[let the water take me] Part III
Title: let the water take me [3/3]
Series: Kingdom Hearts
Summary: It's a love story, see? There's blood in the water and the sharks are coming. Siren-Serial Killer AU.
They spend their second day in Traverse Town, because there’s a festival going on in the Third District that Axel seems mildly interested in. As far as Roxas is concerned, it’s a bit silly-food and dancing and merriment, little children scattered here and there.
They dress up in fancy clothes for a picture booth-Axel squeezing into a pair of breeches and shrugging on a gorgeous overcoat. He even lets the girl at the booth pull some of his hair back into a ponytail, spritzing some hairspray over it. He grins at Roxas and leans over to whisper into his ear.
"Y'know, this would be perfect if you could whip out those teeth of yours. The pirate and the mermaid," he grins, playfully tousling Roxas' hair as he sulkily lets himself be dressed as a bar wench.
"We aren't mermaids. Mermaids are for kids books," he growls.
He lets some of his teeth show when the camera flashes anyway.
When they're back in normal clothes they ride something called a ferris wheel and Axel buys Roxas a stuffed whale because he thinks he’s the height of hilarity. The day isn’t completely wasted, though, because that's the day that Axel introduces him to candy apples-the one human food that Roxas hasn’t been completely disgusted by.
That night, they both visit the bar down the street and entice a young woman back to their hotel room with them. She’s pretty-inky dark hair spilling down her back and mischievous eyes so dark that they’re nearly black.
Her laughter reminds him of whale song, and her kisses taste like the sea. She reminds him of home, mixed blood in her veins and fire in her eyes. He wonders if she can hear the sea calling her, or if she’s oblivious to her heritage. He supposes it doesn’t matter.
As it happens, mixed blood isn’t all that different from human.
.
“Look, I appreciate that you’re enthusiastic, bu-”
Roxas glares at Axel’s flaccid cock and tries mouthing the head. It gives a halfhearted twitch but ultimately droops back down onto his thigh. Roxas glares some more.
It had been a great idea in theory when Roxas was pressing kisses down his chest, licking and sucking bruises into the pale skin there-peeling his pants down his hips and mouthing at his hipbones. But seeing Roxas down there, his lips wrapped around Axel’s cock...
Apparently while Axel didn’t give a shit about Roxas sucking on his jugular, he wasn’t all that okay with the idea of those teeth being so close to his junk.
“I’m sorry?” he whimpers when Roxas levels the glare at him rather than his cock.
Roxas sighs and crawls up Axel’s body until he’s sitting on his stomach, the briefs that Axel let him borrow pushed down past his balls. “Your loss,” he says simply and wraps a hand around his own dick.
When he comes, he does so all over Axel’s face and kisses him on the forehead.
Well, Axel’s finally hard.
.
“No-it isn’t-like this, see?” Axel places a hand atop his, guiding it gently. Roxas snorts.
“I don’t understand why you’re making me do this.”
Axel doesn’t take his eyes away from the road but tightens his grip on Roxas’s hand. He flinches when a bird swoops in low. “Because you need to learn.”
Roxas rolls his eyes. “Do not.”
“Yes, you do,” Axel growls through gritted teeth, knuckles white from where he’s gripping his thigh.
“Nope.”
Axel flinches again when they pass too closely to a pedestrian, the woman shouting after them angrily. He lets a few seconds pass before he speaks. “What if I’m hurt? Or need some emergency bedrest?”
“Then we stop at a hotel.”
“And how do we get to the hotel?” he asks incredulously.
Roxas grins at him. “You drive yourself, moron.”
Axel shrieks when the car jolts forward, nearly rear-ending the car in front of them. “No-no-gently on the gas-” A semi-truck lays on its horn as they speed around it. “Fuck, we’re going to die.”
Roxas smirks at him. “You’re the one who insisted on this.”
“Other lane! Other lane!” he yells, grabbing the wheel to swerve them out of the way of incoming traffic. Roxas laughs.
“Hey, this is kind of fun.”
.
The drives are actually pretty nice. Every day Roxas pulls a new book out of the back of the car and reads with the sun in his face and the breeze in his hair-Axel smoking cigarettes idly next to him.
“I still don’t know how you smoke those things,” Roxas says, even as he’s holding out a hand for a hit. Axel rolls his eyes and flicks his ear, handing the cigarette over. There’s 90s rock playing on the radio, and every so often, Axel will start singing along with it while Roxas sighs next to him, as if it physically pains him to listen. So Axel sings even louder, cooing love songs in Roxas’s ear and pretending that he can’t see him smiling.
When they get too bored with the driving, they’ll pull over and pretend to hitchhike until some idiot stops to pick them up. The unsuspecting drivers always seem surprised when they wind up with a blade to the throat and a hungry siren grinning down at them.
During the walk back to their car, Axel will bump Roxas’s shoulder and tease him about his sloppy eating. Sometimes-depending on how busy the road is, Roxas will push Axel back against a tree, or even down into the grass, and fuck him until he whimpers. On one memorable occasion, Roxas bends him over a guardrail and fucks him hard enough that there are bruises on Axel’s hips for a week from where the hot metal was pressing into him.
It’s the happiest Axel’s ever been in his life.
.
They stop in a place called Radiant Garden, a few hundred miles outside of Twilight Town. It’s a gorgeous city, so once they check into their hotel, they spend the rest of the day wandering around, checking out the sights and keeping an eye out for anyone suspicious. Thus far, they’ve been lucky. Not counting the first, there have been three tails that they’ve had to dispatch. The first two were about as easy to take out as the guy at the gas station, but they run into some complications with the last one. Axel had ended up on his back in the hotel room as Roxas stitched up a knife wound in his side, the boy talking to him gently the whole time.
