[KH] Neither remorse nor regrets
Title: Neither remorse nor regrets
Pairing: Axel/Roxas
Rating: PG
Summary: Axel falls in love or Falls in love.
Notes: For au_bingo, theme 'Fantasy & Supernatural: Angels and Demons', and for shiny_glor_chan's request at the doomed ships comment ficathon, “doomed from the start to meet each other in every next life”. I grabbed it and ran away fast. Title inspired/translated from Serge Gainsbourg's 'Sorry Angel'.
For all that Heaven is a pain to get into, it is the easiest thing to get out of. Maybe because it assumes that no-one would want (be tempted) to leave. Temptation isn't supposed to work that way. The gates of Heaven are a one-way path, and all of its defenses are on the outside, to keep unsuitable people from getting in.
One day, Roxas walked out of Heaven, never to return, leaving only one singularly heart-broken angel in his wake.
It's occurred to Axel that Heaven's security was faulty in another way, simply by letting him in. Since he fell he's developed strong suspicions that he's exactly the sort of being the gates of Heaven should keep out.
He wouldn't have thought so at the time, but he's become aware that mortals have this saying about good intentions and where they're rumored to take you. And while scrupulous honesty prevents him from dubbing all of his intentions strictly speaking good - he can't remember even giving a feather about the greater good - at least they might have been just altruistic enough to qualify; and just selfish enough to damn him for them.
It's not exactly true to say that Axel was cast out; it would be slightly more accurate that he wandered off the righteous path. No longer as swift to return to the soothing, clear-cut nothingness of Heaven after a mission out in the secular world.
The world of the humans is full of lies and deceits, illusions of all kinds; both more nuanced and brighter than the dimension which angels serve.
It was this world Roxas had forsaken Heaven for. Roxas had left him for.
His angel steps lost themselves one at a time in the multicolored maze of the world humans inhabit, the gem-like brilliance of its sky and sun, endless seas of grass and jungles of water tangling and rippling with the winds, and everywhere, the teeming crowds of humanity, its noises and its agitations. Bursts of blood red under choruses of drumming rifles, Indian markets bustling with colors, flashes of pictures from worlds even less real on cinema screens, all this vast eternity of white painted over for an hour or two.
One of the angels, dealing in lies and death and no longer sure whether he was born for it or created for it, no longer sure he cared, either, losing himself into the human mud, rubbing elbows, and other things, with mere humans, far too close to pretext fascination. Fascination would have been condemned, but ultimately excused, a spot on his record that would flaw him for a while, then fade away, only remembered along his peer as a long-ago extravagance.
Others have fallen prey to it before he has. While not righteous, it is acceptable. Angel finds oneself fascinated with humans, children of God, created to his likeness yet susceptible to evil.
Complete, for not being things of pure order.
An admissible tale that he doesn't content himself with.
In the things he sees, he's never just the witness, and whenever he acts thoughts of God-given duty are the last things on his mind.
He deals in death and lies like he has always done, and he's the one selling grenades and he's the one burning snapshots, and he does it because he's curious, and because it's fun, and there are men and women whose pupils widen and whose breath quicken like he was one of their own. And some of them die for these things they've done with him, just as if he was one of them, and the pang of regret that he's caused such waste is almost enough to make him regret it, and he moves on.
He does not age, and he does not bleed like they do, but he has a taste for their food that he doesn't attempt to deny even when it's gone far past the point of inconvenience, and while he can vanish here and there as he pleases he cannot fly at all, and people remember him more often that he can make them forget.
At some point in his travels he finds that he's become Axel, that he's thinking of the humans' world as the real world, Heaven so inconsistent it might as well never have existed; that the messages from above addressed to Lea only provoke the faintest echo within him, that he thinks of himself as spiky and red-haired, skinny thighs and sloped shoulders, male. Lea wasn't, he thinks; Lea the angel whose self was too defined by Heaven to be something to be owned. The only thing that Lea owned was being defined as Roxas' best friend, and that leash tugged Lea out of Heaven until Axel could emerge from it.
All along the way, he looks for Roxas.
He knows what he's looking for; Falling didn't change Axel that much. He stills deals death and lies, and he still likes to make things burn. If today the fire carries stronger hints at brimstone than it used to, it's nothing that surprises or concerns him. It stands to reason that Roxas wouldn't be that much changed either.
