Mm, chapter 6. One of my favourite chapters, maybe my very favourite. I love flashbacks, and this is one of two chapters that's largely flashback. And I love Leon and Cloud. I had the most fun ever writing them. I had fun with them in this chapter, and I had a ton of fun with them in later ones. <3

Title: Deae Ex Machina
Category: Kingdom Hearts, post-KH2 non-AU, humor/romance
Rating: M
Pairings: Primary – AkuRoku, Marluxia/Vexen; secondary – Cloud/Leon; tertiary – Demyx/Xigbar, Xemnas/Saïx, Riku/Sora, other
Summary: Should they have gotten a second chance? No. Do they deserve a second chance? Probably not. Will they do better as productive members of society than they did as criminal masterminds? Even they can’t fuck that one up.

Last time on Deae: “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.”

Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5

Chapter 6 – On Old Friends and Other Types of Nostalgia

Four boys met in the dining hall for dinner around five on Thursday, after their classes were finished for the day and before they headed back to the dorm. Three of them were long since full and were waiting for Sora to finish scarfing down his ungodly stack of pizza slices so that they could leave when a girl bounced up to their table from across the room. Roxas recognized her as the girl who had walked by the dorm room and called him Sora last Thursday.

“Hi, Tori,” Riku said casually.

“Hmr, Drrbhy,” Sora chorused through a mouthful of thin-crust.

“Hi, Sora! Hi, Riku! Hi, not-Sora! Hi, not-Riku!” she said, waving at each of them in turn.

“Axel,” Axel responded. “A-X-E-L. Got it memorized?”

“Yeah, okay, sure,” the girl said. “Anyway, are you guys going back to the dorm? Because there’s this group of people and they’ve, been, like, sitting outside the front door for, like, three hours, and they said they’re looking for you.”

Riku raised a slender eyebrow. “Did you get their names?”

“No,” the girl said happily, as though that were exactly what Riku probably wanted to hear. “There were, like, three of them, though.”

“What did they look like?” Roxas asked.

“Dreamy!” Tori declared. Her audience waited for further information that, it soon became clear, was not going to be dispensed and probably didn’t exist.

“Um, okay,” Roxas said. “Thanks for the, uh, heads-up.”

“No problem!” was the answer. “Oh, and the two guys have no idea how to wear belts, so if you could would you just tell your friends that if they need someone to show them how to wear a belt, I’m totally available?”

“I’ll make a note of it,” Axel said, giving her a winning and subtly condescending smile. Tori grinned and took her leave, bouncing off toward the food line.

“How do these people get into college?” Riku mumbled, watching in apathetic and acclimated horror as Sora managed to shove the entire last slice of pizza into his mouth at once. His boyfriend had remained pretty much oblivious to everything that had just been said, having diverted most of his blood flow from his brain to his stomach to deal with the digestive crisis he was currently entering.

When they returned to their dorm, a three minute walk from the dining hall, the courtyard was scattered with clusters of students who were all whispering and casting poorly-disguised glances at the two figures loitering near the entryway. One of them was leaning on the wall, and the other was standing a couple of feet away from it. They looked like they had all the sense of humor of a slab of sheet rock, with their arms crossed and staring at nothing but empty space and occasionally each other.

Normally two young adults skulking around a college campus would have been nothing noteworthy at all – there were entire flocks of emo kids who did just that all day every day around here, and everyone just ignored them. The difference here was that where other people in autumn in Destiny Islands considered unseasonably chilly weather something that called for maybe a pair of socks and a light cotton jacket, these guys looked like they’d just escaped from a photo shoot for a leather goods magazine. Leather pants, huge leather boots, leather jackets. A lot of something had died so that these guys could dress the way they did, and even more intriguing was that they looked really, really good in their utterly impractical clothing. Also intriguing was the fact that, as the people who’d been hanging around staring at them longer could attest – they had barely moved two muscles in about an hour.

