All right, here we go. This is the story I've been working on for a couple of months now, and it's come out to over 75,000 words. It's completely done, but I'm going to be posting it one or two chapters at a time every couple of days, starting with the prologue and first chapter today.
I have to start this off by giving innumerable thanks to![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
crystal_queer, my beta on this piece. She really threw herself into it and we got to know my versions of these characters inside and out on every level. If the way she dug into their psyches is any indication, she's going to be a fantastic psychologist someday. She egged me on in all the right ways, and thanks to her this story has a better Zexion, cuter Cloud and Leon, and 33% more gratuitous Organization-on-Saïx violence than it would have otherwise.
Title: Deae Ex Machina
Category: Kingdom Hearts, post-KH2 non-AU, humor/romance
Rating: M
Pairings: Primary – AkuRoku, Marluxia/Vexen; secondary – Cloud/Leon; tertiary – Demyx/Xigbar, Xemnas/Saïx, Riku/Sora, other
Summary: Should they have gotten a second chance? No. Do they deserve a second chance? Probably not. Will they do better as productive members of society than they did as criminal masterminds? Even they can’t fuck that one up.
Prologue
“No one would miss me.” He said the words with apparent conviction, but he was directing them more at himself than at the boy standing behind him. He found it difficult to take another step; he took his foot off the ground and told it to move forward, to plant itself just a little farther away from the only place, the only person he’d ever called home. His chest ached like it were caving in on itself, and his whole body felt like a tether was keeping it tied here, tied to those eyes he could feel boring into his back.
His foot met ground again after what felt to him like an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than a second. The second step should have been easier, but it wasn’t. He could feel the backs of his eyes starting to burn, but he wasn’t going to cry. He was never going to cry.
And then he was being held back physically as strongly as he was mentally and – if he could let himself believe it – emotionally. Axel’s hand was on his shoulder, and it burned as real and as hot as the flames his friend called forth, making itself felt through Axel’s gloves and his own coat as though the contact were flesh on flesh.
Suddenly he was being spun around, lifted off his feet and pushed up against the cold granite wall that formed the base of one of the countless skyscrapers that covered the World That Never Was. There were hands on his sides, gripping him tightly, hips pinning his own against the hard surface, and he instinctively clasped his legs around that waist in order not to fall.
But the only thing he could see, the only thing his mind could comprehend, was that face staring out at him from beneath that black hood, the only color in a world that seemed entirely monochrome. Unearthly red hair falling in beautiful, untamed locks around a pale face. Those two black diamonds, no bigger than the tip of his thumb, and that dark, dark eyeliner conspired to draw attention to the eyes that were fixed on him now.
He’d never let himself spend much time looking at those eyes. Everything about Axel made him feel – it didn’t even matter what it made him feel, just that it made him feel – but those eyes were the worst. Those eyes made his chest seem completely empty and full to bursting all at once, called the very nature of his existence into question. And as green eyes captured blue, held them hopelessly in their gaze, he knew that he wasn’t going anywhere, that someone would miss him, and that to walk away would tear them both apart.
He gave in, desperately clinging to Axel as he allowed himself to do everything he’d never even permitted himself to so much as think before, holding him, tasting him, feeling him. Gloves were torn off, coats yanked open, skin pressed against skin, and Axel was inside of him, taking him up against that same wall as he tightened his limbs around his slender, angular frame, and in the pale light from the counterfeit moon that defined their world, all he could see were those green eyes and all he could feel was that ghost-white body, and when they came to the end, they choked out three words, three simple words that they’d never said.
And that wasn’t the way it had gone at all. It wasn’t even the way it should have gone. But his body would wake up sweating in the middle of the night and his mind would wake up sobbing the next morning, and all of him, on some level, wished that things had turned out exactly like that.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Riku stared at the ceiling, counting the beams of light from the cars passing by outside the window as they streaked across the plaster. The body beside him shifted under the sheets, tossing its head restlessly and letting a husky moan escape its lips. Riku glanced sideways at the boy who was pressed into the twin bed almost on top of him. He pursed his lips in consternation.
Here was Sora, his loving boyfriend, his better half. Sora, with whom he’d shared his first kiss, his first love, his first everything. Sora, the boy he wanted to spend the rest of eternity with.
“Oh god, Axel!”
Sora, who’d awoken him three nights running with his particularly loud wet dreams about another man. The first night, Riku had shaken Sora to consciousness, demanding to know just what he thought he was dreaming about, and received in turn half-panicked confusion and a series of rapid-fire apologies from his sweaty, discombobulated best friend. The second night, Riku had simply roused Sora with gentle words, courteously helped him remedy his situation below the belt, and murmured joking reassurances that he would make Sora forget all about everyone else until they both drifted back to sleep.