In Heaven, Roxas was the Lightbringer, the sheer potential for annihilation, God's Justice. Axel, Lea used to think of Roxas as clean and cold and angry in a way that even ice could not hope to reach, like ice was tainted somehow by its links with the physical, whereas Roxas' light was the very light of the Heavens, the light of God.
Pure in that way that meant that Lea quietly adored him and that Axel now looks back as proof that even at the time Axel wasn't too far from Falling, bestowing idolatry upon one other than God.
He remembers the quiet, jealous way with which other angels went at sometimes attempting to incur Roxas' favor, to curb his power to themselves.
Axel is looking for light and perfect, uncompromising destruction.
He finds Roxas purely by chance, on a day he's not looking for him, in Los Angeles. It's the city where he's settled when he's not criss-crossing the world with his brimstone activities. The fainter his connection to Heaven grows, the better Axel appreciates the biting irony that kept him from even thinking about another place to choose as constant base.
A storm is brewing over Los Angeles, casting the city in pit-black night at four in the afternoon in late August. When the skies tear into fat torrents of rain, Axel runs into someone on his way back to his apartment. Hurrying under the rain is one of these frivolous luxuries he entertained even back as an envoy of God, feigning humans' limitations for a few short seconds. It was a fancy Roxas used to tolerate but showed no sign of understanding, like most of these things that related neither to the deep of battle nor to the quietness of post-combat victory.
The pavement is already wet, and when he bumps into the kid he sends him sliding over, satchel opening and items skidding onto the ground.
The kid's grunt of displeased surprise almost gets drowned out by the rain, and Axel catches him by the elbow and helps him back to stability, without thinking about it. Hell is clawing under his skin further every day, and Axel doesn't know what it means that simple acts of benevolence come easier to him now than they ever did when he was a full angel.
Maybe some months earlier he might've tried to convince himself it was humanity finding a grip in him, the middle between angel and demon, but he's past the point of fooling himself if he ever crossed it. There's no middle to something like him. Humanity isn't in his essence, angel or not he's lacking something they have. If he's not an angel there's only one other thing he can be.
Sometimes he wonders what's this soul stuff that he doesn't have, what's missing to make him real. He doesn't feel that much like a fake. But then, what would a fake know of reality?
“You alright, kid?”
Axel almost has to shout over the thunderous rain. He narrows his eyes against the drops to focus.
“I'm fine. The stuff isn't,” the kid says, shrouded with the sound of the water crashing around them, and he looks up, and it's the sound of the world crashing around Axel.
His hair's splattered to his skull, his eyes darker than how Axel pictures them in bright sunlight, as dark as the nights of death and destruction they used to be sent to wreck, in that same weather, wrath of God and doom combined, but still as vivid as Axel's been looking for. The rain flattens the golden mess, running rivulets that draw the soft curve of Roxas' cheek, thin face still almost rounded up to the pointy chin, the upturned nose, the delicate eyebrows over delicate eyelids and blue blue blue that Axel could fall and drown into.
In the human world Roxas looks so young. A kid. Axel's fingers wrap around his arm without stretching. He might be sixteen, and in America Axel thinks that's just a kid.
Roxas' surprised look is already closing off, in that expression Axel knows so well, so he grips his arm tighter for a second and lets go, before the kid can shrug him off, the kid with Roxas' face and Roxas' eyes and none of Roxas' recognition, not the shadow of one fucking spark of one, this kid who doesn't know him, this kid for whom Axel is exactly nothing, no-one, zilch, nada, nobody.
He crouches with Roxas and helps him gather all his things, a bag and pencils and portfolio from which escaped a couple of sheets. “Man, I'm sorry,” he pretends to fuss, handing the items as inefficiently as he can get away with, slow and fingers brushing. “All your stuff. You're an artist?”
“It's my sister's,” Roxas says, and that's another, casual spike through Axel's universe. Roxas doesn't remember him, Roxas has a sister. Roxas doesn't-- Roxas isn't--
Roxas isn't an angel anymore. None of the shallow irritation Axel's started to be aware of when there are angels in the vicinity, just under his skin where he can't get rid of it. It's not just a confirmation of what he expected, he's always known Roxas wouldn't be an angel anymore. Roxas wouldn't do anything halfway, and when Lea saw him leave he knew he'd never see that person again.
Here and now, though, faced with the fact, it makes Axel feel. Things he doesn't know how to put a name on.
“I'm not gonna get you in trouble, right?” Axel prods, because Roxas isn't in a talkative mood but Axel's always made it his business of knowing how to get Roxas to talk to him, even when Roxas was doing his best to ignore Axel's distractions.
