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: 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.

Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3

Chapter 4 – On Meeting the Parents and Other Embarrassments

Xaldin woke up at midnight. He hadn’t needed to set an alarm; the fundamental shift in the space-time continuum that signaled the transition from Thursday to Friday was enough to rouse him from his extremely extended bout of slumber. He stretched, grinning widely as he realized that he had made it through his first Thursday back on the mortal coil apparently unscathed. He’d been half expecting to be awakened at some point by an armed robbery or a nuclear strike, but here it was now technically Friday and he was in one piece and feeling good.

Then he got up and looked out his window. There was a streetlight outside adjacent to his yard, and he could see even at this hour that his backyard fence had been mowed over. The wood was splintered and scattered across the grass, and the flowers on the other side of the yard as well as a good deal of the lawn in between had been torn up by something that had absolutely enormous tires.

“Fucking Thursdays,” Xaldin muttered. He shut the blinds so that he didn’t have to look at the mess he’d be contending with later on and wandered over to his dresser. He pulled out some clothes, dressed, tied his dreads up in a ponytail, and grabbed the phonebook. He’d slept all day and now it was time to find the others, assuming that they were in a similar situation, and figure out what was going on.

He quickly went over the list in his head. Number Thirteen had not died, and Numbers One through Nine as well as Eleven and Twelve would be asleep or vegging in front of the TV at this hour and probably not much fun if he went and coerced them into physical activity. Luxord, on the other hand, would be up. He flipped to the yellow pages and found the only casino in town, the Lucky Strike. Picking up his keys off the kitchen counter as he strode straight through the house he’d never lived in without giving it a second look, he got into his car and drove off.

Luxord was easy to spot even on the crowded casino floor; he was the only person in the place that had a cat sitting on his shoulder. “How did you get that mangy animal in here?” Xaldin asked, peering at Luxord’s hand as he sat down next to him at the poker table.

Jack glanced at Xaldin disdainfully as Luxord turned and nearly fell off his stool. “Xaldin, man, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” Xaldin said. “Now tell me how you got them to let the cat in.”

“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.”

Luxord grinned hugely. “That’s what Jack’s for. What do you say, Jack? Should I fold?” Jack growled low in her throat and made a particular little motion with her head. Luxord nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, then. I’m all in.”

Luxord’s abilities with games of chance had always been rather inhuman, and now apparently they had manifested in a literally inhuman way as well. Xaldin watched the hand and was utterly unsurprised when Luxord walked away from the table a minute later with a small fortune he’d earned from his four of hearts and six of clubs.

“This is the best,” Luxord declared as they walked through the rows of slot machines toward the front of the building, stuffing his winnings into any available pocket. “Xemnas never let me take Jack anywhere, and now she gets to come with me everywhere.” He pulled a small mouse-shaped treat out of his inside jacket pocket and gave it to Jack, who just sat effortlessly on his shoulder as they walked and purred loudly in response.

“How did your cat get here anyway?” Xaldin asked, watching the people pumping quarters into the machines as they passed. He didn’t gamble, but he did enjoy standing there as other people lost munny.

“Dunno,” Luxord said. “Just woke up this morning and she was in my apartment. Weren’t you, Jack?” Jack seemed to shrug a little bit and gave a little bob of her head.

“Can’t you ask her how she got there?” Xaldin said.

“Don’t be ridiculous; cats can’t talk,” Luxord said, laughing. Xaldin furrowed his eyebrows and let it go.

“So what are we going to do now?” Xaldin asked as they exited the casino and entered the warm, breezy night air. Luxord lit a cigarette and looked up at the night sky.

“Who cares?” he said. “We’re on an island. Islands rule. They’re surrounded by beaches; did you know that?”

Xaldin sighed. “Yes, I did know that. And you probably shouldn’t be smoking those things anymore. We’re somebodies now, and it’s bad for your lungs.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Luxord said, taking another drag.

