Xion could barely hear Roxas' choked reply through the sudden buzzing in her ears and the rapid realisation that she had just heard that. It played itself out over and over again in her head until the words ran together and barely seemed to make sense anymore, but the meaning wasn't lost, even in the haze of static that her head had become.

I'd die on my own terms

No. No not Axel, not him. Not her brilliant, sarcastic, irrepressible Axel. Never him. He wasn't supposed to die, he wasn't at all, he was supposed to go on and- well of course he wouldn't be able to go on as if nothing had happened once Roxas had gone back to Sora, but he was supposed to go on! He couldn't gutter and go out like a candle, he just couldn't!

'Axel that's not funny,' she wanted to say. 'Good one Axel. Now what do you really want to tell us?'

But she knew she couldn't, some things he wouldn't joke about, and she knew. She knew it was the truth, she knew that look in his eyes. Roxas looked ashen, and in the back of her mind she imagined she didn't look that much hotter, but as she tried to find the voice with which to question this news, she found her mouth too dry and the words sticking at the back of her throat.

How? Why? Who? When? Why why why?

Please don't let this be true.

He out of all of them was supposed to have a happier ending.