For Rokukami's Faith Challenge
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AN: Okay, due to a lack of clarity and foresight on the author's behalf, Axel is going to seem really hypocritical in the beginning since I negated to explain the reasoning behind his logic, but stay with me and I promise I will offer an explanation for all.
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Namine doesn't particularly like the taste of coffee. In fact, she doesn't much care for the smell, either. About the only thing the caffeinated beverage has going for it is the color, because Namine has always considered brown a very soothing tint. Of course her boyfriend, Roxas, emphatically begs to differ, always saying that he's so terribly glad God made him a blond instead of a brunette because brown hair always makes you look like you're wearing vomit on your head.
Namine knows better than to question the logic of her eccentric significant other and simply bobs her head up and down when he launches off on one of his melodramatic dissertations.
But all this does not explain what Namine is doing in a coffee shop to begin with. Nor does it explain why she ordered a java chip frappacino when she doesn't plan on drinking it, either. It sits before her, untouched and unscathed, swirling in all of its muddy glory. Just ordering the thing made Namine feel like she had fallen victim to diarrhea of the mouth: "I'd like one grande decaf double pump java chip frappacino with extra drizzle and a straw, please." Because God forbid you forget that straw. Regardless if you're going to drink it or not.
She stirs the aforementioned drink aimlessly, watching as the frothy coating dances before her and slowly homogenizes with the dark brown undertones. It looks good, if nothing else. But Namine knows looks aren't what matter, otherwise her friend Riku (who looks like a girl more than she does sometimes) would never get a date. Not that the man isn't aesthetically pleasing, but he could do with shorter hair and less eye lashes.
Religious tracts lay before her in a nondescript, disheveled pile of mayhem and neglect, sprawled upon the mahogany table promising hope and salvation within their five pages of text and poorly characterized cartoons. Eternal life condensed to seven comic strip panels and about six sentences of manuscript. Namine has concluded that if anyone does, hypothetically, manage to get converted with one of these things, then they do not really know what they are getting into.
The front door jingles to life with a resonance that is almost soothing as another customer lethargically saunters into the store. Namine doesn't even bother to look up, her vacant blue eyes fixated on the frozen beverage in front of her. It has her full and undivided attention as the previous person makes their way past the transfixed girl and proceeds forward on to the counter. The girl takes heed of the permeating scent of cinnamon that seems to have sabotaged the very confines of the room ever since the door was opened seconds prior. The smell is raw and overpowering, untamed and tantalizing, but Namine is too wrapped up in her own world of religious pamphlets and virgin frappacinos to notice where the odor is originating from. She is absent minded to say the least.
"Um, excuse me," a syrupy smooth voice, pouring forth like molten lava and marmalade, petitions the barista on the other side of the counter. "I believe I ordered a french vanilla cappuccino."
Namine tears her eyes away from the blissful refuge that lies in the depths of her beverage.
"That is a french vanilla cappuccino," the barista explains, confusion evident in her tone.
"Ha. Nice try," the voice scoffs. "It's only half full. The other half is foam. Now, I don't know about you, sweetheart, but when I order something that costs me three dollars and fifty cents—which is ridiculous, by the way, I have no idea how you guys manage to stay in business, raping your customers like that—I want to get my money's worth. And if you're going to charge me three bucks for air and foam just because you use organic coffee beans or some new age bull shit like that, then I'll be glad to tell you where you can stick that styrofoam lid you're holding."
By now Namine's attention is averted from her own devices and her undivided curiosity is lying completely on the shoulders of this lithe young man whose hair appears as if it has been severely sun burnt while he was frantically frenching an electrical socket.
"I'll...make you another one."
"Thanks darling," came a thickly sugar coated murmur, "knew you'd understand."
After witnessing the anticlimactic conclusion, Namine decides to return to her mundane task of staring half heartedly into her frappacino. She doesn't necessarily want fireworks, but she has been sitting in this coffee house for the past three hours and interpersonal debates can only be enticing for so long.
It was, indeed, while she is in the midst of one of these aforementioned interpersonal debates that she felt the presence of another form beside her, looming over her body; breathing in her scent. Before she can even react to this newly registered information, she hears the proposal of a truly bizarre question.
"You legal?"
Namine looks up from her coffee with a visage donning genuine perplexity.
"Pardon?"
"You," the man reiterated, taking a leisurely sip of his steaming, foamless drink. "Are you legal?"
"...I'm seventeen," Namine says guardedly, trying not to be side tracked by the man's dangerously intoxicating emerald eyes.
"Eh...close enough."
And with that the painfully bright red head plops himself down in the seat across from her, arm casually draped over the back of the chair in the perfect image of nonchalance.