Tonight, Riku weighed his options. One: he could lie awake and listen to Sora’s subconscious work its way to climax next to him. Not particularly fun; not everything Sora said in his sleep was coherent, but what he could make out was either distinctly erotic or irritatingly emotional. Two: he could wake Sora up again. Not appealing, considering the sleep Sora had been losing and the way he’d been stumbling around campus like an extremely anxious zombie for the past forty-eight hours. Three: he could gently reach over and manually help Sora finish as quickly as possible so that Sora would pipe down and Riku could get back to sleep.
It was a measure of his selflessness as a boyfriend, Riku considered, that he was about to implement plan number three. However, just as he snaked his hand lightly over Sora’s sleeping form, his boyfriend stiffened and sprang to consciousness, gasping heavily and bolting upright.
“Oh my god, not again,” he moaned as he regained his bearings. Riku sat up next to him, wrapping one arm around his lover as Sora stared down miserably at his sticky boxers.
“Could be worse,” Riku said reassuringly. “All of my dreams lately have been about failing midterms in my underwear.”
Sora ran both hands through his eternally mussed brunette locks and shook his head. “These aren’t dreams, Riku. They’re nightmares.”
“Nightmares for me, maybe,” Riku quipped, hauling himself out of bed and pulling open a dresser drawer. “I’m the one that has to do your laundry.” He produced a fresh pair of boxers, tossed them at Sora, and climbed back into the bed.
Sora grimaced. “I’m not enjoying this,” he said stubbornly. “And I don’t think Roxas is either.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Sora had a strange relationship with Roxas. About a month after arriving home in Destiny Islands, he’d discovered that his nobody hadn’t really integrated back into his psyche very well at all. This revelation had come quite abruptly one afternoon as Sora was walking along the beach with Riku and Kairi.
Hey, you!
Sora tripped over his own feet and his popsicle went flying forward into the sand. He rapidly turned himself over, his wide eyes darting back and forth in search of the source of sudden interruption. “What the hell!” he gasped, intoning it as an exclamation rather than a question. “What the hell!”
Oh my god, that actually worked? Finally!
“What the hell!”
Sora’s vision was beginning to go a little fuzzy as Riku and Kairi knelt in front of him, filling his line of sight with their concerned faces, and all of a sudden everyone was talking at once.
“Oh my god, Sora, are you contact you for who knows how you look pretty pale, are you never answered; I was about to take you home to lie down, okay? Okay? Sora? Hey, Sora!”
Sora shook his head, seemingly in slow motion, his eyes losing all focus. “Can you—” He was about to say “repeat that?” but his consciousness gave way first and he collapsed backwards into the warm sand, eyes rolling back into his head and body going stiff while the three clamoring voices began shouting his name again, this time totally unheard.
By the time Sora drifted back into his own brain, he was back in his room. He cracked open his eyes and glanced around to find that the sun was setting behind his curtains and Riku had fallen asleep in his chair across the room, head resting on his desk. The house was silent; undoubtedly his mother was not home from work yet.
A rather restrained whisper suddenly emanated seemingly from nowhere and everywhere, like a thought that had just been surgically implanted in his brain. Are you back? it asked. Sora’s eyes widened, but he didn’t panic in quite the same mode as before now that he was out of the open and in the most comfortable and familiar place possible.
“What’s going on?” Sora hissed at nothing in particular. Riku didn’t stir; Riku didn’t sleep much, and when he managed to he was pretty much out of it come hell or high water.
Don’t talk out loud, the voice answered. People are going to think you’re off your meds. Just think at me.
Think at you? Sora thought a little sarcastically.
Yeah, like that, the voice said. I can read your thoughts if I try, but it’s easier if you just project so that I don’t have to feel like I’m prying.
Sora blinked slowly.
This is Roxas, dumbass. How many other people do you think are living in your head? the voice answered.
Stop reading my mind! Sora snapped.
Well, I wouldn’t have to if you would just think at me.
What are you doing? Sora asked, moving swiftly along to the next subject. Shouldn’t you be… me?
Wow, and I thought I was your insensitive half.
Sorry, Sora muttered internally.
Eh, it’s okay, Roxas said. I get that question all the time.
From who?
Myself. I’ve been wanting to get it from you, but it’s taken me all this time just to figure out how to get your attention.
I’m really confused.
You and me both. I’ve spent the past who knows how long with nothing to do but watch your life and listen to your thoughts. How do you live like this? Roxas asked.
Like what?
Roxas snorted. Well, thinking about Riku twenty-four hours a day, for one. Honestly, I feel like he’s living in here with me.
Don’t listen to my thoughts about Riku! Sora gasped.
Oh, come on. There’s probably not a single person on these islands who hasn’t thought those things about Riku, Roxas retorted. Riku probably thinks those things about himself.
