AkuSai / BoC
Rating: M for sex, violence and disturbing themes
Character: Lea, Isa, Axel, Saïx
Pairing: Lea/Isa, Axel/Saïx, Xemnas/Saïx
Genre: Drama, Angst
Summary: Isa suffers from a rare bone disease, osteogenesis imperfecta. When Lea overlooks this in favour of having someone to himself, Isa leaps at the opportunity and so begins their downward spiral from friends to lovers to Nobodies.
Disclaimer: All recognisable characters and settings are copyright to Square Enix.
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LEA, THE BOY WHO'D DISAPPEAR
- six years before death -
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Myde Rossiter was a boy in our year with bad hair and permanent shadows under his eyes. He was one of those unfortunate sods who worked hard at school but was eternally doomed to be as thick as a post. I had only had a couple of run-ins with him. The strongest memory in my mind was the time he had been asking around for a drinking straw. When no one offered one, he sawed the middle of his juice carton open with a ruler, and spent the rest of the hour pissing himself laughing because it had exploded all over the rest of his lunch.
There was something else about Myde, though: he was a musician. He wasn't forced into it by pushy parents telling him to do this and be that; Myde was a musician because denying it would be like rejecting his very existence. He seemed to be built from music, carrying more manuscripts than textbooks, slinging a guitar case where his schoolbag should have been. He sang down the corridors when he was happy, strummed a mournful piece in the cloakrooms when he was sad. Myde only had one layer to his eyes and smile and words. The same way he penned his thoughts and crafted them into honest, transparent melodies, what you saw with Myde was what you got.
It didn't really surprise me that Myde Rossiter was your first crush.
-x-
I really hated how our school preached on and on about The Future, as if parents weren't already doing a good enough job. Apparently, if by the age of sixteen you didn't have a trajectory more detailed than, say, the blueprint of an underground vault, you were irrevocably screwed.
As such, our teacher implemented new lessons in place of private study, where we all sat together and discussed how incredibly important The Future was. In these lessons, we worked towards discovering our life goals and career aspirations. We did personality quizzes to see if we were a genius or a psychopath in the making; we got into pairs and did joint research on the plethora of opportunities The Future had in store for us. In the last few sessions leading up to the end of term, our final project was to collect everything we had learned about ourselves and present to the class what hopes we had for The Future, as though we really had a say in it.
In our class, three of us wanted to be teachers, and after the recent show of new creatures creeping into Radiant Garden, twelve of us wanted to be researchers. When Megan plodded to the front of the classroom and announced she was going to become a therapist, she was met with barrels of laughter, and one boy remarked that patients would mistake fat Megan to be the couch rather than the doctor. Considering how her presentation went, I wasn't surprised when you muttered to me in one class, "I don't want to do it."
I had already done mine. I went straight after Myde, who couldn't even spell the word 'maestro' on the blackboard and somehow wound up talking about his uncle's mortgage repayments instead. Myde got the teacher to crack a bright smile at his silliness. I, on the other hand, got lumbered with a detention for announcing my career as a lawyer could sod off and in fact, the future in general could do one because I was perfectly happy right where I was. My future wasn't a giant branch of opportunities and routes like everyone else's. My future was a steel ventilation shaft and there wasn't any way I could claw up and out of it. My dad had long dismissed my interest in sports as a childish hobby I'd soon outgrow, that being a lawyer was my dream and not his, that my muck about approach to life was just an embarrassing tantrum of defiance and nothing to do with being a warped distress call.
"I can't do it," you hissed urgently. "I don't even know what to talk about."
"What did your questionnaire give you as career suggestions?" I leaned across the table and pried your fingers off your papers. The moment I did, your hands shot back as though I had just stapled you. Your face contorted.
"It suggested I be a teacher."
"Well, talk about that then," I said, but you seemed so downcast that in the back of my mind, I knew I was missing something crucial.
"I don't want to be a teacher."
