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Sora took a deep breath and stepped out onto the tower’s balcony. He could see Lea’s shock of hair silhouetted against the sunset. The former Nobody seemed not to notice him, staring into the distance.
They hadn’t really talked together, not yet, even though Lea had been around since he’d saved Sora during the Mark of Mastery exam. It sometimes seemed like Lea was actively avoiding him, and Sora could guess why.
It was probably similar to why Roxas was avoiding Lea.
Sora had been surprised when Roxas hadn’t come out to see Lea after the exam. With Xion it was a little less surprising, as none of them had remembered who she was yet, but even now both of his passengers seemed reluctant to approach their friend.
He had wound up asking Roxas flat out what was wrong.
I haven’t gone to talk to him because I don’t know how he’d react to me, Roxas had written in the notebook they used to communicate. I was friends with Axel, not Lea. I don’t know if he even has Axel’s memories, or feels the same way about me.
I think he definitely has Axel’s memories, Sora wrote back. He didn’t meet any of us as Lea, but he recognized us all and knew who Axel was.
That doesn’t mean he still thinks of me as a friend.
How could he not?! I know you know what Axel did just to try to get you back. Feelings like that don’t just go away, even if Lea is more, uh, socially conscious?
Roxas didn’t have an answer for him, but Sora was pretty sure he knew what was worrying his Nobody. What would it feel like, to have your closest friend simply not care about you anymore? Not forget you, not cease being friends with you, but simply not acknowledge you as anything other than a name they heard once or twice. Having to fight Riku had been bad enough for him; Sora couldn’t begin to contemplate what it would feel like if the other boy had stopped seeing their relationship as important, for whatever reason.
Xion hadn’t spoken up during their talk. Sora wasn’t sure if Roxas had realized that his worst fear had been exactly what had happened to her. Whether he had or not, it had to be making her uncomfortable. All it would take to bring back Lea’s memories of her would be the simple mention of her name – it was all that it had taken for Roxas’s and Riku’s memories of her to come back – but right now, Lea had to have no idea she had even existed, let alone was still alive in Sora’s heart.
Eventually Sora just couldn’t take it anymore, and had decided to cut the proverbial knot.
Moving from the balcony door, he walked over and took a seat by Lea.
“Come here often?” he asked. Lea started, having been lost in his own thoughts.
“Oh, hey Sora. Uh, I guess. Why?”
“I’ve seen you up here before, and you looked lonely, is all.”
Lea laughed, long and hard and humourlessly. “Now why would I be lonely? I’m only risking life and limb to fight my old boss’s boss, and maybe, if I’m very lucky, get back the only friend I’ve got left, if he’s even still alive. And I’m working with a bunch of people who don’t trust me because of the way I treated them in the past, even if it wasn’t the real me. No, life’s just a party for me right now, got it memorized?”
Sora wanted to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder, but figured that might be a bad idea. Instead, he said, quietly, “I’m sorry that Roxas had to disappear to bring me back.”
Lea stared at him, blindsided. “Oh. Uh. Hey, it’s not like you knew, right?”
“I’d like to think I’d have found another way if I had,” Sora said.
“Yeah, well, you didn’t know. That’s not on you,” Lea said.
The two were silent for a second, until Sora asked, “What was he like?”
“What?”
“What was Roxas like? I never got the chance to meet him, and I’ve been wondering.”
Lea leaned back on his hands and contemplated the question. “Roxas could be moody at times, especially when he felt like he was being left out of the loop, which was pretty often. But everything was new to him; he made me appreciate the world in a way I never thought about before.” He shot a look at Sora. “He was pretty loyal to his friends the same way you are, but you do more of the ‘righteous indignation’ sort of thing, and Rox was always more just plain angry. He couldn’t stand people being dismissive about…” he trailed off. “About… anyway, he would always stand up for what he thought was right, even if he didn’t really understand the situation. Got him in trouble more than a few times.” Lea cracked a grin. “You’d have liked him.”
“So you do remember him?”
Lea let out of bark of laughter. “What, you thought I wouldn’t ‘cause I was ‘Axel’ at the time? Nah, he was still me. I’d like to think I couldn’t be that callous, but I guess that’s what happens when you lose contact with your emotions. Nothing else to be.” He sighed. “I’ve got a lot to make up for. And I do remember it all.
