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“Stay with me tonight,” Axel nudges at Saïx’s earlobe and presses a kiss to the tender skin of his jawline. Saïx remains unyielding but he trembles under Axel’s touch.
“I can’t. Xemnas—“
“God, it’s always Xemnas with you now, isn’t it? Have you finally started fucking him too?” his words are bitter. Axel can see Saïx retreat back into the mask he puts up around the others. It makes something inside Axel ache, but the feeling is hollow.
“You’re disgusting,” Saïx says flatly. He pulls away from Axel and turns toward the door, “I’ll need your mission report before the end of the day,” he reminds him, strictly business now. He steps out of the room and leaves Axel feeling like acid is burning at the back of his throat.
It’s a long time before Axel moves. He stares at the empty space Saïx left behind, the clean white walls of his room feeling less like a bedroom and more like a cage. He knows that once upon a time he’d be crawling into Isa’s room and badgering him until he got his forgiveness, but Axel feels so tired. Or rather, he just doesn’t feel enough to care. Days in the Organization drone by and for what? Xemnas promises them Kingdom Hearts and a chance at humanity again. Saïx keeps promising their old life back and answers about the girl they lost in Ansem’s Castle. It’s been years and it feels like they’re chasing smoke, everything is just within their sight but when they reach out to grab for it, it slips through their fingers. So Axel chooses not to care. Saïx can pretend all he wants for Xemnas’s sake, but Axel knows that underneath VII’s position as second-in-command, he’s as doubtful of the Superior as the rest of them.
Axel can’t quite seem to grasp it, Saïx’s strange mixture of loyalty and distrust for Xemnas. It wasn’t anything he ever saw from Isa, who had stuck by him unquestioningly through childhood right up until their death. Axel sits at the desk in his room and rummages in the drawer till he finds a notebook a quarter of the way filled. He hasn’t touched it in years, but he flips to the first entry, the scribbled handwriting of his teenage-self making him feel uncomfortably aged.
They told us to write in these. Seems stupid. Radiant Garden is gone. We’re dead? He calls us Nobodies. Says we don’t have hearts or feelings anymore. This has got to be all the bullshit from his experiments. Isa thinks so, too. X is gone. At least I’ve still got Isa.
Lea flips through the pages till he finds the entry he’s looking for. The writing looks even messier than the earlier pages:
Kingdom Hearts or whatever crap Xemnas wants to sell us can go to hell. Isa stood up to him today and all he has to show for it is blood and a scar on his face. I had to take him to get stitched up. He didn’t even cry. I don’t care about finding X anymore, I don’t care about Kingdom Hearts. This stupid Organization already took my life, my home, my heart. Now it’s going to take Isa, too? He says he doesn’t care what Xemnas does to him, as long as we go through with our plans, but fuck that. Isa’s supposed to be the level headed one, and now he’s the one talking crazy. I can’t do this anymore. I refuse to.
Axel skims through the few entries after till he reaches the point where the notebook goes blank. The entries are of little consequence, mostly bullet points of conversations between him and Saïx, things he wrote down so he wouldn’t forget their long nights of scheming in each others’ rooms. The notes feel like they come from a lifetime ago. They might as well have come from the days when he was human, they feel so foreign.
He thinks back to Saïx’s refusal to stay with him. Xemnas’s name rings in Axel’s ears, ugly and painful. Xemnas. He’s a Nobody and he shouldn’t feel jealous. Axel knows that. He knows Saïx is close with their superior because he has to be, because no one else is close enough to him to know what he’s really after. But it doesn’t make Axel feel any better about it. It doesn’t stop him from wondering why lately Saïx turns the other way more often than not when he looks at him.
Maybe once upon a time Lea would have begged Isa to forgive him. Today Axel wants answers.
It’s unusual for him to use a dark corridor to get to Saïx’s bedroom, but privacy be damned. Axel braces himself as he steps through the portal and finds Saïx at his desk, which is covered in reports. Axel didn’t know what he had expected, but he hadn’t expected to see something as mundane as Saïx laboring over paperwork.
“I expect you have my report?” Saïx asks. He doesn’t have to turn around to know its Axel in his room.
“What’s your problem?” is Axel’s answer. Saïx almost doesn’t look phased, but Axel knows him better than that. There’s a tension in his shoulders, a certain aggression in the way he marks through reports that lets Axel know he’s upset. As upset as a Nobody could ever be, anyway.
Saïx doesn’t look up, so Axel makes his way over to him and pushes the papers on his desk aside so Saïx’s has no choice but to look up at him. His gold eyes narrow at Axel hovering in front of him, and Axel wonders, not for the first time, why he can never remember the day Saïx’s eyes changed.
“I have work to do, Axel,” Saïx says, Axel’s name coming out like a hiss.
“Do you remember Xemnas giving you that scar, Isa?”
Saïx’s eyes widen a fraction. Axel knows he’s caught him off guard and it’ll give him the edge he needs for answers, but Saïx remains quiet, his silence pressing Axel for an explanation.
“You said you would do whatever it takes to get our hearts back, to find out the truth, but all I see is Xemnas’s second in command at his beck and call like some kind of lap dog. Are you with him or are you with me?” The words are tainted with a deeper implication and they both know it; tonight isn’t the first time Saïx has refused Axel’s invitation, but it’s the first time Axel has confronted the other man about it.
Saïx looks away from Axel’s pressing stare, down at the mess of papers on his desk. There’s a weight to the silence, and then:
“There’s a Nobody he’s going to have join our ranks tomorrow. A keyblade wielder. Do you remember X? She would always be fascinated by keys, the way they rattled in our pockets when we went down to speak to her. She said it was the only thing that felt familiar to her, the only thing she could remember from her old life. Keys. Xemnas says the keyblade is the missing piece to unlock Kingdom Hearts. What if it’s the missing piece for all of this?”
Saïx looks up at Axel, his expression so close to something real that Axel almost wants to reach out and touch him. But he doesn’t. Instead he crosses his arms and looks down at the floor, realizing for the first time that this isn’t about Xemnas or about him. Something inside him makes him feel sick. When they were human, Isa had been Lea’s world and Lea had been Isa’s. Even when they had started in the Organization, things had been that way. Axel isn’t sure when their lives had become separate, when nights of scheming had become nights of trying to find solace in each other’s skin, and finally to nights of staring at the empty walls of their white rooms.
Axel had given in to Saïx’s plans time and time again because it was what Lea would have done. Despite his protests and all the times he had begged them to get out, he had given in, hoping Isa would eventually see how futile it all was. But he hadn’t. And now he was placing his last hopes in some stranger.
“You didn’t answer my question,” is all Axel can bring himself to say.
The sound of dusks out in the hallway is the only sound they hear for what feels like an eternity. If Axel had a heart, he suspects he would be crying, but the tears don’t come. Saïx’s presence feels like a dead weight next to him. Axel summons a dark corridor back to his bedroom and watches the darkness of the portal swirl in front him, giving Saïx one last chance, but the answer he wants never comes.
Axel steps through the corridor and Saïx watches as the last of his legs disappear through the darkness. A keyblade wielder will join their ranks tomorrow and Saïx suspects, despite what Axel might think, that this will be the beginning of the Organization’s end.