KH fic... For the WIN.
May. 8th, 2006 05:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonsheenTitle: Nowhere Man
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts II
Character(s): Axel with a side of...Axel, Axel, Axel. and okay some other guys too.
Spoilers: Identity of Organization member XIII, also maybe some CoM for good measure
Word count(!): 3,368 (BOOYAH it's not a drabble!)
for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chirachira. Happy birthday Miss Spankypants
The weather was cloudy with a side of teeming heartless.
--not, as far as VIII could see, that there was much teeming going on anymore. The army, it seemed, had turned in for this quarter of the endless night. Axel lifted his eyes, unfolded from the rooftop, smoothed out his coat, and with a jaunty step dropped down three stories and into the empty canyons below.
And for his troubles, he turned a corner and nearly ended up with a keyblade in the face.
Truth be told, there wasn’t much light to be found in a world that never was. The darkness before birth tended to have that effect. The city lights were wrought in neon oranges and hot pinks of the flickering, broken signs. As far as anybody who was anybody (or nobody) knew, they ran on paths never traveled and cheated fate and their excess glowed in the droplets running down the other Nobody’s black hood.
XIII stood with his arm straight, his weapon raised, and his own white army waiting in voiceless obedience for the Word. XIII’s lips pressed together in a tight line. The wind lifted his hood slightly, and the pained fizzle from the lamp across the street sparked in his cold, irritated eyes.
“Me oh my oh my. By the twitching of my thumbs--”Axel held up his hands. What else could he do? …guy could cut him five ways from an imaginary Sunday. Or. Well. He could certainly give it a try…. Axel wasn’t in the mood. “Something wicked this way...”
The keyblade vanished in a decisive flash, followed swiftly by the two dozen clicks of the pale samurai sheathing their swords.
“Axel,” said Roxas, with a curt nod. “What are you doing out here.”
Axel turned his surrender into a shrug. “I should say the same!” He swung back, encompassed the whole of the block in a sweep of his arm. “Roxas! … out a little past your hours, aren’t you?”
Roxas said nothing.
“…and so tense. That’s bad for you, you know.”
“We have hours?”
Axel laughed. “Well no.” He folded his hand to his chest. “We are the hours.”
“Right,” said Roxas, and began to walk away.
“Hey… hey!”
“Ou est mon maitre le prince rebelle,” murmured Axel, in a language that he was a lifetime or two away from ever pronouncing correctly again, at a funny place they’d found on the corner. It was a restaurant, and awfully fancy for one that had probably never served a single living soul it the whole of its existence. It had those paneled doors Roxas was so enamored with. Which probably explained why it was XIII who’d made the detour there to begin with. Axel had suggested it (“Let’s unwind! C’mon, you could use it! I’m parched” …as the rain had fallen) …and he’d really been aiming for one of those non-existent bars.
Roxas walked ahead of him with the stiff shoulder and step of a lord returning from war—which wasn’t an entirely inaccurate a description. The samurai bowed to him and his current kill count was already in something like, the thousands that night. The Dusks that bled out of the floor shivered its careful at your service to them both, though; and Axel summoned up a couple of assassins to grab the glasses.
“My treat,” he said.
Roxas raised both eyebrows at him. “My hero.”
“Don’t mention it!”
“What did you mean anyway?” The other nobody sat down on the table one knee bent under him. He drummed his gloved fingers on the table. Axel watched it, doing his very best to slither in and occupy the complete space between the table and the more conventional thing called a chair. With his feet up. Across from him, Roxas glanced up, mouth twitching. “That thing about the hours.”
“Meant you shouldn’t be doing overtime.”
And Roxas’ mouth twitched in a different way. “Not that.”
“What do you think?” Axel set his drink on fire. “It’s what it sounds like. Ever wonder why all members meet in a circle? Some of it is more than company policy. Not all ‘round table’ benefits. You’re forgetting,” he warned, when his companion began to roll his eyes, “Who our boss is. And anyway…”
He teased the smoke between his fingers, feeling grin fade from his face. Sometimes it was frightfully relaxing, to just let that thing go and those were the times when he didn’t look at the Dusk’s out of the corner of his eyes in a kind of cringe and wonder how easy it might be to just have no face with which to grin at all.
“…Axel?”
“In the first hour it starts,” began Axel, hollowly. Roxas tensed. “Of course it does. It’s a process. So the first six hours it begins. Set to boil. Takes shape. You know.”
Axel considered for a moment.
“…as much of a ‘shape’ as we get anyway. Of course, after the first six you’re half-way done. Got it memorized? It’s not a beginning anymore is it? So when your time’s half gone you may as well fine tune it! In the seventh hour you’re kicking it up a notch or two. Then there’s yours truly. Then the ninth hour rocks out, in the tenth hour it’s a game… and in the twelfth hour, Larxene’s hissing and spitting and trying to kill Marluxia again, because I think that’s how those two show they care.”
