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The first time he’d shown Roxas and Xion how to make pizza had been early in the war, not long after the two had regained existences of their own, when Lea had still been painstakingly earning back the trust that neither had been willing to grant him on credit.
“Looks pretty easy,” Roxas had said, watching Lea work, Lea’s arms floured to the elbow. He scoffed and gave the dough another deft toss.
“Yeah, sure, it looks easy. But it takes a lot of practice. Check this action out.”
He tossed the dough into the air several times more, higher and higher each time, until it spun out of control and came crashing down onto his head, impaling itself on his spiky hair. Xion laughed so hard she fell out of her chair, and she and Roxas settled for chicken and rice that simmered on the stovetop while they pinched dough out of a grousing Lea’s hair. But when pizza actually happened a week later, it was well worth the wait.
“Hey, slow down there, Roxas,” Lea said, watching him tear into his third slice with gusto. “You trying to break a record or what?”
“This is amazing!” Xion beamed, in between bites. “Can you make this every day, Axel?”
“It’s Lea,” he said, not for the last time, “and if I did, you’d have to buy bigger pants pretty quick. This stuff isn’t exactly healthy, so it’s gotta be a treat. Once a week, maybe.”
“Healthy?” Roxas said, baffled. “Come on, since when do you care about that? All you ever eat is ice cream and chicken nuggets.”
“Yeah, well.” Lea rubbed the back of his head, ruffling his mane of red hair. “Look, you two are kids, all right? You’re still growing. You can’t just eat junk food every day, you gotta have...I dunno. Vegetables and stuff.”
Roxas and Xion exchanged looks.
“Who are you,” Roxas asked, only half-jokingly, “and what did you do with Axel?”
“I’m Lea,” was the exasperated answer, “and I care about you two clowns, all right?” He made a fist and gently knocked Roxas on top of the head. “All this training we’re doing is tough. You’ve gotta be sure you’re getting enough vitamins.”
“What are vitamins?” Xion asked.
“They’re things in your food that you need to...grow bones and stuff.” Lea sighed and scratched his temple, leaving a trace of flour dust. “Ask your old man, he’ll explain it better than I can. The point is, I’m not making you guys pizza every night.”
“There’s no vitamins in pizza?”
“Not enough.” Lea reached out and took a slice for himself, peeling off a dangling strand of gooey cheese. “Now, come on and enjoy this before it gets cold.”
“You were telling us to slow down a second ago…”
So Friday night had become pizza night all throughout their training, and when the gears of war began to spin too fast to let them do it weekly, the ritual became all the more treasured when they did manage it. The toppings changed as Roxas and Xion’s curiosity expanded, and after cheese and pepperoni they tried whatever they could get their hands on, sardines or bacon or peppers or spinach, anything they could rustle up by the time Friday rolled around. There were never any mistakes so dire as to be inedible, and Lea taught the pair of them every trick he knew: how to make the dough the day before and let it rise overnight, how to punch it down and roll it out to the right thickness, how to toss it high and how to crimp the edges and how hot the oven should be.
Sometimes some of the other Keyblade wielders joined the three of them, and they had no objection to it, but ultimately the routine of pizza was theirs alone, less frequent but more satisfying than a bar of ice cream chomped hastily on the castle battlements. Xehanort’s shadow over the worlds grew darker as the months went by, but even during the worst of it, they kept making pizza.
“It seems like he’s everywhere,” Roxas brooded, after a particularly harrowing run-in with some of the Thirteen. “He’s so powerful...How are we going to stop him?”
“We’ll do it, just you wait,” said Lea with his usual confidence, grating a mountain of cheese onto the dough. “I mean, you’ve got me fighting, don’t you? That old fart won’t stand a chance once I get ahold of him.”
Roxas and Xion teased him into submission while the pizza baked, knowing full well that such bravado was an act he performed in order to see them smile.