Some of the people had been sitting around just enjoying the view; it wasn’t often you got eye candy like this right in front of your own home. A lot of them had stopped to admire the view but stayed to see if those guys were going to actually do anything or just collect dust all evening. Their patience was rewarded when Sora came bounding across the courtyard, followed by Riku, Roxas, and Axel at a more reasonable pace, shouting, “Cloud! Leoooon!”

It wasn’t often that anyone got to see an eighteen-year old boy make a running leap into the arms of two grown men dressed like cyber-assassins, but Sora subconsciously figured that he’d gotten out of having to act like a normal eighteen-year old boy when he saved the universe. Leon and Cloud, for their part, just turned slowly as soon as they heard their names and coolly caught Sora as he jumped on them and pulled them into a huge hug. Their faces hardly moved – well, their mouths may have twitched a little bit at the corners, but that might also just have been a trick of the light.

“What are you guys doing here?” Sora asked, letting them go and hefting his backpack higher onto his shoulders. He wondered if this were a continuing effort by everyone he had ever met to show up at his dorm in quick succession; he kind of hoped that that were the case.

“Actually, I think we’re here about them,” Leon said, gesturing over Sora’s shoulder. Sora turned to find Riku, Roxas, and Axel walking up behind him. “Well, about Roxas and Axel, anyway. Which I assume are you two,” he added, motioning to the correct people.

“How do you know who I am?” Axel asked, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. “Have I asked you to memorize my name before?”

“We should talk inside,” Cloud told them, burying his lower face behind the high collar of his jacket and glancing around at the other students like they might have been wielding wire taps and cameras with extremely high-powered lenses.

“Hold on,” Roxas said. “Weren’t there supposed to be three of you?”

“Yuffie went to find Kairi over an hour ago,” Leon said. “Couldn’t sit still.”

Everyone on the fourth floor knew Sora as the adorable, unapologetically sweet-tempered kid with funny hair and the hottest boyfriend in the dorm. Now, halfway through the semester, they were having to reevaluate their mental schemas of their neighbor to include a fraternal twin toting a redheaded psychopath as well as a pair of steely, leather-clad supermodels and/or international spies who showed up out of nowhere looking for him. Suddenly Sora was an adorable, sweet-tempered kid with a lot of really bizarre people that followed him around.

Leon and Cloud wouldn’t breathe a word of why they were there until they were all behind the closed door of Riku and Sora’s room. Axel wondered if they thought for some reason that the students staring slack-jawed and drooling at them on the elevator were at all interested in them for anything they had to say.

“So what brings you two here?” Riku reiterated after they arrived upstairs. Cloud sat down in Sora’s desk chair at its owner’s behest, but Leon opted to stand behind him, peering out the window through narrowed eyes as he did, as though there were a possibility that maybe a window-washer or a fifty-foot high person were going to come by. Satisfied that the area was free of low-flying helicopters, he finally said, “Yuffie got a letter from Kairi that said that her nobody and you two were back.” He indicated Roxas and Axel. “The only logical conclusion is that if you two are hanging around, the other eleven are probably out there somewhere as well.”

“Including Xemnas,” Cloud interjected.

“Which is bad news,” Leon added.

“That’s why we’re here.”

“We’re the preemptive strike.”

The three others in the room who’d had prior experience with Hollow Bastion’s duo of brooding wunderkinds found themselves wondering when they had started finishing each other’s thoughts. Axel just found himself wondering where Leon bought his pants.

“What, you’re looking for Xemnas?” Roxas asked.

“Yeah,” Leon responded. “Why, do you know anything about where he might be?”

Axel spoke up. “Yeah, he crashed his SUV into a fountain in front of Saïx’s apartment building the other day,” he said, indicating the direction with a jerk of his thumb even though he had absolutely no idea where it had actually happened. Leon and Cloud looked at each other for a moment, apparently communicating with either their eyes or telepathy, and then turned back to their younger companions, crossing their arms in eerie unison.

