All right, I was planning on putting out one of these every other day, but this one has to get done tonight, as it turns out. We're taking our cat in to have her put to sleep, which is always a bout of ethical turmoil for me, so I won't be able to do it tomorrow. Which just means that there should be another one Wednesday instead of Thursday, so good on that, then.

Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed the last bits! You are awesome, and when you point out things you like, it really does help; especially since I'm still making big changes to later chapters as I edit them and I've got a couple of short things I'm thinking of adding in just because people mentioned that they liked that sort of thing. <3

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: 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.

Prologue | Chapter 1

Chapter 2 – On Nobody Infestations and Other Problems

What do you do when the separate half of you who’s been living in your head for two years suddenly becomes a completely distinct entity again? In Sora’s case, he decided that they should go grab Kairi and all go out for pancakes to celebrate. What do you do when your boyfriend wants to throw a party at IHOP and you’ve both got midterms in forty-five minutes? In Riku’s case, he made him get dressed and come to class, promising that they’d celebrate the inexplicable return of his newly-separated nobody that evening and apologizing to Roxas that they couldn’t stick around today.

That was how Roxas ended up sitting in his other’s dorm room by himself that morning, playing video games and trying his best not to too deeply contemplate the years-long series of events that had led him to this point. His very existence was a mistake, and it was a series of similar mistakes that had defined his life up to that point. He had a gut feeling that the fact that he now had his own body back – and with the new addition of an actual heart – was not a mistake as such, but he did not discount the idea that it might turn into one.

He’d spent two years as a mental construct living life only vicariously and not really caring. And now as he sat here on the floor, in his own body with its own heart and his own shot at an actual, normal life for the very first time, he found that he didn’t want to do anything but sit around and play video games; the idea of going out and living seemed empty and utterly unappealing.

What do you do when you’ve exhausted suicide as an option and in the end it failed to achieve anything at all? In Axel’s case, he verbally blew up in front of several strangers, tried and failed to burn down the building with his now apparently defunct power over fire, and lay on his bed wallowing in misery for a couple hours.

What he decided that he really wanted to do after thinking for a while was to hunt down Sora somehow and either attempt to seduce him or attempt to be friends with him or maybe just kidnap him until the cops came and Axel was killed – again – in a bloody standoff. What he actually did, in a remarkable show of self-restraint, was get up and explore the room he’d found himself in.

Within fifteen minutes, Axel was genuinely weirded out. There were, of course, two of everything in here. It was a dorm room, so everything came in pairs. The bizarre part was while one closet was filled with exactly the sort of clothes Axel generally liked, the other was filled with exactly the sort of clothes that would have split at the seams had Axel ever tried to put them on. There were two desks; Axel instinctively knew the password for the computer on one of them, and he had no idea as to the password for the other.

Okay, Axel thought, he had a roommate. That was acceptable and not strange in the least. And while his closet contained a few things that he’d owned before and that looked lived-in, the rest of what was in it was new. It still had the tags on, as a matter of fact. This was also acceptable and not strange in the least once he put it in perspective. The part that confused Axel was that his presumed roommate’s closet was in exactly the same state of affairs: one or two previously worn items were shoved in there, but most of what was there had little retail tags dangling from it.

Axel was not a bad person – although he could manage a reasonable facsimile – but he genuinely had very little sense of propriety, so he dug through the closet that wasn’t his a bit. At the end of the rack of clothes on hangers, he paused and pulled out a waterproof black coat that was identical to the one that was hanging on the hook on the back of the door.

Okay, Axel said to himself numbly. I need to… walk around in a huff. He dropped the hanger, coat still on it, to the floor, spun around on his bare heel, and marched over to the door. He flung it open, fully planning on stomping around randomly in public shoeless and in his jeans and t-shirt, and stopped as a figure that was more than a little familiar disappeared behind the closing door directly across the hall.

Roxas ran into one of Sora’s neighbors in the bathroom. He looked familiar, but Roxas had never made a point of paying attention when Sora got all chummy with random jerks.

“Sora,” the guy said, walking into the room just as Roxas finished washing his hands, “what’s with the new hair?”