When the final battle came at last, its aftermath destroyed most of the routines that the side of light had built for themselves in the castle. Not all who’d survived had done so easily, and at first there was more work to do than there were helping hands to do it. But Lea refused to let pizza night be one of the war’s casualties, and three days after the battle he limped to the kitchen and rolled out dough with bruises under his eyes, gauze sticking messily to his wounds. He and Roxas and Xion shared the results more soberly than they ever had before, and Lea sighed over the last slice and put it onto a plate, taking it upstairs to the room where the shell of Isa lay unconscious.
For the next few weeks, Roxas and Xion watched Isa’s recovery at a distance, as leery of him as he was of everyone, not understanding why Lea sat at his bedside and talked in a low voice for hours, why he lay next to him atop the sheets and kissed the X-shaped scar gouged so deeply into his face.
“I don’t get it,” Roxas told Lea. “He almost killed you, didn’t he? Why did you save him? You said you weren’t even friends anymore.”
Lea sighed and shook his head.
“Look, buddy, it’s hard to explain. Love is complicated.” He reached out and tapped the side of Roxas’s temple, managing a tired smile. “Got it memorized?”
Gradually Isa had thawed, Lea helping nurse back to health the tender parts of him that Xehanort had tightly strangled for so long. When Isa could walk unaided he took part in his first pizza night, and if it was strange to have him there, it was stranger still (for Roxas and Xion) to watch him and Lea bicker off and on, in an oddly harmless way that Axel and Saïx had never done. For the first time they heard the origins of Lea’s pizza-making skills from another source, including details Lea had omitted to save face, and by the end of the evening, Roxas and Xion felt a little cheated that there had been so much light and laughter in Lea’s youth that Axel had never once shared with them on the clock tower. Lea took this criticism in stride.
“I didn’t think it mattered,” he told Xion, when she brought this up afterwards. “It wasn’t like any of that stuff was gonna happen again, y’know? Saïx and I had already…” He paused. “Well, it had been a long time. Figured I oughta just let it go.”
He ruffled Xion’s dark hair affectionately.
“Besides—we’re all here now, and that’s what matters. Everybody in one piece. We’ve gotta make the most of it, you got me?”
“But did you really set Isa’s kitchen on fire?”
“That was an accident.” Lea grimaced. “Don’t listen to everything he says, all right? I did some pretty dumb stuff as a kid.”
“That’s not exactly a surprise.”
Lea laughed despite himself.
Eventually the last of the war’s aftershocks dissipated, and when the time came to decide what the rest of their lives would look like, neither Roxas nor Xion nor Lea chose to become Keyblade apprentices in the Land of Departure. Roxas and Xion’s whole existences had hitherto been defined by the Keyblade, and both wanted to try out other meanings of their own choosing. Lea, for his part, had an oddly blasé attitude towards the weapon he’d striven so hard to earn.
“The Keyblade’s cool and all, but being a Master? Not my style. Besides,” he looked to Roxas, “if you’re not going to keep training, then you’ve gotta live somewhere—and somebody’s gotta keep an eye on you. Ever thought about moving to Twilight Town?”
Roxas grinned so hard it hurt.
So pizza night had become planning night, for munny and time and many decisions were required to make this idea a reality. Friday night’s usual aimless banter turned into Lea and Roxas and Isa sitting around the kitchen table with pens and paper, Lea and Isa arguing numbers and Isa usually winning, Roxas and Xion voicing their opinions and sometimes being called on to break a tie, even though Xion wouldn’t be living with them. More than once the evening’s pizzas went cold and limp before they all managed to come to an agreement.
It was Isa who understood the situation best, who countered Lea’s optimism with level-headed facts and figures, and it was Isa who found the house, even, after they’d been looking for a month and a half. Lea’s wheedling charm made the elderly landlady bring the rent down to what it needed to be for their budget, and then there was more planning and more pizza and shopping trips for mundane household items that they realized they’d need. They had no shortage of advice from everyone else, and no shortage of assistance on moving day, so much so that the commotion attracted most of the neighbors, who weren’t sure what to make of so much noise—a whole platoon of young strangers hauling boxes and moving furniture and arguing happily about what ought to go where.