A strong gust of wind blew down the street, channeled between the city buildings. It caused the cigarette to burn more brightly and blew the smoke it was emitting right in Xaldin’s face. Xaldin waved his hand in front of himself and automatically ordered the wind to change direction. The wind didn’t change direction.

Xaldin pursed his lips, stepping out of the way of the smoke as a backup plan. Okay, he thought. No longer a nobody, no more nobody powers. I can deal with that, I guess. He began to deal with it right away, spotting a twenty-four hour diner across the street that probably didn’t allow smoking inside. “Let’s go get something to eat,” he said, and Luxord nodded, stamped out the cigarette on the concrete, and followed Xaldin across the street.

“This is my seeing eye cat,” he told the hostess as they entered the restaurant.

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

“Here, hold my wallet,” Roxas said, unclipping the chain from his belt and shoving the whole thing at Axel. They were standing out in front of the dorms with Riku and Sora, duffel bags on the ground next to them, waiting for the bus.

“Why?” Axel asked, taking the wallet and trying to decide which of the myriad pockets on his cargo pants he was going to entrust with the item.

“Last time I tried to get on a train I ended up broke. Don’t let Riku near your pants.”

Riku turned and glared at Roxas as Sora barely contained his giggles. Axel looked at Roxas for an explanation, but Roxas just mouthed the words “watch him” and thrust a finger in Riku’s direction. He turned and looked at Riku for an explanation, but Riku just rolled his eyes and mouthed the word “whiner” while thrusting his finger in Roxas’s direction.

“I can’t believe I have to spend the second part of my life with you jackoffs,” Axel said as the bus pulled up and they shouldered their bags. Kairi and Naminé got on at the next stop, which was closer to their dorm, and they all had to struggle to find room to even stand amongst all the adults commuting to work.

Axel and Roxas found themselves clutching the bar that ran along the ceiling and nearly crushed up against a man who was reading a newspaper on his feet and not holding on to anything at all. The only explanation for this was that he had the reflexes of a cat, the balance of an Olympic gymnast, and at least thirty years of experience doing incredible stunts on public transportation. Both boys found themselves casually skimming the front page of the Kismet Tribune, the leading headline on which was “Discombobulated Driver Dunks SUV In Local Fountain”. Kismet was a big city with distinctly small-town news items.

“Holy crap, listen to this,” Roxas said, being the one with the better view of the article itself. Axel was just snickering at the accompanying picture of an expensive panzer of a vehicle sitting in the middle of the courtyard of an apartment complex. “’The vehicle involved belongs to one Xemnas Maharajapuram, a wealthy research scientist who just moved to the area and who claimed that in his native country, parking cars on the lawn was a sign of respect and fertility,’” Roxas read aloud. “‘He was issued a fine of thirty thousand munny in addition to the cost of repair to the fountain and was repeatedly assured by police that his fertility was not under question.’ What the hell is going on around here?”

Axel was clutching his side in laughter. “Maharajapuram? Xemnas’s last name is Maharajapuram? What. The. Fuck?”

“Who cares? The point is that it looks like you’re not the only dead person running around this city. What did anyone do to deserve this? Destiny Islands are peaceful, and some cosmic force just up and unleashed Xemnas on them?”

“I thought that the guy in the background of this photo looked like Saïx,” Axel said, indicating a blurry figure being interviewed by police.

“You know what?” Roxas threw one hand up in defeat. “I’m not even going to worry about this until Monday. I’ve got enough to deal with trying to keep you from burning my house down or getting on the bad side of my mom. Or both.”

“I wouldn’t do that. Besides, who cares how many dead nobodies are running around this place? I just can’t get over that last name,” Axel said, wrapping his arm around Roxas’s waist as the bus went over a particularly nasty bump.

“Well, what’s your last name?”

“I dunno. I didn’t know we were supposed to have one,” Axel said with a shrug.

“Look on your ID card, dumbass,” Roxas told him. Axel tapped his nose and pulled out the card he’d found in his wallet.

