"This isn't like me." I whispered to myself as I drove down a deserted road, it didn't matter where I was going; the point was just to get away. It was dark out; way past midnight but my eyes couldn't seem to find their way to the clock. It was almost as if acknowledging time would pull me out of my disconnection with reality, and my fragile being couldn't take that right now. Those words, words I thought would never be said to me, had broken me, and at any moment I could disjoint into a thousand useless pieces.
"You're breaking this family apart."
"You worthless piece of shit!"
"What happened to the boy I raised, the one I loved!"
I wasn't that kid with problems and a shitty life that was a freak with no friends. I had great parents- the perfect parents- and a loving older brother, friends that stuck by me no matter what, a promising future, and a bright life ahead of me.
But then, I said two little words that ripped my life apart. I had just wanted to be honest to my parents, before I left for college, and let them know the real me and that I was still the wonderful son I'd always been.
"I'm gay."
How could I have been so fucknig naïve? I always saw my parents the way the public saw them, happy, open minded, and understanding to everyone's problem's and differences. I was so wrapped up in the performance they put on for the world, as high powered and wealthy realtors with a perfect family and a perfect life, that I forgot to read off my script and I used my own thoughts. I broke the magic of our little production, and since it was all my parents held dear to them, I should have expected them to lose their ability to act and control their emotions. I should have remembered every family has a black sheep, and now I was exactly that. Different. Abnormal. Outside the norm. Everything my parents feared, like a disease that had seeped into their impenetrable world. They had never expected that the downfall to their performance would come from the inside.
As the anger and despair welled up inside of me, along with tears in my already raw and red eyes, I gripped the steering wheel tighter until my knuckles turned white even in the darkness of my car. I hadn't lost everything, but it sure felt like it. The way my brother had gaped at me from behind my parents, unwilling to intervene to help me even when the hand was raised and with full force struck my cheek leaving a hand print bruise. I had always looked up to him, I had always thought he was so brave. Everyone loved Sora; he stood up for everyone, hands down the nicest guy in the school, and he couldn't even raise a hand to help his younger brother or let out a syllable in defiance to the way my parents were treating me. I knew he was shocked at how much the great Cloud Strife had fallen from his public image to slap his own son in the face, but that wasn't an excuse. The screaming and shouting bounced off the walls of my head and I pressed my foot deeper into the accelerator, willing my car to go faster than normal.
Part of me hoped I would lose control and crash into something hard enough to take me away from everything. I was emotionally unstable, and I knew it, yet I drove on. The numbers blurred on my speedometer, and as I took a corner I waited for impact for something, but nothing came and I continued my drive painfully.
As I came across a straight patch of road, my car whizzing past the night covered scenery, I saw a car approach in the distance. Slowly it came over the crest of a hill, and from a far before the car was in sight the headlights lit up the trees surrounding the road like a beacon of hope. But when the headlights and the car came into view I knew no one could help me tonight. The car approached, steadily humming down the road as I barreled by. As our cars passed by each other, I felt a jolt of electricity shoot down my spine and I could have sworn I saw a shot of red dart across my vision, but I figured that was because of my uncontrollable rage. Before I could even begin to wonder what that was, the weird feeling I got, I mused to myself that that car and its occupant could be the last person ever to see me alive.
With that thought I took my foot off of the accelerator and let my car shoot onwards until momentum was lost and it came rolling to a slow and gentle stop. In the dead of night, on a deserted dirt road with houses spread out against a wide spread of farmlands covered with a blanket of stars, I slammed my head onto the top of my steering wheel and screamed. I vaguely remembered slamming my fist and beeping my horn into the dead of night, but that could have been something I had only wanted to do. Tears streamed freely down my face and I felt myself break into those thousands of pieces.
My family didn't want me. They hated me because the person I really was, to them, was a disgusting fag who didn't deserve their love.
"Well fuck them all!" I shouted, my horse and raw from crying voice crashing around the interior of my car echoing back into my ears solidifying the message. But yet, I couldn't get myself to believe that yet. Even if they hated me, I still loved them. They were still my family, and I wished I could forget about them but I couldn't…I couldn't…I can't…
A blinding light lit up my car, and for a moment I wondered if I had cried myself to death. But then I heard an engine shut off and the lights dimmed away to nothingness. In the darkness I felt my body tense, then slump back into my seat unable to even muster the strength to be worried. As I heard a door open and shoes crunch against gravel I instead shoved my head deeper into my steering wheel and went over the scene from earlier over and over again.
