[Fic] Axel/Roxas -- to burn a hole in the sky (you have to start somewhere); 2/2
When Roxas was first shown his room, before Axel- after Sora had left with a last hug for him and a scowl and a growled, "you better keep him safe," for the Doctor, it was pretty blank.
There was a bed- a queen, thankfully- (the Doctor had seemed to be under the impression that bunk beds were best), a small desk, and a dresser, all shoved in various corners. But that was it.
Over time, the room fills up.
The day that the Doctor takes them to see the Star Wars premiere they come back to sheets that have little light sabers all over it along with an official Empire Strikes Back comforter. A couple days later Axel discovers chemicals- and they come back to a starter chemistry set. (Which was really a terrible idea on the TARDIS’ part.)
It goes on and on like that- them discovering that they like something, and suddenly, it appearing in their room like magic.
(And seriously, it was uncomfortable enough when the TARDIS had seen fit to stock their nightstand with lube and condoms, but a few weeks later when she started leaving sex toys in odd places? Yeah. Awkward.)
To Axel's endless amusement, the wardrobe does the same thing- taking note of their tastes like some kind of catalogue and equipping the galleries of racked clothes with their own personal preferences. She stores them in the secondary wardrobe, closer to the front so that they don't have to go trekking up and down the stairs, fiddling through the endless assortment of increasingly odd clothing every time they want a pair of pants.
They have a nice system set up, one that Roxas thinks that he might understand a bit better than the Doctor in the long run. The TARDIS keeps them safe and happy, and always sends them where they need to go, even when it isn’t where they want to go.
And then, the TARDIS goes on strike.
According to Axel, the Doctor must have done something to offend her again, because "he's always doing these little things- getting himself in trouble and forgetting to thank her for pressing his suits."
According to the Doctor, it must have been Axel. "He's probably set her on fire. Again," he says, wry.
As far as Roxas is concerned, they both look guilty, neither have apologized, and the TARDIS is refusing to stock fresh food in the kitchen. And the rooms are always inexplicably messy.
"Apologize," he finally snaps.
It's like they've both perfected the kicked puppy look while he wasn’t looking. Hell, they've probably started practicing on each other. He sighs. "I don't care who did it- I really don't. You are both going to apologize right now so she doesn't lock us out, and then you're going to come shopping with me."
"But-"
"Apologize."
The whispered "Sorry, dear," and "yeah, sorry," make him smile a little and the TARDIS hums with him, the lights brightening like they're already forgiven.
"Now," he says, and winds a scarf that he'd found in the wardrobe earlier around his neck. "We are going to go fetch milk and orange juice and whatever else you might think we need, and when we get back we're going to go visit Destiny Islands."
The Doctor looks like he's tempted to add something about how they were supposed to be going to the Olympics ("Naked men running around like children! It's ridiculous! I'm sure Axel will love it!") so Roxas adds, "I miss Sora."
Axel's eyes soften a bit and the Doctor deflates. Roxas finishes shrugging into his coat.
"Now, shall we?"
.
They pick up milk, orange juice, carrots, and a ridiculous amount of frozen dinners. And then somehow, the Doctor manages to run into some old nemesis halfway down aisle 5 and they have to sprint back to the TARDIS.
They can't even go to the grocery store without running into trouble. Go figure.
.
Destiny Islands is warm. Warm and lovely in a way that Roxas doesn't really remember. Of course, he supposes, he's never really been there. He's always been there because Sora was there, looking at the world through his eyes. It only makes sense that things would be a bit different when seeing it through his own eyes. The water is a clear blue that makes him think of Riku's eyes, cooler than he remembered too, and he has the sudden urge to kick off his shoes and take off into the surf.
Probably the Sora in him, he reasons.
Kairi's the one who greets them, wrapping Roxas in sun bronzed arms and giggling into his hair, saying, "We missed you, Roxas!" before passing right past him and on towards Axel, who she pins with a look of suspicion. Axel swallows.
“Kairi,” he nods.
“Axel,” she acknowledges. Then, “Well, you seem better at least. I guess you found what you were looking for then?” she grins, nodding towards Roxas.
Axel’s eyes flicker over to his, and he flushes, shuffling uncomfortably on the hot sand. “I think technically he’s the one who found me, but-” he glances back over to Roxas and smiles, “-yeah, I found him.”