Roxas spun around and glowered at the stranger in a distinctly un-Sora-like fashion. “I’m not Sora,” he said flatly, and he pushed past him out the bathroom door. He couldn’t even explain what he was doing here to himself, and he was not about to start making up stupid stories to tell nosy assholes.

“Dude, Sora, what the hell?” the guy called after him, but Roxas just went straight back to Sora’s room without turning around. About a second after he shut the door to the room behind him, however, there was a knocking – well, more of a pounding – on it. Roxas groaned irritably, spun around, and jerked the door open. “I’m not Sora!” he reiterated at Axel.

What do you do when you’ve spent two years trapped in your former self’s body only to wake up one morning and discover that suddenly you’re your own person again shortly before answering the door and finding the one that proverbially and irrevocably got away standing there? In Roxas’s case, his brain stepped out for a breath of fresh air and sanity and his body went stiff as he tipped backwards and landed harshly on the cold floor for the second time that day.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Around this same time, Naminé and Kairi awoke to Kairi’s alarm. They were facing each other, and they both opened their eyes at the same time. Unmoving, they just stared for a good long moment. Kairi was the first to speak.

“Whose dream is this?” she asked. They’d personally wandered into each other’s dreams on occasion before.

“I don’t know,” Naminé answered. She reached over and touched Kairi’s arm, prodding it inquisitively, before doing the same to her own. “Do you usually have dreams about waking up?”

Kairi shook her head gently as she reached over and turned off the alarm clock. “No,” she said. “And normally I don’t have dreams where I feel like I’ve just had an adrenaline shot.”

“I’ve never felt like this before at all,” Naminé said. Kairi looked at her questioningly and Naminé reached over and took Kairi’s hand, placing it on her chest and holding it there.

“Oh my god,” Kairi breathed. “I don’t think we’re dreaming.”

“Oh my god,” Naminé echoed, “You’ve got midterms in a half hour.”

Naminé spent the first twenty-five minutes of her renewed solo existence practically dressing Kairi and dragging her across campus. All the while Kairi protested that she would call her professor, that she’d tell him she was sick, that some things were more important than school.

“I’ll still be here when you’re finished taking your test,” Naminé said as she hurried Kairi up the steps of the maths building. “Remember sohcahtoa, okay?”

“Of course,” Kairi said breathlessly. “But what are you going to do while I’m in class?”

“I don’t know,” Naminé said lightly. “Maybe I’ll go check on Sora and Roxas.”

“Here,” Kairi said, pulling her keys out of her pocket and unclipping the unauthorized copy she had of Sora and Riku’s dorm key. “I’ll find Sora and Riku after class and meet you over there, okay?”

“Sure,” Naminé said, pulling Kairi into a quick, tight hug. “Sohcahtoa,” she reiterated, and she pushed Kairi through the door of the building.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Roxas’s brain, having calmed down enough to have another go at dealing with the outside world, woke back up not long after he passed out. Axel had moved him onto the lower bunk and was sitting over him and running a cool, thin hand over his forehead, smoothing his perpetually messy hair out of his eyes. Roxas cracked his eyes open.

“Rox?” Axel said.

“Ax?” Roxas responded hazily.

Axel let out a punctuated, exhilarated laugh, his face breaking into a broad grin. “Holy shit,” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“What?” Roxas responded, still a little out of it. “You’re supposed to be dead.” There was a split-second pause. “That’s not what I meant,” he added quickly.

“I know. I don’t know how I got here. I’m pretty sure I was dead, I’m pretty sure all of the rest of us died, and then I just… woke up in the room across the hall this morning.”

Roxas began an attempt to sit up despite the fact that he was still rather dizzy. Axel grabbed his hand and helped pull him upright, and they found themselves sitting right next to each other but facing opposite directions. Roxas clenched his hand down on Axel’s as though he were afraid his friend were going to just get up and walk out at any moment the way he himself had just gotten up and walked out what seemed like an eternity ago. His heart was pounding so hard he felt as though it were going to break through his rib cage and he had to take a few steadying breaths, telling himself just to calm down and talk.

“I don’t know how I got here, either,” Roxas said. “I was in Sora’s body last night and I woke up this morning being suffocated between him and Riku.”

