to the pinching feeling in my skull.

I brushed my teeth that night wondering what you were doing right at that moment.

Dear Roxas,

When you left for good, my toothbrush magically fell down on it's own through a toxic mixture of fate and karma and that was even worse because when I stuck my head out to wring your neck for it I remembered that there was no neck to
wring, or smell or touch or wonder or breathe or kiss good night.

Dear Roxas,

I had this dream about you the first night you were away.

You were sailing and sailing on the endless blue sea, feet dangling over the edge of your curlicue piece of driftwood meandering forever, sailing and sailing,
the tiniest wan smile on your face like you knew I was watching.
Axel.
Huh?
Axel.
... Roxas?
This is what you wanted, isn't it?
What are you talking about? Where are you? I've been trying so hard to find you.
You should try introspection once in awhile. It can come in handy, if you so choose.
I don't understand. Come on, just tell me where you are.
You always were so, so demanding...
Of all the things you could say about me.
Can I ask you something?
Stop being so goddamn circuitous. Where are you? Tell me, and you can ask all the questions you want. Later.
Do you mis—

And the boat was capsizing, you were coughing up blood and apocryphal guts, I was a million miles away onshore, undertow sucking me in.

I waded in, stumbling and gasping and one-foot swells felt like ten-mile tragedies, trying my hardest to reach you,
but when your body washed ashore I found my hands full of, full of thick brown matted spikes and crown chains and crooked, deranged smiles that broke under the force of my grip or became crooked and deranged under the weight of my misery.

If I screamed, it woke me up.

Dear Roxas,

I'm not so stupid that I couldn't recognize that the precipice in which I had fallen was both jagged and lightless, an insurmountable climb that I could only dream of reaching you across.

I'm not so stupid that I still cannot see the nature of the problem.
The problem is my heart (oh! Irony! Thou art a heartless bastard),
and that you ever tried to make it exist in the first place.

Dear Roxas,

When I set out to find you, be it of my own volition or not, I checked under cots and behind snowdrifts and at the tops of skyscrapers where I may or may not have held your hand. I set fire to a couple of villages, I killed a couple of Heartless. (I thought of you when I watched their fingerless hands scrabbling over their chests at a stroke past midnight,

searching, searching, searching.)

Roxas, dear,

Twenty angsty days later I found you caught between pixels, and

you stared with me with that fucking insane look of yours like you were ironing holes through my skin, and if I didn't know better I'd have though you remembered me, the devils you were sending my way were so familiar.
And when it all comes to a head and shit's going the fuck down, I think it is pathetic, the kind of morbidly nondescript teenager they have molded you into, a skateboarder douche bag like you were never the crux of existence everywhere (mine not excepted but also not particularly significant), you were nothing like the Roxas I knew and that is why I could afford to
break you in the process of trying to kill you.

Dear Roxas,

Even across a burning wreckage of flames and cardboard cutouts of a town,
I cannot help for split atoms of a second irrationally picturing myself sweeping the princess off her feet,
imagine myself kissing his lips until he feels no more.

Dear Roxas,

I should have known, though, that even as a skateboarder douche bag you were a force to be reckoned with. As it was,

when I tried to count the patchwork clocks etched on your wrists,
you fought me, forgot me.

Dear Roxas,

"This isn't working," Saïx said.
"Stay the fuck out of my business," I snarled by means of reply, fingernails biting into my skin, resisting the urge to knock his head off at the mere mention of my failures.
"No need to be like that. I'm just concerned as to what the Superior will say when he finds out that you aren't really trying to kill Roxas at all." My head jerks up, I whirl around to face the presumptuous bastard, and for a second everything feels oddly surreal.
"What the fuck are you making accusations for! Xemnas's dick getting too big for your britches?"
"Don't tell me that the mighty Axel, the Flurry of Dancing Flames, our very own Number Eight, is actually having trouble knocking a few oversized keys around? Please, if you're not transparent in your efforts to keep Roxas alive, I don't know what you are."
"Roxas is tougher than he looks, okay?" If there ever was an understatement.
"That's not saying much."
"Just shut the fuck up, Saïx! Is that okay with you! Roxas is a thousand times the man you could ever hope to be!" Oh sweet Jesus, was I going to cry?
"That sounds to me a little like my point being proven."
"Listen to me—nobody, and I mean no-fucking-body wants Roxas to come back more than I do! No-fucking-body." I only say this because I have nothing left to say anymore.

And that is all I can manage because if I stay any longer I will only learn the magic of embarrassing myself in front of dickwads like Saïx.

Dear Roxas,

Sometimes, I want to kill her.

Once, I come raging in, everything smoldering, only to find her doodling with her stupid fucking crayons on her stupid fucking pictures, not even a ghost of an idea of the aftereffects of her actions. On me, namely.

"I wouldn't, Axel," she says mildly, picking up a green crayon and shading in the leaves on her tree with long, even diagonal strokes. "You know I'm your only hope of ever getting your Roxas back. I do wonder how you got in here, though." The déjà vu is too much, and I flinch at the truth in her words, hands quivering, chakrams rattling with the effort to restrain myself. "And you'd do well to remember..." she adds idly, burnt sienna for the trunk, "Roxas's memories aren't the only ones I can rewrite." Her head snaps up, and pale, washed-out blue seems to drown everything, and I am left with my mind scrabbling to catch hold of something that is persistent in slipping away.

"Fuck," I hiss, hands clutching at my head, eyes squeezed shut in an attempt to cling on to whatever it was I couldn't begin to remember and didn't dare forget. From the outside, it looked as if I was in pain. I was.

"I thought so," she says, almost smugly, and then like a ray of sunlight snaking through clouds overhead and splitting the flesh of my parched soul, I remember what your mouth tasted like—like purity and strawberry jell-o.

I emerge, gasping and panting. I cast one last glance over my shoulder at her, already hunched back over her drawings, picture of innocence, embodiment of deceit, before I escape so quickly you'd think the devil himself was on my heels. Not that hell had much left to frighten me anyway.

Dear Roxas,

The Organization crumbles, pawn by pawn, until even our king stands alone and vulnerable.

All because of a boy.

Dear Roxas,

There is this whole ugly bit right here that involves me finally pining and moping and shit that I don't really feel like discussing, it's so abominably uncharacteristic of me (wrist-slitting, pill-guzzling, bitch-moaning, etc etc et al). So here's the reader's digest:

- I tried to kill you
- I didn't kill you
- Sora woke up, you fell far and fast
asleep
- Sora gets into a pinch
- I get Sora out of a pinch,
because I have nothing left to lose anymore except for something and that is why I'm losing everything for it

Consequently, I die.

Sora looks misty-eyed and I imagine as I'm lying there burning up into the atmosphere and whatnot that it's you I can see inhaling and exhaling, beating and pulsing and throbbing.
But I think that if there's one thing that life has taught me, it's that I'm a bit too fucking hopeful.

Dear Roxas,

Sometimes when I feel I can still imagine you on the border of the shoreline, sea breeze snapping and breaking overhead, waterlogged sand squishing between your toes underfoot, everything static until the day I can arrive.
You'd send me a postcard, telling me you're waiting. If I was lucky, you'd send me a little piece of you with it.

Dear Roxas,

I wrote you all of this because there is nothing I wouldn't do or give up or leave behind to have you back with me right now like you'd never dreamed of anything more.

There is nothing I wouldn't do to try again.

Yours truly,