Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts.
a/n: So, yeah, this is depressing, BUT I'm adding to the story with a few chapters-not immediately, but I'm working on them-and it'll get... less depressing, in a sense. Anyway. Don't read this if you're not okay with crying, because I have it on good authority that it makes people cry.
Roxas always hated his hair color. Having flaxen, pretty hair when you're twelve is a tough gig, because a) you get called a girl a lot, especially when your hair is chin-length and way too shiny, and b) it was blond, which just got a bunch of dumb jokes hurled his way. He also hated having a twin brother, because Sora, glowing bag of bubbles that he was, got the good hair in the family, and he only got called gay when he messed up in four square or wore pink or something.
Roxas, eating his lunch with Pence, who was nice despite being labeled "the fat kid", always watched his brunet brother with unconcealed spite across the cafeteria, laughing with all his stupid, dumb, popular friends with their stupid, dumb, popular smiles, but what Roxas didn't factor into the equation was how fleeting and shallow those friends of Sora's were, because when Easter rolled around and the McCrimmons found themselves in the hospital because Sora had collapsed at sunrise service, only two of the eight or eighty friends that Sora had in stitches at lunch showed up, and only one of them stayed, because the other had "homework to do, sorry". Roxas felt even worse for all of those days of scorn, because Kairi really wasn't that bad, and as she held Sora's hand, eyes red, she looked right at Mrs. McCrimmon and said that she'd noticed Sora getting skinnier and skinnier, and was worried that he had an eating disorder, because she was pretty sure Selphie was going that direction, but that this explained it a lot better, because Sora was too happy to have an eating disorder.
Roxas hadn't noticed Sora getting skinny, because Roxas hadn't really talked to his brother since third grade, and he'd stopped paying attention to Sora's size when Roxas finally outgrew him in fifth grade, and he felt like crap now, because really, why had Kairi noticed and he hadn't?
Roxas' mom started crying in the second day of sitting in that room, because Sora finally woke up, and the doctor finally really actually completely told them what was going on.
"I have what I hope to be Sora's final diagnosis, and I must say, things could be much worse," the doctor said, smiling his doctor smile with his flashing glasses and his shiny white coat, and Roxas absolutely hated him for being able to smile right then, because his chest felt like it was about to disappear or explode or turn in on itself like a black hole, and Dr. Margree… Margro… Margsomething was smilin' away like Jesus had stopped by to make him coffee that morning and have a heart-to-heart about all the sinning he'd done with that nurse giving him the doe eyes, because Roxas wasn't a retard, and he knew what sexy eyes looked like, and that lady was making some—
"—anaplastic large cell lymphoma. That's doctor talk for cancerous lymph nodes, which are some of the primary structures of the immune sys—"
Roxas couldn't even pronounce that. The clenching in his chest loosened, though, as Dr. Margrapes explained that, traditionally, anaplastic lymphomas were fairly responsive to chemotherapy treatments, and that Sora had pretty good chances, all things considered.
He stared at his brother, blue eyes somber as he curled his hand around Sora's. The brunet had his eyes clenched, breathing labored as he struggled not to lose it in front of Kairi. Roxas remembered some awkward exchange with their mom a few weeks ago, Sora and Mrs. McCrimmon's voices floating down the hall from the kitchen to hand the words "like her a lot, you know?" and "the way she smiles" and "want to ask her" to Roxas on a silver platter, and he remembered grinning like a grinning thing as he made plans to blackmail his perfect brother, and he remembered feeling this burning jealousy when Sora and Kairi grinned at each other and blushed in the cafeteria the next day, because man, why did he get to crush on cute girls when the most Roxas got by way of crushing was Seifer sitting on him when he tried to cut him in line for the soda machine? He remembered all that, and as he looked at Kairi with those perfect, girly tears rolling down her cheeks, hands clenched around Sora's other hand, he felt this really sad, really terrible guilt that he had almost tried to use that against the kid in the hospital bed.
Wouldn't that suck? Having your brother ridicule you for having a dumb little crush when you were weeks away from having this crappy stamp saying "CANCER PATIENT" smacked on your forehead? Man, was he glad he hadn't done that.
