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.

Previously on Deae: “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.

Prologue

Chapter 1 – On the Hang of Thursdays and Other Life Skills

Xemnas’s eyes flew open and he drew in a gasping breath, the first one this body had taken in a long time. He unceremoniously fell out of bed and managed to do so with all the impaired grace of an intoxicated gazelle. Lying prone on the floor, the side of his face smashed into a squishy beige area rug, his lower body half-suspended by a leg that had somehow managed to become hopelessly tangled in the duvet and one of his arms pinned beneath his chest, Xemnas tried to recall how he had gotten here.

His last memories were a little hazy. Keyblade master, Kingdom Hearts, other keyblade master, spaceship, zebra coat…

Oh, yes, he’d died, hadn’t he? Yes, he’d definitely been killed. Xemnas summoned all of his strength and managed, by thrusting all of the parts of his body in different directions at once, to dislodge himself from his bedding and turn himself at least marginally right side up. He massaged his face with one hand. Okay, he’d died, and now here he was in a bedroom he’d never seen before but which looked kind of like one he thought he might have had at some point. He had the distinct impression that there had been some amount of time between his death and now, but he couldn’t for the questionable life of him recall any of it.

Speaking of which, Xemnas was slowly becoming aware of an unfamiliar sound. It was almost inaudible, but he could feel it vibrating… within him? Slowly, ever so slowly, Xemnas’s right hand made its way from its place at his side, up his abdomen, and onto his ribcage, where it came to rest directly over his sternum.

Tha-dum. Tha-dum. Tha-dum. Xemnas froze for a long, long moment, just listening in silence to unfamiliar beating of his heart.

Then he screamed.

-------------

Xigbar had a memory – not his own, but a memory nonetheless – of waking up dazed and hung over in the middle of a herd of sheep one awful Saturday morning, his consciousness feeling only marginally tapped into his body and having absolutely no clue as to where he was or how he had gotten there.

And even though it was Braig and not Xigbar who had had to walk the two miles back into town and get on the bus smelling of livestock that time, and even though Xigbar was in a rather comfortable bed with an alarm going off in his ear rather than dumped unceremoniously on some farm somewhere, he was still getting a distinct feeling of déjà vu about this whole thing.

Ignoring the déjà vu, Xigbar automatically sat up, turned off the alarm, and groped about on the nightstand for his eye patch. Finding it, he slipped it over his head and adjusted it with a practiced flick of his index finger. With the other hand, he attempted to rub the sleep out of his eye.

“Shit,” he said simply. It was what he said most mornings, having long since found that it was the most apt word to describe how he felt at the very idea of having to get out of bed. He reached around and shook the body next to him as he always did, being as he was invariably the only one to wake up to the alarm.

“Dude, it’s like 8:30. Get up,” he said, with the last word somehow achieving its plosive conclusion even as it turned into a yawn. He shook the body again and blinked at the gorgeous orange-yellow sun shining in the cloudless blue sky outside the window.

That… wasn’t right. That had never been there before. He looked around the room. In fact, none of this had ever been here before. This was not his room. This was not the World That Never Was. And yet his alarm had been set, his eye patch had been in its spot, and he was sleeping next to—

He twisted his upper body around abruptly and came face to face with exactly who was supposed to be there.

“What the hell is going on?”

-------------

Xaldin hated Thursdays. He had an ingrained ability to sense Thursdays. You could have drugged Xaldin into unconsciousness and dropped him in the middle of the desert with no means of telling the time or the date, and whenever the first Thursday rolled around he would wake up on that day just knowing in his gut that today was Thursday and that it was going to be worse than all the other days he’d spent wandering the barren wasteland. He was probably going to be peed on by a jackal or something.