“And what about the thirteenth?”
…no one of the Organization had the heart to tell their youngest that he had the most unsettling stare.
Axel picked up his glass, blew on it, and threw back its contents so fast it seemed for a moment he’d opted to swallow it while still alight. There, the grin was back. “Nu-uh uh!” he caroled, wagging a finger. “That I can’t tell you. That you have to tell me.”
“So that’s what that was all for,” said Roxas, and looked into his own drink. His cup wasn’t smoking. Axel’s mouth sort of was. Little wisps curled up around one of his fangs. “…a heartless wrapped around a the tower in the B-district. It was messing up the frequencies. The Superior sent me to look into it. It was pretty big.” Roxas shrugged. “It had friends.”
“You don’t say.”
“What?”
“He didn’t say.”
“…what.”
“That order come from the Superior’s own mouth?”
“…”
“A-ha,” said Axel. “So. Who was it?”
“…Saïx.”
“You told him to piss off last council meeting,” said Axel, cheerily. “He doesn’t like that. The frequencies have never been stable and that heartless’ been there since before us.”
“Oh.” Roxas blinked twice. The glass in his hand cracked. He put it down. “Okay. It’s not anymore.”
“…you got it.”
His coworker’s nose gave an irritated twitch. “Yeah. It was kind of annoying. Thing was about as big as the building…”
“No, no, really. You got it.”
The fist on the table tightened. “I said that already.”
“HAH,” said Axel, throwing his head back for a second. “Excuse me a minute. HAH. Oh maaan okay, okay—you? Are in the good books. You are so in the good books I’m feeling a little humbled here. So what you’re going to do…”
He crooked a finger. Roxas gave him a look. Axel shook his head and lunged across the table, hooking his fingers around the other member’s hood and yanking him forward, to catch his ear.
“…you’re going put that in your next report. And don’t forget to thank your elders for it. Thank them very gracefully, I think. They’d love it if they could.”
“Would they.”
“The Superior? Sure. Might even let the bad language slide…”
Roxas’ eyes narrowed. “What about Saïx.”
“Will,” proclaimed Axel, with a grand old grin. “Bust a scar in delight, I’m sure.”
“I see,” said XIII, clearly thinking on it. Axel kept his hand behind his head, rubbing his hair encouragingly, watching with interest the way it played out. Which was: blank, blank, and then out of nowhere a slow twitch at the corner of his mouth. And then a grin, born like he didn’t quite remember if he was doing it right…although his blue eyes danced.
“Okay. I’ll do that,” said Roxas, alight in the dim restaurant’s wavering glow. “You’re a good friend, Axel.”
“I try.”
Roxas shook his head. “No. I mean. You’re a good friend.”
“Yeah,” said VIII, not quite sure where that hitch came from but not thinking on it lest it do something crazy. Like leave. “…I try.”
And the meeting went pretty well.
“Oh. He’ll be feeling that one.”
Axel stepped out onto the brink. “Oh? Think so?”
Over the neat spread of his cards, Luxord looked up. “In the morning,” he concluded, plucking one between his fingers. He tossed into the center of the table he’d set up on the great flat plane of the battlement. It was a smooth white like animal bone that made up piano keys, and around it sat a handful of his recently reinstated forces: the gamblers, which tipped their bodies and raised their limbs as though they were gossiping amongst themselves, while their master enjoyed the view.
Painted a pretty picture, really. “Magnanimous of you!”
“Not particularly.”
“No?”
“No.” The cards in hand snapped shut like a fan. “My fine, more than temperate friend…what, I wonder, has blown your flames to my corner of this stronghold.”
“Your corner!”
“Care for a wager?”
“No thanks.”
Luxord gathered his suits with a fine arch of his brow. “It’s not that, then.”
“Non-existent,” reminded Axel. “Not suicidal. Think nearly all of us have a pretty good idea what you like to put on the table. I mean, along with that ‘exile’ thing.”
…hands paused in the process of thumbing through the corners of the two sections he’d made of his deck. The gamblers all stopped, as though something inside all of their casing had failed and left them stalled and broken. X made a soft, reproving noise with his tongue. They began to tilt amongst themselves again. His eyes, though, remained on VIII.
“You lecture me on history, Axel.”
“Yeah?”
“So the past comes to dog me,” sneered the Gambler. “But to what purpose? My behavior has been near gentlemanly, I think.”
“Heard you talked to Roxas.”
“Ah.” Luxord smiled, and tapped his cards against the table. He dealt them amongst his party with a practiced swiftness. “The point. It emerges. So you question my intention?”