“Okay,” Leon said. “Roxas, Cloud and I trust you because you’re Sora’s nobody. And Axel, we trust you because you’re Roxas’s… whatever you are.” Axel looked vaguely offended by this assessment before pursing his lips and shrugging his agreement. Roxas hid a smirk behind his hand before placing said appendage on the small of Axel’s back reassuringly.

“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.

Axel and Roxas glanced at each other and Axel tilted his head questioningly toward the other side of the room. They went and stood in the corner near the door, conversing in low voices with their heads bowed together, gesturing and moving their heads in agreement or disagreement occasionally. The other four watched them and made small talk, Riku and Sora inquiring about the wellbeing of Aerith and Cid and Merlin, and Leon answering and asking about Sora and Riku’s studies on behalf of both himself and the blond.

After a few minutes, Axel and Roxas strode back over and said, in perfect unison, “Larxene.”

“Larxene?” Leon asked with a quirk of his eyebrow.

“Number Twelve. She’s the most dangerous of any of us,” Axel explained.

Roxas nodded and added, “Let us tell you about the Organization. We’ll start from the top.”

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

Xemnas had spent most of the week walking around the Castle That Never Was. Not as in continually perambulating, but as in walking when he needed to get places. Most of the Organization would travel via darkness between different floors and rooms, popping in and out unannounced. Xigbar would frequently go so far as to open a portal between the kitchen table and the fridge if he wanted to get more milk. Xemnas, however, had recently decided that this castle had quite a lot of stairs and doors and hallways, and that none of them were being used, and that he was going to use them, darkness be damned.

That Wednesday morning, Xemnas went down ten flights of stairs to the laundry room, then climbed back up seven to the kitchen and burst in the door, huffing like a blast furnace and leaning on the doorjamb for support. The only people he found in the kitchen were Axel and Roxas, both in their pajamas and both sipping from mugs of coffee at the dining table with their feet propped up on chairs.

“Number Eight! Number Thirteen!” he barked between gasps for air.

“Yes, Superior?” Axel drawled into his coffee mug, his green eyes glancing up momentarily at the silver-haired man in the purple bathrobe. Xemnas held up one finger in an indication to wait just a minute while he caught his breath, and after a long moment finally said, “My underwear has gone missing!”

“Can’t you just put on a new pair, then?” Roxas asked lightly, setting his mug down in front of him and turning it back and forth between his hands idly.

Xemnas shook his head; his hair still hadn’t been brushed and styled today, and the shorter bits hung in his face and flopped around when he moved. “No, don’t you see? All of my underwear has gone missing.”

Xigbar appeared directly above the Superior at that moment. The ceilings in much of the castle, including the kitchen, were built at such a height that the only indication to Xemnas that someone was standing upside down right over him was the brushing of the newcomer’s long black and grey hair along the top of his head. He shrieked, ducking and batting frantically at his hair as though he thought that a spider had somehow gotten onto his scalp – which he did.

“I don’t have any underwear today either,” Xigbar said. He was likewise in his robe and was courteously holding it tight around his legs so that gravity wouldn’t compromise what little modesty he had left. Walking down the empty space next to Xemnas, he let go of the robe as he reached the floor.

Xemnas straightened up reluctantly and reduced the frantic brushing of his hair to the occasional nervous twitch, finally realizing that the tingling sensation on his scalp had not been a spider after all. “Do you know where your underwear is, Number Two?” he asked, eying the other man as Xigbar poured himself a cup of coffee and hoisted himself up onto the island.

“Naw, Superior Dude,” Xigbar responded. “Just disappeared into thin air.” Xigbar was grinning broadly; he was pretty sure he knew where his underwear had gone and why; his other was from a world that put particular emphasis on today’s date, and he’d been instinctively expecting something of this sort. He turned and winked at Axel and Roxas, but they didn’t really get it since with a one-eyed person, winking was a fairly meaningless gesture, or at least one that was hard to catch.

