Chapter One: Bones

Lorde- Ribs

Roxas had a habit of chewing his translucently thin fingernails down to the quick. In fact, this was what he was doing while he was sitting on an isolated park bench in the middle of a vaguely familiar state park he might have visited once on an elementary school field trip. He couldn't quite remember, to be frank. His pale blue eyes squinted in response to pain as he felt a tear at the junction of skin and keratin, and he pulled his index finger out of his mouth to discover bright pink, saliva slicked nail bed. He wiped the spit diluted blood on his pants leg. His mother wouldn't stand for it, his compulsive nail chewing that often left his fingers mangled, and he would have to keep his hands out of sight to avoid a lecture. Are all moms so good at making their children feel two inches tall?

Then again, the growing annoyance in the pit of his stomach at the thought of it was pointless in reality. He probably wasn't going to see her. If all went accordingly, and he intensely wished it would, he would be leaving his pathetic, boring, dull (and every other negative word he could think of) adolescent life behind. The thought caused him to shiver, or maybe that was the wind. He was bundled up on that misty December day, in layers of brand new semi-designer clothing his parents rather informally gave him on Christmas morning two days prior.

He would be turning eighteen years old on February seventeenth. The thought usually excited kids his age, the thought of being able to buy cigarettes, lottery tickets, click the "yes, I am eighteen" button on porn sites truthfully, to gain the ability to vote, to be seen as an "adult" in the eyes of Uncle Sam and the United States government. Roxas simply saw it as another year gone, another year wasted.

He was bored. He was just bored.

Saying goodbye to his house and his bed was as easy as was expected, and his silent goodbyes to his parents were disturbingly painless. The only thing that held any semblance of challenge was saying goodbye to his friends, though he could admit that he wasn't as close to any of them as he was a few years ago. He couldn't remember the last time they had all gotten ice cream.

He took a deep, shaky breath of winter air and pulled up the hood on his jacket. He could barely feel his ears already, and he'd only been sitting outside for thirty minutes. He rose from his park bench, and began to walk at a gingerly pace. There was a labyrinth of dirt trails in this massive park, many of them leading to different places. There was the path that would take you back to the lodge where you could look at uninspiring pamphlets about endangered species of butterflies and the invasion of kudzu and drink from communal water fountains that dispensed untrustworthy, dirt-flavored water. You could head down to the swamp, to shoot some drugs, impregnate a minor, dump a body, or whatever. Some people fancied the nature trail through a damp, lifeless, unvaried southeastern forest. Roxas could only take so many pine trees before he died of boredom. He had taken the trail that led toward the river, though he had to admit that calling it a river was slightly hard-pressed. It was more of an over-sized creek flowing with greenish, glass-like water over sludge covered rocks, swimming with microbial creatures and potential organ-melting parasites. Roxas idly wondered if the questionable water fountains back in the lodge were somehow associated with this radioactive looking waterway.

His slow pace could have been correlated with a suppressed sense of doubt that Roxas had been pushing away with pep talks and a forced sense of courage and fearlessness. Truth be told, Roxas had never done anything quite like this before. He'd barely ever had the chance to breathe a word of this even to himself under the watchful eyes and oppressive thumbs of his mother and father.

By fate or luck, his inner turmoil was interrupted by the sudden realization that he had made it back to the highway. The pavement was daunting to look at when he wasn't in a car, a feeling he hadn't expected. The road was wide, infinite, and silent. He pushed another deep breath in and out, keeping as calm as he could. He had read somewhere that smiling, even if you're unprovoked, will lighten your mood and make you feel better, in the sense of manually altering your psyche. With that though in mind, he shrugged his shoulders to shift the heavy backpack he carried and relieve his shoulders of weight and tension, and began walking down the side of the road, his head and thumb both held high.

He walked like that for several miles, away from his home town of Lake City, South Carolina. He didn't mind the walking (he idly commended himself for the exercise) but he was getting cold, despite the amount of bundling up he had done before he had left his house that morning. It had to have been around one or two in the afternoon now. A few cars had passed him by, barely bothering to slow down. Roxas was reminded of his mother's words of warning about hitchikers; they were unpredictable and dangerous. He wondered if the driver of the last few cars thought of his as unpredictable and dangerous. It was laughable, but it almost made him smile.