Sora pouted.
I’m only kidding, Roxas amended, and they both lapsed into a pensive silence.
What are we going to do? Sora asked at last.
What do you mean?
What are we going to do about this? What can I do for you? Sora explained. I mean, god, you’re stuck in my head!
What can you do for me… Roxas repeated. Well, how would you feel about changing our name to Soroxas?
What?
It’s called a joke. Seriously, don’t worry about me. There’s a lot of weird shit you can do as a mental construct; I can keep myself busy. So just… go about your business. I swear I won’t, like… get all up in your consciousness when you’re jerking off or something.
Sora sounded distinctly unconvinced. Roxas…
Really, Roxas said firmly. I just… wanted to let you know I’m in here. It seemed like the thing to do.
You’re not… unhappy?
Roxas hesitated. Let me put it to you this way, he said at last. I’m no less happy in here than I would be out there.
…Okay.
Sora could feel Roxas’s presence fading to a familiar constant at the back of his mind. He sighed heavily, reached over to grab the telephone off his nightstand, and dialed a number he knew by heart.
“Kairi?” he said when the call was answered. “Have you talked to Naminé lately?”
There’s some freaky stuff that you can find out about people. For example, some people are religious. Some people have been in the army. These both entail some fairly weird stuff, but you don’t look at the people in question on a day-to-day basis and think, “He talks to invisible people in the sky,” or, “She’s killed another human being.” That stuff may seem surprising at first, but it’s not something you constantly worry about. It’s background noise.
That was how Sora’s friends treated the fact that he had another person in his head. Roxas was not what anyone thought of when they looked at Sora. It wasn’t that Roxas was ignored, per se. On the contrary, Sora talked to Roxas all the time, once he got used to multitasking with those bits of his brain. Riku talked to Roxas sometimes, with Sora as an intermediary, as did Kairi. Naminé and Roxas also had conversations quite regularly, using Kairi and Sora as go-betweens. Sora’s mother was the only person who looked at Sora and always thought “two people”. She now considered herself a mother of twins and made them nominally alternate days to take out the trash, insisting that it was the principle of the matter.
And so it went for two years. Sora and Riku got together. Riku took a year off from school. Kairi graduated fourth in their class. Sora was elected prom queen. And they all moved to university together.
Sora and Roxas’s thoughts had fairly frequently overlapped in the past. Sometimes Sora would get glimpses of things he did not recognize or hadn’t been thinking about, and Roxas reported the same. Sora would remember things, sometimes, that he’d never experienced. He’d often experience memories of the time he’d spent living with people he’d met only shortly before he’d killed them. Sora didn’t bring these memories up to Roxas. He never mentioned those twelve people, and he failed to mention Number Eight in particular so fiercely that the nobody in question was almost actually unmentioned.
That was until the third night in a row that Sora woke up with Axel’s name on his lips. The next morning he climbed out of bed early, telling Riku that he needed time to, as he always put it, think.
Roxas, he said gently. The constant presence lurking in the depths of his consciousness started a bit. Roxas had, from the feel of it, still been asleep.
Yeah? Sora’s other half responded, his thoughts groggy.
You’ve been sleeping the past few nights, haven’t you?
Roxas hesitated. …Yes.
Well, I’m pretty sure that your dreams have been getting into my dreams. Sora felt the mental equivalent of one’s stomach dropping into one’s feet. There was a brief, distinctly uncomfortable silence.
Oh, Roxas said.
Do you wanna talk about him? Sora asked in his best child psychologist voice.
Actually, I’d sort of rather go hang out by your forehead while you get a frontal lobotomy, Roxas muttered.
Come on, now.
How many people know about this?
Just you and me.
Good.
And Riku, Sora finished.
What?
I talk in my sleep, Sora said defensively.
I want to die, Roxas moaned.
Sora shook his head and made sure that Roxas felt it. You shouldn’t be embarrassed, he assured him. You loved him, didn’t you?
Roxas sighed. I treated him like dirt.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
The important thing to know about gods is that most of them love to meddle. Whether they work alone or in groups, they can rarely keep their noses out of mortal beeswax. They place bets on wars, they give themselves sex changes and sleep with animals, they steal the clothing of the recently deceased. For some reason, they find it very difficult not to abuse their godly powers.
And they never stick to their worlds of origin, either. The god Hades, for example, has been particularly well-known for bringing in lackeys from anywhere he can find them. Once people start traveling, so do the super-powerful immortal divine entities they’ve created.
Chaos and Order were sisters. Twins, to be precise – fraternal ones. They were the products of a long-dead society, but they lived on doing freelance work here and there, and they got along about as well as two women with names like theirs could be expected to.