It's all he has right now; at this point Axel can't advance the long game so long as he doesn't figure out what rules they're playing by. So far all he's got is that they're not pawns in God's grand plan anymore, but he's seen enough of chess to be aware that when a pawn crosses the entirety of the board it turns into any other piece and they call it promotion. Roxas could be a bishop, or a knight, or a queen.
Right now all Axel's angling for is buying Roxas coffee and getting his phone number; getting this mysterious sister to work for him at least that much before he has to consider other implications. “You should totally feel free to blame me for dumping her things.”
“I'll memorize it,” Roxas says, as dry as if he's trying to compensate for the weather, and for all the curve balls destiny has been throwing at Axel. If nothing else Roxas doesn't act that different. He's still as composed soaked as a kitten as he was telling Axel off for wasting time before a mission.
He straightens, keeping the items from falling again as he does, and Axel has no other choice but to follow him, in this like in everything else. Roxas' thin jacket looks soaked through, the rains showing no sign of subsiding.
If Axel doesn't find something, anything, Roxas will leave. Strange new different not-angel Roxas that Axel knows in his bones isn't a demon either, none of the tingle of kin he's started being vaguely greeted with by the presence of leftover demonic forces. He hasn't been in much contact with what used to be the other side, yet. He likes being his own boss, not having to account for what he does. And now, he's just found Roxas again, and when it changes he's going to miss it more than he can possibly say. More than his old associates would say an angel could feel.
Roxas sends him a glance that reminds Axel of times he broke through Roxas' defenses, sharp and over before Axel could crow in victory.
“You know what, buy me coffee and we'll call it even.”
With the rain and the dark, Axel can't be sure, but he thinks he can see the thinnest smile curling Roxas' lips, thin like a blade. This is new, as well. Part of this strange new Roxas with a sister and no memories of Axel. Willing to flirt with Axel despite having no memories of him.
Roxas is human. Just human, a kid in Los Angeles.
“Sure,” he manages to smile.
There's a part of him that wonders how far Roxas will be willing to flirt, today, and how many rules Axel can tempt him to break. There's a part of him that wishes to see if he can make Roxas fall for him.
It would be only fair.
Pairing: Axel/Roxas
Rating: PG
Summary: Axel falls in love or Falls in love.
Notes: For au_bingo, theme 'Fantasy & Supernatural: Angels and Demons', and for shiny_glor_chan's request at the doomed ships comment ficathon, “doomed from the start to meet each other in every next life”. I grabbed it and ran away fast. Title inspired/translated from Serge Gainsbourg's 'Sorry Angel'.
For all that Heaven is a pain to get into, it is the easiest thing to get out of. Maybe because it assumes that no-one would want (be tempted) to leave. Temptation isn't supposed to work that way. The gates of Heaven are a one-way path, and all of its defenses are on the outside, to keep unsuitable people from getting in.
One day, Roxas walked out of Heaven, never to return, leaving only one singularly heart-broken angel in his wake.
It's occurred to Axel that Heaven's security was faulty in another way, simply by letting him in. Since he fell he's developed strong suspicions that he's exactly the sort of being the gates of Heaven should keep out.
He wouldn't have thought so at the time, but he's become aware that mortals have this saying about good intentions and where they're rumored to take you. And while scrupulous honesty prevents him from dubbing all of his intentions strictly speaking good - he can't remember even giving a feather about the greater good - at least they might have been just altruistic enough to qualify; and just selfish enough to damn him for them.
It's not exactly true to say that Axel was cast out; it would be slightly more accurate that he wandered off the righteous path. No longer as swift to return to the soothing, clear-cut nothingness of Heaven after a mission out in the secular world.
The world of the humans is full of lies and deceits, illusions of all kinds; both more nuanced and brighter than the dimension which angels serve.
It was this world Roxas had forsaken Heaven for. Roxas had left him for.
His angel steps lost themselves one at a time in the multicolored maze of the world humans inhabit, the gem-like brilliance of its sky and sun, endless seas of grass and jungles of water tangling and rippling with the winds, and everywhere, the teeming crowds of humanity, its noises and its agitations. Bursts of blood red under choruses of drumming rifles, Indian markets bustling with colors, flashes of pictures from worlds even less real on cinema screens, all this vast eternity of white painted over for an hour or two.