As if on cue, he heard another car far down the way. He could just barely see the car headed towards him. Soon he was able to make out the color, which was black, and eventually he was able to make out the make and model, which was an older Jeep Cherokee. As his heart pounded with the same kind of trepidation you feel on the first day of high school that makes you feel as if your breakfast of pop-tarts and chocolate milk would soon be spewed all over campus, he extended his arm and lifted his thumb.

The utility vehicle began to slow down, and Roxas half expected the driver to gently pump brakes, glance at him indifferently, and move along as if there were nothing to see. He was actually surprised when the Jeep slowed down and actually came to a complete halt in the middle of the abandoned highway. The black paint was old, dingy, and covered with brown dust, and the side mirror on the driver's side was missing. The windows had been tinted with half-assed effort, most likely by the driver's cousin or uncle in a makeshift car garage. Though the job was shitty, it was nonetheless effective, and Roxas couldn't actually see the kindhearted driver who had so graciously stopped for him.

Nothing happened for an uncomfortably long moment, and Roxas was unsure of what he was supposed to do in this event. Was there etiquette involved with hitchhiking? Was there a rule book somewhere that he didn't know about? Before his thoughts could get too convoluted, a window was rolled down and Roxas' eyes were introduced to the most genuine curiosity and amusement he had ever seen etched onto a human face. A human face that was also painfully striking and handsome to look at, like the fashion models you see peppered throughout the pages of Vogue that sometimes make you literally sick to your stomach and full of self-loathing. His looks were alienesque in the hick-town, sprawling dead tobacco field setting they were in, and his eyes were a toxic green that Roxas could easily see from across the road. Roxas was sure he'd never met anyone that looked like that before.

Not to mention the shock of unnaturally red hair sticking out in long, messy skewers behind his head. He felt like he could smell the product mingling with grime to get it to stay in that shape.

"Is this the part where I ask you if you want free candy?"

He half-shouted the words over the engine of the car and amount of distance between them. His voice slipped lasciviously from his bemused smirk in an oddly good-natured way. Roxas would remember this later, when he would realize that his first impression of the man was that he was obviously an avid user sarcasm.

"Isn't this what they warned me about as a child? Stranger danger and all that?" Roxas replied.

"Yeah, and now I think this is the part where I assure you that I don't have to be a stranger for much longer."

Roxas almost laughed a little, but out of suspicion and the lack of wanting to come off as the giggling school girl type, he stayed deadpanned.

"Fuck, you know I'm joking, right?"

Without missing a beat, Roxas retorted. "What if you're not? What if you've got some ploy turning over in your mind right now that involves shaving my legs and raping me?"

"Would you gain any sort of reassurance if I promised to use lube?"

"Not really."

"Good. Then get in, sport."

Memories from within his high school reading list materialized in his mind, and he imagined some elaborate story from the past to explain why the guy just used the moniker "sport". Maybe the man was simply really in to Fitzgerald novels.

With a shrug to push away his doubt, he walked across the gray road and opened the passenger door of the Jeep. His nose was greeted with a mixture of cigarettes, body oder, patchouli oil, cheap car fresheners and old fast food bags. There was no music playing from within the dark, warm vehicle. As he climbed into the seat, he rubbed his numb hands in front of the vents and took a brief moment to attempt an inconspicuous glance at his deliverer. He wore stained, fucked up denim on his lower half and what looked like a brand new black wife beater on his upper half. The kind of brand new black that almost looked blue right out of the plastic Fruit of the Loom package. His eyes which had shocked him from a distance before were much more entrancing up close. He imagined that if you stared at them too long and looked away, you would see phantom spots in your vision, a ghost of the toxic green that had burned your retinas before.

"What's your name?" The savior asked once Roxas had shut the groaning car door. The inside was very dark, save for a dim blue glow emanating from the GPS attached to the dashboard.

"Roxas," he replied plainly.

"No last name?"

Roxas took a moment to weigh out whether this stranger should know such information. He saw the digital green clock on the Jeep's console click to 2:14 PM.

"Wade," he responded, still staring at the clock.