The look on Roxas’s face the moment the knife had slid home-horrified, then utterly feral-it scared Axel. He’d torn the man’s throat out before Axel had hit the ground, scales creeping up the side of his neck-eyes going a deep, eerie blue.
After that, they’d been more careful. It wasn’t a game anymore.
The fact that Roxas had been scared-terrified-in the aftermath, petting Axel’s face even as his teeth fluctuated between deadly and human every few seconds, like there was something in Roxas that couldn’t tell whether Axel was friend or food... They don’t talk about it, or about the way that Roxas had rushed Axel back to the car, driving like a bat out of hell even though Axel repeatedly told him he was okay. When they reached the hotel, Roxas had grabbed Axel’s credit card and booked them a room himself before going back to haul Axel out of the car and up the elevator.
They didn’t talk about it.
.
Their first night in town, they run into a woman pushing a flower cart near the Bailey that has Roxas stopping in his tracks, growling low in his throat. When she turns, Axel can see why. There’s a pink flower tucked behind her left ear, and she’s wearing a long pink dress, but Axel knows her on sight, even if he was three the last time he saw her.
Back then, she was like a dream that he hardly remembered. Just laughter and the smell of the sea, but now-now she’s real.
“Aerith,” he breathes, his hand dropping Roxas’s so he can take a half a step forward.
Roxas hisses at her when she turns to face them and steps between them. “You know her?” he growls, teeth dangerously sharp. Before he has a chance to respond, Aerith gasps.
“Axel?” she whispers, hand going to her mouth. A moment later, she’s flung herself around Roxas and into his arms, clutching desperately at the small of his back. She’s babbling, he realizes, looking down at her in confusion, and when she pulls back, there are tears in her eyes. “I didn’t know-I thought-Axel, they told me that no one survived.”
He goes tense, stuck staring at the pink of the flower and the thin tendrils of dark hair curling around it. There’s blood roaring in his ears, and he’s back to that night-gunshots and the sound of his mother drowning in her own blood. He can smell their corpses-Reno staring up at him with those milky dead eyes, the policemen shouting-he didn’t-he can’t-
“You knew about that?” he whispers into her hair, his eyes drifting from the flower to Roxas, just a few feet away and spitting mad. There’s confusion in his eyes, but mostly there’s anger, some jealousy-his teeth bared at Aerith, white-knuckled from suppressing the urge to tear her away.
She pulls back, confused. “Of course I did. I told Zack that they were coming that night. I wished for years that I hadn’t-if he’d stayed with me, he would have been alive.”
He takes deep breaths, willing himself to calm down-to claw his way free of the panic that’s wrapping its way around his throat. “You called the cops,” he whispers.
She nods. “I didn’t know what to do. Once I made it to the cove...”
“They were already dead,” he says, voice hollow.
She nods again, swallowing. “I didn’t know that you were alive, I swear. I would have taken you with me if I’d known.”
He closes his eyes, because if she’d taken him with her, who knows where he would be right now. He wouldn’t be killing people for the fun of it, he thinks. Maybe selling flowers with her-going to school at the university here in Radiant Garden. He could have grown up here, playing with other kids rather than putting bullets in people’s heads. He could have been here. But then, maybe Roxas would still be in that tank.
Opening his eyes again, he steps around her so that he’s at Roxas’s side. Without even asking-without even knowing-Roxas wraps his hand around Axel’s and tugs him closer until their sides are brushing. Aerith frowns at their hands for a moment, cocking her head. “Where...?”
“He saved me,” Roxas growls. “Rescued me from the humans, and he’s mine now. You can’t have him.”
She stares at him, uncomprehending, before bursting into laughter. Axel glances at Roxas, who looks helpless, like he doesn’t know what to do. After calming herself, Aerith steps closer to them, her spine straight and her shoulders back. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen another of our kind. I’d forgotten how territorial we tend to be.”
She looks at Axel fondly, pulling a photo out of her pocket and offering it to him. “Take it,” she grins. “You have more of a reason to have it than I.”
When he takes the photo, the first thing he notices is how worn down it is-the edges crinkled and fingerprints smudging the images, as if it’s been removed from its hiding place and looked at often. His breath catches when he really looks at it, Zack smiling up at him and Aerith tucked under his arm, grinning at someone just outside of the frame.
“Cloud took that on our fourth date,” she says quietly.
“Why did you stop coming then? If you kept seeing him?” he asks, tucking the photograph into his pocket.
Aerith smiles sadly and shakes her head. “I made him a target,” she whispers. “Didn’t you ever wonder why those people attacked you that night? They were looking for me. I tried so hard to distance myself-only seeing him when it was safe, and it didn’t even matter. They found you anyway.”
“Who did?”
She stares at him for a moment before her smile fades. “He caught me once, you know, and Zack got me out. He saved me,” she says, nodding at Roxas. “Zack saved me like your human saved you, and even then, we couldn’t see each other. I couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t go back to the sea.”
“But what was his name?” Axel hisses, fingers tightening around Roxas’s.
She looks away from them, at a vendor passing too close. When she looks back, her eyes are wet again. “His name was Mr. Rose,” she breathes, and Axel’s world grinds to a stop.
.
Later, before they leave her, she pulls him aside and out of Roxas’s earshot. Roxas paces the alleyway restlessly, glaring at them every couple seconds. “He’s using you, you know,” she whispers. “I’ve seen so many of our kind do this to humans-I can’t let it happen to you.”
Axel shakes his head. “He’s not.”
“Because he loves you, right? That’s how we work-we reel you in and make you love us until you think of nothing else, and then we drag you down with us. It’s a game-one that we always win.”
He scowls at her. “Well, what were you and Zack then?”
Her eyes soften, cool green peering down at the sidewalk. “It started like that. I found him in that cove of yours and I thought, ‘This man is going to be my first.’ My mouth watered when I thought of making him love me and then ripping him apart. But-I met you and Reno, his best friend Cloud, and when I went missing, he came looking for me. He saved me, even knowing what I was. And-I loved him for that.”
