Roxas still found it hard to believe that all of this was real.
It wasn’t that it didn’t seem real, of course it did. But the Organization had been nothing but lies, and Twilight Town…had seemed real, too. A part of Roxas was waiting for it all to get torn away from him again, unmasked as some new phase of a never-ending cycle of falsehoods.
But there was still the clock tower. Somehow, no matter who and where he was, the clock tower was a constant. And these days he wasn’t surprised by the friends he ran into up there, but as soon as he saw Axel alone, tucked so tightly into himself, Roxas couldn’t fail to read the mood.
Axel tried, though, so Roxas returned the smile with a sad one. “Hey.” He approached, and was just about to take a seat when Axel came out with that.
At first, he didn’t know how to react.
“I know,” he said finally, petulantly, and then swiveled himself into place on the railing. So many times he really could’ve used Axel’s honesty, and when it finally came, it was all too late. But…
“But…I think I get it now. Why you couldn’t tell me,” he said slowly, because the words were hard to get out. “It…kinda would’ve ruined everything. Right?”
Good. At least Roxas knew that.
“That’s what I thought.” He paused, remembering. He’d lied so much as Axel, to himself most of all. Even now it was hard to see past those. “No. That’s what I wanted to think. But really... deep down I knew there was nothing I could do to stop you and Xion from being hurt. I just didn’t want to admit it, even right up at the end.”
He’d wanted to believe that if they never found out the truth, everything would be okay. They would just be Roxas and Xion, his best friends. Not parts of Sora. Not forced to choose which one of them got to exist. But Xion remembered anyway, and he lost them both.
“You should have been able to choose for yourself what you wanted to do. I told myself I was protecting you from that decision, but...” He was no better than the Organization, really. Xemnas and Saix wanted Roxas and Xion for their keyblades, and Axel coveted the feeling of being human they gave him. “I’d already lost Xion. I couldn’t let you make a choice that would take you away from me, too.”