They were not, strictly speaking, anthropomorphic embodiments of abstract concepts. They were just two hyper-potent, very humanlike women in whose characters it was to promote particular philosophies on the nature of the universe. Another thing it’s worth noting is that Chaos and Order had almost nothing to do with most of their infinite time.
“You’ll never guess what I have,” Chaos said one morning, walking into her sister’s room without knocking and casually causing an alphabetized row of books to scatter across the floor as she passed it. Convinced of the truth of her previous statement, she answered her own question. “Fourteen souls!”
Order glanced up at the small white orbs that were bobbing gently along behind her sister. “I only count twelve,” she said disinterestedly. She went back to the colored pencils that she had been diligently sharpening to exactly the same length.
“The other two are otherwise occupied, but they still count,” Chaos waved a hand dismissively and Order’s bed unmade itself.
“Well, I want you to put the ones you do have back where you found them,” Order said firmly. Chaos shoved aside some meticulously-arranged paperweights and settled herself down atop the desk. Order quickly evacuated her pencils to safety and glared up at her sibling. An orb floated through her line of sight, and she cast it a distinctly unimpressed look. “Besides, these look kind of… not good.”
Chaos clicked her tongue at Order and plucked one of the luminous entities in question out of her frizzy, unkempt hair. She gently stroked it like it were a tiny, spherical kitten, although this action elicited no response. “They’re perfectly fine,” she said insistently. “They’ve just been through a lot. Not even fully cognizant right now, so what do you want from the poor dears?”
Order finished compulsively realigning the items on her recently disrupted desk, shoved Chaos’s right knee out of her personal space, and took the soul her sister was holding between two slim, manicured fingertips. “What are these?” she asked, peering closely at it and turning it this way and that.
“Nobodies!” Chaos proclaimed quite gleefully. She happily kicked her feet back and forth, her heels pounding against the desk and disorganizing the contents of all the drawers with each impact.
Order frowned thoughtfully. “But they have hearts,” she pointed out.
“They made them!” Chaos practically sang. “Isn’t that just so wonderful and unexpected?”
“Wonderful maybe in that a group of anomalies managed to assimilate themselves into a more logical paradigm,” Order quipped, releasing the orb she’d been studying back into the air.
“Oh, go… do something illogical!” Chaos shot back. “We’re going to have a little experiment.”
Chaos and Order had been arguing an ongoing, utterly unresolved debate for eons, concerning whether or not mortal existence was, by its nature, ordered or chaotic, predestined or random. People often mistakenly assumed that deities were omniscient and omnipotent and all sorts of ridiculous things, but in reality gods could only ever achieve omniscience or omnipotence or any of those qualities on very limited or localized scales, which didn’t really count at all.
Many were the mortals who died expecting to arrive in the afterlife and receive some sort of mysterious sacred knowledge concerning life, the universe, and everything, only to be severely disappointed when they found their gods arguing philosophy with one another. The only universal truth is that nobody knows anything about universal truth.
“These guys weren’t so great when they were alive,” Chaos explained to Order. “I mean, they were pretty immoral and maybe marginally evil. Or at least most of them were. One of them was totally not evil, but she doesn’t really count anyway.”
“What’d they do?” Order asked dryly.
“They tried to build a planet out of stolen hearts.”
“That’s…” Order trailed off, eyebrows furrowed. “You know, I don’t really know how to feel about that.”
“You don’t have to. Point is, they failed and they were all bludgeoned to death with a giant key, otherwise disposed of, or trapped in the bodies of their original selves.”
Order looked at her sister from beneath lowered eyelids. “Are you high?” she asked suspiciously.
“No!”
“…Okay. Go on.”
“My point is that they never really got a chance. They were totally victims of circumstance. They all could have led totally different lives – productive, upstanding ones – if the universe hadn’t pointed its cruel, unforgiving finger at them and said, ‘You’re all worthless! You’re nothing, you’re nobody!’” Chaos practically shrieked this last part, gesturing wildly and breaking a lamp in the process.
“They are nobodies,” Order pointed out.
“Not the point,” Chaos countered. “They didn’t have to end up like they did.”
“My dear sister,” Order said in her most condescending tone, “some things are inevitable.”
“Oh, but they aren’t,” Chaos countered. “And I’m going to prove it.”
“How?”
“We’re going to put these nobodies back. We’ll give them starter lives. Resources, knowledge, something like what their others had. No jobs. And we’ll see what they do.”
Order thought about this for a moment, tapping a perfect rhythm on the desktop with her nails. At last, a wry smile crossed her face. “You’re on,” she said.
Full stop.
Next time on Deae: “Why am I not dead?” he asked himself angrily. He marched the few steps over to the door and threw it open. The loud bang attracted the attention of the four or five students who were already present in the hallway as Axel flew out into the corridor, teeth clenched, shoulders hunched, and breaths coming fast. “Why the fuck am I not dead?” he shouted at them.