“Then who are you to say that we are any different?” When she just shakes her head, he sighs, setting out across the cobblestone and back to where Roxas is still pacing at the mouth of the alley.
“Axel?”
He turns, and she’s watching him, her mouth slanted in a crooked smile. “You look like him,” she calls. “Like Zack. Seeing you... it was like seeing a part of him I never thought I’d see again. Just, be careful, okay? For Zack.”
He nods and leaves her standing there.
.
When they get back to the hotel, Roxas turns to him and demands to know everything.
Axel tells him, plucking at the bracelet on his wrist over and over and over-
.
“We should have made him suffer,” Axel tells him later, when they’re sitting together in a quiet pub on the other side of the city. It’s late enough that the moon is hanging heavy in the sky, casting a soft glow through the big window next to the door. There’s a group of people standing there, laughing-their drinks sloshing out of their glasses and moonlight in their hair. It’s a pretty sight-happy-and Roxas thinks that he doesn’t want to hurt any of them. He was right, when he told Axel that their kind was catching.
He nods, taking a long swig of his beer. It isn’t the worst human invention, but it’s still pretty damn terrible. “We should have,” he says, leaning into Axel. He feels tired, his stomach cramping with hunger, and he doesn’t care. He just wants to take Axel back to their hotel room and sleep.
His legs itch. He’s too used to them by now-he’s almost forgotten what it feels like to be in his true form-the water swirling around him.
“There were more important things to consider, though,” he sighs, and threads his fingers together with Axel’s beneath the counter. Axel turns to him, confusion on his face.
“Escape was more important,” he says, and it feels like a lie on the back of his tongue. “You were important,” he amends, quietly, like he’s giving the air another secret to hold. He squeezes Axel’s hand and finishes his beer in one go. After a moment, Axel squeezes back.
.
They pick an older man who is trying to hide a wedding ring on his pudgy finger as he hits on Roxas-just another messy drunk looking for a good time. When Axel reappears at Roxas’s shoulder, he doesn’t even flinch, just starts making passes at him too.
They lead him into the alleyway next to the pub, and Roxas pulls out all the stops-even going so far as to hum a few bars of the song they’re playing into his ear-but it feels hollow.
When they get him out there, he fumbles for his belt, fingers clumsy with drink, and by the time he gets his belt unbuckled, Roxas has had enough.
He stands back and watches Axel work-watches the blade that Axel had strapped to his ankle slash across the man’s throat, painting the wall with spatters of red. The man gurgles, clutching at his throat, his pants slipping down to his ankles. There’s a can of accelerate on the ground that they’d left here earlier, and Roxas takes his time to douse the man with it. He sputters as some of it splashes into his mouth, still grasping at his ruined throat.
All that’s left is to light the match, so they do.
A match is struck, and the spark catches.
They watch him burn until his fingers stop twitching, and when they get back to the hotel, Axel pins Roxas to the wall, hoisting him up until Roxas’s legs lock around his hips. He fucks him there-deep, bruising thrusts that make Roxas cry out against Axel’s neck.
It’s desperate, hard, and fast, and it hurts.
He doesn’t care. They’re hurting-what does a little bit more matter?
Axel comes with a sob, buried inside of Roxas so deep that he can almost feel it. They breathe quietly in the silence, still joined together, Axel’s face buried in Roxas’s hair. He’s still clutching tight to Roxas’s hips, knuckles gone white, and Roxas knows that he will wake up with fingerprints there tomorrow.
“I think I love you,” Axel murmurs, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. Roxas’s heart misses a beat, and when it kicks back up, it’s racing.
“I know,” he whispers, stroking the tendrils of sweaty red hair away from Axel’s neck.
When Axel drops to his knees, Roxas closes his eyes and thinks ‘Guilt is a human dilemma.’
.
Twilight Town is nothing like the way he remembers it. The train is still there-the clock tower too. The whole place is just as warm and lively as it used to be, warm orange light casting shadows across the streets, friendly residents waving to them as they pass. Roxas knows without even having to ask him that this place is off limits-there will be no prey here-so they have lunch at a local eatery that Axel remembers from when he and Reno came here with Zack. There are kids drawings tacked to a portion of the wall-and to his surprise, his and Reno’s drawing is still there. It was just the one picture, both of them fighting for the crayon until Zack took it away from them and added his own touch.
It’s of their cove, the little house creaking and swaying on its stilted legs-the dock where their little boat was always tethered. There are four stick figures standing proudly in front of the surf-his and Reno’s hair done in a deep, fire-engine red and Zack and their mother’s scribbled in black.
Roxas hovers over his shoulder, concerned, and it’s he who removes the picture-folding it carefully and tucking it into Axel’s pocket.
After that, eating is a quiet affair. They both get fish and chips, and even if Roxas pushes his fries in Axel’s direction, he doesn’t complain once about the fish not being fresh enough.
.
On their way to the train station, they stop by the clock tower. Roxas squints at it, shielding his eyes from the sun. He grins at Axel, nudging his shoulder. “Hey, wanna go up there?”
Axel’s eyes widen. “Up there?” he asks incredulously, voice rising to something that he’ll never admit is a squawk.
“Well, yeah.”
Axel stares at him for a few seconds before his shoulders slump. “Sure, why not?”
.
Unsurprisingly, the top of the Clock Tower is very high up. They have to creep past security guards to get there, muffling giddy laughter into each others shoulders. Now that they’re here, Roxas is actually a little bit green from the height. “If you were scared of heights, why the hell did you suggest it?” Axel asks as Roxas rounds the corner carefully.
“Well, I didn’t know that I was scared of heights when I suggested it, now, did I?” Roxas growls, carefully not looking at the ground.