Axel’s breathing was audibly unsteady as he said, “So then this is… real, right? You are you, aren’t you?”

Roxas nodded. “I am if you are.”

“How do we know that?”

“Because…” Roxas didn’t know how to answer that. “Because we’ve never lied to each other.” He studied Axel’s face for a long moment as they lapsed into contemplative and thoroughly stunned silence, and then he shifted his upper body and leaned his head on Axel’s shoulder, wrapping his free arm around the redhead’s body and letting it come to rest lightly on the soft, familiar curve of his hip. “This is completely fucked up.”

“No argument here,” Axel agreed. His left hand was still being held in Roxas’s death grip, and he twined the fingers of his right through his friend’s hair, massaging them back and forth absently as they sat there in silence, his mind feeling more numb than anything. Axel was wearing a quite thin t-shirt, and he became aware of the wetness soaking into his shoulder just before Roxas’s body shook with a silent sob.

“Roxas?” he said, turning his head but unable to see anything at all, really. He gave his shoulder a little shake, but Roxas just tightened his grip on him in response.

“I’m so sorry,” Roxas sobbed, his voice cracking with each word. Axel was taken completely off guard by this whole turn of events, even in the context of how off-guard he’d been taken continually all morning. He had never, in all the time he’d been with Roxas almost every waking moment of every day, seen him come anywhere close to crying.

“Sorry? For what?” he asked. He felt Roxas balling up part of his t-shirt in his free hand.

“For leaving,” Roxas said. He paused and took several deep breaths before continuing. “I thought that Sora would complete me, and he didn’t. You did, but I wouldn’t let you, and I don’t care if it was my fucking… destiny or whatever or if it was what needed to be done or any of that. I’m so fucking stupid, and I can’t figure out why you’re here now because I don’t deserve to even see you again.” He pulled away from Axel and wiped his face on his sleeve roughly.

Axel had seen Roxas in nearly every condition. Angry, happy, drunk, sick, depressed. The one thing he had never seen Roxas display was vulnerability, at least not directly. Likewise, where Axel had never seen Roxas vulnerable, Roxas had never seen Axel speechless, but that was exactly what he was now.

“I’m sorry,” Roxas repeated. “I’m sorry, and I don’t know what else to say but that I’m a cunt, and I’m in love with you, and I’m sorry.”

Axel, albeit quick-witted, wasn’t the smartest person in the world, much less in the Organization; nevertheless, he was fairly certain that those three phrases had never been put together quite like that before. Roxas wasn’t a poet, but he did know how to fit multiple points into one sentence if he needed to. The blond boy was looking at him uncertainly, like he were waffling back and forth between waiting for Axel to say something and jumping out the room’s fourth-floor plate glass window.

Axel took in and let out a deep breath through his nose. For a lot of people, this was a sign of frustration, but Axel found that it helped to do it every time he needed to fight the urge to give into his impulsive side; his impulsive side, after all, comprised approximately eighty percent of his psyche (with the remainder being ten percent obsessive and ten percent other). And right now the lightheadedness he was feeling and the almost painful tightening of his stomach and the very novel pounding of his heartbeat were making it even more difficult.

“Rox,” he said carefully, having successfully quashed the urge to act before speaking, “you’re not a cunt. You’re just human. And you don’t need to be sorry; you did the right thing and what happened to me was my doing.” He stopped here and watched Roxas’s face. Roxas stared back at him with puffy eyes and sniffled softly. There was a long silence between them until finally Roxas averted his gaze to the bit of his own shirt he was twisting between his hands.

“Okay,” he said, nodding absently.

“All right,” Axel declared suddenly, quite loudly, and he grabbed Roxas’s shoulders and pushed the boy’s upper body back down onto the mattress, climbing on top of him and bracing his hands on either side of his head. “Enough of this restraint crap,” he said; he’d startled the blond, but their eyes were still locked together. “You know I love you, Roxas. I lied and cheated and killed for you. I killed myself for you. And none of it worked, but I don’t regret any of it for a second because in my world, nobody else matters, not even me. You’re the only thing that counts because I fucking love you and I always have.”

