Kingdom Hearts 13 Lessons in Losing Yourself

1. _a room of silver_

Pale light shimmers across his ceiling; the glow-in-the-dark stars are a faded green, thirteen years old and out of commission. The window is open slightly, admitting a breeze that sweeps out the drapes and fractures the moonlight. He can just make out the faces on the posters he had put up when he was a kid and had never taken down—old bands, television shows, comic book characters from series long out of print. His childhood room brings an ache to his chest—a chill from the wind, too, but he does not have the energy to get up and close the window—and it is nostalgic in a way distinctly detached from the objects of the days when he was child of the summer, mind full of adventure and ten thousand plots and plans to combat imagined foes. He is twenty-five—fresh out of college and freshly moved into a broken down three-room flat in the next town over—home again because what fate giveth fate taketh away, and all the mirrors in the house are turned to the wall.

The ache is one of loss: it pierces him within and without and he thinks, over and over, insomnia-addled and face rigid with unspent unfelt grief, that he has felt this way before, though he cannot remember when or why. When he finally sleeps, he dreams of death—his own—and cracked, mirrored lake surfaces that contain the multitudes of lives he thinks may have once been his own. He wakes three hours later—clock blinking green in his eyes, and he winces unconsciously—and stays up, rolls out of bed, shuts the window. When he goes to the bathroom to shower, he hears someone sobbing through the thin wooden door—the sounds thunder through his bones, cascading heavily over his head, choking him with a despair so raw and emptying that it clenches icy claws around his heart, bending out the ribs and pulling hard. He grits his teeth, puts a hand to his mouth, and moves on to the kitchen.

II. _new-built city_

When he couldn't sleep, Isa would climb onto the roof of his house, tip-toeing past his parents' room to the hall window where he would scale the fire escape. Radiant Garden stretched out below him like a maze of lights. The castle could be seen from almost any point in the city, but the view from his roof—he thought—was the very best. The windows were always lit a rich, golden yellow, shining down onto the sea of flowers that stretched out from the castle on all sides, ending at the tall wrought-iron gates that he had foiled many times now (the guards knew him by name, though they still carelessly tossed him out, well-learned men saddled with the unpleasant duty of taking out the trash).

If the moon was out, he would instead sneak down the fire escape to the alley that ran along the side of his house, the streets awash with a comforting pale light that made them—he thought—safer and more navigable. The night unsettled him, when he couldn't see, but on nights such as these he gathered himself and went to visit Lea, stretching up to his friend's first-floor window and knocking quietly until he opened it, sleepy-eyed as he poked his head out, violent red hair sticking out in all directions. Lea would say different things every time Isa came around. Sometimes it was "You again?" as though he was expecting someone else, or "Y'know it'd be quieter if you just chucked a fucking rock through my window" on days when Isa was particularly impatient.

Tonight, it was "We really need to stop meeting like this," and Isa rolled his eyes, grabbed Lea's hand and climbed through. Lea's room was neat in a way that spoke highly of his father, who had long since given up trying to convince his son of the merits of a clean space and instead took upon himself the grim task of tidying it.

"Tomorrow," Isa began without preamble, standing somewhat awkwardly by the window as Lea, yawning, returned to bed, "we go back."

This seemed to catch his attention. "What's up? You find out something new?"

"There's a new apprentice hanging around. He's clearly not from around here."

"You mean from another world? Are you _sure_?" The skepticism had sunk in, and Lea laid back, folding his arms behind his head, eyes closed. He had heard it all before.

Isa narrowed his eyes, immediately annoyed. "If it's such a _bother_, I'll go without you."

Lea grinned, then, before he rolled over and put his back to Isa as though he was returning to sleep. "Yeah, all right, I'm in. You know that."

"We'll meet at the usual spot, then?"

"Sure thing, partner."

Isa never stayed long, though both he and Lea knew that the trivial midnight conversations were things that easily could have been put off until morning. Isa's insecurities were quiet and guarded, and if Lea knew of them, he never said. But Isa felt a sort of solemn satisfaction whenever he returned home afterwards, crawled into his own bed and stared up at the stars, glowing bright green in the dark, and eventually he would drift off to sleep.