“Depends,” Axel paced along the far curve of the table, his arms folded behind his back. “On if there is some intention.”
Luxord looked at him curiously. A nobody threw a card into the center, the face up—a joker. The humor wasn’t exactly lost on any of the parties involved.
“… our little locksmith’s not here at present,” said X, at length, “Xemnas enjoys racing him about. He does work enough to compensate a number of us--well number and a half, if you’re really counting. … he’s handy isn’t he?”
“Has his uses, sure.”
“Beyond twitting Saïx, I mean. Why,” Luxord brushed his next draw against his lips, eyes narrowed, “At this very moment I imagine he’s wreaking a world of havoc. Such dark hearts, we cultivate for the benefit of his harvest…”
“Oh, dramatize.”
An ace of spade slashed through the air. It ended up standing, with its corner imbedded in the table. “You know, some establishments avoid naming a thirteenth floor. Because they take it to be poor luck. …not as such for me, strangely. His inception welcomed me back into the fold. I’m sure you remember.”
Axel spread his arms, and smiled nastily.
“Who could forget.”
“Key of Destiny. Gambler of Fate. My interest is purely… poetic,” Luxord chuckled, “We may be alike. No, Axel. There will be no coup d’etat here. What pleasure is there for me in playing the same game twice? Now? … these things simply grow, as they may.”
“Like daisies, huh?” Axel tipped his head, “Good to know.”
“…tell Roxas I look forward to our game.”
He caught XII raiding over a vending machine on the second level of the west wing. He stepped out of the wall, much to her…instinctual leap from her prey, which was quite dead at that point. ‘least as dead as Vexen’s designs tended to go. Which sometimes meant they whimpered.
This one was just smoking slightly.
Larxene stepped off with a defiant bent to her shoulders and her arms full of fizzy drinks. The air was suddenly filled with the scent of burning rubber.
“So! Question!” said Axel, to that…charming squashed face she was making at him. “How were you planning on covering your tracks?”
He nodded to the knives embedded in the wall.
“Oh. It’s you.” Larxene’s heels slid back together. She composed herself: which mostly meant her hair stopped crackling and her faces melted from outright peel-your-skin-from-your-bones to only mildly disdainful. “I know these chronic conditions are very tragic. But do try to keep your mouth shut, Axel.”
She caught one of the cans before it could get away from her.
“Keep my mouth shut about what?”
“Exactly,” winked the Savage Nymph.
“…would’ve thought you’d be due back at Castle Oblivion by now.”
“Bite me.” A door bloomed at the end of the corridor.
And Axel considered his response very, very carefully before delivering it:
“You know what? I don’t think I like you that much!”
…it cost him to even say it, though the immediate reaction was almost worth it. Larxene stopped in front of the door and whirled back at him: her eyes gone as tiny as pinpoints and her face drained of all color, then gone a little green, then flushed and twisted in complete and utter revulsion. He could nearly see the way her every bit of non-being wanted to suddenly crawl away from them both.
“That’s sick,” she whispered, hoarsely. “That is…Completely sick.”
A point was made out of all of this; Axel spread his fingers over his chest with meaning. “…too strong? For you, Larxene? I’m honored…watch your wording, next time. And…oh. Seen Marluxia?”
“…my wording…” She recovered well enough: with a heavy swallow, and a squeal of static around her bangs that one day, someone would have to try tuning the reception on. “Like I’m obligated to say!”
She threw herself through the door. It shivered shut behind her.
Alone with the dying vending machine, Axel shrugged and passed a hand over his face.
“I guess I’ll catch him later,” he murmured, opened his own port beneath him, and sank through the floor.
They kept themselves covered. It wasn’t so easy to be nobody, you see. An uncomfortable state at the very best; even with the most distant memories of “somebody” the lack was an eternal companion to lonely not-lives that wandered without the capacity to speak rhyme or remember reason. It lent itself to a… certain vulnerability, really. So, the dusks zipped up their featureless faces and the samurai wore masks and the assassins—with whom Axel was especially familiar with oh yes—hunched behind many bits of dangling metal. Every inch stayed well covered, well guarded. It was protection, of sorts, from the air that did not want them, from the sun didn’t touch them, from the substantial that threatened the feeble lines of their insubstantial—that could blow them away like a little lick of smoke. The lancers huddled in their dragon’s hoods. The dancers swayed in their elastics…
XIII, in his mass of zippers, did a belly flop across the futon.
And to the pillow and the false-shoji of the strange dojo him and his samurai didn’t actually call home, Roxas said:
“Fuck.”
“Now, now,” crowed the shadows to his left. Out of which sprung Axel, like an eager thing, all long limbs separating from the darkness as though he’d waited there forever. “Didn’t we go over this? The Superior let you off this once but that kind of mouth doesn’t belong in this dark stronghold!”