And there it was, that one thing that they’d never said to each other, the words that they’d swallowed and clamped down over and over again because they didn’t make any sense and that wasn’t what nobodies did. A big question in most relationships is who’s going to initiate the first kiss. Who’s going to be the first one to work up the balls to just lean over and do it? In this case, neither was first, because as far as anyone would have been able to see Axel and Roxas both just flew forward to meet each other at the exact same moment.

It was their first time in every way; they were young and isolated and the closest either of them had come to kissing anyone at all was through detached secondhand memories of their mothers kissing them goodnight back when they weren’t even themselves. They grabbed each other tightly and just pressed their lips together for a very long moment before drifting apart the slightest bit.

“I think we’re supposed to move our mouths,” Roxas said breathily. “And maybe open them.”

Axel raised his eyebrows. “Haven’t you done this before?”

Roxas let his head fall back a little to where it was resting on Sora’s pillow. “What, you think I was in the cleaning closet with Xaldin when you weren’t looking?”

Axel smacked him on the arm. “No, idiot, as Sora.”

Roxas shook his head emphatically and stuck out his tongue with distaste at the idea. “Hell no. We never really merged; I only experienced what he was doing if I wanted to, and if you think that necking with Riku directly or indirectly has ever been on my list of things to achieve in this lifetime, you’re even dumber than you look.”

The smirk that spent so much time gracing Axel’s lips returned once again. “Well, Riku’s pretty hot, you know.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Roxas said, laughing.

“Maybe after we get the hang of this whole kissing thing,” Axel quipped, and he leaned back down, wrapping himself around Roxas to try again. Time passed – breathless, flushed, enthusiastic, slightly desperate time with the appropriate accompanying butterflies – and the two were just beginning to feel that they were getting really good at not knocking their teeth together when there was a sharp knock at the door. The pair didn’t pull apart but simply froze, eyes flying open.

“Who’s that?” Axel hissed into Roxas’s mouth.

“Dunno,” Roxas whispered. “Riku and Sora are taking midterms. Might be that moron from down the hall coming to accuse me of being Sora again.”

“What?”

“I was in the bathroom right before you came over and there was this guy who—” Roxas was cut off mid-explanation as a key turned in the lock and Naminé walked into the room.

“Oh my god, I didn’t know, I’m so sorry!” she blurted out, instinctively moving to go back out again, but she just ended up doing a funny little double-take dance while holding onto the handle of the open door. “Oh my god,” she breathed.

“Naminé?” both boys exclaimed in unison, too surprised at who had just walked in to continue trying to disentangle themselves. Just then a figure walked past the open door, did her own little double take, and kept going.

“Sora, I know that’s not Riku,” the girl called out in a nonchalant sing-song as she moved off down the corridor. Roxas automatically let out a frustrated sigh as Naminé pushed the door shut, ran over to the bed, and grabbed Axel’s face with both hands. She began moving his head back and forth like a doctor examining his swollen lymph nodes, and then she took her thumb and rubbed it across one of his tattoos.

“Axel!” she gasped.

Axel waved one hand in concession. “I can see you have it memorized.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I thought it was kind of obvious.”

Naminé huffed at him good-naturedly. “Roxas I was expecting, but you’re… you… well, you died, Axel.”

Axel threw up his hands. “Is that all anybody can think about today?”

Roxas interjected, “He doesn’t know how he got here. He woke up in the dorm across the hall.”

Naminé nodded at this like that were exactly what she’d expected and she had a firm grasp of this entire situation and suddenly threw her arms around both of them, managing to pull both boys into a tight hug despite her small frame. She then released them and smiled warmly. “I think this is what they call a fortuitous bequest of destiny.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Roxas asked.

“The International Association of Big Words?” Axel suggested.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kairi ran across the quad, where she’d hurried after her exams to intercept Riku and Sora as they returned to their dorm. “Guys!” she shouted, jogging up to them with her jacket trailing from one hand and her loaded messenger bag jostling audibly as she bounced across the courtyard. “Tell me something weird happened this morning,” she said as she ground to a halt in front of them.

“Tell me you got crushed half to death by Naminé,” Riku responded dryly.

