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Axel was not okay.
Sure, he wore the skin of a man keeping it together. They’d ask “how are you doing?” and he’d say he’s “doing just fine” when in reality he was a man held together by duct tape and chewing gum and a rediscovered smoking habit.
623 days.
Six hundred and twenty three days.
Axel kept count.
His friends told him he looked well, lately. That he stood a little taller. That he looked grounded. They purposefully didn’t look at the gold band still on his finger. They didn’t ask about his work.
Axel had quit the Institute. He was being rash, he was having a breakdown, he’d regret it once the world settled around him. That’s what they all told him. It was such a great honor to work there, according to everyone else. Axel had thought that way too, once upon a time.
Six hundred and twenty three days ago.
Axel didn’t trust the Institute anymore. The name tasted like bile on his tongue, it’s pristine halls were glorified prisons. Eyes watched him, he was sure. They wouldn’t tell him anything. He had a right to know and they wouldn’t tell him anything! They just filled him with empty platitudes about how sorry they were for his loss...
His loss.
How patronizing.
Everyone ignored it. People went missing all the time now, each a mini tragedy that was chalked up to natural reasons and forgotten by the world at large.
Deja vu was a daily occurrence for everyone. No one talked about it. Nor did they talk about the things only seen from the corner of your eye, or how you would be so sure some everyday object was... different. Exactly the same, yet not. Replaced, somehow, by a perfect replica that could fool the eye, but you knew. You always knew. But you didn’t mention it.
People ignored the way the sky would sometimes shift and bend, like cellophane pulled and twisted by greedy hands. Axel wondered when it would break – he was sure it eventually would – and what would come pouring into their world that had previously been kept just behind the blue.
623 days.
Everything was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong.
An no one mentioned it. Pretended not to see. The same way they pretended not to see the way Axel still kept two pairs of shoes by the door. Two coffee mugs on the kitchen counter. Two toothbrushes in the bathroom.
A wedding ring on his left hand.
Six hundred and twenty three days. That’s how long he’d been alone. That’s when his world had fallen apart.
That’s when-
“Hey, Axel.” A heavy hand clapped down on his shoulder, pulling Axel from his thoughts.
Axel blinked rapidly and pulled his eyes away from his computer screen. “Morning, boss.”
Barret was a mountain of a man. Tall, imposing, and built like a brick house. He could easily snap Axel’s skinny body in half, if Barret weren’t, in reality, such a softie. The man had taken Axel into when he needed it most. Practically grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and hauled his drunken ass in to the little group he’d formed.
“Heard ya used to work for the Institute. We could use a brain like yours. Now, don’t lookit’ me that way, I – we – understand. We know what you’re goin’ through, kid. It’s hard. You ain’t obligated to do anything, but at the very least, come see what we’re about.”
Axel had done just that, and accepted his position on the spot.
Their team was small. Underground and secretive in their work. They didn’t even have a name, just a common goal.
Axel found he fit in with the band of misfits. They were all like him, eyes opened to the world around him, and disillusioned to its lies.
He was grateful to the team. After departing the Institute, he’d spent his time alone, isolated, running himself thin. When he wasn’t working, he was drinking into oblivion. When he wasn’t drinking into oblivion, he was working. He often had more cigarette smoke in his system than food.
The team gave him some stability. A sense that he belonged. That he wasn’t alone. That he wasn’t crazy. He couldn’t say he was terribly close with any of them — though some were certainly more friendly than others — but their presence was grounding and reassuring all the same.
And they were all looking for something. Someone.
Yuna’s boyfriend had gone missing two years prior. Lightning’s sister just a little longer than that. Prompto was looking for his best friend – a senator’s son, shockingly enough. Balthier was looking for his ‘partner in crime’, though Axel suspected there was more to the relationship than the man let on.
Barret probably had it the hardest. His young daughter had been missing for four years. It had been the driving force behind him starting up his little venture in the first place.
And Axel? Well...
“I’m sending you, Lightning, and Prompto out to the Western Wilds today,” Barret said. “Big energy flux out there.
With a nod and no questions asked, Axel grabbed his things and prepared to depart.
The Western Wilds had been beautiful once. Rolling green hills interspersed with the occasional grove of lush green trees. Blue skies that stretched on for miles. It had been left largely uncultivated, and instead acted as a nature preserve and wildlife park. There’d been a time when Axel, like many others, enjoyed weekend getaways there to camp or hike and simply ‘be one with nature.’
Now, it felt broken. Damaged. Strange rifts had opened up there, distorting the once beautiful and safe landscape. People couldn’t ignore the rifts as much as they did everything else, so they opted to abandon the place altogether. Retreat to the cities and their illusion of safety. Axel supposed be couldn’t blame them, there. Even much of the wildlife had fled.
It had become a routine place for the team to investigate because of the strange rifts. Surely it held answers for them. Surely it was connected to everything else so broken and wrong with their reality.
It’s distorted landscape was familiar enough, but as Axel and his companions hiked out onto the rolling fields, it felt... different. The air felt sharp, and something hummed in Axel’s veins.
Next to him, even the usually chatty Prompto had fallen quiet, camera gripped tightly in his hands, a thumb playing nervously with a dial. Lightning was never chatty, but there was a sharpness in her gaze. A tenseness in her shoulders. Something was different today.
It didn’t take them long to find their target, the cause of the energy flux. Cresting over a hill, the team spotted it immediately.
What had once been a small grove of trees, mercifully untouched by the schisms, was now a rats’ nest of distortions. Axel could hardly focus his eyes on the place. It was a smeared painting of what had once been trees. Leaves vibrated to the point of blurring, or seemed to flicker in and out of existence entirely. The very air around it warped and bent, like heat rising off asphalt. A strange black substance, so dark it absorbed light, oozed from bark like poisoned sap.