"Roxas Wade," the man articulated back to him. His voice held a promise of being very well and able to purr and roll with seductive lilts that Roxas had only heard in high quality downloaded porn.

"What's yours?" Roxas asked politely.

"Axel Payne," he said, tucking a cigarette between his lips and lighting it on cue as if they were in a movie scene. He held the soft pack out to Roxas, the cancer sticks like an offering of friendship. Roxas hesitantly took one of the Newports and hoped he could choke the whole thing down without coughing or getting sick. He wasn't much of a smoker; in fact, this would be the third cigarette he had ever had in his life.

"Want a smoke?"

The first cigarette was fairly memorable and Roxas could look back on it almost fondly. He was fifteen and almost every ounce of his spare time was spent goofing off inside of cars driven by slightly older teenagers that still thought it was cool to call cigarettes "cigs". Today they were in the Sonic Drive-In. Last weekend they were in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and the weekend before that they were behind the do-it-yourself car wash. The slightly older teenagers that his mother would refer to as troublemakers and delinquents were seniors this year, and most of them had this hideously annoying habit of bringing up the fact every time something vaguely nostalgic happened. His mother was surprisingly off the mark about them; these kids actually didn't do much worse than smoke cigarettes, consume copious amounts of caffeine and call each other "cunts".

"Sure, thanks," Roxas responded politely, taking one from the pack of Camel Menthols that was thrust in front of him almost demandingly. He was thankful that no one had handed him a lighter, considering he wasn't entirely sure if he knew how to make one function properly. He'd never had a reason to use one before. As a lit match was jammed in front of his face, he placed the filter between his lips and attempted to puff on the cigarette solely by the force of his lungs. His face scrunched in effort and confusion.

"Suck on it like a straw," the girl holding the match said through giggles. Her face was pale and plain with an underlying air of vanity behind her sloppy eyeliner, Jack Skellington earrings and lackluster blond hair.

Roxas did as he was told and felt smoke fill his mouth. The process clicked suddenly, and he inhaled what smoke he had gathered into his orifice and immediately gagged and coughed.

Sardonic laughter rang like bells throughout the small circle of friends as if they hadn't choked on their first cigarette.

"You'll get used to it," the girl said as she discarded the match out of the window of the car and into a puddle of water, slapping him on the back. Roxas wasn't sure if he wanted to get used to it. It tasted like shit and felt like fiberglass scratching the delicate pink interior of his esophagus with a million microscopic cuts.

"Hey Roxas!"

A red pickup truck that had seen better days had pulled up next to the SUV he was currently sitting in. His best friend Hayner was practically hanging out the window of said truck, reaching out towards him with his fist in a request for daps, which Roxas accepted with a smile.

"Man what are you doing here at Sonic? This place blows dicks," Hayner taunted playfully. Hayner was a year older than Roxas, and got the beat up truck for his birthday a few months ago.

"Good question..." Roxas responded. Why was he with these seniors again? They were pretentious and boring and couldn't make him laugh the way his best friends could.

"Get in loser, we're going shopping," Hayner laughed, reaching across the seats to push the passenger door open.

Roxas looked back at the group of teens in the car with him. They were looking at him with disdainful sneers, like he'd just played a sick joke on small child. Roxas shrugged and got out of the car, happy to hop into the cab of Hayner's truck and drive away from those assholes.

His second cigarette was way more exciting, in one of the most typical ways you could imagine. Cue nineties alternative band playing a song about much they hate their town...

"Want a cig?"

Roxas always wanted to cringe, scoff, and roll his eyes all at once when he heard that stupid word. He wasn't sure why he hated it so much, but it always felt like a word you wold say when you were trying too hard.

"I guess," Roxas said in a monotone.

He took the cigarette and tucked it between his lips. He looked around to make sure no one was around; they were, after all, behind the cafeteria at Lake City High.

"Dude, don't be so paranoid."

There were two "friends" that were with him, one of them a tall, brown haired guy he didn't know all that well, and the other was the blond girl with the slaphappy eyeliner. She wasn't so bad. Just stupid and painfully uninteresting.

Roxas cut his eyes at the senior boy that had chastised him and slowly turned around to face the expanse of grass behind the building, Zippo in hand.