Roxas muttered something into his cushions.
“… don’t think that belongs either,” said Axel, archly, doing the rounds about the bed. His feet moved silently, and Roxas didn’t budge, wasn’t going to. He was, in fact, protesting the very concept of motion, at present.
“So, it turns out Luxord wasn’t shopping for any muscle.”
“Nng.”
“He just thinks you’re pretty. You owe him a match, by the way!”
“Nng.”
“...someone else might be shopping around, though!”
“Nnnnng.”
“You know I’m nothing without you.”
…Roxas turned his head in the fabrics and looked at him. “…Really.”
“Nah.” Axel took that as permission to skate his gloved hand over the other nobodies back. “Just seeing if you were listening.”
Roxas closed his eyes, and let the pressure run between his shoulder blades. “Ah.”
Axel leaned over him, and put on most heartfelt look to be given from someone who obviously lacked the real essentials for it. “I really just wither into a ball of destitution.”
“…destitution? We don’t get paid.”
“I mean misery, silly! Work with me.”
“Oh,” Roxas said, and then for a moment was distracted by tips of Axel’s fingers skating behind his neck. “Should, mm, see someone about that.”
“But I don’t want to see anyone else but you! That’s the thing! Oh sweet torment--”
“That’s the name of a broom closet isn’t it.”
“…no Xemnas doesn’t like to put ‘sweet’ in anything. Kinda ruins the mood.”
“Right.” The fingers were doing a little dance behind his head, like they had the hours—or days—or the years—or--- well, when they’d gone to the restaurant together. Putting time on these things was a pain, and the warmth felt through the black cloth was more of one.
“Where was I? Oh, right. Every waking hour, every day-- …nevermind we don’t…have days, okay-- I don’t want to think of anyone but you, Roxas. I’ll wait, and wait, and wait for you to come back—
“That one’s from that play right?”
“…the sequel actually—but shush, you. I’m going somewhere with this. A thousand words, doesn’t even begin to describe it. I waste away! Turn into an insubstantial shivering mass of -- …man.”
…his nose was suddenly about an inch away from the other nobody’s neck.
“…maaan.” And the slight bump of skin of against skin was a shiver of no no no wrong right through the both of them. …Axel stayed there. “Superior’s really kind of running you ragged, isn’t he…”
“Shut up,” snapped Roxas. He rolled over, grabbed Axel by the hood, and pulled him down.
Roxas held his face and pushed their mouths together. Roxas shoved him down onto his back, did it hard, did it with a look in his eyes that wasn’t incensed, not really but close enough to the real thing that Axel couldn’t really voice a terrible amount of protest at being straddled, or when the gloved hands settled on his throat, or when they slid lower to be replaced by Roxas’ mouth on the bare skin—the touch of another Nobody rang hard and awful against the senses. Invasive didn’t even really begin to describe touching something that amounted to all that nobody was. But it felt like something and something wasn’t nothing and Axel laughed and laughed as Roxas lips followed his neck, followed his collarbone. All with a fierce, ragged concentration.
“You feel that?” asked Axel, as Roxas grasped the zipper at his midsection.
Roxas looked up, briefly. “…do you just not stop talking?”
“You feeeeel that?” crooned Axel. Roxas growled and opened his coat. “Do you? Do you?” And he kept at it, ‘till Roxas shoved a hand into his mouth to shut him up, and Roxas glared down at him. And the hand was still gloved, so Axel grinned into it, reached up along his sleeve, found the edge somewhere near the elbow, and peeled it off.
And:
“Axel?”
“Yeah?”
“What exactly are you trying to do?”
“…this and that. Can’t all be the fuzzy mascot--! Don’t worry, Roxas. All goes according to plan.”
“…there’s a plan?”
“Kinda.”
“... kinda.”
“There’s the one.”
“Which one.”
“The one that I make up as I go along.”
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts II
Character(s): Axel with a side of...Axel, Axel, Axel. and okay some other guys too.
Spoilers: Identity of Organization member XIII, also maybe some CoM for good measure
Word count(!): 3,368 (BOOYAH it's not a drabble!)
for
chirachira. Happy birthday Miss SpankypantsThe weather was cloudy with a side of teeming heartless.
--not, as far as VIII could see, that there was much teeming going on anymore. The army, it seemed, had turned in for this quarter of the endless night. Axel lifted his eyes, unfolded from the rooftop, smoothed out his coat, and with a jaunty step dropped down three stories and into the empty canyons below.
And for his troubles, he turned a corner and nearly ended up with a keyblade in the face.
Truth be told, there wasn’t much light to be found in a world that never was. The darkness before birth tended to have that effect. The city lights were wrought in neon oranges and hot pinks of the flickering, broken signs. As far as anybody who was anybody (or nobody) knew, they ran on paths never traveled and cheated fate and their excess glowed in the droplets running down the other Nobody’s black hood.