The Doctor clears his throat noisily behind them, a sound that is stuck somewhere between horrifically annoying and catastrophically appalling. When Roxas turns though, he’s grinning, twiddling his thumbs in front of him and rocking back and forth on his heels.
“Not that this isn’t very moving- no, no, don’t laugh, Roxas, that isn’t nice- that was very touching, Axel, really.” Kairi giggles and the Doctor’s attention shifts to her. He beams. “But if you don’t mind, I need some sunscreen before I start to look a bit like a lobster, and we don’t want that. I don’t visit beaches much, see, but when I do... well, let’s just say that this particular body doesn’t tan.”
.
Apparently, the looming threat of death by UV rays has no effect whatsoever on the Doctor trying to have fun on a beach. In fact, the only thing more annoying than the Doctor flouncing about the beach in board shorts declaring that they start random games of volleyball, is Sora bouncing about the beach after him, making a point of yanking Roxas and Axel out of the shade of a nearby palm and making them join in.
Sora and the Doctor together is kind of like shoving two ADHD toddlers into an enclosed space with lots and lots of breakable objects. They’re unstoppable.
The game itself is a bit of a disaster once Sora and Riku decide to cheat by using their keyblades and Axel catches the ball on fire. A free for all involving keyblades, chakrams, and sonic screwdrivers follows, and after nearly thirty minutes of torture, Kairi manages to extricate Roxas from the complicated sport.
The sand is just a few degrees too warm beneath his feet, and Roxas watches their toes curl into it as Kairi drags him down in front of the old battered boards of the seaside shack. For a few minutes, they just watch the others play- the Doctor teaming up with Sora and launching a vigorous assault on Riku and Axel.
“You’re happy, aren’t you?” she asks, and he tears his attention away from how low Axel’s shorts are sitting on his hips.
“What?”
She smiles and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “Happy- with them. You are, right?”
He thinks about it for a minute, because ‘til now it’s just been a fact. Of course he’s happy. He has Axel and all of time and space before him- what’s to dislike? He glances back at them, to where the Doctor has somehow procured a squirtgun and is proceeding to douse Riku with salt water. He’s laughing about it, white teeth bared in a happy grin, acting more like a four year old than a nine hundred year old member of one of the most intelligent races in the whole of time.
“Sora told us about it, y’know. When he got back.” Kairi’s playing with the sand that’s clinging to her shins, tracing symbols through the glittering grains. “He told us that some madman with a box had done something to him and that you were gone. That you had your own body and were looking for something important.”
She giggles, and flicks some sand at him. “I knew you were looking for him, but Riku didn’t believe me. He said it was impossible.”
Roxas eyes Riku from across the beach. They’d never gotten along- not really. The only time they’d been face to face, they’d kicked he shit out of each other and Riku had kidnapped him and stuck him in a fake world. He’d seen Riku afterwards, through Sora’s eyes. Seen the way that he cared for Sora, more now that he knew what it was like to lose him. He wasn’t all that bad.
“Riku should be the last person to talk about impossible things. He wanted to get to a new world on a rickety old raft.” The sun is at it’s peak in the sky, and Roxas shifts uncomfortably in the sand, feeling the salt water dry against his shoulders.
Kairi laughs and draws a circle in the sand between them. “Well, once upon a time, we all thought that.”
She’s adding details to the circle; large geometric shapes and little squiggles. For a moment, she’s quiet.
“Sometimes,” she starts, looking up at him for a moment before returning her gaze to her creation, “I feel like I’m the only one who didn’t get an adventure. Like I missed out on this big event, just sitting back and waiting for the boys to get home. I regret it, a bit.”
The circle starts to look more familiar- a glimpse of Twilight Town from far away. Suddenly, he aches a bit, for those friends that were never really his; who knew him only as that weird kid in the black coat who asked weird questions, not Roxas, the boy who helped them with their homework and helped them save up money to go to the beach.
“And then I remember that they’re here now, and I don’t really need an adventure in my life. They’re handfuls enough.”
Roxas watches her fingers, slim and pale- flecks of sand clinging to the underside of her thumb. He thinks about how she must have felt, the island coming back to life around her, watching Sora fade away. How she must have felt when she realized she’d forgotten his name. How she felt that day, when something inside of Roxas had teased, starts with an ‘S’...
He stares at her, and thinks that she’s stronger than any of them know. “But if they left again, you’d follow them, right?”
