Two chapters today! I'm posting these together because, well, they're the last of the AkuRoku arc for the time being, though they're still gonna be hanging around in the background and their relationship will get explored much more deeply later on. Chapters 6 and 7 are going to be one hundred percent pure humor whereas this one, being mostly about Roxas's issues, is one of the most serious chapters. After that we get to Deae Shippuden the Vexen/Marluxia, which is totally different from the AkuRoku and which I enjoyed writing immensely. But this is the last bit of the Axel and Roxas story for now.

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: “‘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?”

Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4

Chapter 5 – On Mental Distress and Other Forms of Pain

They took the latest train home and collapsed into bed in the wee hours of the morning, all of them too exhausted to do anything but try to squeeze in a sufficient amount of sleep before getting up the next day.

Early in the afternoon, Naminé met Axel and Roxas outside of the registrar’s office. They were leaving as she was heading in. “Oh, did you just sign up for classes?” she asked.

Roxas’s jaw was tightly set and his lips pursed. “In so many words,” he replied flatly.

Naminé raised an eyebrow at the irritation in his voice. Axel seemed well beyond perfectly fine. She turned to him and asked, “What did you pick as a major?”

“Archaeology,” he chirped. Naminé raised her other eyebrow.

“Really? That’s very academic.”

“Well, I was thinking really hard about it, and then it hit me: archaeology is the study of dead people. I was dead once, so that kind of gives me a leg up, right?”

Naminé had to keep from laughing aloud, both at Axel’s reasoning and at the way Roxas seemed to have developed an uncontrollable twitch of his left eye. “Well, more power to you, Axel. I always knew you were smarter than you looked.”

“Oh, he’s smarter than he looks,” Roxas said suddenly. “Remember those placement tests we took this morning?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Axel broke the grading scales in two languages. The linguistics department offered him a grant.”

“Ela loved that sort of thing,” Axel said, shrugging nonchalantly as Naminé gaped at him.

“But Axel hates that sort of thing,” Roxas fumed.

“I just don’t really like to read. Or write. Talking is nice, though.”

Naminé directed her next comment at Roxas as much as at Axel. “Well, I think it’s best to go with what you love, don’t you? I’m doing fine arts, and that’s hardly a marketable skill…”

“Oh, did we mention?” Roxas said, a bit snappishly. “Axel’s double majoring, and his other one is a marketable skill.”

“And what’s that?” Honestly, Naminé was finding this conversation to be as amusing as it was insightful, even if Roxas looked like he were about to blow a gasket.

“Welding.” Roxas spat the word out like it he could barely even stand to have it on his lips.

Naminé looked back at Axel, who grinned at her. “I miss playing with fire,” he explained.

She had to bite her tongue. After a few seconds, when she managed to regain most of her composure, she asked, “And what are you doing, Roxie?”

“Psychology,” he said bluntly.

“Really?”

“Axel inspired me, actually.”

Axel looked smug, like he’d already heard this from Roxas and knew exactly what his boyfriend was going to say next. “How so?” Naminé asked.

“I want to analyze, classify, and name whatever it is that’s wrong with his brain.” Roxas hefted his bookbag and started off down the hall. Naminé gave Axel a wide-eyed, good-natured look.

Axel responded with a huge smile, rocking his slender hips forward and sticking his hands in his pockets. “He’s talking in the long term.” His voice was practically bubbling with excitement.

“Of course he is.”

“He doesn’t want me to waste my talents.”

“I should say not.” Axel’s grin, Naminé was finding, was infectious.

“He’s concerned about my well-being.”

“Very.”

Axel licked his lips, trying not to just burst into happy giggles. “He loves me,” he said, sounding like he were announcing that he’d just won the lottery.

“Obviously, Axel. Doesn’t he tell you?”

“Seventeen times so far,” Axel beamed. “But it’s nice to have it actually demonstrated.”

“In a non-coital way,” Naminé added.

Axel raised a short, thin eyebrow. “Ooh, you’re not nearly as innocent as you look,” he told her, giving her hair an affectionate tug as he went after Roxas.

“And you’re a much bigger optimist than your suicide would have suggested,” Naminé called after him, making the statement into a pure compliment. Axel laughed loudly and was gone.