"—any questions?" The doctor smiled at them all, allowing an appropriate amount of comforting sympathy to grace his brown eyes as he looked at Kairi and Sora, eyebrows lifting at Roxas, and Roxas felt the sudden need to be involved in this exchange, because hell, that was his brother in that bed, and he hadn't told the kid he loved him in about eighty million years, and, I mean, he wasn't gonna do that now or anything, because he had dignity, you know, but taking interest would be enough for the moment, right?
"Can I come with him to his treatments?" His voice was earnest in the uncomfortable room, eyebrows so scrunched down that he looked like he was trying to remember a magnificent plan he had cooked up to get to the moon with only a garbage can and a cat that would inevitably save the whole of humanity.
Dr. Mangroves looked pleasantly surprised, having assumed that Roxas was one of those pre-teen kids that didn't react to much aside from chili dogs and skateboarding.
"Well, as you're family, you're perfectly allowed to come along. I'll make sure to have a chair set up for you, alright?"
"Yeah," Roxas replied, looking away, because that smile was way too cheesy, but he met his mom's teary gaze and looked back long enough to shrug and say "Thanks."
Roxas hated Sora's chemotherapy almost as much as Sora did, but it was okay at first, because Sora was so surprised and happy to have Roxas talking to him again that he smiled the whole way through, except when they jabbed the needle in and pulled it out. Roxas hadn't known that Sora had noticed that he was being ignored, or hated, or whatever, but as the conversation went when they were in the waiting room about the third time they went to the cancer ward, those smiles Roxas had so despised on Sora's face had been fake for a while. Apparently, he'd been trying to convince Tidus and them that Roxas wasn't a girl or a pansy or anything for months, because he really hated seeing his brother stepped on all the time, but his jerk friends were too stupid and biased to give a care what Sora said, because Sora was just Sora, and though he was "the man", he wasn't "man" enough to convince them not to name-call.
The chemo stopped being okay when Sora came into Roxas' room with a tuft of hair in his hand and tears hiding in his eyes, because Sora was pretty fond of having hair, though he really hadn't paid it much attention before. As more and more brown strands littered the floor of the bathroom, and Sora wore more and more hats to school, Roxas got sadder and sadder, because he loved Sora's hair, because it was so pretty and brown, and Roxas wished that he had hair like that. So when Sora caved in and shaved it off, when he attached that beanie to his head permanently and shoved his hands into one of their dad's sweatshirts and started looking like a punk-ass teenager, Roxas did the same thing. He shaved his hair off and crammed a beanie on his head and wore an over-sized sweatshirt, and they were back to the old days, before Roxas' hair went blond, when nobody could tell them apart, because, after all, they were one-egg twins.
Sora's eyebrows fell out, too, and Roxas and Kairi joked with him and drew them on for him, as well as a Hitler moustache, and they took dumb pictures of him doing the Nazi salute before their mom caught them and said that it wasn't funny, because a lot of people died in the Holocaust.
Roxas pulled his eyebrows out with his mom's tweezers, but when Sora's eyelashes fell out, he stopped trying to look exactly the same, because the thought of pulling out his eyelashes made him cringe.
The really scary part started when Sora got skin legions, and his eyes got all sunken and bruised, and he lost even more weight, because apparently the chemo had stopped working, and the doctors didn't know what to do for a while.
After a day and a half of Sora curled up in a hospital bed, IV hydrating him while he slept, which he'd been doing for a while, Dr. Maplethorp came back and suggested that Sora be moved to a cancer facility on the west side of town. Mrs. McCrimmon cried some more, and Kairi and Roxas stared at each other with quiet, sad eyes, and volunteered Sora for the transfer themselves. Predictably, the hospital couldn't act on the word of two twelve-year-olds, but Sora's parents agreed after the determined pre-teens stared them down for several minutes, because really, was it that hard to see that Sora was going to waste away to nothing if they didn't fix him fast?
Two days later, they transferred the little bald kid, bereft of his stupid, shallow friends, to the Hollow Bastion Cancer Center, his girlfriend and his twin brother clinging to a hand each, parents scooting along behind the ambulance in their sedan, all five of them thankful that the EMTs hadn't felt the need to use the siren and lights to drive the fourteen miles across town.