In any case, Xaldin always knew when it was Thursday. He knew it before he even opened his eyes in the morning. Thus, Xaldin was the first to realize that something was amiss that morning, because he knew that it was Thursday and that therefore something had changed before he even fully awoke. Xaldin had not felt a Thursday in… a very long time. He couldn’t remember what he’d been doing for all that indeterminate time, but days of the week had pretty much lost all sense of meaning during it, and Xaldin had the feeling that even though he hadn’t really been quite aware of his surroundings, he’d actually been fairly happy due to an extended period of not having to deal with Thursdays at all.

Xaldin also had the easiest time coming to terms with his unexplained appearance in a strange bed in a strange yet familiar dwelling that morning, largely due to the fact that today was Thursday and therefore it was going to be a very bad day, and that required most of his concern.

Okay, Xaldin, he said to himself, think for a second. What do you remember last?

He remembered dying. This was not actually that surprising, because that had been a Thursday. He’d known before he set out on that ridiculous mission that it was going to go badly because Xemnas had not let him put it off until Friday. So, yes, he’d died on a Thursday. And now here it was Thursday again. Couldn’t have been the same Thursday, but a Thursday nonetheless. And he was alive again, apparently. In fact, possibly more alive than he had been before, Xaldin realized as he reached up and felt the gentle thumping of a novel new organ beating away in his chest. So, this was all quite unusual. How best to handle this?

Xaldin knew the answer to that one without even thinking about it. He got up, closed the curtains, locked the door, and then returned to the bed that was apparently his. He curled up under the sheets and drifted back to sleep without another thought. Today was Thursday. Today was not a good day for doing things. He was going to hibernate today and worry about his unexpected resurrection on Friday.

-------------

Vexen would not have been able to tell you, had you asked him, if he was interested in science because he had a natural tendency to analyze everything around him on a constant basis, or if he analyzed everything around him on a constant basis because he had a natural interest in science. Not that it really mattered, though. The point was that Vexen was cold, Vexen was calculating, Vexen was a sentient computer in a questionably organic form.

Vexen was not a sociopath. None of the Organization were sociopaths, really, although had they been some things might have been much easier. Vexen had plenty of feelings that he simply relegated to a small, walled-off corner of his mind like the secret, mutated cousin of his cerebral family tree. Feelings could not be analyzed, so they really weren’t much fun at all. Therefore, Vexen was not surprised or confused when he woke up on a futon on the floor of a lab that was much like his own but significantly less worked-in. He simply opened his eyes and looked around, and his brain set to work evaluating his surroundings.

Body: four limbs, head, torso – check. Grey striped futon, tile floor. Lab equipment, unused. Two fluorescent bulbs, unlit. Door closed, curtains open. Sun outside, blue sky, birds, no clouds… palm tree. Last conscious experience: chakram in the back.

Vexen sat up, pulled his hair into a ponytail with the tie he always kept around his left wrist, and got out of the futon. He straightened the sheets out, rolled it up methodically, and placed it into a closet that he’d never used before but which he knew would be there and have a place for the bedding on the third shelf down. Not even bothering to explore the rest of the single-story abode he’d found himself in, he simply walked into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror.

He stripped off all his clothes and stood under the harsh glare of the single light fixture, staring at himself analytically with pursed lips and a single furrowed eyebrow. He turned around and examined his back over his shoulder. His naturally sallow skin actually had a large, irregular streak of pale white scar tissue running across it. He reached behind himself and ran his fingers with some trouble along part of the mark on his lower back. It tingled lightly like scar tissue, but it wasn’t raised and it looked more like a particularly large birthmark than a healed-over wound.

He checked the rest of his body over. Every mole was the same as it had always been, every other scar that he’d gotten from a lifetime of standing there calmly as various glass implements full of every sort of toxin and caustic chemical exploded right in front of him. This was definitely, he concluded, the same body he’d had before he died, whenever that had been. The only difference he could detect, he concluded at last, was the absence of that former unused space in his chest.

