FicWad

He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see. He thought he could see black, but it wasn't seeing, it was the absence of sight - he couldn't feel his legs, arms, neck - couldn't open his mouth to scream - couldn't feel his feet to run - he didn't exist, nothing more than a detached consciousness trapped in the emptiest of spaces -

- and then oxygen rushed back into his deflated lungs with a whoosh, and there was solid ground under his feet, and he collapsed with a bruising thud onto an unforgiving surface. When Demyx tentatively squinted his eyes open, slitting them against the glare of sunlight, it was only to discover that Axel was standing next to him perfectly unharmed and with a vaguely amused expression.

"Won't bite, huh?" Demyx croaked as he levered himself onto his feet, his voice as unsteady as his legs. Maybe he had been screaming after all.

Axel shrugged eloquently, one-shouldered. "Eh, you get used to it," he answered dismissively, withdrawing the hand he'd offered to help Demyx up when Demyx did it by himself. "You're alive, aren't you?"

"Barely." Demyx dusted off his rag-worn jeans with his palms and turned in a slow circle, taking in his unfamiliar surroundings with steadily increasing awe.

No wonder it had been so bright when he'd opened his eyes: three suns perforated the pale pink sky, surrounding the landscape in a wash of light that was disconcerting until Demyx realized it was because there were no shadows. They had landed on a strip of what looked like pavement but was too smooth and seamless to be made of concrete, alongside a roadway narrower than any roads back home - and it was suspended in the air the same way as an overpass, with glass-and-steel buildings beneath, but when he stepped to the edge to look over there were no supports beneath. The whole thing was hanging in midair, held up by some force he couldn't see. Demyx stepped back, dizzy.

"I'm either dreaming," he announced, still eyeing the expanse of glittering city before them, "or I've gone mad, or I've somehow gotten dropped in the middle of a fairy story." Demyx ground the heels of his palms against his eyes, but when he opened them again, it hadn't gone away. "Hey, Axel, you a fairy or something?"

He turned around and stopped again. Axel was leaning against the biggest, most beautiful motorcycle Demyx had ever seen, its motor purring impatiently: all polished chrome and ebony paint, although the elaborate flames were a bit too clichéd for Demyx's tastes. Suddenly the narrow width of the freeway made more sense. "Nah," Axel shot back, grinning. "Not quite." His jeans tightened across his thighs as he slung himself easily over the seat, fitting into it as easily as if it were part of him; his black-gloved hands tightened around the handlebars, and the motor throbbed. "Coming?"

Demyx opened his mouth and then shut it again. He'd never been on a motorcycle - a fact that now seemed both a shame and a terrible danger. You don't even know this guy, don't do it, said his brain, and "Yeah," said his mouth, as he stepped forward and gingerly slid into the seat behind Axel. The redhead gunned the motor with that smile of his.

"Hold on," he called, and the motorcycle bucked to life and raced away down the highway.

"Hold onto what?" Demyx was screaming, but the wind snatched his words away and left them far behind. He clamped his fingers around Axel's shoulders white-knuckled, but that was hardly a reassuringly safe handhold, so with a thousand misgivings he slid his arms down and wrapped them around Axel's waist. This was a slightly more secure position, but Demyx had qualms about grabbing the waist of a strange guy.

The curious and easily distracted mind of the young man, however, was soon diverted by the landscape they were zooming past. Buildings of spun glass and spidery steel melted away into steep hills, coated with what looked like tall grass but was red instead of green: in their valleys grew copses of trees, and at their crests flourished expanses of mustard-coloured flowers. Beyond it all glittered a vast and horizonless ocean, as rosy-hued as the sky overhead. If he unfocused and let it slide by, everything became a washed-together slur of colour, vaguely reminiscent of shape and form but lacking both.

The highway took a steep dive downwards. Demyx screeched and wrapped his arms tighter around Axel's ribcage as the motorcycle roared down the incline, Axel as exuberantly carefree and gunning the engine as if he didn't realize how easy it would be for them to fall off and get totally killed. Clenching his eyes shut and grinding his teeth, Demyx bowed his head and waited for the inevitable.

