InsaneJournal

[fic] Kingdom Hearts 2, "Day"
Day
Kingdom Hearts 2
Part of the Completionverse. Completion; The Story of the Time Riku Killed Axel in the Face; Beating Hearts, (Un)complicated.
OT6. Namine, Kairi, Sora, Roxas, Riku, and Axel in various combinations. Indeed. Though this part's mostly the girls. To make up for yesterday or osmething. XD
Wordcount approx 5000
Not safe for work! Post-game spoilers


Naminé approaches Axel like a ghost on the wind, like a scrap of cloth caught and torn from the line. Axel’s sitting on the paopu tree, smelling and tasting the salt air off the water; he cuts off his conversation with his internal Riku abruptly and glances at her out of the corner of one bright eye.

She hesitates, halfway across the bridge leading to that last outcropping of island before their world ends, and then she hurries over after all, her steps quick like a beetle scurrying over open ground. Axel’s face splits into a grin and he shifts over a bit, patting the tree beside himself invitingly.

Be nice to her, Riku warns idly.

Axel shrugs at him, more a roll of his shoulders than anything else. "Aren’t I always?" he breathes. He ignores Riku’s irritable response as Naminé finishes approaching and looks up at him uncertainly. "You coming up?" he asks.

Naminé tilts her head slightly, and then reaches up and puts her hands on the tree. She’s been gaining height recently, but she’s still a bit shorter than it. Her hands are very white, but her fingers curl against the bark and then she’s shoving with her thin arms, sliding herself up. It takes a moment, and she yelps faintly as she starts to slip, her dress riding up a bit -- Axel snorts and looks away with mock modesty as Riku snaps at him; like Naminé’d care -- and then she’s got her belly over the curve of the tree and that’s enough leverage to get a knee up there. And then she’s up, her hands flaked with tree bark and one knee very slightly scraped, not even enough to bleed, and she twists around to sit next to Axel, legs hanging.

He looks back at her. "Comfy?"

"It’s a good view up here," she answers indirectly, and stares out across the water intently for a moment. Axel watches her with his head tilted, wondering, briefly, how long Kairi’d been doing the same before he’d shown up to try to get her. After a moment Naminé tears her eyes away from the distant illusion of horizon and focuses them past Axel instead, to the fruit hanging on the branch. Her lips twitch up into a smile.

"Want one?"

"From you?" she asks. It’s not a retort, really. Just inquiry.

Axel considers that. "Nah," he says, and grins again. He leans back, planting his hands against the tree’s trunk to support himself. "You can get one yourself, if you want it."

She doesn’t lean over him, doesn’t reach past, just looks up at him. "I don’t need one," she says, and smiles again.

"Guess not," Axel says. "You’ve already been connected to someone’s fate, huh?"

"Yes," she says. Her smile increases in intensity for a moment before fading again.

They sit in silence for a while. And then Axel says, "Don’t often see you out on your own."

"I’m not on my own."

He snorts. "You know what I mean. In control."

Naminé says, almost playful, "Like you can talk."

It’s lack of experience, Axel decides after a few seconds, that made him take so long to recognize the voice in Naminé’s mouth. "Morning to you too, Kairi" he says, instead of answering. He and Riku aren’t like the others; they don’t share one flesh like they’re part of the same thing, their hearts bump together and set off chain reactions of memories that don’t belong to two halves of the same whole, there’s nothing about them of a person and his negative image. The only thing they really share is the same space of existence at the same time, and that isn’t shared with anything like natural ease. They’ve been working on it; lately Riku’s seemed to realize that confining Axel so much is just contributing to their joint exhaustion and irritability. It’s not easy; Riku hates submission and though Axel doesn’t like it, he’s better at it, and it’s easy sometimes for Riku to shove him around.

But whether or not they work on it is nobody else’s business. He shrugs at Naminé as Kairi fades from her face again.

Naminé says, "I don’t need to be."

It takes Axel a moment to trace that back to what she’s answering. "Don’t need to be out, huh? That’s normal, I guess."

"I’m very comfortable," Naminé says. "I think I’d fade, if I could." Her voice comes out soft, and she splays one hand to her chest. "Not into darkness, as I’d always thought I must, but into--"

"Light?"

"Kairi," she says, and gives him a small smile.

"Close enough, huh."

Her smile's a little strange. "Something like that," she agrees.

Axel glances at her out of the corner of his eye again. Where it might have come naturally once, this time it takes effort to fight down his natural revulsion to the thought. Not for her -- if it worked for her, fine, whatever. But the thought of Roxas's features, individualities fading until there was nothing but Sora puts a chill in his stomach and stiffens his shoulders. Sora's ... important to him, whatever, but he already came way too close to losing Roxas to that the once.