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

Roxas came home from one of his first classes that afternoon, got off the elevator, and rounded a corner to find someone who was unmistakably Axel pinned up against the wall outside their room by someone who was unmistakably not Roxas – being as Roxas was currently the one doing the stumbling upon.

Roxas stopped dead in his tracks, feeling like all of his organs had dropped into the pit of his stomach. A split second later he had pulled himself back around the corner, leaning against the wall for concealment and support with his blood rushing in his ears. His first thought was that he’d been too hard on Axel that morning and now Axel was… what, leaving him? Trying to make him jealous? Just… cheating on him right out in the hall?

He’d felt pretty awful about criticizing Axel’s personal life decisions so harshly, and he’d ended up calling Sora and asking for advice on apologizing. Sora had made some suggestions, and Roxas had suggested that Sora stop being such a sap. Now he looked down at the bag in his right hand and felt as though he were going to be sick. He swallowed heavily, wondering whom to kill first: Axel or the other guy.

And then suddenly he realized that the other guy was Zexion. Not because he’d gotten a good enough look before his brain melted out his ears, but because as his neurons congealed back into something resembling a serviceable organ, the first thing he heard was Axel growling, “Zexion, you stupid fuck, get off of me or I swear to all the gods I will light you on fire.”

For a stomach-turning split second and against all logic and reason, Roxas thought to himself that Axel was cheating on him with Six, of all people. That he was going after what Roxas strongly suspected were Lexaeus’s sloppy seconds. And then he realized, confirming this by peeking around the corner, that he’d been completely mistaken and Axel had, in fact, been ambushed by one of their old cohorts.

“Light me on fire, Eight?” Zexion growled. His fingers were clenched in Axel’s collar and he was managing to keep a pretty firm hold on the significantly larger man. His face was so close to the redhead’s that there was little wonder Roxas had thought they were doing something else. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but you can’t do your little fire tricks anymore.”

“So what the hell are you planning on doing to me? You don’t have your stupid illusions anymore and you never did learn how to fight properly, did you?”

Zexion snarled quite audibly. “I want your explanation, Eight. I want to hear you defend your actions. Now talk.”

Axel brought his hands up to grab Zexion’s wrists, if anything just to preserve the status quo. “Gee, Six, it was all kind of an orgy of manipulation and blood for a while there. Hard to keep track of who killed whom for what reasons.”

Roxas had to fight the urge to walk in there and break them up. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear this, but on the other hand was it really any of his business? Well, enough of his business to do anything other than sit and listen?

“Oh, so you just happened to forget your reasoning,” Zexion, his voice low and dry.

Axel replied in a tone much stonier than before. “Everything comes back to Roxas, Zexion. You damn well know that. You shouldn’t have gotten involved or I wouldn’t’ve had to do it.”

“Don’t pretend you weren’t looking out for your own interests, Axel.” Zexion was fuming; Axel had never seen him so visibly angry, not even that time that Xaldin had suggested he use his lexicon as a booster seat. But he was just as angry himself. He jabbed Zexion in the chest, hard.

“Roxas’s interests are my interests, you imbecile! I’d have gone through the whole Organization for him if I had to, and before you ask, yes that includes Demyx.”

“That makes it so much better. You would’ve killed everyone for him, so it’s okay that you killed me? Look, asshole, Vexen may not blame you, but I sure as hell do!”

“It doesn’t make it better, but you’re not going to get me to say I regret any of it,” Axel said darkly. “I might have done it differently if I’d known what I know now at the time, but I’m not sorry I did it and the only thing I am sorry for is that it had to come to that.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Zexion replied, pulling at Axel’s collar and knocking him back against the wall again, though it was hard for him to get very much leverage.

Axel’s eyes narrowed and he brought his hand up to grab Zexion’s throat with long, slender fingers. Zexion gasped, eyes widening in fear – which was exactly what Axel wanted. He wasn’t cruel, and there was no way he was going to hurt Zexion again, but Zexion didn’t have to know that.