Chapter 1
I have to start this off by giving innumerable thanks to
crystal_queer, my beta on this piece. She really threw herself into it and we got to know my versions of these characters inside and out on every level. If the way she dug into their psyches is any indication, she's going to be a fantastic psychologist someday. She egged me on in all the right ways, and thanks to her this story has a better Zexion, cuter Cloud and Leon, and 33% more gratuitous Organization-on-Saïx violence than it would have otherwise.Title: Deae Ex Machina
Category: Kingdom Hearts, post-KH2 non-AU, humor/romance
Rating: M
Pairings: Primary – AkuRoku, Marluxia/Vexen; secondary – Cloud/Leon; tertiary – Demyx/Xigbar, Xemnas/Saïx, Riku/Sora, other
Summary: Should they have gotten a second chance? No. Do they deserve a second chance? Probably not. Will they do better as productive members of society than they did as criminal masterminds? Even they can’t fuck that one up.
“No one would miss me.” He said the words with apparent conviction, but he was directing them more at himself than at the boy standing behind him. He found it difficult to take another step; he took his foot off the ground and told it to move forward, to plant itself just a little farther away from the only place, the only person he’d ever called home. His chest ached like it were caving in on itself, and his whole body felt like a tether was keeping it tied here, tied to those eyes he could feel boring into his back.
His foot met ground again after what felt to him like an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than a second. The second step should have been easier, but it wasn’t. He could feel the backs of his eyes starting to burn, but he wasn’t going to cry. He was never going to cry.
And then he was being held back physically as strongly as he was mentally and – if he could let himself believe it – emotionally. Axel’s hand was on his shoulder, and it burned as real and as hot as the flames his friend called forth, making itself felt through Axel’s gloves and his own coat as though the contact were flesh on flesh.
Suddenly he was being spun around, lifted off his feet and pushed up against the cold granite wall that formed the base of one of the countless skyscrapers that covered the World That Never Was. There were hands on his sides, gripping him tightly, hips pinning his own against the hard surface, and he instinctively clasped his legs around that waist in order not to fall.
But the only thing he could see, the only thing his mind could comprehend, was that face staring out at him from beneath that black hood, the only color in a world that seemed entirely monochrome. Unearthly red hair falling in beautiful, untamed locks around a pale face. Those two black diamonds, no bigger than the tip of his thumb, and that dark, dark eyeliner conspired to draw attention to the eyes that were fixed on him now.
He’d never let himself spend much time looking at those eyes. Everything about Axel made him feel – it didn’t even matter what it made him feel, just that it made him feel – but those eyes were the worst. Those eyes made his chest seem completely empty and full to bursting all at once, called the very nature of his existence into question. And as green eyes captured blue, held them hopelessly in their gaze, he knew that he wasn’t going anywhere, that someone would miss him, and that to walk away would tear them both apart.
He gave in, desperately clinging to Axel as he allowed himself to do everything he’d never even permitted himself to so much as think before, holding him, tasting him, feeling him. Gloves were torn off, coats yanked open, skin pressed against skin, and Axel was inside of him, taking him up against that same wall as he tightened his limbs around his slender, angular frame, and in the pale light from the counterfeit moon that defined their world, all he could see were those green eyes and all he could feel was that ghost-white body, and when they came to the end, they choked out three words, three simple words that they’d never said.
And that wasn’t the way it had gone at all. It wasn’t even the way it should have gone. But his body would wake up sweating in the middle of the night and his mind would wake up sobbing the next morning, and all of him, on some level, wished that things had turned out exactly like that.
Riku stared at the ceiling, counting the beams of light from the cars passing by outside the window as they streaked across the plaster. The body beside him shifted under the sheets, tossing its head restlessly and letting a husky moan escape its lips. Riku glanced sideways at the boy who was pressed into the twin bed almost on top of him. He pursed his lips in consternation.
Here was Sora, his loving boyfriend, his better half. Sora, with whom he’d shared his first kiss, his first love, his first everything. Sora, the boy he wanted to spend the rest of eternity with.
“Oh god, Axel!”
Sora, who’d awoken him three nights running with his particularly loud wet dreams about another man. The first night, Riku had shaken Sora to consciousness, demanding to know just what he thought he was dreaming about, and received in turn half-panicked confusion and a series of rapid-fire apologies from his sweaty, discombobulated best friend. The second night, Riku had simply roused Sora with gentle words, courteously helped him remedy his situation below the belt, and murmured joking reassurances that he would make Sora forget all about everyone else until they both drifted back to sleep.