“McDonagh,” he read. “Huh, should’ve figured; that was Ela’s last name. I get to sound like a fucking fast food restaurant. What’s yours?” he asked, gesturing at Roxas with the card.

“Same as Sora’s: Hart,” Roxas told him.

“Roxas Hart,” Axel repeated. “It’s got a certain something to it. If we ever get married, I’ve got dibs on your name.”

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

The boys and the girls separated again after they got off the train in Tenbun, Kairi and Naminé wishing them all good luck and promising that they would be over at Sora’s the following evening for dinner. They shouldered their bags and walked the short half-mile through the small town to Sora’s house, arriving at around half past ten.

As Sora fumbled through his pockets for his keys, Axel pulled out a hair tie from somewhere and tried to force as much of his hair as he could into it. He ended up with a very large, very spiky ponytail and a mass of spikes sticking out all over the top of his head.

“What are you doing?” Roxas asked. He’d only ever seen Axel with his hair up once, and that had been in a taka shimada Marluxia had coaxed it into when Axel had played Cio-Cio opposite Larxene’s Pinkerton in Demyx’s way, way, way off-Broadway production of Madame Butterfly.

“Trying to make a good impression on your mom, you twit,” Axel said, grunting as he forced his hair through the straining elastic a third time. Roxas rolled his eyes.

“Hold on,” Sora said as he finally produced his key ring and opened the front door. “I’ll go get her.” Riku followed his boyfriend into the house, since he was obviously not a surprise anyhow, and Axel and Roxas stood in the small entryway and dropped their bags against the wall.

“Do I need to take off my shoes?” Axel whispered. Roxas stifled a laugh and shook his head.

“MOM, SURPRISE,” Sora yelled, which really wasn’t necessary in the relatively small house. He and Riku ran into his mother emerging from the laundry room.

“Sora! Riku!” she gasped, her face going from near-heart-attack to ecstatic in an instant. She threw her arms around both of them at once, hugging them close. “You should have told me you were coming! I would have made sure the house was clean and bought champaign.”

“Champaign?” Riku asked, laughing. Ms. Hart held him at arm’s length and tugged his hair with mock disapproval.

“One of these weekends you boys are going to come home and tell me you’re engaged or pregnant or both, and when that weekend comes I need to be prepared,” she said, both boys too used to her particular sense of unacknowledged humor to say anything about the pregnancy comment. She stood on tip-toes to reach up and give Riku a kiss on the cheek, but when she turned to do the same to Sora she stopped in her tracks, her smile fading.

“Sora Augustus Hart,” she said, raising one finger and pointing it at him accusatorily, “where is your brother?”

“Buh?” Sora and Riku turned and looked at each other. For the life of them, they would never understand how Sora’s mother knew these things. They had always chalked it up to women’s intuition on prior occasions, like when Riku asked Sora out for the first time and then Sora went home and his mother immediately asked him if he needed his pants pressed for his big date.

Riku was the first to get his words back, explaining, “Er, that was the real surprise.”

“He’s in the front hall,” Sora added.

Suna Hart was a tiny, attractive woman with Sora’s blue eyes and ashy blond locks she kept cropped close to her head in an effort to overcome the Hart family’s physics-defying hair. She didn’t look her age, and she didn’t really act any age in particular – her personality was an odd mixture of maternal and empathetic with perky and eccentric. Nevertheless, she fixed Sora with a steely look that said that if his twin was not in the front hall as promised, he was going to be in physical rehabilitation for the next decade, and she turned and made her way towards the front door.

“Oh my god, Roxas!” she cried as she caught sight of him. She sprang forward and grabbed him in an enormous hug. “How’d you get out?” she asked as though he’d just tunneled his way out of prison, squeezing him and rocking back and forth happily.

Roxas smiled broadly and hugged her back. “Dunno, Mom. Just woke up yesterday morning and I was back in my own body.”

