When Roxas first left, it was like his soul had been shredded. His bones were all broken, his ribs crushed. His throat was eternally raw from the silent wailing, mouth wide open and wet with tears, soundless. Constantly awake, staring and tamping down the dark surges of thoughts--you weren't enough, he's not coming back--his eyes were tired, felt dry and old like paint flaking off of wood. He was missing a part of himself, incapacitated by the loss. It was easier to watch something long-had drift away, the fading into mist or misty memory. To have and then suddenly not have was like a bad joke, like a misstep. Axel told himself it had to be a mistake. Sometimes he lied, and sometimes he was a jackass, but he'd never pegged himself for a sucker. (He wryly hoped that Roxas was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. No body could take this abuse twice.)
It got easier to ignore when Roxas would take his calls. The could joke, and he could jack off later thinking of Roxas's perfect, little chest, the slope of his cheek, bridge of his nose, the way he chewed the inside of his lip and the things he'd said to Axel two days after his birthday last year. He would come over his hand, gasping, and be able to not think past that. To ignore the what ifs and if onlys.
After that, Roxas nearing the hysteric, always about Sora, Sora, SORA, it was easy to tell himself that he could do this. He could be in the shadows and love (Was this love? It often felt like obsession, staring at pictures of Roxas's face, smally smiling, or replaying conversations over and over. The idea of him, smell, feel, all kinds of feel--Axel felt the burn of humiliated defeat. Why overcome something he wanted so bad? If this was disease, why was it so beautiful?). But he was never entirely okay, because Roxas did need him, needed him to be right on the edge of dying and smitten all the time.
But, he supposed, he'd joked to himself that he was willing to take any abuse. He'd always been a quitter about most things; shit wasn't worth his time. This, though, this was worth it. This was it.
So after after the complete deconstruction of pride, Axel paced in thought, deliberating. He bit out a cocky, "fuck this." There was, after all, a limit to how long you could avoid the inevitable.
Axel wanted Roxas back, and Axel always got what he wanted.