It's strange to think that Axel was too afraid or too unsure to walk out on the Organization. Roxas can remember a time when he thought Axel was the bravest person in the world who knew everything and could do anything. It can't have been that long ago—what, two years at most? But for him, it was almost a lifetime ago, and it feels like it. He wonders if this is what it's like for normal people to look back on their childhoods.

"I wish you had," he says. Hadn't he asked Axel to go, once? He can't quite remember. "Maybe some things were going to happen anyway, but it would've been better than staying with the Organization."

Maybe he would have had to return to Sora's heart anyway, but maybe it wouldn't have hurt so much with Axel by his side. Maybe it would have been on his terms. Maybe not a thing about his last days would be different except for having had a while longer with his best friend. That would have been enough.

"I heard you another time, too," he says after a moment. "Later on, after me and Sora...you know." He flattens his hand against his chest for a moment. "I think they expected me to disappear completely, but I didn't. It was more like I was dreaming. And when you and Sora fought the Dusks on the way to the castle, I woke up again."

Even knowing Axel is alive and well right here beside him, Roxas can't keep the faint traces of misery from his face. He'd woken abruptly but been unable to do anything but watch from behind someone else's eyes until the grief and the fury had risen up within him and he'd willed himself to act.

"You did it for me, didn't you?" he asks, looking over at him. "It wasn't just to save Sora. It was to save me."