It had taken time for Roxas and Xion to come to terms with Isa, and vice-versa. The process had been long and uneasy, Lea at first bouncing between them like a child between divorced parents, but Roxas and Xion’s interest grew with each day that went by, and it was Xion who braved the unknown first and extended an olive branch. Even before Isa was up and about she dared to introduce herself, bringing flowers for the windowsill and books for the nightstand, not knowing whether he would hate her any less than he had in her first life, but ready to follow Lea’s example and give him a chance.
Isa did not recant at once, but something vicious inside him had been slain forever, and the insults Saïx had hurled so often did not come nearly so freely from his human self. It helped that Xion had once shared the experience of Xehanort’s possession, however briefly, and it helped too that Isa could see her, really see her, for the first time in his life. It was less like making peace with an old enemy and more like getting to know a complete stranger. He didn’t apologize to her—not then, not that early—but she did not demand it, even when Roxas told her she ought.
“What’s the point?” he asked her, after one of her earliest ventures. “Don’t you remember what a jerk he was to you in the Organization?”
“Of course I do. But...A lot’s happened since then, hasn’t it? Things are really different now, and he isn’t with Xehanort anymore. And Lea likes him.”
“What if Lea’s wrong?”
Her only answer was a shrug, resigned to her own kindness.
They broke in the new house with pizza, not handmade but ordered from a corner shop as a celebratory contribution to the local economy, eating grease-soaked slices off paper plates while sitting on the last of the boxes that hadn’t yet been dealt with.
“Yours is better,” Roxas told Lea, picking red onions off of his slice.
None of it felt real until the next morning, when Roxas half-hung out of his bedroom window in his pajamas to watch the sunrise, realizing that for all his countless hours in Twilight Town before this, a sunrise here wasn’t something he’d ever once seen. Soon the smells of coffee and bacon lured him downstairs, and there was Isa at the stove with a mug already in hand, Lea sitting on the kitchen windowsill with one leg dangling, eating a slice of cold pizza as he watched the morning take shape outside.
“Day one,” he said with a smile, punching Roxas on the shoulder.
For the first few days they settled in and introduced themselves to the neighbors, but the exam loomed larger as the week drew to a close, and the night before, Lea made pizza with all Roxas’s favorite toppings while a visiting Xion drilled him mercilessly with flashcards. By the time the pizza came out of the oven, Roxas was slumped with his forehead pressed to the tabletop, exhausted.
“I’m sick of studying,” he groaned. “If I don’t know this stuff by now, I’m never gonna learn it.”
“Just one more!” Xion insisted, shuffling the flashcards. “What if this is on the test?”
“What if it’s not, though? What if none of this is?”
“C’mon, pal, buck up.” Lea slapped him on the back, not hard but hard enough to make him yelp. “You gotta think positive and get it memorized.”
“Very funny.” Roxas tried to throw a flashcard at Lea over his shoulder; it veered off course and landed in the steaming pizza resting on the stovetop. Isa fished the flashcard out of the still-bubbling cheese without comment.
Xion kept quizzing him as they ate, relentless in her enthusiasm, letting her share of pizza grow cool beside her. When Roxas could take no more, he simply stopped responding to questions, and Lea laughed good-naturedly at his exasperation.
“Think you’re ready, Roxas?” he asked him.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Roxas said wearily, and grabbed himself another slice.
Even after Xion’s assurances that Isa was now harmless, Roxas had kept his guard up at first. Never mind that Lea cared about him, and that Lea had taken up his rehabilitation as a personal mission; Lea had made mistakes before. So Roxas watched and waited, and wondered whether the quiet, careful person who haunted the castle in Saïx’s skin was any less dangerous than the strict Nobody he remembered. They hadn’t interacted much initially, out of mutual wariness, but one evening finally found the two alone in the kitchen by coincidence, Roxas poking at a plate of leftovers while Isa made himself a meal on the stovetop. Its strange, delicious aroma finally enticed Roxas to speak.