Roxas pitched a fit when they tried to make him leave that night, though Kairi had acquiesced quietly, and his mother was blowing her nose, and his dad was looking solemn in the hallway, because hell no he wasn't going to leave Sora alone in this creepy room, thanks. He knew that Sora couldn't sleep in new places until at least three days had passed, because Sora had slept in Roxas' bed for almost a week when they moved into town in second grade, and he had tossed and turned audibly and had dark circles under his eyes when they moved into the new house a few years ago, and Roxas knew that, and his brother was already tired without three sleepless nights because of something stupid and scary, like the ambient buzzing of fluorescent lights in the hallway being unfamiliar, or because the pillow crinkled when he moved his head.
"You can't make me leave!" He snarled at the orderly, snatching his arm out of her grasp yet again, even though he knew that they could and would make him leave, because professional places were like that. It was dumb, he thought, and he wasn't going to leave without a fight.
What he wasn't expecting was for the Smooth Medical Three (as he had already dubbed the trio of disturbingly attractive doctors running the place) to sweep into the room and order the other bed in the room made up for Roxas.
"Sora won't have a roommate for a few days yet, and we understand the bonds of brotherhood," the blond one said with a suave, rather impressively pristine smile at the orderly and Roxas and pretty much everyone in the room. Plus, he had a British accent, which makes you twelve times awesomer in everyone's book.
"You'll have to live by the house rules, though, which means lights out at ten, among other things that I'm sure you'll end up disagreeing with," the gray-haired one added, voice a monotone, most of that weird hair falling in his face. Roxas thought it odd that he had such a hair color, because they were all surprisingly young, which must have meant it was a dye-job. He never asked.
"Is this alright with you, Mom and Dad?" The last one had pink hair that must have been a joke, though he really didn't look like he was joking. Even when he called Mr. and Mrs. McCrimmon "Mom and Dad", which should have been a diverting attempt at humor, his voice was rather flat, though not nearly as expressionless as Doctor Gray Hair's.
"Mom and Dad" agreed, however tentatively, and Roxas barely restrained himself from dancing, because now Sora would be able to sleep.
What he wasn't counting on were the frequent nightly visits from the nurses, waking Sora up at least every other hour to check his blood pressure, make sure he felt alright, all that jazz. It ticked him off, honestly, because dude, why would you wake a sick person up in the middle of the night? Seriously.
A week passed, Roxas returning to his own room about four days in, because Sora's roommate had need of the bed Roxas had been using, and Roxas had to go back to school eventually. Leaving Sora hadn't been the best idea ever proposed to him, but he was okay with it as long as the silver-haired kid moving in didn't freak out or die or something, because that would just traumatize Sora. And anyway, Riku was pretty cool. He had leukemia, which honestly must have sucked, but his wig was pretty awesome, so he at least had fun with being bald. Roxas and Sora oohed and aahed over the shiny silver thing Riku had attached to his head, Sora swinging his legs over the side of his bed and wiggling his fingers at his new roommate, silently asking "Can I touch it?"
Riku smiled vaguely, walking over and inclining his head far enough for Sora to feel the synthetic hair. It was pretty convincing, Roxas thought, pondering the taller kid from his corner of the room.
Predictably, the conversation turned to cancer.
"So, what're you in for?" Sora sounded like a convict asking the newest meat on the cellblock what crime he'd committed to get thrown in the slammer, waggling the skin where his eyebrows should have been in a goofy way. Riku smiled, tucking hair behind his ear as he settled on his bed.
"I'm finishing up a cycle of chemo before they move onto marrow transplants. It hasn't been working all that well, according to my doctor, so they're putting me on supervision and upping the treatment," he explained. His voice was mellow and teenage, facial expressions tending towards the sarcastic and jaded.
"Oh, wow," Sora said, eyes widening. "I'm really glad I don't need a transplant."
Riku snorted.
"Yeah, I would be, too. It sucks."
Something about living in this environment of sick people must have been effecting Roxas' typical lack of social forwardness, because he took that moment to climb onto Sora's bed and stare at Riku.
"What d'they do when they give you a marrow transplant? Like, suck all your bones empty and fill them back in?" The image in his head was that of a cannoli, hollow crust being filled with white, creamy stuff from a pastry bag.
Riku shook his head, then shrugged.
"I mean, it's not exactly like that. They, uh… well, they have to kill all the marrow that's already there, which is supposed to pretty painful and miserable, and then they put the fresh marrow in and it has to grow to fill your bones in right." He didn't sound very pleased with the process, eyes averted. "Survival rates are pretty slim."
