[Fic] Finding Isa
To: Haru (kenkumeisu) From: Away (awayandlaughing) Message: Hopefully this tickles your fancy for post-KH3, at least until we get more news, and I hope your holidays are pleasant (if busy).
When they were kids and something had gone wrong, Lea had always been the dealer. He who dealt with issues, that was. Isa had always just disappeared, usually literally but sometimes just withdrawing emotionally. It had worked for them. Lea had yelled, pranked or cajoled as needed and Isa had gone off to do whatever it was Isa did alone.
But that had changed, like so many things. Lea had become Axel and Isa had become Saïx and they’d both become monsters or something worse. But now Lea is Lea again – well he is Lea and he is Axel and the latter is what he hears the most – and Isa is gone.
And so Lea is searching.
It isn’t hard, really. Lea has known Isa at his best and at his worst and at all the little points in between. They might not have been friends through it all, no definitely not, but Lea knows Isa in a way no one else could ever hope to. It isn’t fair, however, that he is the one hopping from world to world looking into shadows and scrapping together whispers. A part of him spends the entire time saying give up because he’s spent his whole life, and unlife, doing this. Now he is new and so they should be new.
But he does not give up. Not on Isa. Not again.
Lea finds him on an island in a land where the sun never sets and Lea laughs when he first steps foot here. Isa’s sense of humour is as sharp as ever.
And okay, calling it an island is being generous. It is an oversized sandbar with a tree and some grass on it and apparently is popular for picnics during vacation season. It isn’t vacation season right now. In fact it is unseasonably cold and horrible. Stormy skies and tossing seas and no one had wanted to take him out to the island to the point he’d almost fallen back on old habits and threatened someone.
Almost.
But he remembered himself, and gets through to them with his amazing charm and wit. Because that is who Lea is now. The echoes of Axel-who-was are loud, sometimes, but they aren’t in charge. No one is in charge of Lea except Lea and no one ever will be.
Anyway, the island.
Because it’s so small and barren, Isa isn’t hard to find, even with overcast skies. He’s seated in the shelter of a sand dune, just staring. He doesn’t move when Lea slides down to join him, but Isa ignoring him isn’t new to Lea. Saïx ignoring him isn’t either. He wonders who’s ignoring him now.
“I didn’t think you’d come out here,” he says at last. Calm, measured. Cold. And older, like Lea himself. Older and more hurt and maybe not even wiser for it all. It’s hard sometimes. The not knowing. He spent nine years not knowing and it had lead to terrible things. Loss and regret and pain and hate all while being told none of it was real. “There’s a storm coming.”
“You’re an ass,” Lea says, “for making me come out here while there’s a storm. I got in trouble with the locals, y’know.”
“What a shock.”
So many things have changed since Xehanort’s defeat. So many. But not everything and golden eyes stare back at Lea, distant, but also troubled. An emotion they’d never worn before. Not in that colour, anyway. Lea smiles.
“I am known for my wildcard likeability,” he says, “now come on or that old guy’s gonna leave me here to die of exposure.”
“Then go,” Isa says because that is definitely an Isa thing to do. I need to be miserable, alone and preferably as physically uncomfortable as I am emotionally right now so go away Lea.
Lea is not a natural listener however. Or inclined toward being agreeable.
“Yeah no,” he says instead, “I’ve been to so many weird places looking for you, you’re not committing suicide by natural phenomena on my watch.”
“No one says you had to watch,” Isa says and Lea rolls his eyes so hard he actually hurts himself. Were they this dramatic before? He can’t remember. They probably would have been, if they’d had access to a coast line and a perpetual sunset. Give it to Isa, he has a good sense of drama.
“No one says you had to watch,” Lea mimics, pitching his voice comically low. “You’re a piece of work, Isa. Now go get in the damn boat before I knock you out and have to drag you there.”
————————————————————
Isa isn’t unconscious when Lea drags him to the rowboat but he certainly isn’t willing. Which isn’t uncommon, really, so Lea ignores the fact he is being ignored and fervently hopes they’ll be out of the boat soon.
Water isn’t really his element. ————————————————————-
The resort town does not apparently have a proper name, either that or the boat-owner just hates Lea and his charisma that much. Both are equally possible, given there appears to be a population of ten people, all of whom share a recent ancestor. Several times over.
At any rate, they have an inn and the inn owner is much more friendly than the boat-owner and had bundled them up into a room with two matching, creaky beds the moment they appeared. She had fussed, too. Isa immediately disappeared into the bathroom, leaving Lea to dry himself via slightly more hazardous means, and without the benefit of washing off the sea-salt first.
At least the bedside has lotion, even if it smells like roses and therefor the eighty year old inn owner.
Isa reappears wetter and just as grumpy, and he collapses on the bed in a way that radiates displeased with you and everything ever. Isa is a master of body language and other silent communication methods.