“Did you know,” Axel growled through gritted teeth, “that I killed myself to save Roxas? Maybe no one told you, but I’m telling you now, you son of a bitch. All that Organization shit turned into bad business pretty quick, and I know that, but don’t you dare imply that I’m a hypocrite. I may be cold, I might even be psychotic, but at least I care about something, and everything is fair game when it comes to him.” He slowly loosened his grip on Zexion’s neck. “I’d jump in front of a train for him, and the only thing I can tell you is stay away from the fucking tracks. Because I would not hesitate to take you down with me.”

Zexion’s hands were slackening, letting Axel off his toes and back down onto flat feet. “Fine. Okay. I’ve heard your side of it. I can take that. I can understand it.”

“You always were particularly quick on the uptake,” Axel muttered.

“That’s half of what I came for,” Zexion told him, finally letting go of the redhead. Axel looked down and started fixing the front of his clothes.

“Oh, good, I can’t wait to hear what the second half is.”

“My side of it,” Zexion said. Axel looked up from his rumpled shirt just in time for Zexion’s fist to collide with his face. His head bounced back against the hard plaster of the wall with a rather sickening crack, and by the time he regained his bearings Zexion was stalking back down the hall.

Roxas was crying. He felt so stupid, but there it was, the quiet sniffling and the tears that couldn’t be blinked away. He wasn’t really sure why; Axel had told him what happened in Castle Oblivion, or at least the basics of it, a long time ago. Roxas hadn’t understood the reasons he’d given at the time, but he’d willingly awarded Axel the benefit of the doubt. Roxas couldn’t imagine, then and now, that the kid who’d tried to open a rehabilitation clinic for injured heartless in the basement of the castle would ever kill for no reason. He couldn’t believe that the only person who made him feel was a cold-blooded murderer. And he definitely couldn’t deny that Vexen and Zexion, two of the original six, had reaped what they had sown.

Hearing it straight from Axel, though, seemed to tear a hole in his heart. Axel had been out there defending him and his existence preemptively and then sneaking back to Roxas at night to curl up in his bed and hold him close and talk about their feelings like they were frauds and their friendship like it were just make-believe, and Roxas had done nothing but go along with it before abandoning him by the wayside without ever having given him a chance and without ever having been totally honest with himself or with Axel, who deserved it the most.

He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d have done the same for Axel, thrown his innocence and ethics out to protect him. He supposed that he would have, or at least he wanted to think that he would have. He didn’t like to imagine that if push had come to shove the other way around he would have been so cold and so deluded that he could have just stood by and watched his only friend’s life, or what passed for one, endangered and torn apart. Something in the back of his mind told him that it wasn’t important anymore what he’d have done then. The important part was that he undoubtedly would now.

And there was also the fact that none of them were the people now that they were back then. Axel was happy. Roxas was humbled. Xemnas was driving sport utility vehicles into fountains. Zexion was fighting physically instead of mentally. This last part came abruptly into Roxas’s consciousness with the unmistakable sound of flesh and bone connecting with flesh and bone. He glanced around the corner quickly, wiping away enough of the tears to see that Zexion had punched Axel, and felt pure white-hot rage shoot through his core. He ducked back around the wall, gritting his teeth as Zexion’s footsteps pounded toward him.

Axel had only managed to take a couple of steps after Zexion when the former illusionist disappeared around the corner toward the elevator lobby. A fraction of a second later there was another, slightly muffled crack and Zexion practically flew back into view, hitting the floor hard. He didn’t get back up.

Axel sprinted forward and nearly ran into Roxas as he rounded the bend. The blond was staring at Zexion with wide, watery red eyes, holding one fist up absently. That fist was clutching a brown paper bag that was rapidly getting soggy and wet from the inside. “Roxas?”

Roxas’s eyes finally snapped up to his and his sniffled heavily. “Axel?”

“I didn’t know you could hit like that.”

“Neither did I.” Roxas’s voice was still a little distracted. He obviously had not expected for Zexion to be out cold.

Axel lowered his voice. “How long were you standing here?”

Swallowing heavily, Roxas met his eyes and said, quite hoarsely now that he tried to raise his voice above a murmur, “The whole time, I think.”

Axel swore, wincing visibly. His nose was starting to bleed; Zexion’s aim had been rather crude, but as a result he ended up doing slightly less than optimal damage to a significantly larger portion of Axel’s face. “You weren’t supposed to hear that.”