3. _chipped sharp_

The wake is somber and songless—everyone is crying except for him. He is standing alone by a window, burning through his second pack of cigarettes and trying not to look at anyone for too long. He hadn't spoken a word all day, and his family had nodded knowingly, moving onto his mother who renewed her loud grieving every hour on the hour. He had heard once that people break differently; his mother shattered into a million pieces that glittered cruelly on the beige carpet, and all the attendees and well-wishers can do is step carefully and try not to crush the tiny shards that are left of her.

He feels jagged: broken in half, sharp cutting edges that warn all others away, leaving him to his plume of smoke, stony lips set in a harsh line broken only by the damp end of the filter. He has never smoked before this day, but there is something soothing about the smell of burning. Eventually the sidelong looks from aunts and cousins drive him outside where he sits on the stoop, staring down anyone passing on his side of the street. Many see him, recognize him, cross to the other side, until he sees a flash of red and Axel is approaching him, thumbs hooked carelessly through the loops of his jeans. He sits next to him on the stoop, pilfers a cigarette and lights it up. They sit in silence for what must have been hours, and it is only broken once the pack runs out.

"How's it going?" Axel doesn't look at him when he asks.

He doesn't answer, drops his eyes to the cracks in the sidewalk and feels that ache all over again—that bitter nostalgia for things he cannot seem to remember. He grits his teeth and closes his eyes. "Saïx?" Axel's tone is cautious, and they are both aware of the crackling, volatile energy that chokes the air—Axel acutely and Saïx peripherally, as though he is only vaguely cognizant of his own emotions.

"It doesn't seem real," Saïx offers reluctantly, voice low because he is teetering on the edge of an unimaginable and endless chasm where he sees only darkness, and that too elicits a familiar pang that hollows out his insides. He doesn't wish to speak, but Axel is the only one caring or careless enough to push him.

Axel is relieved by the answer: it is one he has heard on television shows before, the numbness following a death. He can respond to this, he thinks, with the proper care. "'Course not. It was so sudden and all. Probably hasn't sunk in yet, y'know? Just take it easy, man. Maybe take a few days off and relax."

"No."

Axel looks a little aghast now, turned toward him slightly and looking at Saïx with one eye curtained by red. He opens his mouth to say something more, but after a moment's deliberation he closes it without a sound. Saïx's eyes are still trained on the lines that separate the sidewalk slabs. Axel's presence agitates him, makes him fidgety and restless, and he rubs his lips for want of another smoke. The mirrors are turned to the walls; Saïx hasn't seen himself in three days, though he can feel the purple bags pulling down beneath his eyes—a curious cross between green and blue, though now they are vacant and unseeing. The sidewalk melts away, leaving behind only the yawning pit that stares unblinkingly back, waiting and waiting and waiting.

IV. _stormy world_

It always rained; large vacuous puddles collected around gutters clogged with blank bits of paper and colorful candy wrappers written in a gibberish language. Amidst the pattering of the falling storm, there was the buzzing of the neon signs—they flickered with the lightning, winking out only to come back without fail several minutes later. The world was an empty facsimile, a desperate replica mindlessly grasping for its place in a universe that had no room for it. Organization XIII, if nothing else, had a great love of irony—a collection of empty dolls playing god in an empty world.

In the beginning, Saïx spent a lot of time in front of the skyscraper, hood up and hands shoved deep in his pockets, clenched into tight fists while disjointed images danced across the cracked screens. Radiant Garden. Lea. The ice cream shop down the block from his parents' house. The castle. Flowers glowing in the moonlight. Lea laughing. Sundresses in the spring. Dark fissures cracking the earth apart, pouring out world-eating monstrosities as a violet orb pulses in the sky, drawing all towards it. Lea bleeding out in his arms, ribcage wrenched open and offered to the heavens as viscous black liquid (what _is_ that) seeps out, covers his hands, bites into his flesh.