Eventually, however, he felt a distinct decrease in the sensation that he was about to go flying over the handlebars; he took the risk of opening his eyes a hairline crack, and discovered that the highway had leveled out once again and now ran through the hills with the scarlet-coloured grass fringing the sides. Through the gaps in the hilltops Demyx could see the glint of the sea. Within minutes, it was that same sea that they approached, the not-quite-cement giving way to sand that the spinning wheels beneath them kicked up in a fine spray not unlike water.

Demyx was beginning to be afraid that Axel would drive straight into the ocean - it wouldn't surprise him, though, with everything else that had happened, if water was suddenly as solid as ground - when the redhead pulled up sharply and spun the bike to the side, spraying a wave of sand across the beach. As soon as they were stopped Demyx disentangled himself from Axel and clambered off, hopping several steps to his right before he regained his balance. He wanted nothing to do with that terrifying machine anymore.

Axel was slower about getting off, but when he did, he let the motorcycle collapse sideways into the sand with a whump, not even looking backwards at it. He strode past Demyx without a look for him, either: in a few paces he broke into a headlong sprint, his feet leaving sharp-edged imprints in wet sand, and launched himself arms-first into the most graceful swan dive Demyx had ever seen. He vanished beneath the water with a magnificent splash.

Demyx sat down heavily on the sand. "I'm trapped on a beach with a crazy guy in a different world," he tried. That didn't sound realistic even to him. "I'm dreaming that I'm trapped on a beach with a crazy guy?" A few yards away, Axel resurfaced, red hair plastered down and dripping magnificently. He grinned and waved enthusiastically at Demyx, who stared at him as if he'd completely lost his mind, and began to wade out of the water while attempting to tie back the length of his sodden hair at the same time.

"Pretty, isn't it?" Axel collapsed beside him, oblivious to the amount of sand that plastered to his now-transparent shirt. "Your oceans are blue. That's weird. I like pink better."

Demyx eyed him. "...Yeah. Okay. So, where are we, exactly? And why the hell am I here?"

For a long moment, Axel didn't answer. Arms crossed over his hips, he peeled his soggy t-shirt up and over his head, leaving streaks of salt water across his cheeks, and tossed the wadded-up fabric towards his bike. He licked his lips as though he were going to speak and turned his gaze out over the ocean, over the slender dashes of whitecaps and dark splotches that were birds bobbing on the current. The crash and ebb of cascading waves pounding the sand filled the landscape, a fittingly serene sound for the empty expanse of sand and sea. Demyx noticed that there was a spiky-wheeled tattoo around Axel's navel.

At last, Axel closed his eyes and leaned back on his elbows. "I got bored," he murmured, as if that excuse should be perfectly satisfactory. "So I went world-hunting, and I found you. I thought you'd like to see my world...don't you like it?" He sounded hurt, even petulant,

Demyx tore his eyes away from the tattoo - it wasn't polite to stare at any part of a person, even if he really did want to know what that was - and blew out his cheeks in exasperation. "It's lovely. I love it. I love everything. But I'm not supposed to be here - what are my parents going to think, what's my boss going to think - "

"Oh, don't be such an alarmist," interrupted the redhead. "As much fun as that would be, I don't intend to keep you forever. I'll take you home eventually."

Eventually. How reassuring. Demyx pulled his knees up to his chest and looped his arms over them, surveying the ocean; Axel seemed momentarily content to lie there with his arms crossed behind his head and ignore Demyx completely. After a few minutes, Demyx turned his attention to the three suns overhead.

"Does it ever get dark here?" he asked, his curiosity aroused once more. The sky had the colour of a sunset at home, but with three suns, he wasn't sure how sunsets worked. It seemed to him that in order for night to actually occur, all three of them would have to have set at once, and the odds of that happening were approximately one out of...a lot.

"For a few hours a day," Axel answered immediately, clearly finding this question much easier to answer, "in the end of the last quarter of the year. But it gets all dusky at this time of year, because Cih actually does set for about six hours," and indeed, one of the suns was halfway past the horizon, and the salty sea air was still bright but hazier. Both of them subsided into silence for a long stretch of silence, interrupted only by the steady surf, to watch the fluorescent orb descend beyond the sea.