XIII stood with his arm straight, his weapon raised, and his own white army waiting in voiceless obedience for the Word. XIII’s lips pressed together in a tight line. The wind lifted his hood slightly, and the pained fizzle from the lamp across the street sparked in his cold, irritated eyes.
“Me oh my oh my. By the twitching of my thumbs--”Axel held up his hands. What else could he do? …guy could cut him five ways from an imaginary Sunday. Or. Well. He could certainly give it a try…. Axel wasn’t in the mood. “Something wicked this way...”
The keyblade vanished in a decisive flash, followed swiftly by the two dozen clicks of the pale samurai sheathing their swords.
“Axel,” said Roxas, with a curt nod. “What are you doing out here.”
Axel turned his surrender into a shrug. “I should say the same!” He swung back, encompassed the whole of the block in a sweep of his arm. “Roxas! … out a little past your hours, aren’t you?”
Roxas said nothing.
“…and so tense. That’s bad for you, you know.”
“We have hours?”
Axel laughed. “Well no.” He folded his hand to his chest. “We are the hours.”
“Right,” said Roxas, and began to walk away.
“Hey… hey!”
“Ou est mon maitre le prince rebelle,” murmured Axel, in a language that he was a lifetime or two away from ever pronouncing correctly again, at a funny place they’d found on the corner. It was a restaurant, and awfully fancy for one that had probably never served a single living soul it the whole of its existence. It had those paneled doors Roxas was so enamored with. Which probably explained why it was XIII who’d made the detour there to begin with. Axel had suggested it (“Let’s unwind! C’mon, you could use it! I’m parched” …as the rain had fallen) …and he’d really been aiming for one of those non-existent bars.
Roxas walked ahead of him with the stiff shoulder and step of a lord returning from war—which wasn’t an entirely inaccurate a description. The samurai bowed to him and his current kill count was already in something like, the thousands that night. The Dusks that bled out of the floor shivered its careful at your service to them both, though; and Axel summoned up a couple of assassins to grab the glasses.
“My treat,” he said.
Roxas raised both eyebrows at him. “My hero.”
“Don’t mention it!”
“What did you mean anyway?” The other nobody sat down on the table one knee bent under him. He drummed his gloved fingers on the table. Axel watched it, doing his very best to slither in and occupy the complete space between the table and the more conventional thing called a chair. With his feet up. Across from him, Roxas glanced up, mouth twitching. “That thing about the hours.”
“Meant you shouldn’t be doing overtime.”
And Roxas’ mouth twitched in a different way. “Not that.”
“What do you think?” Axel set his drink on fire. “It’s what it sounds like. Ever wonder why all members meet in a circle? Some of it is more than company policy. Not all ‘round table’ benefits. You’re forgetting,” he warned, when his companion began to roll his eyes, “Who our boss is. And anyway…”
He teased the smoke between his fingers, feeling grin fade from his face. Sometimes it was frightfully relaxing, to just let that thing go and those were the times when he didn’t look at the Dusk’s out of the corner of his eyes in a kind of cringe and wonder how easy it might be to just have no face with which to grin at all.
“…Axel?”
“In the first hour it starts,” began Axel, hollowly. Roxas tensed. “Of course it does. It’s a process. So the first six hours it begins. Set to boil. Takes shape. You know.”
Axel considered for a moment.
“…as much of a ‘shape’ as we get anyway. Of course, after the first six you’re half-way done. Got it memorized? It’s not a beginning anymore is it? So when your time’s half gone you may as well fine tune it! In the seventh hour you’re kicking it up a notch or two. Then there’s yours truly. Then the ninth hour rocks out, in the tenth hour it’s a game… and in the twelfth hour, Larxene’s hissing and spitting and trying to kill Marluxia again, because I think that’s how those two show they care.”
“And what about the thirteenth?”
…no one of the Organization had the heart to tell their youngest that he had the most unsettling stare.
Axel picked up his glass, blew on it, and threw back its contents so fast it seemed for a moment he’d opted to swallow it while still alight. There, the grin was back. “Nu-uh uh!” he caroled, wagging a finger. “That I can’t tell you. That you have to tell me.”
“So that’s what that was all for,” said Roxas, and looked into his own drink. His cup wasn’t smoking. Axel’s mouth sort of was. Little wisps curled up around one of his fangs. “…a heartless wrapped around a the tower in the B-district. It was messing up the frequencies. The Superior sent me to look into it. It was pretty big.” Roxas shrugged. “It had friends.”
“You don’t say.”
“What?”
“He didn’t say.”
“…what.”
“That order come from the Superior’s own mouth?”
“…”
“A-ha,” said Axel. “So. Who was it?”