-------------

Lexaeus was a much lighter sleeper than Zexion. He was an intellectual, but his body didn’t match his nature. He was built and wired to be some sort of super-soldier. He was strong enough to launch medium-sized livestock like scud missiles, tall enough to intimidate smallish professional basketball players, and big enough that he would have been considered a public health threat had he ever gotten involved in a mosh pit. Additionally, he had the sort of instincts necessary to covertly and single-handedly take out third-world fascist dictators with naught but a paper clip and a stick of chewing gum. Most importantly, he had a jawline made for cutting diamonds.

Consequently, Lexaeus frequently found himself springing awake at all hours of the night in response to things like the thermostat hissing or the Superior wandering down the hall in his socks on the way to the kitchen. At these moments, he frequently was overwhelmed with an ingrained fight-or-flight response and overcome with the thought that they were back, and this time they meant business.

He was not sure who “they” were, and he was quite sure that he had never encountered “them” in his life. He chalked this up to some sort of genetic predisposition for engaging in mortal combat that he had heretofore ignored, and neglected to mention this to anybody but Zexion. He was quite sure that if Vexen, for one, ever found out that he had a habit of waking up in cold sweats convinced that his life was in danger, Number Four would never let him rest until he’d run enough tests and drawn enough blood to map Lexaeus’s entire genome.

This morning, it was a car door slamming in the street that caused Lexaeus to jump straight from lying in bed to crouching in the opposite corner of the room, a table lamp in one hand and his heart racing in his chest. He realized quite quickly that he, as always, was in no immediate danger. He realized a nanosecond later that he was also in no immediately recognizable location. This looked something like what he thought of as his room, but the furniture was not his and the room itself had slightly different dimensions and he hadn’t had a window in his room at all before.

Lexaeus just stood there for a good twenty seconds, taking deep, deliberate breaths and relaxing his muscles. He then made his way over to the door, stepped out into the hall, and walked over to the room next to his own. It never once occurred to him that the person he was looking for wouldn’t be there.

-------------

Zexion slept like a rock that had just spent most of eternity continually trying to stop some single-minded asshole from pushing it up an endless hill. He was an intellectual, just like Lexaeus, but where Lexaeus was designed for single-handedly fighting misguided military operations in the jungle, Zexion was designed for taking photos of himself in the bathroom mirror and going to rock shows in women’s jeans. Although he did own women’s jeans, he had never been to a rock show and he was more than capable of using a camera timer. But he still slept like an angst-ridden fourteen year old, usually only clawing his way back into the world of the conscious before noon if Lexaeus came in and forced him to do so.

There were two sharp knocks that caused the bedroom door to rattle in its frame. Zexion didn’t need to open his eyes to throw a pillow completely ineffectually in the direction of the noise. “Z, I’m coming in,” Lexaeus called. He always said that exact thing in the morning just before he walked in, and he never once received any real, effectual argument.

“Fuck off, Lex,” Zexion muttered as his best friend entered the room. His voice was muffled by the fact that he was pretty much talking into the mattress, but he managed to get his point across regardless.

Lexaeus knew very well that the fact that Zexion was cogent enough to spew profanities at him was not really saying anything it all. He calmly walked over to the bed, removed the bedclothes, and picked up Zexion as easily as a sack of 1845 vintage Dublin potatoes. Hefting his limp form over one shoulder and noting with a shake of his head that while he’d awoken in a reasonable pair of drawstring pants, his younger friend was still sleeping in his clothes, he marched back out of the room and into the bathroom across the hall.

He dropped the lid of the toilet down with one hand and gently but unceremoniously put the quietly snoring Zexion down in a sitting position on said fixture. He then picked up a washcloth off the vanity, soaked it in the iciest water he could get the faucet to produce, lifted up Zexion’s shirt, and applied the freezing cold cloth with one enormous hand to Zexion’s chest.

Zexion shrieked like a little girl caught in a wheat thresher, starting so suddenly that he’d probably have fallen to the floor had Lexaeus not been prepared to hold him upright. He clutched what he considered to be his much abused nipples protectively as he was suddenly thrust into awareness of his surroundings.

