Axel; Ⅷ; The Flurry of Dancing Flames (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
got_it_memorized) wrote1999-08-08 05:40 am
got_it_memorized) wrote1999-08-08 05:40 am
Entry tags:
for 8/14 i guess
For all the worth and importance Axel placed on memorizing things even he couldn't remember everything. Oh, sure, a photographic memory was an impressive thing--were he an artist he could have drawn every single line from the memory of Isa's face; were he a musician he could have sung every note of the song his mother used to sing to him before bed each night with perfect pitch; were he a writer he could have transcribed every important conversation he'd ever had with every important person he'd ever known... Axel was none of these things, really, though. He drew a mean stick figure, but he rarely sang outside of the shower, and writing was too much like reports, after all. He wondered sometimes, though, if maybe he should have written more things down. Memory was fallible, flawed, and fleeting, and no matter how tightly recollection was clung to it was destined to fade with time. So while Axel could remember a lot of things, there were just as many that somehow seemed to have faded into a nondescript patchwork background noise: the unobtrusive soundtrack to his thoughts.
Like music, however, thoughts and memories had ebb and flow, crescendo and diminuendo. Once in a while as he found himself staring at the ceiling in his room in The Castle That Never Was there would be a flicker of color or a spark of laughter, a face, a voice, a sort of cognitive dissonance that would rise to the surface--a descant over the rest of the dull din. Axel was no stranger to reflection; there wasn't much else to do in the long hours of the night and sleep often evaded him, and so there were nights he just spent hours contemplating the ceiling in his room and letting his mind wander.
Sometimes he reflected on the past. He still remembered every sideroad and alley of Radiant Garden, still recalled every shop he'd frequented. He could still see the texture of the trees in the garden, could still remember the cobbled streets with clarity. Sometimes these reflections made him smile, like when he thought on those times he and Isa had gotten themselves into trouble. He sometimes thought back to that day he'd broken his arm getting a neighbor's cat out of a tree, or the time he had dared Isa to climb the fountains in the court. Those were good nights, with fond memories.
Sometimes the reflections weren't so happy, though: the way the darkness had grown long and frightening toward those last days before the world fell, the way the ground had opened beneath him and swallowed him up, the way Isa had never been the same after that. Those were bad nights, heavy and dark where no matter how exhausted he might have been his mind wouldn't let him sleep, lest he dream of times he couldn't change and awaken drenched in sweat with a scream in his throat.
Other times he thought on the present. These thoughts were no less dark than those memories of Gardenfall. Roxas was gone, Saïx was... Saïx, and sometimes Axel wondered what the hell he was even doing with his life anymore. Could he even really call it life? What did you call the existence of a creature that wasn't supposed to exist?
Those were the nights that made him the most uncomfortable, not because he found himself musing darkly on whether or not he even had a purpose anymore, but because something was just... off. Axel prided himself on his memory, on his retention, on his ability to flip through the Rolodex of his mind and find exactly what he needed when he needed it, no matter how miniscule the detail might have seemed. He recalled all those conversations he had with Roxas, right down to the kid's inflection as he had walked away that night in the alley, but something about some of those conversations just wasn't right.
'I think this is my first three-man mission.
Just remember it's still a mission. We're not on a field trip, guys.'
'Guys'? He could plainly hear Roxas' voice, but who had the third person on that team been? He didn't remember any missions that called for three people.
'What, don't you want to go somewhere different for a change?
So... it would be just the three of us?'
Three again. Why three?
'The three of us... we're inseparable.'
It was when he reflected on his own words that Axel found goosebumps would race up his arms and something cold would curl into the pit of his stomach. Three. Three. Why did that number keep floating to the surface of his mind? Hadn't it always been just him and Roxas? Who was the third person?
And why couldn't he remember?
There were other signs too, other conversations that made no sense without the presence of another person, other situations he could recall vaguely but drew a conspicuous blank on details. It was like there were panes of frosted glass situated strategically throughout his own memories, blocking certain things, certain moments. Axel couldn't understand why, and it was unsettling at best and frightening at worst.
