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Sorry this is so late today. I completely rewrote an entire part of it this afternoon, and I think it's better now; I was never happy with Axel and Roxas's bit, so when push came to shove, I trashed a huge part of it and replaced it. It's longer now, though, and this is the chapter that earned this story its M rating. Ooh la la.
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.
Last time on Deae: 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.”
Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2
Chapter 3 – On Reincarnation and Other Novel Experiences
Holding the slip of paper up for examination with one hand and pushing her sunglasses up onto her forehead with the other, Larxene pursed her lips and tapped her foot thoughtfully. Marluxia joined her a moment later, holding his own nearly identical slip of paper between his fingers and with a blue plastic debit card sticking out of his mouth as he tried to figure out what he’d done with his wallet.
“Bb nemr hooduh brnk coont behoor,” he said, his eyes lighting up as he produced the brand new Hello Kitty wallet he’d just bought from Target from the breast pocket of his coat. He normally wasn’t that pathetic, but the cat emitted something like a siren’s call of pink and cute.
“Take the card out of your mouth before you talk, Pansy,” Larxene told him. Marluxia did so and repeated himself.
“I said that I’ve never had a bank account before. Is your PIN your birthday as well?”
“No,” Larxene said. She smoothed her hair back and replaced her sunglasses on her nose. “Obviously whatever cosmic force opened these bank accounts for us knows that I am not a total hoser like you.”
“Hmph.”
“Don’t worry about it; you’re my hoser, so you’ll be all right. Lemme see your receipt.” She reached out her hand and Marluxia placed the little white slip of paper in her upturned palm. He turned and looked up at the sign above the door of the bank: Second National Bank of Destiny Islands. Marluxia didn’t know it, but the First National Bank of Destiny Islands had gone under some time ago and now the Second National was the only national bank of Destiny Islands. But they still kept the name.
“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.” Larxene was silent until finally Marluxia stopped studying that cloud and looked at her. “What?”
“Auramil was a stripper?” Larxene repeated flatly.
“Holy shit, your other was a stripper, dude?”
Larxene and Marluxia both turned to find a quite familiar figure standing just a few feet from them, having just emerged from the revolving doors of the bank. Marluxia’s jaw dropped and Larxene’s right eye twitched a bit.
“Xigbar?” she asked, like there were more than one prematurely graying one-eyed surfer sporting a huge facial scar and pointed ears running around this universe.
Almost as if in response, the revolving door turned again, a little too fast this time, and spat Demyx out onto the sidewalk and straight into Xigbar’s back. “I’ll never be able to work those things,” he lamented, clutching the shoulder of Xigbar’s t-shirt and using the leverage to get his feet back under him. “Oh, hey guys,” he said, noticing Marluxia and Larxene. “…Wait.”
“What are you two doing here?” Larxene asked.
“Trying to get our accounts merged,” Xigbar said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I’ve got a degree in biochemistry and Demyx has never done anything but deliver pizzas. I don’t want him to starve to death on me, you know?”
“…You’re just letting Demyx run wild with your munny?” Marluxia asked incredulously.
“Naw, dude. Well, kind of. I like to think of it as a tradeoff,” Xigbar replied, sticking his thumbs through the belt loops of his oversized jeans and rocking back and forth on his flip-flops.
Demyx raised one finger to signal that he was about to say something he was proud of. “I was thinking that we could call it ‘Bucks for Blowjobs’,” he announced. Xigbar pumped his fist in the air and they high-fived. Larxene let her head drop into her hands.
“I’m going to be sick,” she moaned.
Marluxia was not, needless to say, quite as put out as his pet lesbian at hearing about the various things one could do with a penis, and just nodded approvingly. Then he brightened up considerably. “Hey,” he exclaimed. “Do you guys need a gardener?”
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Conversation at Sora and Roxas’s dorm – after, of course, Naminé had finished her drawing – had quickly gone from completely unnecessary re-introductions all around to practical considerations.
“Roxas, you and Naminé need clothes,” Sora said. “And we need to get you signed up for classes; you can take some of the half-semester ones that start next week.”
“And you need to go around this entire building and tell all of your friends that I’m not you,” Roxas said.
“They should realize it the first time they see you with your tongue down Axel’s throat in front of Riku,” Kairi pointed out, ever the practical one.
“When is this going to be taking place?” Axel asked eagerly. Roxas smacked him, easily falling back into old habits like he and Axel had been physically abusing each other only yesterday.
“And we need to get them keys to the dorms,” Riku pointed out, leaning against the top bunk with his arms crossed and his hair, which was always dancing precariously along the border of Emo Land, hanging in his eyes.
“I have a key to Kairi’s room already,” Naminé said. She pulled said item out of her pocket, and indeed it was an average dorm key attached to a keychain labeled with Kairi’s room number. “I found it on the extra desk in the room this morning.”
Riku thought for a minute; Kairi had no roommate so of course Naminé would be living with her, but he and Sora were already in here. Finally he strode across the room and peered around at Sora’s desk, which was – like every other surface in the room – hopelessly cluttered with all sorts of crumpled bits of paper and empty food packets and gods-know-what. He actually spotted the new keychain quite quickly despite the mess. It was resting on top of a stack of history handouts and was identical to the one that Naminé had.
“Here,” he said simply, tossing it to Roxas. The blond boy caught it easily and examined it.
Axel leaned over and peered at the key over Roxas’s shoulder. “That’s a key to my room,” he said, pointing at the room number on the tag. “Four twenty-one. This is room four twenty-two.”
“Oooh, somebody’s gonna get slapped with a molestation lawsuit by the end of the semester,” Sora predicted happily. Axel winked at Sora while Roxas ignored the remark and abruptly turned to Axel, which resulted in their noses ending up about an inch apart.
“Is this your key?” Roxas asked.
“No,” Axel practically purred, the sort of grin he was sporting making his perfectly normal teeth look more like fangs by proxy. “I locked my key in my room. In fact, I should probably go get it.” He reached over, snatched Roxas’s key out of his hand, and got up, loping out of the room like he had springs in his shoes.
“This fortuitous bequest of destiny appears to get more and more fortuitous as the day goes on, Roxie,” Naminé declared, reaching over from her chair and tweaking Roxas’s nose.
“Oh, be quiet,” Roxas mumbled. “This is bad.”
“Oh really?” Kairi asked. “How so?”
Roxas paused for a second. “Axel… always leaves his dirty socks all over the room,” he said lamely.
At that moment a door slammed, and a second later Axel strode back into the room, carrying not only two keys but also a long black coat draped over one arm. He looked quite pleased with the world in general. Not that anyone would expect less from someone who’d just returned from the dead, but in Axel’s case it was quite exceptional. He walked back over to where he and Roxas had been sitting on the bed, took his seat once more, and took the liberty of putting Roxas’s key directly into its owner’s pocket and draping the coat over Roxas’s lap.
