Beast's Castle, Second Visit:
In Which Family Means Something
They met Namine at the top of the stairs; her eyes were wide, alarmed, and flew over them all as if to make sure they were still in one piece. "You..." she said, hushed. The fact that they were intact didn't seem to reassure her at all.
Poor Namine. Roxas told her simply, "The Organization just wanted to show off and make threats. They haven't made a move against us -- yet."
The set of her shoulders eased slightly, and her gaze settled on Axel, thoughtful. If she planned to say anything, Leon spoke first, saying, "I don't know who the Organization is. Or why... Braig was with them." His face twisted a little, but Roxas almost didn't notice, too startled at that name. Xigbar's Somebody's name... "And I won't ask now. You said -- they were worried."
They-- Yuffie and the others! Roxas was impressed he could even remember that, after what had just happened, and he hurried to say, "Yes, of course. Let's head back."
"But," Leon said, tired eyes meeting his, "I want explanations later."
Roxas nodded, saying nothing. That wasn't a conversation he would be looking forward to, but he deserved the explanation -- and it was probably much more dangerous for him to know only half the story.
They reached Merlin's house without incident, but when Leon's hand was an inch from the doorknob the door swung open. Yuffie stepped out and looked up at Leon with a solemn, blank expression. She didn't move or speak for a long beat, until Leon shifted, uncomfortably. "Well," he said, "I'm glad to see you're not going to overreact--"
Then she threw herself at him, so hard that he nearly fell to the floor, and Roxas could dimly hear her ranting about his disappearance, and what a huge jerk he was, and how protecting the town was a lame excuse, but there was nothing really audible until she whipped around and shouted, "Aerith! Aerith, he's all right!" at a nearly deafening volume.
"Of course I'm all right," Leon said, to no one in particular. "Why wouldn't I be?" He was blocking the doorway; Roxas shoved him into the house, and Yuffie took the cue, dragging the tall man further in by the wrist.
The staircase had returned on the right-hand wall, and Aerith descended it slowly, with one hand on the banister. She paused at the landing to watch Leon, and then seated herself casually on a step and leaned over her knees to beam at him, an expression far more real than anything else Roxas had seen from her in the last few days. "Welcome back," she said.
"That's all you're going to say to him?!" Yuffie demanded.
"He knows," Aerith said. "And he also knows that he's never leaving this house on his own again." She smiled at him.
Leon almost smiled back, just a faint twitch of his lips that Roxas would've missed if he hadn't been waiting for his reaction to that announcement, and then he looked away. "I can take care of myself."
"Oh yeah, that's why Roxas had to come save you. Right, Roxas?" Yuffie's teasing didn't sound half as sarcastic as it usually did, and when she grabbed Roxas's hand she squeezed it so tight that it could only have been gratitude.
Roxas grinned, very slightly. "I'm sure he can take care of himself, but I wouldn't want to argue with either of you about it."
"Who's arguing?" Leon asked, very slightly amused, but he was moving over to the stairs to take Aerith's hand, light and intimate, and then they spoke in hushed voices.
Well. Roxas glanced at the others, eyebrows raised. Yuffie was smirking, but Axel only rolled his eyes, and then he had to bite back another grin. But he realized, looking at them, that they were all exhausted -- the long day, and the battles, and the confrontations having taken its toll on them. And Leon would only be even more tired.
He lifted his voice to say, "Now that Leon's back, I think everyone in this house needs to go to bed."
There was some grumbling from his audience, but no real objections. Everyone filed out of the room, with Roxas, Axel, and Namine bringing up the rear. The tension in the house had faded away -- something Roxas had barely noticed for three days, a stinging wound that had now finally healed over. They really were like a family -- if something happened to one of them, the others mourned.
This was a family... not the Organization. Roxas remembered the aftermath of the Castle Oblivion incident quite well. Traitors aside, Vexen and Lexaeus and Zexion's "brothers" hadn't mourned them for very long. Once they were gone, it was as if they had never been there in the first place.
He thought about it, as he was getting into bed. It was strange -- and not the only thing just slightly out of place about that encounter.
"If they had really wanted to break down that gate, they could have, easily," Roxas said to the dark room. "Probably, they wanted to make Leon into a Nobody... right?"
Axel was silent for so long that Roxas thought he might not have heard, and then he said, quiet and tired, "Go to sleep."
But he stayed awake for a long time.
The next morning there was a knock on the door, stirring Roxas from sound sleep; Axel was already awake, and darted Roxas a quick look before moving to open it. "What?" he said, ungraciously. Roxas hid a sleepy smirk in his pillow.
"Sorry to wake you," said Aerith's voice. "But a message arrived for you a little while ago, and he said it was very important."