5. _diamond-strung_

It doesn't rain when they finally put him in the ground. The sun shines brightly—butterflies float lazily by on the pleasant autumn breeze—and his mother clings to his side, always crying now, her face washed of all color and replaced only with the barren look of a heart picked clean. It is unbelievably hot; the priest is perspiring, tugging at his collar, struggling through the sermon though the humidity lies thick on his tongue. Axel is standing across from him, hands clasped, head bowed and eyes closed, statuesque in his reverence—the only time he can remember seeing Axel in a position of genuine deference. Saïx stares openly at him, tracing the curve of his hairline with his eyes; Axel's skin is dusted with a late summer tan.

Saïx has not seen himself in two weeks. The mirrors remain turned to the wall. His mother has begun to lose her hair—he finds clumps of it gathered in the shower drain. After the funeral, she will return to her spot in the living room where she will curl up in his father's leather chair and stare vacantly at the window, seeing nothing beyond it. She will not eat unless he leads her to the kitchen and sits her before a plate and quietly ushers her into robotic and perfunctory motions.

Axel looks up, catches him staring and then stares back, brows knitted questioningly though Saïx gives away nothing with his blank expression. There is an overwhelming sense of déjà vu—Axel sitting on a bed, framed by a wide window set in a silvery sill, yellowish light pouring in behind him from a concave moon. There is a sense of urgency that rattles dully in his chest. Saïx tears his eyes away only to look down at the lonely black coffin, and they begin to pile the hole high with dirt. He watches impassively, face twisted into a grimace as his mother clutches him tighter, and he has to wrap an arm around her to keep her from sinking to her knees right there in the middle of the cemetery.

He thinks of fissures and disintegrating planets and the sensation of standing still and solitary while reality crumbles around him, chunks of debris detaching and floating up to a shattering sky. The set of his jaw tightens as the group gathered around the grave disperses, and for a minute he mistakes the scattered rose petals for blood dotting the white tarp placed around the hole. He touches his chest for a moment—to make sure it's all still there before he gently leads his mother back to the limousine. Axel has disappeared, and Saïx does not see him again until the funeral party.

VI. _fire gone gray_

The castle was always hollow; the walls were white and cavernous, stretching high above and forming buttresses that seemed to defy the very laws of physics. The rooms were amorphous and constantly shifting like the white bodies that danced through the air, fluid and graceful with zippered mouths glinting dangerously in the light. It didn't stabilize until they shackled Kingdom Hearts to the world, and even then the library sometimes arbitrarily swapped places with the third floor bathroom.

It was nothing like the castle of Radiant Garden, though this—too—could be seen from any point in the dark, thundering city. A large, titanic mass stabbing spires into the barren starry sky and backlit by the yellow glow of an artificial moon. There was no more summer here; only cold rain that ran down the outsides of the windows, smudging the faraway worlds.

It was not unlike when they were kids; they had a plan, always, and Lea—Axel—still laid on his back with his arms folded behind his head, stretched out like a cat. In the dim light, his hair was a slow-burning auburn fanned out on the white pillowcase—a savage starburst of color against the faded dull backdrop of the castle walls, alike only in the unforgiving angles that make them. Axel—Lea—was not soft, had not been soft for years before the Organization asked him to be a killer; he was sharp where Saïx was hard, all edges and points where Saïx was straight immovable lines. Together, they were graceless.

They kissed, sometimes, badly and in moments of feigned passion—lips mashing together, all teeth and sometimes blood though they never knew whose. It made Saïx restless in a way that he wanted to get away, and he would push Axel off, hard. Sometimes Axel would hit his head and curse, and that would be the end of it; he would stalk back to his room, clothes askew, flipping the bird while he left without looking back, and Saïx would wonder why Axel went through all the trouble of putting on this show when neither of them had any capacity to be upset in to begin with. Sometimes Axel would hold a grudge, too, and Saïx responded as he always did—coldly, methodically, uncaringly because he knew Axel would get over it, and he always did.

They became motions: mechanical and performed only because they had always been performed and neither of them saw a reason to change it. Axel didn't like it when Saïx looked at him during—said the eyes reminded him of before, when they had died, gold like the shadows that had ripped them apart and carved out their insides. He used to ask why they had changed to begin with, said he'd liked them better blue, but that had caused Saïx to be particularly rough, shoving Axel's head face-down into the pillow until he almost suffocated while Saïx kept a white-knuckled fist knotted in the hair at the back of his skull, and Axel didn't ask anymore.