Axel laughs, and Roxas is almost around the corner when he bumps into someone-flailing backwards, arms windmilling wildly before Axel catches him, reeling him in so that his nose is pressed into his chest. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my fucking god,” Roxas is chanting before he realizes that Axel is talking to someone.
“-at the fuck are you doing up here? You could have killed him!”
And then, a voice that makes Roxas’s heart stop.
“Us? What the hell are you doing up here? Blondie there could have killed him!”
Carefully, he peels away from Axel’s chest and glances up at...
Riku.
Definitely Riku.
His hair is still the same white as it was the last time Roxas had seen him, and his green eyes are narrowed, teeth bared in a growl. And in his arms, in nearly a mirror of the way Axel had been holding him is...
“Sora,” he whispers, voice trembling as he takes in the wild brown hair tucked up beneath Riku’s chin. At his voice, Riku’s eyes widen, and the line of Sora’s back stops trembling, going utterly still.
When his brother turns to face him, his eyes are wide and blue and so very Sora that Roxas thinks he’s dreaming-that he’s finally gone crazy, because here is his brother, at the top of a tower in a town he’s never been to-miles away from Destiny Islands, and it’s Sora.
“Roxas!” Sora cries, flinging himself forward and into Roxas’s chest hard enough that Axel grunts, rocking back on his heels as he tries to keep them all from going over the side.
“We looked everywhere for you,” his brother sobs, rubbing his face into Roxas’s neck.
Slowly, Roxas wraps his arms around him, burying his nose in his brother’s hair and breathing in home.
.
They sit on the edge of the Clock Tower as Roxas explains things to Axel, his brother tucked close to his side. Riku still hasn’t said much, rubbing circles into Sora’s back as they talk, exchanging stories.
“Kairi’s back at home, because she doesn’t like heights, but we’ve been coming here for the last few months-the sunset is really gorgeous here. We love it.”
Roxas watches his brother, who is gesturing wildly and kicking his legs out over the open air in a way that speaks of familiarity.
“We’ve been looking for you, Roxas,” he repeats, eyes sad. “I couldn’t find you for so long. I thought you were dead.”
Sora’s skin is tanned, his hands rough with calluses. Roxas wonders when he was last home.
As he speaks, Roxas stares at him, his stomach like lead. When was the last time that Sora was in his true form? When did he become this reliant on his little human playmates? How-when was the last time he felt the waves?
He’s made the land his home as surely as it once was the sea.
Axel is quiet at his side, and when Roxas turns to look at him, he’s staring at the ground so far beneath them, legs kicking against the brick.
“And then-Roxas?”
Roxas looks at his brother and thinks, ‘I was his anchor to the sea. Without me, he just left.’
His brother made his own home. Now Roxas has to make his.
He grins at Sora and climbs to his feet, tugging Axel up with him. “I’m sorry-I really am. I love you, but there’s something that Axel and I need to do.”
Sora’s staring at him like he’s crazy, but he gets to his feet as well, a familiar pout chasing its way across his features. Roxas laughs and bumps their shoulders together. “Don’t worry, we’ll be back. We can go swimming. But... we really need to do something.”
He wraps his brother up in one last hug. “Meet us here tomorrow at sunset, okay? We’ll talk then.”
And because he never said it enough before-“I love you, okay? I missed you every day.”
He pulls away, still grinning, and tugs Axel towards the door. “What are you doing?” he’s growling. “Roxas!”
He laughs again, chest light. “Tomorrow at six! Don’t forget!”
They have a train to catch.
.
They take the train down to the cove, Axel’s heart beating out of his chest until Roxas curls his hand over it-gentle-and tells him that it’s distracting. So Axel tucks his hand on top of Roxas’s and leaves it there, feeling his heart slow beneath their joined palms.
.
The house is still there.
No one lives there, so Axel’s slightly surprised that it’s still standing. He stands in front of it for too long, listening to the scream of the gulls and the crash of the waves against the sand, unwilling to climb the mostly rotted wooden stairs. He stares at it until Roxas presses up against his back and wraps his arms around his waist.
“Why don’t we go for a swim first?” he whispers into Axel’s hair.
Axel shakes his head. “If I’m ever going to do this, it has to be now.”
The living room is covered in dust-the ugly plaid monstrosity his mother called a couch a shrine to the dust bunnies. Someone took it upon themselves to clean the blood from the carpet, and Axel thinks of Aerith and her flower cart-thinks of “Take care of yourself, for Zack,” and feels like crying. The stairs leading to the upstairs bedroom still creak in the same places, and he has to step around the place that he once saw Reno, as if his ghost is still there, lying in the same spot.
Roxas climbs the stairs with him, the quiet puffs of breath against Axel’s neck grounding him.
His and Reno’s room is tidier than it was that night, just a single fire truck in the middle of the floor, like a relic to the past. He bypasses that room completely, heading for Zack’s, except once he’s there, he doesn’t know what to do. He stands in the doorway, staring at the outdated computer on his desk and the dirty clothes on his floor. There’s a very faint imprint on one side of the bed, and he thinks of Aerith again, coming here time and time again just to linger in Zack's scent.
Biting his lip, he crawls into Zack’s closet and presses his nose to the suits still hanging there-moth-eaten and falling apart.
It’s only when Roxas crawls in after him, wrapping warm arms around his shoulders that the tears come.
Roxas rocks him through it.
He laughs brokenly against Roxas’s shoulder, and wonders how Aerith ever thought that Roxas didn’t love him.
.
Afterwards, when the sun is setting, Roxas wades into the water-lets it slosh around his hips and turns to Axel with a grin and an outstretched hand.
“Race you to the sandbar?” he laughs.
Axel grins.
He goes.
.
(Destiny Islands is lovely-white sands and clear blue water as far as the eye can see. Roxas grips his hand, and Axel thinks of a story he once heard.)