"We're very different, Roxas and I," Naminé says, as if she's reading his thoughts. Maybe she is.

Maybe you're just really obvious, Riku suggests and Axel shrugs again. It doesn't matter now if he's obvious, which is kind of a nice change. "Sure," Axel says.

Naminé hesitates, and swings her legs a little. Almost loses a sandal into the ocean. Would she go after it? Axel wonders. Expect him to? Watch it drift off to be lost?

Wouldn't have to. I'd get it for her. It's just a little water.

Naminé says, "Axel... what was it like?"

"Huh?"

"Dying," Naminé says.

Axel stares at her for a long moment through narrowed eyes. She looks uneasy, even unhappy, as much as Naminé gets these days; Axel remembers how, back in the Castle, she'd always been afraid and unhappy. Little lost bird fallen from the nest, scented with darkness so nobody'd come back for it. Even then, she'd been enough like them not to want to die. Afraid to be alone, afraid to die, afraid of what might come after. If she'd been cruel or ruthless -- and she can still be cruel and ruthless, Axel bets; despite her uniquely biased view on the matter, Larxene's right that under that pretty face she can do some horrible things -- it was pretty much all to avoid those fates. It's something Axel understands in her, in his way, but he's pretty sure he doesn't understand her well at all.

"Tch," he says. "Why do you want to know?"

She hesitates, tucks her hands tightly together in her lap. "I just do," she says. "I want to know what they suffered. I want to know what I didn't."

"The urge to know's always been a dangerous thing with our people," Axel points out, drawling it. "You sure you want to risk it?"

Naminé ponders the question with a greater seriousness than it maybe deserves. "I don't think I'm that much like the people curiousity put in danger," she says. She smiles again, and puts a hand to her chest. "I'm not interested in staring into the darkness to see what stares back."

"With little yellow eyes, yeah?" Axel says. "Tch. Well."

Naminé says, "You don't want to answer?"

Axel shrugs, tilts his head up and stares at the endless blue sky for a moment before he drops his chin again to look at her. "Well, it hurt."

"Being dead?"

He waves a finger in a circle in the air, expression sarcastically flat. "Nah, that was pretty much numb. Dying."

"...Mm," she says, hands clutched to her chest. She looks down.

"I mean, I expected that," he said, and then added thoughtfully, "and it's not like I hadn't been in pain for a while anyway. You probably know from Kairi what Saix did when he caught up to me."

She nods briefly, brows creasing. Axel thinks maybe she's upset by the thought. It's a bit weird to realize, because he couldn't care less, actually. It had been a failure, and that was the worst part of it. Being tossed around like a rag doll had been the least part of it, though it had made it difficult to run after Sora in the space between the paths. And it had hurt in a way he couldn't heal without a long, long time to curl up and not move, and he hadn't had that luxury.

You really can get used to anything, including pain.

"When I actually did that thing," Axel says, "it was pretty much the easiest part." He's not that far off from an Assassin, after all, and after they're hurt a certain amount there's only amount of time before they're willing to die now in the hopes of getting what they need to done. Running into them and catching fire had been almost freeing, in a numbing way. Hurt, sure, hurt like bits of his being were flaking off, but hey.

Sora'd been impressed.

"So, it was okay?" Naminé asks. She sounds surprised.

"Okay?" Axel asks. He closes his eyes. Can't shake the memory of it, of the realization that that was it, it was over. No more Roxas. All the emotions he'd never been able to feel properly welling up in him. Needing to be said, to be heard by someone, to be made real. Burning afterimages of his life into Sora, so he won't just disappear. I liked him and He was the only one and even that last terrible confession which had ached in him harder than the rest because -- maybe he's got used to losing Roxas now, but he's not used to the feeling like he's betrayed him for someone else. Torn between trying to say everything now and losing enough strength that he can't get Sora out. The pain of loss. It had been stronger than he'd known any feelings could be. Trying to keep his voice even anyway because what was the point? What was the point? Feeling it distort him anyway, feeling the pain creasing his brows and drawing his lips back in a smile that isn't, and then -- no, business, gotta do what he must, and throwing the last of himself out to make Sora a way out.

Sora stayed with him until the end. Axel's not really recovered from that. Even with Kairi on the line, Sora stayed until the last of his consciousness was torn into nothingness. Axel remembers that, the fading trailing off until he can't see or hear and Sora still crouching beside him, and there when Axel stopped.