I laughed on reflex. "Isa, you don't have to take it all so seriously. What, you think those twelve people who want to be researchers, are actually going to be researchers? This is just a doss lesson designed to make you think your crazy ambitions are within reach. It's a lesson in false hope - got it memorised? That's why I'm not participating."
You sank down in your seat, head resting on folded arms. Your teeth grinding on the end of your pen rang louder than the collective chatter of class, and you muttered until the end of class, "I can't do it. I don't want to do it."
-x-
In the wake of difficult career choices, you ended up taking two days off sick. I was surprised it had had such an effect on you. In any case, I tried visiting on your first day off, but your aunt turned me away before I could even ring the doorbell.
The second day followed a different tune. While walking out of school with Megan, both of us wondering out loud if you were all right, I spotted your aunt waiting at the school gates. Her lips were thin and she had attempted to hide her tiredness with makeup.
"Lea, perhaps I could have a word?" She seemed to regard speaking with me to be about as pleasant as rubbing her nose in animal waste. "It's Isa. He's not well."
"What's wrong with him?" Megan and I said at the same time.
"That's just it," your aunt said stiffly. "We don't know. The doctor's been round to check and said there's nothing wrong with him."
I scoffed in disbelief - because wasn't it obvious that the worst injuries were the ones you couldn't see? - and Megan ducked her head to politely address your aunt. "Isa has been worrying a lot in his career classes. He might be stressed."
Your aunt took a deep, shuddering breath. "…He won't eat," she confessed, and then she corrected herself with obvious distress. "I mean to say, I can't get him to eat. I've tried everything, and normally I wouldn't…well, I wouldn't-"
resort to asking you, I finished in my head. But I grinned at her and pretended I was the first point of call, and not the last. "Don't worry, Miss, I'll look after Isa."
-x-
This probably wasn't the best time to make such an observation, but you had a knack for making even sickness something quite beautiful. When I stopped round your house and slipped into your room, I was left amazed at how you could lie so motionless in bed and yet, still boast a riot of betraying emotions - taut shoulders of defiance, stark pale skin of worry, mussed hair of hopelessness. Your sheets were crinkled, bunched together with your tight fist as its core; they drew lines down your body like desperate tree roots fighting for support. You were so thin, so tired and yet something so extraordinary to look at; I felt you ought to be on a pedestal with me at your feet, drawing you in an attempt to replicate your elegance.
There was a tray of untouched food on your bedside table. Carefully, I moved it to the study desk and dragged your chair over. "Your aunt swallowed her pride and asked me to come round," I began, but I might as well have been talking to the wall. You stared straight through me. "You want to talk?"
You answered that question easily with your silence. I spent a few moments studying the sharp contours of your collarbone and then tried again. "I think Myde was looking around the classroom for you today. You like him, don't you?"
You tensed up and your lips thinned. Still, you said nothing, and I surmised I wasn't saying the right thing. You were complex, but not in the way I was. You weren't a thousand conflicting emotions, nestled in lies and schemes; instead, you had a thousand defences, a thousand barriers to break - and usually this would be easy, if only you would look at me.
"You don't have to be a teacher, you know." I rested my elbows on your bed and propped up my chin with my hands. "You don't have to have a grand plan," I said, but I knew even without your confirmation that I was far, far off the mark. I had to look for something more basal, more emotional, something that could lock your tongue and freeze your bones. I wetted my lips, almost afraid to ask. "Did someone hurt you, Isa?"
Still, nothing. I kept in a sigh and sat back in my seat. I didn't think there was anything more raw or frightening than being hurt by someone else. My dad had often spoke in court on behalf of traumatised victims of assault, how they were wrecked and ruined with invisible fractures across their skin, how they felt their voice had lost its worth, how the world had betrayed them in the cruellest way possible.
And then - as my gaze drifted across your room to the pack of tarot cards poking out from a stack of star charts - I worked it out. "Bad dream?"
Your gaze was wary, as if you weren't sure who I was. "I don't dream."
