[Fic] Axel/Roxas - trapped in the amber of the moment
Title: trapped in the amber of the moment [Ao3]
Series: Kingdom Hearts
Pairing/Characters: Axel/Roxas, Sora, Riku
Rating: PG-13
Total length: 2048 words
Warnings: An ungodly fusion of cyberpunk and steampunk that may have worked, but quite possibly did not.
Summary: "Those machines have no use of a heart. Don't come crying to me when you have a revolution on your hands."
Author's Note: Written for halcyon_iota at my Kingdom Hearts meme. I have no idea where this came from. It wrote itself. Well, I bothered Nick pretty frequently about coding, computer viruses, and whether oil could be converted into acid. Prompt was We wear our scarves just like a noose, but not 'cause we want eternal sleep / And though our parts are slightly used, new ones are slave labor you can keep. Title from Kurt Vonnegut- “Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.” The naughty words are various swear words from Star Wars. Bishwag is a swear word used by many humans during the last decades of the Old Republic to indicate an untrustworthy being. Ish'ka is a Yuuzhan Vong swear word used to indicate one's displeasure with a situation. This isn't necessarily a Star Wars fusion, but I like their swear words. :)
.
They put Roxas's heart on display in the year of 3044. The Museum of Science and Invention was as good a final resting place for it as any, with it's meticulously cobwebbed hallways and the rusted gears lining it's floor. The copper and brass paneling zigzagging across glass walls designed to resemble the teal solar sails of the Earth's first intergalactic flagship.
It's a good place for a clockwork heart, still whirring and ticking though the body is long gone.
.
Forty four years previous, Roxas was first getting his heart. The engineer who created it laughed at him when he reached for it, synthetic skin scratching against the old man's grizzled ones. "Hasty, are we? One would think that your handler should receive it," he'd said, grinning widely, his mouth a flash of gold in the shade. Roxas had lagged, confused, and Sora had reached forward to take it for him.
"We thank you," Sora had said, taking the glinting brass instrument out of the man's hands and bowing low. The man laughed again. "Don't know why," he'd spat. "Those machines have no use of a heart. Don't come crying to me when you have a revolution on your hands."
He'd left before Sora had straightened out, leaving the stench of cigar smoke drifting after him like a mournful pet.
"Bishwag," Sora hissed at the man's retreating back, hands curling around his cargo. Roxas watched him grind his teeth together, growling and spitting out a few more curses before he pulled back, running one hand through his hair as he attempted to get a hold of himself. "Ish'ka!"
After a moment, he turned to Roxas, a sheepish smile curling around his mouth. "I apologize brother, that was uncouth of me."
Roxas smiles at his brother ([c: prf\brother\RXS>affection]) and nods. "True. He was quite irritating though."
Sora laughs at him, throwing his head back and showing his teeth, pearl white and perfectly straight. Roxas lets his smile widen ([c: prf\brother\RXS>amusement]) and inclines his head ever so slightly. The object in Sora's grasp glitters in the light filtering through the windows of the hall and Roxas reaches again, curious. This time, his brother lets him take it.
He runs his hands along the object, fingertips registering the cold and the jagged edges-the gears that make up the center. He runs acrylic nails along the crevasse, and the contraption springs open. The inside of it is intricate,-amethyst for love, emeralds for curiosity, intellect, and mischief, rubies for anger and passion, sapphires for peace and tranquility, diamonds for strength. The gemstones are cut in triangular patterns so small that they look as if they are one part of a whole. When he looks away from it, Sora is grinning at him, eyebrows near his hairline. He tucks a hand over Roxas's and leans in, towards his ear-whispers, "Now comes the fun part."
.
Sora is a pilot-a soldier of fortune. A hero, conqueror, opportunist-the son and heir of one of the most powerful men in the galaxy. But first and foremost, he is a scientist.
He builds onto the clockwork heart, tweaks the gemstones and shifts the gears to perfection, and in the end, he has one of his most loyal friends cut out a piece of his heart. A small piece, the barest scrapings of cells that he applies to the center of Roxas's heart the moment he is off the operation table. Riku watches him carefully, exchanging worried looks with Roxas as they watch Sora tinker with magnifying glasses and miniscule knives. "Is this wise, Sora?" Riku asks, the white of his hair all but mixing with the white of his labcoat. His sleeves are flecked in red, slick with the mucous coating Sora's heart.
"Probably not," Sora hums cheerfully. Roxas cannot look away from the stitching in his chest, small precise black lines that eerily resemble a mouth. Riku makes a concerned noise, and Sora turns to look at him, blue eyes manic behind his glasses. He smiles. "Don't worry about it," he says. "I'll be perfectly fine."
When he turns a few minutes later, he tells Roxas to boot down. "Don't worry about a thing, bro. When you wake up, you'll have a brand new heart."
[SHUTDOWN /r /m \\serverRXS /d P:2:17]
"Roxas."
Formatting C drive
Installing backup file [RXS_hrt_0138].....
Rebooting System...
When his eyes open, the first thing he notices is that his heart is ticking. He takes a deep breath, and the feel of it nearly knocks him off the table. Sora is smiling, Riku over his shoulder looking wary. "So how do you feel?" Sora asks.
He doesn't know. There's an emotion growing in his chest, no coding behind his eyelids to tell him what to feel, except-[c: prf\brother\RXS>love]
[ERROR. System stability compromised
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE
Reconfiguring System
Shutdown -r -f -t 45]
Formatting C drive
Installing backup file [RXS_hrt_0138].....
Rebooting System...
"Okay, so I'll be the first to admit that it had a couple of glitches," Sora tells him, looking pale, sweat clinging to his brow. "I promise you should be good now, though."
