(no subject)
Title: Completion
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Pairings: Mostly gen. There are hints of Roxas/Axel and Riku/Sora and/or Riku/Sora/Kairi if you want to see it that way (though the latter two are only on about the level you get in canon.)
Genre: Serious with a tinge of humour.
Word Count: 2,067
Notes: Christmas fic for cyrulean, 2006.
Summary: Sora likes having Roxas around. Well, once he'd gotten over the whole "oh my god I'm going CRAZY" thing, anyway.
All in all, Sora has gotten pretty used to having Roxas around. It’s quite comforting to feel Roxas’s presence at the back of his mind, and Sora feels somehow more complete now, which is probably the point. Not that he’d felt incomplete before, exactly. Except for the fact that he’d actually been separated from Kairi and Riku the whole time he’d been separated from Roxas, which had made him feel a lot like he was missing part of himself, so on second thoughts maybe he just hadn’t noticed the extra absent layer.
The thing is, though, to be entirely honest, Sora hadn’t even noticed Roxas was there the entire time he’d been looking for Riku. He’d had to have it pointed out to him. Then again, that doesn’t say very much, since he hadn’t noticed Kairi’s heart inside him either, and that was a pretty important thing to miss too. Sora had kind of had to conclude that he just isn’t very good at noticing these things.
Anyway, whether Sora had been incomplete before or not, Roxas is always there now, and Sora is unexpectedly happy about this. Well, okay, so maybe at first he had kind of been surprised and a little weirded out to realise that Roxas wasn’t him. It seemed obvious when Sora tried to put it in words like that, but he’d assumed that a part of him that was missing would just be… him. Somehow.
But Roxas isn’t him. Roxas doesn’t even look like him, and he’s a lot more sarcastic than Sora is, for one thing (which is distressingly like having Riku in his head sometimes, though not quite, because Roxas tends more to quiet but very pointed disgust when he thinks Sora’s being stupid whereas Riku is usually more vocally insulting). For another… well, he’s just not Sora. He has his own memories, his own things and people and places that are important to him. Sometimes Roxas is reminded of Twilight Town, of his friends in the simulation, and Sora can feel a twinge of regret and longing; sometimes he’ll think of Axel, and there’ll be a pang of something painful that makes Sora feel awkward and uncomfortable and remember how much it hurt when Axel died for him.
He isn’t sure how much of that was him and how much was Roxas, now that he knows Roxas was a part of him at the time.
The thing is, though, Sora is glad that Roxas isn’t him. It’s a little strange and it had made him freak out and worry about the strange schizophrenic feel of it at first-- seriously, was he going crazy?-- but once he’d gotten used to it, once Roxas had started to accept him and all the jagged edges where they fit together had begun to smooth over, it had actually started to be kind of fun having someone in his head to talk to. Sora constantly craves company, and the best thing about having Roxas always there is that he no longer gets lonely the way he sometimes used to after he and Riku and Kairi had gone their separate ways for the day. He likes Roxas, never gets sick of him there or wants to be alone; Roxas’s presence is comforting, a reminder that Sora isn’t alone, and after all, even though they’re not the same person, they’re still connected. They complement each other, and Roxas and Sora have learned gradually how to live with each other. How to give each other space while still being there, when to talk and when to be silent.
Admittedly that had been harder for Sora to learn than Roxas, probably because Roxas is a little pricklier than Sora and has more personal space issues, but hey.
So really, Roxas is almost the twin brother Sora had always wanted, only not, because they don’t fight and Roxas is always there and they always know what they’re both feeling. It’s closer than that. It’s like… like having an imaginary friend inside his head, except for the fact that, you know. Roxas is real. Or maybe like an extension of himself, but not. Or like… um, like…
Okay, so maybe that kind of analogy doesn’t make him feel any less crazy. Whatever! The point is that Sora likes having Roxas there to talk to and share things with.
And hey, it doesn’t hurt that Roxas is better at board games than he is.
“Alright, biology this time! What’s the most common species of Heartless?”
“Uh,” says Sora, staring hopelessly at Kairi’s small smile as she holds the Trivial Pursuit card in her hand and Riku’s supremely disgusted eye roll when Sora doesn’t answer immediately. They’re both unfairly good at this game, and Sora sucks at it; he always loses, and Riku always makes fun of him. The older boy is less of an ass about it than he used to be, but he’s still intensely competitive and he still mocks Sora for missing obvious (and not so obvious) answers, and though Sora realises now that Riku’s insults are often a form of affection, that doesn’t mean he likes losing any better.
Which is why he’s going to appeal to his brand new “call a friend” option.
‘So. Um. Help?’
‘……’
Roxas manages to make silence sound very pointed, which is something Sora’s always wished he could do.
‘Pleeease? Come on, I know you like it even less than me when Riku gloats!’
Roxas and Riku have a bizarre and complicated relationship that mostly consists of them being wary and suspicious of each other. They mostly get along okay, but that’s probably because Riku is determined to accept anything and everything that’s a part of Sora and because Sora’s feelings for Riku are strong enough to bleed over and colour Roxas’s own perceptions, softening the edge of mistrust and betrayal from his own memories involving Riku from before the time he and Sora merged.
‘You do realise this is cheating, right?’ Roxas answers eventually, with an air of reluctance, and Sora can’t help the hint of whine in his voice when he protests.
‘It’s so not! It’s like, you know, teams. Teams are allowed! Anyway, I bet Kairi is asking Namine for help too.’