Xaldin was not happy about his lack of undergarments. Every single pair of his extensive collection of multicolored boxer-briefs had disappeared. He didn’t tell anyone this, but Axel and Roxas knew that that included the pair he’d gone to bed in the previous evening. They’d privately decided that it could never be said that they were unwilling to risk life, limb, and dignity for a really thorough prank.

“There’s got to be something weird going on,” the wind elemental grumbled, stalking into the Organization’s preferred common area and sitting down heavily in one of the myriad overstuffed chairs scattered about the room, tapping his fingers on the arms irritably as he furrowed his eyebrows in thought. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

Vexen glanced up from where he was revising some of his hundreds of pages of notes and equations, managing to make even his relaxed position with his feet up on a coffee table look absolutely professional and delicate. “I suppose that you are likewise divested of all of your underwear?” he asked.

Xaldin scowled. “Yeah. And my trousers chafe.”

Vexen nodded, tapping his pencil softly against his lower lip and brushing some of his hair out of his face. He had a gut feeling that Axel and Roxas, who were sitting at a small table across the room, talking with their heads bent together and glancing up at them occasionally, were behind this. As the most analytically-minded of the six scientists in the Organization, however, he was loathe to listen to what anything so non-objective as his gut had to say about these matters. This instinct could barely even qualify as a hypothesis, and even if it did he had no way of going about proving it short of searching their rooms, and there were some places that even a stone-cold ice princess like Vexen would not dare venture.

Lexaeus and Zexion entered the room in that moment via the same portal. Lexaeus was looking pretty neutral today, all things considered. He was eating a piece of buttered toast, and he immediately and wordlessly made his way right past Axel and Roxas, grunting in their general direction as a greeting, and flopped down on a sofa by Vexen and Xaldin. He acknowledged Xaldin, who was the only one looking at him, with a curt nod.

Xaldin responded with, “Lex, are you wearing underwear today?”

Lexaeus shook his head. “Couldn’t find any,” he said with a small shrug.

Hearing this, Vexen looked up and watched Xaldin as Xaldin watched Lexaeus, waiting for something more by way of answering the question. At last Xaldin said, “And aren’t you at all upset about it?”

“I kind of like it,” Lexaeus said matter-of-factly. A small smile tugged at the corners of Vexen’s mouth and he ducked his head out of sight under pretense of examining something he’d previously written more closely.

Meanwhile, across the room, Zexion was standing still and just smelling, his nostrils flaring and his eyes narrowed. He slowly turned and stared at Axel and Roxas, who stopped their indiscernible conversation and looked up at him silently. He stalked over to them and brushed the hair that usually hung in his face behind one ear. Axel and Roxas both raised an eyebrow in surprise; seeing Zexion’s other eye was jarring, as the rest of the Organization subconsciously thought of Number Six as being as cyclopean as Number Two.

Zexion bent down suddenly, bringing his face close in to Axel’s. The redhead leaned back instinctively, eyes widening. Zexion took a long, deep breath through his nose, walking in a semicircular motion around Number Eight as he did so, hands clasped behind his back. As he reached Axel’s other side, he turned abruptly to Roxas, performing the same routine on the Organization’s youngest member.

Eight and Thirteen had a similar scent. They spent so much of their time together that it often seemed to Zexion as though their body chemistries had somehow become more similar, like their periods would have done if they’d been a little more female. Presently, however, there was something else mixed in. They smelled a little bit more like every other member of the Organization today, and they really smelled like laundry detergent. The two younger Nobodies were watching him with wide eyes under furrowed eyebrows.

Zexion leaned down, spreading his hands on the table they were sitting at, letting his hair fall back into his face. “I know what you did,” he said quietly. “I am not going to say anything. I expect that tomorrow morning, every last pair of my underwear will be back in my drawer. And someday in the future – and that day may never come – I will demand a favor of you two, and you will comply without question.” He straightened up and gave them one last lingering look before marching off across the room, sitting down next to Lexaeus, and accepting a proffered bite of his toast.

