Title: Reason to Cry
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Pairing: Past Isa/Lea, Past Axel/Saïx
Rating: Mature
Length: 1,717 words
Content notes: Contains descriptions of unconventional violence and BDSM-adjacent activities.
Summary: A missing scene fic. There's one thing Axel remembers more vividly than anything else, because it's the one thing that hurts the most.



“So what was it like,” Roxas asked, over ice cream under the canopy of the sunset, “back when you were a human? What were you like?”

Axel knew why Roxas was asking, so he shouldn’t have been too surprised that Roxas did ask. They’d been talking about what set the members of the Organization apart from other Nobodies (well, all the members of the Organization except for Roxas and Xion) so the question was bound to come up. Of course Roxas wanted to know.

“Well, let me see…” Axel began. He threw his memory back, carding through all that he could recall of that time, trying to find something useful enough to tell Roxas about. One memory in particular was quick to jump out at him from the fray. He paused. Of all the things that could come to mind, huh. Figures it’d be this.

-------

Isa’s eyes had always flashed a cool blue, a clear sky, since they were kids. But things were different that night.

“What’s this about, anyway?” Lea whispered at Zexion, jogging up to where Zexion was walking in front of him. They were all walking in a single file with Lea at the tail-end of the line.

“You need to be quiet,” Zexion whispered back, not turning to look at Lea. “I’m sure we’ll be shown soon enough.”

“I usually follow after Isa,” Lea retorted. “Why’s he all the way up at the front with Xemnas this time?”

“Our leader,” Zexion corrected, “has plans for him. What they are I don’t know. Now, enough.” As if his words weren’t final enough, Zexion’s tone of voice made it clear that Lea’d get in a lot more trouble if he kept talking.

Lea frowned, glancing up ahead again. Isa was close behind Xemnas—their leader, whatever—with Xigbar following close behind. The rest of the line trailed back to Lea from there. What did any of this have to do with saving that girl, Isa? Was that really the reason they were all here now, following Xemnas and Isa in their climb up to the top of this castle?

Maybe once it would have been, but Lea’s not stupid. Sure, it had started out that way, with Isa wanting to find and save the girl they used to visit, that much was true. When they’d first shown up on Ansem the Wise’s doorstep ready to make apprentices of themselves, Ansem and all his existing apprentices were already wrapped up in this “Organization”—Isa said it only made sense for him and Lea to go along with it, too, might bring them closer to their goal.

But Lea had begun to feel a shift in the goalposts pretty soon after he and Isa had joined their ranks. Something had changed. Lea didn’t know what it was exactly. What he did know was that this had nothing to do with that girl any more… it hadn’t had anything to do with that girl for a while.

Their upward climb reached a peak and they all spilled out on to the Altar of Naught (as Xigbar had called it, back when he’d shown Isa and Lea around this place for the first time). Lea stayed back with the others as they gathered around the edges, but all the while his stare was fixed on Isa, Xemnas, and Xigbar, who now moved to the center of the altar. Lea wondered what that was all about.

Xemnas murmured something to Isa. Lea couldn’t hear a word of it, but it must have been a command, based on what happened next.

Apparently without saying anything in reply, Isa put his hand to his chest. Isa's hand slid down the front of his body. His zipper came apart in two. His coat broke open and slipped down his shoulders, baring his back, his lower back, his hips, his…

Lea couldn’t help the redness that broke out across his face even as he could barely believe what he was seeing. The coat fell from Isa’s body to the steel flooring at his feet. Pale and bare, Isa’s body was exposed for everyone to see.

Beneath his own coat, Lea’s skin suddenly felt dirty. The first time he and Isa had shown themselves to each other, it'd been shy and fumbling and slow, like it was special. After so many years of friendship spilling into attraction neither of them wanted to admit until they couldn't deny it any more, it had felt like it meant something, when Isa finally let Lea see him. Felt like Lea meant something.

Now, naked except for the boots on his feet, Isa kneeled down before Xemnas at the center of the altar. Behind Isa, Xigbar crouched down and did… something to him. Only when Xigbar returned to his full height and stepped back did Lea get to see what. Xigbar had fastened Isa’s wrists to his ankles with a sharp, black chain, locking Isa into this kneeling position he was in.

Xigbar gripped the back of Isa’s head. He shoved it forward, forcing Isa look up at Xemnas.

