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A heavy sort of darkness lingered in his body -- he couldn’t call it his heart, because Nobodies didn’t have hearts. They didn’t have feelings, at least not strong ones, the way that humans did. Sure, they could be angry, they could laugh, they could cry, but at the core of it all, there was an overwhelming numbness deep down inside that they couldn’t remove entirely. It was more like acting than experiencing true emotions.
“No one would miss me,” Roxas stated. It wasn’t a question, nor was it an opinion. As far as he was concerned, it was a fact. The emptiness he felt when speaking those words only solidified his point; the Nobodies didn’t feel.
“That’s not true!” Axel cried distantly, but his words fell on deaf ears. Roxas knew Axel understood, deep down, even if he refused to accept it. He’d seen Axel spend days lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling with dull eyes, unable to move himself to complete his daily tasks. He’d been unperturbed by any of the Organization, who left him in silence until he finally crawled out of his cozy tomb. They all suffered from this feeling -- no, this lack of feeling. No one had any more empathy for one another’s pain, if they’d ever had any to begin with. (They didn’t.)
So Roxas knew that Axel would understand. Their world didn’t allow for love. It was cold, it was heartless, and it was empty.
“... I would,” Axel whispered into the darkness.
***
Roxas learned to swim in the sea of darkness. He closed his eyes, and it was all that surrounded him, a thick black ocean carrying a sickly sweet scent. He dove deeper into this darkness, allowing it to pour into his chest, filling up the empty hole where his heart should be. He could feel it lapping over its confined pool and into his lungs, making each breath feel shallower than it should have been, making himself taste the sweet despair. It curled around him like a blanket wrapped snug around his limbs, trapping him in place. It pooled within him, until he felt adrift no matter where he walked, no matter where his feet took him, as long as it was further away from the Organization, from the only home he’d ever had.
Though, Roxas would be very generous if he’d ever called it a home. A home implied that he had a family, and Roxas never had a family. He’d be hard-pressed to call anyone there his friend, either. He was alone in life and death, alone in light and darkness, alone in dreams and consciousness. The black ocean swallowed him up and left him in a perpetual state of drowning, and yet he walked, for a childlike dream he would never be able to grasp.
Then the boy with the blindfold appeared on the rooftop. He’d been tracking him down for days, the Organization XIII cloak he was wearing seeming to mock him. Roxas was done letting these Nobodies control him. He was putting an end to it, right then and there.
“Who are you?!” he demanded. The only feeling he could muster anymore was anger, and it bristled in every syllable.
“What does it matter? I’m here for you,” came the voice, a sickeningly confident, somewhat familiar tone that made Roxas almost feel something.
“Why are you trying to stop me?!”
“Because I want back the rest of Sora’s memories.”
“Sora?!” It was always about Sora . He sneered at every repetition of the name. Roxas was done hearing about this Sora. All the name ever brought him was trouble, and he was done dealing with other peoples’ problems. “Enough about Sora!”
“Do you have some kind of plan?”
“I’ll set Kingdom Hearts free!” Roxas responded. “Then everything will be the way it was! She’ll come back… and the three of us can be together again!” The words were of a hope too foreign for him and the life he led, too far from the realm of possibility. Even he knew it was a stretch, but he was sure as heck going to try.
“... You mean Xion…?” the boy’s gaze lowered. “It’s a struggle just to remember the name now…” He paused. “Either way… I can’t let you go and do anything crazy.”
“I’m freeing Kingdom Hearts. And I’m going to find Sora. I want Xion back. I want my life back!”
The boy frowned. “If you try and make contact with Kingdom Hearts, the last thing you’ll get is your life back. The Organization will destroy you.”
Roxas refused to hear it. He refused to believe there was nothing more he could do, that he was bound to his empty husk of a life for eternity.
“Enough!” he cried, charging forward in a blaze of anger. The silver-haired boy pursued him, and soon enough they were locked into an unrelenting clash of weapons.
***
An hour later, the battle finally ended and much had been lost. Riku didn’t allow himself to mourn his return to the darkness, focusing instead on Roxas and the conflicting feelings that came along with defeating his friend’s Nobody.
Riku stared down at the unconscious boy’s face. His eyes were closed, but Riku could still remember the bright shade of blue in them that matched Sora’s, that matched Xion’s. There was no denying who he was. His spiky hair resembled his childhood friend’s, but the complete hostility and desperation was nothing like him at all.
‘I am me! Nobody else!’
Riku’s heart reached out to him. He understood the feeling. He didn’t want to keep Roxas trapped in this tragic, meaningless existence. But for Sora, he would do it. He would do anything.
“DiZ… he could feel Sora,” he said, remembering Roxas’s moment of confusion as he teased him, Sora’s words from childhood flooding out of his mouth before he could stop it. Roxas had looked devastated, the proof that he was not just himself too much for him to take. He couldn’t just feel Sora -- he was struggling not to.
‘I am me! Nobody else!’ Riku wasn’t sure Roxas even believed that at this point.
DiZ only scoffed. “Oh, he told you how he felt , did he?” Riku knew DiZ understood far more about Nobodies than he ever could, but something about his attitude toward the mere idea rubbed him the wrong way. “Ridiculous. A Nobody cannot feel anything.”
Thinking of Roxas’s dark rage and his desperation to see his friends once again, Riku wasn’t so sure about that.
***
Roxas blinked awake with the morning sunlight peeking through his curtain windows. He yawned and stretched deeply, his thoughts lingering on his dream from the previous night, of the enigmatic character his subconscious kept putting through trials and tribulations.
“Another dream about him,” he mumbled to himself. How many had it been in a row now? Roxas didn’t particularly mind the dreams; they were charming, in a way, and full of fascinating adventures. Still, he wondered why Sora looked so real, as if he had come from something more than just his ordinary imagination…
Today’s dream involved Sora and his friends trying to build a raft to go out to sea together. Roxas felt a vague sense of dread throughout that one; the thought of being adrift at sea, with no one to turn to and no secure lifelines, wasn’t particularly fun, in his eyes. Then again, for someone living on an island and not a city, the ocean probably wasn’t as scary a place to Sora as Roxas’s mind made it out to be. But Roxas felt lost at sea enough in his own life that he hoped Sora wouldn’t end up going through with it. He didn’t feel up for those sorts of dreams right now. But he had no choice in what his subconscious provided him, did he?
Roxas opened his blinds and leaned on the windowsill, taking in the beautiful sight of Twilight Town in the morning, the sky still in the process of waking up. He was pretty content where he was, he supposed. Sometimes he didn’t quite feel like he belonged, like there was somewhere else he was supposed to be -- but wasn’t that an ordinary teenage feeling? He had his friends, and he had a good name for himself in the community -- and when it came down to it, that was enough.
Roxas smiled into the sunrise, then turned away from the window to get himself ready to face the day.
Meanwhile, a red-haired man in a long black cloak stared up at his window from behind one of the back alley corners, a hopeful look in his eyes.
“I’ll get you out of this, Roxas,” he promised, vanishing moments before the alley flooded with middle school NPCs walking to their morning classes that didn’t exist. None of them knew that in just a handful of days, their existence would be erased by the Nobody most desperate to save his collection of nonexistent friends.