At last Demyx stretched, sighed, and flopped back on the sand with his arms outspread. "It's nice here," he commented lazily, "and I think I might not even mind being abducted through a warphole in the space-time continuum by an insane red-haired man anymore."

Beside him, Axel grinned. "Oh, good. I'm complimented." All of a sudden, startling Demyx, he flipped himself upright like he was made of elastic instead of muscle and sinew. "Hey! Want to see something awesome?"

It would have been nice to have fallen asleep here on the beach, in the barely-humid warmth and with the ocean only a running leap away, but ruefully Demyx realized that would not happen. "Okay," he agreed amiably, burrowing his elbows into the sand beneath him and levering himself into sitting. "Do I have to move?"

Axel only shook his head. All the laughter and mischief disappeared from his face, to be replaced by something like studious concentration: his eyes narrowed to half-lidded, and his body was already swaying with an energy akin to a runner at a starting line. Demyx found himself caught up in fascination, despite himself.

With a sudden, strange movement, a twist of his wrists and a flick of his fingers, Axel brought his hands forward suddenly gripping two life-sized versions of the object tattooed on his stomach. At once he began to twirl them, shifting them nimbly from fingertip to fingertip in a spinning whirl of red and white, the twin discs shifting from side to side as Axel's body gyrated in the same circular rhythm. His eyes were half-closed with concentration; he shifted them from hand to hand, never breaking the rhythm of their spinning, so fast that they became a reddish blur in his dexterous fingers.

All at once, Axel swung his arm straight up in a violent swing and launched first one, then the other, far into the air above his head. They spun up, and up, towards the empty rose sky overhead - and then at the peak of their descent, both discs burst into flame. Axel's body was a taut line, arms outstretched and fingers straining above his head, when they hurtled back down: but he caught them without them seeming to break their rate of descent, only slowing, as his body dipped and swayed with their momentum. His slim hands were indifferent to the flames and kept up their rhythm, now the roaring of fire devouring air accompanying him, as he tossed the flaming discs from hand to hand, arched his back dramatically to exchange them behind him, tossed one over his head and catching in on the other hand to spin two at once. The flames threw Axel's face into sharply shadowed definition, outlining the harsh look of intense focus that occupied his features. Abruptly, the rapidly shifting rhythm of his body stopped: he hurled the flaming discs into the air once more, this time together, spinning faster than ever in side-by-side symmetry of one another, and then they plunged earthward with a velocity that threatened to impale Axel on the spot and send him into flame - but his outstretched fingers caught them again, and at the same instant the flames went out and the discs vanished the same as they had appeared.

Demyx had forgotten to notice when his jaw had slackened. He gaped at Axel like the small-town idiot he was, his mind overloaded by the sheer amazing display he'd just witnessed. "Ah," he began, and cleared his throat hurriedly when his voice cracked. "That. That was...that was cool."

Axel was pretending to be disinterested, inspecting his hands (presumably for charring), but the way his face lit up was unmistakable. "Glad you liked it," he returned casually, lowering his hands and grinning sardonically at Demyx. "That's my favourite routine. Maybe I'll show you another one sometime. If you come back, that is."

Demyx carefully levered himself to his feet. "How, exactly, do I come back?" Dusting off the back of his jeans with his palms, he turned to discover that the mysterious dark portal had reappeared, and Axel was looking at him in a profoundly different way - almost with hunger, or expectancy, as if there was something else he really, really wanted, and hadn't gotten yet. Demyx couldn't decide if the portal or the look made him more uncomfortable.

The intensity of Axel's gaze didn't lessen. "Oh, I'll come find you," he announced cheerfully and gestured dramatically at the swirling vortex. Demyx took a deep breath, shut his eyes very tightly, and stepped through.

-

It was only once he'd taken a few deep breaths, picked up his now-cold tea with a shaking hand, and wondered for several minutes if it had all been a crazy dream, that he noticed the black cloak draped across one of the stools at the bar.