Tonight, Riku weighed his options. One: he could lie awake and listen to Sora’s subconscious work its way to climax next to him. Not particularly fun; not everything Sora said in his sleep was coherent, but what he could make out was either distinctly erotic or irritatingly emotional. Two: he could wake Sora up again. Not appealing, considering the sleep Sora had been losing and the way he’d been stumbling around campus like an extremely anxious zombie for the past forty-eight hours. Three: he could gently reach over and manually help Sora finish as quickly as possible so that Sora would pipe down and Riku could get back to sleep.
It was a measure of his selflessness as a boyfriend, Riku considered, that he was about to implement plan number three. However, just as he snaked his hand lightly over Sora’s sleeping form, his boyfriend stiffened and sprang to consciousness, gasping heavily and bolting upright.
“Oh my god, not again,” he moaned as he regained his bearings. Riku sat up next to him, wrapping one arm around his lover as Sora stared down miserably at his sticky boxers.
“Could be worse,” Riku said reassuringly. “All of my dreams lately have been about failing midterms in my underwear.”
Sora ran both hands through his eternally mussed brunette locks and shook his head. “These aren’t dreams, Riku. They’re nightmares.”
“Nightmares for me, maybe,” Riku quipped, hauling himself out of bed and pulling open a dresser drawer. “I’m the one that has to do your laundry.” He produced a fresh pair of boxers, tossed them at Sora, and climbed back into the bed.
Sora grimaced. “I’m not enjoying this,” he said stubbornly. “And I don’t think Roxas is either.”
Sora had a strange relationship with Roxas. About a month after arriving home in Destiny Islands, he’d discovered that his nobody hadn’t really integrated back into his psyche very well at all. This revelation had come quite abruptly one afternoon as Sora was walking along the beach with Riku and Kairi.
Hey, you!
Sora tripped over his own feet and his popsicle went flying forward into the sand. He rapidly turned himself over, his wide eyes darting back and forth in search of the source of sudden interruption. “What the hell!” he gasped, intoning it as an exclamation rather than a question. “What the hell!”
Oh my god, that actually worked? Finally!
“What the hell!”
Sora’s vision was beginning to go a little fuzzy as Riku and Kairi knelt in front of him, filling his line of sight with their concerned faces, and all of a sudden everyone was talking at once.
“Oh my god, Sora, are you contact you for who knows how you look pretty pale, are you never answered; I was about to take you home to lie down, okay? Okay? Sora? Hey, Sora!”
Sora shook his head, seemingly in slow motion, his eyes losing all focus. “Can you—” He was about to say “repeat that?” but his consciousness gave way first and he collapsed backwards into the warm sand, eyes rolling back into his head and body going stiff while the three clamoring voices began shouting his name again, this time totally unheard.
By the time Sora drifted back into his own brain, he was back in his room. He cracked open his eyes and glanced around to find that the sun was setting behind his curtains and Riku had fallen asleep in his chair across the room, head resting on his desk. The house was silent; undoubtedly his mother was not home from work yet.
A rather restrained whisper suddenly emanated seemingly from nowhere and everywhere, like a thought that had just been surgically implanted in his brain. Are you back? it asked. Sora’s eyes widened, but he didn’t panic in quite the same mode as before now that he was out of the open and in the most comfortable and familiar place possible.
“What’s going on?” Sora hissed at nothing in particular. Riku didn’t stir; Riku didn’t sleep much, and when he managed to he was pretty much out of it come hell or high water.
Don’t talk out loud, the voice answered. People are going to think you’re off your meds. Just think at me.
Think at you? Sora thought a little sarcastically.
Yeah, like that, the voice said. I can read your thoughts if I try, but it’s easier if you just project so that I don’t have to feel like I’m prying.
Sora blinked slowly.
This is Roxas, dumbass. How many other people do you think are living in your head? the voice answered.
Stop reading my mind! Sora snapped.
Well, I wouldn’t have to if you would just think at me.
What are you doing? Sora asked, moving swiftly along to the next subject. Shouldn’t you be… me?
Wow, and I thought I was your insensitive half.
Sorry, Sora muttered internally.
Eh, it’s okay, Roxas said. I get that question all the time.
From who?
Myself. I’ve been wanting to get it from you, but it’s taken me all this time just to figure out how to get your attention.
I’m really confused.
You and me both. I’ve spent the past who knows how long with nothing to do but watch your life and listen to your thoughts. How do you live like this? Roxas asked.
Like what?
Roxas snorted. Well, thinking about Riku twenty-four hours a day, for one. Honestly, I feel like he’s living in here with me.
Don’t listen to my thoughts about Riku! Sora gasped.
Oh, come on. There’s probably not a single person on these islands who hasn’t thought those things about Riku, Roxas retorted. Riku probably thinks those things about himself.
Sora pouted.
I’m only kidding, Roxas amended, and they both lapsed into a pensive silence.
