tampered | (no subject)

Current Mood: indifferent

(no subject)

When; Today, early evening (before 8 PM, lulz schedule)
Rating; PG-ish?!
Characters; Roxas [

spellthingsout]
Summary; After this thread. Roxas wants to know the truth. Axel finally gives in. Maybe.

Log;

It was the type of situation where he'd have disappeared for a few days until the whole thing had blown over.

Yeah, like it was going to happen now. One city, one place despite all the seemly locations; none of which he found interest in. Except, maybe, the rooftop he'd recently taken to haunting. Plenty of stuff to watch, people to pretend to get to know. It was a funny kind of existence without a way to portal out of the City. Not so much...fun.

Scratching the back of his head, Axel had found their conversation just a little tedious. So what if Roxas wanted to know? Really, it had been the general consensus to leave him out of that altogether. Considering orders were orders, done and over with. Drone, drone, drone. Boring, boring, boring. Still, giving him enough information to chew couldn't be THAT hard. Leave it to him to do the dirty work.

Through a portal, and he dropped rather unceremoniously onto the edge of that bed, the other Nobody its current occupant. Palm resting flat, he regarded him with an almost solemn look.

"Suddenly not so fuzzy on the details now." A finger pointed at the book Roxas held. "Interested?"

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After weeks of questions to no avail, it was hard to believe that Axel would crumble so easily. He didn't believe it, not really - at least not until he felt the bed bounce under the sudden impact of one skeletal Nobody. Then, all at once, it felt a little more real. Axel knew better than to goad him in person, so unless he was planning to beat a strategic retreat in the next five minutes--

In spite of himself, he frowned. The suddenness with which Axel had decided that sharing was caring was a little weird. Why now, of all times? Still, Roxas wasn't going to question it. Most of the time it seemed like Axel didn't operate by logic so much as by whatever he thought would annoy the maximum amount of people. Not to mention there was some saying about this kind of thing - something about horses and mouths?

Sora probably knew. Which just made it one in a whole world of things Sora knew that Roxas didn't.

The furrow deepened between his brows. He quashed the thought. At Axel's gesture, he closed the book. Even so, Roxas kept it in his hand as he turned.

"Go ahead."

So much for the start of a conveniently planned beginning.

Axel was relatively positive that sitting so close to a constantly cranky, somewhat unpredictable Roxas couldn't have been safe. Especially when he felt his mouth twist into the start of a sneer upon hearing such simple words. Go ahead where? Couldn't care less -strange, he would have laughed at that- about anything except that. Control suddenly spontaneous, he looked away, leaning back on both hands as in the guise of thinking.

What did he want him to tell him anyway? Oh, sure, he'd been around for the crumbling of the Organization , had probably stuck his hand a little too deep in the proverbial cookie jar with that one. But he had his own agenda to keep, things to do; even if this pathetically constructed City gave him less to work with. Somewhere along the way, involving Roxas but not including him had become second nature. Weird.

"Can't guess where you want me to start at." Castle Oblivion, Twilight Town. It was all blurring together into a lump of pointless memory. Or, perhaps, he was stalling. "Gonna give me a hint?"

Ignoring the jibe, he considered the question. There were way too many mysteries for his comfort. Castle Oblivion, for one. To Roxas, it had been just another mission Superior had pushed over his head. But if Sora had been there… ignoring it would be dangerous – especially if another Nobody who’d died in the castle showed up. Who knew how many of those deaths had been Axel’s fault?

Not that it really mattered to Roxas.

The most important question was, of course, how he could have disappeared. What could have transpired to bring him from Memory’s Skyscraper – and that was where he’d intended to go when he’d left, he was sure of it now – back to Sora? … But he couldn’t expect Axel to know that. Unless something’d happened.

Fixing a cool, even gaze on Axel, he asked the first question: “Why were you traveling with Sora?”

Of all the gaps in his knowledge, that made the least sense. Why would Axel care about what happened to some kid with a Keyblade if he’d left the Organization? Maybe they’d met in Castle Oblivion – though that still left too much accounted for. The why and the how and – everything else, for that matter.

Nice question to ask, would have been the preferred method of countering such an odd query. Maybe a little physical interaction, liking poking him in the forehead. Hard.