The flame fluttered in the slight breeze and the tobacco crackled gently as he sucked on the filter, and the moment he raised his eyes to look back across the field, his eyes widened in surprise and pure, unadulterated fear.

"Oh fuck," the blond girl squeaked.

Roxas dropped the lighter to the ground and booked it around the building, cigarette still tucked between his lips, praying to God that he would lose the assistant principle that had just caught them smoking and skipping class all at once. He felt as if he were running incredibly slow, the same sensation you get while trying to run during a really shitty nightmare. Your legs feel like useless Play-Dough appendages and you can't seem to go fast enough to get away from the monster chasing you.

He wasn't sure where his friends were at that point, and he didn't really care. He ran and ran through the commons area, then through the double doors of building C, turned the corner, and careened with squeaking sneakers into the chest of the head principle.

Roxas bounced off of the solid male form and hit the tile floor with a sick sound between a thud and a crack.

"What the hell do you think you are doing, boy?" The man's voice rumbled with anger and authority.

Roxas laid there on the floor, defeated and spread eagle, and responded to the ceiling.

"I was smoking and running at the same time and ran into you. Obviously you know about that last part."

"Smoking? Smoking what?" His dark, beady eyes narrowed.

"A cigarette, Mr. Bullard."

Roxas suddenly realized that said cigarette had disappeared. He eyelids drooped as he imagined himself swallowing the damn thing whole on impact with the brick wall of a human he had just collided with. He imagined the red hot cherry burning a trail down his esophagus, the thing dropping into his stomach acid and festering there until he died of some horrid new form of cancer that riddled his entire body with tumors and pain.

Mr. Bullard took a few steps towards a row of lockers against the wall, bent to the ground, and picked up a miraculously still-lit cigarette. Roxas was surprised. He was genuinely convinced that he had swallowed it.

"Get up, Mr. Wade."

Roxas sighed and pushed himself into a sitting position, shaking his head back and forth in an attempt to reset his equilibrium, and stood to face his undertaker.

"You realize you're getting a serious amount of detention for this." The cigarette, which Roxas glared at accusingly, continued to burn between his fat sausage fingers.

"Yeah I'd pretty much accepted that as soon as I crashed into you."

"You don't seem to care much, son."

"Since we're all being honest here, I really don't. No offense."

Mr. Bullard shook his head solemnly and walked to the double doors. He opened one of them and threw the cigarette into a puddle beside the trashcan.

"You know Mr. Wade, I've been head principle at this school for ten years now," he started as he turned and walked down the hallway, Roxas assuming he was meant to follow, "and I've only known three students who were anything near as hardheaded and smart-mouthed as you."

"That so?"

"Yes, Mr. Wade, that is so." Roxas could tell he was getting frustrated. He smirked in satisfaction. Honestly, he was sixteen at the time and overflowing with the kind of angst that could make anarchists look like preschoolers at snack-time.

"Your mother's gonna be getting a phone call about this later."

"Oh Christ..."

The third cigarette he had inside of Axel's dark car made him feel as if the act could become habitual and embedded in his bones in the form of carelessly developing lung cancer. The way he felt in that moment was something almost fanciful, and it was a feeling he couldn't quite comprehend just yet. He almost smiled again, but thought better of it. He didn't have much reason to be happy. He was a fucking runaway.

"Where ya headed?" Axel asked him after a few moments of driving. Roxas noticed the direction he was going and suddenly thought about the very-not-funny possibility that Axel was headed towards his home town.

"Anywhere but Lake City," Roxas responded quickly.

"Well, I can tell ya that's not where I'm headed."

"How far are you willing to take me?"

Axel pondered the question for a moment, his lips pursing in a way that resembled the freak counterpart of a Maybelline commercial.

"I'm headed to the beach, if you're looking to go that far."

"The beach?" Roxas' chest tightened and he forced his breath to come slow, the same way he might have three years ago, before he had any semblance of social competence and was winked at for the first time by a person approximating something attractive. This enigmatic man, his proverbial golden ticket, was suddenly illuminated with a heavenly light before Roxas' eyes.