It was unlike any distortion they’d seen before.
Next to him, in a hushed voice, Prompto asked, “What on Earth is that?”
No one answered him. They had no answer to give.
Slowly, cautiously, they carried their equipment down the hill and approached the rift-torn-grove. The air buzzed as they picked their way between trees, closer and closer to the source of the distortion.
They knew it when they saw it, as it was unlike anything Axel had seen before. The very space seemed cracked, like a broken mirror, and reality sat disjointed and askew. A deep void in the center of the breakage, swirling black, and Axel felt the very blood in his veins pulled towards it.
The rifts of the Western Wilds often distorted and broke the landscape. None had such a... hole in them.
They stopped a few feet away, not daring to move any closer, and unloaded their equipment.
Every member on the team had their own theory to the distortions. A rift in time, from the future or the past. A tie to another reality altogether. Even a sentient being, or collection of beings caught in space time. No one theory prevailed above the others, but neither had any been ruled out.
Attempting communication with them or whatever was on the other side was one of their key goals, and since Axel had been working on doing just that before joining the team, he was in charge of continuing that work.
His equipment worked to record any transmission received from the rifts, where Axel would take them back to the lab to decipher what – if anything — they relayed.
He also sent his own messages out to the rifts, hoping something — someone — might pick it up.
His messages were wide and varied. Greetings in numerous languages. Speeches, Morse code, music. One song in particular was his favorite. It had been their song. Axel hoped that maybe it would reach, well...
It was one of multiple messages he’d use today. His teammates had their work as well. Prompto snapped photos and recorded video of the odd new rift, documenting it from every angle he could safely reach. Lightning surveyed the surrounding area, made notes of the trees, the plants, the soil, the wildlife – or lack thereof.
Axel’s first transmission went out, the sound oddly muffled and muted in the warped air around them. If Axel didn’t know better — and maybe he didn’t — he could have sworn the very sound and frequency was pulled into the void itself. He sent it out a second time, but his machines recorded no response.
A second, a third, a fourth, and a fifth all went out the same way, and all were greeted with silence from the other side. Axel couldn’t say he was surprised. Disappointed maybe, but this had long since become routine. He’d become used to the lack of a breakthrough.
He was nothing on his own. A bitter thought really, one that burned like bile. Smart? Capable? Hard working? Yes. But brilliant? No. Brilliant had been... brilliant was when they were together. Two minds working as one, filling in for and lifting up the other. Brilliant was-
With a sigh, Axel prepped the last message to be sent off to the void. His song — their song. The soft melody drifted up and out, bittersweet these days but no less lovely to Axel’s ears. He had almost let himself drift away with the music, when a loud ringing echoed through the grove. A sharp ping, like a glass being struck, so clear and loud compared to all other muted and warped sound.
All three members of the group stopped and, after a moment’s pause Lightning and Prompto rejoined Axel’s side. He could practically feel the questions on their tongues, but neither spoke, as all three simply waited with baited breath.
As they hoped, there was another loud ring. It came from the void and Axel’s equipment at once, as though the two were linked and communicating somehow. His heart stuttered in his chest at the revelation. Something had made contact! Something had made contact!
The next ring that came stretched into a long note, and Axel realized it was in tune with the music. A little warbly and distorted, but sure enough, there was a second song playing along with his own.
Axel didn’t have time to process that thought before the music began to get louder, and louder. Shrill and ringing it sliced through the crackling air, and sent the three team members to their knees. They covered their ears as the whole world vibrated around them, like a struck tuning fork. Cracks in the sky and the air splintered out, slicing reality like so much broken glass. Just when Axel thought they couldn’t take much more, it stopped.
The air went quiet and still.
Looking up, Axel saw the void had changed. The hole, the rift, had gotten wider. The dark expanse beyond it now seeped out, rolling like fog and dripping like oil. Where once the world had bent and pulled in towards toward the rift, now whatever was on the other side seemed to bulge and push back out.
The three held their breath as they watched, as silent and still as the air around them.
Movement. A shape, dark and cloaked in shadows, or rather, dripping with them. Inky black and moving oddly as it emerged from the void. It took a moment for Axel realize there was solid form at all beneath the darkness.
It shambled, staggered, then righted itself, moving like something injured or exhausted beyond reason. Perhaps both. All the while, the black substance sloughed off it like so much rotten skin. As more fell, the shape beneath was revealed.
They were human, or at least, human-esque.
Another stagger, and an arm raised to wipe away more of the inky black substance. It fell away with ease, leaving the person beneath it clean where Axel would have assumed them stained in black.
Each bit that fell away revealed more of the person beneath. Tanned skin, muscular arms. A tattered top, and dark, worn-in boots. Blond hair.
Axel tried to swallow the odd lump that had formed in his throat as his own heart threatened to beat out of his chest. He was standing, equipment dropped and forgotten on the grassy earth. Next to him, his team members called his name, but they sounded so far away. So unimportant. All Axel could focus on was the figure before him.
623 days.
Another step, and the man faltered, exhaustion finally taking its toll. He fell, one leg giving way, then two, before he slumped to the ground entirely.
Axel was running before he knew it, the frantic calls of Lightning and Prompto far, far behind him. He skidded to the ground next to the fallen, unconscious man.
With shaking hands and held breath, Axel brushed blond hair aside to behold the familiar face. Tanned skin. Freckles. Hidden eyes that Axel knew to be blue. A wedding ring on one finger.
Six hundred and twenty three days since he’d gone missing, disappeared like so many others. Six hundred and twenty three days that Axel had waited, and hoped, and searched, and now...
Axel’s husband was home.
Roxas was home.