I hadn't even registered I had started screaming again until I heard a pounding on my window. I took a breath, and as I rolled down my window with one hand my other hand hastily attempted the futile job of wiping away my tears.
A shock of red hair and shinning green overwhelmed my exhausted eyes outside my car window. The owner of these characteristics was a willowy guy a few good years older than me with two distinct dark tattoos under his eyes, an arm propped up against the roof of my car, and a far off look in his eyes. He wore over his thin limbs a tight, worn out leather jacket with a white wife beater underneath. As he shifted slightly outside my window I saw a glint off of metal and realized he had a lip ring delicately poised on the corner of his bottom lip.
We looked at each other for a good few moments in silence, taking in the sight of each other. I couldn't deny, he was handsome in a way I couldn't quite put a finger on, and his expression somehow fit how I was feeling. A cool night breeze blew past us ruffling his spiky red hair and making me shiver, which somehow jolted us out of our gazing. He broke the silence first.
"You ok?" The words were almost whispered, a deep voice that left me hanging on every syllable. "Well, no, of course you're not…I'm Axel," he blurted out his name and I it took me a few minutes to process.
"R-Roxas." I stumbled over my own name, my voice coming out cracked and raw. "How…? How did you know I was…?" God, fuck it all I couldn't even put together a coherent sentence, but weirdly enough, he seemed to understand.
"You don't have to say it, I've been here before, I know what it feels like. Just, maybe you should get out of your car. You're a danger to motorists everywhere." I felt as if the last part was meant to be a joke, and his lips twitched in a small smirk, but I wasn't in a laughing mood so I glared instead.
"Who are you to say you know how I feel? You don't know jack shit about me."
"I know you were driving at least eighty down this road, and when you pulled over I know you were screaming and sobbing your eyes out. Sure, I don't fucking know why you're acting like that, I just meant I'd been there before. But fine, if you don't want my help, sorry I stopped." He stood up, and I didn't realized how tall he was and it momentarily took me off guard. I knew he was ticked off as he stood and turned away, but there wasn't the same hatred and anger mingled with the words like I had felt earlier, and this made me feel slightly comforted. Not everyone hated me; a complete stranger wanted to help me when my parents threw me away.
I needed something, someone, to make me hold on to my life. As I saw Axel about to open his car door in my side mirrors I threw open my door and tumbled out into the night. Axel looked up, not surprised, and I realized that maybe he really did know how I was feeling. "I just knew you'd come around, hop in." He called out to me with a smirk on his face but a far off look in his eyes. "I don't have all day kid."
I ignored the nickname, and after locking my car door, I ambled around his car blindly in the dark and got in only on blind faith and a good first impression. As I stooped down into the passenger seat the smell of cigarettes and a pine air freshener filled my nose. Even though it was a July night his heat was on, and I sunk into the seat when I sat down, but I felt comfortable and secure, two things I hadn't felt in the past few hours.
As we sat in silence without the car running and I was slowly becoming more calm and relaxed, I broke the silence. "You don't do this often, do you? By that I mean, pick up young boys on the side of the road and invite them into your car."
He let out a loud laugh that boomed in the small car and I couldn't help but chuckle a bit too. "You're a clever one, but no, you're my first. babe." He gave me an over dramatized wink, a purposefully failed attempt at seduction and pretended to slink and arm over my shoulder which I punched away.
"Piss off." I mumbled, crossing my arms over my chest and slumping back into my seat so my knees rested on the dashboard as I attempted and failed to act mad.
As a friendlier air swept over the car, it was replaced just as quick by a cold one as Axel casually asked why I was out here. "I mean," he hurriedly added as I felt my face fall and I tried to sink into the seat. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, but it's better to talk to someone. Trust me, whatever it is; keeping it all bottled up'll make you explode." Even in the dark I could see that look in his eyes again. And somehow, whether it was the darkness of the safety of the presence of someone I barely knew, or the fact that I felt as if he held all the answers to my problems in his eyes, I quietly spilled the pieces of my broken life out in front of him.