After all, memories were all they had, right? What did it mean when those began to degrade and fall apart?
There were times Axel thought he was seriously losing his mind. He would hear flickers and patches of words, fuzzy and distorted as if spoken through a poor radio connection. Sometimes he could make out sentences, but most of the time it was just snippets, fragments, shards of his past that he couldn't piece back together no matter how he tried.
Roxas was gone, missing, but he wasn't the only thing that had been lost, it seemed, and Axel didn't like the implication that he'd not only lost his best friend (again), but there was something else that had been misplaced (taken?) and it seemed the harder he tried to remember, the harder he looked for it, the more obscure the memories became.
'Even if things change, we'll never be apart--
As long as we remember each other... right? Don't worry, Axel--we got your hokey speech memorized.'
He jerked awake with a gasp, fingers tangled in the stark white sheets of his bed and his heart (yeah right) thudding in his chest. When had he fallen asleep? Had he slept at all these past few days? He couldn't even remember for sure. It was like time had stopped when Roxas had left and Axel wasn't even sure he was moving anymore. The kid had made life feel real again, and now without him around everything felt fabricated and synthetic, like they were just moving dolls in a life-sized castle.
The voice in his head echoed eerily. 'I'll have... memorized... long time. Forever...' A girl's voice? He wasn't sure--the sound was distorted and reverberated almost painfully, like the inside of his head was a cavern and he was lost inside the very corridors of it, trying to find something he didn't even know he'd lost by following an echo he couldn't trace.
And then it was gone again, as soon as it had cropped up. The voice faded, leaving naught but a whisper and the faintest image of blue eyes that weren't Roxas' in the back of his head.
Axel sat up and draped his arm across one leg, a crinkle between his eyebrows and a frown on his lips. He'd never really believed in ghosts, but he really couldn't help but feel he was being haunted. Whose eyes were these that snaked through his mind when he was distracted? Whose words were these that spun inside his head and vanished before he could focus on them?
Reaching into the pocket of his coat he removed the white envelope that had been left in his room the last day he'd seen Roxas. Inside there was a popsicle stick, from the ice cream they always shared. 'Winner', it said in happy letters, and Axel sighed as he stared at it. He wasn't sure if Roxas had ever really grasped the concept of irony, but there was definitely a big helping of it in that word.
Glancing toward the window, his eyes traced the beams of moonlight that plunged from the great heart-shaped moon outside, flooding The World That Never Was with a perpetual eerie silver-blue light. His hand swam to the front of his coat, over the left side of his chest, where his heart should have been. The space behind those bones hadn't felt quite this empty in a long time.
Getting to his feet, Axel shoved the popsicle stick back into his pocket and headed toward the door. He knew what today would bring: he was to go after Roxas, to bring him home or kill him. Axel wasn't sure he could do the former, and he'd be damned before he did the latter, that was for sure. There were answers he still needed, lost somewhere deep within a heart he wasn't even supposed to have, and he knew he would never find them without Roxas. He wasn't even sure he wanted to. After all, what good was a heart without friends to fill it? What was the point of seeking what couldn't be had without destroying what was supposed to be the foundation of it?
For all the worth and importance Xemnas placed on completing Kingdom Hearts, he sure didn't seem to have any grasp of what the heart was for.
Striding down the whitewashed hallway toward the lobby, Axel lifted a hand to his brow. That buzzing sensation behind his eyes hadn't faded completely, and though it didn't hurt exactly there was something keenly unpleasant about it. It was as if the memories buried there were burrowing deeper somehow. He didn't want that; whatever these memories were--these shattered fragments of faded memories--he didn't want to give them up.
"Are you ill?"
"Ah--!" Axel snapped his head up at the sound of Saïx's voice and gave a visible start, stopping dead in his tracks and staring at his old friend with alarm on his features.