The one that Axel and Roxas had really been worried about when they put their plan into action was Saïx. If you’d asked those who knew him, under guarantee of nondisclosure, to describe Number Seven in three words, most of them would have immediately said “batshit insane schizophrenic”. Saïx was scary because he was liable to go into his yellow-eyed berserker mode at the slightest provocation or even with no provocation at all, like the time Demyx had innocently said the word “sausage” in casual conversation and ended up cowering under the dining room table while Saïx tried to smash through the top with his claymore.

When Saïx appeared in the common room, Roxas glanced up and nudged Axel with his boot, letting him know that Unpredictable McRampagemeister had arrived. Axel nodded silently and called up a tiny portal of Darkness between them that could be quickly expanded at a moment’s notice. Saïx, however, just waved at them almost cheerfully and went over to sit next to the other older members of the Organization. For their part, Vexen, Xaldin, Lexaeus, and Zexion all looked up at Saïx with cautious anticipation of an eminent psychotic episode etched on their faces.

“I feel really great today,” Saïx said. It was the first time he’d ever said anything of that sort to anyone. Axel and Roxas blinked at each other and pretended to ignore the proceedings.

A glance was exchanged between the other four. Vexen spoke up, hypothesizing, “Do you have your underwear today, Seven?”

Saïx smiled, his lips curving into a feral grin. “No,” he said. “They’re gone. I hope they stay that way. I hate having to wear clothes.”

“You… hate having to wear clothes,” Xaldin repeated.

“Of course I do,” Saïx responded, half-sitting on the back of one of the couches. “They’re unnatural. We were meant to walk around naked, not wrap ourselves in constricting cloth fabrications. I’d probably never put on clothes if the Superior didn’t make me.” He flipped some of his hair over his shoulder. “I’m glad my underwear have disappeared; I feel free.”

Axel found himself about to burst into helpless laughter, so Roxas grabbed his hand and dragged him into the Darkness and along back to the kitchen. As they disappeared, the others looked over and watched them go.

“They have so got to be doing it,” Zexion commented.

Eight and Thirteen arrived back in the kitchen just before Xigbar appeared out of a portal over by the toaster. Going into the cabinet directly above the appliance and pulling out a box of strawberry toaster pastries that no one but Demyx ever touched, the space elemental ripped open a package and stuck them in the toaster. He then turned and noticed Axel and Roxas staring at him like he’d just strode in and started popping down someone else’s prescription painkillers.

“Dude, they’re not for me,” Xigbar said, holding up his hands defensively. “They’re for Dem. He doesn’t want to get dressed today because he says that wearing pants without underwear makes him feel awkward. So he’s not leaving his room.”

Axel leaned one of his pronounced hips on the counter and crossed his arms over his chest, smirking. “If Demyx isn’t getting dressed, I’m surprised you left his room today.”

Xigbar turned to hide a blush under pretense of making sure the pastries weren’t burning. “He got hungry,” he said simply.

Axel turned and looked at Roxas, who returned his gaze only shortly before averting his eyes and walking quickly over to the refrigerator to rifle through it aimlessly. They both frowned; talking to Xigbar and Demyx always made their chests constrict in a way that felt more like heartache than should have been possible for boys without hearts.

At that moment, Luxord burst in the door. Number Ten had invented the concept of coming out of the Darkness directly on the other side of a door just so he could dramatically fling it open to enter a room, and he did it a lot. “Oh my god, have any of you seen my lucky boxers?”

Luxord had exactly one pair of underwear. They were green and had silly-looking yellow birds printed all over them, and he put them into the wash every single night so that he could wear them every single day. Axel and Roxas found this quite ridiculous, but they’d been grateful for it last night when they’d only had to bother with kidnapping a single pair of boxers out of the laundry room to completely clean out Ten’s supply.

“You can’t find them?” Axel asked.

“Did you check the laundry?” Roxas added, peering over the door of the fridge.