“…Saïx.”
“You told him to piss off last council meeting,” said Axel, cheerily. “He doesn’t like that. The frequencies have never been stable and that heartless’ been there since before us.”
“Oh.” Roxas blinked twice. The glass in his hand cracked. He put it down. “Okay. It’s not anymore.”
“…you got it.”
His coworker’s nose gave an irritated twitch. “Yeah. It was kind of annoying. Thing was about as big as the building…”
“No, no, really. You got it.”
The fist on the table tightened. “I said that already.”
“HAH,” said Axel, throwing his head back for a second. “Excuse me a minute. HAH. Oh maaan okay, okay—you? Are in the good books. You are so in the good books I’m feeling a little humbled here. So what you’re going to do…”
He crooked a finger. Roxas gave him a look. Axel shook his head and lunged across the table, hooking his fingers around the other member’s hood and yanking him forward, to catch his ear.
“…you’re going put that in your next report. And don’t forget to thank your elders for it. Thank them very gracefully, I think. They’d love it if they could.”
“Would they.”
“The Superior? Sure. Might even let the bad language slide…”
Roxas’ eyes narrowed. “What about Saïx.”
“Will,” proclaimed Axel, with a grand old grin. “Bust a scar in delight, I’m sure.”
“I see,” said XIII, clearly thinking on it. Axel kept his hand behind his head, rubbing his hair encouragingly, watching with interest the way it played out. Which was: blank, blank, and then out of nowhere a slow twitch at the corner of his mouth. And then a grin, born like he didn’t quite remember if he was doing it right…although his blue eyes danced.
“Okay. I’ll do that,” said Roxas, alight in the dim restaurant’s wavering glow. “You’re a good friend, Axel.”
“I try.”
Roxas shook his head. “No. I mean. You’re a good friend.”
“Yeah,” said VIII, not quite sure where that hitch came from but not thinking on it lest it do something crazy. Like leave. “…I try.”
And the meeting went pretty well.
“Oh. He’ll be feeling that one.”
Axel stepped out onto the brink. “Oh? Think so?”
Over the neat spread of his cards, Luxord looked up. “In the morning,” he concluded, plucking one between his fingers. He tossed into the center of the table he’d set up on the great flat plane of the battlement. It was a smooth white like animal bone that made up piano keys, and around it sat a handful of his recently reinstated forces: the gamblers, which tipped their bodies and raised their limbs as though they were gossiping amongst themselves, while their master enjoyed the view.
Painted a pretty picture, really. “Magnanimous of you!”
“Not particularly.”
“No?”
“No.” The cards in hand snapped shut like a fan. “My fine, more than temperate friend…what, I wonder, has blown your flames to my corner of this stronghold.”
“Your corner!”
“Care for a wager?”
“No thanks.”
Luxord gathered his suits with a fine arch of his brow. “It’s not that, then.”
“Non-existent,” reminded Axel. “Not suicidal. Think nearly all of us have a pretty good idea what you like to put on the table. I mean, along with that ‘exile’ thing.”
…hands paused in the process of thumbing through the corners of the two sections he’d made of his deck. The gamblers all stopped, as though something inside all of their casing had failed and left them stalled and broken. X made a soft, reproving noise with his tongue. They began to tilt amongst themselves again. His eyes, though, remained on VIII.
“You lecture me on history, Axel.”
“Yeah?”
“So the past comes to dog me,” sneered the Gambler. “But to what purpose? My behavior has been near gentlemanly, I think.”
“Heard you talked to Roxas.”
“Ah.” Luxord smiled, and tapped his cards against the table. He dealt them amongst his party with a practiced swiftness. “The point. It emerges. So you question my intention?”
“Depends,” Axel paced along the far curve of the table, his arms folded behind his back. “On if there is some intention.”
Luxord looked at him curiously. A nobody threw a card into the center, the face up—a joker. The humor wasn’t exactly lost on any of the parties involved.
“… our little locksmith’s not here at present,” said X, at length, “Xemnas enjoys racing him about. He does work enough to compensate a number of us--well number and a half, if you’re really counting. … he’s handy isn’t he?”
“Has his uses, sure.”
“Beyond twitting Saïx, I mean. Why,” Luxord brushed his next draw against his lips, eyes narrowed, “At this very moment I imagine he’s wreaking a world of havoc. Such dark hearts, we cultivate for the benefit of his harvest…”
“Oh, dramatize.”
An ace of spade slashed through the air. It ended up standing, with its corner imbedded in the table. “You know, some establishments avoid naming a thirteenth floor. Because they take it to be poor luck. …not as such for me, strangely. His inception welcomed me back into the fold. I’m sure you remember.”
Axel spread his arms, and smiled nastily.
“Who could forget.”