She looks up at that, and her grin is sharp and blinding and all teeth. “Of course I would. I wouldn’t let them leave without me.”
.
They eat on the pirate ship- melon that Kairi’s brought from home and some not-turkey that Axel digs out of the cooler in the TARDIS. The Doctor walks about the ship, frowning and gesticulating and grousing about where the ship could have come from.
“My mom says it’s been here since her dad was a kid,” Sora puts in, wiping melon juice from his chin. The Doctor points a celery stick covered in peanut butter at him and shakes it.
“That isn’t the point! The design is all wrong! Just look at it- there’s no way this is from the island-”
“Doctor!” Roxas says loudly, pulling away from the cage of Axel’s arms to tug him down by the suit jacket. The Doctor turns wide eyes on him, as if surprised to suddenly be sitting on the floor. “Just sit down and eat. The ship won’t eat us- promise.”
They eat.
.
The ship doesn’t actually try to eat them, but when the Doctor insists on getting below deck, the infestation of small spiky aliens try to.
Only the Doctor.
.
“They were harmless- it isn’t like you were really in danger.”
Riku scowls and pulls a barb from his hair.
Somewhere, Sora is laughing.
“You only surprised it- Roxas, tell him that they’re harmless!”
Roxas hides a smile behind his hand, and pats the small body of one of the creatures. It purrs.
“They’re herbivores, Riku. It just... liked your hair a bit too much.”
Riku grumbles.
.
They don't stay the night, though Kairi assures them that her house has room. The sun sets gold and pink and violet here, and even though Roxas has seen dozens of sunsets, he thinks he likes Destiny Islands most of all.
Axel sits beside him on the little dock, kicking his feet in the waves. The others are still on the beach- Riku bickering with the Doctor about how medicine changes in the future and Sora talking quietly with Kairi near the shoreline.
Axel is warm, pressed up against his side- faintly damp and smelling of salt. He has a bit of a sunburn, the worst of it around his shoulders and spread in blotchy patches across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, and it's something- that little proof that this is real.
"You're going to freckle if you keep that up," he whispers, bumping their shoulders together. Axel glances away from the sunset for a moment and smiles.
"For a day like today, I think I'll risk a few freckles." He kicks at another wave and sends the water up to spatter their knees. "And besides," he adds, still smiling, "I hear freckles are kisses from your guardian angel."
Roxas snorts. "Warning signs, more like. 'Stop while you're ahead, pale one. This way lies the cancer of the skin.'"
Axel flicks him on the ear, but he's grinning, so there's no real bite.
"Hey Roxas-" he starts, and Roxas cuts him off with a kiss.
He doesn't need to know why the sun sets red.
.
Sora hugs him goodbye- a tight embrace that brings to mind brotherly affection that he never had the chance to familiarize himself with. He hugs Axel too, though a bit less enthusiastically than he'd grabbed Roxas. The Doctor though- no, hugging isn't enough. Not for Sora. Instead, Sora lunges at him- giggling and happy, hooks his arms around the back of the Doctor's neck, and plants a large, sloppy kiss against the Time Lord's mouth.
He draws back long enough to whisper something in the Doctor's ear, and whatever it is, it makes the Doctor eyes go soft- the surprise fading away.
And then he's bouncing over to an irritated looking Riku and an amused looking Kairi, sliding his hands into each of theirs and laughing when Kairi demands a kiss of her own. He dips her low, broad hands spread against the small of her back, and when he kisses her, it's nothing like the one he gave the Doctor. When he draws back, both of them smiling and pink cheeked, Riku's scowling- and somehow, Roxas is only a little bit astonished when he gives Riku one of his own.
.
"What did he say to you? Before?" Roxas asks later, curious. They're sitting around the console, sipping tea and coffee and nibbling on some of Sora's mothers homemade sugar cookies. The Doctor looks away from a wire he's idly toying with and smiles, cookie crumbs clinging to the corner of his mouth.
"That he's glad you're happy."
.
Skip, skip, skip- the record player skips on an on, fractured and broken- never quite whole, but perfect anyway. Axel's chest is still quiet, but the emotion in his eyes speaks volumes.
.
(Somewhere, a star is being born.)
.