One of the angels, dealing in lies and death and no longer sure whether he was born for it or created for it, no longer sure he cared, either, losing himself into the human mud, rubbing elbows, and other things, with mere humans, far too close to pretext fascination. Fascination would have been condemned, but ultimately excused, a spot on his record that would flaw him for a while, then fade away, only remembered along his peer as a long-ago extravagance.
Others have fallen prey to it before he has. While not righteous, it is acceptable. Angel finds oneself fascinated with humans, children of God, created to his likeness yet susceptible to evil.
Complete, for not being things of pure order.
An admissible tale that he doesn't content himself with.
In the things he sees, he's never just the witness, and whenever he acts thoughts of God-given duty are the last things on his mind.
He deals in death and lies like he has always done, and he's the one selling grenades and he's the one burning snapshots, and he does it because he's curious, and because it's fun, and there are men and women whose pupils widen and whose breath quicken like he was one of their own. And some of them die for these things they've done with him, just as if he was one of them, and the pang of regret that he's caused such waste is almost enough to make him regret it, and he moves on.
He does not age, and he does not bleed like they do, but he has a taste for their food that he doesn't attempt to deny even when it's gone far past the point of inconvenience, and while he can vanish here and there as he pleases he cannot fly at all, and people remember him more often that he can make them forget.
At some point in his travels he finds that he's become Axel, that he's thinking of the humans' world as the real world, Heaven so inconsistent it might as well never have existed; that the messages from above addressed to Lea only provoke the faintest echo within him, that he thinks of himself as spiky and red-haired, skinny thighs and sloped shoulders, male. Lea wasn't, he thinks; Lea the angel whose self was too defined by Heaven to be something to be owned. The only thing that Lea owned was being defined as Roxas' best friend, and that leash tugged Lea out of Heaven until Axel could emerge from it.
All along the way, he looks for Roxas.
He knows what he's looking for; Falling didn't change Axel that much. He stills deals death and lies, and he still likes to make things burn. If today the fire carries stronger hints at brimstone than it used to, it's nothing that surprises or concerns him. It stands to reason that Roxas wouldn't be that much changed either.
In Heaven, Roxas was the Lightbringer, the sheer potential for annihilation, God's Justice. Axel, Lea used to think of Roxas as clean and cold and angry in a way that even ice could not hope to reach, like ice was tainted somehow by its links with the physical, whereas Roxas' light was the very light of the Heavens, the light of God.
Pure in that way that meant that Lea quietly adored him and that Axel now looks back as proof that even at the time Axel wasn't too far from Falling, bestowing idolatry upon one other than God.
He remembers the quiet, jealous way with which other angels went at sometimes attempting to incur Roxas' favor, to curb his power to themselves.
Axel is looking for light and perfect, uncompromising destruction.
He finds Roxas purely by chance, on a day he's not looking for him, in Los Angeles. It's the city where he's settled when he's not criss-crossing the world with his brimstone activities. The fainter his connection to Heaven grows, the better Axel appreciates the biting irony that kept him from even thinking about another place to choose as constant base.
A storm is brewing over Los Angeles, casting the city in pit-black night at four in the afternoon in late August. When the skies tear into fat torrents of rain, Axel runs into someone on his way back to his apartment. Hurrying under the rain is one of these frivolous luxuries he entertained even back as an envoy of God, feigning humans' limitations for a few short seconds. It was a fancy Roxas used to tolerate but showed no sign of understanding, like most of these things that related neither to the deep of battle nor to the quietness of post-combat victory.
The pavement is already wet, and when he bumps into the kid he sends him sliding over, satchel opening and items skidding onto the ground.
The kid's grunt of displeased surprise almost gets drowned out by the rain, and Axel catches him by the elbow and helps him back to stability, without thinking about it. Hell is clawing under his skin further every day, and Axel doesn't know what it means that simple acts of benevolence come easier to him now than they ever did when he was a full angel.
Maybe some months earlier he might've tried to convince himself it was humanity finding a grip in him, the middle between angel and demon, but he's past the point of fooling himself if he ever crossed it. There's no middle to something like him. Humanity isn't in his essence, angel or not he's lacking something they have. If he's not an angel there's only one other thing he can be.
Sometimes he wonders what's this soul stuff that he doesn't have, what's missing to make him real. He doesn't feel that much like a fake. But then, what would a fake know of reality?
“You alright, kid?”
Axel almost has to shout over the thunderous rain. He narrows his eyes against the drops to focus.