“You can try some, if you like,” Isa said offhandedly, once he’d explained what curry was. Roxas swallowed a bite of rice too fast, and coughed it back up with difficulty.
“What?”
But Isa did not repeat himself, and Roxas realized he was as cautious about extending the offer as Roxas was about accepting it. By the time Roxas finished debating with himself, the curry was ready, and he accepted a forkful of it only because he’d watched the whole process and was almost certain it wasn’t poisoned. The taste surprised and pleased him.
“Lea’s never cooked anything like that,” Roxas admitted, wishing he could ask for more.
“He’s never been much of a cook.” Isa spoke with his back to Roxas, rinsing his plate in the sink. “Not that he realizes it.”
“Hey now, come on. I make a mean bowl of cereal.”
Lea stuck his head in the doorway, and the smell inside the kitchenette drew him to the stove and made him lift the lid from the pot. Its contents confounded him.
“Hold up—you made him curry? Seriously?” He looked affronted, half earnestly and half an exaggerated affectation. “What did he do? I’ve been asking for curry for two weeks!”
Isa finished rinsing the plate and set it in the drying rack, ignoring Lea as calmly if he couldn’t hear him, making Lea tease him further. It wasn’t until Lea went so far as to kiss him on the neck that Lea seemed to remember there was an audience, and froze as if caught in a spotlight, alarmed and embarrassed. Roxas and Isa made eye contact.
“Do you see what I have to deal with?” Isa asked, completely deadpan. It took Roxas a whole second to decide how to respond, his head giving one reply and his heart another. He went with his heart.
“He is pretty obnoxious,” Roxas admitted, through a mouthful of rice.
Lea’s indignation made Roxas snort with laughter, and even Isa smiled just enough to be noticeable.
School was not something Roxas initially grasped the concept of, but the more he heard about it, the more the notion appealed to him. Spending time with peers, hanging out and having fun, learning about the world and using that knowledge to build a future—all of it seemed fantastical and alien, too good to be true. In Roxas’s short life his only joys had been intermittent, whittled out of the sharp edges of drudgery and bitterness and war, and the idea that every day could be enjoyable took him a long while to believe.
To his surprise, the first time he expressed these thoughts in the wake of the war’s end, Lea seized upon the idea immediately.
“School would be good for you,” Lea said, as he kneaded the dough for tonight’s pizzas while Xion helped Isa with the sauce. “You deserve to get to be a regular kid.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.” Lea flipped the ball of dough over, leaving knuckle prints in it when he punched it down. “I’m serious, Roxas. If you wanna go to school in Twilight Town, we’ll figure out how to make it happen.”
“What about you two—Lea? Isa?” Xion asked from the stove; both Lea and Isa looked to her. “Did you guys like school when you went?”
“It was alright,” said Lea, kneading harder. “Never finished, though. Only got up to about…” His brow furrowed. “We never made it out of junior high, right, Isa?”
“No.”
“How come?” Roxas asked.
Lea and Isa exchanged looks, and Isa turned down the heat on the burner.
“A story for another time,” was all he said, letting Xion stir the sauce.
But the conversation picked up again the next Friday, when Lea and Isa reported that they had, of all things, actually done the legwork about seeing what Roxas would need to do to start high school in Twilight Town.
“They have a placement exam for transfer students,” Isa reported, sprinkling more shredded basil onto tonight’s pair of pizzas before they went into the oven. “If you do well enough, you’ll be put with other students your age. Your perceived age.”
The fact that only a piece of paper with questions on it stood between him and a new life was all the impetus Roxas needed. The placement exam became a challenge that he approached with the same determination as any battle he’d ever fought, and there were so many people who cared about him now that getting him accepted into school became the work of a small village. He was exempted from helping to cook on pizza night, instead sitting with both elbows planted on the counter and poring over books from the castle library, answering Xion’s flashcard questions one by one. Out of solidarity she learned everything alongside him, and if they had questions the book could not answer, she had no qualms about dragging in Even or Ienzo to explain (preferably Ienzo, as he was better at it). Roxas’s resolution impressed everyone, including his other half.