"Oh," Roxas said, grasping the weight of the situation anew. This happened fairly regularly, him getting a new, firm grasp on the fact that all these kids had serious diseases, but it still shocked him every time he realized that the skinny, grimacing person telling him about their personal brand of doomed could very well die in the next few weeks or days or months. It was weird, looking at Riku and knowing that if the chemo didn't start working, he was probably going to die.
The conversation ended there, Riku's older sister striding into the room with a smile and a wink.
"Hey, kiddo," she said, and Riku tried to smile, and Roxas and Sora took that as their cue to withdraw into their half of the room.
When they kicked him out that night, with an admitted level of grudging on the part of Sora's nurse, who had grown quite fond of Roxas over the last few days, Roxas shuffled through the sliding doors, eyes on the dark sky.
He hadn't wanted to leave, because on the second day, Roxas had met Axel.
Axel's eyebrows had only half fallen out when Roxas stumbled across him in the lounge, teaching some skeletal eight-year-old how to tie a headscarf. It was because of that weird act of kindness, and the way that Axel smiled at the kid that made Roxas talk to him, because it takes a certain kind of guy to do that kind of thing and mean it, which he did, judging from his smile, and Roxas had always liked that certain kind of guy, for whatever reason.
"Hey, uhm… that was cool of you," he said awkwardly, blinking from under the edge of his beanie, looking too serious to be a twelve-year-old.
Axel blinked, grinned, tugging on his own headscarf in a kind of noncommittal way, like most people would shrug, only not shrugging.
"Thanks. Yeah, I figure it's a handy skill when you're stuck in this shit hole. If you can't have hair, have scarf!" His voice was husky, sounded prone to smiling.
Roxas snorted, rolled his eyes, and then hesitated, feeling bad for kind of making fun of the bald kid crouched on the floor, because yeah, Roxas was bald too right now, but he wasn't really bald, because he had sparkly fuzz growing back where his hair had been, and he was probably the only one under the age of thirty in here who still had functioning hair follicles.
"Haven't seen you around. You new?"
Roxas nodded, shifting awkwardly, staring at the floor and Axel intermittently.
"My, uhm… my brother's got lymphoma. I'm staying with him." It was the usual greeting for him, because the first couple of people he'd met had assumed – with good reason – that he was a patient, and it was really awkward trying not to stutter as he explained that he wasn't terminally ill or anything, he was just here because his twin had bruisy eyes and was way too skinny.
Obviously, that wasn't what Axel was expecting to hear from the kid with the beanie, because what was left of his eyebrows shot up towards the crease of his scarf, green eyes curious.
"That's not a story you hear everyday." He paused as he stood up, grinned conspiratorially and leaned forward. "You sure you don't have one little tumor? No? Nothing? Well hell, kid, aren't you lucky."
Roxas blinked, not really know how to respond to that. Do you say "Thank you" when someone tells you you're lucky for not having abnormal cell growth? They really ought to teach these things in school.
Axel took his silence for I'm-not-sure-how-to-respond-to-that-so-I'm-not-going-to silence, and shook his head, holding out a hand.
"Name's Axel. Got it memorized?" Man, that cheeky grin was going to be stuck in Roxas' head, kind of like that one line from a song you only half know that loops around and around for days until you hear it again.
"Uh, sure. I'm Roxas," he replied, looking a bit dazed as he shook hands with this unnaturally tall guy with a name like a part of a wheel.
It was funny, he thought in hindsight, how easy it was to be friends with Axel. Within ten minutes of meeting him, Roxas was only slightly unwilling to follow the guy to his room, because it was noon, and noon meant check-ups for all the patients, and Axel was too busy gesticulating as he talked about cars for Roxas to wander off, because it was rude to leave while someone was talking, and though Roxas frequently tried his best to be rude, he couldn't summon the willpower when the person to which he would be being rude was the guy who had just shown a cancer patient how to tie a headscarf in a semi-attractive way. Also, the guy knew a lot about cars, and Roxas thought cars were pretty cool.
That was how he found himself stretched out in the orange chair with the plastic cushions beside Axel's bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling while Axel talked a red-haired nurse's ear off.
