Birds
"The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and
which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing."
-Eric Berne
Sora liked birds – after all, his name did mean sky. Roxas liked birds, too, though because he was just a jumbled up version of Sora, he liked his birds dead. He'd lead Axel into his room by the window and open up the fish tank he'd scored from some punk down the street. "Look, Ax," He'd coo as he extracted yet another lifeless corpse. Mostly they were canaries or robins or cardinals because "they remind me of you, Ax."
Axel would chuckle and tell his little songbird to put the birdie back in its 'cage' for some more 'sleep'. Roxas always nodded. Back into the tank the bird would go, on top of the pyramids of fiery feathers and claws and beaks and dried brown blood.
These were the times between school and working for the Organization, between here and there, between the times when Roxas wore his glasses and when he wore his contacts. See, Roxas had bad eyes. You couldn't expect someone with such bright, blue eyes to have good vision, could you? It would be greedy to want both beauty and the ability to see beyond point A. And Roxas didn't want to be greedy. There could not be greed in the Organization.
Only efficiency.
Everyone worked together.
"How did you get that canary, Roxas?"
"It flew into my hand..."
"Yes? And then what did you do, Roxas?"
"...I put my other hand over it and snapped its neck," He admitted, eyes down. Roxas seemed uncomfortable now, so Axel touched his palm to Roxas' shoulder and said the other's name in a voice that could only mend. Axel had found that Roxas liked hearing his name.
But sometimes:
"I'm not Roxas," The blonde boy scowled, crossing his arms in a childish manner. "I'm Sora."
"Righht. I remember you."
"Good. Now who are you?"
"Nobody, Sora."
"Who?"
"I said I was nobody."
"No, I mean, who is Sora?"
Axel put his bigger hands on Roxas' elbows and lightly pushed them down, unfolding his arms, leaving the boy in a vulnerable position. "Forget about it," He'd murmur into Roxas' young neck – which always smelled like acrylic paint, no matter how many times he burned the skin and watched the red turn back to pink.
And Roxas liked pink birds, too. Not that he ever found any. He sprawled out on the floor of Axel's room and flipped through the picture book someone-or-another had lent him as a welcoming gift. Oh yeah, sure, that made it all worth while, all the work and sweat and statutory rape and looking for hearts, all of the things that beat the very memory of emotion out of you.
Welcome to Hell, here's a picture book.
"Look!" He tugged at Axel's hand. "It's a pink bird. It's pink! What's his name?"
"That's a flamingo."
"A what?"
"Forget about it."
Roxas smiled. "Okay."
Small things were easy to forget. Bigger things were harder to forget. Thankfully, one of the last emotions to go was Determination.
Big blue eyes stared sightlessly from underneath him. You could hardly call what Axel was doing with his mouth kissing, more like touching with his mouth. There was no Love, no Care, no Lust, no Friendship, none of the things Roxas thought he had seen in Axel's eyes. He was alone with a blur above him and a repetition tumbling out of his mouth.
Pain was one of the harder things to forget. It's nearly impossible, because when one just remembers it Pain has the tendency to reappear. "Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it," Roxas repeated, the pain mounting inside of him, threatening to burst from his stomach and fly away. He closed his mouth and the opened to say 'stop it' again, but his repetition was cut off by a scream. He cringed from the noise. Who was screaming?
"Forget it."
He gasped. The screaming was worse. Roxas tried to speak. Not with the screaming, he could hardly think. Finally, when the screaming ended, he managed to say, "Someone is in pain! Help him!"
"There is...N-no one here! But us! Forget it."
"No! He needs our help!"
"Forget it."
"…Okay."
The screams ripped apart his soul.
One day, squeezing tears out of his nearly sightless eyes, he came to Axel's door with the fish tank, shuddering. "Take them. Take them all. Take them away." He shoved the tank into Axel's chest.
"There's no where to put them."
"Burn them."
They sat side by side in front of the blazing fish tank. Feathers tinged with fire floated through the air like sick confetti and the smell of paint, which had been strangely pleasing before, now danced in Axel's nostrils with the smell of death.
"I want to forget everything," Roxas said, inching towards Axel. There was a different kind of fire in his eyes, and Axel knew he was going to be consumed by it, just like the bird he was.