“Key of Destiny. Gambler of Fate. My interest is purely… poetic,” Luxord chuckled, “We may be alike. No, Axel. There will be no coup d’etat here. What pleasure is there for me in playing the same game twice? Now? … these things simply grow, as they may.”
“Like daisies, huh?” Axel tipped his head, “Good to know.”
“…tell Roxas I look forward to our game.”
He caught XII raiding over a vending machine on the second level of the west wing. He stepped out of the wall, much to her…instinctual leap from her prey, which was quite dead at that point. ‘least as dead as Vexen’s designs tended to go. Which sometimes meant they whimpered.
This one was just smoking slightly.
Larxene stepped off with a defiant bent to her shoulders and her arms full of fizzy drinks. The air was suddenly filled with the scent of burning rubber.
“So! Question!” said Axel, to that…charming squashed face she was making at him. “How were you planning on covering your tracks?”
He nodded to the knives embedded in the wall.
“Oh. It’s you.” Larxene’s heels slid back together. She composed herself: which mostly meant her hair stopped crackling and her faces melted from outright peel-your-skin-from-your-bones to only mildly disdainful. “I know these chronic conditions are very tragic. But do try to keep your mouth shut, Axel.”
She caught one of the cans before it could get away from her.
“Keep my mouth shut about what?”
“Exactly,” winked the Savage Nymph.
“…would’ve thought you’d be due back at Castle Oblivion by now.”
“Bite me.” A door bloomed at the end of the corridor.
And Axel considered his response very, very carefully before delivering it:
“You know what? I don’t think I like you that much!”
…it cost him to even say it, though the immediate reaction was almost worth it. Larxene stopped in front of the door and whirled back at him: her eyes gone as tiny as pinpoints and her face drained of all color, then gone a little green, then flushed and twisted in complete and utter revulsion. He could nearly see the way her every bit of non-being wanted to suddenly crawl away from them both.
“That’s sick,” she whispered, hoarsely. “That is…Completely sick.”
A point was made out of all of this; Axel spread his fingers over his chest with meaning. “…too strong? For you, Larxene? I’m honored…watch your wording, next time. And…oh. Seen Marluxia?”
“…my wording…” She recovered well enough: with a heavy swallow, and a squeal of static around her bangs that one day, someone would have to try tuning the reception on. “Like I’m obligated to say!”
She threw herself through the door. It shivered shut behind her.
Alone with the dying vending machine, Axel shrugged and passed a hand over his face.
“I guess I’ll catch him later,” he murmured, opened his own port beneath him, and sank through the floor.
They kept themselves covered. It wasn’t so easy to be nobody, you see. An uncomfortable state at the very best; even with the most distant memories of “somebody” the lack was an eternal companion to lonely not-lives that wandered without the capacity to speak rhyme or remember reason. It lent itself to a… certain vulnerability, really. So, the dusks zipped up their featureless faces and the samurai wore masks and the assassins—with whom Axel was especially familiar with oh yes—hunched behind many bits of dangling metal. Every inch stayed well covered, well guarded. It was protection, of sorts, from the air that did not want them, from the sun didn’t touch them, from the substantial that threatened the feeble lines of their insubstantial—that could blow them away like a little lick of smoke. The lancers huddled in their dragon’s hoods. The dancers swayed in their elastics…
XIII, in his mass of zippers, did a belly flop across the futon.
And to the pillow and the false-shoji of the strange dojo him and his samurai didn’t actually call home, Roxas said:
“Fuck.”
“Now, now,” crowed the shadows to his left. Out of which sprung Axel, like an eager thing, all long limbs separating from the darkness as though he’d waited there forever. “Didn’t we go over this? The Superior let you off this once but that kind of mouth doesn’t belong in this dark stronghold!”
Roxas muttered something into his cushions.
“… don’t think that belongs either,” said Axel, archly, doing the rounds about the bed. His feet moved silently, and Roxas didn’t budge, wasn’t going to. He was, in fact, protesting the very concept of motion, at present.
“So, it turns out Luxord wasn’t shopping for any muscle.”
“Nng.”
“He just thinks you’re pretty. You owe him a match, by the way!”
“Nng.”
“...someone else might be shopping around, though!”
“Nnnnng.”
“You know I’m nothing without you.”
…Roxas turned his head in the fabrics and looked at him. “…Really.”
“Nah.” Axel took that as permission to skate his gloved hand over the other nobodies back. “Just seeing if you were listening.”
Roxas closed his eyes, and let the pressure run between his shoulder blades. “Ah.”
Axel leaned over him, and put on most heartfelt look to be given from someone who obviously lacked the real essentials for it. “I really just wither into a ball of destitution.”
“…destitution? We don’t get paid.”
“I mean misery, silly! Work with me.”