Eventually, even the mock-anger seeped out. They slept without touching, legs tangled but separate in the sheets, back-to-back with enough room between that another person could have fit there. If this was merely the natural progression of things, there was no one to say for there was nothing natural to be found—about them or about this arrangement that had become little more than a farce or a shoddy second-rate reproduction of something that had once contained meaning.

7. _drowned in rain_

Comparatively, the funeral party is quick and painless—his relatives bring and prepare food, and they each take shifts sitting with his mother by the window, leaving him free to change out of his tear-stained button-down. When he climbs the stairs to his room, already loosening his tie as he opens the door, he finds Axel there waiting for him, picking through the old action figures on his desk with his back to Saïx, who looks for but a moment before going to his armoire. Only once he has his hands on the handles does Axel speak:

"You know," he begins tentatively, still turned towards the desk, fingers brushing aimlessly over the plastic faces, "if you need to talk or something…you know…" He is audibly struggling with both his own pride and the overall shock of being in a situation where he is the steady one and Saïx is floundering and everyone knows it but is too polite to say anything. Axel has never been polite.

Saïx doesn't answer; instead, he picks out a new shirt and takes off the old one, letting it drop on the floor in a crumpled pile, wrinkles already setting in. Axel, to his credit, tries again, though his voice is now thick with barely-concealed frustration: "Okay. Then how about sleeping? Have you been sleeping all right?" They both realize it is a pointless question, though it demonstrates Axel's commitment to playing this role of emotional caretaker. Saïx would laugh, had the circumstances been different—the amusement is short-lived, flutters briefly in his chest before dying out, leaving him cold and chasmic and bitter. He roughly tugs on a new shirt—something comfortable because he has grown tired of this, tired of nice shirts and jackets, tired of everything but especially the constant comings-and-goings of people in his house whom he has only ever had to see on holidays. He is tired of being in the house altogether; his apartment is shabby and cold in the winter, but there he can sit up all night without listening to the broken cries of a shadow of a woman.

Axel says something else, but there is a deafening hum in Saïx's ears and he isn't listening when he abruptly turns from the armoire. Axel watches him warily, his back to the desk now, and there is a look in his eyes that makes Saïx hesitate, something halfway between a scowl and a grimace contorting the shape of Axel's thin lips—they have been friends for as far back as Saïx can remember, yet now—

Time seems to grind to a halt and for a minute Saïx can hear the dull roar of rainfall outside, though the window just over Axel's shoulder admits sharp yellow sunlight and a cloudless blue sky. He raises a hand to his face, runs it down his cheek, everything falling out of focus like an unadjusted camera lens, and the next thing he remembers is being pushed down—on the bed, no, the floor because he can feel the buttons of his discarded shirt pressing insistently into the small of his back—and Axel is on top of him, his long fingers framing his face as his tongue slips into his mouth. Saïx is supine and pliable—there is something distinctly hollow, and he concludes this with a clinical detachment when he feels Axel shove a hand into his pants.

VIII. _fetid darkness_

When Isa finally came to, the sky above him was black. Something wet and warm was seeping into his scalp, and absentmindedly, childishly, he was annoyed by the way it was matting his hair. Vaguely, he could feel the earth trembling beneath him; small shivers that worked their way into and cracked open, little by little, the thin fractures spiderwebbing the pavement. Far away, he heard a scream. Something was burning—there was sulfur searing hot in his nose—and when he sat up he was struck by vertigo, light-headedness, motion sickness. He half-rolled half-fell forward onto his hands and knees in time to vomit. The bile was black and sticky. Looking at it made him feel cold (he assumed it was from all the ash in the air), and without thinking too hard about it he hauled himself to his feet, wiping his mouth on the back of his sleeve.