He is good. He's great.
.
The side effects hit him a week later when his heart starts pumping acid in place of the oil that had run through his veins before. The oil now corrosive and near impossible.
The glitch lasts three days and eats through the synthetic skin at the hollow of his throat before Sora replaces his tubing with a more hardy construct. Sora looks apologetic as he wraps his scarf around the hole in Roxas's throat, his exposed gears leaving Roxas feeling strangely naked. "We'll fix the hole once we figure out what the hell is wrong with your blood," he tells Roxas.
Three days after the scarf, they switch the mechanical oil to a coolant that the heart accepts.
Three days after the coolant, the heart starts pumping blood.
Sora looks bemused, because there are impossibilities and then there are impossibilities.
.
"Your heart is growing," Sora tells him, frowning down at the innards of Roxas' chest.
"An impossibility."
Sora looks at him. "No, Roxas. The cells from my heart-they're expanding, they're growing."
This Roxas can deal with. This is not an impossibility. Humans have been growing their own hearts for years, stem cells and emergency surgeries, but never had it occurred to him that a heart would grow in a synthetic body.
.
His heart grows until he does have a fully functional heart sitting in his chest. He grows with it, learning new things about all the different emotions that he feels every day.
.
He meets Axel a year after he gets his heart.
He doesn't know how the computer virus gets past his security protocols, but it brings him down from the inside, crumpling him in his room where he shakily reboots his systems until he has to perform an emergency shutdown and hope that Sora finds him.
.
Sora doesn't find him, Axel does.
When he wakes, red hair is all he can see, synthetic as his own, but poorly made, the plastic tips fraying at the ends. Roxas blinks when the man pulls back, cautiously checking his protocols in case anything was damaged in the crash. Nothing is, but his coding is subtly different, the errors fixed by the man across from him rather than himself or Sora.
"I'm sorry," the man says. "I really am. I didn't know my virus was going to latch onto another humanoid, I just-"
"You were just stealing secrets from the heir of the most powerful man alive," Roxas states, pleased when the other humanoid flinches.
"I-yeah. I guess I was," he admits, shrugging. He glares defensively. "You gonna report me?"
He could. Hell, he really should. If there's someone out there trying to hack into Sora's secrets, Sora should probably know. But then again, Roxas can always upgrade their security. Even enlist the guy in front of him for help. God knows that the guy can make a truly spectacular virus, which just means that he might be able to create an ever more spectacular security system.
"No, I don't think I will."
.
The guy's name is Axel, and the reason he can create such a destructive virus is that's how he started. That the virus that took Roxas down was a part of him, replicated and cast out to extract Sora's secrets. That's Axel's origin story-computer virus that some German hackers stuffed into the synthetic body of an android they'd stolen from some government labs. Apparently Axel's model was scheduled to be scrapped, that it wasn't on par with the government's standards. Axel grins ferally and tells him about his time before, endless streams of data and just that driving desire to infiltrate, replicate, and destroy. He sounds like he misses it.
Roxas enlists his help, asking him to help upgrade their systems instead of going back to his makers-tells him that machines should stick together. Axel just shrugs and tells him that he never liked his family anyway.
.
It's a bit harder explaining things to Sora.
.
Another thing that had never occurred to Roxas was his heart's capacity for love. The idea that he could develop affections for anyone besides his brother would have been ludicrous to him three years ago. But now he watches Axel in Sora's lab, a labcoat draped around his shoulders and his hair pulled back into a messy braid. He watches Axel's hands against various compounds, listens to him explain viruses to Sora more thoroughly than even an expert. No one has ever had an actual virus to theorize with, and shortly after Axel, Sora has revolutionized the world's view on computer viruses. He gives Axel credit, of course, even if nobody pays attention to that. Humanity as a whole has a tendency to view any synthetic being as scrap. Sora gets the credit and looks guilty. Axel tells him it's all right and grins over at Roxas, as if they're sharing some kind of inside joke.
Hell, maybe they are.
He smiles back.
His heart feels like it's growing again.
.
The first time they kiss, his heart swells so much that it feels like it will burst.
When he asks Sora to check it for him and explains the situation, Sora laughs at him, affection in his eyes, and shakes his head.
"There's nothing wrong with you, Roxas. You're experiencing love."
.
When Sora dies, they try to repossess Roxas's heart. Riku sneaks them out of their home, Axel's hand clenched tight to his as Riku shoves them out into the maze of tunnels beneath the house-telling them to go-and not look back.
They're halfway through the tunnels when they hear the gunshots.
They run.
.
Grief is the worst emotion, one that dwells solely in the replica of Sora's heart that sits in his chest. There are no gemstones for grief, and he feels it sharper than all others. He grieves for Sora and Riku in the rundown shack they've hidden themselves in, and when he sobs into Axel's chest, saline solution soaking into Axel's blood-spotted labcoat, his heart feels as if it might break.
.
Two weeks later, they issue an order for the shut down and scrapping of two rebel synthetics. Roxas watches Axel and listens to the radio as the description is given. Axel looks at him, frowns, and touches a fingertip to the radio. The man's voice is drowned out by the sound of static, and after a moment, the station goes dead.
Axel gives him a sad smile and wriggles his fingers. "Virus."
.
Three weeks in, Axel asks him what he wants to do.
Roxas thinks back on the man who created the framework of his heart. The one who had given him the basest clockwork heart that Sora had filled with love. He thinks of what he'd told Sora that day, a sneer on his face. He thinks of, "Those machines have no use of a heart. Don't come crying to me when you have a revolution on your hands."
"I want to change the world," he tells Axel, listening to Sora's heart thumping away in his chest.
.
Four weeks in.
They start a revolution.