6,581 Miles to Luma [ 6/?? ]
Don't go nuts on me now, it's not a proper double-update. This part is short. In fact, most of you have probably read it before. ^^
Title: 6,581 Miles to Luma [ 6/?? ]
Author: Casey
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: R/M
Pairings: Axel/Roxas, Riku/Sora
Warnings: The holy trinity of language, sex and violence.
Genre: Post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy road trip
Summary: A clone, a priestess, a fugitive and a knight are crossing the desert together in a V-class 1300-series armored truck. There must be a punchline.
Previous: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Intermission: Hot Pursuit, Part One
"Number eight, this is number two; confirm your position. Over."
The sonex snapped into static at the end of the sentence, settled back into a hum. Axel pulled his hand away from his right eye just enough to glare at it, momentarily, as the waveline on its monitor jumped and wriggled along with the sounds. Having glared sufficiently, he resettled his arm over his eyes and recrossed his ankles (which were still hanging out the open door of the hopper, warming in the sunlight) and prepared to return to sleeping. As that was preferable to whatever Xigbar might think he ought to be doing.
"Number eight, wake your lazy ass up and confirm or I'll snipe your tires and leave you out overnight. Over."
He muttered a few random and half-formed curses and flung out his free arm, blindly grabbing for the sonex's mic. He ended up batting it out of its clasp onto the floor, then under the seat when he swiped for it again, and eventually had to remove the arm over his eyes and sit up slightly to retrieve it. Which only made him curse more.
"Number eight--"
"You're a bastard, you know that?" Axel growled into the mic, kicking ineffectually at the grass under his heels just because he could. It didn't really make him feel better. "What the hell do you want?"
"If you ever bothered to fucking listen, eight, you would know that I asked you to confirm your position. Twice."
He grumbled to himself--more curse words, something about losing another eye, something else about codgy old bastards who liked to pick on the young, handsome guys out of jealousy--and shoved stray hair back out of his face, scratching one hand through the mess at the back of his head and squinting in the sunlight angling through the hopper's windshield. "I'm on the floodlight perimeter just outside of Rhohadam--which, if you ever bothered to listen, is the exact same place I have been for the last two days." Axel swung his legs back inside the vehicle with another huff, straightening in the driver's seat and reaching up to pull the hatch-door closed. "And before you ask--no, I haven't seen a goddamn thing. But if you really want to know, I'm pretty damn sure the desert wasn't this close to the city the last time I was here."
"Uh, guys," a third voice crackled over the sonex, higher tone distorting the waveline. It died for a moment, then crackled again. "I mean--uh, Roger ten-forty, this is Demyx."
Of course it was. Axel rolled his eyes, was suitably unhappy for a moment that no one was present to see his rolling of eyes, and slammed the door shut just as Xigbar's voice snapped over the sonex again.
"How many times do I have to tell you, nine--numbers on the airwaves. Numbers!"
"Oh right. Um... this is--no, wait. Come in number--oh, what the fuck ever. You guys need to see this."
Shit, the kid had actually found something. Axel paused to frown at the steering console, one finger tapping against the ignition switch and letting the conversation on the sonex go on without him.
"What's your location?"
"About ten miles into the desert from the Rhohadam border."
This was it. Time to play non-involvement.
He flipped the switch and threw the vehicle into gear, speeding out of the small patch of vegetation that separated the tile-roofed city from the encroaching desert and kicking up bits of grass and wildflowers behind him. The hopper skidded when the tires met gravel, dust billowing around it as he crossed the bridge over the city's muddy little irrigation canal and then the safety of the floodlight-ring was behind him. The tires stabilized on the sun-bleached pavement of the refugee road that wound away into the desert. Ten thousand miles of heat and dirt and nothing between Rhohadam and the Seven Cities.
There was a school of thought, in the West, that those cities didn't actually exist, and that all the people who escaped their failing homeland into the desert were doomed to die on its endless road. Axel didn't hold with that, personally--he knew better, after all. But if he were to harbor a superstition or, failing that, a general fear of the unknown... well. Crossing the floodlight perimeter sent chills down his spine, despite the high midday sun assuring him that it wouldn't be dark for hours yet.