“Oh, I knew it was bound to happen eventually!” Suna pulled back a bit and studied Roxas’s face. “You’re even more handsome than I thought,” she said happily.

“Mom, I look exactly like Sora,” he countered, feigning distaste as she planted several kisses on his cheeks.

“Bull!” his mother declared. “You’re both gorgeous, unique snowflakes.” She hugged him again and this time her brain fully registered that there was a tall figure with a blinding red hair standing off towards the corner with his hands stuffed in his pockets.

“Who are you?” she asked with a little gasp, managing to intone the sentence so that it sounded completely warm and welcoming. “Are you a friend from school?” She hurried over to Axel and said, “I’m Suna; call me Suna!” She grabbed him in a heartfelt hug, and it occurred to Axel that Suna was probably the type of person who would hug the guy who came to read the meter.

“I’m, uh…” Axel raised one of his hands and made a vague gesture in the direction of himself and Roxas and then in the vague direction of Riku and Sora, and then he gestured to pretty much the whole room. “I’m…”

“Oh, honey, you don’t normally wear your hair like this, do you?” Suna said. She tugged the tie out of Axel’s hair and grinned. “Stunning,” she declared, and she turned and looked at the other boys. “Are you going to introduce me to the boy or what?”

Roxas coughed. “Mom, this is my, uh… my…” he scratched his head. “This is my Axel,” he said at last. “We go way back.” Suna gasped and turned back to Axel.

“Ohhhh,” she said. “You’re his.” Her smile took a turn for the devious and she winked at him. “You must be from the Organization, then. What number are you?”

Axel looked over Suna’s head and Roxas just gave him a helpless look. “Um, I’m Number Eight,” he said.

Suna’s eyes lit up. “Eight! Lucky number, you know. Like seven, but one better. So, I’ve never heard a word about you.” She directed this last part at everyone else in the room.

Axel scratched his head and laughed. “That’s probably because I just spent a couple of years dead,” he explained.

“Oh, cupcake, I’m so sorry!” Suna exclaimed. Roxas slapped his palm to his forehead at the word cupcake. “How did that happen, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“It’s a long story, Mom,” Sora butted in.

“Yeah,” Roxas said, appearing between his mother and his boyfriend and attempting to pry the former away from the latter. “For right now let’s just say that he died a good death. It was very Romeo and Juliet. But he’s back now, and that’s all that matters.”

“I’ll tell you all the gory details later,” Axel told Suna, feeling like he was beginning to get into the swing of conversation at Roxas’s house. Suna shook an index finger at him.

“I’ll hold you to that,” she said, and she turned her attention to Roxas. “I approve of this one. He’s feisty.” She leaned in close to him and whispered loudly, “And he’s gorgeous.” Straightening up, she grabbed the hands of the two people nearest to her – Roxas and Riku – and led them all into the kitchen, declaring the necessity that they all have tea.

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

As it turned out, Suna was an avid photographer. She paid the bills as a sous chef at a fancy beachfront hotel a few miles down the coast, but in her free time she took pictures of everything. In retrospect, Axel figured, he should have realized this fact the minute he walked into Roxas’s house and found the walls covered in pictures of people, places, plants, clouds, everything. Suna was quite good, too; her photographs made it look rather like someone had torn pictures out of National Geographic, framed them, and filled the house with the results.

According to Sora and Roxas, their mother rarely didn’t have a camera on her, but she left it in its bag Friday night, actually; the only reason Axel found out that she’d taken all the house’s photos was because Sora informed him of the fact. Suna had laughingly explained, upon Riku’s teasing inquiry about the camera’s absence, that there would be no photos tonight; she wanted to hear everything Roxas had previously told her secondhand straight from his mouth, and she wanted to hear the life story of Axel and of Axel’s other, and she wanted to hear it all while she was mixing and cooking and forcing fresh baked goods on the four boys.

