Please Excuse My French

By Samurai-Nashie

Disclaimer: Please. If I owned either Axel or Riku, do you think I would be sitting here by my lonesome writing a fanfic? Yeah right.

Random Author's Note: Well, this is the first time I've put the author's note at the beginning of one of my stories. New year, new things, I guess. Um…this story is strange. Which is why it's AU. With multiple pairings – none of them canon. If you want something serious and closer to canon, go check out Somebody, Somewhere, Someday. If you want something humorous and closer to canon, go check out This is Not High School Musical. And, yes. I know it's shameless plugging.

This is entire story spawned from me paging through a Vogue magazine, waiting to get my hair done at a beauty salon. And from reading AU stories. And really liking them. And I'm blaming all the Zemyx writers out there – I've been made into a Zemyx fangirl.

Enjoy the randomness of first person.

xoxoxoxoxoxo

I never wanted to become a model.

Somehow, the idea of starving myself and doing crunches five hundred and seventy thousand times idea just didn't appeal to me. Of course, neither did working at Sonics for the rest of my life. Not that I didn't like Sonics. But the minute one of the girls quit and they came to me with a pair of roller-skates, I figured they had crossed the line.

Of course, I can probably blame most of it on my mother. She wasn't a stage mother, per se, but she adored the limelight. Something about being Ophelia in a high school play. Either way, she liked being the center of attention. I guess I may have gotten my reclusive personality from my father – not that I could confirm that. He had died when I was four, so I don't remember much about him. Mom said I look a lot like him, and showed me old headshots of his from when he was in college. I suppose that's when the idea about me being a model came into her head.

She asked me about it once – and only once – and I turned her down. I had been fourteen at the time, uncompromisingly short and in the beginning of that wonderful phase known as teenage angst. I told her I would rather die a trillion times by drinking honey and then eating a jar of fire ants while getting stabbed with a really dull knife. She had laughed and then grounded me for a month for thinking such dark thoughts.

When I turned sixteen, she told me she had set up an "appointment" for me. Since I had just finished the SATs and ACTs (too easy, in my opinion) and filled out at least twelve different college applications, I assumed that I was meeting a representative from one of those colleges I really wanted to go to. Not even close. Somehow, I had been pulled into meeting a friend of a friend of a friend (of a friend?) of Mom's who worked at a modeling agency called V.Zero. I didn't know it at the time (didn't really care at the time either), but V.Zero was one of the top two modeling agencies in the world.

The world.

And that fact when completely over my head.

Long story made short – they signed me, I had to drop out of regular school and got a tutor, and have been traveling the world ever since, posing for magazines, walking down catwalks, chatting with beautiful actresses and models, and pretty much having the world at my feet.

Of course, I hated it.

Then I met him.

Not to say that it was love at first sight. I was too pessimistic to even begin to think about entering a relationship, and he was…well, he was himself, and that explains everything. Being in the modeling world, I had heard of him. Most models keep track of their competition. Not that he and I really competed in anything. I was edgy, high-fashion (bleh), and he had that trendy commercial look. But I still knew of him. I had even seen him around before.

And even after I did get to know him, it wasn't Cupid at his best - we had both been caught up in the now infamous Mode Vendetta. It had been the most interesting three weeks of my life – not to say the most annoying, the most headache-creating, the most hectic, and by far, the busiest.

Mode was a fashion orgy, to put it nicely. Every year in April, Paris and Milan threw the biggest fashion party of the season, if not the entire year. It was the most talked about event, the most gossiped about event, and the crown jewel of fashion shows and parties. Designers went crazy, models were ecstatic, and the fashion industry giggled like prepubescent schoolgirls at a Hannah Montana concert. I went along for the ride – I had never gone to Mode, never wanted to go to Mode, and never dreamed about being there in the future.

But this year was different. Mode was celebrating its 50th anniversary. That meant everything was...over the top? Well, as over the top as fashion is allowed to be while still remaining chic and trendy and all those other terms associated with up-to-date cutting edge fashion.

And somehow, between October and February, I ended up becoming part of the Core.

The Core is essentially the top five models of V.Zero. They are the ones who get first billing for all the major fashion shows, photoshoots, awards shows, magazine covers, etc., etc.

When I found out, Kairi teased me about the murderous look I got in my eyes for nearly two weeks afterwards. Since she was already part of the Core, she thought of it as no big deal. In fact, she thought modeling was no big deal in general. She was one of those girls who was naturally petite, and, despite being on the shorter side, was one of V.Zero's top models.

Anyway, Mode's 50th birthday bash was looking to be an…interesting event.

Of course, then the Mode Vendetta had to happen.

When it first began, I had decided that Roxas and Axel were both being stubborn, prideful idiots who really needed to get a life. Then somehow, I got pulled into it. Looking back, I'm still not sure how I managed to end up in the thick of the mess. But I did – and I ended up meeting him.

The fact that when we first met he was half-dressed and soaking wet and I was hanging upside down under an awning tied up with a corset is beside the point. (I asked him about it later though. I still haven't got a satisfactory explanation).

The course of true love is never smooth, as they say. Not that I cared about the proverb (or that I was a superbly, disgustingly cheerful optimist – that job fell to Sora). But honestly, it couldn't have been truer. Since we met in the midst of what will probably the most famous modeling feud in the history of modeling feuds, it would have been fair to say that hell was probably a lot friendlier place than Mode that year. Surprisingly, no one killed each other or maimed each other (though I'm pretty sure Axel, at the beginning, was dying to burn Roxas at the stake…)

The strangest thing was that it started so…simply. Luxord took a vote later, and most of us decided that Naminé was mostly at fault for the entire thing, followed closely by Yuffie and Cloud. Not that they started the feud or anything.

But the fact that it began with a decaf split-shot no whip non-fat vanilla latte and a day-old newspaper should have already forewarned us that the coming month was not going to be pleasant.

xoxoxoxoxo