“Wasn’t all bad, though. At the end of the day Rox and I would get ice cream in Twilight Town and hang out on the clocktower. A sort of tradition, just the two of us.” He frowned. Something seemed… off about that statement, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
Next to him, Sora shook his head a bit. “You know,” he said, grinning. “I used to do something like that with a friend of mine, too. We’d watch the sun set and talk about anything at all.” He laced his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes. “There was this one time he started off on a tangent on why the sunset was red. Something about the wavelengths of light and red being the longest, and travelling the furthest.”
Lea stiffened, because that sounded familiar. “Sora, that was a conversation I had with Roxas. Do you… do you have some of his memories?” Maybe that would explain why the kid had come to talk with him. A lingering nostalgia? It wasn’t like having his friend back, but maybe…
The kid sitting next to him cracked open one eye and regarded him with a sardonic grin. “Jeez, Axel. I’m not Sora. I’m me. Nobody else. I thought you had that memorized?”
For a barely a second there was a flash of hope, deep within Lea’s heart, but it was gone as soon as it arrived. “Sora, that’s not funny,” he said, trying and mostly failing not to be angry with the kid.
“It’s… Axel, it’s not a joke. It’s really me. I’m not dead.”
“What, he ‘lives on in your heart’ or something? It’s not funny, Sora. I have no idea what you think you’re trying to pull, but I don’t appreciate it and it’s pissing me off.” Lea pulled his legs onto the balcony and crossed his arms over his knees, resting his forehead on them.
Next to him, Sora grew quiet. “Axel, look at me,” he said.
“Stop calling me that, Sora.”
“Look at me.”
“Why? So I can see that you aren’t him? I’ve already got that memorized, I don’t need a reminder, Sora!”
“Apparently you do! Because for the last time, you jackass, I’m! Not! Sora!” And with that, the kid stood, grabbed Lea’s shoulder, and swung him around to face him. With a bit of shock, Lea noted anger, genuine anger, on Sora’s face, the kind he’s never seen before, not when he was gradually losing his memories, not when facing down the Organization.
But it was an expression he’d seen before.
And for a split second, so quickly that if you told him he’d imagined it, he would have believed you, a different face superimposed itself over Sora’s. The same blue eyes, but thinner cheeks, and untidy blond hair.
“…Roxas…?” he asked, desperately wanting to believe it, desperately wanting to avoid the pain of being wrong.
The kid breathed a sigh of relief with a smile, and released Lea’s shoulder, sitting back down beside him. “Jeez, took you long enough.”
“Roxas… It’s… you’re really…”
“Yeah, it’s really me.” Roxas grinned at him. “I’m sorta living in Sora’s heart at the moment. On account of not having a body of my own anymore.”
“…How?” Lea’s world was rapidly turning on its head, and he was struggling to keep up.
“You remember asking me if I was sure I didn’t have a heart that one time?” Lea nodded. “Well, apparently I did by the end of that year. And since I didn’t technically die when I rejoined Sora, my heart stuck around. Naminé was sure we’d just be absorbed, but–”
“Is Naminé still around, too?” Lea broke in.
“Huh? Oh yeah, she’s in Kairi now. She doesn’t like to talk much, though. I actually haven’t spoken with her yet.”
“Well… that’s… great.” Lea managed. So he’s actually working with three people with legitimate grievances against him. Well, that’s a problem for another day.
“So you’re just… inside Sora?” he asked.
“Yeah, kind of. I can see what he sees, and if he lets me, I can ‘drive’ for a bit. He doesn’t remember what I get up to, though, so we have to talk to each other through this.” He indicates the notebook strapped to his hip, the presence of which suddenly makes sense to Lea; Sora had usually left the notetaking to other people previously, and he’d been wondering.
“So what have you been up to, Axel? Sora and the rest don’t really talk about what you get up to, but I did see that you’re a Keyblade wielder now. How did that happen?”
“Well, if I was going to try to get Isa back from Xehanort’s control, what better way than to join up, right? So I went to the King and Yen Sid and asked. The old man wasn’t very enthusiastic, considering my, uh, track record. But his mousiness decided to give me a chance.”
“I’d imagine dying to save Sora might have put you on his good side.”
Lea chuckled. “More to save you, you understand.”
Roxas smiled. “I do.”
“Anyway,” Lea continued, “The King held out his Keyblade and made me hold it, and did this weird chant about oceans and stuff, and then they whisked me away to those three fairies to see if I had the potential. And,” he added, holding his hand out and summoning his fiery weapon, “apparently I did.”