It was easier and harder than I thought it would be. I was harder to speak when the sobs caught in my throat, but the words came to my mind easily, and I felt like it didn't matter what I told Axel because all he was doing for me was listening. At the end of my story, eyes finally dried after spilling all the tears I had and fists unclenched as my anger dissipated, I looked over into his deep green eyes and in the silence left afterwards found myself asking him my own question.
"I just want to know," I started quietly, and he shifted his eyes from the road to my face, listening and paying attention to me without playing an act, at least one I could see, and waited for my question. "How…how did you know I wanted to kill myself? I mean, you were in the car I passed before right? How could you have known, apart from me speeding, I was really that emotionally unstable? And what did you mean you knew what I was going through when you hadn't even known my story yet?" His eyes took on the look again, accept they grew even darker, and at first I supposed I had scared him away with my prodding.
"I almost killed myself a mile away from here." I told me, looking me straight in the eye, confident in his words as if this wasn't something horribly emotional to relive. "I was going to take a handful of sleeping pills and go the easy way, pain free and on a sea of dreams." He smiled here, but it was so sad and lost I felt another tear find its way back to my eyes. "My brother, Reno, was my twin, and he and I were inseparable. He died, in a car crash coming home from a party. He wasn't drunk, but the driver that hit him was shitfaced, and Reno died before the ambulance was even called. He…he was my other half. I never even thought about my life without him, and in one fucked up moment he was gone. And so I told myself, if he couldn't grow old, then neither would I. It wasn't fair for him to miss out on life while I was left to take it one head first by myself. I didn't think about my family, my friends, the other people who I had, and I almost threw away my life because I was being selfish." I looked at me, and the look I saw in his eyes I now realized, as I saw a dark reflection of myself in the swirls of emerald, was the look on my face I had seen when I'd climbed into my car to drive away and glanced in the rearview mirror. It was the moment when I'd reached complete hopelessness and agony in loneliness. True I didn't have my family, or at least there was now a mutual agreement it seemed of neither party wanting anything to do with the other, but there were other people who cared about me. Could I have really done that to them all, taken my own life?
"You do understand everything…" I mumbled in a daze to myself more than him, but he heard. "I can't believe I was about to…" I felt my heart catch in my throat and my stomach churned so violently I had to throw open my door and stumble into the dark field to hurl the contents of my stomach away from Axel's car. I didn't realize Axel had raced after me until in a few brief seconds afterwards I felt a hand gripping my shoulder and another rubbing my back soothingly. Tears came back and I wiped my mouth off on my sleeve, and I didn't even care I was bawling like a child because I felt as stupid and blind as one to the realities of life. "If you hadn't come along…" I all but blubbered out, my hands clawing into the dirt for support and to solidify the fact that I wasn't dead.
"You can't think like that." He replied sternly but in a concerned and caring way. "You have to stop thinking about the past, about how things could have gone or things that could have happened because it will drive you crazy. All you have now is the present and the future. Hold on to those, and everything will work out, I promise. Just look at me, I turned out all right."
Throughout his encouragement speech I found myself standing up and turning to face him before throwing my arms around his waist and tugging him close to me. There was something powerful and familiar in the way his arms felt wrapped around me and the steady beating of his heart against my ear as it pressed against his chest. Maybe it was crazy, but he seemed like someone I had met before, and maybe that was why I trusted him to all my deepest darkest secrets so easily, and vice versa.
I felt a hands slowly rub up and down my back as the other rested in my hair. He breathed out a long sigh above me and in it I heard my name whispered on his exhale. "Would it be weird," I whispered quietly into his jacket just loud enough for him to hear, "if I said it feels like I've known you for longer than barely two hours?" There was a pause, and I froze for a moment wondering if I'd gone to far, confessed just a bit too much.
"No. I was actually thinking the same thing." He whispered back. At that moment I felt some of those broken pieces of my life gently fall back into place. I was still broken, far from healed, but as uncanny as it seemed, Axel seemed to be helping my put some pieces back together. And for that moment, wrapped in protective arms that held me close and shielded me from everything outside our suddenly very small world, I didn't think about my parents and what I was going to do or where I was going to go, I just focused on warm arms and leather that smelled like cigarettes and pine. I breathed in those scents, and for that moment I felt whole. That was all that mattered.