Saïx looked nonplussed at best. "If you are ill I can have someone else go," he said, lowering his eyes back to the clipboard in his gloved hands.
Axel thought to himself that that was the closest thing Saïx had shown to compassion in a long time. He shook his head firmly and reached out to push the clipboard down.
"No," he said with a shake of his head, "it's fine. I'm fine, just... headache."
"You have had many headaches recently." It wasn't a statement of concern, really, just a statement of fact, and for some reason Axel resented it.
"Yeah, well, you're a bit of a headache yourself," he grumbled with a roll of his eyes.
Saïx gave him a dry look and then stepped backward, pulling the clipboard out from beneath Axel's hand before lowering his eyes to it again. "You know your mission today." It wasn't a question so much as a given.
"Right, sure." It wasn't an acquiescence so much as a lament. Back to that illusory world where Roxas wasn't Roxas and memories were apparitions. "Try, try again."
"Don't hold back this time."
'Don't hold back... promise!'
Axel's hand lifted to his temple and he inhaled sharply as Saïx's words were suddenly distorted with static and obscured with a sharp keening whine. A grimace rose unbidden to his features and he closed his eyes.
something about this just stinks but how do you know that?they're gonna destroy you! it's for the good of everyone you just keep running
"Perhaps someone else should--"
"No!" Saïx's voice was as sharp and cold as an ice cube down his back and Axel snapped out of the strange discordant trance, lifting a hand to brush away his old friend's suggestion with pointed dismissal. "No. It's fine. I'm fine."
"You said that already," came the reply, "and yet I find it hard to believe you."
Axel narrowed his eyes venomously. "Nice of you to care," he said, and then shook his head. "I'll go, I'll bring him back. You just worry about your clipboard."
And with that Axel turned on his heel and summoned a corridor, stepping through it and leaving Saïx to his notes and reports and rosters. The static was gone again, as quickly as it had erupted, leaving that smear of uncertainty across his brain like a film. Axel didn't know what was happening or why, but something about this wasn't right and he wasn't about to just leave it be.
Every time it happened he was left with naught but the whispers in his head, the flickers of blue and black and the sound of the ocean, but one thing was always clear: his own voice, his own words. No matter where the dreams or memories or whatever they were ended, no matter how brief or truncated the imagery, there were eight words that always rang true and clear in Axel's head, and those words were all he had to cling to.
Whoever this ghost was, whatever they wanted, whatever they were trying to tell him or show him, maybe all he needed were those eight words to figure it out.
'I'll always be there to bring you back.'
One memory at a time.
Like music, however, thoughts and memories had ebb and flow, crescendo and diminuendo. Once in a while as he found himself staring at the ceiling in his room in The Castle That Never Was there would be a flicker of color or a spark of laughter, a face, a voice, a sort of cognitive dissonance that would rise to the surface--a descant over the rest of the dull din. Axel was no stranger to reflection; there wasn't much else to do in the long hours of the night and sleep often evaded him, and so there were nights he just spent hours contemplating the ceiling in his room and letting his mind wander.
Sometimes he reflected on the past. He still remembered every sideroad and alley of Radiant Garden, still recalled every shop he'd frequented. He could still see the texture of the trees in the garden, could still remember the cobbled streets with clarity. Sometimes these reflections made him smile, like when he thought on those times he and Isa had gotten themselves into trouble. He sometimes thought back to that day he'd broken his arm getting a neighbor's cat out of a tree, or the time he had dared Isa to climb the fountains in the court. Those were good nights, with fond memories.
Sometimes the reflections weren't so happy, though: the way the darkness had grown long and frightening toward those last days before the world fell, the way the ground had opened beneath him and swallowed him up, the way Isa had never been the same after that. Those were bad nights, heavy and dark where no matter how exhausted he might have been his mind wouldn't let him sleep, lest he dream of times he couldn't change and awaken drenched in sweat with a scream in his throat.