“I’m not wearing ‘em,” Xigbar said. The toaster pastries popped up and he immediately went to grab them, flinching as he burned his fingers and wringing his hand to get the pain out. He was quite sure by this point that Axel and Roxas knew exactly where Luxord’s boxers were, but he was enjoying Demyx’s reaction to the prank way too much to do anything but play along with it.

Luxord began pacing back and forth across the kitchen, looking more than unusually tense and shuffling his deck of cards nervously. “I have to find them,” he said. “I mean, I know I put them in the laundry last night. Where could they have gone since then?”

“All of our underwear is missing, dude,” Xigbar said. “I’m sure it’ll all turn up eventually. Not having underwear isn’t that bad anyway.”

Ten shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. What if the Superior decides that he wants me to go on a mission today or something? What am I going to do then?”

“Go do it without underwear?” Roxas suggested.

Luxord looked scandalized. “But I’d be killed, or worse! My lucky underwear is the source of my powers!”

Axel rolled his eyes. “Don’t be ridiculous, Lux,” he said. “Your powers come from your being a nobody, not from your fucking boxers.”

“That’s what you’d like to think,” Luxord spat back.

Xigbar abruptly turned and called forth one of his guns, unleashing a bullet with perfect aim straight Luxord’s head. All at once, Luxord stepped on of his own playing cards that he hadn’t even noticed he’d dropped, and he went flying forward onto his face just as the bullet cruised over him and lodged in the wall across the room.

“See, Lux?” Roxas asked. “Your timing is still perfect.”

Luxord rolled over onto his back and picked up the card he’d slipped on, staring at the seven of clubs in horror. “But I’ve lost my luck!” he exclaimed. “I never drop my cards!”

Xigbar had gone back to trying to get Demyx’s pastries out of the toaster without significant harm to his hands, and he nearly dropped one of them on the floor when he heard this. “Man, I just shot at your head at, like, point blank range. And I missed. You are one lucky son of a bitch.”

The blond on the floor just grimaced and shuffled the stray card back into his deck. “I need my boxers back,” he moaned.

Axel was about to say something else, but as soon as he opened his mouth Marluxia came running out of a portal and straight onto the top of the dining table. His hair was flying in every direction and he looked distinctly flustered.

“Hey,” Xigbar said, only glancing at the pink-haired man as he poured a glass of milk, presumably also for Demyx. “You wearing any underwear today, dude?”

“I never wear underwear,” Marluxia said hastily. “But Larxene does and she’s on her way here and oh my god is she pissed.”

Axel, sensing danger, instinctively stepped in front of Roxas, shielding the smaller boy with his body. Luxord scrambled back to his feet and Xigbar dropped the glass he was holding, the milk exploding across half the kitchen. Before anyone could do anything more, there were resonant footsteps from within the portal that Marluxia had just exited, and Eleven was sent flying off the table by a pair of hands shoving him off balance. A loud blast of thunder shook the kitchen as the rest of Larxene became visible and the portal dissolved.

The tiny blond woman was standing on top of the table, shoulders hunched and lightning glinting in her aquamarine eyes as actual lightning crackled through the air around her. Her kunai were out and her lips were curled back into a vicious snarl. More thunder cracked as a larger bolt shot across the room between the nymph and the cowering males, causing their hair to stand on end with its proximity. Axel’s hair rose up in a way that made him look like a green-eyed parakeet, and he forcefully held Roxas in place as the blond peeked around his side.

“WHERE THE FUCKING FUCK IS MY UNDERWEAR?” she roared. She glared down at her best friend, homicidal rage still etched on her face. “I know you have my thongs, you fruitcake,” she spat at Marluxia, and then she turned and pointed at the other four with her kunai extended. “But I want to know where my bras and panties are right now or I swear to all the fucking gods that I will emasculate every single fucking fairy in this castle; DO YOU HEAR ME?”