--Riku didn't know any of that, Axel realizes a moment later when the stillness inside him is nearly overwhelming. The moment he thinks of Riku again, there's movement like a breath being drawn in and then a squeeze to his shoulder, silently.

Axel looks back at Naminé. He'd shifted to staring at the middle distance at some point. "Anyway," he says. "I digress. The actual death part wasn't anything."

"...Ah?"

"I mean that," he says. "It's the death of will. A Nobody's death is losing the ability to concentrate on holding himself together. I was snuffed out. There was nothing there."

"You remember that?"

He shrugs. "When the group of you got together to drag me in that day, it pulled me back together enough to fight to be, just enough. Even then I still wasn't anything, but you made something out of nothing." His lips twitch into an unpleasant smile. "So yeah, I remember the blankness of not thinking, not caring, not trying -- not living." He shrugs. "I don't recommend it, really."

She nods. "Are you glad?"

"Huh?"

"To be back?"

"I've got my heart," Axel says. "I exist. I'm where I want to be. Can you even doubt it, Naminé?"

***

Sometimes, Naminé tells Kairi, I'm not sure I know much at all.

"I know what you mean," Kairi says. She's playing with Naminé's hair casually, even if her fingers pass through it and into Naminé's head more often than not. It's soft, and she buries her face in it to smell the scent of rosemary that hangs around her.

You do?

"Sort of," Kairi says. "They're always ahead of us, aren't they?"

Mm...

"It feels that way, sometimes," Kairi says. "That wherever I go, they've been first and I have to run to catch up or I'll fall behind."

They wouldn't leave you.

"Not in here," Kairi says, and puts a hand to her chest. "But they're always busy living right now, and they go off and do their own things. I don't mind--"

I know.

Kairi smiles. "Yeah," she says, and drops against Naminé and half through her. "I don't mind chasing them, but it's a little daunting sometimes."

Yes, Naminé agrees. And then, tentatively, But what if they're actually the ones who are slow, and we've gone on ahead?

"Well," Kairi says. She considers it. "I guess we still have to chase them instead, and drag them up with us. I don't want to not be at their side."

***

Sora kisses Kairi with boundless enthusiasm and Naminé shivers into his touch, feels Kairi's enthusiastic kiss back, the way they tangle together warmly.

To Naminé's vision, they're surrounded by chains which don't bind them but connect them. Where their skin touches, there's a burst of light and the emergence of chains hovering ghostlike around them, close and soft.

It's warm and comforting, being here at the centre of a web that shivers through her being, passes through her before coming out the other side. She is in love with Sora; she thinks distantly, and couldn't be anything with Sora but in love with him. He's too much both to the part of her that's Kairi and the part of her that's Naminé. Their hearts are drawn together. Their bodies are drawn together. As Kairi she is whole, fully and completely; they have their own thoughts, their own twists of personality, but it is so completely overlapped that Naminé's long since lost sight of any boundary, if any ever existed. She likes that, likes how at the shivering point of contact in that brilliant heart they're something bright and beautiful.

Perhaps I was so much shadow because Kairi cast so much light, she thinks a little distantly.

And then Sora enters them and they arch, both because of the sudden physical impact -- pressure inside, stretching, the slide of body around body -- and because of the emotional impact. Kairi is gasping, and her hands grasp at Sora's shoulders roughly. Naminé can feel the smoothness of Sora's skin, the glide of muscle under there built up from practice against Riku, built up from the Keyblade, built up from everything Sora does as part of Sora.

As Kairi holds tight to his back, Naminé reaches out and grasps the chains hanging all around them, slides her fingers in and holds on to keep herself steady as Sora and Kairi moves her.

***

Kairi and Sora fall asleep together after. Naminé lets them slip deep into sleep, and then she leans herself up on her elbow, hair falling down around her bare skin, as she props herself up on an elbow and watches Sora sleep.

A rattling at the window draws her attention. She heads there, unselfconscious about her body, and opens the window.

Riku, below, looks up at her and his eyes widen as his cheeks go red. "Oh," he says. "I uh --"

"Riku," she says. And she puts a finger to her lips, smiling, then beckons him to come up.

He hesitates, and she knows why -- he always avoids coming to Sora at times when Kairi is there, and always avoids coming to Kairi when Sora is there. It's as though he thinks they aren't already sharing each other, but Riku is Riku and will always have his quirks about them. Perhaps that too will change with time, Naminé thinks.

After a long moment, however, he nods and jumps up, grabbing the window and swinging himself in. He lands near silently, and then straightens.

Naminé folds her hands together in front of herself, and silently heads back to the bed. "Riku," she says again, soft. "Look."

He comes to her side, his cheeks still red, and looks down.