Ms. Hart showed a remarkable amount of restraint on Friday night indeed, managing to not take a single snapshot and instead concentrate on what she considered more important – people and food – all evening. At the end of the night, when none of them could do much more than keep their eyes open, she led them upstairs and told Axel that he and Roxas would be staying in Roxas’s room, which turned out to have been the guest room until that morning.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” Axel volunteered, “or the floor if you want.”

“No, I will,” Roxas said, moving for the linen closet in the hall. Suna slammed her hand against the door, preventing Roxas from accessing its contents. She grinned quite broadly at them.

“It’s a queen bed. Plenty of room.”

“Mom…” Sora sighed, standing in the doorway of his room. “You’re supposed to try to stop your children from being molested.”

“Ridiculous,” Suna declared. “Axel, how old are you?”

“…Twenty?” Axel said, intoning it like he were guessing at his own age. Which he kind of was. He wasn’t really sure if he’d lost two years and he and Roxas were now the same age or what.

“See!” Suna declared in Sora’s direction, placing one hand on her hip and gesturing with the other. “We’re all technically adults here! Queen bed! Sora, you and Riku will just have to put up with your twin. Sorry.” And with that, Suna marched off into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

Sora and Roxas may have just had an extremely realistic, extremely laid-back mother. Most reasonable observers would have simply figured that Suna’s approach to dealing with sons was that boys would be boys, and some boys would do boys, and there was nothing to do about that, so why not just leave a box of condoms on their dressers and rip their throats out if they didn’t use them?

Not that she’d actually done that on any other occasion besides Sora’s prom night, but still, these thoughts were pretty much what Suna did think about dealing with teenage boys, and that was all well and good because deep down inside she knew that her sons weren’t stupid enough to actually have sex with their mother in the house. But Axel discovered first thing the next morning that the woman who had, the previous evening, declared herself his Pending Mother-In-Law was really much more demented than he gave her credit for.

Axel’s old photo album from his and Roxas’s Organization days was one of his personal effects that had turned up in their dorm room. Roxas had thought to grab the tome and bring it home to show his mother, who’d concluded that it was the single greatest book of any sort ever produced – whereas the other people – like Riku and Roxas – who’d seen the album had thought of it as something along the lines of a study of idiots produced by an idiot.

One thing that Axel’s album had was a photo of every single member of the Organization at some stage of getting out of the shower – even Larxene, whose wrath and genitalia Axel feared above all others. He’d started taking them just to annoy people, and then when Roxas came he’d been exceedingly glad that he’d started such a wonderful tradition of surprise humiliation. The surprise humiliation had, in fact, resurfaced the previous evening when Roxas realized, as his mother was looking through the book, that that picture of himself was still in there.

One thing that Axel’s album did not have was a photo of Axel getting out of the shower; it had very few pictures of Axel at all, since Axel was not in the habit of taking photos of himself. And that was how Axel ended up almost having a heart attack the next morning when he walked out of the bathroom half-dressed with his wet hair hanging loosely about his face and a toothbrush stuck in his mouth; a flash went off and he jumped about a foot in the air and shrieked rather loudly.

That brought Roxas out into the hall almost immediately, still wearing his chocobo pajamas (which Axel had pointed out matched his hairstyle, earning him a smack). He found his mother standing there, fully dressed with her compact digital camera in hand, and his boyfriend just a few yards away, in the middle of brushing his teeth and holding his balled-up t-shirt in front of his chest like a high school girl upon finding that a boy has snuck into the locker room, looking absolutely horrorstruck.

“What the… Mom, what are you doing?”

“Completing the set,” Suna said matter-of-factly, handing Roxas the camera and starting back downstairs. “By the way, waffles are ready.”

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

“This place is pretty cool,” Axel said, leaning back and letting his eyes roam across the ceiling. “Your mom let you play here when you were little?”

“In a way, I guess,” Roxas said. “Kids around here learn to swim before they can walk. It’s not really a big deal to let your five-year-olds get in boats and head over to another island all day.”