What are we going to do? Sora asked at last.
What do you mean?
What are we going to do about this? What can I do for you? Sora explained. I mean, god, you’re stuck in my head!
What can you do for me… Roxas repeated. Well, how would you feel about changing our name to Soroxas?
What?
It’s called a joke. Seriously, don’t worry about me. There’s a lot of weird shit you can do as a mental construct; I can keep myself busy. So just… go about your business. I swear I won’t, like… get all up in your consciousness when you’re jerking off or something.
Sora sounded distinctly unconvinced. Roxas…
Really, Roxas said firmly. I just… wanted to let you know I’m in here. It seemed like the thing to do.
You’re not… unhappy?
Roxas hesitated. Let me put it to you this way, he said at last. I’m no less happy in here than I would be out there.
…Okay.
Sora could feel Roxas’s presence fading to a familiar constant at the back of his mind. He sighed heavily, reached over to grab the telephone off his nightstand, and dialed a number he knew by heart.
“Kairi?” he said when the call was answered. “Have you talked to Naminé lately?”
There’s some freaky stuff that you can find out about people. For example, some people are religious. Some people have been in the army. These both entail some fairly weird stuff, but you don’t look at the people in question on a day-to-day basis and think, “He talks to invisible people in the sky,” or, “She’s killed another human being.” That stuff may seem surprising at first, but it’s not something you constantly worry about. It’s background noise.
That was how Sora’s friends treated the fact that he had another person in his head. Roxas was not what anyone thought of when they looked at Sora. It wasn’t that Roxas was ignored, per se. On the contrary, Sora talked to Roxas all the time, once he got used to multitasking with those bits of his brain. Riku talked to Roxas sometimes, with Sora as an intermediary, as did Kairi. Naminé and Roxas also had conversations quite regularly, using Kairi and Sora as go-betweens. Sora’s mother was the only person who looked at Sora and always thought “two people”. She now considered herself a mother of twins and made them nominally alternate days to take out the trash, insisting that it was the principle of the matter.
And so it went for two years. Sora and Riku got together. Riku took a year off from school. Kairi graduated fourth in their class. Sora was elected prom queen. And they all moved to university together.
Sora and Roxas’s thoughts had fairly frequently overlapped in the past. Sometimes Sora would get glimpses of things he did not recognize or hadn’t been thinking about, and Roxas reported the same. Sora would remember things, sometimes, that he’d never experienced. He’d often experience memories of the time he’d spent living with people he’d met only shortly before he’d killed them. Sora didn’t bring these memories up to Roxas. He never mentioned those twelve people, and he failed to mention Number Eight in particular so fiercely that the nobody in question was almost actually unmentioned.
That was until the third night in a row that Sora woke up with Axel’s name on his lips. The next morning he climbed out of bed early, telling Riku that he needed time to, as he always put it, think.
Roxas, he said gently. The constant presence lurking in the depths of his consciousness started a bit. Roxas had, from the feel of it, still been asleep.
Yeah? Sora’s other half responded, his thoughts groggy.
You’ve been sleeping the past few nights, haven’t you?
Roxas hesitated. …Yes.
Well, I’m pretty sure that your dreams have been getting into my dreams. Sora felt the mental equivalent of one’s stomach dropping into one’s feet. There was a brief, distinctly uncomfortable silence.
Oh, Roxas said.
Do you wanna talk about him? Sora asked in his best child psychologist voice.
Actually, I’d sort of rather go hang out by your forehead while you get a frontal lobotomy, Roxas muttered.
Come on, now.
How many people know about this?
Just you and me.
Good.
And Riku, Sora finished.
What?
I talk in my sleep, Sora said defensively.
I want to die, Roxas moaned.
Sora shook his head and made sure that Roxas felt it. You shouldn’t be embarrassed, he assured him. You loved him, didn’t you?
Roxas sighed. I treated him like dirt.
The important thing to know about gods is that most of them love to meddle. Whether they work alone or in groups, they can rarely keep their noses out of mortal beeswax. They place bets on wars, they give themselves sex changes and sleep with animals, they steal the clothing of the recently deceased. For some reason, they find it very difficult not to abuse their godly powers.
And they never stick to their worlds of origin, either. The god Hades, for example, has been particularly well-known for bringing in lackeys from anywhere he can find them. Once people start traveling, so do the super-powerful immortal divine entities they’ve created.
Chaos and Order were sisters. Twins, to be precise – fraternal ones. They were the products of a long-dead society, but they lived on doing freelance work here and there, and they got along about as well as two women with names like theirs could be expected to.
They were not, strictly speaking, anthropomorphic embodiments of abstract concepts. They were just two hyper-potent, very humanlike women in whose characters it was to promote particular philosophies on the nature of the universe. Another thing it’s worth noting is that Chaos and Order had almost nothing to do with most of their infinite time.