It took less than ten minutes to reach the spot on the roadside where Demyx's hopper was pulled over, gleaming stain of metal-black against the baked earth, tires sprawled in the gravel like the limbs of a giant insect. It was, however, enough time for Axel to decide he hated the desert for three very important reasons: One, he couldn't stand sitting in the driver's seat and staring at nothing for even that long, let alone any longer. Two, even with the climate controls holding steady over the hopper's interior, the sun slanting in through the windshield made the air around him bake. And three--
Well, with the lack of landscape in general, it was that much easier to see the crack in the sky.
He skidded to a halt deliberately, kicking up a cloud of sand around his vehicle, and predictably Demyx walked through it anyway, waving his arms in front of himself and coughing. Axel waited for it to settle before opening the door.
"Oh, shit." And promptly slammed it back closed.
Demyx tapped on the window, dead frown on his mouth and a definite wilt to his countenance. "Axel."
"It's fucking hot!"
"Get out of the car."
Axel grumbled under his breath--he seemed to be doing that a lot today, he thought--and opened the door again, wincing at the heat that slammed into him with the force of a hammerfall. He shrugged quickly out of his coat and tossed it back inside before climbing out.
Demyx was definitely wilting--his annoyingly perky hair was curling down a bit around the edges and there was a ring of sweat around the collar of his shirt. He'd ditched the coat, too. "Who ever heard of a pyrologist having a bitch fit about heat?"
"Fire is one thing. This--" Axel explained, waving one hand through air so hot it felt thick against his skin, "is something else."
"I think I'm dehydrating."
"Unlikely. What did you find?"
Demyx took a step back and another to the side, motioning for Axel to follow. "Vexen's gonna be pissed." Their feet left the pavement and started crunching through the gravel and sand that lined the side of the road, dipping down into a hollow that fell a few feet below. "Speaking of which--why the hell isn't he here enduring this torment for the sake of science, or whatever it is? Or is that beside the point?"
"Missed it, I think." Axel reached back to pull his mess of hair up off the back of his neck, curling one hand around it and pondering whether he had anything to tie it with. "Vexen's still busy being insanely pissed and chasing after those lab rats that ran away from him last year. I think he set Xaldin and another horde of Replicans on them. Fuck knows what he's doing himself."
"Yet another creepy experiment. Maybe he'll make us a new teammate again. This way." Demyx turned and skidded on the gravel when it dipped lower, deeper into the hollow and into a sliver of blessed shade. "It's here."
And sure enough, there it was.
...Huh.
Demyx looked bored--or possibly just overheated and in need of a large body of water. "What the hell is it, anyway?"
Axel approached the metal and glass contraption with a certain level of trepidation. It was pretty big, as scrap metal went--about six feet long and egg-shaped. From the crack in the large, glossy cover it looked like it was probably broken, but the buttons and switches and LEDs all along the sides gave it an ominous look, like it would whirr and blink itself back to functionality at any moment. "I think it's a stasis pod."
"Oh. That's not good, right?"
His professional opinion, strangely enough, echoed Demyx's. "Vexen's gonna be pissed."
"Understatement of the fucking century," Xigbar's voice muttered behind them, accompanied by the crunching of gravel. The man had also discarded his coat, white shirt sleeves rolled up to his armpits and he regarded his two subordinates and the broken machinery beyond them with one good eye. After a moment, while they all stood there in the ungodly heat in silence for absolutely no good reason (Axel thought), he reached over and clapped Demyx on the shoulder. "Good work, kid. How'd you find it?"
Demyx shrugged a little, still wilting and not looking particularly happy at how pleased Xigbar was to find a heap of scrap metal. "Stopped to take a leak."
Xigbar barked a laugh, brief and not quite humorous enough to be believable, and stepped between them to examine the abandoned pod. Circling it slowly. "Yep, he definitely ditched this. That's bad news, but at least we know he went into the desert now."
"Well," Demyx piped up unexpectedly, just as Axel opened his mouth to interject--and damn if help didn't come from strange places, some days. "Not necessarily. I mean, he could have left it as a--whatchacallit. A decoy."
"As much as I hate to admit it, Dem has a point, there." Axel kept his grin carefully wry, like it was meant to poke fun at Demyx rather than triumphantly support his fantastic theory.
"Not so sure about that--he's a direct guy. Leaving red herrings around doesn't seem like his style." Xigbar paused on the other side of the pod, crouching a bit to squint at something.
Axel scowled where he couldn't see--no, no, listen to the idiot's theory, dammit!