Roxas slapped Axel’s hand lightly away at this, and the redhead lay back on Sora and Riku’s bed, hands behind his head and looking quite smug. “So you’re my mysterious roommate. I found this in the closet this morning and it’s not mine.” He indicated the jacket and with a visible shudder said, “It’s really small, so I was almost afraid it was Larxene’s.” Roxas picked it up and examined it. Axel continued, “Mine is over there, too. I say every Friday should be Wear Your Organization Uniform to Class Day.”
Roxas reached into the pocket of the coat and pulled out a handful of coins. He raised his eyebrows. “Well, here’s that thousand munny I thought I’d lost.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lexaeus and Zexion had only been alive since that morning, but already they were hanging around in front of a 7-Eleven. They’d spent quite a bit of their time in the old days hanging around in front of 7-Elevens; they found that it was much easier and more productive to loiter by convenience stores for the duration of their missions and then return to Xemnas and just tell him that they’d done what they were supposed to do than it was to actually carry out their orders. Loitering at 7-Elevens was easy, it was free, and it gave them plenty of time to work out the story they were going to feed to the Superior. Plus they got to witness armed robberies almost every night.
There was no reason for them to be loitering now. They didn’t have a mission; in fact, they’d only gone to the 7-Eleven because Zexion wanted a Slurpee like he were pregnant or the drinks were laced with cocaine. But as they’d exited the building, errand accomplished, they’d both stopped and looked at each other. Wordlessly they reached an agreement and moved to the side of the doorway, and that was where Vexen found them.
Vexen nearly walked right by them before he realized that the figures he’d initially assumed were the local drug dealers were actually Numbers Five and Six. He backed up and stared at the extremely large man and the extremely small man leaning against the dirty white brick wall next to a postbox and a payphone.
“What are you two doing here?” he asked coolly, as though at this time of day they were supposed to be at work instead of something more along the lines of dead.
Zexion jumped when he turned around to find Vexen looking at him and Lexaeus just said, “Loitering. What are you doing here?”
Vexen rolled his eyes ever-so-slightly. “I’m getting a sandwich.”
“You’ve just been resurrected mysteriously and you’re getting a sandwich from 7-Eleven?” Zexion said, trying to regain the cool he’d lost when he realized that he and Lexaeus weren’t the only dead people hanging out at the convenience store that day.
“I’d make one myself,” Vexen explained, “but I threw out everything in my fridge to make room for the Petri dishes. It was, in retrospect, possibly a rash decision.”
Lexaeus was idly scraping his straw around the outside of his cup, trying to pack the remainder of his Slurpee into a cohesive mass with enough solidity to effectively live up to its name. “We all get weird about growing cultures sometimes, Vex.”
“That’s true,” Vexen agreed. “Hey!” He said suddenly, stepping closer to the pair and getting a look in his eyes that signaled that somewhere deep down inside he was mildly interested in something in a way that resembled excitement. “Do you two want to come to my lab and help me try to figure out why we’re not dead? I’ve run all sorts of tests on myself, but I need a broader sample.”
“You want us to be your guinea pigs?” Zexion said incredulously.
“I’d use actual undead guinea pigs if I had them,” Vexen retorted. “But you guys are scientists; you can help do the work too. Assuming everyone else is around here, I’m going to test all of us eventually, and I’m going to need people to go test Marluxia because I’m allergic to him. I’ll pay you.”
“What, did you get a grant or something?” Zexion muttered.
“No, it’s my own munny.”
“Where’d you get that kind of munny?” Lexaeus asked.
Vexen actually smiled a tiny smile that almost reached his eyes. “The old-fashioned way: I sued someone.”
“Really?” Zexion said, perking up at this. “Whom?”
“Lab supply company,” Vexen declared proudly, flipping a bit of his hair over his shoulder. He pulled back his lab coat and lifted up his shirt to show them a series of long scars running down his torso. “I have shards of an Erlenmeyer flask embedded all down my left side.”
“Man,” Zexion breathed. “I forgot how fucking awesome you can be, Number Four.” He high-fived Vexen and tossed his empty Slurpee cup into a trash bin. “Let’s get our science on.”
Vexen held up his index finger. “Sandwich first.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Three nobodies and three somebodies went out for dinner that night. They were all either college students or pending college students, so they couldn’t afford anything as fancy as what Sora lamented that the occasion deserved, but at least the little Indian place they went to had tablecloths and glasses that had stems.
Sora pulled out a sheet of paper while they waited for their food and unfolded it on the table. It was a computer printout of a train schedule. “There’s a train going south tomorrow morning at eight,” he said, pointing out the time he’d circled in red ink. “So we have to be up by seven to make it to the station.”
Axel stared at the sheet of paper, none of the place names listed meaning much of anything to him aside from Kismet, which he had gathered was the city they were currently in. “Who’s ‘we’ and where are ‘we’ going?”
“‘We’ is all of us,” Sora said, “and we’re going home for the weekend.”
“What?”
Kairi spoke up, “Well, Roxas and Naminé have never met their parents in person, so we’re going to go home and surprise them.”
“Yes, I get that,” Axel said. “But why am I coming?”
Sora poked him. “Silly, if you’re going to ravage Roxas, you have to meet our mom.” An ice cube lodged in Roxas’s throat.
Riku laughed softly. “Sora, he’s going to ravish Roxas, not ravage him.”
Sora glared at him out of the corner of his eyes. “Thank you, Mr. English Major. I was beginning to forget why I keep you around.”
“He might accidentally ravage Roxas in the process of ravishing him,” Naminé said quietly through a small, devious smile. “I think Axel probably gets a little overenthusiastic on occasion.”
Roxas dropped his head onto the table. “I hate you all,” he announced. Axel, for his part, was not paying much attention to the conversation. He was an emotional time-bomb by nature, yes, but he could be keenly analytical when it came to his baser needs, and right now he was thinking that three days at Sora and Roxas’s house with their mom meant almost no time to molest Roxas. Sure, he’d been waiting to molest Roxas for three years, but right now three days still seemed like an eternity.
Oh well, he figured. He would just have to get it out of his system tonight. That decision made, Axel got straight to work. As their waiter returned with their order, Axel surreptitiously slid his left hand over to Roxas’s lap, letting it come to rest on his upper thigh. Roxas jumped a little bit and looked over at Axel, whose upper body was angled away from him as the redhead leaned his head on his other hand and said something to Kairi about the time he’d lit Luxord’s underwear on fire in the middle of one of Xemnas’s long-winded speeches.
As if he knew that Roxas was staring at him in disbelief, Axel’s thumb began tracing little circles on his leg while the hand’s owner continued talking with the others and eating, never missing a beat. Roxas tried to surreptitiously move away from Axel, but he had nowhere to go. Then he tried to physically remove Axel’s hand, but Axel was having none of it.