"Who said?"
Roxas sat up, rubbing at the corners of his eyes, and so he could see Aerith's head tilt thoughtfully to the side. "The mouse."
By the time Roxas came out of the bathroom, dressed and refreshed, Namine had joined Axel in the hallway, toying uneasily with her zipper. They both looked up to see him.
"So, just to get this out of the way," Axel said, a hint of dryness in his voice. "We all know we're talking about the king rodent, right?"
Namine murmured, "Aerith said the same thing. She said Merlin took the message, though, and didn't think to keep him there..."
Roxas shrugged into his vest. "So what did he want? What was this message?"
Axel rubbed the side of his nose with one finger. He glanced at Namine, and then told Roxas lazily, "Something about leaving things unfinished, people needing our help, donating to worthy charities... That sort of thing."
"He said that the Beast needs your help," Namine said, a little bit more useful. "You went there and did something for him, didn't you? But he's still in trouble, and King Mickey said that there wasn't much time left."
Roxas eyed her for a minute and decided not to ask how she knew about that. "He means Xaldin," he said, half to himself. "But I'm not... sure it's wise to get in Xaldin's way."
Xigbar was the Organization's second in command, but Xaldin was a half-step behind him, perhaps less. They were two sides of a coin: the genial and cooperative 'good cop' and the strict and authoritarian 'bad cop' -- only you coudn't turn your back on the good cop and the bad cop wasn't playing a role. To antagonize Xaldin now, when last night Xigbar had only lightly decided to help them, would certainly be opening a closed issue for reconsideration.
"I'm not Sora," Roxas said, mutedly. "I'm not going to go running around the multiverse because someone somewhere is crying. I want to make my own choices, not live for other people."
"But can you just ignore it if someone is crying right in front of you?" Namine pressed, almost sounding sad herself. "If it's someone you know? Can you walk away, and still be okay with that?"
Roxas hesitated, unsure. He glanced at Axel, and caught just a glimpse of the redhead's tight expression before it relaxed away. Axel said, shrugging, "Don't look at me. I'm just along for the ride."
Eternally unhelpful. Roxas waited a few beats longer, thinking, but the image of Belle, mourning, or worse... Damnit. It made his heart twist unpleasantly, to know he could've done something about it.
"Open a corridor," he said finally. "If the King thought it was so important he'd drop us a line, I guess we should check it out."
Namine smiled at him, a small sign of approval, and then reached behind her, with one hand summoning a corridor, leading away into swirling darkness. She drew the hood of her sweater up over her head; Axel and Roxas exchanged a glance, sharing a brief moment of Wish I still had a hood to pull up, before they steeled themselves and followed.
They came out in the courtyard of the Beast's castle, and Axel stopped still immediately. "Something's wrong," he said stiffly.
"What?" Namine asked, and then Roxas snapped, "He's right, there's Heartless!" The atmosphere of the world was so dark that even Roxas could sense it tingling over his skin -- dangerously close to the brink of sinking from the realm of light -- but the overpowering hunger of the Heartless made the air tense before they appeared. A half-dozen Armored Knights dropped to the ground and ran their greedy yellow eyes over all of them before fixing on Roxas.
That was fast, Roxas thought grimly, summoning his keyblades. He wondered belatedly if he should change out the keychain -- try Stiltzkin's keyblades out -- but now wasn't the time. The Heartless were already sidling for him, and Xaldin was here, right now, if this darkening aura was any indication.
A rush of air surrounded him suddenly, a protective barrier, and Roxas tossed Namine a quick smile before running forward. She was making good use of her magic, better than he was -- but he had never used light as readily as the other Nobodies had used their elements. The light was a brutal weapon in The World That Never Was, overkill more often than not, and it unsettled his own allies to see him use it. Reminded, he glanced at Axel, but the redhead seemed shaken, not nearly as quick with his flames as Roxas had expected.
"What is it?" Roxas called out to him, pummeling a Knight and then darting away. Namine's lightning crashed down on top of it as he left it behind, finishing it off. He could barely hear Axel's response over the sounds of the battle, and scowled to himself. It just wasn't like Axel.
"Hey," he said again, sliding back closer to him, where Axel was almost absently holding off a Soldier, without enthusiasm. "What gives?" He focused his will and called the light in pillars around him, spiraling out and breaking apart any Heartless caught in their path -- it didn't feel so much like overkill when Axel was only half-fighting.
There was no expression on Axel's face, and he was looking straight ahead at the Heartless as if Roxas weren't there at all. "I don't know why I couldn't hear it before... But now I can."
"Hear what?" Roxas said, glancing briefly at him.