"Well, yeah, but--" Demyx, at least, was defending himself. Axel was still scowling. "He's not suicidal, either. He can't want us following him." He paused and turned his wilted, rather confused expression on Axel, questioning. "Right?"
Axel swallowed. "Can't see why."
"It's a note!" Xigbar straightened abruptly, tugging a folded slip of paper out from a gap between glass and metal. He opened it quickly, scanning the surface and then made a low, exasperated sound and rolled his one good eye skyward, thrusting the paper in Axel's general direction. "It's for you."
Axel blinked for a moment, heat clouding his senses until Xigbar's glare spurred him into motion and he stepped forward to snatch up the paper, straightening the folds and returning the glare before holding it up to read the large, blocky black text. Something in his chest bounced and pulsed out of time with the rest of his heart (what was left of it, anyway) and he had to thump himself in the sternum with a fist a couple times to get it to settle down and return to existing quietly like it was supposed to.
The note read:
LOVE YOU, BABE
XOXOXO
xoxxx
x
--and Roxas's sense of humor still sucked.
Demyx hovered over his shoulder to sneak a peek and snorted. "Oh, now he's just fucking with us." He paused, just to one side and halfheartedly patted Axel on the shoulder in a gesture of discomfited sympathy. "Sorry, man."
Axel made sure his grin was a little wistful and slightly pained. "Don't suppose we could just let him go, huh boss?" He refolded the paper carefully, focusing all his attention on the little creases and edges because if he didn't he might just laugh in their faces and tell them all about it. That would probably be a bad idea. "You know, ten generations of Nocturne University destroying whatever was left of the House of the Wise trying to synthesize cardiopathy, and we're going to kill the only real success they ever had? Sounds like one of those self-defeating prophecies. Or... whatever."
"Not a chance." Xigbar kicked idly at the broken pod and crunched through the gravel back around it, passing between the two of them again and climbing back up through the slippery rocks back to the parked hoppers. "We're back in Rhohadam tonight. Stock up, fuel up, get Xemnas on the sonex and tell him Roxas is somewhere on the refugee road."
"And then?" Demyx asked with something approaching his usual brightness.
"And then," Xigbar echoed, pausing to shoot him a look of restrained exasperation, "we go after him. Move out."
The crunch of gravel was loud behind him, two sets leaving and then one returning, heavier, and Xigbar's hand landed on his arm with even more force than the crushing heat and jerked Axel back around towards the road.
"The kid's a traitor." Xigbar growled the words with a kind of emphatic tilt to his voice, like he was telling himself this as much as Axel. "Fuck if I want to chase him down, either, but unfortunately Nocturne's been having this epidemic of runaways lately. Vexen has all his resources on those two kids from the labs, Marly's up in arms over his damned witch going missing, and as Roxas so conveniently killed the only other two people with enough free time to take on another manhunt, we're it. Little bastard had all his ducks in a row."
You have no idea, Axel thought, and kept his face in a careful mask of slightly cowed despair--because that was probably how he ought to look, right? Just match their expectations, Roxas had said--do that, and they'll never think twice.
Axel dragged his feet back to the car and was only climbing inside and turning the climate controls back on full blast when Xigbar pealed out, back towards town, and Demyx followed just as he closed the door and settled into his seat.
When they were both out of sight, he unfolded the paper in his hand again and raised it up to his nose, inhaling deeply. It smelled like desert. Like heat and sand and a bit like the ink the note was written in--seriously, X's and O's. What the hell?
Somewhere beneath that, though, he was almost positive he could smell something like the skin on Roxas's neck. And that distracted him enough that he spent ten minutes longer than he even intended to still in the desert, remembering playing hooky from supply runs in this very hopper to make out in the driver's seat, horn blaring when he forgot where they were and pressed Roxas back against the wheel--because clearly, that was more fun. Who needed rations and fuel cores, anyway?
He remembered somewhere in the middle of this fantasy (and it involved Roxas's neck and little pants of breath against his ear and an apparent lack of clothing that his fantasies never bothered to explain) that he was actually supposed to be doing something important--making sure that neither he nor the rest of his unit actually found Roxas, for one; Axel rather preferred him alive and whole and therefore his role in this entire scheme would have to be played to perfection.
Axel pressed a soft kiss to the paper and folded it back up, pushing the note into his back pocket before reaching for the ignition and the gear shift. "Love you, too."