“Where I come from, we’d have the backlash against the parents around here as the top story on the evening news,” Axel commented. “So these pictures have been here for like twelve years?”

Roxas shook his head. “Nah, they started drawing most of these two years ago. Bunch of sentimental dorks, if you ask me, but whatever.” Axel nodded and continued to poke about the room inquisitively. His other life had been all urban and high tech in a way that made Kismet look positively pastoral; for him, the idea of playing in a cave as a child was totally foreign.

“Sora and Riku lost their virginity here,” Roxas said after a minute, making it sound as though he were discussing the lousy weather they were having lately. Axel made a gagging noise next to him.

“Thanks for sharing that,” he said when he was finished fake-regurgitating his breakfast. He continued to walk around the small cavern, studying the multi-colored chalk drawings that covered the rough rock walls and ceiling. Some of them were getting to be quite faded, and some of them looked fairly fresh, and others looked like they’d finally succumbed to time despite the shelter from the elements and had been retraced to bring them back to life. The walls weren’t completely covered in drawings, but they were definitely getting there.

There were pictures of everything imaginable, and writing interspersed, little fragments of sentences and dates and all sorts of nonsense. Many of the people in the drawings were easily recognizable as Kairi and Riku and Sora, and they were drawn doing all sorts of things. They were eating paopu and hitting each other with sticks and sitting around bonfires. Axel wasn’t sure he was reading all of them correctly, but one of them definitely looked like it was trying to convey an image of Riku with a jellyfish in his swim trunks and Kairi laughing on the ground next to him.

“Sorry,” Roxas laughed, referring back to his little comment on his other’s personal life. “Just thought you might like to know that you were standing in a room where history was made.”

Axel snorted. “Yeah, history. I can see the headlines now: Keyblade Master and Other Keyblade Master Get Freaky Deaky in Cave.”

“C’mere,” Roxas said, grabbing Axel by the hand and pulling him over to one wall. He pointed to a phrase almost obscured by ivy but still quite legible.

“I’ve got sand in places I didn’t even know I had,” Axel read aloud.

“Sora wrote that afterward,” Roxas said, his subsequent laughter reverberating back and forth through the small space. Axel made a huge production out of losing his balance and collapsed onto the ground.

“I fucking hate you,” he said, attempting to scrub the mental images out of his eyes with the palms of his hands and writhing around in melodramatic agony.

“And by that you mean that you love me, right?” Roxas asked, setting himself down next to the redhead and leaning over him. Axel stopped convulsing and let his hands drop away from his face.

“After what you just burned into my brain?” he responded incredulously. Roxas grinned and nodded. “…Yeah,” Axel conceded. “You win this round.”

“I win every round,” Roxas said smugly. He leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to Axel’s lips, picking one hand up and running his fingertips gently over the portion of Axel’s side that had been exposed by Axel’s t-shirt riding up during his faux seizure. Axel jolted a bit involuntarily at the light touch on a sensitive area.

“I don’t care if we’ve been good all weekend,” Axel said sternly, pulling away from Roxas and grabbing the blond’s wrist to keep him from starting an all-out tickle war. “I’m not having sex with you where Riku and Sora did the horizontal tango.”

“Disappointing,” Roxas said, not looking at all put out, “but probably for the best. That’s not what I brought you out here for anyway.” With that, he sat up and reached into one of his pockets, and after a bit of digging he pulled out a fistful of multicolored sticks of chalk in various states of use and brokenness. “I’ve got as much right as Sora to vandalizing this place, so I might as well start now. And you’re going to help me. Just don’t… draw anything too obscene.”

Full stop.

Next time on Deae: Zexion sighed. “If I’d known that before I went there, I’d have handled things a little differently.”

Lexaeus raised an eyebrow, although Zexion couldn’t see it. “How so?”

A short laugh. “I’d have skipped calling him a hypocrite and gotten to the physical violence a little bit sooner.”

Chapter 5