"Course," I murmured. You rolled onto your back, blinking fiercely. I wanted to ask you what you had seen, what slice of the future had crawled into your unconscious and hurt you this badly. I wanted to ask you and yet, I already knew. Only I was capable of making you react like this.
You lay still. Your hands clenched and unclenched. "…There's fire," you said finally. "Lots of it."
I reached for those bony hands, but you wriggled away with a sharp intake of breath. It was difficult to pretend I wasn't hurt by such a callous move. "We better carry fire extinguishers round with us from now on." I smiled - because ages ago, that's all it took to cheer you up - but instead of returning it, you tried to hold back an audible choke. Something dribbled down your face.
"You're going to kill yourself, Lea."
I felt the fire then, somewhere between my gut and throat. You had frozen in bed; I had burned to a crisp in your gaze. Finally, you looked at me. I wished you'd stop.
"It's not funny," you breathed. "It's really not funny. Stop doing that face!"
It was only when I started at the tone of your voice that I realised I had been grinning at you. Where you had been rendered immobile and sick in response to your premonition, I had buckled in my own way and taken refuge in my simplest disguise.
"…What happens?"
You gave a tiny shrug. "An explosion? I…I don't know. All I know is it's your choice."
"I don't know what to say," I said eventually. "I mean, I hardly feel suicidal now and I can't account for my future actions."
"Really?" you spat back. You sat up in bed and rubbed your face furiously. "I replay that horrid vision every time I close my eyes, and when I'm awake, all you do is confirm it's going to happen. Why are you doing this to yourself, Lea?"
I preferred you when you were nonresponsive. At least that way, the pain was dull and constant, and nothing like the progressive verbal strikes that you now felt compelled to deal.
"I mean, you stood up in front of class two days ago and announced your career as a lawyer could sod off, but minutes later you were researching the bar exam and taking out library books on law. You go on and on and on about how you're doing your own thing, but you're a copycat enough as it gets. That stupid collection of scarves and watches you ransack to dress like your father; you're even copying his catchphrase." You fought out of the covers, proving you could barely fill out the old shirt and shorts you were in. "What is it, Lea? What bothers you so much about yourself that you have to pretend all the time? You…you don't like who you are?"
I was wrapped up in soft cashmere. My fingers had flown to my scarf by instinct, and I tugged and pulled, but the choking sensation wouldn't go away. "You won't understand."
"Try me," you said, so prompt and so naïve. I very nearly did. I very nearly opened the closet to reveal my skeletons; nearly admitted that I wanted to strangle Myde for thieving you; that I wanted to be like my dad because I needed to learn to successfully protect the people I cared about; that I wanted to be tough and witty and fiery and everything you weren't, so you'd stay; that it was all because of you, that I woke up some nights sticky and flushed, and had to change my sheets in the dark before anyone could ask; that I prayed for days when Megan was off sick and it'd be just us two; that if you stripped me of my masks and falsities, tore right to my core, you'd only find yourself - because that was all I was.
"Lea," you said after a moment. "I'm worried about you. Look at me, I'm sick with worry."
Your hands shook in the tousled sheets. I reached for you, slow and careful, at the pace of a predator. "I think your vision was a symbolic one. You know, metaphoric."
Your frown increased. "They don't work like that."
"Sure they do," I fed you, getting up from my seat, "because I'm going to explode at some point if I don't ever get to do this."
"Do what?" You scrabbled back but I already had one knee between yours, pinning you in the sheets. I reached for the back of your neck and closed the gap between us.
I hadn't ever kissed anyone before, but I had often seen my eldest sister macking with her boyfriend at the school gates, and it seemed simple enough. I had seen my parents kiss too, and could surmise that unless one person was wrinkling their nose, pursing their lips or wriggling away, then the level of care a kiss denoted was surely mutual.
Your hand was freezing, even though you had spent so long in a stuffy room. I trembled as your fingertips grazed my cheekbones and you shifted closer. I kissed harder, deeper, forced it into something beyond an innocent first time. I wasn't gentle but then again, neither were you. You threw your reservation aside, buried your hands in my hair and breathed out my name. The prickly teases travelled from the back of my neck to my collarbone, and it was just as I leaned into your touch that you seized up.
