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Training is long and hard and unforgiving. Lea feels everything so much more clearly now he is a Somebody again. He would never feel the aches of wielding a weapon as much before, could ignore the heat of his flames easily before, he wouldn’t ponder to consequences of his actions before.
Kairi and he lay on their backs, catching their breath after the last sparring session of the day. Yen Sid had already left to climb to the top of his tower with an unknowing expression on his face.
Kairi is slowing unwinding the bandages around her hands, once again forgetting to put on her gloves that morning, she stretched her aching fingers, poking at the forming callouses.
Lea craved sea-salt ice cream.
Kairi’s phone beeps and she smiles at the screen as she reads the message.
“Sora has found out something that might help get Roxas back, and that other girl.” Kairi looks over to Lea, waving the device in his face.
Lea is still staring up at the sky, he puts a hand up to swat away the phone before staring at his glove. The leather at the tips of his fingers seems to be warped some. Disfigured from years of wear and heat.
“That’s,” he pauses for a moment, folding his arms under his head, “good.”
Kairi stares at him hard, like she can hear how hard his heart is beating, can hear his racing thoughts.
“What are you so afraid of? Lea?” She questions him, legs folded and leaning on one hand.
Lea blows out a sigh, a stand of hair moves off his face, he closes his eyes.
“I don’t know,”
He can see them, both of them, barely. On top of the tower, laughing as though they can actually feel happiness, eating the slowly melting ice cream.
“What if I changed too much?”
Was he still the person he remembers? How much as Axel was Lea? How much of Axel did he take with him?
He still wears the cloak, he can’t take it off, not yet. He’s been wearing it for too many years now, it felt like a second skin. One that tried to suffocate him.
He had a Keyblade now; he fought against his old allies. He held himself to a certain moral standard that he never even thought about before.
Did he still speak the same? Did he make different jokes now? Did he walk differently now? He always felt off-balance now, holding one weapon instead of two.
“And what if, I didn’t change enough?”
Roxas once told him he smelt of smoke, like the aftermath of a fire. Lea always thought Axel smelt of something burning, he ran too hot, always. Always just one snap away from incinerating whatever he desired, whatever the Organisation desired. More than once he had woken to a bed on fire, had seen black footprints from soot following him down hallways, felt the ends of his hair crisp and fall out.
He never told Roxas what his role was, what Axel’s true role was. He probably could have guessed. He did control the Assassins after all.
The icky jobs are what he called them, such an understatement of what they were. The Organisation’s dirty work. He took out anyone or anything that stood in the way of their mission. And now, he is so ashamed to even think it, but for a while, he even liked it. Before he met Roxas, and before his heart started to feel again, solving those problems almost made him feel something.
Maybe that feeling was regret.
He looks in the mirror sometimes and thinks, thinks for a moment he can still see those tears carved into his face. What sort of joke was that? A Nobody that looked like they were endlessly crying. He looked like a clown; he felt like a monster.
Kairi grabs his arm, forcing him to look over at her.
“Lea,” She doesn’t have much else to say, but the look on her face relives Lea. For all, he had done to her, done to her friends, and she, a Princess of Heart, willing to forgive a traitor like him, it helped slow his racing heart.
He picks himself off the ground, staring off into the endless void of this world.
“Sometimes, I think,” Lea mutters, “my sins have followed me here.”
He wonders back to the tower, hands in pockets, thinking out a blonde boy smiling during a sunset.