"You know, if I still had hair, I'd dye it your color," he was saying as Roxas tuned back in, blinking, because he was pretty sure Axel was eighteen, and there should have been a whole layer of lasciviousness behind that comment, because it could pretty easily be construed as a hitting-on-you compliment. There wasn't a single shred of lasciviousness, though, and though he was definitely flirting, it didn't take an idiot to realize that Axel flirted with pretty much everything.
The nurse smiled, hugging her clipboard to her chest. She was nice-looking.
"You have red hair, Axel," she said, amusement making her voice resonate like a bubble. Roxas watched them quietly, trying to imagine Axel with red hair.
"Well, shyeah, but it was, like, dudewhoa red. Yours is auburn. It's prettier," Axel said with a snort and a tug on one of the locks framing her face. All the evidence pointed to the two having established a rapport. How long had Axel been here, anyway?
"This is true, this is true," the nurse laughed, batting his hand away with a slight roll of the eyes, excusing herself to check other patients with a smile.
"That's Aerith. She's been my nurse since I moved in, even though they've moved me about eight times. She's awesome." Axel grinned at Roxas, crossing his legs on the bed.
"How long've you been here?" Roxas' eyebrows were higher than usual, because this grinning guy was way too comfortable here.
"Ah, about a year. They keep saying they're gonna let me out, but I'm pretty sure I'd have better chances of leaving if I just up and died already," he said, shrugging, his voice dropping almost imperceptibly, laden with a kind of miserable bitterness. Roxas became painfully aware that Axel didn't have eyelashes.
Axel listened to the weirdest music. Half of it was loud and unbelievably abstract, thrumming bass lines and roaring guitar, straining voices and incomprehensible lyrics, though, of course, Axel knew every word. He called it anti-music, and babbled about punk and other weird stuff, but then he changed CDs and the other half turned out to be a sunshiney kind of indie, the next hour filled with acoustic guitar and harmonies and stuff about birds and magical horses. He looked at Roxas for a long time, and Roxas couldn't decide if he was staring or simply not seeing, because Axel was blinking normally, but he was still abnormally focused, because he never really sat still for more than three minutes.
"I started listening to this stuff when my roommate died. He had always… dug this stuff, you know?" Axel's voice was abrupt and sad, an answer to Roxas' unasked question, because two completely opposite genres must have a kind of significance when listened to almost simultaneously. "He liked sitar, too. Weird kid, but… you know, he was kind of my best friend."
Axel's dead roommate's mom turned out to be a hairdresser, and, thankful as she had been for the support her son had gotten from the kids at Hollow Bastion, she had offered her services to them as a wigmaker. Of course, she had to learn how to make them first, but a week after Roxas moved out, Mrs. Askelson – Susie, as she demanded they call her, showed up with a sketchbook and measuring tape. All of the patients got excited, crowding around her with smiles and laughter, and Roxas couldn't help grinning along with them. All of the bald kids pulled their head coverings off, waving their arms and asking her to pick them first, them first! Of course, her eyes fell on Axel, smiling sheepishly from the back of the horde, by Roxas. Of course he would get first dibs on a wig, because Roxas had heard the tone he used when he talked about Demyx, and it obviously meant that Demyx had been good for him, and that he had tried to be good for Demyx, and Demyx's mom had no doubt heard about and talked to Axel while her son was in residence, and she was no doubt quite fond of him.
Roxas followed Axel and Mrs. Askel—Susie into Axel's room, her hand on his back in a mom-ish way, his shoulders drooping. Both of them were tensely quiet as they stepped into the room, Susie's eyes darting around and fixing on the empty bed, recently vacated by Axel's most recent roommate, a moody guy with a weird scar on his face. Her lips were pressed thin, and she was still for several moments, Axel shoving his hands into his pockets and staring at the floor, hunched and anxious and sad.
Roxas accidentally broke the ice by squeaking the orange chair with the plastic cushions, drawing both pairs of eyes as he winced.
Susie smiled with some effort, clapping her hands together, and within seconds, she was running on high again.
"Let's get started! Could you take your scarf off, honey? I know you don't like to, but—"
Axel shook his head, pulling the scarf off, eyes flashing Roxas' way as though daring him to say something. They had established a relationship of mockery and insults, so it was to be expected that Roxas would have to bite his tongue in this situation, except that he actually didn't. Without his scarf, Axel looked like a punk-ass teenager, kind of hardcore, kind of heroine-addicted, because he was so skinny, but he pulled it off in the weird, cat-like way he pulled everything else off. He had to admit, there weren't many people in the world who looked that good bald.