Lexaeus was a man of relatively few words, but he knew how to convey important information quite briefly. “We’re alive,” he said simply.

“Holy fucking shit on a shit sandwich.”

-------------

Saïx was the least human of the members of the Organization. He insisted that he was human, but most people who knew him privately considered the fact that he was prone to going absolutely batshit seemingly at random and with or without provocation, combined with the yellow eyes and the funky ears and the fangs, and also the fact that he was constantly fighting the urge to mark his territory all over the castle, to be an indication that he was at least partially something else.

This feral side was the reason that when he was unexpectedly awoken by the portable phone handset on the floor near his bed, his initial response was to let out a roar that was more feline than anything before tearing apart a feather pillow with his teeth and nails. Ten seconds later, he came back to his higher-functioning senses, goose down all over the bed and in his hair and mouth, and realized that he was not only unexpectedly not dead, but that someone was trying to call him.

Social custom won out over existential confusion, and Saïx snatched up the phone and pressed the talk button without even having to look at it. “Hello?” he said, sending damp white feathers flying out of his mouth as he spoke.

“Saïx!” It was Xemnas. Well, Saïx said to himself, he’d just awoken unexpectedly and alone in an unfamiliar place; of course Xemnas was calling him.

“Hello, Superior,” Saïx drawled, looking around the room in an attempt to see what time it was. He spotted a digital clock on the dresser that informed him that it was 8:37 AM.

Xemnas audibly gasped. “It is you!”

“I know it’s me.”

“I found you in the phonebook,” Xemnas said. “I didn’t think it would work but I looked and there was only one Saïx and it was you.” Xemnas was talking at about a mile a minute.

“Yes, that’s me, Saïx.” He got up, slid his feet into his slippers as he did every morning, and moved to the window to examine the alien beachfront landscape. “I don’t suppose you know what we’re doing… wherever we are?” he asked in a sleepy monotone.

“No! But that’s not important!” Xemnas answered. “Saïx, do you have a heart?”

Saïx rolled his eyes with the practiced effortlessness of someone who’d been dealing day in and day out with the Organization’s leader for quite some time. “No, Xemnas,” he said irritably, “and while we’re at it I don’t have a uterus, either. Anything else you’d like to know about my anatomy?”

Xemnas sighed into the phone. “No, Seven, I want you to check if you have a heart. Just reach up and feel.”

Saïx sighed right back at Xemnas and put his hand over his chest with all of the exaggerated effort of someone who was talking to a person who could actually see his physical mannerisms. “All right, Xemnas, I’m feeling my chest and—” Tha-dum. “What the fuck?”

-------------

Axel had been pretty convinced that nobodies didn’t have an afterlife to look forward to. After all, a heart seemed like the black tie necessary to get into the swanky, exclusive Eternity Club. Therefore, he’d expected when he pretty much blew himself to bits in front of Sora that his consciousness was done for, and that had been exactly what he’d wanted. The way he saw it, Roxas was the meaning of life. Not much of a meaning of life, maybe, but he was Axel’s and Axel was more than happy with him.

The logic had been simple. No Roxas, no meaning of life, no point in dragging out the inevitable. So he’d taken a shortcut in the most useful way he could think of and he never expected to wake up. He particularly didn’t expect to wake up sprawled out on his stomach with the perky strains of some top forty pop crapstravaganza blaring in his ear from a clock radio. Axel woke up quite calmly, as was his nature, simply opening his eyes and blinking a couple of times.

I’m alive. I’m… alive. I’m ALIVE?

And his entire body gave a jolt. He was tangled in a single cotton sheet, which he kicked off of his lower torso with much effort. The sheet flew in a sort of textile Gordian Knot to the floor, joining Axel’s favorite threadbare comforter that had fallen there some time earlier. Axel lay on the mattress with his fitted sheet and his pillow, breathing heavily and staring at the underside of the top bunk above him. After a few moments, the insipid music emanating from the alarm clock began to seep back into his thoughts and he rolled over, grabbed the offending appliance, ripped its cord out of the outlet, and threw the entire thing into the far wall of the room.