‘I really doubt that somehow,’ Roxas says dryly. ‘For a start, I doubt Kairi would ask or that Namine would feel comfortable agreeing even if she did. And secondly, I’m pretty sure Kairi has more knowledge of trivia than Namine does. Which makes me wonder why you suck so badly at this when you’ve existed a lot longer than I have. This stuff is all about accumulation of pointless knowledge. Is your brain some kind of sieve or what?’
‘Hey, just ‘cause my memory isn’t as good as yours,’ Sora responds defensively, and he gets the distinct feeling that Roxas is raising a very sceptical eyebrow at him that means, your memory sucks. ‘Roooxaaaas!’
“Hey, we’re waiting here, you know,” Kairi tells him, teasing, poking him in the arm. “If you don’t know, you should just guess.”
“And stop trying to cheat,” Riku adds, and Sora starts, guilt written across his face. “I’m playing you, not Roxas.”
“Hey! How did you--?”
“If you’re going to do that, at least learn to be less obvious about it,” Riku cuts him off, smirking a little. “You scrunch your face up when you’re talking to Roxas, it’s kind of hard to miss.”
Kairi’s innocent expression suggests she’s thinking something along the lines of, At least it is for someone who stares at you as much as Riku does, anyway.
‘Told you so. Cheating.’
“Geez, okay, shut up already,” Sora says out loud, speaking to both Roxas and Riku, and crosses his arms with a pout. “I don’t even know the names of any of the stupid Heartless, anyway!”
‘… You’re kidding.’
“I dunno, I just fight them,” Sora tells him sulkily. “I don’t, like, ask them their names or favourite colours, you know. Anyway, that’s so not fair. Duh you’d know better than me. I mean, you were a No-- OW!”
“Oops, sorry,” Kairi says sweetly, pretending that she hadn’t totally kicked him on purpose, and Riku mutters under his breath, “wow, that was tactless.”
“… Sorry,” Sora says shamefacedly a moment later, when he realises what he’d been about to say. “I didn’t mean to, um. You know.”
Roxas gives the impression of shrugging. Sora could feel that it had hurt a little, but Roxas is getting better at distancing himself from that kind of thing.
“Since I don’t think Sora’s going to get it,” Kairi says, changing the subject back to the game and away from the awkward silence, “the answer is ‘Shadow’.”
“Duh,” Riku finishes, for good measure, and Sora blushes, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly.
“Okay, maybe that was kind of obvious,” he admits, and in his mind, Roxas agrees. Sora sticks his tongue out mentally, managing (just) not to do it physically as well, but continues on with what he was saying. “Maybe next game Roxas could play? He’s better than me!”
Riku stares at him unreadably, obviously weighing up the fact that he only really wants to play ‘stupid kid games’ when it’s with Sora (and Kairi) against not being an asshole to what is essentially part of Sora.
“Sure,” he says eventually, and Sora and Kairi both grin.
“Great!” Kairi says happily. “Namine, you too! It’ll be fun!”
Which effectively puts an end to Sora’s cunning backup plan for not getting beaten by Kairi and absolutely decimated by Riku, but he doesn’t really mind. Roxas is a lot better at Trivial Pursuit than Sora is, and he’s enjoying himself, which means Sora is having fun too.
Afterwards, when Riku and Kairi are asleep and the three of them are lying curled up on the floor, Sora says, ‘Hey, you’re really good at board games. Have you played them a lot before?’ which isn’t quite as tactless as what he’d said earlier but still isn’t very well thought out. Roxas just snorts, though, a cross between nostalgia and irony as he thinks first of Twilight Town and then of The World That Never Was.
‘Can you imagine the Organisation playing monopoly?’ he asks wryly, and then a shared mental image pops up into their minds and both of them are cracking up, Sora stifling his laughter in his pillow. ‘It would be completely homicidal.’
‘I would totally kill to see that,’ Sora says, sniggering with glee. ‘No, SERIOUSLY, I so bet Xemnas would create all kinds of dumb rules in the middle of the game.’
‘Demyx would lose,’ Roxas says, tone implying absolute certainty. ‘Every time, except maybe once when he got lucky, and then someone would cheat him out of it anyway.’
‘Probably Axel,’ Sora says without thinking, and winces when his common sense catches belatedly up to his thought process, but there’s only a small pang of loss when Roxas answers, and Sora gets the feeling that maybe Roxas is smiling, just a little.
‘Yeah, probably,’ Roxas says quietly. ‘He’d goad everyone into throwing bets on the table, triple cross everyone, cheat like crazy, and probably end up winning half the time and going all for broke the other half.’
Sora knows, probably because Roxas knows, that when Axel won he would almost definitely split everything with Roxas.
It’s the first time they’ve really talked about Axel, the first time Sora’s felt comfortable bringing it up or that Roxas has been ready to mention his name casually, suffering from a mix of guilt and regret and sadness, and Sora is aware suddenly that this is important. That Roxas is coming to terms with something, and that while he’s lost things, things he hadn’t realised were important when he still had them, he’s able to understand now that it was better to have had them in the first place than not to have had them at all. If they can talk about this, joke about it and share it the way they’ve learned to share everything else, it’ll all be okay. It’ll be complete.
“Yeah,” Sora says, swallowing the lump in his throat and feeling the warmth of Roxas wrapping around his consciousness. “Yeah, he totally would.”
Sora is glad that Roxas is a part of him, and not only because he makes it easier to cheat at board games.