Sora's curled peacefully on his side. He looks spent and content, soft and happy, his round cheek bared, head tilted back, mouth a little parted. As Riku watches him, Naminé curls back down on the bed again, because while she'd taken the warmth of Kairi's body away from him, he'd reached a hand out to that spot. She props herself up again, though, and watches.

"Heh," Riku says after a moment.

"This is familiar, isn't it?" Naminé asks, softly, smiling.

"It is," Riku says. "Except better."

"Mm. Because he's going to wake up," she suggests.

"Yeah," Riku says. "Because he's going to wake up.

Naminé looks up at him and he meets her gaze and grins. She feels her warm smile burst out over her face without really intending to; the feel of it warms her from the inside like the sun's rays shattering the cloud cover. Inside her, her heart flutters, pulses with crystalline heat and warmth. She reaches out, touches her fingers to what must look like the air between him and Sora, him and Kairi -- herself -- and she traces her fingers along the chains -- so many chains, invisible and thin and brilliant and stronger than anything else about him -- and feels the way the links warm to her touch.

"I should go," Riku says after a long moment, but he's still grinning, like something's shifted slightly, some uncertainty settled back into the confidence of fact. "Looks like they're busy."

It doesn't feel like an imposition at all to reach out and curl her fingers around his warm wrist. "Stay," she urges. "When Sora's sleeping, it should be you and I here to watch over him, shouldn't it?"

"You don't think they'll mind?"

Naminé draws Riku down with surprising strength; it's like this is a part of herself she never knew and as her heart beats hard she thinks it comes, possibly, from Naminé. When Riku is sitting next to her, she leans slightly, just rests her head against his shoulder. They're sitting in similar, almost mirrored poses, him with one knee tucked up so he can sit on the edge of the bed but still watch Sora in it; her with both knees up, one leg curled beside her, the other tucked underneath. Pale and similar, she thinks, if back then Sora saw them as he dreamed of nothing at all, he must have thought they were ghosts, not truth at all.

"They could never mind you," Naminé says. Her hand covers Riku's on the bed. Riku's hand under hers doesn't twist up to touch but he doesn't move it away.

Between them, there's his warmth seeping into her where her cheek rests on his shoulder. Her warmth seeping into him. The borders all overlap, she thinks softly, they all run into each other in ways that she'd never anticipated as possible when she'd been alone. She curls her fingers against Riku's and doesn't mind his stillness. She watches Sora sleep, and thinks he's dreaming of something pleasant.

"Riku," she says softly.

"Yeah?"

"Do you mind that time? When Sora was asleep, and we were waiting for him." She had always thought he must have. He had waited all that time for Sora, waited to bring Sora back so he could take Sora back to Kairi, could chide him for disobeying his last promise to Riku's heart.(Sora, she thinks, warmly, has never been good at keeping the promises he makes). So that at long last, it could be the three of them. She knows Riku was miserable when Sora wouldn't wake up, when he remained trapped in nothing, with the links of his memory refusing to bind together again. Riku's world is very small, she thinks, quietly. Smaller than Destiny Islands; the width of two persons' hearts. It has been growing a heart at a time as he connects to more people, but that's a new development. No wonder he has always wanted more, she thinks. No wonder he's always wanted to escape.

It must have been lonely. And because of the strength of the connections he had, he must never have known it. She aches at the thought.

He is watching her now. "I didn't mind it," he says, and doesn't bother to explain, but she smiles anyway, and looks down as if shy; she is actually watching the double chain running between their chests, one chain strong and old, one newer and softer and made of a material that looks to her vision almost like glass. It's filled with images of Sora in its transparency, sleeping. Like it's made of the same material that the incubators are, with which she can remake what she destroys.

It throbs warmly between them and she closes her eyes. Her own mouth is so unused to smiling, but Kairi's is used to it, so it doesn't hurt, how often she finds a smile on her face now.

She says, "I didn't mind it either."

***

Sometimes she watches Roxas from a distance. Through Kairi's eyes, now and then; Kairi and Roxas get along surprisingly well when they're both interacting at the same time, though it's not that often. From their own space as well. Sora is usually the dominant one, the one out and about, just as Kairi is for Naminé. But Roxas is a demanding person, and he takes his own space when it's not offered to him.

(Not that Sora would withhold anything like that, Naminé thinks, if he knew it was in demand, but Sora's never been good at seeing what's inside him. He missed Kairi herself there for an age.)

So sometimes Roxas is the one controlling Sora's body, with Sora in the back, often asleep. He sneaks out at night a lot, when Naminé and Kairi are in bed, and she cannot follow him then. But sometimes she'll see him walking down to the beach, and Kairi'll offer up her space one way or the other, and she'll follow him.