Roxas shifted the paper bag between his hands as he quickly shrugged off his favorite white and red jacket with the checkered trim and reached up to use it to stifle the bleeding. “I’m glad I heard it.”

Axel shook his head. “I don’t want you to see me like that.”

“I wish I could make you see me like that.”

“You don’t want to be like that.”

“I am like that. Don’t hang around any train tracks, ‘cause I’ll be there and this relationship goes both ways.”

It took Axel a moment to realize what Roxas was talking about, but when he did he laughed, the action causing his cheek to throb with pain. Roxas did as well, a choked post-cry sort of laugh. At that moment, the elevator doors slid open and one of their neighbors, a short, well-built boy, stepped off and froze, staring at the scene in front of him.

Zexion knocked out on the floor, the side of his face rapidly turning the same shade as his hair. Axel standing there bruised and bleeding with Roxas nursing his wounds with a balled-up bloody shirt. The two conscious ones stared back at him. There was a long, awkward silence and then the newcomer went bolting off down the hallway. At first they thought they’d scared him away, but then he shouted, loud enough for the whole floor to hear, “Hey, everyone, Sora’s brother and the pyro started a fight club!”

Axel and Roxas glanced at each other and then quickly made for their room to avoid any possibility of being forced to battle more overeager neighbors in a quasi-institutionalized bloodsport. As soon as Axel had shut the door behind them, he turned to Roxas and found that he was still clutching the soggy paper bag. He pointed at it. “What do you have in there?”

Starting a bit, Roxas looked down at the bag like he’d forgotten he was holding it. A sullen look came over his face and he shrugged his arm before kind of limply holding it out to Axel. “I forgot I was holding it when I punched him,” he muttered dismally.

Axel furrowed his eyebrows and took the proffered bag, pulling it open and peering inside. He reached in and took out a good-sized chunk of what was unmistakably a slightly mangled paopu fruit. Roxas winced at the rather pathetic sight.

“Rox…” Axel’s heart was melting and seeping into his voice and expression. “You bought a paopu fruit?”

A pause. “No…” Roxas was staring at his shoes.

“What?”

Roxas’s face had already been red from crying, but now it was turning even more red from embarrassment. He muttered something quickly and under his breath that sounded like clmatrincrtd. Axel put the bag containing the rest of the fruit down on the bedside table. He stepped forward and used slim fingers to angle Roxas’s chin up until blue eyes met green.

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that.”

Roxas bit his lip and then said, just a little bit louder and slower, “I climbed the tree in the courtyard.”

Axel bit his lip. “So what’s the problem?” he asked softly. Roxas let his head drop to one side and sighed heavily. And then the part of him that was distinctly Sora-ish came forward in a big way.

“Ax, I’m sorry!” he cried. “I got so irritated this morning and I didn’t mean to get mad but I just wasn’t thinking right and it’s not my place to get angry about your choices and I just didn’t wanna see you not take an opportunity you won’t have again but it’s stupid to take an opportunity you don’t even want just ‘cause you have it and if you miss playing with fire I totally get that and I don’t expect you not to do something that makes you happy and honestly I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your brain, I love your brain, so I asked Sora how to make it up to you ‘cause you didn’t seem upset but I still felt awful and he was the one who suggested the paopu and I know it’s stupid and sappy but I figured it’d get my point across and then I came back home and you’re talking about everything you did for me even when we’d hardly known each other that long and I didn’t appreciate any of it and just kept pretending like what we had didn’t exist and I left you and you still did all that for me and I never got to tell you how much I cared and I still can’t tell you ‘cause I don’t know how and I don’t know how to show you either and I’ll never be able to make it up to you and all I can do is bring you this stupid fruit and I can’t even do that right because I punched Zexion in the face with it!”

Axel blinked. He’d never heard Roxas say anything near that long at once before. Had the boy even taken a breath? “Rox, if you’d just—”

Roxas’s eyes were wide and his face was flushed bright pink. “Oh, god, and I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on you, but I was coming home and I didn’t realize at first and I freaked out ‘cause I thought you were doing something else with someone and I know that’s really stupid and I do trust you, I trust you so much but I was just so startled and I had about five heart attacks at once but then I realized and I didn’t leave because I was afraid he’d flip out at you and he kind of did…”

Axel waved a hand in front of Roxas’s face, but he couldn’t get him to stop. “Roxas! Roxas, would you shut up and listen to me?”