He looked around. There were posters for bands he liked on the walls, there was his long black coat hanging on the back of the door, and that was definitely the teddy bear he’d given to Roxas and then stolen back once it had started to smell like the other nobody sitting at the foot of the bed staring at him blankly. Axel had of course never been to college. Ela had planned on it before he lost his heart, but it had never even occurred to his nobody to get a higher education. This was definitely a dormitory, though; the cheap bunk beds and the poorly-painted cinderblock walls and the general air of academic despair that surrounded him attested to that.

Axel jumped out of bed, his disarrayed mass of red hair protecting his head from the bump it would have otherwise sustained from the knock it received on the upper bunk. He stared down at the familiar tartan drawstring pants he was clad in and snarled.

“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.

-------------

Demyx loved waking up next to people. He could have been slated to go to the gallows on any given morning, but if he woke up next to someone on that day he’d probably saunter up to the hangman whistling happily. Many mornings, Demyx woke up and went back to sleep for a while just so he could have the pleasure of waking up in bed with someone again.

Of course, Demyx had only ever woken up next to one person, but that was fine with him. He came to as he was shaken a bit more roughly than usual, a grin spreading across his face as he yawned and stretched his body out. He opened his eyes only as he sat up, and was met with Xigbar’s familiar face looking distinctly less happy than even Xigbar, the very antithesis of a morning person, was wont to appear before noon.

“What the hell is going on?” Xigbar asked. Demyx blinked, his smile fading quickly.

“What?”

“We’re alive, Dem,” Xigbar pointed out. Demyx stared at him for a long moment, the neurons in his brain running double-time to get themselves started up and working on this problem.

“I don’t—” Demyx paused. “Oh. Oh.” He looked around the room, quickly taking in the general familiarity and the fact that he’d never been here before, and he blinked again. “We’re alive,” he said at last.

“Man, do you remember anything between dying and now?” Xigbar asked.

Demyx hesitated and then shook his head. “No.”

“Me neither.”

“Where are we?”

“I think we live here.”

“So do I.”

“Have you ever seen this place before?”

“No.”

“Do you wanna go check out the rest of it?”

“No.” Xigbar raised an eyebrow at this, turning back to look at Demyx and finding his face captured between soft hands. Demyx shifted his body onto Xigbar’s and lowered him down onto his back as his tongue darted into the older nobody’s mouth. There was one thing that Demyx liked doing with Xigbar even more than waking up.

-------------

Luxord liked to bet against himself on what time he would wake up in the morning. He would bet himself all sorts of extravagant sums, and he kept track of what he owed himself in a small notebook he kept with him at all times. At present, he was mired in self-debt to the tune of about seven million munny.

Luxord woke up that morning at 8:34. He automatically looked to the left, made note of this off of the clock on the wall, and reached under his pillow. Pulling out the notebook, he flipped open to the page held by the pencil tucked in along the binding. He was about to write down the actual time he’d awoken in the appropriate column when he realized that there was nothing written down as a bet for the past night.

That was how Luxord realized that he was not in his room and, more importantly, he was not dead. He scratched his head absently as he mentally estimated the odds of waking up in a totally new place, alive, after having been killed. Probably not very good, he decided. The odds were better of waking up in some sort of afterlife, but Luxord knew that this was no such thing. He definitely felt alive. In fact, he felt somewhat more alive than he had before he died.

Suddenly, he became aware of something sitting at the end of his bed, watching him. He sat up quickly and was surprisingly unsurprised to find his cat lounging by his feet.

Luxord had kept a cat for quite a while. None of the other Organization members had ever had any pets, although Marluxia did spend a lot of time having conversations with his plants. Luxord, however, kept a cat that had somehow wandered into the World That Never Was fully intact, heart and all. This had prompted Vexen and Xaldin to run a series of tests on the animal that led them to conclude that cats were, by nature, just so diabolically self-absorbed and evil that they were incapable of housing any more darkness than their souls already contained.