It's habit, perhaps, or a distant demand that she can't quite put her finger on. But when he looks up and catches her watching from the door of the shack at the island, he waves her over.

"Hey," he says and smiles as she walks up.

It makes something inside her clench and release. How she'd wanted that, she thinks, back when she was working for DiZ. She'd been aware at the time, though distantly, that his personality she was observing in the program was a construct DiZ had made to trick him into believing himself to be a normal boy. But she'd wanted that; hadn't they all wanted that, to develop normal feelings so that they might be indistinguishable from people who were whole?

That program has become part of Roxas forever now. His old self has absorbed it because he never lost those memories; it's like, she thinks, when she tricked Sora. His feelings for her were based on the transferance of the warmth of a memory to something else. When he lost those memories, he lost those feelings, as was only right. Given the choice between feeling false warmth forever and picking the cooler reality, who would not pick the reality? But Roxas was never offered a choice. And perhaps, she thinks, though it's shameful, his soul might be more at peace like this than if he were entirely that sharp-edged person melded with Sora, trying to absorb the concept of proper friendship without any background. At least the false memories mixed with the real ones will ease the way in the future.

She hadn't seen how false they were, though, until she'd started to link him to Sora and his memory opened to her, where for that entire year before it had been a book locked tight to her, barely even visible.

Every day, running in the program, she'd watched him go about and eat ice cream and play games, do jobs, live life and fight against the increasingly more dissonant ruptures into his world as Axel and his men tried to break in to get him out; as the locked-up self fought against its containment in a human shelf, as it slammed into those gates and gave him headaches, made him pass out, made sunlight blinding, rattled its cage. As she'd drawn the two closer, as she'd been told to do, she saw more of that person.

Naminé had wanted to meet the false Roxas, who, given the opportunity could live such a normal life. It gave her hope; she'd lived a long time without really understanding hope, and perhaps that made her hungrier for it. But she had wanted to meet the real one as well, as she grew to understand him more. His desperation. The angled blade of his need. His cold refusal to accept the things that annoyed him. His rage and hate and lack of reality. He was a Nobody like every other she'd grown up around, and while she didn't miss Castle Oblivion -- didn't miss the studies, the poking and prodding into the empty space her own memory had been, didn't miss the tests of what she could do, Marluxia's heavy-lidded smug eyes, Larxene's sadism, all the rest -- she thinks at the time she'd been too scared of them to understand really what it was. What Nobodies were. That common edged feature. Why they had it.

She'd drawn Roxas's escape then, and pinned it to the wall, so that when Roxas came, so when it was too late to escape, he would at least see it and know who he was, who he had been.

Perhaps Axel's right; knowledge can be dangerous, but Roxas is someone she's wanted to know. Both sides of him. And they exist here, and they exist now, and so she watches.

And when he beckons like that, she gets up and goes to him.

He grins at her with easy comfort and companionship. She thinks, perhaps, that's the reason they were so looking forward to living together like this, when it came down to it; they're a bit alike, and neither are alone any more.

"Roxas," she says.

"I'm about to catch some fish," he says, and jerks a thumb towards the shallows. "Want to join me?"

"Ah-?" Her eyes widen, almost alarmed.

He has no bait or tackle. But his pants are rolled up past his knees and he's wading in and grabbing at them. Catches them, more often than not.

"Come on," he says, and catches her wrist like one of those fish.

She gasps, and he drags her into the water. Surprised, she stands there; it's cold around her pale legs and laps around them. She feels dragged into the current even at this shallow depth.

"Look," he says, and starts to explain how to notice the fish.

Naminé thinks, she should avoid this. She should go back to land, where she can watch safely and draw what is happening, but instead she stands there for a few moments, confused, and slowly begins to follow his instructions.

She's not good at it; she's too slow, not quite able to figure out the angles to cut the fish off before they dart away, and before long she's soaked through, flopping around and the fish are slipping through her fingers.

But she can't mind their loss; she finds herself laughing. Her voice rises loud and clear and surprises herself. More so when Roxas joins in. They take their bucket of fish -- theirs, she thinks, because it was done together even if she caught nothing only -- and go back to land. When she walks, the sun-warmed sand clings to her feet like she's really on this world, and she gives Roxas a helpless smile.

He grins back, tilts his head up to watch the sun in motion, shielding his eyes from it with one hand. "It's a nice day," he says.

"Yes," she echoes. "A nice day." She wriggles her toes in the sand.

More out of desire to see it herself than mimicry, she tilts her head back as well and gazes towards the sun.