“Wow. So that’s what your heart looks like, huh?”
“I guess? Seems about right.”
The two lapsed into a happy silence. Eventually Roxas leaned over and wrapped his arms around Lea. “I missed you, Axel,” he murmured.
“I missed you, too, Rox. But it’s Lea now, got it memorized?”
“Right, cause you’re not a Nobody anymore.”
“Now you’re catching on.”
The silence returned, and Lea looked over at the kid sitting next to him, remembering happy evenings at the Twilight Town clocktower.
So why did it feel off?
“Hey Roxas?” he asked, “Does something about this seem strange to you?”
Roxas cocked an eyebrow. “Other than the fact that I’m inhabiting someone else’s body?”
“Yeah, besides that. This is exactly what we used to do, but it feels like something’s missing. And before you start, it’s not the ice cream,” he added with a gentle warning glance to head off the inevitable snark. Roxas had learned well from him.
“The two of us on a tower at sunset. What else could be missing?” Roxas said. “Aside from the ice cream.”
Something was itching at the back of Lea’s skull, something that he knew was important but that avoided all attempts he made to nail it down. “It’s… Earlier, when I was describing you to Sora, I felt like I was forgetting something. The phrase ‘the two of us’ just sounds… I don’t know, wrong to me. And I don’t know why.”
“Like it wasn’t just the two of us?” Roxas asked, quietly.
“…I know it was just us two, but that sounds wrong. Saying it out loud, thinking about it, something’s missing. Like there’s a hole or something in my memory.”
“That might be because there is.”
Lea turned to look at his friend. “What do you mean?”
“If it feels like you’ve forgotten something important, it’s because you have. We all did, except Naminé.”
“What did we forget?” Lea asked, confused and concerned.
“Not what.”
“…no, it’s a who, isn’t it.” There was a certainty to the idea in Lea’s mind. “Who did we forget, Roxas?”
Roxas turned to meet his eyes. “Her name is Xion.”
And there was a sudden pain in Lea’s skull as the memory floodgates opened, and the image of a black-haired girl Roxas’s age seared itself back into his consciousness. Once he only thought of her as a puppet, but eventually became able to see her the same way Roxas had; as her own person, who (perhaps) had grown her own heart.
Harsh words, drawn weapons, seashells, ice cream, worry, laughter, threats, promises, none of which he realized he had forgotten, all came rushing back, filling holes he didn’t know were empty.
Oh. There was another promise to a friend he couldn’t keep.
“I’ll always be there… to bring you back,” he whispered, now understanding that the “you” had been plural.
Next to him, Roxas sighed. “I wish it was that easy.”
“Roxas, what happened to her? Why couldn’t I remember her?”
Tears misted in the corner of Roxas’s eyes. “You remember when the Organization set us against one another, told us to ‘eliminate the enemy’ that was each other in disguise?”
“Yeah.” The sight of his two best friends dueling to the death, clearly not recognizing each other, had been one of the most painful of his life.
“Well… apparently it was always going to come down to that.” Roxas continued on to talk about how Xion had taken on Sora’s appearance in full, and had forced him to fight her until he killed her. “She was made from Sora’s memories, and those memories had to go back to him. She had accepted that, and thought that if she sacrificed herself, I could survive. Which, as we’re both aware, was not the case,” he said, with a humourless laugh. “She said she was glad she was able to meet the both of us, and died in my arms. Then the memories returned to Sora, and she vanished, like she never existed. And our memories of her faded, like everyone’s who ever met her.” A single tear rolled down the side of his face. He didn’t seem to notice.
Lea sat back and tried to process that, but all he could come up with was a single word.
“Bullshit.”
“What?”
“I said, that’s bullshit. She was her own person, with her own life, and her own memories. Those didn’t just vanish with her! She was a real person, who cares if she ‘came from Sora’s memories’ or whatever?! There was enough of her that was distinctly her, that was Xion, not ‘replica of Sora’, that taking away the bits that were Sora should have just left her as herself! What the hell?!”
“I watched her die, Axel.”
“The hell you did, Roxas! If you had a heart, if Axel had a heart, then Xion definitely had a heart, too! You didn’t disappear when you went back to Sora, so why should she have?!” Lea was on his feet now, feeling anger, real, not mimicked, genuine anger for the first time since he’d come back to himself. It felt good, to feel.
“She has to still be out there, somewhere. And we’re going to find her.”
“Find her?” Roxas asked. “How? Her body’s gone, Axel.”