And it goddamn well better be worth having to follow you through this fucking desert.
[ NEXT ]
Title: 6,581 Miles to Luma [ 6/?? ]
Author: Casey
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: R/M
Pairings: Axel/Roxas, Riku/Sora
Warnings: The holy trinity of language, sex and violence.
Genre: Post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy road trip
Summary: A clone, a priestess, a fugitive and a knight are crossing the desert together in a V-class 1300-series armored truck. There must be a punchline.
Previous: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Intermission: Hot Pursuit, Part One
"Number eight, this is number two; confirm your position. Over."
The sonex snapped into static at the end of the sentence, settled back into a hum. Axel pulled his hand away from his right eye just enough to glare at it, momentarily, as the waveline on its monitor jumped and wriggled along with the sounds. Having glared sufficiently, he resettled his arm over his eyes and recrossed his ankles (which were still hanging out the open door of the hopper, warming in the sunlight) and prepared to return to sleeping. As that was preferable to whatever Xigbar might think he ought to be doing.
"Number eight, wake your lazy ass up and confirm or I'll snipe your tires and leave you out overnight. Over."
He muttered a few random and half-formed curses and flung out his free arm, blindly grabbing for the sonex's mic. He ended up batting it out of its clasp onto the floor, then under the seat when he swiped for it again, and eventually had to remove the arm over his eyes and sit up slightly to retrieve it. Which only made him curse more.
"Number eight--"
"You're a bastard, you know that?" Axel growled into the mic, kicking ineffectually at the grass under his heels just because he could. It didn't really make him feel better. "What the hell do you want?"
"If you ever bothered to fucking listen, eight, you would know that I asked you to confirm your position. Twice."
He grumbled to himself--more curse words, something about losing another eye, something else about codgy old bastards who liked to pick on the young, handsome guys out of jealousy--and shoved stray hair back out of his face, scratching one hand through the mess at the back of his head and squinting in the sunlight angling through the hopper's windshield. "I'm on the floodlight perimeter just outside of Rhohadam--which, if you ever bothered to listen, is the exact same place I have been for the last two days." Axel swung his legs back inside the vehicle with another huff, straightening in the driver's seat and reaching up to pull the hatch-door closed. "And before you ask--no, I haven't seen a goddamn thing. But if you really want to know, I'm pretty damn sure the desert wasn't this close to the city the last time I was here."
"Uh, guys," a third voice crackled over the sonex, higher tone distorting the waveline. It died for a moment, then crackled again. "I mean--uh, Roger ten-forty, this is Demyx."
Of course it was. Axel rolled his eyes, was suitably unhappy for a moment that no one was present to see his rolling of eyes, and slammed the door shut just as Xigbar's voice snapped over the sonex again.
"How many times do I have to tell you, nine--numbers on the airwaves. Numbers!"
"Oh right. Um... this is--no, wait. Come in number--oh, what the fuck ever. You guys need to see this."
Shit, the kid had actually found something. Axel paused to frown at the steering console, one finger tapping against the ignition switch and letting the conversation on the sonex go on without him.
"What's your location?"
"About ten miles into the desert from the Rhohadam border."
This was it. Time to play non-involvement.
He flipped the switch and threw the vehicle into gear, speeding out of the small patch of vegetation that separated the tile-roofed city from the encroaching desert and kicking up bits of grass and wildflowers behind him. The hopper skidded when the tires met gravel, dust billowing around it as he crossed the bridge over the city's muddy little irrigation canal and then the safety of the floodlight-ring was behind him. The tires stabilized on the sun-bleached pavement of the refugee road that wound away into the desert. Ten thousand miles of heat and dirt and nothing between Rhohadam and the Seven Cities.
There was a school of thought, in the West, that those cities didn't actually exist, and that all the people who escaped their failing homeland into the desert were doomed to die on its endless road. Axel didn't hold with that, personally--he knew better, after all. But if he were to harbor a superstition or, failing that, a general fear of the unknown... well. Crossing the floodlight perimeter sent chills down his spine, despite the high midday sun assuring him that it wouldn't be dark for hours yet.