"Stop," you whispered. You pulled away, fingers tracing your mouth. They were shaking. "What…what am I doing? Lea, I…it's wrong, it's so wrong."
"Why?" I challenged. "It's right. Nothing's ever felt more right, and you know it."
Your eyes softened. You could tell how much you were breaking me and yet, because it was such a change in roles, it mattered all the less. "Lea, we're friends. Anything more than that, and I have to sit down and think whether it's really worth losing my best friend over. To be honest with you, I can't deal with that at the minute. I…I've only got a year left of school and I'm not well off like you. I'm not smart or rich or confident. I have to study and focus, and right now, as hard as it is for the both of us, I really need you to be my best friend."
"And I can be that, I promise," I said immediately.
"No, you can't. N-not after…you know. Look, we're not doing each other any good," you admitted. "I feel like I do more bad than good around you. Do you feel that?"
I knew you had tasted the poison in me. I should never have kissed you until I was absolutely certain I could lace the venom with enough honey.
"No." I folded my arms, thinking that was enough pressure on my chest to twist lies into truth. "I think we're perfect together."
"We used to be, maybe," you conceded.
I had experienced this many times before. I went through friends the way others went through clothes; I wasn't anything permanent. I was too loud, obnoxious, forthcoming; I was always someone's passing phase. You had, for six incredible years, made me believe I had finally broken out of this cage of a lifestyle, but you had merely taken me round a giant, six year long circle.
I stood in front of you, hot and humiliated, still tasting you on my lips, and I wished for nothing more than to terminate a friendship - for the first time - of my own accord.
-x-
The next afternoon, you had to stand in front of the class to talk about your career plans. To my surprise, you announced you wanted to be a teacher and contrary to your words from before, you could do it. You could stand in front of thirty people and talk confidently. I spat out the shred of paper I had been chewing, swung my chair forwards for it to land back on four feet, and I admitted at last, that I had cared for you in such a way, you hardly needed me any more.
I lifted my hand. You stopped talking, glanced across the stretch of the classroom and then at our teacher.
"You have a question, Lea?" she said.
"Yeah. I just wanted to ask Isa how he's going to become a teacher."
You blinked. I saw out the corner of my eye that Myde had lifted his head in mild interest. "I…I've just explained the-"
"I know, but won't there be some sort of issue?" I leaned back in my seat, and I folded my arms behind my head so no one could see my hands shaking. "I mean, you're gay, right?"
And just like that, from the back of the room, over the cluster of snickers, I heard the thread tying us break. Like a bicycle chain getting caught, like a tree branch exploding in lightning, like one of your bones snapping. You flushed, racing from pale to burning red. "I…" you started.
"Excuse me, Lea, you don't make accusations like that," said the teacher, but I shook my head at her.
"No miss, he told me." I grinned at you, at the way your eyes darted with embarrassment and horror. You looked just like I always did when people were done with me. "Trust me," I said, turning round to address Megan, Myde, everyone in class, "that's just the first level of his weirdness."
I laughed, and it tasted like bile at the back of my throat. I didn't care that the teacher subsequently threw another detention at me, that when you sat back down, there was a chorus of cruel whispers. I didn't care at all when Megan hissed at me and called me a bastard. You wanted to dump a friend; I had merely shown you a better way to go about it.
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AXEL, THE FLURRY OF DANCING FLAMES
- thirty-six days after birth -
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A simple lesson that's a ridiculous conundrum to a fifteen year old:
Friend A and Friend B hold a two handled basket between them. In it is everything that makes them friends. There's light stuff, like inside jokes and silly secrets and the habit of borrowing the other's stationery for the day; and there's the heavy stuff, like trust and big promises and confessions.
The basket is fragile, though. It's crafted in such a way that it needs to be supported at both handles. It relies on mutuality. If Friend A adds more to the basket and Friend B can't hold the weight, Friend B will inevitably let go.