They’re in the Quallison quadrant chasing down a petty crook who plans on taking over the universe with a garbage ship (“Really! A ship full of rubbish! What does he plan on doing? Threaten us with a couple hundred kilos of trash until we cower in fear? HA!”) when Axel gets sick. The coughing starts when they’re crawling through the rubbish heap, so it’s easily explained away as a reaction to the garbage. Allergies and what not.
He’s still a bit under the weather when they make it back to the TARDIS, flushed with victory despite the general smell that’s lingering about their persons, but when the Doctor asks, he just waves them away.
“It’s all right,” he sighs, pressing a messy kiss to Roxas’ curls. “I’m just- I’ll have a bath. It’ll be fine. Sleep. Rest. All this running is kind of exhausting.”
The Doctor and Roxas share a glance. Axel loves the running. Just last week he’d said it was better than Martha Stewart’s chocolate cake. Not a statement to be taken lightly.
He frowns grumpily when he sees their expressions and huffs. “It’s fine. Promise. I just need to... not suck so much. Feel sucky. Whatever.”
And with that, he meanders off towards the bathrooms.
The Doctor looks at Roxas for a moment before rolling his eyes. “Well, what are you doing? Shoo! Shoo! Better make sure he doesn’t drown.”
Roxas goes to do just that, because he doesn’t really need the Doctor’s permission to go shampoo his boyfriend’s hair when he’s feeling sick.
He doesn’t drown, even though there’s a minute where he drops into sleep, sliding down into the bubbles until his head’s resting on Roxas’ chest just above the waterline.
When they’re cocooned in their blankets, Roxas asks again.
“And you’re sure you’re okay?”
Axel just snuffles sleepily in reply and kisses the edge of Roxas’ ear. “Never better, Rox.”
.
The next morning Roxas wakes up to Axel wheezing into his shoulder- great gasping breaths and sounds emitting from his nose that are vaguely reminiscent to a flock of Canadian geese. It isn’t the best sound in the world to wake up to, and for a moment he seriously contemplates smothering Axel with a pillow and just going back to sleep.
The TARDIS hums quietly around him, quiet. He can’t hear the Doctor.
He spends several minutes watching the shadows play over the ceiling, light spilling in from the hall- listens to Axel breathe.
When the Doctor pokes his head in a few minutes later, brows near his hairline, Roxas just shakes his head and smiles wryly. “So,” he starts, taking a moment to brush a few strands of hair away from Axel’s face, “know of a planet with some decent soup?”
.
As it turns out, the Doctor happens to know many places with good soup. They get the soup from Laerta XVI and some medicine from a little planet nearby. Apparently, with all the advances in medicine over the centuries, the common cold has managed to evade destruction.
For his part, Axel mostly just complains.
“But I don’t like chicken noodle.”
and
“Roooooooxas, I huuuuuurt.”
and
“Make it stop.”
and
“But I don’t want to shower alone.”
The last, is a bit more endearing than irritating, which is why Roxas actually lets himself get talked beneath the spray so Axel can rub all over him and wheeze happily against his neck.
The Doctor learns to distance himself from Axel after two excruciating days of Axel being the most insufferable asshole in the entire world. He whines and moans and buries himself in a heap of quilts that magically appear on their bed, as if even the TARDIS is sick of him bitching about how she can never quite get the temperature just right.
Most of the time, Roxas stays in bed with him, occasionally slinking out into the kitchen to get procure tea and/or sustenance. Sometimes during the night, when Axel’s breathing is a bit too loud, he’ll creep down the hall and into the library, or into the Aether, where he’ll almost surely find the Doctor.
The Doctor assures him that it’s just a bug- no real reason to worry, but Roxas does anyway.
He worries.
(Axel gets better just as Roxas is starting to sniffle. Figures.)
.
They run into Larxene once. It’s just the once, and it isn’t really Larxene anyways.
The woman who Larxene once was is confident and charming, blonde hair in a wild tangle down her back and blue eyes sharp and too clever behind a pair of slim spectacles. She’s sarcastic and biting, and really, a bit of a bitch, but she helps them corral her fellow villagers away from town while the Doctor attempts to combat the gigantic man eating teletubbies that have started walking around.
Roxas stands next to her and watches as she bickers with her older brother (and what kind of name is Gaston, anyway?) and feels a smile crawl it’s way onto his face as the woman bares her teeth at the older man in a familiar snarl. Cowed, her brother backs down, and Larxene (not Larxene, not her- not really) grins and flops back against some tree roots with an old, leather bound book.