Series: Kingdom Hearts
Summary: It's a love story, see? There's blood in the water and the sharks are coming. Siren-Serial Killer AU.
They spend their second day in Traverse Town, because there’s a festival going on in the Third District that Axel seems mildly interested in. As far as Roxas is concerned, it’s a bit silly-food and dancing and merriment, little children scattered here and there.
They dress up in fancy clothes for a picture booth-Axel squeezing into a pair of breeches and shrugging on a gorgeous overcoat. He even lets the girl at the booth pull some of his hair back into a ponytail, spritzing some hairspray over it. He grins at Roxas and leans over to whisper into his ear.
"Y'know, this would be perfect if you could whip out those teeth of yours. The pirate and the mermaid," he grins, playfully tousling Roxas' hair as he sulkily lets himself be dressed as a bar wench.
"We aren't mermaids. Mermaids are for kids books," he growls.
He lets some of his teeth show when the camera flashes anyway.
When they're back in normal clothes they ride something called a ferris wheel and Axel buys Roxas a stuffed whale because he thinks he’s the height of hilarity. The day isn’t completely wasted, though, because that's the day that Axel introduces him to candy apples-the one human food that Roxas hasn’t been completely disgusted by.
That night, they both visit the bar down the street and entice a young woman back to their hotel room with them. She’s pretty-inky dark hair spilling down her back and mischievous eyes so dark that they’re nearly black.
Her laughter reminds him of whale song, and her kisses taste like the sea. She reminds him of home, mixed blood in her veins and fire in her eyes. He wonders if she can hear the sea calling her, or if she’s oblivious to her heritage. He supposes it doesn’t matter.
As it happens, mixed blood isn’t all that different from human.
.
“Look, I appreciate that you’re enthusiastic, bu-”
Roxas glares at Axel’s flaccid cock and tries mouthing the head. It gives a halfhearted twitch but ultimately droops back down onto his thigh. Roxas glares some more.
It had been a great idea in theory when Roxas was pressing kisses down his chest, licking and sucking bruises into the pale skin there-peeling his pants down his hips and mouthing at his hipbones. But seeing Roxas down there, his lips wrapped around Axel’s cock...
Apparently while Axel didn’t give a shit about Roxas sucking on his jugular, he wasn’t all that okay with the idea of those teeth being so close to his junk.
“I’m sorry?” he whimpers when Roxas levels the glare at him rather than his cock.
Roxas sighs and crawls up Axel’s body until he’s sitting on his stomach, the briefs that Axel let him borrow pushed down past his balls. “Your loss,” he says simply and wraps a hand around his own dick.
When he comes, he does so all over Axel’s face and kisses him on the forehead.
Well, Axel’s finally hard.
.
“No-it isn’t-like this, see?” Axel places a hand atop his, guiding it gently. Roxas snorts.
“I don’t understand why you’re making me do this.”
Axel doesn’t take his eyes away from the road but tightens his grip on Roxas’s hand. He flinches when a bird swoops in low. “Because you need to learn.”
Roxas rolls his eyes. “Do not.”
“Yes, you do,” Axel growls through gritted teeth, knuckles white from where he’s gripping his thigh.
“Nope.”
Axel flinches again when they pass too closely to a pedestrian, the woman shouting after them angrily. He lets a few seconds pass before he speaks. “What if I’m hurt? Or need some emergency bedrest?”
“Then we stop at a hotel.”
“And how do we get to the hotel?” he asks incredulously.
Roxas grins at him. “You drive yourself, moron.”
Axel shrieks when the car jolts forward, nearly rear-ending the car in front of them. “No-no-gently on the gas-” A semi-truck lays on its horn as they speed around it. “Fuck, we’re going to die.”
Roxas smirks at him. “You’re the one who insisted on this.”
“Other lane! Other lane!” he yells, grabbing the wheel to swerve them out of the way of incoming traffic. Roxas laughs.
“Hey, this is kind of fun.”
.
The drives are actually pretty nice. Every day Roxas pulls a new book out of the back of the car and reads with the sun in his face and the breeze in his hair-Axel smoking cigarettes idly next to him.
“I still don’t know how you smoke those things,” Roxas says, even as he’s holding out a hand for a hit. Axel rolls his eyes and flicks his ear, handing the cigarette over. There’s 90s rock playing on the radio, and every so often, Axel will start singing along with it while Roxas sighs next to him, as if it physically pains him to listen. So Axel sings even louder, cooing love songs in Roxas’s ear and pretending that he can’t see him smiling.
When they get too bored with the driving, they’ll pull over and pretend to hitchhike until some idiot stops to pick them up. The unsuspecting drivers always seem surprised when they wind up with a blade to the throat and a hungry siren grinning down at them.
During the walk back to their car, Axel will bump Roxas’s shoulder and tease him about his sloppy eating. Sometimes-depending on how busy the road is, Roxas will push Axel back against a tree, or even down into the grass, and fuck him until he whimpers. On one memorable occasion, Roxas bends him over a guardrail and fucks him hard enough that there are bruises on Axel’s hips for a week from where the hot metal was pressing into him.
It’s the happiest Axel’s ever been in his life.
.
They stop in a place called Radiant Garden, a few hundred miles outside of Twilight Town. It’s a gorgeous city, so once they check into their hotel, they spend the rest of the day wandering around, checking out the sights and keeping an eye out for anyone suspicious. Thus far, they’ve been lucky. Not counting the first, there have been three tails that they’ve had to dispatch. The first two were about as easy to take out as the guy at the gas station, but they run into some complications with the last one. Axel had ended up on his back in the hotel room as Roxas stitched up a knife wound in his side, the boy talking to him gently the whole time.