Fucking Axel. Their relationship might have looked one-sided to outsiders, what with Axel always chasing Roxas and Roxas making Axel go to Hades and back quite literally before he’d admit his feelings, but the point was that in the end Roxas did admit those feelings, and the other point was that Axel was extremely hot, and he was just sitting there looking extremely hot and sneaking his hand closer and closer to Roxas’s crotch and Roxas had absolutely nowhere to go and he’d be damned if he were going to announce to the table that Axel was practically giving him a handjob in the middle of a restaurant.
Poor Roxas. He was way too stubborn to just turn to Axel and say, “Stop arousing me in public, you skinny freak of nature,” because he didn’t want anyone to find out that he was being aroused in public by a skinny freak of nature, but by the time they finished eating everyone at the table had noted how Roxas’s fork was shaking throughout the meal, and even if they hadn’t noticed that they definitely would have noticed the way Roxas quickly blurted out, “No thank you, we have to get home and get to bed,” as soon as the waiter asked if they wanted dessert. “Have to be up early,” he added quietly when the waiter had gone for the check. He was a terrible liar.
At least Axel was courteous enough to remove his hand long enough before they left that Roxas had time to think about cold showers and naked women before standing up, and was thereby able to salvage what remained of his dignity. They walked back to campus in the warm, dark night and bid their farewells, and then the four boys took the elevator upstairs and as soon as they’d disappeared into their respective rooms, Roxas turned to Axel and told him, “I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”
Axel feigned hurt as Roxas moved across the room, opened his closet, and searched through the stacks of unused clothing for a pair of pajama pants. “I thought you liked it,” he said, sitting down on the bed with his back against the headboard and his long legs stretched out over the sheets. “It felt like you liked it.”
Roxas paused in his search and sighed as Axel watched him with amusement. He pushed the clothes on the shelves back into their places and turned around, leaning back and resting his hands on the top shelf for support. “What do you want, Axel?”
“You,” Axel replied immediately, as if there had only ever been one answer to that question. He didn’t try to make it sound sexy; it wasn’t meant to be sexy. It was just honest.
“Okay,” Roxas said, and he pushed himself away from the closet. He was across the tiny room and right next to the bed in just a few steps. He crawled onto the mattress and straddled Axel, the height he gained from sitting on Axel’s legs bringing him exactly face-to-face with the taller boy. “I lost you once because I was never honest with you or myself. I won’t make that mistake again, starting right now.”
He grabbed Axel’s face between his hands, twining his fingers into the redhead’s thick locks of hair and yanking him forward, their lips colliding in a kiss that was significantly more smooth than their first one that morning. Axel let out a quiet moan as Roxas’s tongue pressed its way into his mouth, and his arms came up to wrap around the blond’s back, his left hand finding its way under Roxas’s shirt and sliding against the smooth ridge of his hip and his right hand cradling the back of Roxas’s head.
Axel had once stolen a book from Larxene that described tongues “dancing” around each other during a kiss. He’d made out for the first time about twelve hours prior, and he still hadn’t figured out how that worked. Dancing was complicated; it required balance and coordination and intricate series of particular and varied movements. But as far as he could tell, there was only so much you could do with your tongue in another person’s mouth.
Not that it didn’t feel good; Roxas’s mouth was warm and his tongue was soft and even the fact that they both tasted slightly spicy was actually kind of pleasant. He was rather disappointed when the rhythm of his breathing ended up just a little out of whack and he had to pull away for air, but that just made Roxas move down to his neck; breaking off the kiss suddenly seemed like not such a bad thing at all.
“That feels really, really—ow!” Axel exclaimed. “You bit me!” Roxas leaned back and grinned at him, running a finger along Axel’s cheekbone. Axel pouted. “I was trying to give you feedback and you bit me!”
At this, Roxas darted forward and nipped at Axel’s lower lip. “I can stop if you want,” he said, while at the same time he reached down between their bodies and grabbed the hem of his own shirt, pulling it off in one motion that resulted in his smacking his hand on the frame of the bunk above them.
Axel burst out laughing and Roxas glared at him as he shook the pain out of his hand. “You’re an asshole,” the blond informed him.
“I know,” Axel said, taking Roxas’s injured hand and pressing small kisses into the reddened knuckles. Roxas’s demeanor began to palpably soften under his ministrations, and that was when Axel bit one of his fingers. Roxas shrieked involuntarily and yanked his hand out of further harm’s way.
“All right, it’s time for retribution,” he said, digging the fingers of his battered right hand into the hair at the base of Axel’s neck. “I was going to unbutton your shirt for you, but now I can’t because you fucking injured me. So you’ll have to do it yourself, and I’m not kissing you again until it’s done.” As soon as he said this, he yanked open the fly of Axel’s jeans with a technique he’d gained from a year of wearing pants himself and reached his left hand between the denim and Axel’s boxers.
Axel almost moaned at the sudden pressure, but Roxas remained one step ahead of him by bringing his free hand round and covering the older boy’s mouth. “Shirt,” he said simply. Axel nodded, eyes wide, and set to work.
The simple process of removing a casual dress shirt had never been so difficult for Axel. Firstly, there was the fact that even though the shirt had been in his closet, it was a women’s one that buttoned backwards; he probably had his unnaturally slender waist to blame for that. And then there was the fact that every time he tried to do anything, Roxas would do this thing with his hand that caused little bursts of pleasure to go rampaging through his brain, hopelessly destroying anything that was going on in his centers of motor coordination.
Axel counted the buttons as he struggled past them. There were eight. Eight fucking buttons. Who the hell made a shirt with eight buttons? Roxas, for his part, was enjoying himself rather immensely. His libido was getting a lot of pleasure out of the expressions on Axel’s face when he moved his hand around, and the rest of him was quite satisfied with the stream of curse words that poured out of Axel’s mouth every time he fumbled a button.
“I… jeez… goddamn it alllll FUCK—would you just—finally!” Axel gasped as he got the last of the accursed buttons undone.
“It’s about time, Ax,” Roxas said just before he brought his mouth to his lover’s once more. At the same time, he pressed his upper body forward so that their now-bare chests came into contact, the simple, heated feel of skin on skin seeming to Roxas like one of the most incredible sensations he could imagine. He wrapped both arms tightly around Axel’s neck and shifted his hips against his boyfriend’s, which elicited some rather pleased noises and more of that motion from both of them.
After a few minutes, Axel again broke the kiss, Roxas letting out a tiny, feminine whimper that he would afterwards deny to his grave. “Hold on,” he said, and suddenly he moved his legs apart so that Roxas fell between them onto the mattress, and he pushed him down onto his back and crawled onto him. Roxas didn’t seem to mind this at all, but he still pulled him down with both hands to kiss him again as though he needed Axel more than oxygen at that moment. Then he seemed to have another thought occur to him, and he hooked his thumbs around Axel’s jeans and boxers and began shoving them off of him.