Susie smiled at him, glanced at Roxas, and started measuring, taking notes and muttering things to herself. The measuring only took a few minutes, but as Roxas stared at Axel in all his hairless glory, the teenager turned redder and redder, eyes dropping to the floor after a few seconds of meeting Roxas' inquisitive gaze. Humiliation colored his posture, and Roxas was genuinely surprised. Axel tended to be such a thoughtlessly confident guy that it was weird seeing him embarrassed about something, and here his discomfort was nearly tangible. Roxas wondered why Axel thought he cared if he was bald. After all, Roxas was bald, too. Kind of. Not permanently.
Axel pulled his scarf back on with a look of relief when Susie stepped back and winked at him, saying "You're good, kiddo. Wanna design the thing now?"
Roxas leaned forward for this part.
The other two talked over colors and lengths for a few brief minutes, Axel declaring almost immediately that he wanted it to be red, and not just any red, he wanted it to—
"—be, like, whoamygod red, you know?"
Which was funny, because he had said, the first day Roxas knew him, that he wanted a richer shade of red as far as his hair was concerned, but as Susie pulled out a sample color, and Axel nodded furiously, he understood: Whoamygod red was the only thing that Axel could ever possibly have as a hair color, because that was the way the Universe worked, just like Roxas' eyes could only ever look at Axel, because Axel commanded attention from him, because that was the way the Universe worked.
It was weird, he thought as he watched Axel try to gesticulate to describe the shape of his dream hair, how bizarrely okay he felt when he was around him. Not that he had any business feeling anything but okay, because it wasn't like he had cancer, but life could be pretty crappy when you were twelve and lonely and antisocial, and Axel made him feel better. Axel was so exuberant and so comfortable and so weirdly right, and he fit Roxas' general existence pretty perfectly, to the point that he was sadder that Axel was sick than he was that all of the other kids in Hollow Bastion – Sora aside, of course – were sick.
Susie showed him the final sketch, and Roxas grinned, because when he superimposed the long, spiky, flaming red hair over Axel's headscarf, the kid just looked right. He was almost as excited as Axel was now, not to mention the fact that Sora had gotten next dibs on Susie's skills, so Roxas and Axel wandered down the hall to watch Sora get his shiny head measure and prodded at, and helped him design his gravity-defying, brown pseudo-hair.
Roxas had adjusted to life back home weeks ago, and his shiny new routine was already getting prettily tarnished: Wake up, get dressed, eat, run to the bus stop, school, Hollow Bastion, eat, shower, sleep. He did his homework at the Center, alternating between the table in Sora and Riku's room and the table in Axel's room depending on workload.
On Sundays, he went to church. Axel scoffed when Roxas told him that he'd been praying for him, arching an invisible eyebrow, because the rest of his eyebrows had fallen out a few weeks ago.
"Rox, God is a dipshit. I don't want his help," he said, eyes incredulous as he suffered the epiphany that his dorky, awkward friend was Methodist.
Roxas opened his mouth to protest, but Axel interrupted him by yanking the beanie off his head and patting the blond fuzz that spent all its time hiding, because Roxas didn't want to draw attention to the fact that he had hair. It was about an inch and a half long now. Roxas wanted to shave it off, but Axel had protested loudly when he mentioned it, because Axel hadn't known that Roxas had blond hair, and he wanted to see it. He'd even drawn Roxas sketches for cool haircuts, because Axel was actually pretty good at drawing, and even though Roxas had no clue how he was going to get his hair to stand up like that, he figured he'd humor the redhead, because if he couldn't play with his own hair, the least Roxas could do would be to let him play with his.
"I hate it when you do that," he groused, stuffing his hands deeper into the kangaroo pocket of his sweatshirt, staring holes in the floor because his face was hot. Axel chuckled, flicking Roxas' cheek and tugging the beanie onto his own head, over the wig that now spent all its time hiding his naked scalp.
Roxas had to admit, he looked better with hair. A lot better.
A week later, while Roxas was doing his homework in Axel's room, Axel started talking about school, and that was when Roxas fell in love with him.