“I don’t care. What’s the point of a Keyblade if I can’t help my friends? ‘So long as you champion the ones you love,’ got it memorized? I made a promise, and I’m going to bring the both of you home.”
His righteous tirade came to a jarring stop when Roxas wrapped his arms around Lea’s waist. “I really am glad, that I have best friends like the two of you,” he said.
Or someone did.
Lea looked down in shock at Sora’s face again, and this time, instead of Roxas’s face superimposing itself, the face of a young girl with dark hair flashed over Sora’s. “Xion?” he said.
“Yep.”
“You’re inside Sora, too?”
“Yep.”
“And…”
“Not dead.”
“Good. Um. I’m going to sit down now. Would you mind, you know, explaining?” Lea was having something of a day.
The girl laughed and sat beside him. “Basically, you’re right. Despite everything, I did have a heart of my own. When I died,” and she patted his arm as he flinched, “my heart latched on to Roxas’s. When he went back to Sora, I came with him, and here I am.”
Lea suddenly realized that Roxas had been referring to her in the present tense, save when describing past events. He had known, the twerp, and let him think she was gone anyway.
“Remind me to punch Roxas when he gets his body back. He had me believing you were dead.”
Xion laughed. “Well, I sort of am. I did die, you know.”
“Yeah, if you want to get technical, I did, too. Or Axel did, anyway.”
“That’s right, you aren’t a Nobody anymore. So your name is…” she pursed her lips, trying to figure out a name from the letters “a”, “e”, and “l”. “Ale?”
Now Lea was laughing. “Close, it’s Lea.”
Xion smiled. “I’ll get it memorized.”
The smile slid off of Lea’s face. “Look, uh… I’m sorry for–”
“Don’t start,” Xion cut him off. “Forgetting me wasn’t your fault. Besides, you were ready at a moment’s notice to find me again the second you thought my death sounded suspect. It means a lot.”
“Not just for that. For everything I did while we were in the Organization. If I hadn’t brought you back…”
“Someone else would have. And they might have actually killed me. You’re forgiven, Lea.”
He looked up in surprise. “Oh. That’s… okay. A bit unexpected.”
Xion smiled. “We’re friends. Best friends. Friends forgive each other. It all turned out okay, anyway. I can still be with the two of you.”
Lea considered this for a minute. “The way I see it, my job’s only half done right now.”
“Half done?”
“I promised that no matter where you go, I’d always bring the two of you back. Well, you’re not dead, so that’s a start, but I’m not leaving you inside Sora. He’s a nice guy and all, but I want to sit on that clocktower in Twilight Town with both of my best friends again. At the same time. Which means, I’m going to figure out a way to get the two of you your bodies back.”
Xion smiled and hugged him again. It was a little odd, especially considering it was still Sora’s body, but it was nice. Today seemed to be the day for receiving things he didn’t know he had been missing.
Sora blinked and opened his eyes. He was still on the tower balcony, sitting next to Lea, who was watching him with an amused look.
“So,” he asked as soon as his eyes refocused. “Did you get to talk to Roxas?”
Lea smiled. “I did. Xion, too.”
“You remember her now? That’s great!” Sora grinned. Apparently this had gone better than he’d hoped.
“Thanks, Sora. For saving them. For keeping them safe.” There was a curiously serious look on Lea’s face now. Sora thought about it for a second and realized the former Nobody was out of practice in arranging his face to show gratitude.
“Least I could do after what they gave up for me. Even though it’s not like I consciously did anything,” he said.
“Still, thanks.” Lea shifted and got up. “Well, at least now I’m surer of what I’m doing here.” At Sora’s confused look, he added, “I’m going to get Isa back from Xehanort, and I’m going to get Roxas and Xion their bodies back.”
Sora smiled again. “Anything I can do to help, just let me know.”
Lea smiled, too. “Thanks. First things first, though. Gotta stop the thirteen old codgers or whatever. Then I’m going to go have a long conversation with Even. If anyone knows anything about building bodies, it’d be him.”
“I think I know a guy in Halloween Town that might be able to help,” Sora mused. “With a way to put a heart in a body, at least.”
This was the happiest Lea had felt in years. He had a job, he had a plan, and nothing was going to get in his way. “I can’t wait to see them again.”
“I’m looking forwards to getting to meet them myself,” Sora said. “Also, so they can flirt without me having to see it. It gets awkward.”
“So they can what?”