Axel broke the kiss, looking as though this motion had taken him completely by surprise. Roxas gave him a very serious look, despite how flushed and breathless he was, and said, “Axel, pants off. Now.”
That got a rather frantic shake of the head from Axel. “But I… You first!”
At first Roxas had been somewhat confused and irritate at Axel’s hesitation, but now it hit him just why he was reacting that way, because he himself was feeling rather iffy about the idea of being the first one with no clothes left. “No, I can’t… because…” And he found that he had to leave it at that.
Axel would have laughed, but as far as he was concerned they had a serious problem. They just stared at each other for a long moment and then Axel said, tentatively, “We could… do it at the same time…”
Roxas nodded quickly as though this were the best idea he’d ever heard. They both climbed off the mattress quickly, and once they were standing they went to start taking off the rest of their clothes, but then looked up at each other at the same moment. Their faces went even redder and they turned away from each other to do it. Roxas had his pants mostly off and was toeing his socks off when something landed on him; it was Axel’s shirt.
He disentangled himself from the shirt and spun around, prepared to yell at Axel for throwing clothes at him at a time like this, but Axel turned to look at him at the same time; they’d both had something to say – Roxas an admonition for the shirt-flinging and Axel some witty thing to show how totally relaxed he was right now, but neither of them could even remember what they were about to tell the other. They just stared at each other for a long, long moment, Axel tugging on a lock of his hair and Roxas twisting handfuls of Axel’s shirt. And then Roxas threw the shirt at Axel.
Axel sputtered as he grabbed the shirt and yanked it off his face, and he did just in time to catch Roxas as the boy pounced on him. He nearly fell over, and would have if Roxas’s genes had ever allowed him to break the five foot mark, but he managed to get his arms around the blond and hold him as Roxas wrapped his legs around Axel’s hips. “Geez… Rox…” he breathed between harsh kisses.
Although Roxas was kissing him like he’d never get to again, suddenly he pulled away, shaking Axel’s arm to get him to put him down. Axel gave him a slightly confused look as he let him go, but Roxas just grabbed him and pushed him toward the bed. Letting out a slightly surprised noise, Axel nevertheless got onto the mattress and immediately Roxas was shoving him onto his back, climbing on top of him, and tangling their legs together.
“Rox, what’re you—” Axel’s eyes went from vaguely confused to half-lidded as Roxas interrupted him by rocking his hips into Axel’s. “Oh.”
“That’s what I’m doing, Axel,” Roxas murmured, lowering his head to speak into the other boy’s ear. “It’s called frottage, and it’s a legitimate form of sexual intercourse.”
“I can tell,” Axel breathed unsteadily, his breath catching in his throat as Roxas moved his hips again. “You’re just… very... ah… dominant all of a sudden…” He was finding it increasingly difficult to form a coherent sentence as Roxas continued the motion.
“You didn’t... laugh at me being… nngh—naked,” Roxas replied. “And you’re really… really… hot. So shut up…”
And for once in his life, Axel did shut up. They lapsed into silence punctuated by stifled moans and gasps and even when kissing became too much to concentrate on, Roxas rested his forehead against Axel’s and they held each other’s eyes even as they quickened the pace and instinctively wanted to close them.
It didn’t last long. They both continually upped the tempo in order to elicit even more of a response from the other, and self-restraint had never been the forte of either of them. They came one fast behind the other with their breathing ragged, and as they did they chokingly whispered each other’s names.
Roxas collapsed forward onto Axel after it was over; Axel, for his part, held Roxas to himself like there were a possibility of losing him. It hadn’t been particularly great; it had hardly even been particularly sex. But it had still been mind-blowing to them, and even if it hadn’t been as well-choreographed and insane as what they’d spent a good deal of their lives together trying not to think about, it had still been exactly what they’d wanted. Roxas buried his face into Axel’s neck and tried to steady his breathing.
“We’re not going to need the top bunk either, are we?” Axel said after a minute.
“No,” Roxas agreed, “but if you think we’re going to be like Riku and Sora in any other way, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Axel chuckled. “They seem happy together.”
“They shared a paopu,” Roxas told him, sitting up slightly and making a gagging motion. “They went to prom together. And Sora made Riku this awful chicken noodle soup when he was sick once. They’re a couple of fruitcakes.”
Axel raised an eyebrow. “Oh, they are? And what does that make us?”
“We’re not fruitcakes,” Roxas explained matter-of-factly. “We’re fags; big difference. We’re not nearly as ridiculous as they are. Although Riku’s hair is only almost as stupid as yours.”
“I’m sticky,” Axel said dryly, both he and Roxas knowing full well that Roxas was going to pay for his remark about Axel’s hair sooner or later. Sooner, as it turned out: Axel looked around, groping with his hand a bit, and finally picked up what he was looking for off the mattress. He proceeded to wipe off Roxas’s stomach with the item he’d retrieved.
Roxas smacked him on the arm. “That’s my t-shirt, shithead.”
“That’s what the gods gave us washing machines for,” Axel said, determining Roxas sufficiently clean and moving on to the mess on himself.
“Use your own, then,” Roxas said. Axel tossed the t-shirt at the laundry hamper in the corner and thoroughly missed.
“Yours is mine and mine is ours, or whatever,” he said dismissively.
“Bullshit. Stop taking my stuff, Axel,” Roxas complained. He reached over and grabbed something else from where it was resting on the mattress. It was a stuffed bear: soft, black, squishy, and in good condition because of how little time its erstwhile owner had been in existence and not for any lack of love. “You stole him.”
Axel looked at it and blushed, trying to put on a confident face. He’d taken his secret to the grave and the tactic had utterly failed. “Well, I was the one who gave it to you.”
“You still stole him! I was worried sick about him!”
“I… I wasn’t sleeping in your room as much anymore. It smelled like you.”
Roxas’s expression softened a bit, but he still thwacked Axel upside the head with the bear. “I knew it! I knew you took Axel and you always acted like you didn’t but you never came out and said that you didn’t!”
“Wait,” Axel said, holding up a hand. “You named it? After me?”
Now it was Roxas’s turn to blush. “Well, who else was I gonna name him after? Xemnas? Yeah, there’s nothing I like more than to curl up with the Superior at night.”
“Well, then, I’m glad I took it,” Axel said haughtily, giving the bear a disdainful look. “You have an unhealthy attachment to that thing.”
“You’re a very bad man, Axel,” Roxas said, clutching the bear as he pointed an accusatory finger at the redhead, “and I hate you.”
“And by that you mean that you love me, right?”
“I’ve never meant it any other way.”
Full stop.
Next time on Deae: “Jack’s my seeing eye cat. Don’t you remember?” Luxord motioned to the dark sunglasses he was sporting.
