who i am from the start

[pullsheavendown]

Who: Roxas (pullsheavendown), Sora (happylocksmith), Axel (icingonthecake) & Riku (dreamprotector) in varying combos
What: Meetings & reunions
When: Day of the latest pod awakenings, pre-Nadril
Where: Thesa Station
Warning(s): Kingdom Hearts lore is stupid

[So, he's awakened in space with the knowledge that his worlds is gone, found his other half, and had a conversation he always wanted to have but never thought he'd be able to. What next?

Go to Disney World

Get dragged along the corridors of Thesa Station, apparently.]

Comments

[pullsheavendown]

Roxas' mouth twitches into a semblance of a smile, just for a moment, and he shakes his head. No, he doesn't want Axel to beat Riku up, and he's pretty sure Axel knows that. He's also pretty sure that if he did want that, Axel would actually do it, joking or not. But it's not the right thing, and anyway Roxas would do it himself before he'd let anyone do it for him. Those two reasons are about equivalent in his mind.

Actually, there are even more reasons not to give in to the sorrow and pain and rage that still linger in his heart. He'd been desperate to wake Sora up, and Sora would be sad now, and it wouldn't do any good because Riku has literally changed since then and now—and Roxas doesn't hate him. In some ways, it would be easier if he did.

Axel's hand on his shoulder pulls him out of whatever reverie he'd sunken into, and he's grateful for that—a solid point of contact, something he knows for sure is real.

"It's okay," he says. "I'm sorry I didn't know you. Even though I was really mad at you when I left the castle the last time, I didn't want it to be forever. I guess part of me hoped you'd follow eventually. And I would never have wanted you feel forgotten. If it had been the other way around..."

What would that have been like? Axel the normal person with a normal life and normal friends, and not a single memory of the afternoons they'd shared on the clock tower, laughing and being silly and talking about everything and nothing. If Roxas had been the one forgotten? He'd have been devastated. Just in a different way than had happened for real.

"It felt real to me," he says after a moment. "It still does. I'm me again, I was even when I was in Sora's heart, but it's like it all happened in a dream once and I didn't forget it after I woke up."

[icingonthecake]

If Roxas legitimately wanted Axel to [attempt to] beat Riku up, Axel would absolutely [attempt to] beat Riku up. He does understand where Riku was coming from, so he doesn't actively want to beat Riku up, but he owes Roxas that much, if that was what Roxas wanted, really.

He smiles a little and shakes his head then.

"It... it's okay, kiddo," he says. "I mean, yeah, it sucked, and I was hurt and angry about it, which was bizarre because I shouldn't have been able to be those things in the first place, so I was just kind of a mess, myself. Besides, it wasn't your fault." He stares at his hands and gives a wistful sort of sigh. "I wanted to follow you, I really did. And not in the creepy stalker way I wound up following you." He looks at him again. "The fact is, I knew so long as I was still there working for them, they'd send me after you instead'a someone else, because they knew if anybody could get through to you, it was probably me." He pauses a moment, then shakes his head again. "If I left to go with you, who knows what they might have been driven to do to try and get you back," he says. "I was nervous about what they'd do to me if I'd tried to leave, back then, but... I think I was more worried about what would happen to you if I wasn't there to be the one to go after you."

He gives him a mildly encouraging look.

"It was real, in a way," he assures him. "Even if the world itself was fake, the experiences you had there were real. Whatever you said and felt, it was real enough, I think." He nudges Roxas' shoulder. "Maybe one day, you'll get to go be those kids' friend for real," he says, and then looks at him very sternly. "So long as it doesn't cut into our hangout time too much."

[pullsheavendown]

Roxas wonders about that. You can banish a heart from a body and it will try to replace it, for as many times as it takes to get it back, Sora had told him. He's still processing some of what he's heard about the future, about what Xemnas—Xehanort—had really wanted, and he probably will be for a while. But if that part is true, when does it start? How long does it take? How much of a heart could Axel have had then?

It makes him happy to be certain that the good times they had up on the clock tower were real, not just two empty beings' imitation of friendship. But the heart that Roxas is sure he has aches at the way the Organization used it against them.

At least they still have it. They could leave this place and go back to Twilight Town today, if the storm hadn't taken it, and he'd have to start all over with the other people he remembers as friends.

"Maybe," he says, and it's nice to think about, even if he's not sure if it could really happen. "But you know it wouldn't. You're my best friend, no matter what."

Once, he'd thought they'd lost that. Now that he knows they haven't, he's determined to never let go of it again, no matter what world they're in.

[icingonthecake]

Nobodies were never supposed to exist, but that didn't stop them, and Axel isn't about to believe that what they experienced wasn't real simply because they were never meant to experience it. They did, and that's that, and no one can take that away from them.

He had been mostly joking with his jab, but Roxas' assurance makes him feel warm, anyway. After everything that tried so damn hard to come between them, here they still are: a little older, a little wiser (a little sorrier), but still best friends. For everything he's lost in his life--his home, his heart, his childhood friend--getting Roxas back now, and being given the chance to make up for all the stupid mistakes he made before, maybe it all really did accomplish something. He had never grieved for his home, for his family, for his heart, because in losing them, he'd lost his emotions as well. Even if he had wanted to grieve, he had been incapable--or at least impressionable enough to believe that was the case.

He reaches over and bumps the bottom of his fist against Roxas's shoulder, smiling more sincerely in that moment than he may have since the fall of Radiant Garden.

"Right back at'cha, partner."

Maybe Axel had simply spent so long caring about nothing at all, that it took losing the one important thing he'd found in twelve years to remind him of what it felt like to grieve in the first place. And maybe, just maybe, that had been enough for a change of heart, however absent or fledgling that heart may have been.