“…and I realize now how dumb this paopu thing really is ‘cause you’ve only been back for five days and here I am treating it like it’s been forever and I’m probably coming off as creepy and needy but I was just so miserable without you and I’m having trouble keeping myself under control so if you don’t want the paopu I totally understand but all I was trying to do was say that I never want to be without you again but now that I think about it even saying that is kind of stalk—”

Axel had finally just stuck the piece of fruit in his mouth, crushed it a bit more than it already was, and leaned down to force Roxas into a kiss mid-diatribe. Roxas let out a surprised, muffled sound as he found his mouth filled with the almost overwhelmingly sweet flavor of the fruit’s juice and pulp, mitigated only by Axel’s own slightly spicier taste. Axel finally pulled away, swallowing and allowing Roxas to do the same. “I can’t believe I’m finally getting to tell you this instead of the other way around, but shut the hell up, Rox.”

Roxas stared up at Axel blankly, still quite stunned at being interrupted, and then finally he said in a subdued monotone, “I think I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

That got a grin. “I can tell.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I’ll be here to help you through it. Do we have to eat the whole thing to be sure of that?”

Roxas glanced over at the remainder of the decimated, much-abused paopu in the bag on the table. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He looked back up at the redhead, reaching over and taking more of the fruit out of the bag as he wrapped his other arm around Axel’s neck. “Better safe than sorry.”

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

Zexion got home while the sun was setting. Lexaeus could hear his footsteps stomping loudly up the stairs and the slamming of the door resonated through the walls, rattling the windows and the plate glass balcony doors. He looked up from his book as Zexion came into the living room and fell face-down onto the sofa, his posture dazed and stiff as a board.

Lexaeus did most things wordlessly, and it was no exception now when he put his book down on the arm of the chair, got up and went into the kitchen, and retrieved an ice pack. He wrapped it in a thin dish towel and brought it back out to Zexion, who didn’t turn over or even look up.

“Here,” Lexaeus said after a moment.

“I don’t want it,” Zexion muttered, unmoving.

Lexaeus cast a glance up at the ceiling, as if asking the myriad gods that lay beyond it to please grant Zexion a shred of common sense. He stuck the ice pack under his arm and then reached down, his broad hands nearly encircling Zexion’s tiny waist as he hauled him up off the couch. Zexion let out an only mildly surprised sound as he was lifted. Lexaeus sat down on the couch and put the much smaller man in his lap before pressing the ice pack to his face.

Zexion screwed up his face, half in pain and half in obstinate irritation, but brought his hand up to hold the ice there himself. He stayed curled up in a little ball for a moment, but finally relaxed slightly and leaned against Lexaeus. He looked up at the larger man, who looked down at him, his eyebrow quirking just a tiny bit, and Zexion sighed.

“Sorry I disappeared. I… went to do something.” Lexaeus tilted his head almost imperceptibly, and Zexion rolled his eyes. “Okay, I went to see Axel.”

“And did you get what you wanted?”

Zexion sighed through his nose. “He said exactly what I thought he was going to say.”

“Roxas,” Lexaeus said simply.

“Exactly,” Zexion muttered. “He’s such an idiot. He wouldn’t even apologize, he killed me and he wouldn’t give me as much as a stupid I’m sorry.”

Lexaeus decided not to pursue that train of Zexion’s thought for the time being; he was one of the only people who consistently saw the more high-strung side of the smaller man, and he secretly worried that Zexion was going to develop a world-class case of hypertension. So he went down a different path for a moment.

“And when did he hit you?”

Zexion glanced at the floor. “He didn’t. I punched him because he was being a fucktard.” Lexaeus didn’t even want to know where Zexion had pulled that word from.

“So you punched him and yet you ended up with a huge bruise.”

“Well, I punched him, and then I was leaving when Roxas came out of nowhere and knocked me out,” Zexion said miserably. “Like some kind of goddamned midget ninja.”