Xaldin hesitated for only a moment before nodding and agreeing, “Yeah, I always forget you’re blind, Lux. I mean, what with the way you always know what’s on your cards and everything.”
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.
Last time on Deae: 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.”
Holding the slip of paper up for examination with one hand and pushing her sunglasses up onto her forehead with the other, Larxene pursed her lips and tapped her foot thoughtfully. Marluxia joined her a moment later, holding his own nearly identical slip of paper between his fingers and with a blue plastic debit card sticking out of his mouth as he tried to figure out what he’d done with his wallet.
“Bb nemr hooduh brnk coont behoor,” he said, his eyes lighting up as he produced the brand new Hello Kitty wallet he’d just bought from Target from the breast pocket of his coat. He normally wasn’t that pathetic, but the cat emitted something like a siren’s call of pink and cute.
“Take the card out of your mouth before you talk, Pansy,” Larxene told him. Marluxia did so and repeated himself.
“I said that I’ve never had a bank account before. Is your PIN your birthday as well?”
“No,” Larxene said. She smoothed her hair back and replaced her sunglasses on her nose. “Obviously whatever cosmic force opened these bank accounts for us knows that I am not a total hoser like you.”
“Hmph.”
“Don’t worry about it; you’re my hoser, so you’ll be all right. Lemme see your receipt.” She reached out her hand and Marluxia placed the little white slip of paper in her upturned palm. He turned and looked up at the sign above the door of the bank: Second National Bank of Destiny Islands. Marluxia didn’t know it, but the First National Bank of Destiny Islands had gone under some time ago and now the Second National was the only national bank of Destiny Islands. But they still kept the name.
“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.” Larxene was silent until finally Marluxia stopped studying that cloud and looked at her. “What?”
“Auramil was a stripper?” Larxene repeated flatly.
“Holy shit, your other was a stripper, dude?”
Larxene and Marluxia both turned to find a quite familiar figure standing just a few feet from them, having just emerged from the revolving doors of the bank. Marluxia’s jaw dropped and Larxene’s right eye twitched a bit.
“Xigbar?” she asked, like there were more than one prematurely graying one-eyed surfer sporting a huge facial scar and pointed ears running around this universe.
Almost as if in response, the revolving door turned again, a little too fast this time, and spat Demyx out onto the sidewalk and straight into Xigbar’s back. “I’ll never be able to work those things,” he lamented, clutching the shoulder of Xigbar’s t-shirt and using the leverage to get his feet back under him. “Oh, hey guys,” he said, noticing Marluxia and Larxene. “…Wait.”
“What are you two doing here?” Larxene asked.
“Trying to get our accounts merged,” Xigbar said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. “I’ve got a degree in biochemistry and Demyx has never done anything but deliver pizzas. I don’t want him to starve to death on me, you know?”
“…You’re just letting Demyx run wild with your munny?” Marluxia asked incredulously.
“Naw, dude. Well, kind of. I like to think of it as a tradeoff,” Xigbar replied, sticking his thumbs through the belt loops of his oversized jeans and rocking back and forth on his flip-flops.
Demyx raised one finger to signal that he was about to say something he was proud of. “I was thinking that we could call it ‘Bucks for Blowjobs’,” he announced. Xigbar pumped his fist in the air and they high-fived. Larxene let her head drop into her hands.
“I’m going to be sick,” she moaned.
Marluxia was not, needless to say, quite as put out as his pet lesbian at hearing about the various things one could do with a penis, and just nodded approvingly. Then he brightened up considerably. “Hey,” he exclaimed. “Do you guys need a gardener?”
Conversation at Sora and Roxas’s dorm – after, of course, Naminé had finished her drawing – had quickly gone from completely unnecessary re-introductions all around to practical considerations.
“Roxas, you and Naminé need clothes,” Sora said. “And we need to get you signed up for classes; you can take some of the half-semester ones that start next week.”
“And you need to go around this entire building and tell all of your friends that I’m not you,” Roxas said.
“They should realize it the first time they see you with your tongue down Axel’s throat in front of Riku,” Kairi pointed out, ever the practical one.
“When is this going to be taking place?” Axel asked eagerly. Roxas smacked him, easily falling back into old habits like he and Axel had been physically abusing each other only yesterday.
“And we need to get them keys to the dorms,” Riku pointed out, leaning against the top bunk with his arms crossed and his hair, which was always dancing precariously along the border of Emo Land, hanging in his eyes.
“I have a key to Kairi’s room already,” Naminé said. She pulled said item out of her pocket, and indeed it was an average dorm key attached to a keychain labeled with Kairi’s room number. “I found it on the extra desk in the room this morning.”
Riku thought for a minute; Kairi had no roommate so of course Naminé would be living with her, but he and Sora were already in here. Finally he strode across the room and peered around at Sora’s desk, which was – like every other surface in the room – hopelessly cluttered with all sorts of crumpled bits of paper and empty food packets and gods-know-what. He actually spotted the new keychain quite quickly despite the mess. It was resting on top of a stack of history handouts and was identical to the one that Naminé had.
“Here,” he said simply, tossing it to Roxas. The blond boy caught it easily and examined it.
Axel leaned over and peered at the key over Roxas’s shoulder. “That’s a key to my room,” he said, pointing at the room number on the tag. “Four twenty-one. This is room four twenty-two.”
“Oooh, somebody’s gonna get slapped with a molestation lawsuit by the end of the semester,” Sora predicted happily. Axel winked at Sora while Roxas ignored the remark and abruptly turned to Axel, which resulted in their noses ending up about an inch apart.
“Is this your key?” Roxas asked.
“No,” Axel practically purred, the sort of grin he was sporting making his perfectly normal teeth look more like fangs by proxy. “I locked my key in my room. In fact, I should probably go get it.” He reached over, snatched Roxas’s key out of his hand, and got up, loping out of the room like he had springs in his shoes.
“This fortuitous bequest of destiny appears to get more and more fortuitous as the day goes on, Roxie,” Naminé declared, reaching over from her chair and tweaking Roxas’s nose.
“Oh, be quiet,” Roxas mumbled. “This is bad.”
“Oh really?” Kairi asked. “How so?”
Roxas paused for a second. “Axel… always leaves his dirty socks all over the room,” he said lamely.
At that moment a door slammed, and a second later Axel strode back into the room, carrying not only two keys but also a long black coat draped over one arm. He looked quite pleased with the world in general. Not that anyone would expect less from someone who’d just returned from the dead, but in Axel’s case it was quite exceptional. He walked back over to where he and Roxas had been sitting on the bed, took his seat once more, and took the liberty of putting Roxas’s key directly into its owner’s pocket and draping the coat over Roxas’s lap.