"Name?" he continues to press.
"N...Namine," comes the barely audible reply.
"Axel," he offers. "And now that we got the obligatory pleasantries out of the way, lemme ask you a real question: just what the hell are you doing here?"
Namine is taken aback at first. Audacity radiates off this man like a chemical plant. He drips saccharine in his tone but spits venom with his words. She is not used to such, so the preliminary repertoire she is usually pretty decent at seems to seep out of her mind. She is rendered currently speechless in the face of this individual with such a superiority complex she feels as though she should bow and exalt him simply for speaking to her.
"Excuse me?"
Axel exudes a sigh. "Alright. You've been here for three hours. Don't deny it; I can tell by your drink. It's melted something horrible and doesn't even vaguely resemble coffee and chocolate anymore; it looks as though you took a crap in it. You obviously didn't come here for the beverages, since you never even bothered to touch yours, and you don't seem too privy to the prospect of getting laid because otherwise you would have pounced on me already."
Namine quirks an eyebrow in unorthodox response.
"Don't flatter yourself."
A smirk flitters by on the man's unblemished face.
"Well, I'm right, aren't I?"
Namine clenches her jaw in preparation, unsure of how to explain her current predicament to this character who seems to view himself as the right hand of God. She chooses to ignore the previously posed inquisition and continues to stir her drink in hypnotic like fashion.
"Maybe I just came here to think."
"Pifft, that's a load of turd if I ever heard it," Axel exhales dramatically, further proving he fits the mold of stereotypical attention whore. "You could have thought in your bedroom for free. Why come all the way down here and cough up three dollars and fifty cents for an over priced novelty drink when your aren't even gonna bother to drink the damn thing anyway?"
Namine's pale, thin mouth is drawn into a single firm line as she sits there and seethes in the impudence this man exudes. She did not come here to be bothered and she did not come here to strike up conversation. She came here to hide and she came here to be alone. Neither of which she was accomplishing.
"Well what about you?" she queries abruptly, grabbing the interrogation by its figurative corners and doing a complete one eighty. "Why are you feeding into this company's money lust if you so full heartedly detest it so?"
Axel's left eye twitches in response, and he grasps his paper cup and shoves it into the girl's unsuspecting face. "Nicotine," he spits in a tremulous voice. "I'm addicted. They put friggin' nicotine in these damn things, I swear."
Namine gently brushes his convulsing hand away. "I'm pretty sure it's just caffeine."
"Just caffeine," the man buffs incredulously. "Sure, that's what the government wants you to believe."
Namine, once again, chooses to refrain from commenting.
The girl watches as Axel finishes off his beverage in one last drawn out slurp. He wipes the residue off his mouth with the back of his hand and stoically sends the empty cup into orbit as he launches it off in the general direction of a neglected garbage can. He misses by a mile, but he still beams like he sunk it, and returns his attention back to the clandestine female.
"So, is blond your natural hair color, sweetheart?"
Namine stops stirring her drink and meets Axel's acidic gaze. It was the equivalent of swallowing sulfuric acid. You stutter and you fumble and convulse until you have no choice but to give in.
"Yes," she says slowly, cryptically, unwilling to give away more of herself than absolutely necessary.
"Liar," the man spews out. "You bleach it."
"I most certainly do not!" she chides in defense, for girls will go through great lengths to protect the validity of their aesthetics. "But I suppose there is really no way to prove that to you, now is there?"
Axel grins like the toddler who just took a leak in the community swimming pool.
"Well, I do know one way you could prove it to me..."
Namine fumbles in the face of such an audacious implication.
"I have a boyfriend!"
"Relax!" Axel laughs, finding the whole spectacle unbelievably amusing. "Don't get your panties is a twist, I was just kidding. Geesh, you girls don't know how to flirt nowadays. Take it as a compliment I was willing to venture down south to begin with, honey."
Axel now eyes Namine's untouched, but not unravished, java chip frappacino.
"Okay. Are you gonna drink that?"
Namine, who is still recovering from previous sexual innuendo, blithely shakes her head in nonvocal response and simply watches as the man reaches for her cup and leisurely begins to sip the muddy mess as he leans against the wall for unnecessary support.
"I'm only gonna ask one more time," Axel begins, resuming the position of dominate conversation leader even though he is but a mere guest at the girl's table. "What exactly are you doing here?"
Namine, now drinkless and defenseless, racks her mind for a plausible excuse but upon finding none ends up resorting to the truth since it is the only answer she has readily at hand.
"I'm hiding."