Other times he thought on the present. These thoughts were no less dark than those memories of Gardenfall. Roxas was gone, Saïx was... Saïx, and sometimes Axel wondered what the hell he was even doing with his life anymore. Could he even really call it life? What did you call the existence of a creature that wasn't supposed to exist?
Those were the nights that made him the most uncomfortable, not because he found himself musing darkly on whether or not he even had a purpose anymore, but because something was just... off. Axel prided himself on his memory, on his retention, on his ability to flip through the Rolodex of his mind and find exactly what he needed when he needed it, no matter how miniscule the detail might have seemed. He recalled all those conversations he had with Roxas, right down to the kid's inflection as he had walked away that night in the alley, but something about some of those conversations just wasn't right.
'I think this is my first three-man mission.
Just remember it's still a mission. We're not on a field trip, guys.'
'Guys'? He could plainly hear Roxas' voice, but who had the third person on that team been? He didn't remember any missions that called for three people.
'What, don't you want to go somewhere different for a change?
So... it would be just the three of us?'
Three again. Why three?
'The three of us... we're inseparable.'
It was when he reflected on his own words that Axel found goosebumps would race up his arms and something cold would curl into the pit of his stomach. Three. Three. Why did that number keep floating to the surface of his mind? Hadn't it always been just him and Roxas? Who was the third person?
And why couldn't he remember?
There were other signs too, other conversations that made no sense without the presence of another person, other situations he could recall vaguely but drew a conspicuous blank on details. It was like there were panes of frosted glass situated strategically throughout his own memories, blocking certain things, certain moments. Axel couldn't understand why, and it was unsettling at best and frightening at worst.
After all, memories were all they had, right? What did it mean when those began to degrade and fall apart?
There were times Axel thought he was seriously losing his mind. He would hear flickers and patches of words, fuzzy and distorted as if spoken through a poor radio connection. Sometimes he could make out sentences, but most of the time it was just snippets, fragments, shards of his past that he couldn't piece back together no matter how he tried.
Roxas was gone, missing, but he wasn't the only thing that had been lost, it seemed, and Axel didn't like the implication that he'd not only lost his best friend (again), but there was something else that had been misplaced (taken?) and it seemed the harder he tried to remember, the harder he looked for it, the more obscure the memories became.
'Even if things change, we'll never be apart--
As long as we remember each other... right? Don't worry, Axel--we got your hokey speech memorized.'
He jerked awake with a gasp, fingers tangled in the stark white sheets of his bed and his heart (yeah right) thudding in his chest. When had he fallen asleep? Had he slept at all these past few days? He couldn't even remember for sure. It was like time had stopped when Roxas had left and Axel wasn't even sure he was moving anymore. The kid had made life feel real again, and now without him around everything felt fabricated and synthetic, like they were just moving dolls in a life-sized castle.
The voice in his head echoed eerily. 'I'll have... memorized... long time. Forever...' A girl's voice? He wasn't sure--the sound was distorted and reverberated almost painfully, like the inside of his head was a cavern and he was lost inside the very corridors of it, trying to find something he didn't even know he'd lost by following an echo he couldn't trace.
And then it was gone again, as soon as it had cropped up. The voice faded, leaving naught but a whisper and the faintest image of blue eyes that weren't Roxas' in the back of his head.
Axel sat up and draped his arm across one leg, a crinkle between his eyebrows and a frown on his lips. He'd never really believed in ghosts, but he really couldn't help but feel he was being haunted. Whose eyes were these that snaked through his mind when he was distracted? Whose words were these that spun inside his head and vanished before he could focus on them?
Reaching into the pocket of his coat he removed the white envelope that had been left in his room the last day he'd seen Roxas. Inside there was a popsicle stick, from the ice cream they always shared. 'Winner', it said in happy letters, and Axel sighed as he stared at it. He wasn't sure if Roxas had ever really grasped the concept of irony, but there was definitely a big helping of it in that word.