And it doesn't matter if Friend A takes the weight back out or even says he'll carry for the both of them - the basket doesn't work like that.
-x-
A rumour descends on the Castle like a finger idly running down the strings of a guitar, that you pushed an ornamental urn off a sixty foot drop and nearly hit the Superior with it. It's a rumour that twists a smile onto me which, for all its callousness, feels weirdly impalpable.
The next day, you say almost nothing, preferring to sit and scribble away in your book, turning it round and round in your hands like a sea captain steering his ship back on course. There's a blank between this scene of searching and a moment afterwards, when the glass panel behind you is suddenly fractured. You say you didn't do it. There's a spider web of lines, and when I examine the intricate pattern, my reflection is somehow smiling.
One time, at the rare occasion of eating with others, you randomly snap your head up and stab Lexaeus' hand with your fork. I burst out laughing at his immediate wince - fuck knows the brute deserves it after all the blows he's dealt me - and your gloves squeak with the forceful grip of your fingers.
There's another incident. The Superior - courtesy of Zexion - has a medical record drawn up on you and for the purposes of accuracy, it's important you have a look at it. Xaldin chucks a file at you; you chuck it right back. It explodes against the window when powered by your throw. The papers burst from their confines like moths fluttering free of the flame. They fall at the Superior's feet, a shapeless blanket of snow, and I laugh at that too.
There's an alcove, an arched expanse of refuge beneath a bridge, and the puddles creep at our boots and there are damp streaks of rain running down the walls, and you react again, unprovoked and uncharacteristically fierce. You lash out and strike me, a strong fist that goes straight for my collarbone. The sound of impact echoes and bounces off the stone.
After that, it stops being so funny.
-x-
You're in the examination room for the first time. You're as pale as the whitewashed walls, still raking your hair and tugging at it to the point that over the days, the crown of your head has considerably shorter, spikier hair. Vexen and Lexaeus are running standard tests, but the real observations are coming from the other side of the glass. I try to sit apart from the others. I twirl a chair and sit on it the wrong way round, my back to the Superior. Zexion won't have any of it, though, and he sits on the half wall as a black smudge of annoyance in my peripheral vision.
"There is something wrong with him," Zexion says. In the background, the Superior, Xaldin and Xigbar shuffle paperwork; they compartmentalise you into words and numbers, as if you're that easy to solve.
"I got beaten up once." I lean forwards on the backrest, but Zexion doesn't quite slip from view. "There was something wrong with me too. I had red hair."
I hold his stare, unrelenting. Then, Zexion smiles a thin line of deadly patience and calm. "You misunderstand me, Axel. I was not stating an opinion, rather making a translation of your expression. You believe something is wrong with him."
He gives me little time to recover from his astuteness. It seems pointless to mask my concern when he has so easily shot an arrow right through its centre. "Well, something doesn't sit right," I admit. "These flashes of anger. They're so irrational. Isa was never like that."
"He was never angry?" Zexion talks in such a way, I don't need to look at him to acknowledge his contempt.
I chew the mouth of my glove. Answering with silence seems to be the logical move to keep my cards close to my chest.
He slides off the half wall, not unlike a panther bored of chasing small game. "Perhaps you mean he never showed he was angry. There is quite a measureable difference."
"Yeah, he was pretty introverted." The chair creaks, a sound of protest against my white-knuckle grip.
"But even an introvert needs to vent, surely?" Zexion conjures up a book and nudges the spine with his palm. It falls open, right in the middle, and Zexion's visible eye switches between reading the text and studying me, as if somewhere on those pages is the very definition of me. "Saix is an amnesiac by disassociation, and you're a pretender with corrupt memories, living a life of denial. One could argue that with such disrupted witnesses, the story of your past has dissolved. I'm not the Organisation's doctor," he continues idly. "Surgery just happens to be a field I'm naturally proficient in. I actually serve as the analyst. I dissect facts, figures, people, places; I break down the oceans of data to droplets of potent, useable information."