Roxas slapped Axel’s hand lightly away at this, and the redhead lay back on Sora and Riku’s bed, hands behind his head and looking quite smug. “So you’re my mysterious roommate. I found this in the closet this morning and it’s not mine.” He indicated the jacket and with a visible shudder said, “It’s really small, so I was almost afraid it was Larxene’s.” Roxas picked it up and examined it. Axel continued, “Mine is over there, too. I say every Friday should be Wear Your Organization Uniform to Class Day.”
Roxas reached into the pocket of the coat and pulled out a handful of coins. He raised his eyebrows. “Well, here’s that thousand munny I thought I’d lost.”
Lexaeus and Zexion had only been alive since that morning, but already they were hanging around in front of a 7-Eleven. They’d spent quite a bit of their time in the old days hanging around in front of 7-Elevens; they found that it was much easier and more productive to loiter by convenience stores for the duration of their missions and then return to Xemnas and just tell him that they’d done what they were supposed to do than it was to actually carry out their orders. Loitering at 7-Elevens was easy, it was free, and it gave them plenty of time to work out the story they were going to feed to the Superior. Plus they got to witness armed robberies almost every night.
There was no reason for them to be loitering now. They didn’t have a mission; in fact, they’d only gone to the 7-Eleven because Zexion wanted a Slurpee like he were pregnant or the drinks were laced with cocaine. But as they’d exited the building, errand accomplished, they’d both stopped and looked at each other. Wordlessly they reached an agreement and moved to the side of the doorway, and that was where Vexen found them.
Vexen nearly walked right by them before he realized that the figures he’d initially assumed were the local drug dealers were actually Numbers Five and Six. He backed up and stared at the extremely large man and the extremely small man leaning against the dirty white brick wall next to a postbox and a payphone.
“What are you two doing here?” he asked coolly, as though at this time of day they were supposed to be at work instead of something more along the lines of dead.
Zexion jumped when he turned around to find Vexen looking at him and Lexaeus just said, “Loitering. What are you doing here?”
Vexen rolled his eyes ever-so-slightly. “I’m getting a sandwich.”
“You’ve just been resurrected mysteriously and you’re getting a sandwich from 7-Eleven?” Zexion said, trying to regain the cool he’d lost when he realized that he and Lexaeus weren’t the only dead people hanging out at the convenience store that day.
“I’d make one myself,” Vexen explained, “but I threw out everything in my fridge to make room for the Petri dishes. It was, in retrospect, possibly a rash decision.”
Lexaeus was idly scraping his straw around the outside of his cup, trying to pack the remainder of his Slurpee into a cohesive mass with enough solidity to effectively live up to its name. “We all get weird about growing cultures sometimes, Vex.”
“That’s true,” Vexen agreed. “Hey!” He said suddenly, stepping closer to the pair and getting a look in his eyes that signaled that somewhere deep down inside he was mildly interested in something in a way that resembled excitement. “Do you two want to come to my lab and help me try to figure out why we’re not dead? I’ve run all sorts of tests on myself, but I need a broader sample.”
“You want us to be your guinea pigs?” Zexion said incredulously.
“I’d use actual undead guinea pigs if I had them,” Vexen retorted. “But you guys are scientists; you can help do the work too. Assuming everyone else is around here, I’m going to test all of us eventually, and I’m going to need people to go test Marluxia because I’m allergic to him. I’ll pay you.”
“What, did you get a grant or something?” Zexion muttered.
“No, it’s my own munny.”
“Where’d you get that kind of munny?” Lexaeus asked.
Vexen actually smiled a tiny smile that almost reached his eyes. “The old-fashioned way: I sued someone.”
“Really?” Zexion said, perking up at this. “Whom?”
“Lab supply company,” Vexen declared proudly, flipping a bit of his hair over his shoulder. He pulled back his lab coat and lifted up his shirt to show them a series of long scars running down his torso. “I have shards of an Erlenmeyer flask embedded all down my left side.”
“Man,” Zexion breathed. “I forgot how fucking awesome you can be, Number Four.” He high-fived Vexen and tossed his empty Slurpee cup into a trash bin. “Let’s get our science on.”
Vexen held up his index finger. “Sandwich first.”
Three nobodies and three somebodies went out for dinner that night. They were all either college students or pending college students, so they couldn’t afford anything as fancy as what Sora lamented that the occasion deserved, but at least the little Indian place they went to had tablecloths and glasses that had stems.
Sora pulled out a sheet of paper while they waited for their food and unfolded it on the table. It was a computer printout of a train schedule. “There’s a train going south tomorrow morning at eight,” he said, pointing out the time he’d circled in red ink. “So we have to be up by seven to make it to the station.”
Axel stared at the sheet of paper, none of the place names listed meaning much of anything to him aside from Kismet, which he had gathered was the city they were currently in. “Who’s ‘we’ and where are ‘we’ going?”
“‘We’ is all of us,” Sora said, “and we’re going home for the weekend.”
“What?”
Kairi spoke up, “Well, Roxas and Naminé have never met their parents in person, so we’re going to go home and surprise them.”
“Yes, I get that,” Axel said. “But why am I coming?”
Sora poked him. “Silly, if you’re going to ravage Roxas, you have to meet our mom.” An ice cube lodged in Roxas’s throat.
Riku laughed softly. “Sora, he’s going to ravish Roxas, not ravage him.”
Sora glared at him out of the corner of his eyes. “Thank you, Mr. English Major. I was beginning to forget why I keep you around.”
“He might accidentally ravage Roxas in the process of ravishing him,” Naminé said quietly through a small, devious smile. “I think Axel probably gets a little overenthusiastic on occasion.”
Roxas dropped his head onto the table. “I hate you all,” he announced. Axel, for his part, was not paying much attention to the conversation. He was an emotional time-bomb by nature, yes, but he could be keenly analytical when it came to his baser needs, and right now he was thinking that three days at Sora and Roxas’s house with their mom meant almost no time to molest Roxas. Sure, he’d been waiting to molest Roxas for three years, but right now three days still seemed like an eternity.
Oh well, he figured. He would just have to get it out of his system tonight. That decision made, Axel got straight to work. As their waiter returned with their order, Axel surreptitiously slid his left hand over to Roxas’s lap, letting it come to rest on his upper thigh. Roxas jumped a little bit and looked over at Axel, whose upper body was angled away from him as the redhead leaned his head on his other hand and said something to Kairi about the time he’d lit Luxord’s underwear on fire in the middle of one of Xemnas’s long-winded speeches.
As if he knew that Roxas was staring at him in disbelief, Axel’s thumb began tracing little circles on his leg while the hand’s owner continued talking with the others and eating, never missing a beat. Roxas tried to surreptitiously move away from Axel, but he had nowhere to go. Then he tried to physically remove Axel’s hand, but Axel was having none of it.