Luxord had never seen evidence of any of this. He and his cat got along fantastically, and he was quite convinced that against all odds he loved that cat and that cat loved him back. “Come on, Jack,” he said as he picked up the feline. “We’ve had a strange sort of… something or the other, huh?” Jack signaled her agreement by purring and knocking her head into Luxord’s chin. “What say you and I go bet on how many bowls of Lucky Charms I’m about to eat?”

Jack growled at this and dug her claws into Luxord’s arm. “Fine, you’re right,” Luxord conceded. “That’s not a fair wager at all.”

-------------

Marluxia hated getting up in the morning. In fact, he hated getting up at pretty much any time of day. He was the sort of person who could sleep for fourteen hours and still bitch about how goddamned exhausted he was when he was physically dragged out of bed. The only resident of the castle who’d ever slept more than Marluxia was Luxord’s cat.

Marluxia became slightly aware of his own consciousness after his alarm had been going off for approximately forty-five minutes.

Fuck, he thought to himself. I’m alive. I’m alive and I’m awake. Well, only one way to fix that.

He went back to sleep, not even bothering to turn off the alarm.

-------------

Larxene awoke to Marluxia’s alarm. She was not in the same room. She was not even in the same house. Nevertheless, Marluxia’s alarm was loud and abrasive, and Larxene was an exceedingly light sleeper. It only took about three minutes of continual blaring noise for Larxene to become fully awake and unable to get back to sleep.

“Okay,” she said out loud. “I’m alive.” She grimaced. “Fucking people making noise at…” She looked around and found a watch on the nightstand. “…half past eight in the fucking morning.” She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. She waited about thirty seconds and the alarm didn’t stop. “God dammit, I need fucking coffee.”

Larxene brewed a pot of coffee in the kitchen. She wondered vaguely about how and why she was here, but she really couldn’t be too arsed to care because that horrible grating alarm was bouncing around in her skull. She sat at the dining table, drinking the coffee steadily and glaring daggers at the house next door. The pot, which started off totally full, depleted over the course of the better part of an hour, and once Larxene had finished all of it and the alarm was still going, she stood up – to all appearances perfectly calm – and threw the pot into the wall. She then turned and strode out the front door.

After leaving the house, she did not take the shortest path across the adjacent lawns. She marched down the front walk of her house, turned left on the sidewalk, frightened a small dog that was being walked in the opposite direction and a child on a bike, turned left again onto the front walk of her neighbor’s house, and stomped up the path to the entryway.

She kicked the front door in with the practiced skill of a woman with an anger management problem and an unhealthy disdain for doorknobs. Following the sound of the accursed alarm, she stalked single-mindedly through the house, which was tastefully decorated and hardly visible through the dense domesticated foliage that filled it. Her slippers on the carpet illogically managed to sound like jackboots on concrete. Reaching another closed door at the end of the hall, she kicked that one in as well.

Her voice was like a hurricane emanating from a tin can. “All right, shithead, prepare to—” Larxene froze as she came face to face with Marluxia.

Marluxia, for his part, had slept through two doors nearly being ripped off their hinges, but the sound of an angry Larxene had been permanently etched into the DNA of every member of the Organization as an immediate call to alertness, adrenaline, and pants-wetting, and Marluxia was cowering in the corner of his bed within a half a second of having her voice penetrate his eardrums.

They sat there and stared at each other for a long moment, Marluxia clutching his pillow instinctively as a shield and Larxene heaving like a grizzly bear who’d just completed a triathlon.

“…Marly?” she said at last, and her voice had returned to a tone more suitable to a girl Larxene’s size.

“Larxene?” Marluxia answered, his voice only cracking a bit.

Larxene’s face brightened in an instant. “Fag!” she exclaimed happily.

“Hag!”

“You wanna go get an Egg McMuffin?”