"Is that so?" Axel feigns intrigue, extracting the green plastic straw from the stormy sea of Namine's beverage and placing the end in his mouth to lick the contents dry. "Gah," he hisses disdainfully. "I've tasted piss water better than this."
"It's double pump," Namine explains unnecessarily.
"Why the hell did you order double pump if you aren't even gonna taste it?"
"Because it's what my boyfriend always orders. He says it makes the drink taste better."
"Ya know what else it does to the drink, sweetie? It makes it cost more. Fifty cents more, to be exact. You're selling out for an extra pump of chocolate drizzle when you could be using that money for much more important things, like curing cancer or something."
Namine's brow furrows together subconsciously. She does not see the relevance in saving pocket change to aide in the epic quest to eliminate malignant tumors. But she is not a stupid girl, so she decides it is in her best interest not to question the man further.
"Anyway," Axel dismisses, flinging his hand back and forth in response to the trivial matter at hand. "What are you hiding from?"
Namine's lips purse together as she falters in supplying her comrade with a response.
"Ya know darling, you're starting to get annoying..."
She sits there dumbfounded and without retaliation.
Coming to her rescue, or so it would seem, are the sugar packets that have picked now as the impeccable timing to collide with the floor. Always one for guilt trips and inexplicable benevolency, Namine subconsciously scurries over to the condiment counter and re-arranges the packets just so. She feels Axel's eyes on her as she squats down, careful, so very very careful, not to bend, and fixes the table top so it looks as though nothing had ever happened. Her hand is on her abdomen and she is cradling her stomach without knowing it. Namine then returns to her previous seat and resumes her previous blank expression so they could pick up the avant-garde conversation in the same awkward place where they left it off.
Axel inhales sharply through his nose. Averting his vision and casually scratching his forehead with his thumb, he leaks through his teeth, "Aw hell, you're pregnant, aren't you?"
At this, Namine can not even find it within herself to breathe. She is glad her heart beats subconsciously otherwise she would have forgotten to tell it to do so.
"..." she emits and then finds herself clearing her throat much more aggressively than necessary. The words were adhering themselves to her mouth and she can't choke them out. "Is it that obvious?"
"Please, why else wouldn't you want to sleep with me?"
Again, Namine is rendered speechless.
"So what are you hiding from, pray tell? The father? Your father? The omnipresent Father?"
Namine subconsciously feels her tiny hands travel to her slightly bulging abdomen and clutch it protectively, even if the contents are less than desirable.
Axel's undomesticated green eyes travel to the religious pamphlets lying at the center of the table. He quirks at the sight and, again, proffers a sigh that sounds more like a deflating balloon than anything else.
"And judging by the fact that your Jesus Junkie comic books are crumpled and torn in two, I'm assuming planning for adoption was not high on your list."
Namine sat there, seething in her simmering silence, angry she had no way of vindicating herself or her actions, and angrier still that this man she had met only moments prior was able to tell more about her in five minutes than Roxas would be able to reiterate in a lifetime.
As outspoken as he had just recently proven himself to be, the lava kissed man did not erupt in a proclamation of condemnation or threaten her with fire and brimstone. Instead, he simply sat there, breathing, contemplating, and sipping his so called piss water in a way that could almost be mistaken for torpor.
"Is the father your boyfriend who likes double pump frappacinos?"
A nod of affirmation.
"I guess that's not all he likes double pumping..."
Namine would have again chastised the comment if she were not in a position to be chastised herself.
Axel places the drink down on the table pointedly and resumes his previous task of boring holes into Namine's forehead with his eyes. Another shift of position and three more unscripted sips later, he blatantly asks, "So what's the guy's favorite color?"
At this, Namine startles. While eccentric fit the man perfectly, she wouldn't go as far as to label him autistic. "Excuse me?"
"Favorite color," Axel repeats for those hard of hearing. "Your boyfriend."
There is a lull in which vision is averted and recollections are pondered.
"I...don't know," Namine finally came back with. "He never told me."
"Well, not to be offensive darling, but did you ever take the time to ask?"
Namine's eyes narrow in confusion. They are glassy and rimmed with saline but still capable of emitting other emotions than that of the melancholy nature. "I'm failing to see the relevance."
Axel snorts in amusement. "Okay. So you feel like you know the guy well enough to sleep with him, to open up to him—quite literally, I might add—and yet you cease to know the most trivial things like his favorite color. Am I the only one who finds this amusing? What about his mother's maiden name? I bet you don't know that, either."