Axel had dropped out of high school when he turned eighteen a year ago, pissed off at the world, six months into the land of T-cell lymphoma, because there's nothing that makes failing your sophomore year of high school for the second time better than getting embarrassing, inexplicable rashes on your extremities. In actual fact, a lot of the reason for the second set of failing grades was the skin disorder, because the teachers never knew what it was, because the Rodriguezes didn't even know what it was yet, and when the teachers saw him with contagious-looking rashes on his forearms, they sent him home over and over again. Miss too many days of school and you miss graduating.
He said, though, that watching Roxas do his homework every day made him miss it, weirdly enough, and it made him think of his mom, who worked two jobs to feed herself and keep him at Hollow Bastion. It made him think about how, if he never graduated and just got a job at Burger King or started doing caricatures in the subway station, she would be heartbroken. Watching Roxas' black-clothed head bob over a textbook, he could almost hear the murmured Spanish spoken into the phone, the words flying through a telephone line to his dad back in Honduras – he could almost feel the shame of letting them both down and knowing it, and about four weeks in, he signed up for online courses. The fact that he had already flown through half his sophomore year credits in the three months he had known Roxas spoke to the fact that he hadn't flunked because he was stupid, and his mom had smiled over the phone when he told her he had passed Spanish II, chemistry, and English in Spanish. He took the classes during the day, though, so Roxas hadn't heard a word until Axel told him about this mental image he had of himself walking commencement bald, and Roxas laughed, because it was a funny image, but he got the idea behind it. He got how proud Axel was to be himself right now, and he knew from three months of pretty serious acquaintance and rapidly increasing perception where the redhead was concerned that Axel wasn't frequently proud to be himself.
Axel tended to kind of hate himself, actually, and Roxas knew, and Roxas sympathized, because life was crappy, and sometimes sympathy is all you can give to people.
When Axel said that, though, about walking bald, Roxas had this image of Sora walking bald, and of himself walking with a head of the most feminine, angelic hair the world had ever seen, maybe spiked like Axel wanted it, maybe not. Either way, as he looked at Axel over his pre-algebra textbook, he knew he was in love, because this dead skinny teenager on the bed across from him had made him feel okay with himself, and he had returned the favor. And Axel was pretty when he smiled, which he was doing now, just a little bit, just enough to make his violently green eyes twinkle like Santa Claus.
It only took a few days for Axel to worm the reason for the weird looks he'd been getting from Roxas out, and even though he didn't really know what to do with the sentiment at first, eventually he caved in and kissed him.
The first time Axel and Roxas held hands in front of Sora, he flipped out so much that the nurses had to come in and make sure he was alright. His heart rate monitor had gone haywire, which had upset Roxas so much that he dropped Axel's hand and moved to the side of the bed, clutching his brother's hand instead. Sora pushed him away, making Axel get to his feet with the squawk of a chair on linoleum, and Roxas was trying to get them both to calm down, because Sora was just overreacting, "he'll get over it, Ax," and Axel was being protective as, apparently, he was wont to do when the apple of his eye was threatened.
The nurses made them leave with frowns on their faces, closing the door behind the two boys. Roxas sniffled, because it was hard enough seeing Sora back on all of that noisy hospital equipment because his chemo had stopped working again, and Riku had been in quarantine for so long that they had almost forgotten that he existed, despite the fact that he and Sora called themselves best friends – which they were – and hadn't been seen apart once after Riku first moved in up until the paperwork for the marrow transplant was signed and he was hauled off to his new isolated chambers, and Axel was about to go off his chemo, too, and Roxas had four inches of luscious blond hair for Axel to play with, and everyone else in Hollow Bastion was still bald, and it was just crappy, because Roxas had been asked to sit with Hayner and Tidus and Olette at lunch on Friday, because Kairi had put in a good word, because she was dating his cancer-infested twin brother, and it was just crappy, because he was fine.
He was fine, and it had tears rolling down his cheeks in big fat gobs of agony and fine.
Axel groaned, reaching out to wrap his long, skinny arms around Roxas, running long, lithe fingers through his hair, murmuring and cooing at him to calm down, and "what's up, Rox?" and "he's your brother, it'll be fine", and Roxas pushed him away, shouting:
"This isn't about being gay!" and he stormed off, locking himself in the boy's bathroom on the third floor.