Kairi almost squealed. “She’s upstairs right now! I gave her my key!” And she grabbed the hands of her two best friends and dragged them towards their residence hall like she’d been dragged to her class hours earlier.

Three flights of stairs later, they burst into Sora and Riku’s dorm room and stopped cold in a sort of upright heap in the doorway. Naminé was there, as expected. She was sitting in a fabric folding chair near the window, a mechanical pencil in her hand and a sheet of white printer paper spread across Riku’s advanced literary theory textbook balanced on her skinny knees. She was motioning insistently for them to keep the noise down because she was trying to sketch the other two occupants of the room and she didn’t want them to move.

Roxas and Axel had fallen asleep on the bed. Axel was lying on his back, his head fallen to one side, and Roxas was kind of sprawled out face-down across the other nobody with his head resting on Axel’s chest. The three newcomers stared at this and then back at Naminé, looking absolutely dumbfounded and silently seeking an explanation. Naminé nodded and exaggeratedly mouthed with corresponding hand motions, “Roxas was listening to Axel’s heart.” She then smiled sweetly at them.

Riku nodded slowly and held up one finger at Naminé before grabbing his companions and dragging them back out in the hallway. Kairi grabbed the door by the knob and shut it partially. “What the hell is going on?” Riku hissed, still instinctively keeping his voice lowered.

Sora shook his head and turned up his hands. “Our dorm room is a nobody magnet?” he suggested.

“Where did Axel come from?” Kairi asked, and all three of them went silent.

“Why are we asking each other this?” Riku said. He went back into the room and reappeared a moment later with Naminé trailing him sans pencil and paper.

“Nami, where did Axel come from?” Kairi reiterated once the door had been pulled mostly shut again. Naminé immediately indicated the door directly behind them.

“That’s his dorm room,” she said brightly.

“What?”

“He woke up in there this morning. He was dead until then, he thinks.” Sora nodded a confirmation, indicating that Axel had, in fact, pretty much kicked it.

“He just…” Riku trailed off and ran a hand through his long, shaggy hair. “This is the weirdest day ever,” he concluded at last.

“This,” Naminé said matter-of-factly, “is a fortuitous bequest of destiny.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Xemnas got lost on the way to Saïx’s flat. Neither he nor Saïx had ever been to Kismet, the city in Destiny Islands the phonebook told them they were now living in; the only thing that they knew about it was that Roxas may or may not have been from somewhere in the general vicinity, with “general vicinity” meaning “same basic area or planet”.

Kismet was the only real city in Destiny Islands. It contained the only university, the only public transit system, and the only amusement park. It was also the only area that really had anything resembling highways, and some overzealous urban planners – the forerunners and sole practitioners of their field on this world – had included many things such as overpasses and bypasses and all sorts of passes that the more than manageable vehicle traffic in the city didn’t really need at all. And they included all these things quite badly.

Xemnas was extremely wealthy; he’d inherited his munny from Xehanort, who’d inherited it himself from some uncle who’d hit it big in the interplanetary under-the-radar shipping business. As any person with a lot of cash and very little sense of direction would, Xemnas had a dashboard navigation console in his car.

Saïx’s apartment block was less than four miles from Xemnas’s house. Fifty-seven minutes after leaving his driveway, Xemnas’s state-of-the-art global positioning system informed him, in its friendly gender-neutral monotone, that it was just as confused as he was. At the moment that it officially gave up, Xemnas was stuck on a roundabout in a residential area; he’d been driving in circles for going on eleven minutes, and by this point he was feeling more than a little sick.

Xemnas began to panic when he realized that he was currently so lost that even the microchips in his GPS – devices that he considered his mental superiors – had no idea where the hell he was or where he was going. He let go of the wheel abruptly, crashed through a fence, decimated several flower-beds, and ground to a halt with one wheel in a fountain and the stone statue of a young woman carrying a basket of paopu fruit that had formerly stood at the center of said water fixture collapsed across his hood.

The former leader of the Organization stumbled out of his car, fell to his knees, and dry-heaved in the general direction of the ground; he had not eaten anything so far today and thus his stomach was thankfully devoid of anything to actually regurgitate on the already quite abused lawn. Having successfully but fruitlessly pandered to his nausea, he pulled himself to his feet, wobbling a bit, and looked up at the building he’d found himself in front of. The address above the door was Saïx’s.

