AkuNami

AkuNami is the het ship between Axel and Naminé from the Kingdom Hearts fandom.

Canon
Axel meets Naminé when he goes to Castle Oblivion as a part of his mission with Organization XIII. She is being held captive by Marluxia, who is forcing her to tamper with Sora's memories. Axel initially plays along with this plan because he wants Marluxia and Larxene to trust him, and is also interested in testing Sora. However, he later talks to Naminé and allows her to escape so that she can go speak with Sora. Marluxia later holds her as a shield, but Axel is willing to attack anyway until Sora shows up.

After the other members of the organization in Castle Oblivion are killed, Axel is ordered to find and retrieve Naminé. However, he later gives up on this as he sees no point in doing so. While Roxas is being kept in a simulated Twilight Town, he sees a drawing of himself with Axel, and Naminé reminds him that they were best friends. After Roxas merges with Sora, Naminé is forced to run away as DiZ wants her destroyed, and Axel accompanies her as he decides to turn against the organization. He agrees to protect her and is strangely moved by her words.

Fanon
AkuNami has a decent amount of popularity in the Kingdom Hearts fandom. It is mostly based on their interaction in Chain of Memories. However, Axel also demonstrated willingness to harm her if he had to in order to get to Marluxia. In the final mix of Kingdom Hearts II, an extra cut scene was added to show that Axel is the one who protected Naminé when DiZ wanted her to be destroyed. This also increased the amount of fan support for the pairing.

Due to the age gap between them, some ship Naminé with Axel's young somebody self from Birth by Sleep, make Naminé older and more around Axel/Lea's current age, or have Axel acting like a big brother-figure to Naminé when they were on the run from DiZ and the Organization. Despite the way Axel acted towards Naminé when Marluxia used her as a human shield in Chain of Memories, it hasn't stopped fans of the ship from altering the said scene by having Axel care about Naminé's life and tries to save her from his former ally.

Because they both care about Roxas in their own ways, some fans add him their AkuNami fanwork and has even gotten them to merge AkuNami, RokuNami and AkuRoku together in order to place them in a poly ship. By having Naminé take Xion's place in the small group of Nobodies or have them as a group of four than three.

There are exactly seven works for the two on AO3.

Fandom
FAN FICTION
 * Axel/Naminé tag on FanFiction.net
 * Axel/Naminé tag on FanFiction.net

FAN ART

Trivia

 * Riku entrusted Axel with the task of protecting Naminé after Roxas merged with Sora.