When he unlocked the door twenty minutes later, Axel was curled against the wall, arms wrapped around his knees, looking sheepish and tired.
"Sorry," Roxas mumbled, scuffing his shoe against the floor, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his pants. Axel smirked up at him, waggling his eyebrows.
"You're not gay until you've tasted the delicacies," he replied, leaning against the wall as he clambered to his feet. Sometimes he just looked so sick that it made Roxas' heart twinge.
"I'm not gonna do that anytime soon," he scoffed, making a face at Axel before turning and walking towards the elevator. "Let's go play Mario Kart."
Axel had been off the chemo for three days when it happened. Sora had accepted his brother's weird, convoluted, unorthodox relationship – on the condition that he could mock Roxas endlessly – when it happened. It was Demyx's birthday when it happened.
Axel's body, for all intents and purposes, flipped out on him, and he passed out cold at breakfast, head coming down heavy on the floor, hand twitching. The Smooth Medical Trio said later that it was a miracle he hadn't seized right there on the floor of the dining hall, but Roxas and Mrs. Rodriguez didn't care how lucky Axel was, because his body was rejecting itself, rejecting the chemicals it had been forced to absorb for… God knows how long—his body was finished, and it was stating its claims.
The Smooth Medical Trio gave Mrs. Rodriguez the ultimatum while Roxas and Kairi and Sora were in the room.
"Axel's lymphoma is progressing rapidly, and I'm sorry to say that there isn't much we can do."
The blond one was doing most of the talking, as he seemed to have the most people skills.
"He has three options. We can start him on radiation and put him on an extreme cycle of chemotherapy. It's not our favorite, but it might stand a chance against the cancer," he said, tapping his clipboard with a pen.
"Alternatively, we can put him on an IV of Vorinostat, which is safer, but generally less effective." The one with the grey hair did that bit, arms folded around his own clipboard, eyes sad despite the characteristic blandness of his tone.
"Or we could let him go." Pink hair.
That was when Roxas knew they had lost, because he knew which option Axel would choose. Anything to get out of Hollow Bastion.
A week of morphine and weeping and skipping school later, Roxas and Sora and Kairi went to Axel's funeral, bringing Riku's best wishes with them, trying not to cry as they held hands and listened to the priest speak words of love and godliness over the casket. Roxas didn't last very long, because Axel didn't believe in God, dammit, so why were they forcing Him on him? He had never wanted God in his life, and Roxas doubted that he wanted God in his death, and he was crying so loud that Mrs. Rodriguez wrapped an arm around him, even though she didn't know him very well. Death does that. It makes you comfortable with people that you are ordinarily entirely uncomfortable with, because it's a uniting factor in every crappy and wonderful life out there.
Sitting there, crying under Axel's mom's arm, with his red-rimmed eyes fixed on Axel's shiny, mahogany casket, Roxas imagined the lanky kid tying the scarf around the eight-year-old's head on that second day in Hollow Bastion, and realized that that right there was everything that Axel ever was. He was a guy who would stop in the common room to teach a cancer patient how to not be so bald, because he understood that being bald made you young, because having your head bare like that opens you to the Universe, makes you vulnerable like nobody's business. He was a guy who would extend the hand of courtesy to someone crying and small, but who mostly kept his business to himself and let everybody else's business go on outside his little bubble of Axel, because he was bald, and he didn't want someone to drop something on his head.
If you can't have hair, have scarf!
Name's Axel.
"I g-got it memorized." And he did.
Roxas didn't miss a day at Hollow Bastion. The morning after Axel's funeral, he shuffled into Sora's room, looking exhausted and miserable, and Sora did his best to smile at him, which wasn't as hard as it ought to have been, because he'd gotten good news in the middle of all the crap.
"Tomorrow's my last treatment," he said, his toothy grin bringing Roxas' mood up a few notches, pulling a watery, sad smile from him, because that meant that they would both be out of here in another five days. One day for the treatment, four days to monitor the cancer, to make sure it had gone into remission like it was supposed to, and then they would be back home, and Sora would get to go back to school properly.
All that day, he had Axel's cheeky grin stuck in his head.
But it was okay, because his brother lived. It was alright, because Sora survived, and he got to press his nose against Sora's shoulder while he got his last chemo treatment ever, thinking of Axel never walking bald, thinking of Axel.
Thinking of Axel.