The Garden was burning. All around him was the thundering sound of collapsing buildings, the thick wooden beams groaning and splintering and dumping the tiled roofs inward. Sometimes the bits and pieces of rubble floated up like they had all at once forgotten about gravity. He felt sick all over again. His neck was stiff and sore like he had whiplash when he forced himself to look around, spotting Lea's body sprawled out nearby. Isa stumbled and fell halfway to him, then closed the rest of the distance with a painful crawl and scraped up his palms and shins on the jagged asphalt and pieces of crushed glass blown out from the burning houses.

There was blood blossoming across Lea's chest, staining the tatters of his shirt where his ribcage had been broken. The air around him was sour, tinged by black wisps that scalded Isa's flesh where they brushed against him. Lea's eyes were open, staring up blankly, mouth slightly ajar, chin painted a deep red. His torso was a gaping void (Isa vomited again, like he was purging his entire self, his essence, the black tar pouring out onto the broken ground and seeping wetly into the cracks). Everything was picked clean. There was nothing left.

9. _in darkness dwelt_

He can hear his mother crying in her room down the hall from his. He is going back home—to his apartment—in the morning, but he is not selfish enough to think that has anything to do with her latest bout of tears. She is going to die too—he can feel it, deep in the pit of his chest where he keeps the rest of the things he does not allow himself to think about—slowly and painstakingly. Starvation of the heart. Wilting like a sunless flower, like a lovebird who's lost their mate. There's nothing he could possibly do to stop it, so he regards it with the morbid inevitability of a terminal cancer patient.

Axel is snoring quietly, mouth slightly open where his face is pressed into the side of Saïx's neck. Axel's arms and legs are draped across him, and Saïx is nearly falling off the edge of the twin mattress. He has one hand braced against the bedpost the keep them both from ending up on the floor (he can't sleep like this, but it's not like he is ever going to sleep anyway). The air reeks of sweat and sex despite the open window; he doesn't feel the cold.

He doesn't feel much.

X. _falling stars and eagles_

They barely talked; often, Saïx would pass Axel in the halls on his way to one room or another, and he was always accompanied by Roxas or Xion or both, faces alight in unfelt camaraderie. Axel started making those animated, excited hand gestures again that had been characteristic of him when they had been people, had petered out as the months in Never Was wore on. This caused Saïx quite a bit of bewildered wonderment—

Axel was a Nobody when he went to Castle Oblivion to clean house, but now he almost looked like someone real—ten years younger with a heart still firmly beating in his chest.

Officially, Saïx did not care what Axel did on his own time; his only concerns were the missions—both Xemnas's and his own—though he had felt—no, thought—for a long time that Axel was beginning to distance himself from their plans. Unofficially, there was a sort of melancholic nostalgia that he refused to acknowledge; it was something weak and cantankerous, something that belonged to a human being with a heart. He was hollow—they all were, even Xion. What set them apart, him from it, was that though it lacked a face it still had a capacity to feel, and in many ways Saïx hated it for that—had he a heart to hate with—and he hated Axel for his little charade, his insistence on acting like he had any entitlement to the emotions he plastered across his face.

What right had they to things that he himself was denied?

11. _fear of walking slowly_

When he is finally home again, to his apartment with the chipping walls and the vague urine smell that no amount of bleach can seem to purge from the bathroom, his mother calls him every night, and she does not cry. She tells him everything—the final testimony of a dying woman. He learns of her childhood (she ran away at 16, got a job as a waitress, rented her first place and never looked back) and his father. He learns that she does not—had not—loved him, not in a way you think a married couple ought to love one another. She had simply found a person she could not live without, and he listens patiently, watching Axel struggle with the coffee maker in the kitchenette while his mother speaks for the first time in days without her voice breaking.

Axel, predictably, follows him back to his apartment. This is not the first, nor the last Saïx posits after he has gotten off the phone with his mother for the evening and decides to help with the coffee. Axel is both easily bored and seized by seasonal addictions: like the cigarettes he smokes and quits every other month, Saïx is a fixture whom Axel habitually leaves and returns to.

"It's like déjà vu," Saïx says quietly, later, a hand wrapped around Axel and rubbing slowly, thoughtfully, in a way that makes Axel swear under his breath and arch his back. He is only half-listening—resisting the urge to tell Saïx to shut the fuck up, really—which is why Saïx says it at all. Even now, he doesn't feel like he's all there—like he is caught between two opposing forces both equal in their desire to have him. He has never experienced loss like this—though he feels like he has—so he wonders if this is just all par for the course.