It took less than ten minutes to reach the spot on the roadside where Demyx's hopper was pulled over, gleaming stain of metal-black against the baked earth, tires sprawled in the gravel like the limbs of a giant insect. It was, however, enough time for Axel to decide he hated the desert for three very important reasons: One, he couldn't stand sitting in the driver's seat and staring at nothing for even that long, let alone any longer. Two, even with the climate controls holding steady over the hopper's interior, the sun slanting in through the windshield made the air around him bake. And three--
Well, with the lack of landscape in general, it was that much easier to see the crack in the sky.
He skidded to a halt deliberately, kicking up a cloud of sand around his vehicle, and predictably Demyx walked through it anyway, waving his arms in front of himself and coughing. Axel waited for it to settle before opening the door.
"Oh, shit." And promptly slammed it back closed.
Demyx tapped on the window, dead frown on his mouth and a definite wilt to his countenance. "Axel."
"It's fucking hot!"
"Get out of the car."
Axel grumbled under his breath--he seemed to be doing that a lot today, he thought--and opened the door again, wincing at the heat that slammed into him with the force of a hammerfall. He shrugged quickly out of his coat and tossed it back inside before climbing out.
Demyx was definitely wilting--his annoyingly perky hair was curling down a bit around the edges and there was a ring of sweat around the collar of his shirt. He'd ditched the coat, too. "Who ever heard of a pyrologist having a bitch fit about heat?"
"Fire is one thing. This--" Axel explained, waving one hand through air so hot it felt thick against his skin, "is something else."
"I think I'm dehydrating."
"Unlikely. What did you find?"
Demyx took a step back and another to the side, motioning for Axel to follow. "Vexen's gonna be pissed." Their feet left the pavement and started crunching through the gravel and sand that lined the side of the road, dipping down into a hollow that fell a few feet below. "Speaking of which--why the hell isn't he here enduring this torment for the sake of science, or whatever it is? Or is that beside the point?"
"Missed it, I think." Axel reached back to pull his mess of hair up off the back of his neck, curling one hand around it and pondering whether he had anything to tie it with. "Vexen's still busy being insanely pissed and chasing after those lab rats that ran away from him last year. I think he set Xaldin and another horde of Replicans on them. Fuck knows what he's doing himself."
"Yet another creepy experiment. Maybe he'll make us a new teammate again. This way." Demyx turned and skidded on the gravel when it dipped lower, deeper into the hollow and into a sliver of blessed shade. "It's here."
And sure enough, there it was.
...Huh.
Demyx looked bored--or possibly just overheated and in need of a large body of water. "What the hell is it, anyway?"
Axel approached the metal and glass contraption with a certain level of trepidation. It was pretty big, as scrap metal went--about six feet long and egg-shaped. From the crack in the large, glossy cover it looked like it was probably broken, but the buttons and switches and LEDs all along the sides gave it an ominous look, like it would whirr and blink itself back to functionality at any moment. "I think it's a stasis pod."
"Oh. That's not good, right?"
His professional opinion, strangely enough, echoed Demyx's. "Vexen's gonna be pissed."
"Understatement of the fucking century," Xigbar's voice muttered behind them, accompanied by the crunching of gravel. The man had also discarded his coat, white shirt sleeves rolled up to his armpits and he regarded his two subordinates and the broken machinery beyond them with one good eye. After a moment, while they all stood there in the ungodly heat in silence for absolutely no good reason (Axel thought), he reached over and clapped Demyx on the shoulder. "Good work, kid. How'd you find it?"
Demyx shrugged a little, still wilting and not looking particularly happy at how pleased Xigbar was to find a heap of scrap metal. "Stopped to take a leak."
Xigbar barked a laugh, brief and not quite humorous enough to be believable, and stepped between them to examine the abandoned pod. Circling it slowly. "Yep, he definitely ditched this. That's bad news, but at least we know he went into the desert now."
"Well," Demyx piped up unexpectedly, just as Axel opened his mouth to interject--and damn if help didn't come from strange places, some days. "Not necessarily. I mean, he could have left it as a--whatchacallit. A decoy."
"As much as I hate to admit it, Dem has a point, there." Axel kept his grin carefully wry, like it was meant to poke fun at Demyx rather than triumphantly support his fantastic theory.
"Not so sure about that--he's a direct guy. Leaving red herrings around doesn't seem like his style." Xigbar paused on the other side of the pod, crouching a bit to squint at something.
Axel scowled where he couldn't see--no, no, listen to the idiot's theory, dammit!