“What do you think?” Marluxia said, leaping to his feet.

“Good,” Larxene declared, and she tore the alarm clock out of the wall and hurled it straight through the bedroom window.

-------------

Roxas, Sora, and Riku were all feeling distinctly cramped in a rather horizontal sort of way. Like nearly every other dorm room on campus, Riku and Sora’s room had bunk beds. The top bunk, however, was never used, as both residents of the room opted to share the bottom.

The bottom bunk was not designed for two people by a long shot, so having both boys pile into it was about as practical and – if you wanted to look at it that way – romantic as trying to fit two bodies into the same coffin. It worked well enough, however, and Riku and Sora, being two teenagers in love, were both perfectly happy with the somewhat uncomfortable arrangement.

But once a third party was unexpectedly added into the equation, the entire dynamic shifted. Riku began to stir when his right brain started to receive messages informing it that the left side of his body was, for all intents and purposes, no longer on the mattress.

“Sora, move over,” he mumbled, trying to physically push the body next to him further onto the bed without much success.

“I’m already against the wall,” Sora responded sleepily.

“Well, I’m falling off the bed,” Riku complained, shoving harder.

“Would you two assholes stop your bitching?”

Riku’s eyes snapped open and a second later he hit the cold laminate floor with a dull thud.

“Roxas, stop your bitching,” Sora muttered, his physical and mental auditory and verbal processes running together as they often did when he was tired. He shifted his weight and unthinkingly wrapped his arms around what he presumed to be Riku. This was what made Roxas realize that something was amiss. He automatically bolted in the other direction as he became aware that he was being hugged, and he flew into Riku just as the other boy was sitting up. Both of them crashed to the floor.

Sora finally woke up at this. He sat up and peered over the edge of the bed. The scream he let out was short, punctuated, and matter-of-fact. It was a scream that said, “This is utterly unexpected and very odd but not really bad now that I have a moment to get a handle on what’s going on so never mind.”

“What the fuck?” Roxas asked, voice breathy with adrenaline and in a tone that said that he actually expected an explanation.

“You’re crushing my lungs,” Riku said, his voice muffled by the mouthful of Roxas’s hair he was being involuntarily subjected to. Roxas rolled off of Riku, and Sora sat there trying to decide whether he should check on Riku’s physical well-being or hug Roxas or what. Finally he just threw himself on top of both of them, clutching the pair to himself as tightly as he could.

“How did you do that?” Sora exclaimed at Roxas.

“I didn’t do it,” Roxas said. He was using the hand that wasn’t pinned between Sora and Riku to examine the various parts of his body to make sure that they were actually there. “I just… woke up.”

“We need to call Mom!” Sora exclaimed. “No… wait. We need to surprise Mom! We’ll take the train home tomorrow and surprise her! Oh! Do you think you’re going to stay this way?” Sora lifted his head up to give both Riku and Roxas the sort of huge grin that stays behind when its owner evaporates, the thought never seriously entering his mind that Roxas might answer no.

“I don’t know,” Roxas said, continuing his inspection of his own body. “I guess so,” he said a few seconds later as his hand came to rest on his chest.

“You guess so?” Riku repeated.

“I think… this must be my heart,” Roxas said.

-------------

Naminé was much more adept at math than Kairi and had stayed up most of the night to help her other study for a trigonometry exam. They slept much later than anyone else that morning, curled up together on Kairi’s bed, review sheets and textbook and pencils scattered across the comforter beside them, small smiles flitting over their lips as though some part of them fully expected to wake up soon to discover that they were two separate people again.

Full stop.

Next time on Deae: “Saïx, don’t you know anything about heart disease?” Saïx looked at him with the exact same expression he’d sported the very first time Xemnas had shown him the zebra coat. “Hearts are death magnets!” Xemnas told him. “They can have attacks, they can have murmurs, they can beat irregularly, they can clog if you eat too much red meat. The list of horrors is a mile long.”

Chapter 2