"Yeah. I'm looking to move there semi-permanently, if I can find any place with carpet not stained with frat boy spooge."

"So you're not going for the foam parties, fifteen year old slut bags and reggae music?"

"The fifteen year olds may have also been a secondary excuse, yes."

Roxas went silent again, wondering if he was joking about this, too. Multiple jokes about pedophilia weren't exactly standard within the first few minutes of meeting a person.

"I'm kidding again. Do you always take a moment to contemplate taking every joke literally?"

Roxas remained silent just long enough for Axel to drum his fingers once against the steering wheel.

"I don't know you," he settled with mumbling, managing to tear his eyes away from Axel.

"You're right. I guess that is an adequate reason to question me. You are the kid who decided to hitchhike alone, though." Axel chuckled. "How vintage. Pretty risky business, hopping into total strangers cars... You can't be more than fourteen, fifteen tops."

"I'm seventeen", Roxas corrected him with a defensive bite.

"Close enough."

"I'd say you missed the mark."

Axel smirked and cut his eyes towards the blond boy. Something just short of a laugh escaped his throat before he took an obscenely attractive drag off of his cigarette.

"How old are you, anyway?" Roxas asked.

"I turned twenty-two last month, on the nineteenth." Smoke curled and billowed out of his nostrils as if he were a dragon as he spoke. Roxas noticed that no one had bothered to roll any windows down, causing a light haze to be cast over them. "Just graduated early a couple of weeks ago. Feel lucky you ain't headed for the college route, kid."

"So you're a Scorpio," Roxas near-murmured.

"Junior Astrologist?"

"Not really. I just know about signs."

"Then tell me about mine, and I can tell you if you're full of shit." He flashed a grin and waited.

"You're volatile, brash, aggressive and passionate. You say a lot of shit you don't mean, and you may or may not know that your words are your greatest weapon and tool. They can build or destroy whoever you choose to direct them at. You're extremely sexual and have a hard time keeping it in your pants. You rarely think before you act, and that can either spell a good time or a quick trip to the hospital, or jail. The things you believe in, you believe in deeply enough to fight and kill for. The few people you love should feel lucky, because no one will ever love them as deeply as you do. You also have a penchant for hypocrisy."

Axel whistled. "So I'm a violently passionate, hypocritical slut-bag. Impressive. But that barely begins to paint a picture of my inner complexities and machinations."

"Is your indulgent vocabulary supposed to impress me?"

"No, it's supposed to make me feel better about myself."

"Is that a lack of confidence I sense?"

"Potentially, but I don't think a seventeen year old possesses the credentials to formulate such a claim."

"I might have a lot more depth than most seventeen year olds."

"Yeah, and most seventeen year olds would say that."

"You're not even that much older than me." Roxas was beginning to feel incredulous.

"Most seventeen year olds would also say that, for they lack the knowledge of just how much can happen in five years."

"Four years, one month, and twenty days, actually."

"Your birthday is in February?"

"Yep."

"So you're an Aquarius?"

"I thought astrology was bullshit?"

"I never actually said that," Axel said, a wink following close behind. The kind of gut-wrenching wink that could cause puppies to spontaneously combust into ash and blackened organs all the while causing unicorns to achieve orgasm.

Roxas took a final drag from his cigarette and mushed what was left into the overflowing ashtray under the digital clock. He remained silent and decided to give up on the debate, wondering if it was normal or not to have such rapid-fire confabulation with a stranger in the first place all the while pondering if the carpet matched the drapes.

He turned his head and looked out of the window. Dead tobacco shifted to dead cotton, and that was about the greatest extent of stimulation one could get whilst driving down the flat, depressing highway in Bum Fuck Egypt, South Carolina in the dead of winter.

When his mouth wasn't talking, it was usually working a number on his nails, especially when he was nervous. He had received something of a shock when he really noticed how the trees and various crops and livestock were rushing by him from within the dark and overwhelmingly unfamiliar vehicle. Mile after nonrefundable mile flew by from within that stranger's car, and it was only until that moment that he felt something powerful- something that he didn't want to admit felt a lot like fear. He looked down at his hands, fingers tense and un-moving. He only had one nail left to chew, and that was the thumb nail of his left hand.