"The Assassins. They're screaming."
"What?" He thought for a beat that he had heard wrong, and directed a wild look at the older man. Axel's face was blank, only lending to the surreal moment; surely he should've been... angry, shocked, horrified. "Screaming? W, why?"
Axel shook his head briefly, as if denying it -- or physically trying to shake off what he was hearing. "Because they're in pain," he said, his voice so subtly thick.
Roxas surged closer, grabbing his arm, and demanded, "Call them! Call them here, hurry--"
"It could be a trap," Axel snapped back at him, but the look he gave Roxas was less angry and more... torn, hurt. Then he shook off the younger boy's hand and turned away. "We can't risk it."
Namine stared back and forth between them, desolate, and then drew up a dome of air around the three of them that Roxas barely noticed. Somewhere, the Assassins were in terrible pain, screaming in Axel's mind -- and Roxas had a sick feeling that he was right, that this was the Organization's doing, a trick to lure them into misstepping, or intended to warn or unsettle them.
And it didn't matter. "Call them," Roxas repeated after a long moment to breathe. "We'll be ready. But if you don't call them--" His expression tightened. Stupid, incredibly stupid, half-suicidal creatures that they were... "You know what they'll do to themselves."
Axel held still for a long moment, the set of his back unchanged, and then very slowly he tipped his head back. The air twisted immediately, pulsed and then welled with darkness as first three, then four Assassins appeared. They were slow to move, not as sinuous as they usually were, a side-effect of their terrible condition: strips of white flesh had been torn off, several spiny razorblades missing entirely, and they bled a thick silver, dissolving from their bodies in acidic dark clouds before it could drip away. Namine's horrified gasp was the only sound beyond the whirl of wind around them.
What the hell-- could do this to them? Roxas thought, paralyzed for a brief moment, and then he forced himself to step forward, raising Oblivion above his head and willing the Cure spell to work on the Assassins as well as it had on Axel. A cascade of green energy filtered down around them, and bit by bit the silver blood stopped, the dark mist around them lessened, and they seemed to move with less pain. One lashed, turning lightly in the air to fix its dark gaze on Roxas, and he held his breath.
If they were going to attack, now would be the time. If Xemnas had control of them...
But the Assassin said, hollow voice echoing in his mind in a raw whisper, You... were worth it.
Roxas went still, trying not to think, So this was because of me. It was an honor to be spoken to, rare for a servant Nobody to speak to anyone other than their master, and even moreso if this sacrifice was acceptable to them, for his sake. He bowed his head a little in acknowledgment.
"The others?" Axel said, his expression still distant. "Dead?"
"It can't be," Namine said, hushed, and Axel stiffened further at the sound of her voice. "All but these four...?"
Apparently Axel received the confirmation he needed, and his head jerked to the side. "I told them to hide," he said in terse explanation. "When" --his gaze darted to Namine-- "we went into the mansion in Twilight Town. I told them to get far away, and stay there. I thought... it would keep them safe from the Organization." His lips twisted bitterly. "Stupid thought."
So it really was the Organization, Roxas thought, his suspicions confirmed, and he felt anger settle in the pit of his stomach -- a cold fury, deep and dark enough to burn without heat.
"Whoever is responsible for this is dead," he said coolly. He'd demand no less for anyone's servants. "What happened?"
Axel didn't look at him directly. "--Xemnas won't take it so well if we start going after Organization members."
"You don't get a vote," Roxas told him. If Axel was too numb to indulge in the anger -- the rage -- that Roxas knew very well he should be feeling, Nobody or otherwise... then Roxas would just have to indulge for him. He glanced over the Assassins, calculating. They weren't small creatures, at all; man-height, long and lanky, like their master, there weren't many Nobodies who had the sheer size to do something this brutal to them. "Was it Saix?"
A Heartless screeched outside the air barrier, but only Namine jumped. Finally Axel said, "Yes. There were -- Berserkers. A lot of them."
There was something else. Something he wasn't saying. Roxas felt himself go still. Something worse than the systematic slaughter of his servants?
"They were eating them," Axel said distantly.
Eating...?
Roxas felt his breath speeding up. It was strange, how he could feel so still and so cold when all the world felt like it was burning down around him -- the air rushing in and out of his lungs scalding, like he was trying to surface from a blazing inferno. But he couldn't let go of anger. Couldn't let go of hatred. And they were holding him down, until
The world fell away, and he sucked in a lungful of cool, serene water as he plummeted through a dark ocean. The only color in the whole world was directly below him
A stained-glass mosaic, blue and red and yellow.
NEXT >>> Beast's Castle, Second Visit (Part 2)