He watches her until she notices, scowling and gesturing for him to join her.
They talk about books and monsters and older brothers, and when the Doctor and Axel come back, Roxas finds that he almost wants to say something else to her. To warn her, maybe.
The words are licking around his teeth, trying to find a way out, because she’s smiling at him and twirling straw yellow hair around her little finger and he doesn’t want her to die.
Axel gently grasps him by the wrist, and with a quiet goodbye, leads him away.
Fixed points, the Doctor would say.
Roxas wonders if she remembered them later- when she was Larxene. If she knew that they’d gotten their happy ending after all. If maybe that’s why she hated them so much.
He joins the Doctor at the console and idly toys with a gear. Flips it forward- back- and again and again until the TARDIS makes something explode in warning.
The Doctor asks him where he’d like to go, and he smiles over at Axel.
“Anywhere.”
.
He doesn’t know how it happened. All he knows, is that one minute he was crouched next to Axel desperately avoiding stray bullets, and the next he was waking up next to a corpse.
As if the corpse wasn’t enough to worry about, the place where he woke up was not only nowhere near Cardiff in the 1930s, but also appeared to be sporting three moons in the night sky.
So, not Earth.
Got it.
Wherever he is, there isn’t just one corpse. There are dozens.
And some of them seem to be moving.
Roxas sighs. As a rule, he’s learned to accept that the Doctor has a very strict no guns policy. In the recent years-weeks-months-centuries that they’ve been aboard his ship, he seems to have made an exception for only keyblades and the occasional firestorm. But he’s not too fond of weapons.
Axel likes to speculate that it’s because he’s trying to not compensate for something in a strange Doctorish way.
Roxas knows that it’s because the Doctor remembers how it feels to use them.
All the same. There’s a woman with half of her face sloughing off of sharp yellow cheekbones in fatty gray chunks and the keyblade flinches away when he reaches for it. The corpse next to Roxas has a gun in his hand and a bullet between his eyes. He, thankfully, is not moving.
So Roxas puts the thought of Doctor and his morals to one side and grabs the gun. Lines up a shot.
Pulls the trigger.
.
It’s not that he doesn’t trust the Doctor to come get him. He does, implicitly. And even if the Doctor hadn’t wanted to come get him, there’s no way that Axel would have accepted it. He would get that look on his face, the stubborn one- scowl twisting his lips and jaw tensed up tight, and he wouldn’t accept no for an answer. He would come get Roxas, even if he had to drag the Doctor along behind him.
It’s just that he likes to have a second option.
The planet that he’s on is somewhere in the YRFJ quadrant, twenty-two hundred light years away from Earth. It has four moons, actually- not the three he’d seen before. The fourth had been hiding in the second’s shadow, and he hadn’t noticed it until the first sun had started to rise against the horizon- sending magenta and violet whirls throughout the sky.
The lighting would have been pretty if it hadn’t cast a dim red glow over the already grizzly battlefield.
Finding help is the first thing he does.
The group of survivors are the ones who tell him where he is and exactly what is going on. He doesn’t stay with them for long, but it’s enough to realize that the entire planet is in the middle of a lockdown, and has been so for the past twenty four years.
They tell him that they’re in the middle of white space- that the disease had crept onto their planet aboard a slave ship and that it had overrun them, same as it had all the neighboring planets.
When he’d asked about disease control, they’d laughed at him. A woman with a plastic eye had grinned with two blackened teeth and said, “sonny, if ya’ think ya’ can control it, ya’ got a’notha thing comin’.”
White Zones. Dead Space. Planets of the dead.
Shuttles carted the disease between planets in the form of stowaways or rich folk with enough money to pull through a decent bribe. They always left in the hopes that other planets would have a cure, fighting to hold onto that last bit of humanity.
Some turned on the way, and passed the virus through the ship. A ship of ravenous monsters, ever moving through space, just waiting for the one sorry soul unlucky enough to happen upon it.
Others turned once they’d arrived, and from there, the disease would spread.
Mostly, Roxas just figures that he needs to stay away from the teeth and the fluids.
He can keep that up until the Doctor comes to get him.
He can.
.
The thing is- months pass. Time passes and the gun starts to feel less of an unnecessary weight and more of an extension of his arm.
The sight and smell of rotten flesh becomes commonplace.