I rest my chin on my folded arms, which dig into the chair's backrest. "Has anyone ever told you you're really creepy?"
Zexion doesn't react at all, which rather cements what I've just said. "My point, Axel, is that while you endeavour to sweep your mistakes away and stretch a blindfold over Saix, you cannot trick me. In fact, out of the three of us, I have the fullest, most comprehensive and accurate knowledge of your past, and ironically, I'm supposed to be an illusionist."
He's just playing games, the same way Lexaeus feigns uppercuts and goes for my ribcage instead, the same way Xigbar uses insults to fish for a reaction. Shit, I know he's playing games and yet, all I need to do is look at him and poison taints my throat. I feel my deck of carefully preserved secrets crumble at my feet, like a castle of sand welcoming the sea.
Does he really know me? Has he any idea what I've done, or is he just bluffing?
"You're so young," Zexion says abruptly. "You were how old? Twenty?"
My hairs stand on end. It is a particular kind of grating when a haughty snake hidden in a twelve year old remarks on your immaturity. Suddenly, I ask myself why I am tolerating this, when there is such an easy way to finish off the stare that unravels me.
I leap out my seat with such force, it topples over. I call up fire, grinning at the way it skates across my skin like armour. Zexion might be quick with words, but physically he is as slow as a glacier. I reach him in the blink of an eye, wrap my fingers round his tiny, veiny throat and shove him head first against the window.
"Axel!" Xaldin berates over the sound of shattering glass and dispositions.
Together, we topple over the half wall, falling in the rain of glittering fragments. You, Vexen and Lexaeus jump aside. We crash, grunt, struggle, grapple at one another's weaknesses. I squeeze his throat, dig into his skin. Zexion uses what little breath he has to crease up into a derisive laugh.
"You still fit my data," he pants, grinning beneath his slate fringe. "A brawler who beats down whatever he feels threatened by."
I snarl, and a whirring chakram grinds against the cold tiles. I bring it down - hard and desperate - on that smirking face. I want to tear his face apart until it is nothing but a sticky red mess that protects me from that gaze, but my arm freezes in someone's painful grip. Zexion is still laughing, relaxing in gratifying pain as the chakram just manages to scrape his eyelid.
There is a nod out the corner of my eye - the Superior, I make out, and he's here with everyone else - and then, Lexaeus delivers a swift, brutal punishment. He throws me, back up the way I fell. The white walls soar past, as blank as the stares that watch me go, and I wait for impact, to hit the stone half wall and break my back.
It never comes. Instead, I collide with something softer, sturdier. My knees buckle. Blue hair slinks over my shoulder as your arms wrap around me. I groan and with shaking hands, I dust off the shards of glass down my front. You feel impossibly strong against my back. There isn't the single indication you are hurt at all; there isn't a single explanation to cover how you could run as fast as I was thrown. It's only in the wake of the scuffle that I entertain the possibility, in a bit of a daze, you might be far stronger than I am.
You help me up, your slight smile and subtle gaze a stark contrast to the scar that mars your face. From that viewing platform, we glance back at the Organisation together.
Vexen taps at his clipboard. "Perhaps I should log that," he says after a moment. "Number Seven. Surprisingly mobile and responsive."
The Superior favours Xigbar with a half smile and murmurs something, and then he portals away with a shake of his head, as if this sort of conflict is utterly normal.
"What did he say to you?" You absently wipe some blood off your face, where a slice of glass must have just nipped you.
"Nothing." I glare at Zexion who, with the help of Lexaeus and Xaldin, is now resetting his dislocated shoulders. "He's just got a face I want to punch. More importantly, you got here quick. What…what was that?"
You shrug, losing a hand in your hair. "It was an unconscious move," you explain. Your eyes rest on Vexen, at the plethora of equipment behind him, all there to deconstruct you. I hold my tongue, bite down on the secret, that someone's unconscious can easily be programmed at an early age.