Guess it was better than some of the other things he could have asked, considering. Not that confessing to half of what he'd actually done after Roxas had left wouldn't have been amusing; watching his face twist into whatever resembled emotion was always entertaining - in more ways than one. Yet, that would leave far too much for him to consider, and really, he just didn't have the patience to put up with that. Axel stiffened a little, shifting positions to lean forward, arms resting on the either knee so he could stare at the floor instead.

"Wasn't exactly how you make it sound." Couldn't be, anyway. It had only been a convenient outcome, Sora and he being in the same places at almost the same time. Maybe-- "Ask the little hero about it. He'll tell you whatever ya want."

Again with the assuming, but if Sora was - in anyway - like Roxas, at least the natural honesty would slip somewhere amidst all the faces and slow on the uptakes. With a tilt of his head, green eyes leveled on him.

"Ain't like it was fun running around after him." If he'd died-- There was a shrug, and nothing else to it.

Ignoring the shifting, Roxas only tightened his grip on the book as he thought. It wasn’t like Axel – no, wait, it was exactly like Axel to play up the enigmatic angle. Roxas would have ignored the subject entirely if it weren’t for the fact that somewhere along the line, he disappeared.

The City was only a temporary haven; a few people here and there had managed to stay for years, but everyone went back in the end. And, whether he could carry the knowledge back into his own story or not, he needed to know – in case things could be changed.

But was that it? Coincidence? Well, Sora had said something about fighting a bunch of Dusks and Axel dropping in from nowhere to blow himself up but, somehow, Roxas hadn’t managed to take it very seriously. Axel could be stupid and infuriating, but he wasn’t suicidal. If he’d wanted death, he could have faded back into a Dusk at any time. Anyway, as for Sora--

Roxas curbed the thought. He didn’t want to think about it.

“You’re here right now,” he pointed out instead, meeting Axel’s gaze without hesitation. “And I’m asking you. So tell me. Why were you with him?”

Response immediate, he was up on his feet and walking, moving just to move in the confines of such a small space before a single sound was uttered in reply. That was the thing about Roxas and his curiosity - it was always constant, always stifling, always...there to annoy him. In the Organization, it had been the same, just like now, and maybe that rendered him a slightly confused Nobody.

Cases of mistaken identities and altered personalities just weren't enough; he had to deal with this, too. Huh.

Axel knew he could comprise a million more excuses that would, possibly, appease the blond long enough to stop their game of ask, ask, threaten with Keyblades, ask, but it just wasn't his style to let it slide so easily. Yet, how hard was THAT story to understand? He'd been there with Sora, with mass Heartless and in the process of deciding to give them the biggest BANG of their lives before haphazardly showing up in the City. Body stopping, he ran a gloved hand through the mess that was his hair.

"You weren't coming back." It was a jagged mumble, as if the thought itself had torn itself free from his mouth without consent. "Figured that was as good a place as any to be."

...Right?

Nah. He was the honest to whatever bad guy, even if that had been the reason for consorting with the other runt on more than one occasion. Roxas could think what he wanted; Axel didn't - couldn't, really- care. And he crossed his arms, settling back with a foot pressed against the surface of the wall behind him.

This admission should mean something. That much was obvious from the way Axel tossed it off, as if it really was just that casual, a feather-light sentence that carried no consequence. Roxas puzzled over it slowly. He kept an eye on Axel still, following him through the motions with a watchfulness that was more abstracted than anything else. So the reason was much – smaller than he’d thought it would be, and not about Castle Oblivion or Sora as much as—

Well. That made sense – sort of. As much sense as Axel could ever make, anyway. He supposed he should be grateful that he could understand it at all.

His shoulders slackened and eased. In an unspoken echo, Roxas angled his head back against the wall and thought. When he’d first arrived, Axel had said that he wasn’t dead (yet) – which meant that he couldn’t be allowed to leave the City anymore. But that was separate. It had nothing to do with the questions that remained to him, so Roxas filed it for later. He hadn’t found out everything yet anyway.

“When’d you meet him?” he asked at last. “Castle Oblivion?” Just the name brought a fresh onslaught of holes in the story he knew, things that had yet to be understood. His grip on the book tightened a little, gloves creaking. They’d never told him anything about what was happening there. The omission seemed strange now – especially in light of the fact that Sora had been there and yet couldn’t remember any of it.

But Roxas did remember certain things – like the name Zexion had given him before he’d left.

Coolly, Roxas posed the next: “Do you know who Namine is?”

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