Roxas buried his face in Axel’s shoulder – not out of fear of Larxene directly, but out of fear that his fear of Larxene would cause him to blurt out where they’d put her undergarments. Axel spoke up instead, shaking his head rapidly and insisting, “None of us know where our underwear is, but we’ll help you find it if you want.”

Larxene narrowed her eyes at the redhead, stepping down off the table via a chair and Marluxia’s back and stalking across the kitchen. The four men who were in any position to do so crowded together like a herd of wildebeests threatened by a small, psychotic lioness. Larxene brandished her weapons at them, staring them each in the face in turn with the exception of Roxas, who was fortunately one of the only people small enough to hide completely behind Axel.

“If I find out that you assholes are wearing my underclothes, I will make absolutely sure that you will come to rue the day your others lost their hearts, do you hear me?” she said, her voice lowering to a deadly growl. “Do you know why I need underwear?” she asked them through clenched teeth.

They glanced at each other out of the corners of their eyes. Luxord shook his head nervously in response. Another bolt of lightning shot through the room and they were nearly deafened by the subsequent blast of thunder. Nevertheless, Larxene managed to shriek quite audibly over the ringing of their ears. “BECAUSE I AM BLEEDING OUT MY VAGINA AND I HAVE NOWHERE TO PUT A PAD,” she roared right in their faces. They all had the courtesy to look absolutely horrified with this information. Larxene stepped back a bit, still shaking her kunai threateningly and glaring at all of them in turn. “I had best not get toxic shock from wearing tampons all day,” she growled, “and my underwear had best be back in my drawer tomorrow.”

She didn’t look happy about having to say this, and the males in the room were quite certain that without the threat of the Superior keeping her in check, they’d all have been completely fried by this point. With one final round of thunder and lightning, Larxene was back into the Darkness and gone. Marluxia finally dared to lift his head and begin pushing himself off the floor after about ten seconds, and the rest of the occupants of the kitchen slowly un-tensed their muscles. Axel was shaking as he made his way over to the island and sat himself down on a stool. Roxas followed him, placing one hand on his shoulder and massaging the muscle there gently. “Thanks,” he murmured, in reference to Axel’s volunteering as a meat shield.

Luxord slumped back against the fridge, massaging his face with trembling fingers. Xigbar turned and asked, “Dude, are you crying?”

“No,” Luxord said. “I think I just had a rapid succession of elaborate heart attacks, though.”

“Okay,” Xigbar responded. He opened up a portal and muttered, “I gotta go make sure Demyx is all right,” as he hurried through it. Marluxia stumbled over and grabbed one of the forgotten toaster pastries off the counter, shoving a huge chunk of it into his mouth and chewing forcefully and mechanically as he stared at the wall through wide eyes; Number Eleven compulsively ate when he was nervous or upset.

Roxas bent down behind his best friend and whispered in his ear, “Happy April Fools Day, Ax.”

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

Leon and Cloud blinked in unison as Roxas and Axel finished their story. Riku and Sora were likewise staring at the former Nobodies with utterly unreadable expressions on their faces. Axel stuck his hands in his back pockets and swayed his hips back and forth as he rocked on the balls of his feet. Roxas just leaned on the post of the bunk beds. They both waited for some sort of response to their lengthy patched-together diatribe.

“So you’re saying that you feel that Larxene is the biggest threat to public safety because she almost killed you for stealing her underwear?” Leon said at last.

“Well,” Roxas said, “yes and no. That was an isolated incident, but me and Ax feel that that particular day is a good representation of what most days were like in the Organization.”

“Most days in the Organization were like April Fools Day?” Riku asked.

“More or less,” Axel said. “We didn’t usually plan for them like April Fools Day, but they always turned out that way in the end.”

“It kept things interesting,” Roxas commented.

“Yeah…” Axel said, a nostalgic look coming over his face. “Hey, you wanna see something I found in our dorm?” he asked suddenly. Without waiting for an answer from anyone, he bolted out the door and across the hall, reappearing twenty seconds later with a thick hardcover book in his hands. It was a photo album.