Fucking Axel. Their relationship might have looked one-sided to outsiders, what with Axel always chasing Roxas and Roxas making Axel go to Hades and back quite literally before he’d admit his feelings, but the point was that in the end Roxas did admit those feelings, and the other point was that Axel was extremely hot, and he was just sitting there looking extremely hot and sneaking his hand closer and closer to Roxas’s crotch and Roxas had absolutely nowhere to go and he’d be damned if he were going to announce to the table that Axel was practically giving him a handjob in the middle of a restaurant.
Poor Roxas. He was way too stubborn to just turn to Axel and say, “Stop arousing me in public, you skinny freak of nature,” because he didn’t want anyone to find out that he was being aroused in public by a skinny freak of nature, but by the time they finished eating everyone at the table had noted how Roxas’s fork was shaking throughout the meal, and even if they hadn’t noticed that they definitely would have noticed the way Roxas quickly blurted out, “No thank you, we have to get home and get to bed,” as soon as the waiter asked if they wanted dessert. “Have to be up early,” he added quietly when the waiter had gone for the check. He was a terrible liar.
At least Axel was courteous enough to remove his hand long enough before they left that Roxas had time to think about cold showers and naked women before standing up, and was thereby able to salvage what remained of his dignity. They walked back to campus in the warm, dark night and bid their farewells, and then the four boys took the elevator upstairs and as soon as they’d disappeared into their respective rooms, Roxas turned to Axel and told him, “I’m going to kill you in your sleep.”
Axel feigned hurt as Roxas moved across the room, opened his closet, and searched through the stacks of unused clothing for a pair of pajama pants. “I thought you liked it,” he said, sitting down on the bed with his back against the headboard and his long legs stretched out over the sheets. “It felt like you liked it.”
Roxas paused in his search and sighed as Axel watched him with amusement. He pushed the clothes on the shelves back into their places and turned around, leaning back and resting his hands on the top shelf for support. “What do you want, Axel?”
“You,” Axel replied immediately, as if there had only ever been one answer to that question. He didn’t try to make it sound sexy; it wasn’t meant to be sexy. It was just honest.
“Okay,” Roxas said, and he pushed himself away from the closet. He was across the tiny room and right next to the bed in just a few steps. He crawled onto the mattress and straddled Axel, the height he gained from sitting on Axel’s legs bringing him exactly face-to-face with the taller boy. “I lost you once because I was never honest with you or myself. I won’t make that mistake again, starting right now.”
He grabbed Axel’s face between his hands, twining his fingers into the redhead’s thick locks of hair and yanking him forward, their lips colliding in a kiss that was significantly more smooth than their first one that morning. Axel let out a quiet moan as Roxas’s tongue pressed its way into his mouth, and his arms came up to wrap around the blond’s back, his left hand finding its way under Roxas’s shirt and sliding against the smooth ridge of his hip and his right hand cradling the back of Roxas’s head.
Axel had once stolen a book from Larxene that described tongues “dancing” around each other during a kiss. He’d made out for the first time about twelve hours prior, and he still hadn’t figured out how that worked. Dancing was complicated; it required balance and coordination and intricate series of particular and varied movements. But as far as he could tell, there was only so much you could do with your tongue in another person’s mouth.
Not that it didn’t feel good; Roxas’s mouth was warm and his tongue was soft and even the fact that they both tasted slightly spicy was actually kind of pleasant. He was rather disappointed when the rhythm of his breathing ended up just a little out of whack and he had to pull away for air, but that just made Roxas move down to his neck; breaking off the kiss suddenly seemed like not such a bad thing at all.
“That feels really, really—ow!” Axel exclaimed. “You bit me!” Roxas leaned back and grinned at him, running a finger along Axel’s cheekbone. Axel pouted. “I was trying to give you feedback and you bit me!”
At this, Roxas darted forward and nipped at Axel’s lower lip. “I can stop if you want,” he said, while at the same time he reached down between their bodies and grabbed the hem of his own shirt, pulling it off in one motion that resulted in his smacking his hand on the frame of the bunk above them.
Axel burst out laughing and Roxas glared at him as he shook the pain out of his hand. “You’re an asshole,” the blond informed him.
“I know,” Axel said, taking Roxas’s injured hand and pressing small kisses into the reddened knuckles. Roxas’s demeanor began to palpably soften under his ministrations, and that was when Axel bit one of his fingers. Roxas shrieked involuntarily and yanked his hand out of further harm’s way.
“All right, it’s time for retribution,” he said, digging the fingers of his battered right hand into the hair at the base of Axel’s neck. “I was going to unbutton your shirt for you, but now I can’t because you fucking injured me. So you’ll have to do it yourself, and I’m not kissing you again until it’s done.” As soon as he said this, he yanked open the fly of Axel’s jeans with a technique he’d gained from a year of wearing pants himself and reached his left hand between the denim and Axel’s boxers.
Axel almost moaned at the sudden pressure, but Roxas remained one step ahead of him by bringing his free hand round and covering the older boy’s mouth. “Shirt,” he said simply. Axel nodded, eyes wide, and set to work.
The simple process of removing a casual dress shirt had never been so difficult for Axel. Firstly, there was the fact that even though the shirt had been in his closet, it was a women’s one that buttoned backwards; he probably had his unnaturally slender waist to blame for that. And then there was the fact that every time he tried to do anything, Roxas would do this thing with his hand that caused little bursts of pleasure to go rampaging through his brain, hopelessly destroying anything that was going on in his centers of motor coordination.
Axel counted the buttons as he struggled past them. There were eight. Eight fucking buttons. Who the hell made a shirt with eight buttons? Roxas, for his part, was enjoying himself rather immensely. His libido was getting a lot of pleasure out of the expressions on Axel’s face when he moved his hand around, and the rest of him was quite satisfied with the stream of curse words that poured out of Axel’s mouth every time he fumbled a button.
“I… jeez… goddamn it alllll FUCK—would you just—finally!” Axel gasped as he got the last of the accursed buttons undone.
“It’s about time, Ax,” Roxas said just before he brought his mouth to his lover’s once more. At the same time, he pressed his upper body forward so that their now-bare chests came into contact, the simple, heated feel of skin on skin seeming to Roxas like one of the most incredible sensations he could imagine. He wrapped both arms tightly around Axel’s neck and shifted his hips against his boyfriend’s, which elicited some rather pleased noises and more of that motion from both of them.
After a few minutes, Axel again broke the kiss, Roxas letting out a tiny, feminine whimper that he would afterwards deny to his grave. “Hold on,” he said, and suddenly he moved his legs apart so that Roxas fell between them onto the mattress, and he pushed him down onto his back and crawled onto him. Roxas didn’t seem to mind this at all, but he still pulled him down with both hands to kiss him again as though he needed Axel more than oxygen at that moment. Then he seemed to have another thought occur to him, and he hooked his thumbs around Axel’s jeans and boxers and began shoving them off of him.
Axel broke the kiss, looking as though this motion had taken him completely by surprise. Roxas gave him a very serious look, despite how flushed and breathless he was, and said, “Axel, pants off. Now.”
