Conflagration (Kingdom Hearts, Axel/(m)any) Title: Conflagration Author:puella_nerdii Rating: PG-13 Warnings: language. And fire. Lots of fire. Wordcount: 702 Prompt: Axel/any: fireplay - it's fear, more than pain, that brings the rush A/N Axel/any was interpreted as Axel/(m)any -- to wit, Larxene, Marluxia, Demyx, and Roxas.
The thing that bothers Axel—which technically raises the question of whether or not things should bother him at all, but he doesn’t think you need a heart for the Organization to bug the hell out of you a decent chunk of the time—but the thing that bothers him is this. For fire to grow, it needs to consume. It needs fuel for its rages, kindling for its flickers, logs for its blazes.
So what the hell do his flames feed on here, when they’re surrounded by nothing but Nobodies?
He tries not to think about it too often. It’s a rhetorical question; the point of it is that there isn’t really an answer. Answers are in pretty short supply around here, after all. But he still thinks about it sometimes before he sleeps, when he tries to summon up the echo of what blood flowing through his veins must have felt like.
***
Larxene has him pinned to the ground, her nails digging into his wrists and her knee grinding into his groin. He grins at her and holds still, because she doesn’t get as much from it when her victims don’t squirm.
“Aren’t you going to try and singe me?” she asks, her lips dipping closer to his.
“You want me to?” Sparks dance across the tips of his fingers; they grow into thin tongues of flame by the time he reaches up to caress the hollow of Larxene’s throat.
She hisses like a cat and slashes at his hand with her knives, lining his skin with quick cuts until he can’t separate the burn of pain from the burn of fire. “Maybe I should drive these through your hands,” she says, her voice as sweet as Marluxia’s flowers. “I’ll pin you to the floor like a bug.”
“Bitch,” he says, smiling even wider.
***
Larxene is the kind of fire that rips through buildings and leaves only blackened shells in her wake. Bright, violent, preventable. Marluxia is a slower smolder altogether; the blaze building up beneath layers of rotten matted leaves and dead twigs.
Marluxia stretches out his hand and passes it slowly through the flames dancing in Axel’s palm. The trick is to do it quickly if you don’t want to get burned, but even when Marluxia’s eyelids get heavier and his lips turn as red as rose petals, he doesn’t speed up. Axel glides Marluxia’s burned fingers into his mouth, and the heat singes his tongue.
“No Nobody,” Axel counters. “So that means Somebody likes me.”
Demyx looks like he’s fighting not to roll his eyes.
“Since when did you grow a spine, huh?” Axel trails his hand down the line of Demyx’s back and leaves sparks glowing in his wake, sputtering as they sink into the dark fabric of his jacket.
A while ago—he can’t say how long, because he doesn’t have any real sense of time in this place, no Nobody does except maybe Luxord—that might have made Demyx jump out of his jacket, but now he just says, “Knock it off.”
“Not afraid, huh?” Axel lets the heat build up in his mouth until it’s a blazing furnace and catches Demyx’s earlobe between his teeth, tugging on it.
Demyx yelps and makes a face while at the same time trying hard not to make a face, which is kind of funny. “What’s so scary about you?”
He grins.
***
And then there’s Roxas.
What else can he say about him? Roxas is Roxas, and that’s that.
The fire simmers underneath his skin when Roxas walks next to him, and it sends up blinding flares when Roxas’s fingers just barely brush his.
He’s never thought fire could burn him. But the flames don’t leave him unscathed. He expects to find charred marks all over his skin, blackened burns shaped like—
Shaped like something.
He knows he can’t feel, but thinking about it still sends a thrill down his spine, gives his chakrams a sharper edge.
“Roxas,” he murmurs to himself before he goes to sleep. “Roxas.”