Glancing toward the window, his eyes traced the beams of moonlight that plunged from the great heart-shaped moon outside, flooding The World That Never Was with a perpetual eerie silver-blue light. His hand swam to the front of his coat, over the left side of his chest, where his heart should have been. The space behind those bones hadn't felt quite this empty in a long time.
Getting to his feet, Axel shoved the popsicle stick back into his pocket and headed toward the door. He knew what today would bring: he was to go after Roxas, to bring him home or kill him. Axel wasn't sure he could do the former, and he'd be damned before he did the latter, that was for sure. There were answers he still needed, lost somewhere deep within a heart he wasn't even supposed to have, and he knew he would never find them without Roxas. He wasn't even sure he wanted to. After all, what good was a heart without friends to fill it? What was the point of seeking what couldn't be had without destroying what was supposed to be the foundation of it?
For all the worth and importance Xemnas placed on completing Kingdom Hearts, he sure didn't seem to have any grasp of what the heart was for.
Striding down the whitewashed hallway toward the lobby, Axel lifted a hand to his brow. That buzzing sensation behind his eyes hadn't faded completely, and though it didn't hurt exactly there was something keenly unpleasant about it. It was as if the memories buried there were burrowing deeper somehow. He didn't want that; whatever these memories were--these shattered fragments of faded memories--he didn't want to give them up.
"Are you ill?"
"Ah--!" Axel snapped his head up at the sound of Saïx's voice and gave a visible start, stopping dead in his tracks and staring at his old friend with alarm on his features.
Saïx looked nonplussed at best. "If you are ill I can have someone else go," he said, lowering his eyes back to the clipboard in his gloved hands.
Axel thought to himself that that was the closest thing Saïx had shown to compassion in a long time. He shook his head firmly and reached out to push the clipboard down.
"No," he said with a shake of his head, "it's fine. I'm fine, just... headache."
"You have had many headaches recently." It wasn't a statement of concern, really, just a statement of fact, and for some reason Axel resented it.
"Yeah, well, you're a bit of a headache yourself," he grumbled with a roll of his eyes.
Saïx gave him a dry look and then stepped backward, pulling the clipboard out from beneath Axel's hand before lowering his eyes to it again. "You know your mission today." It wasn't a question so much as a given.
"Right, sure." It wasn't an acquiescence so much as a lament. Back to that illusory world where Roxas wasn't Roxas and memories were apparitions. "Try, try again."
"Don't hold back this time."
'Don't hold back... promise!'
Axel's hand lifted to his temple and he inhaled sharply as Saïx's words were suddenly distorted with static and obscured with a sharp keening whine. A grimace rose unbidden to his features and he closed his eyes.
something about this just stinks but how do you know that?
i have to go back everyone thinks they're right--
THIS IS RIGHT--'
"Perhaps someone else should--"
"No!" Saïx's voice was as sharp and cold as an ice cube down his back and Axel snapped out of the strange discordant trance, lifting a hand to brush away his old friend's suggestion with pointed dismissal. "No. It's fine. I'm fine."
"You said that already," came the reply, "and yet I find it hard to believe you."
Axel narrowed his eyes venomously. "Nice of you to care," he said, and then shook his head. "I'll go, I'll bring him back. You just worry about your clipboard."
And with that Axel turned on his heel and summoned a corridor, stepping through it and leaving Saïx to his notes and reports and rosters. The static was gone again, as quickly as it had erupted, leaving that smear of uncertainty across his brain like a film. Axel didn't know what was happening or why, but something about this wasn't right and he wasn't about to just leave it be.
Every time it happened he was left with naught but the whispers in his head, the flickers of blue and black and the sound of the ocean, but one thing was always clear: his own voice, his own words. No matter where the dreams or memories or whatever they were ended, no matter how brief or truncated the imagery, there were eight words that always rang true and clear in Axel's head, and those words were all he had to cling to.
Whoever this ghost was, whatever they wanted, whatever they were trying to tell him or show him, maybe all he needed were those eight words to figure it out.
One memory at a time.