“I'm fine. The stuff isn't,” the kid says, shrouded with the sound of the water crashing around them, and he looks up, and it's the sound of the world crashing around Axel.
His hair's splattered to his skull, his eyes darker than how Axel pictures them in bright sunlight, as dark as the nights of death and destruction they used to be sent to wreck, in that same weather, wrath of God and doom combined, but still as vivid as Axel's been looking for. The rain flattens the golden mess, running rivulets that draw the soft curve of Roxas' cheek, thin face still almost rounded up to the pointy chin, the upturned nose, the delicate eyebrows over delicate eyelids and blue blue blue that Axel could fall and drown into.
In the human world Roxas looks so young. A kid. Axel's fingers wrap around his arm without stretching. He might be sixteen, and in America Axel thinks that's just a kid.
Roxas' surprised look is already closing off, in that expression Axel knows so well, so he grips his arm tighter for a second and lets go, before the kid can shrug him off, the kid with Roxas' face and Roxas' eyes and none of Roxas' recognition, not the shadow of one fucking spark of one, this kid who doesn't know him, this kid for whom Axel is exactly nothing, no-one, zilch, nada, nobody.
He crouches with Roxas and helps him gather all his things, a bag and pencils and portfolio from which escaped a couple of sheets. “Man, I'm sorry,” he pretends to fuss, handing the items as inefficiently as he can get away with, slow and fingers brushing. “All your stuff. You're an artist?”
“It's my sister's,” Roxas says, and that's another, casual spike through Axel's universe. Roxas doesn't remember him, Roxas has a sister. Roxas doesn't-- Roxas isn't--
Roxas isn't an angel anymore. None of the shallow irritation Axel's started to be aware of when there are angels in the vicinity, just under his skin where he can't get rid of it. It's not just a confirmation of what he expected, he's always known Roxas wouldn't be an angel anymore. Roxas wouldn't do anything halfway, and when Lea saw him leave he knew he'd never see that person again.
Here and now, though, faced with the fact, it makes Axel feel. Things he doesn't know how to put a name on.
“I'm not gonna get you in trouble, right?” Axel prods, because Roxas isn't in a talkative mood but Axel's always made it his business of knowing how to get Roxas to talk to him, even when Roxas was doing his best to ignore Axel's distractions.
It's all he has right now; at this point Axel can't advance the long game so long as he doesn't figure out what rules they're playing by. So far all he's got is that they're not pawns in God's grand plan anymore, but he's seen enough of chess to be aware that when a pawn crosses the entirety of the board it turns into any other piece and they call it promotion. Roxas could be a bishop, or a knight, or a queen.
Right now all Axel's angling for is buying Roxas coffee and getting his phone number; getting this mysterious sister to work for him at least that much before he has to consider other implications. “You should totally feel free to blame me for dumping her things.”
“I'll memorize it,” Roxas says, as dry as if he's trying to compensate for the weather, and for all the curve balls destiny has been throwing at Axel. If nothing else Roxas doesn't act that different. He's still as composed soaked as a kitten as he was telling Axel off for wasting time before a mission.
He straightens, keeping the items from falling again as he does, and Axel has no other choice but to follow him, in this like in everything else. Roxas' thin jacket looks soaked through, the rains showing no sign of subsiding.
If Axel doesn't find something, anything, Roxas will leave. Strange new different not-angel Roxas that Axel knows in his bones isn't a demon either, none of the tingle of kin he's started being vaguely greeted with by the presence of leftover demonic forces. He hasn't been in much contact with what used to be the other side, yet. He likes being his own boss, not having to account for what he does. And now, he's just found Roxas again, and when it changes he's going to miss it more than he can possibly say. More than his old associates would say an angel could feel.
Roxas sends him a glance that reminds Axel of times he broke through Roxas' defenses, sharp and over before Axel could crow in victory.
“You know what, buy me coffee and we'll call it even.”
With the rain and the dark, Axel can't be sure, but he thinks he can see the thinnest smile curling Roxas' lips, thin like a blade. This is new, as well. Part of this strange new Roxas with a sister and no memories of Axel. Willing to flirt with Axel despite having no memories of him.
Roxas is human. Just human, a kid in Los Angeles.
“Sure,” he manages to smile.
There's a part of him that wonders how far Roxas will be willing to flirt, today, and how many rules Axel can tempt him to break. There's a part of him that wishes to see if he can make Roxas fall for him.
It would be only fair.