“You were supposed to be here over an hour ago,” Saïx said matter-of-factly when his doorbell rang.

“Just buzz me up, you cretin,” Xemnas snapped.

Thankfully, Saïx only lived on the second floor, so Xemnas had to navigate a minimal number of stairs in order to get to his destination. Saïx was leaning in his doorway at the top when he got there.

“You decided to wear that?” Saïx asked, one eyebrow raising disdainfully.

Xemnas looked down at his beloved zebra coat and pouted involuntarily. “It’s the first day of the rest of our lives,” he said. “It’s a special occasion.”

“It’s a crime against fashion,” Saïx corrected, but he took Xemnas’s arm and led him over to the sofa in his living room. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I had some navigational difficulties,” Xemnas said, spreading himself out the couch and massaging the bridge of his nose with one hand. “And my SUV is in your building’s fountain.”

Saïx just pursed his lips and let it go, leaning his frame against the wall at the end of the sofa and crossing his arms as he gazed down at his harried former boss. “Do you want anything to… I don’t know, drink or eat or something?” he asked after a moment. He was pretty sure that was what you asked people when they came to your house.

“No,” Xemnas groaned. “I feel kind of sick.”

Saïx rolled his eyes, knocked Xemnas’s feet off the furniture, and sat down in the newly-freed space next to him. “So why was it that you needed to see me so urgently?” he asked, adding, “If it’s sex you’re after, you shouldn’t have worn that coat.”

Xemnas gave him a half-hearted glare and said, “We have a problem.”

Saïx nodded his agreement. “I know,” he said. “Our relationship consists of two things: arguing and sex. And every time you wear that coat you kill half of it.”

“Saïx, we have hearts now,” Xemnas said.

“Yeah, I know. It’s a load off my mind, to be honest; now that I don’t have to spend every waking minute plotting to get my heart back, I can cultivate other interests. I was thinking I might be good at Thai boxing.”

Xemnas goggled at the blue-haired man. “Hearts are not a good thing, Saïx,” he told him. “They’re bad.”

Saïx dropped his head into one hand and asked himself why Xemnas could never just want sex. Some feral part of him considered the Superior his mate, but he still wanted to throttle him more often than not. Their relationship would have been perfect, he considered, had Xemnas been able to just shut the hell up and take his clothes off.

“Xemnas,” he said, his words slow and deliberate, “do you remember the time you made us all help you build Kingdom Hearts? You know, the kingdom that was built out of hearts?”

“Look, Saïx, using hearts as a construction agent is one thing. Righteous indignation about having to exist without a heart is also one thing. But actually having a heart is completely different.”

Saïx shook his head. “Can’t you just take off that stupid coat?” he asked, his tone beginning to take a turn for the morose.

“No!” Xemnas insisted. “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.”

Saïx stared at him incredulously. “So… what you’re saying is that being a complete person is less important to you than the possibility that we might not be able to eat steak four nights a week anymore?”

“Oh, let’s stop kidding ourselves,” Xemnas said with a wave of his hand. “We were never emotionless drones. Sure we didn’t have hearts, but it still hurt me when I bought this coat and you laughed at it, and I still forgave you because I… well, because I care about you. I didn’t need a heart for that.”

“Xemnas…” Saïx said, his expression softening distinctly.

“So having actual physical hearts to deal with is nothing but a burden,” continued Xemnas, hardly pausing. “Hearts are hazardous to everyone’s health. We have to do something about it.”

Saïx sighed lightly. “Okay,” he conceded. “I’ll help you do something about it if you take off your coat and give me twenty minutes.”

Xemnas glanced at him sidelong and chewed on his lower lip in consideration. “Make it thirty and you have a deal.”

Full stop.

Next time on Deae: “We’re good for the time being,” Larxene declared, “but we’re going to have to get jobs. You got any ideas?”

Marluxia bobbed his head back and forth and watched a cheerful cumulus cloud float by as he thought about this. “No, not really,” he concluded.

“Well, what did your other do for a living?”

“Exotic dancer.”

Chapter 3