"That's not the kind of stuff that comes up in normal conversation," Namine spits out in self defensive, almost like a karate move for the mind. "Spare me the holy vernacular and let me contemplate this on my own."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Axel commences, throwing his hands up in the air, gravitating attention, as per usual. "Who said anything about religion? Where does religion come into all this? Did I mention Jesus? No. Did I mention God? No. That's your conscious talking sweetheart, whether you want to admit that or not. The hell would I bother preaching to you, anyway? If that tactic worked than I think your oven would be somewhat vacant right now and we would not be having this little discussion."
Axel reaches for the mutilated tracts. "Let's forget about religion for a moment, shall we?" He then tosses the papers into a nearby trashcan and resumes the interrogation.
Namine is shocked into a petrified sort of fish like gape.
"What?" Axel asked indignantly. "You can't use the Bible to validate something if someone doesn't view the Bible as valid to begin with."
Namine begins to open her mouth but Axel stops her.
"I don't care if you think the Bible is the inerrant word of God or an overgrown, commercialized paper weight. The subjects 'oh damn the rubber broke lemme go get a coat hanger' and 'I go to Sunday School every week and I'm the pastor's daughter' aren't friggin' attached at the hip. There's more to abortion than simply saying, 'God said no, so I'll say no too.' Originality people, please. News flash: atheists don't care what the hell your God says. I doubt Buddhists care much, either. So let's try to figure this one out for ourselves, shall we?"
Namine, who can not even find it within herself to articulate a coherent sentence, simply nods her head and clutches her abdomen further.
"Alright then. So, does the double pumping father even know what's going on?"
A dizzying shake of the head that sends Namine's equilibrium spinning.
"Excellent," drones the satirical individual with cherry blood for hair. "Ya know, that's half his fetus, too."
"...I know."
"Funny how he has no say in the matter, isn't it? Oh, and you know what's even funnier? What if your boyfriend's mother—of whom you cease to know her maiden name—decided she didn't feel like giving birth to your horny little lover? Granted, we would not be here now, having this discussion, but even more importantly: you would never have discovered the wonders of double pump frappacinos! And, hell, the apocalypse is nigh when that happens."
Namine tries to excavate the logic she used last night when reasoning with herself under the covers of her bed while curled up in the vulnerable fetal position, all correlations notwithstanding. "It's my body, it's my choice, and no, I am not a pastor's daughter."
Axel laughs. Again. In the face of the delicate balance of life.
"Of course it's your body and your choice. If the baby is gonna kill you? Yeah, I think you have a right to choose. If you were brutally raped and forced to conceive a living, breathing token to serve as a memory of the worst night of you life? Yeah, I think you have the right to choose the outcome of that too." Axel then pushes aside his piss water and leans in over the table. "But terminating the possibility of life just because you were horny and wanted to experience a five second orgasm? Please. Whose fault is that?"
Namine's eyes narrow, so much so that you could almost blindfold her with a piece of dental floss. "What right do you have to make me feel guilty for disposing of something that isn't even alive?"
"Nice word choice," Axel retorts, almost complimentary, as if he really did find her word usage something to be commended. "So how do you feel when you see road kill?"
"There is no correlation between terminating a fetus and running something over with a car."
"No, of course not. Hitting something with a car is accidental."
Namine proceeds to glare accordingly.
In response, Axel finishes off the piss water in one gravity defying slurp.
"So, like, wait nine months and pop it out and give it to a nun or something. Oh, that's right," Axel feigns, "the boyfriend would know."
And it is then that Namine's head audibly snaps. It was stronger than this man's passion and it was stronger than the coffee at the counter and it was stronger than the scent of cinnamon wafting through the air. The jaw is clenched, the fists are balled, and Namine's eyes hold warning of the impending storm.
"And what right do you have to judge my actions?" she hisses, finally realizing that she did not necessarily have to fall victim to this man's opinions just because he was a marvelous twister of words. "You wanted to sleep with me before you even knew my name."
Axel, again, characteristically chuckles privately to himself and takes a moment to regain his composure. "Okay. I'm an ass hole. I make no claims otherwise. I just threw Jesus in a trashcan. But I don't go around killing babies."
"Oh, because you must only sleep with women who are infertile, is that it?"
Axel rolls his eyes. "Vasectomy," he offers. "See? I take responsibility for my actions. No mini Axels for me. Now tell me, darling, does your boyfriend share my astounding foresight?"
Silence.
"Thought so."
Axel sees the glint in Namine's eyes and realizes that he just lost any chances he had of changing her mind. Yes, actions speak louder than words. Yes, things catch up to you. And yes, hypocrisy is just that vile.It will gnaw, ravish, and rape you until you lay cold and bleeding on the ground, with just the faintest traces of a pulse, taking whatever thoughts were lurking around in your head with you. It's the poison in your mouth and the cyanide to your ideas. And it runs in your blood destined to have your logic backfire and take a casualty with you.
It doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong. You're both human. You're both equal. And no opinion is better than the other when you are ultimately both hypocrites and entitled to whatever you choose to accept as the truth. Unless you pull Jesus out of the garbage can but neither of you look like you are about to do so.
He senses the impending defeat and gets up to leave because he hates to admit it. Chucking the remaining piss water in the garbage can, he takes his sweet time to prolong the one fluid movement he makes as he rises to make his way to the door. He tries to procrastinate the departure for as long as he can, hoping that somehow, in these last few moments, he will be able to come up with something that will be able to negate his previous actions and render his duplicity worthless.
But he sees it in her face. Her hands. Her posture. Her body language. He has lost her and he knows it.
Inside he is writhing and dying because he knows that now he is inadvertently connected to this baby's death. If only he were not such a double standard man whore, if only, for once, he practiced what he preached and found out Namine's favorite color before trying to get inside her pants (vasectomy or not) if only he wasn't such a fucking hypocrite and self detonated his very own point, rendering the whole conversation invalid, despite any notions she may have had of reconsidering her previous decision. It was all blown to hell now, because yes Axel, you can repent until you are blue in the face and deplete your lungs from the very thing they so need but hypocrisy stands alone and it stands tall and it doesn't disappear just because you need it to.
"Hey, ya never know," he says in resignation as he heads for the door, a ghost of a smirk still playing on his lips. "Have faith in your fetus. He may just be the one to invent the cure for cancer." There is a pause. "Then again, he may grow up to be a world renown terrorist." Silence. "Oh well. Make sure you hug him enough as a child."
He left her sitting there smirking and he can do no more.
In the end, she is more confused. In the end, she hates him even more. And in the end, she is tempted to finish it just out of spite.
And in the end, she lets her bitterness win and she goes through with it.
And there isn't a single day she spends not regretting it.
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Author's Note
There is a whole slew of things you, the reader, can take away from this. There are even more things if you know me on a personal level. How many times have you judged an idea by the person/religion/political party instead of by the reasoning behind it? How many times have I misjudged a religion by the hypocritical believers and not the foundation of the religion itself? And how many times have I succumbed to bitterness and acted on it accordingly?
I tried to leave specific religions out of this piece for a reason. Too many times (and I have seen it in my private school) people assume all Republicans/Christians/Conservatives believe one thing and all Democrats/Liberals believe another; that you can not truly claim to be a member of the right/left wing or affiliate yourself with a certain religion if you believe this or that, oppose that or this. And what also came up in my school as an omnipresent factor was defending every stand with the Bible, which is fine and all, but the teachers failed to see not everyone believes in the Bible and therefore all of our reasoning was rendered useless in the secular world. You need to back up ideas with logic, and while I may personally choose to think the way I do because I happen to like Jesus doesn't mean the Wiccan/Buddist/Muslim/Athiest next to me (who also has a right to vote and therefore form policies and laws; as it should be) is going to listen to me back up my idea with something they don't believe in to begin with. If someone told you the sole reason rape/murder/speeding on the highway should be legal is because their ancient aztec sun god said so, I doubt you would listen.
I found it odd that my subconscious planted Namine as the antagonist in the end whereas Axel became the protagonist.
And also: in light of the fact I made Axel become what he hated correlated with my own discovery that while I do, indeed, become enraged with blatant hypocrites and liars, there are times where I fall guilty of the very thing I am opposing as well. No matter how good original intentions may be, some people (...like myself, unfortunately) have a hard time handing out second chances.
Namine was so disgusted with Axel's unintentional hypocrisy that all of his previous logic, however sound it might have been, was rendered useless and she acted out of spite (along with, like, a bunch of other things that factor into your head when you become pregnant.) She was mad that he condemned her for sleeping around when he does so all the time; though he always felt it was justified because he had taken the initiative to prevent offspring.
It's not a matter of who was right and wrong. It's just how I think one human being would react to another. Maybe you think they're both wrong. Maybe you think they're both right. Leave a review and tell me what's going through your head. You can hate the story, you can love it. As long as you have an opinion? That's good enough for me. You listened to my idea, so feel free to share yours; though I prefer you do so in a mature manner as opposed to 'omgsh u sux and u r going 2 hell!'
Wow. Vixen went back to her roots. A little bit of a contrast from her current dabblings in humor, no? Well, I know this was not my typical writing, and I actually wrote most of this while under the influence of heavy medication (read: sedatives...no, I am not crazy, I am sick, very very sick, check the profile for details.)
This was written for Rokukami's FAITH competition, and I included the required word at the very end during Axel's last line of dialogue. Hope you liked it Rokukami!