Lexaeus marveled that Zexion could make fun of someone’s height, but then again, he tended to classify all people into two groups: small and smaller. Zexion and Roxas were both squarely in the smaller category. “Do you feel any better?”

The other man had to stop and think about that for a long moment. “Kind of, yeah. At least I got it off my chest.”

“And do you understand more now?”

“I understand that Axel is an obsessive, sociopathic git.”

Sometimes Zexion could be a real moron for being so brilliant. “Zex,” Lexaeus said softly, “how can he be a sociopath if he feels the way he does about Roxas?”

“Stop defending him!”

“I’m not defending him,” Lexaeus replied, perfectly calm as always. “I’m just saying that maybe the best way to deal with this is to try to understand each other.”

Zexion glared up at him. “Oh, yes, understanding will make it all easier.” He took the pack away from his face and readjusted it in its towel before putting it back on. “I understand what he was thinking, but he’s still a douche.”

“I’m sure you’ll probably never get along with him again. But,” Lexaeus continued, “I can’t be actively angry with Axel.”

Zexion drew away from Lexaeus, sitting up and giving him an angry, hurt look. “Well, great, Lex. Thanks for showing exactly how much you care about me!”

Lexaeus shook his head. “It’s because I care about you, Z. I understand what Axel did because if you’d been in Roxas’s position and Axel in yours, I would have done exactly the same thing.”

Staring up at Lexaeus, Zexion couldn’t think of anything to counter that. Finally he sighed and leaned against his companion again, mumbling, “So I’m just supposed to forgive and forget?”

“Maybe not; maybe you’re just supposed to move on. I’m not saying you have to be friendly with Axel. You don’t even need to see Axel. All I’m saying is that it’s unhealthy to dwell on the past.”

Zexion took one of Lexaeus’s hands, practically twice as big as his own, and twined their fingers together as best he could. “How the hell can you be so sympathetic?”

“When you spend all your time listening, you get to know people. It’s hard not to understand them. I think I might even have Saïx figured out.”

The smaller man’s lips curved into a smile, albeit reluctantly. “I refuse to believe that Saïx’s mental processes are anything but a completely random firing of neurons that follow no logic and have no purpose.”

“You might have it there,” Lexaeus mused. They slipped into a comfortable silence – naturally, since their relationship was made up of about seventy-five percent comfortable silence. Zexion could hear Lexaeus’s heart; he’d sat like this so many times, but this was an entirely new experience, and honestly he liked it. It was calming in a way that was something akin to getting a backrub while in a warm bath. Possibly also while surrounded by kittens, but not kittens in the bath.

Finally he spoke up again, his voice very soft and devoid of all anger by this point. “Did you know that Axel killed himself?”

“Mm, I heard from Xigbar,” Lexaeus replied. “When I talked to him yesterday. I told you what he told me, about what happened after we were gone, and about Roxas.”

“You didn’t tell me about that part.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to hear anything about Axel. I thought it might make you upset.”

“I was already upset,” Zexion replied. He shifted the ice pack on his cheek.

“I didn’t want to upset you even more.”

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.” Lexaeus smiled softly and Zexion added, “What an idiot.” His tone was rather neutral for the sentiment.

“He’s very passionate,” Lexaeus said simply.

“He’s a passionate idiot, then. Maybe not a hypocrite, but still stupid as all get out.”

“I think I read a sonnet once called ‘The Passionate Idiot’.”

It took him a moment, but then Zexion looked up, eyes wide. Lexaeus didn’t like to speak any more than he had to, not even with Zexion, although he spoke with Zexion about fifteen times more than he did with all other sentient creatures combined. And humor fell distinctly outside the realm of strictly necessary. “Did you just make a joke, Lex?”

Lexaeus shrugged slightly. “Eh.”

Zexion smiled, wincing a bit at the pain on his cheek, and said, “You know, you’re my favorite person.”

Full stop.

Next time on Deae: “The point is,” Cloud clarified, “that we trust you two, and we need to know, preferably from both of you…”

“…which of the other eleven you would consider to be dangerous,” Leon said. There was no reason for him to take control of the sentence halfway through, except perhaps that Cloud had reached some sort of verbal quota.

Chapter 6