The look on Roxas’s face the moment the knife had slid home-horrified, then utterly feral-it scared Axel. He’d torn the man’s throat out before Axel had hit the ground, scales creeping up the side of his neck-eyes going a deep, eerie blue.
After that, they’d been more careful. It wasn’t a game anymore.
The fact that Roxas had been scared-terrified-in the aftermath, petting Axel’s face even as his teeth fluctuated between deadly and human every few seconds, like there was something in Roxas that couldn’t tell whether Axel was friend or food... They don’t talk about it, or about the way that Roxas had rushed Axel back to the car, driving like a bat out of hell even though Axel repeatedly told him he was okay. When they reached the hotel, Roxas had grabbed Axel’s credit card and booked them a room himself before going back to haul Axel out of the car and up the elevator.
They didn’t talk about it.
.
Their first night in town, they run into a woman pushing a flower cart near the Bailey that has Roxas stopping in his tracks, growling low in his throat. When she turns, Axel can see why. There’s a pink flower tucked behind her left ear, and she’s wearing a long pink dress, but Axel knows her on sight, even if he was three the last time he saw her.
Back then, she was like a dream that he hardly remembered. Just laughter and the smell of the sea, but now-now she’s real.
“Aerith,” he breathes, his hand dropping Roxas’s so he can take a half a step forward.
Roxas hisses at her when she turns to face them and steps between them. “You know her?” he growls, teeth dangerously sharp. Before he has a chance to respond, Aerith gasps.
“Axel?” she whispers, hand going to her mouth. A moment later, she’s flung herself around Roxas and into his arms, clutching desperately at the small of his back. She’s babbling, he realizes, looking down at her in confusion, and when she pulls back, there are tears in her eyes. “I didn’t know-I thought-Axel, they told me that no one survived.”
He goes tense, stuck staring at the pink of the flower and the thin tendrils of dark hair curling around it. There’s blood roaring in his ears, and he’s back to that night-gunshots and the sound of his mother drowning in her own blood. He can smell their corpses-Reno staring up at him with those milky dead eyes, the policemen shouting-he didn’t-he can’t-
“You knew about that?” he whispers into her hair, his eyes drifting from the flower to Roxas, just a few feet away and spitting mad. There’s confusion in his eyes, but mostly there’s anger, some jealousy-his teeth bared at Aerith, white-knuckled from suppressing the urge to tear her away.
She pulls back, confused. “Of course I did. I told Zack that they were coming that night. I wished for years that I hadn’t-if he’d stayed with me, he would have been alive.”
He takes deep breaths, willing himself to calm down-to claw his way free of the panic that’s wrapping its way around his throat. “You called the cops,” he whispers.
She nods. “I didn’t know what to do. Once I made it to the cove...”
“They were already dead,” he says, voice hollow.
She nods again, swallowing. “I didn’t know that you were alive, I swear. I would have taken you with me if I’d known.”
He closes his eyes, because if she’d taken him with her, who knows where he would be right now. He wouldn’t be killing people for the fun of it, he thinks. Maybe selling flowers with her-going to school at the university here in Radiant Garden. He could have grown up here, playing with other kids rather than putting bullets in people’s heads. He could have been here. But then, maybe Roxas would still be in that tank.
Opening his eyes again, he steps around her so that he’s at Roxas’s side. Without even asking-without even knowing-Roxas wraps his hand around Axel’s and tugs him closer until their sides are brushing. Aerith frowns at their hands for a moment, cocking her head. “Where...?”
“He saved me,” Roxas growls. “Rescued me from the humans, and he’s mine now. You can’t have him.”
She stares at him, uncomprehending, before bursting into laughter. Axel glances at Roxas, who looks helpless, like he doesn’t know what to do. After calming herself, Aerith steps closer to them, her spine straight and her shoulders back. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen another of our kind. I’d forgotten how territorial we tend to be.”
She looks at Axel fondly, pulling a photo out of her pocket and offering it to him. “Take it,” she grins. “You have more of a reason to have it than I.”
When he takes the photo, the first thing he notices is how worn down it is-the edges crinkled and fingerprints smudging the images, as if it’s been removed from its hiding place and looked at often. His breath catches when he really looks at it, Zack smiling up at him and Aerith tucked under his arm, grinning at someone just outside of the frame.
“Cloud took that on our fourth date,” she says quietly.
“Why did you stop coming then? If you kept seeing him?” he asks, tucking the photograph into his pocket.
Aerith smiles sadly and shakes her head. “I made him a target,” she whispers. “Didn’t you ever wonder why those people attacked you that night? They were looking for me. I tried so hard to distance myself-only seeing him when it was safe, and it didn’t even matter. They found you anyway.”
“Who did?”
She stares at him for a moment before her smile fades. “He caught me once, you know, and Zack got me out. He saved me,” she says, nodding at Roxas. “Zack saved me like your human saved you, and even then, we couldn’t see each other. I couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t go back to the sea.”
“But what was his name?” Axel hisses, fingers tightening around Roxas’s.
She looks away from them, at a vendor passing too close. When she looks back, her eyes are wet again. “His name was Mr. Rose,” she breathes, and Axel’s world grinds to a stop.
.
Later, before they leave her, she pulls him aside and out of Roxas’s earshot. Roxas paces the alleyway restlessly, glaring at them every couple seconds. “He’s using you, you know,” she whispers. “I’ve seen so many of our kind do this to humans-I can’t let it happen to you.”
Axel shakes his head. “He’s not.”
“Because he loves you, right? That’s how we work-we reel you in and make you love us until you think of nothing else, and then we drag you down with us. It’s a game-one that we always win.”
He scowls at her. “Well, what were you and Zack then?”
Her eyes soften, cool green peering down at the sidewalk. “It started like that. I found him in that cove of yours and I thought, ‘This man is going to be my first.’ My mouth watered when I thought of making him love me and then ripping him apart. But-I met you and Reno, his best friend Cloud, and when I went missing, he came looking for me. He saved me, even knowing what I was. And-I loved him for that.”