"Well, yeah, but--" Demyx, at least, was defending himself. Axel was still scowling. "He's not suicidal, either. He can't want us following him." He paused and turned his wilted, rather confused expression on Axel, questioning. "Right?"
Axel swallowed. "Can't see why."
"It's a note!" Xigbar straightened abruptly, tugging a folded slip of paper out from a gap between glass and metal. He opened it quickly, scanning the surface and then made a low, exasperated sound and rolled his one good eye skyward, thrusting the paper in Axel's general direction. "It's for you."
Axel blinked for a moment, heat clouding his senses until Xigbar's glare spurred him into motion and he stepped forward to snatch up the paper, straightening the folds and returning the glare before holding it up to read the large, blocky black text. Something in his chest bounced and pulsed out of time with the rest of his heart (what was left of it, anyway) and he had to thump himself in the sternum with a fist a couple times to get it to settle down and return to existing quietly like it was supposed to.
The note read:
LOVE YOU, BABE
XOXOXO
xoxxx
x
--and Roxas's sense of humor still sucked.
Demyx hovered over his shoulder to sneak a peek and snorted. "Oh, now he's just fucking with us." He paused, just to one side and halfheartedly patted Axel on the shoulder in a gesture of discomfited sympathy. "Sorry, man."
Axel made sure his grin was a little wistful and slightly pained. "Don't suppose we could just let him go, huh boss?" He refolded the paper carefully, focusing all his attention on the little creases and edges because if he didn't he might just laugh in their faces and tell them all about it. That would probably be a bad idea. "You know, ten generations of Nocturne University destroying whatever was left of the House of the Wise trying to synthesize cardiopathy, and we're going to kill the only real success they ever had? Sounds like one of those self-defeating prophecies. Or... whatever."
"Not a chance." Xigbar kicked idly at the broken pod and crunched through the gravel back around it, passing between the two of them again and climbing back up through the slippery rocks back to the parked hoppers. "We're back in Rhohadam tonight. Stock up, fuel up, get Xemnas on the sonex and tell him Roxas is somewhere on the refugee road."
"And then?" Demyx asked with something approaching his usual brightness.
"And then," Xigbar echoed, pausing to shoot him a look of restrained exasperation, "we go after him. Move out."
The crunch of gravel was loud behind him, two sets leaving and then one returning, heavier, and Xigbar's hand landed on his arm with even more force than the crushing heat and jerked Axel back around towards the road.
"The kid's a traitor." Xigbar growled the words with a kind of emphatic tilt to his voice, like he was telling himself this as much as Axel. "Fuck if I want to chase him down, either, but unfortunately Nocturne's been having this epidemic of runaways lately. Vexen has all his resources on those two kids from the labs, Marly's up in arms over his damned witch going missing, and as Roxas so conveniently killed the only other two people with enough free time to take on another manhunt, we're it. Little bastard had all his ducks in a row."
You have no idea, Axel thought, and kept his face in a careful mask of slightly cowed despair--because that was probably how he ought to look, right? Just match their expectations, Roxas had said--do that, and they'll never think twice.
Axel dragged his feet back to the car and was only climbing inside and turning the climate controls back on full blast when Xigbar pealed out, back towards town, and Demyx followed just as he closed the door and settled into his seat.
When they were both out of sight, he unfolded the paper in his hand again and raised it up to his nose, inhaling deeply. It smelled like desert. Like heat and sand and a bit like the ink the note was written in--seriously, X's and O's. What the hell?
Somewhere beneath that, though, he was almost positive he could smell something like the skin on Roxas's neck. And that distracted him enough that he spent ten minutes longer than he even intended to still in the desert, remembering playing hooky from supply runs in this very hopper to make out in the driver's seat, horn blaring when he forgot where they were and pressed Roxas back against the wheel--because clearly, that was more fun. Who needed rations and fuel cores, anyway?
He remembered somewhere in the middle of this fantasy (and it involved Roxas's neck and little pants of breath against his ear and an apparent lack of clothing that his fantasies never bothered to explain) that he was actually supposed to be doing something important--making sure that neither he nor the rest of his unit actually found Roxas, for one; Axel rather preferred him alive and whole and therefore his role in this entire scheme would have to be played to perfection.
Axel pressed a soft kiss to the paper and folded it back up, pushing the note into his back pocket before reaching for the ignition and the gear shift. "Love you, too."
And it goddamn well better be worth having to follow you through this fucking desert.
[ NEXT ]