Axel silences him before he can say anything more (knows well enough that when Saïx gets like this, there's no stopping him until he's emptied his entire head of the shit he's collected in it since the last time he dumped it all out), drags Saïx's face forward with a hand roughly grabbing his jaw and kisses him. Saïx almost feels something then.

XII. _a colony of wolves_

He often wished he could be without these phantom pains in his chest, things he likened to lingering remnants of the heart he had lost. He and Axel spoke even less now, and it was almost like he was disappointed, and that bothered him more than the fact that they weren't speaking. Bothered him as much as how his insides twisted grotesquely whenever he caught sight of Xion's eerily blank face. Xion sickened him, and he had yet to understand why.

How Axel could trick himself into thinking he had formed a genuine bond with an eyeless, mouthless _thing_ was beyond Saïx. It had never been about jealousy—it was the knee-jerk revulsion that burned his throat whenever Xion wandered into his sight, animal instinct kicking in like a beast regarding a sickly member of its group, something open to disease that threatened them all. He looked at Axel and felt an acute disappointment (morose, even), and he looked at Xion and felt a throbbing, deep hatred of something weak and needy. He didn't sleep anymore.

The moon was always there, always visible from every room in the castle at once, and it didn't make sense the same way nothing else did. He felt like if he could somehow block it out, evade the omnipresent, mocking gaze of that giant _fucking_ heart he could sleep, he could sort it all out, he could learn why he felt things when he objectively should not, why he felt like puking every time he saw that hooded thing walking around like it was one of them, like it had any right to when it could feel perfectly well because Saïx had seen it, seen with his own eyes the artificial heart Vexen had given it.

13. _deep dark gold_

Now, when he sleeps, he dreams of rain. Sometimes he still thinks he can hear thunder, pattering on the window, and he'll look up suddenly and every time he'll see only a bright, dry summer day. Axel thinks it's weird—Saïx can tell by the face he makes whenever he catches Saïx doing it—but has yet to ask about it. It has been two months since the funeral, and he is still learning to cope with the loss of something he can no longer see or touch.

Even though it had been such a short amount of time, he is not used to looking in the mirrors, usually gets ready for work without them unless Axel catches him about to walk out the door with jam on his face. Axel says "You look better," often, but Saïx still sees the same haggard, sleepless man in the mirror that is very much in keeping with what he imagines he had looked like during the entire funerary process. Every so often, the lingering smell of piss in the bathroom drives him insane, and Axel comes home to him on his hands and knees, scrubbing frantically at the cracked tiles.

This is inexplicably familiar as well. He cares so little about anything anymore that when something finally breaks through, it is overwhelming and he becomes obsessed with the need to correct it. He's felt this way before, a long time ago he thinks. He could move—Axel reminds him this every time Saïx locks himself in the bathroom with the bleach—but he can't. Doesn't care enough, or maybe he cares too much about that fucking smell. Axel says as much, makes a caustic remark about how Saïx makes more noise about the stench than he does about getting blown. Saïx says he sounds a little hurt, and that gets Axel off his back.

His mother no longer calls, and he does not call her. It is not a conscious neglect: he never thinks to call her. It never occurs to him that he ought to perhaps check in. He is back in his apartment and he can almost pretend the last couple months have been a bad dream except for how Axel is still here fumbling around with his coffeemaker, and for some reason that strikes Saïx as odd. It shouldn't be—this thing between them is nothing new—yet he watches him and feels like this is all wrong, his being here.

So one day Saïx asks how long Axel plans on staying; his response is either playful or sarcastic, but it is evasive nonetheless. Axel likes to keep people guessing, but Saïx is impatient. It isn't like Axel has ever just up and left without a word; Saïx will know when it happens, but he's still impatient and weirdly concerned with it. It's like something has changed, not all at once but slowly and beginning with the funeral and the dreams and this disconnection he's been having from everything around him, and if Axel walks out that door, Saïx is not so sure he'll come back again.


End file.

Kingdom Hearts, Angst, Romance