No…

Lea knew no one was 'forcing' Isa do anything. Because Isa wasn’t fighting it. His shoulders weren’t rigid. The slope of his neck was easy, willing, as if Isa wanted this… and it dawned on Lea with all the coldness of the moon rising in the sky that Isa had been wanting this for a while.

The moon was behind Xemnas now. With Isa kneeling before him, looking up at him, Xemnas drew back, stepped aside. He cleaved himself away and invited Isa to meet uninterrupted with the moon above.

When the moon pierced through Isa, he began to scream. He arched his back and screamed and shook and raged with the moon in his eyes. The hairs along his bared body tore upward like heckles along his skin, Lea used to run his fingers over that skin where only he and Isa could see, used to comb through the feathery crop of hair that always fell so serenely in strands on Isa’s shoulders—strands that now flared up all around his head like a fire way too dangerous for even Lea to touch.

“Stop it!” Lea shouted, to Xemnas and Xigbar, to the others, to anyone but Isa because Isa couldn’t listen like this and probably was too far gone to want to listen anyway. Isa’s screaming burned all other sounds to a crisp. Lea made to run over to him when hands clamped down on his shoulders and he was pulled back by Vexen and Zexion. He struggled against them, but like everyone else in this Organization, they weren’t afraid to use force. Lea ended up falling to his knees from a kick to the legs.

“Be a good boy,” hissed Vexen. “It’s your turn next, remember.”

Lea gritted his teeth. He resisted the urge to spit on Vexen’s boots but there was nothing he could do about the stinging pain that pricked the corners of his eyes. It was so stupid. So… so freaking stupid. If Isa had been here by Lea’s side, he would have told him not to cry. He’d’ve wiped the tears away like he usually did, tell Lea there wasn’t any reason to cry. Usually when he said that, he was right.

The chains between Isa’s wrists and ankles rattled in desperation, all of Isa glowing with the same amber light as the heart-shaped moon in the sky.

“My Luna Diviner.” Xemnas’s voice echoed across the altar, into the ground. Lea could feel it in his knees, dark and foreboding. “I will give you the sigil of the Recusant, so that yours…” Xemnas placed his hands on Isa’s shoulders, “…will be the name of Saïx.”

They learned it in school together, Lea and Isa. When you grow up, you can become somebody. Chained and shackled to the floor, what was becoming of Isa now? Lea’s shoulders shook as he cried, laughed, he couldn’t tell anymore. A rough hand seized his shoulder, not that it did much to snap him out of his crying. “Get up.” Vexen. Lea let himself be hauled back to his feet.

Isa? Isa hadn’t changed. Isa was gone.

Through the blur of tears, the shape of Xemnas stepped toward Isa again. In silence, he made two slashing motions that Lea didn’t understand and wouldn’t understand until later.

When he came face to face with Saïx much later, Lea didn’t cry about what he saw. He reminded himself that Isa had wanted this, and he told himself that that’s why he didn’t cry about it, that that’s why he wasn’t crying about it when he saw the sharp points along the shell of Saïx’s ears, the cold amber in Saïx’s eyes. Isa had wanted this. So Lea didn’t cry. He lost the name he’d always wanted people to remember him by, he went on to follow Saïx into darker and deeper depths, and he didn’t cry at all. It wasn’t like he couldn’t cry anymore. It wasn’t like he let Isa take that away from him, too.

Axel sucked on the bite of ice cream in his mouth until it was a hollow, tasteless crust of ice. He crunched it with his teeth, swallowed. “Well, I was still me,” said Axel. “Except, maybe I was a bit more emotional. Sure, we Nobodies can still feel things like anger and hate, but emotions like sadness, hurt, happiness, love… you need a heart to feel all that stuff. So when you’re a human, you feel all those things. Not that that’s a very helpful answer.”


“That’s okay,” said Roxas, thoughtfully taking a bite of his ice cream. “I guess it was kinda a stupid question to start with.”

“Nah. I get it. You can’t remember, so you wanna know.”



“I wish I did. I wish I knew what any of that felt like,” said Roxas, and gazed out at the sunset over the tram line and the treetops.

Axel glanced at Roxas. Was Roxas really the worse off of the two of them? Roxas couldn’t remember the past, but… on the other hand, Roxas wasn’t cursed to keep his memories in his skin even as he’d been stripped of everything else, either.

“Really?” Axel said, unsure. “It’s just baggage, you know.”