“Then who are you to say that we are any different?” When she just shakes her head, he sighs, setting out across the cobblestone and back to where Roxas is still pacing at the mouth of the alley.
“Axel?”
He turns, and she’s watching him, her mouth slanted in a crooked smile. “You look like him,” she calls. “Like Zack. Seeing you... it was like seeing a part of him I never thought I’d see again. Just, be careful, okay? For Zack.”
He nods and leaves her standing there.
.
When they get back to the hotel, Roxas turns to him and demands to know everything.
Axel tells him, plucking at the bracelet on his wrist over and over and over-
.
“We should have made him suffer,” Axel tells him later, when they’re sitting together in a quiet pub on the other side of the city. It’s late enough that the moon is hanging heavy in the sky, casting a soft glow through the big window next to the door. There’s a group of people standing there, laughing-their drinks sloshing out of their glasses and moonlight in their hair. It’s a pretty sight-happy-and Roxas thinks that he doesn’t want to hurt any of them. He was right, when he told Axel that their kind was catching.
He nods, taking a long swig of his beer. It isn’t the worst human invention, but it’s still pretty damn terrible. “We should have,” he says, leaning into Axel. He feels tired, his stomach cramping with hunger, and he doesn’t care. He just wants to take Axel back to their hotel room and sleep.
His legs itch. He’s too used to them by now-he’s almost forgotten what it feels like to be in his true form-the water swirling around him.
“There were more important things to consider, though,” he sighs, and threads his fingers together with Axel’s beneath the counter. Axel turns to him, confusion on his face.
“Escape was more important,” he says, and it feels like a lie on the back of his tongue. “You were important,” he amends, quietly, like he’s giving the air another secret to hold. He squeezes Axel’s hand and finishes his beer in one go. After a moment, Axel squeezes back.
.
They pick an older man who is trying to hide a wedding ring on his pudgy finger as he hits on Roxas-just another messy drunk looking for a good time. When Axel reappears at Roxas’s shoulder, he doesn’t even flinch, just starts making passes at him too.
They lead him into the alleyway next to the pub, and Roxas pulls out all the stops-even going so far as to hum a few bars of the song they’re playing into his ear-but it feels hollow.
When they get him out there, he fumbles for his belt, fingers clumsy with drink, and by the time he gets his belt unbuckled, Roxas has had enough.
He stands back and watches Axel work-watches the blade that Axel had strapped to his ankle slash across the man’s throat, painting the wall with spatters of red. The man gurgles, clutching at his throat, his pants slipping down to his ankles. There’s a can of accelerate on the ground that they’d left here earlier, and Roxas takes his time to douse the man with it. He sputters as some of it splashes into his mouth, still grasping at his ruined throat.
All that’s left is to light the match, so they do.
A match is struck, and the spark catches.
They watch him burn until his fingers stop twitching, and when they get back to the hotel, Axel pins Roxas to the wall, hoisting him up until Roxas’s legs lock around his hips. He fucks him there-deep, bruising thrusts that make Roxas cry out against Axel’s neck.
It’s desperate, hard, and fast, and it hurts.
He doesn’t care. They’re hurting-what does a little bit more matter?
Axel comes with a sob, buried inside of Roxas so deep that he can almost feel it. They breathe quietly in the silence, still joined together, Axel’s face buried in Roxas’s hair. He’s still clutching tight to Roxas’s hips, knuckles gone white, and Roxas knows that he will wake up with fingerprints there tomorrow.
“I think I love you,” Axel murmurs, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. Roxas’s heart misses a beat, and when it kicks back up, it’s racing.
“I know,” he whispers, stroking the tendrils of sweaty red hair away from Axel’s neck.
When Axel drops to his knees, Roxas closes his eyes and thinks ‘Guilt is a human dilemma.’
.
Twilight Town is nothing like the way he remembers it. The train is still there-the clock tower too. The whole place is just as warm and lively as it used to be, warm orange light casting shadows across the streets, friendly residents waving to them as they pass. Roxas knows without even having to ask him that this place is off limits-there will be no prey here-so they have lunch at a local eatery that Axel remembers from when he and Reno came here with Zack. There are kids drawings tacked to a portion of the wall-and to his surprise, his and Reno’s drawing is still there. It was just the one picture, both of them fighting for the crayon until Zack took it away from them and added his own touch.
It’s of their cove, the little house creaking and swaying on its stilted legs-the dock where their little boat was always tethered. There are four stick figures standing proudly in front of the surf-his and Reno’s hair done in a deep, fire-engine red and Zack and their mother’s scribbled in black.
Roxas hovers over his shoulder, concerned, and it’s he who removes the picture-folding it carefully and tucking it into Axel’s pocket.
After that, eating is a quiet affair. They both get fish and chips, and even if Roxas pushes his fries in Axel’s direction, he doesn’t complain once about the fish not being fresh enough.
.
On their way to the train station, they stop by the clock tower. Roxas squints at it, shielding his eyes from the sun. He grins at Axel, nudging his shoulder. “Hey, wanna go up there?”
Axel’s eyes widen. “Up there?” he asks incredulously, voice rising to something that he’ll never admit is a squawk.
“Well, yeah.”
Axel stares at him for a few seconds before his shoulders slump. “Sure, why not?”
.
Unsurprisingly, the top of the Clock Tower is very high up. They have to creep past security guards to get there, muffling giddy laughter into each others shoulders. Now that they’re here, Roxas is actually a little bit green from the height. “If you were scared of heights, why the hell did you suggest it?” Axel asks as Roxas rounds the corner carefully.
“Well, I didn’t know that I was scared of heights when I suggested it, now, did I?” Roxas growls, carefully not looking at the ground.