“I bet I don’t even know any of this stuff,” Sora admitted cheerfully, peering over Roxas’s shoulder at his biology notes. “It all looks pretty tough. Good luck!”
“Thanks,” Roxas sighed, scratching an itch on his cheek with the corner of a flashcard. Determination aside, the barrage of new information was daunting. “I think I’m gonna need it.”
But he persevered, and basic math and science and everything else a high school freshman ought to know trickled into his brain little by little.
Roxas did as well on the placement exam as he’d dared hope, and the start of second term after the summer break sent him off to school with a backpack slung over his shoulder and a spring in his step. Lea walked him all the way there, and moped outside the building before dragging himself home again, hands in his pockets. He spent the rest of the day in an odd funk, equal parts proud and anxious.
“He hasn’t been around that many other kids before,” Lea said, as he lay on the sofa. “What if he doesn’t fit in? What if they make fun of him?”
“If he could handle working for the Organization,” said Isa, peeling carrots in the small kitchen, “he can handle a few schoolyard insults.”
“Yeah, but he shouldn’t have to. Kids can be real jerks.”
“You worry too much.”
“Well, can you blame me?” Lea lobbed a decorative pillow at the ceiling, catching it with both hands when it fell. “Every time I look the other way, something bad happens to the people I care about. It’s enough to make a guy go gray, I’ll tell ya.”
But Roxas came home in the evening with a smile on his face, the day’s excitement having far outweighed its frustrations. He’d met more people than he knew how to count. There were so many clubs to join that he couldn’t yet begin to decide which he ought to try. There was a field trip coming up next month.
Lea surprised himself with how well he adapted to domesticity, because he’d never planned far enough ahead to want it. In his earliest days as Axel there’d been only the vaguest thoughts of what he and Saïx might do once they conquered the Organization and escaped, and long after those particular dreams had faded, there had been other, fleeting fantasies only rarely, mostly during that final year on the clock tower. Nothing extravagant, nothing detailed—just a hollow yearning for endless days of ice cream and laughter without any shadows looming over his head. Now Lea found himself enmeshed in a life that Axel had never prepared for, and while there was plenty of ice cream and laughter it was mostly a lot of grocery shopping, and hanging laundry out to dry on a line, and wracking his brain in the evenings trying to help Roxas with his homework. Roxas and Xion and Isa, all of them alive, all of them whole and his—Axel could never even have fathomed it.
“Look at us,” Lea said one afternoon, after he and Isa had taken almost an hour to assemble some cheap furniture without instructions while Roxas was at school. He ran a hand through his hair, tired but pleased, admiring the new bookshelf now tucked into the corner of their bedroom. “Never thought we’d make it this far, y’know?”
Isa had been picking stray nails and screws out of the carpet; now he sat on the side of the bed, closing his hand around them to keep them from falling onto the sheets.
“Well, if you’d read the instructions first...”
“I don’t mean that.” Lea made a flippant gesture that encompassed not only the fruits of their recent labor, but the rest of the room as well, the house and its inhabitants and the whole world going on around them. “C’mon, Isa, don’t tell me you knew all this was coming.”
“I always knew I’d be stuck with you,” Isa said, his green eyes glittering. “One way or another.”
Lea laughed. His arms went around Isa’s waist from behind as he rested his chin on Isa’s shoulder, and Isa rolled his eyes but did not pull away, not even after Lea kissed him on the cheek.
“You’re such a stick in the mud,” Lea grumbled, nudging Isa’s head with his own.
“One of us has to be the responsible one.”
“Mm...guess so. I mean, I’m already the cool one and the handsome one…”
Banter turned to kissing and back to banter as they started on the next piece of furniture. They were two actors who had performed together so long that each knew the other’s cues and tells intimately, not of one mind (and rarely in agreement) but always on the same wavelength, and if Lea’s cavalier openness and Isa’s cool stoicism were a little rehearsed now, a little play-pretend to help disguise the ravages of time, they both knew it and accepted it, and had made it part of the show. Reuniting had been painful and difficult and completely unavoidable. After all that had happened, even now, they were each one half of the other.
