Looking back on it, I have to admit it was my fault. Well, if you listen to Axel, you'll get the idea that I'd apologize for anything and everything, including the weather and plumbing leaks, but this time it really was my fault. I was way too tired to drive, and if I had any sense at all I'd have at least pulled over for a quick nap or something. No, handing over the keys wasn't an option. Once upon a time, four of us had valid driver's licenses, but Axel got a few too many points on his record and Luxord blew a few too many points on a breath test and Larxene got in a few too many accidents...and the end result is, I'm the only member of the Organization who's allowed to drive on any world.
On the other hand, Axel does know how to drive. Maybe if I'd pulled over, woken him up, and handed him the keys, we wouldn't have gotten into this mess. Or maybe we would have anyway. He did lose his license for a reason.
Maybe if the Superior had given us a longer timeframe to complete the mission, I'd have felt more secure pulling in somewhere for a break without being unable to sleep for worrying about the delay blowing the mission. Then again, I guess it wasn't his fault that the conferences we were supposed to hit were so close together in time and so far apart as far as driving time goes.
Maybe next time, he can try to get an interview with these fancy-ass heart researchers his own damn self. Like he'd ever dirty his hands on an actual mission.
Maybe it was just one of those stupid things that you can't predict or prevent. That is why they call these things "accidents".
Anyway. Our mission was to start in Ann Arbor, talk our way into one conference, talk our way into an interview with this one heart specialist, drive to Marquette, talk our way into another conference the next day, talk our way into an interview with these two other heart specialists, go home, share the information we got out of the conferences and the interviews. It started out pretty easily; we got the rental car all right, convinced the people at the conference we were all students at the local university, and out of the crowd all gathered around Dr. Gilchrist afterwards - mostly students trying to interview him for some project or another - out of the dozen-odd I know he actually interviewed, he picked me out specifically because I was wearing hearing aids. Turns out his younger brother was born deaf. We conducted half the interview in sign language, in fact. Since I was driving and doing the interviewing, Axel wondered out loud why I hadn't just been sent alone, until I locked the keys in the car and had to ask Roxas to bail me out.
The hard part came when we realized Ann Arbor and Marquette were well over 400 miles apart. And since none of us had ever been to Marquette before, we couldn't just portal there. Just in case you were wondering why we didn't take the easy way there. And just to make things a little livelier, it was winter. Road conditions...let's say they weren't optimal. "Pretty slick to just plain shitty" might be a better term. We were asking for it just by being on the road.
By the time it happened, I'd been driving for well over six hours. Axel and Roxas were fast asleep in the backseat, and weren't waking up for love nor munny. I know that, because I tried to wake them up to see the beautiful bridge we'd driven across an hour and a half earlier, and neither of them so much as twitched. I was honest-fuckin' exhausted at this point; I'd had the radio on earlier, but I couldn't find any stations worth listening to anymore, and even if I could, I couldn't have turned the volume up too high for fear of waking Axel and Roxas up. Yes, I did just say I couldn't wake them up. So sue me.
Anyway. I had essentially no company, it was dark out, there was nothing at all to distract me, my ass was numb from six-plus hours in the car seat and my legs and lower back were following, the road was covered in ice and snow, and I could barely keep my eyes open. I guess it was pure luck we were relying on to get us there safely at this point, because I was useless, and the first time I let my eyes close for one second, it ran out. I opened my eyes again and all of a sudden, there was a deer in the road, right in front of us.
Give me this much credit. I did not hit the deer. As it stood there staring at me through the windshield, I jerked the steering wheel, hard - too hard - the tires slid off the road - while the deer bounded off across the road, I jerked the wheel back the other way, trying to get back on the road - the tires left the ground completely - the car started to flip over - and the last thought that ran through my head was If I ever meet Bambi, I'm going to kill him and enjoy it.
AN: Now this one is going to be slow to update. Mwahahaha.
This has been kind of a side project to "Losing the Melody". I just had to publish the first chapter. Though "Losing the Melody" is still going to be my main story for now. This is set after "Into the Nexus", so Fori is going to be making appearances. After this chapter, the rest of it is going to be about the aftermath of the accident. Demyx is going to have a surprisingly limited role (no, I'm not going to kill him!)
And I'm going to do the whole story from first-person PoV. Different first-person PoVs. Including Demyx, Axel, Roxas, Fori, and possibly Zexion.
Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, got it memorized?