“So are you going to talk to me, Isa or-”
“Do not call me that,” Isa says and Lea blinks.
“Why not? Do you prefer Saïx?” Lea has gotten used to answering to Axel, but he doesn’t think of himself as that person. It is almost like having a movie in his head, sometimes, and everyone keeps referring to him as the character in the film who happens to be an identical stranger. Only sometimes with guilt.
Anyway. The point is, he can’t imagine wanting to be that person, but Isa’s a different breed and also has a history of being contrary.
“No,” Not-Isa says, and he sounds like he thinks it’s the end of the conversation. Lea, not being the one to let someone have the last word stands and settles next to Isa or Not-Isa or whoever, ignoring the death glare sent his way.
“Then what do I call you? You with the hair is a little unspecific,” not to mention Isa’s hair is actually pretty tame compared to some people’s. Constant company included.
“Nothing. I’m nobody, remember?”
Nobody. Lea hates that word. Sitting up, he hauls Isa after him, fist curled into the loose shirt that was left by the door for them earlier. Isa is warm and as stiff as granite, confusion warring with indignation, and Lea doesn’t care. “We were never nothing,” he says. “Never.”
Isa keeps his gaze, doesn’t move an inch. Lea doesn’t either, refusing to back down. He’s never done so before, not in either life and not in this third one. Finally, Isa speaks.
“But then it matters, Axel. All of it.”
The name stings like ice on a bruise. “Sure. But so do we. We always have.”
Isa looks away. ———————————————————
See, the problem turns out to be less that Isa’s pouting and more that he’s having a crisis and doesn’t have any way to cope. Which shouldn’t surprise Lea. Lea died in a blaze of glory and was almost immediately taken under the wing of those he’d opposed and technically terrorized with intent to murder. Sora doesn’t give a man a lot of time to have a crisis, between the world-saving and the violently loving everything.
Isa had died and woken up alone.
That means Isa has Lea to help him now, and only Lea. Which is not the most comforting thought Lea has ever had but it’s true. Before this, he’d poked around Radiant Garden and found it empty of all the familiar faces save those from the Organization. Somehow, Lea doesn’t think what Isa needs in his life is to tell Ienzo or Even about his new and frustrating feelings.
So Lea works with what he has, and forces Isa to work with him. The first order of business is to leave Twilight Town and surrounding environs. It’ s no good here. There are too many memories. Painful memories which are so amazingly wonderful for Lea and not so much for Isa. So he takes him to a place where people are a little less likely to pry and where there are no clock towers to intrude on their lives or psyches.
Traverse Town is grubby, dark and everyone there is probably depressed, which means that they’re all happy to ignore two new additions to their horrible town. Isa steps off the gummy ship and almost immediately balks, nose wrinkling fastidiously.
“This place, really?” he asks, and it’s the first time he’s said something in any way that doesn’t include the adverbs angry or stoic. Lea counts it as a win already.
“Really really,” he says. “Trust me. RG is full of busy bodies these days, you don’t want to go back there,” not yet, any way, and Lea doesn’t think Destiny Islands is ready for the Isa Experience. And Isa really isn’t ready for the Destiny Island experience. Too many hugs involved.
Well and history, too. And attempted heart stealing. And successful heart stealing.
Not the point.
“Anyway, there’s a place here we can crash in. Apparently the restoration committee stayed here and-” he stops because Isa obviously has no idea what he’s talking about. “It’s a free place to crash while we uh,” he doesn’t actually know what he’s doing here, “figure shit out.”
“Charming,” Isa says, watching a rat scuttle across the courtyard. One of the locals walks bye, eyeing them curiously and flashing some skin. Isa takes a step back, right into Lea’s chest. “So charming.”
Lea laughs a little, patting Isa’s arm. “Keep that attitude,” he says, “you’ll need it. Now. Leon says that the locals are weird and tend to lock down the sectors on whims, so we need to find the key to those gates over there before we can get to the place we’ll be staying.”
“I hate you,” Isa says. Lea grins at him, loping off to chat with the man staring at them from a cafe-type place.
“It’s a start,” he says. ——————————————————-
It stays at the start for almost an entire month. Isa and Lea get sort-of jobs helping everyone feel safer by walking around looking punkish and ergo more threatening than anyone else who might show up. They don’t get paid, or any thanks, but they also don’t get their house egged after the first week so. Progress on one front.
On the Isa front, it’s less promising. Whenever Lea tries to talk to him he gets the classic stone wall. So Lea combats it with his most classic attack. Chatter.
Right now, they’re in the kitchen trying to feed themselves. Isa is cutting vegetables very slowly while Lea pokes at an empty pan as it heats up. And talking to fill the silence. “And so that’s basically why fishing is terrible,” he says, “you sit and you don’t make any noise at all or you’ll scare off nature’s most disgusting meat.”