“You’ll never guess what I have,” Chaos said one morning, walking into her sister’s room without knocking and casually causing an alphabetized row of books to scatter across the floor as she passed it. Convinced of the truth of her previous statement, she answered her own question. “Fourteen souls!”
Order glanced up at the small white orbs that were bobbing gently along behind her sister. “I only count twelve,” she said disinterestedly. She went back to the colored pencils that she had been diligently sharpening to exactly the same length.
“The other two are otherwise occupied, but they still count,” Chaos waved a hand dismissively and Order’s bed unmade itself.
“Well, I want you to put the ones you do have back where you found them,” Order said firmly. Chaos shoved aside some meticulously-arranged paperweights and settled herself down atop the desk. Order quickly evacuated her pencils to safety and glared up at her sibling. An orb floated through her line of sight, and she cast it a distinctly unimpressed look. “Besides, these look kind of… not good.”
Chaos clicked her tongue at Order and plucked one of the luminous entities in question out of her frizzy, unkempt hair. She gently stroked it like it were a tiny, spherical kitten, although this action elicited no response. “They’re perfectly fine,” she said insistently. “They’ve just been through a lot. Not even fully cognizant right now, so what do you want from the poor dears?”
Order finished compulsively realigning the items on her recently disrupted desk, shoved Chaos’s right knee out of her personal space, and took the soul her sister was holding between two slim, manicured fingertips. “What are these?” she asked, peering closely at it and turning it this way and that.
“Nobodies!” Chaos proclaimed quite gleefully. She happily kicked her feet back and forth, her heels pounding against the desk and disorganizing the contents of all the drawers with each impact.
Order frowned thoughtfully. “But they have hearts,” she pointed out.
“They made them!” Chaos practically sang. “Isn’t that just so wonderful and unexpected?”
“Wonderful maybe in that a group of anomalies managed to assimilate themselves into a more logical paradigm,” Order quipped, releasing the orb she’d been studying back into the air.
“Oh, go… do something illogical!” Chaos shot back. “We’re going to have a little experiment.”
Chaos and Order had been arguing an ongoing, utterly unresolved debate for eons, concerning whether or not mortal existence was, by its nature, ordered or chaotic, predestined or random. People often mistakenly assumed that deities were omniscient and omnipotent and all sorts of ridiculous things, but in reality gods could only ever achieve omniscience or omnipotence or any of those qualities on very limited or localized scales, which didn’t really count at all.
Many were the mortals who died expecting to arrive in the afterlife and receive some sort of mysterious sacred knowledge concerning life, the universe, and everything, only to be severely disappointed when they found their gods arguing philosophy with one another. The only universal truth is that nobody knows anything about universal truth.
“These guys weren’t so great when they were alive,” Chaos explained to Order. “I mean, they were pretty immoral and maybe marginally evil. Or at least most of them were. One of them was totally not evil, but she doesn’t really count anyway.”
“What’d they do?” Order asked dryly.
“They tried to build a planet out of stolen hearts.”
“That’s…” Order trailed off, eyebrows furrowed. “You know, I don’t really know how to feel about that.”
“You don’t have to. Point is, they failed and they were all bludgeoned to death with a giant key, otherwise disposed of, or trapped in the bodies of their original selves.”
Order looked at her sister from beneath lowered eyelids. “Are you high?” she asked suspiciously.
“No!”
“…Okay. Go on.”
“My point is that they never really got a chance. They were totally victims of circumstance. They all could have led totally different lives – productive, upstanding ones – if the universe hadn’t pointed its cruel, unforgiving finger at them and said, ‘You’re all worthless! You’re nothing, you’re nobody!’” Chaos practically shrieked this last part, gesturing wildly and breaking a lamp in the process.
“They are nobodies,” Order pointed out.
“Not the point,” Chaos countered. “They didn’t have to end up like they did.”
“My dear sister,” Order said in her most condescending tone, “some things are inevitable.”
“Oh, but they aren’t,” Chaos countered. “And I’m going to prove it.”
“How?”
“We’re going to put these nobodies back. We’ll give them starter lives. Resources, knowledge, something like what their others had. No jobs. And we’ll see what they do.”
Order thought about this for a moment, tapping a perfect rhythm on the desktop with her nails. At last, a wry smile crossed her face. “You’re on,” she said.
Next time on Deae: “Why am I not dead?” he asked himself angrily. He marched the few steps over to the door and threw it open. The loud bang attracted the attention of the four or five students who were already present in the hallway as Axel flew out into the corridor, teeth clenched, shoulders hunched, and breaths coming fast. “Why the fuck am I not dead?” he shouted at them.
8 tomates | delicioso