“Oh,” Roxas said, and then for a moment was distracted by tips of Axel’s fingers skating behind his neck. “Should, mm, see someone about that.”
“But I don’t want to see anyone else but you! That’s the thing! Oh sweet torment--”
“That’s the name of a broom closet isn’t it.”
“…no Xemnas doesn’t like to put ‘sweet’ in anything. Kinda ruins the mood.”
“Right.” The fingers were doing a little dance behind his head, like they had the hours—or days—or the years—or--- well, when they’d gone to the restaurant together. Putting time on these things was a pain, and the warmth felt through the black cloth was more of one.
“Where was I? Oh, right. Every waking hour, every day-- …nevermind we don’t…have days, okay-- I don’t want to think of anyone but you, Roxas. I’ll wait, and wait, and wait for you to come back—
“That one’s from that play right?”
“…the sequel actually—but shush, you. I’m going somewhere with this. A thousand words, doesn’t even begin to describe it. I waste away! Turn into an insubstantial shivering mass of -- …man.”
…his nose was suddenly about an inch away from the other nobody’s neck.
“…maaan.” And the slight bump of skin of against skin was a shiver of no no no wrong right through the both of them. …Axel stayed there. “Superior’s really kind of running you ragged, isn’t he…”
“Shut up,” snapped Roxas. He rolled over, grabbed Axel by the hood, and pulled him down.
Roxas held his face and pushed their mouths together. Roxas shoved him down onto his back, did it hard, did it with a look in his eyes that wasn’t incensed, not really but close enough to the real thing that Axel couldn’t really voice a terrible amount of protest at being straddled, or when the gloved hands settled on his throat, or when they slid lower to be replaced by Roxas’ mouth on the bare skin—the touch of another Nobody rang hard and awful against the senses. Invasive didn’t even really begin to describe touching something that amounted to all that nobody was. But it felt like something and something wasn’t nothing and Axel laughed and laughed as Roxas lips followed his neck, followed his collarbone. All with a fierce, ragged concentration.
“You feel that?” asked Axel, as Roxas grasped the zipper at his midsection.
Roxas looked up, briefly. “…do you just not stop talking?”
“You feeeeel that?” crooned Axel. Roxas growled and opened his coat. “Do you? Do you?” And he kept at it, ‘till Roxas shoved a hand into his mouth to shut him up, and Roxas glared down at him. And the hand was still gloved, so Axel grinned into it, reached up along his sleeve, found the edge somewhere near the elbow, and peeled it off.
And:
“Axel?”
“Yeah?”
“What exactly are you trying to do?”
“…this and that. Can’t all be the fuzzy mascot--! Don’t worry, Roxas. All goes according to plan.”
“…there’s a plan?”
“Kinda.”
“... kinda.”
“There’s the one.”
“Which one.”
“The one that I make up as I go along.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 09:48 pm (UTC)AXEL, POLITICS, LUXORD TALKING, VENDING MACHINE, PORN. What more could I ask for!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 09:52 pm (UTC)Thank you for sharing it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 10:38 pm (UTC)Your writing makes me try harder to play a better Axel. :| Oh yeah. Join usssss~ When school's kinder to you.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 11:18 pm (UTC)*flees*
Sorry you had me app into the cast yet, Axel~~~?(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 02:44 am (UTC)As if, Princess.You may have escaped... FOR NOW. (Join us OR DIE,
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 11:18 pm (UTC)Let's see! Axel in Roxas are awesomer than usual when written by you. More please.
Luxord's voice is really, really excellent. I was lost by the exile bit though? Is this something mentioned that I didn't notice/forgot or did you make it up yourself? And I admit I found the political stuff kinda hard to follow. Not sure what exactly Axel was after. (Which is how we know he's making it up as he goes?)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-08 11:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 12:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 12:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 02:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 04:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 05:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 07:56 am (UTC)*flails and dies and is no more*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 10:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-09 08:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-10 04:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-14 04:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-15 10:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-05-22 10:31 pm (UTC)Still journal surfing. ^^ This is awesome. It could be half because my brain has gone completely from sitting in this hot stuff office all day, but there were times when I got...sort of lost. But it also kind of felt like that was a the point, a lot of the time -- the story and your style of writing seems to really fit the nobodies, in that it would and should be difficult to describe and tell a story about the interaction and experience of a group of people/things that don't exist.
It's a lovely story, really, and I love the mood it gives. way better than working. :3
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-02 10:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-24 10:14 am (UTC)acjptp[---
jabvjpt.
ACKPTBT.
I MAY JUST LOVE YOUR AXEL MORE THAN IS SAFE, OKAY? OKAY. GLAD WE'VE GOT THAT CLEAR.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-08-09 11:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-11-12 02:46 am (UTC)*memories*