Isa’s response to that story is to slam his knife down, “enough, Axel. Just…stop.”
Lea almost asks if Isa likes fishing that much, but he’s trying to help. “Isa-”
“Don’t,” his eyes are suspiciously shiny. “Don’t. I’m not him any more, why don’t you get that?”
“Well you won’t tell me what else to call you so-”
“Nothing! I shouldn’t be here. I did terrible things,” he’s grasping the counter like it’s a lifeline and Lea does the same to the edge of the stove, least he try and reach for Isa and do…he doesn’t know what. “I shouldn’t be anywhere.”
“That’s bullshit,” Lea says, “you have as much right to be alive as anyone. Why would you possibly think otherwise?”
Isa laughs, bitter and broken and Lea wants to hug him. Which is a dumb impulse but anyway. “Why would I have any right to be alive? I fought against the very concepts of light and love itself. I believed it so much I died for it. I should have stayed dead.”
“Don’t say that,” Lea says and Isa responds very maturely by walking away, head down, shoulders tense. Lea stares after him for a moment, and by the time he collects himself Isa’s disappeared, leaving the door open.
Lea stands in the door way, stomach clenched and throat tight and doesn’t know what to do.
——————————————————
He melts the pan, is what he does. Not on purpose but apparently if you spend a few hours pointlessly wandering around and don’t turn off the stove, that’s what happens. And he’s in the middle of dealing with – namely trying to air out the house – when soft feet pad in. He turns to find Isa there, back lit by the lights of the hall and shivering. Traverse Town is chilly, and Lea is fairly certain Isa wasn’t even wearing shoes. For a long few minutes neither speak, until finally the words burst out of Lea like a terrible, emotionally vulnerable monster.
“Don’t leave me.”
Isa goes very still very briefly, before he walks over to the kettle. He’s silent as he runs the water, silent as he puts it on the stove and silent as he sets the burner to the highest setting. It isn’t until the kettle starts to shriek that he answers, barely audible over the sound of the steam escaping.
“You’re the one who left me.”
————————————————————
They sit in the living room, curled up on chairs and clutching mugs of still steeping tea like those damn things are lifelines. Isa looks very small and unsure, which is basically how Lea is feeling so at least they’re on the same page.
“Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m me,” Isa says, dunking his tea bag nervously. “I’ll reach for something and this…this doubt hits me. Do I real want that thing on the counter or is it some…some echo of him? We were so intertwined for so long I don’t,” he bites his tongue as if to stop the words. “I don’t know who I am.”
He isn’t Saïx, of course. He’s Xemnas, the rat bastard and Lea aches in very tender, technically new places.
“He’s gone,” Lea says and it’s feeble. It doesn’t matter, after all. Your mind can make a lot of shit real. “You’re you.”
Isa looks up and says, “but that doesn’t mean anything.”
Except it does. Because Isa looks up, and Lea swears he sees green. Without thinking he dives across the room, hearing the splash of hot water and Isa is mid-swear when Lea takes his face in each hands and stares. There, surrounding the pupils in a subtle starburst is green. Isa goes cross eyed trying to keep him in focus, which sort of ruins it, but Lea still grins so widely his cheeks ache within seconds.
“It means whatever you decide to make it mean,” he says, leaning back a little. “You are your own person, Isa. You can,” he tries to think of something not keyblade related. “You can be a gummyship engineer or a chef or official rat catcher for Traverse Town,” Isa’s lips tweak upward in a very timid attempt at a smile. “Just, anything. Be or do anything, I’ll help. You won’t be alone, Isa.”
Or controlled. Not ever again.
Isa just stares at him for a minute, that tiny quirk still in the corner of his mouth and then he leans forward and presses a kiss to Lea’s suddenly very slack lips.
“Neither will you, Lea.” ———————————————————-
When they were kids, Lea used to scale the outside of Isa’s house and squeeze through his window into his bed where they’d chat and on occasion swap homework for copying before Lea had to sneak out again in the morning. Back then it had been an innocent desire to keep hanging out with his friend.
Now he isn’t sure what this is, other than better than scaling a wall. Stairs are easier.
Lea lay there, Isa draped lazily over him. Despite movie conventions, they’re not naked. It’s too soon for that. No, they’re just there, intertwined and breathing synced and maybe a little tear stained though if some interloper were to mention that they’d probably die.
They’ve been silent for a while now, and Lea is half asleep until Isa speaks up, voice thick with exhaustion.
“I don’t want to be a rat catcher anywhere.”
“Figured,” Lea says.
“And I don’t want to feed other people. I can’t really cook.”
“Me neither.”
Isa pokes him, and he pries open an eye. Despite his words, Isa’s face is serious. “I don’t know what I want, Lea. Just what I don’t want.”
Lea opens the other eye and smiles, “it’s a start.”