That got a rather frantic shake of the head from Axel. “But I… You first!”
At first Roxas had been somewhat confused and irritate at Axel’s hesitation, but now it hit him just why he was reacting that way, because he himself was feeling rather iffy about the idea of being the first one with no clothes left. “No, I can’t… because…” And he found that he had to leave it at that.
Axel would have laughed, but as far as he was concerned they had a serious problem. They just stared at each other for a long moment and then Axel said, tentatively, “We could… do it at the same time…”
Roxas nodded quickly as though this were the best idea he’d ever heard. They both climbed off the mattress quickly, and once they were standing they went to start taking off the rest of their clothes, but then looked up at each other at the same moment. Their faces went even redder and they turned away from each other to do it. Roxas had his pants mostly off and was toeing his socks off when something landed on him; it was Axel’s shirt.
He disentangled himself from the shirt and spun around, prepared to yell at Axel for throwing clothes at him at a time like this, but Axel turned to look at him at the same time; they’d both had something to say – Roxas an admonition for the shirt-flinging and Axel some witty thing to show how totally relaxed he was right now, but neither of them could even remember what they were about to tell the other. They just stared at each other for a long, long moment, Axel tugging on a lock of his hair and Roxas twisting handfuls of Axel’s shirt. And then Roxas threw the shirt at Axel.
Axel sputtered as he grabbed the shirt and yanked it off his face, and he did just in time to catch Roxas as the boy pounced on him. He nearly fell over, and would have if Roxas’s genes had ever allowed him to break the five foot mark, but he managed to get his arms around the blond and hold him as Roxas wrapped his legs around Axel’s hips. “Geez… Rox…” he breathed between harsh kisses.
Although Roxas was kissing him like he’d never get to again, suddenly he pulled away, shaking Axel’s arm to get him to put him down. Axel gave him a slightly confused look as he let him go, but Roxas just grabbed him and pushed him toward the bed. Letting out a slightly surprised noise, Axel nevertheless got onto the mattress and immediately Roxas was shoving him onto his back, climbing on top of him, and tangling their legs together.
“Rox, what’re you—” Axel’s eyes went from vaguely confused to half-lidded as Roxas interrupted him by rocking his hips into Axel’s. “Oh.”
“That’s what I’m doing, Axel,” Roxas murmured, lowering his head to speak into the other boy’s ear. “It’s called frottage, and it’s a legitimate form of sexual intercourse.”
“I can tell,” Axel breathed unsteadily, his breath catching in his throat as Roxas moved his hips again. “You’re just… very... ah… dominant all of a sudden…” He was finding it increasingly difficult to form a coherent sentence as Roxas continued the motion.
“You didn’t... laugh at me being… nngh—naked,” Roxas replied. “And you’re really… really… hot. So shut up…”
And for once in his life, Axel did shut up. They lapsed into silence punctuated by stifled moans and gasps and even when kissing became too much to concentrate on, Roxas rested his forehead against Axel’s and they held each other’s eyes even as they quickened the pace and instinctively wanted to close them.
It didn’t last long. They both continually upped the tempo in order to elicit even more of a response from the other, and self-restraint had never been the forte of either of them. They came one fast behind the other with their breathing ragged, and as they did they chokingly whispered each other’s names.
Roxas collapsed forward onto Axel after it was over; Axel, for his part, held Roxas to himself like there were a possibility of losing him. It hadn’t been particularly great; it had hardly even been particularly sex. But it had still been mind-blowing to them, and even if it hadn’t been as well-choreographed and insane as what they’d spent a good deal of their lives together trying not to think about, it had still been exactly what they’d wanted. Roxas buried his face into Axel’s neck and tried to steady his breathing.
“We’re not going to need the top bunk either, are we?” Axel said after a minute.
“No,” Roxas agreed, “but if you think we’re going to be like Riku and Sora in any other way, you’ve got another thing coming.”
Axel chuckled. “They seem happy together.”
“They shared a paopu,” Roxas told him, sitting up slightly and making a gagging motion. “They went to prom together. And Sora made Riku this awful chicken noodle soup when he was sick once. They’re a couple of fruitcakes.”
Axel raised an eyebrow. “Oh, they are? And what does that make us?”
“We’re not fruitcakes,” Roxas explained matter-of-factly. “We’re fags; big difference. We’re not nearly as ridiculous as they are. Although Riku’s hair is only almost as stupid as yours.”
“I’m sticky,” Axel said dryly, both he and Roxas knowing full well that Roxas was going to pay for his remark about Axel’s hair sooner or later. Sooner, as it turned out: Axel looked around, groping with his hand a bit, and finally picked up what he was looking for off the mattress. He proceeded to wipe off Roxas’s stomach with the item he’d retrieved.
Roxas smacked him on the arm. “That’s my t-shirt, shithead.”
“That’s what the gods gave us washing machines for,” Axel said, determining Roxas sufficiently clean and moving on to the mess on himself.
“Use your own, then,” Roxas said. Axel tossed the t-shirt at the laundry hamper in the corner and thoroughly missed.
“Yours is mine and mine is ours, or whatever,” he said dismissively.
“Bullshit. Stop taking my stuff, Axel,” Roxas complained. He reached over and grabbed something else from where it was resting on the mattress. It was a stuffed bear: soft, black, squishy, and in good condition because of how little time its erstwhile owner had been in existence and not for any lack of love. “You stole him.”
Axel looked at it and blushed, trying to put on a confident face. He’d taken his secret to the grave and the tactic had utterly failed. “Well, I was the one who gave it to you.”
“You still stole him! I was worried sick about him!”
“I… I wasn’t sleeping in your room as much anymore. It smelled like you.”
Roxas’s expression softened a bit, but he still thwacked Axel upside the head with the bear. “I knew it! I knew you took Axel and you always acted like you didn’t but you never came out and said that you didn’t!”
“Wait,” Axel said, holding up a hand. “You named it? After me?”
Now it was Roxas’s turn to blush. “Well, who else was I gonna name him after? Xemnas? Yeah, there’s nothing I like more than to curl up with the Superior at night.”
“Well, then, I’m glad I took it,” Axel said haughtily, giving the bear a disdainful look. “You have an unhealthy attachment to that thing.”
“You’re a very bad man, Axel,” Roxas said, clutching the bear as he pointed an accusatory finger at the redhead, “and I hate you.”
“And by that you mean that you love me, right?”
“I’ve never meant it any other way.”
Next time on Deae: “Jack’s my seeing eye cat. Don’t you remember?” Luxord motioned to the dark sunglasses he was sporting.
Xaldin hesitated for only a moment before nodding and agreeing, “Yeah, I always forget you’re blind, Lux. I mean, what with the way you always know what’s on your cards and everything.”
42 tomates | delicioso