“This is the same photo album I had at the castle,” he said. “I don’t know how it got here, but it’s definitely mine.” He pulled over Riku’s computer chair and sat down in the middle of the group, balancing the book backwards on his skinny knees so that everyone could see as he flipped through it. “Maybe this can help you guys get a better feel for who you’re dealing with.”

There were all sorts of pictures in it, but most were action shots. One showed Xemnas hunched over his cards playing poker with Luxord and looking very disgruntled in only his boxers. Another showed Marluxia chasing Vexen down a long corridor, the former having practically turned himself into a living, moving topiary. A third showed Demyx and Xaldin playing air sitar in the common area – Demyx jumping up and down on the couch doing scissor kicks and Xaldin writhing around on the coffee table – as Xigbar stood on an end table nearby, headbanging with his untied hair flying everywhere.

Then there was an entire page of pictures of just Roxas. Asleep with his head on the dining table next to his forgotten breakfast, holding up the bottom of his coat daintily as he tried to navigate the basement of the castle that one time that the whole place had flooded, curled up with a small stuffed bear tucked under his head like an extra pillow. There was one that showed just Roxas’s face, propped above his hand as he looked up at the camera from the book he was reading. He was smiling in a way that few people ever saw him smile.

Roxas hadn’t known he was being photographed in those other ones, but he remembered the day that Axel had taken the last one, and he stared at it dumbstruck. That had been taken months before he’d left, and there he was looking up at Axel with that look on his face. His heart constricted, and he wished he could have seen back then how he looked at Axel. He moved closer to the redhead and placed his hands gently on his slender shoulders as Axel flipped the page again.

Most of the pictures had not contained Axel himself, presumably since Axel was the photographer of them. This page, however, had a shot of him – he was standing with Larxene, who was wearing some sort of military dress uniform. Axel himself was sporting a full kimono. It was an elaborate red affair with a yellow and orange dragon winding its way around across the surface of it and a purple brocade obi. His hair was done up elaborately and he had all sorts of complicated dangles and pins stuck through it. He was also holding a fan up to his face and very visibly flirting with the camera as Larxene gave him a sidelong look of much put-upon irritation.

“That’s when Demyx directed us in his production of Madame Butterfly,” Axel explained. “Turns out we were terrible singers, but he just played the music so loudly no one could hear us and it turned out pretty awesome.” He looked up at Cloud and Leon. Cloud had his elbows on his knees and his face in his left hand. Leon was running his fingers through his hair.

“What’s the matter?” Roxas asked.

Leon sighed. “If we’re going to stop any repeats of what happened before, we have to keep in mind that the Organization was actually a dangerous group of individuals. And frankly, the air guitar and the underwear and the Broadway musicals are making it a little difficult to look at them that way.”

“They purposely overran worlds with countless heartless,” Cloud said.

“That’s true,” Axel said thoughtfully. “We were kind of evil, I guess. But we weren’t very good at it.”

“We sucked,” Roxas added. “I mean, really. We were pretty bad at what we did.”

“You might have been bad at it,” Riku said seriously, “but even when you’re bad at something of that scale, you can get a lot of shit done.”

Leon nodded. “Cloud and I are taking responsibility for keeping tabs on Xemnas and the others until we know there’s no threat. We’re just going to have to consider all of them dangerous until we can prove otherwise.”

“Except maybe that one,” Cloud said, pointing to a picture of Demyx sitting obliviously at a table with his shoelaces tied to the legs of his chair.

Axel and Roxas said at the same time, “Good call.”

Full stop.

Next time on Deae: Xigbar and Xaldin were on the verge of leaping up and making their dispute over Roxas’s chastity physical, but Luxord – who was sitting between them and had been watching and listening to the debate in silent amusement – held up a small notebook. He’d pulled it out of his pocket, and now he stood up and flipped it open to a page toward the middle, looking quite pleased with himself.

“If you recall, gentlemen,” he said happily, “we had a betting pool going on this very subject.”

Chapter 7