When he breathes, he can taste the stench of this world- decaying, rotting from the inside in a way that even the heartless had never managed. Some days, he wakes up to the taste of blood on his teeth and panics before he realizes that he’s chewed his tongue to a pulp while he’d slept.
He rarely eats, and when he manages to get a hold of food, he has to pick the maggots and weevils out- shoo away the flies. The world is curdling around him like rotten milk and Roxas doesn’t know what to do.
He isn’t exceedingly clever. He’s brave enough to be a keyblade master, strong enough to hold the monsters at bay. He’s smart enough to stay a few steps ahead of the average human, but what he needs to be able to do is circumnavigate the stars. He needs a ship. A TARDIS.
He misses the TARDIS.
He misses the Doctor.
He misses Axel.
He waits some more.
.
A year passes, and the only thing that marks the anniversary is that Roxas takes out an entire nest.
.
Two years, six months, fourteen days, and a handful of seconds.
Axel looks exhausted and terrified, but so overwhelmingly relieved that for a moment, Roxas forgets that he’s standing on top of an overturned confection stand, covered in three months worth of blood and grime. There are still walkers around, but they’re over fifty feet away and Axel and the TARDIS are within eye sight.
He runs, gun slapping his side, a vice grip on the axe he’d gotten his hand on a couple weeks ago. He cuts them down as he goes, pretending that the axe in his hand is his keyblade and the creatures dropping beneath each blow are heartless- that they don’t have human faces, and that the Doctor won’t be horrified when he sees first hand what Roxas has done.
Fifty meters.
Twenty five.
Ten.
Five.
He collapses into Axel’s arms and lets their momentum take them past the doors and into the TARDIS. The door shuts behind them and the TARDIS purrs, as if welcoming him back.
Roxas presses his face up against the nape of Axel’s neck and tries not to cry.
.
It’s been two weeks since he disappeared.
Two weeks.
“It was a Rift, see. Well- The Rift, rather.”
“Roxas, please. We’re sorry.”
Two weeks.
Eventually, Axel asks him how long he’d been there.
Roxas looks at him.
He feels older, he’s pretty sure. His body’s grown- not much, but enough. He’s taller now, and his voice is ever so slightly deeper. There are scars pockmarking his body that hadn’t been there before, some pink and fresh while others are moon-white. There are bruises beneath his eyes and Roxas has been able to count each of his ribs since that first month. Axel presses a kiss to the top vertebrae- cervical, and then to his occipital bone, dotting little kisses around to his zygomatic arches. A single kiss to the center of his forehead, the frontal lobe- the best place to take out a walker.
He shudders and doesn’t look the Doctor in the eyes.
He tries to smile.
(It trembles.)
“I’m not really sure,” he says. Something on the console releases a hiss of steam, and he smiles, because the TARDIS really knows him too well.
Later, he lies in a real bed- clean and warm and loved, halfway wrapped around a faintly snoring Axel, and whispers, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.”
.
Somewhere, there’s a star that’s collapsing into a black hole. It’s inevitable, really. Infinite space and time, of course there’s something dying somewhere. Somewhere else, there’s a baby being born. A newly hatched bird wriggling free of its shell. A brand new plant in the rainforest springing up from the decaying bark of an older giant. A star bursting into life. The universe in flux, ever changing, forever in a constant loop of life and death.
Less common, are the things that stand still. The things that get stuck in stone -in time- and stay there, unmovable. There is a man named Captain Jack Harkness, who did not always go by that name, and will one day be known as another. There is Merlin, forever waiting. Flamel, with his stone. One day, there will be a man called Rory Williams, the Lone Centurion, the boy who waited. One day, the Doctor will even know him.
Past Cygnus X-1 and Orion’s belt, there is a planet that never moves-- man made and completely impossible.
Here, there is a lonely old alien and his blue box- a man who has lost his home and his people, but gained a place amongst the hearts of the stars.
There is a boy, born from the inexplicable friction between body and soul-- a boy who should never have drawn breath, but exists, and loves all the same.
And there is a man that isn’t really a man- a man that goes by the name of Axel, who used to be called Lea, who doesn’t have a heartbeat. He does not age, and when he bleeds, the substance is neither red nor is it liquid.
He is looking for his heart.
Throw maps, compasses, and calenders out the window-- and set a course for the unknown.
.