Axel laughs, and Roxas is almost around the corner when he bumps into someone-flailing backwards, arms windmilling wildly before Axel catches him, reeling him in so that his nose is pressed into his chest. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my fucking god,” Roxas is chanting before he realizes that Axel is talking to someone.
“-at the fuck are you doing up here? You could have killed him!”
And then, a voice that makes Roxas’s heart stop.
“Us? What the hell are you doing up here? Blondie there could have killed him!”
Carefully, he peels away from Axel’s chest and glances up at...
Riku.
Definitely Riku.
His hair is still the same white as it was the last time Roxas had seen him, and his green eyes are narrowed, teeth bared in a growl. And in his arms, in nearly a mirror of the way Axel had been holding him is...
“Sora,” he whispers, voice trembling as he takes in the wild brown hair tucked up beneath Riku’s chin. At his voice, Riku’s eyes widen, and the line of Sora’s back stops trembling, going utterly still.
When his brother turns to face him, his eyes are wide and blue and so very Sora that Roxas thinks he’s dreaming-that he’s finally gone crazy, because here is his brother, at the top of a tower in a town he’s never been to-miles away from Destiny Islands, and it’s Sora.
“Roxas!” Sora cries, flinging himself forward and into Roxas’s chest hard enough that Axel grunts, rocking back on his heels as he tries to keep them all from going over the side.
“We looked everywhere for you,” his brother sobs, rubbing his face into Roxas’s neck.
Slowly, Roxas wraps his arms around him, burying his nose in his brother’s hair and breathing in home.
.
They sit on the edge of the Clock Tower as Roxas explains things to Axel, his brother tucked close to his side. Riku still hasn’t said much, rubbing circles into Sora’s back as they talk, exchanging stories.
“Kairi’s back at home, because she doesn’t like heights, but we’ve been coming here for the last few months-the sunset is really gorgeous here. We love it.”
Roxas watches his brother, who is gesturing wildly and kicking his legs out over the open air in a way that speaks of familiarity.
“We’ve been looking for you, Roxas,” he repeats, eyes sad. “I couldn’t find you for so long. I thought you were dead.”
Sora’s skin is tanned, his hands rough with calluses. Roxas wonders when he was last home.
As he speaks, Roxas stares at him, his stomach like lead. When was the last time that Sora was in his true form? When did he become this reliant on his little human playmates? How-when was the last time he felt the waves?
He’s made the land his home as surely as it once was the sea.
Axel is quiet at his side, and when Roxas turns to look at him, he’s staring at the ground so far beneath them, legs kicking against the brick.
“And then-Roxas?”
Roxas looks at his brother and thinks, ‘I was his anchor to the sea. Without me, he just left.’
His brother made his own home. Now Roxas has to make his.
He grins at Sora and climbs to his feet, tugging Axel up with him. “I’m sorry-I really am. I love you, but there’s something that Axel and I need to do.”
Sora’s staring at him like he’s crazy, but he gets to his feet as well, a familiar pout chasing its way across his features. Roxas laughs and bumps their shoulders together. “Don’t worry, we’ll be back. We can go swimming. But... we really need to do something.”
He wraps his brother up in one last hug. “Meet us here tomorrow at sunset, okay? We’ll talk then.”
And because he never said it enough before-“I love you, okay? I missed you every day.”
He pulls away, still grinning, and tugs Axel towards the door. “What are you doing?” he’s growling. “Roxas!”
He laughs again, chest light. “Tomorrow at six! Don’t forget!”
They have a train to catch.
.
They take the train down to the cove, Axel’s heart beating out of his chest until Roxas curls his hand over it-gentle-and tells him that it’s distracting. So Axel tucks his hand on top of Roxas’s and leaves it there, feeling his heart slow beneath their joined palms.
.
The house is still there.
No one lives there, so Axel’s slightly surprised that it’s still standing. He stands in front of it for too long, listening to the scream of the gulls and the crash of the waves against the sand, unwilling to climb the mostly rotted wooden stairs. He stares at it until Roxas presses up against his back and wraps his arms around his waist.
“Why don’t we go for a swim first?” he whispers into Axel’s hair.
Axel shakes his head. “If I’m ever going to do this, it has to be now.”
The living room is covered in dust-the ugly plaid monstrosity his mother called a couch a shrine to the dust bunnies. Someone took it upon themselves to clean the blood from the carpet, and Axel thinks of Aerith and her flower cart-thinks of “Take care of yourself, for Zack,” and feels like crying. The stairs leading to the upstairs bedroom still creak in the same places, and he has to step around the place that he once saw Reno, as if his ghost is still there, lying in the same spot.
Roxas climbs the stairs with him, the quiet puffs of breath against Axel’s neck grounding him.
His and Reno’s room is tidier than it was that night, just a single fire truck in the middle of the floor, like a relic to the past. He bypasses that room completely, heading for Zack’s, except once he’s there, he doesn’t know what to do. He stands in the doorway, staring at the outdated computer on his desk and the dirty clothes on his floor. There’s a very faint imprint on one side of the bed, and he thinks of Aerith again, coming here time and time again just to linger in Zack's scent.
Biting his lip, he crawls into Zack’s closet and presses his nose to the suits still hanging there-moth-eaten and falling apart.
It’s only when Roxas crawls in after him, wrapping warm arms around his shoulders that the tears come.
Roxas rocks him through it.
He laughs brokenly against Roxas’s shoulder, and wonders how Aerith ever thought that Roxas didn’t love him.
.
Afterwards, when the sun is setting, Roxas wades into the water-lets it slosh around his hips and turns to Axel with a grin and an outstretched hand.
“Race you to the sandbar?” he laughs.
Axel grins.
He goes.
.
(Destiny Islands is lovely-white sands and clear blue water as far as the eye can see. Roxas grips his hand, and Axel thinks of a story he once heard.)