“I thought you had forgotten me,” Isa told him, not for the first time, as they lay together on the couch with their fingers entwined.
“I couldn’t forget you,” Lea said tiredly, resting his head on Isa’s chest. “Believe me, I tried all the time.”
Xion’s choice not to move with them to Twilight Town had mildly disappointed Roxas and Lea, but hadn’t surprised them. After all, she’d found her family in Radiant Garden, odd and misshapen as it was, and neither could blame her for wanting to call the castle her home.
“I’ll come see you guys all the time,” she’d told them. “It’s not that I don’t want to stay with you, I just...”
“We get it, kiddo,” Lea said, smiling. “You belong here. No worries.”
“I’ll visit as much as I can. I promise.”
She kept her word. Most evenings she swung by around dinnertime to hear about the day’s misadventures, and sometimes she even showed up in the morning to help Lea run household errands. The two of them never managed to stay completely on task, buying cheese and picking up dry cleaning but always wandering, too, Xion sometimes shopping for clothes or grabbing a small present for someone back home. The lady who ran the ice cream shop always rang up their order the moment she saw them coming, so that by the time they actually reached the booth, several bars of sea salt were already packaged and ready to go, sitting like a gift on the countertop.
Sometimes, if Lea were busy, it was Isa that Xion accompanied on morning errands—a more straightforward and straight-laced process than laughing with Lea up and down the block, but not unpleasant now that she and Isa had gotten to know each other. If Lea was a friend, then Isa was something a little more distant and authoritative, an older cousin perhaps, who still merited friendship even if he did not crack a joke nearly as often. Lea was not the object of a tug-of-war between them, but rather a source of camaraderie, as they now shared the burden of putting up with him.
“He tries to be cool,” Xion said thoughtfully, handing Isa a stick of sea salt ice cream, “but he’s kind of a dork.”
Isa shifted his grip on the grocery bag to accept the bar, biting into it as they started up the street.
“Did he ever tell you he once ate an entire box of crayons for a bet?”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. We were in the fourth grade…”
Slowly, imperceptibly, the war faded. Not into oblivion—never that, not with this many scars between them—but dark memories fell dormant and sank to the bottoms of their hearts, sleeping in the narrow spaces between pizza night and pillow fights and PTA meetings. A stranger looking into the window on a Friday night months later might even have mistaken them for normal people: Lea tossing pizza dough, arguing with Isa making side dishes at the stove, Xion giggling across the table from Roxas as he cleaned sauce off of his algebra textbook. That night, while the pizza baked, they learned from Xion of everything happening back in Radiant Garden, and from Roxas of everything happening at school; while the pizza cooled, it was decided that life had gotten a little too rhythmic lately, and they ought to make time for an adventure.
“You should all come visit the castle,” Xion insisted. “The Restoration Committee’s been working really hard. There’s a lot going on in town now.”
“We’ll be back for Christmas,” Isa reminded her. “That isn’t too far off.”
“Yeah, but still. You can come see all the new buildings. And Naminé painted this really amazing mural.”
Isa cut the pizza with a rolling blade as Roxas surrendered and shoved his pile of homework aside, a pencil rolling off the edge of the table and bouncing away.
“What about the Land of Departure?” Roxas suggested. “I haven’t seen Ven and the others in forever.”
“I dunno if we can all just drop in for a weekend,” Lea mused, leaning back in his chair with his arms folded. “They have their hands full over there with training and all that. We’d have to ask Aqua.”
“Disney Town?”
“We were just there a couple months ago.”
“Yeah, but it was fun.”
The pizza appeared in the middle of the table, no longer bubbling but still sending up steam. Lea let his chair fall forward, the front legs hitting the floor loudly. He grinned with sudden inspiration as Isa sat down among them.
“Well, here’s a good one,” Lea said, and reached out for the first slice of pizza. “How about we all pack up and go to the beach?”