Sometimes, when Sora is resting and his mind is calm and blank, Roxas dreams.
He calls it dreaming because he doesn't know what else to call it, although he's positive it's not really dreaming, because he's not sure he can dream. In reality, he thinks it's probably just a byproduct of his mind having nothing better to do as his Other rests, not having the emotion of battle that Sora feels flowing through him or the feeling of determination that Sora carries while they travel to distract his thoughts.
He thought, once he learned that he would cease existing after he met his Other, that he'd simply vanish into nothing, with no thoughts left, no emotion left, and no dreams left. He had been wrong, of course, because he does think, he does have emotions (even if they aren't really his), and he does dream (even if it really isn't dreaming at all).
The dreams come to him when Sora's mind is velvety-black and blank, empty and calm and free of worry and ambition, and the only things that flitter around him are the images of Sora's friends and his childhood and his home, of beaches and ice cream and toy swords.
Roxas sits in the middle of the dark, his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped around them with his chin propped upon his left forearm, and he watches the images dance and flutter around him. The dreams only come at night – during the day, Sora fights, hard and long and desperate, for what he wants to find. He fights, and, in turn, Roxas fights, with just as much fervor and passion.
It's changing now, however. Now there's no more need to fight. Sora's found what he's been looking for, he's made his way back home, and there's only a blissful sort of too-warm peace in his mind, a feeling similar to floating through lukewarm water and not having to worry about breathing as the soothing current wraps him up and carries him off somewhere else, somewhere better.
And Roxas falls into a dream. He dreams of somewhere else, some place from before that he knows he's always been, has never truly left behind; he dreams in vivid color and palpable emotion and he dreams of people he remembers clearly, people who are burned into his thoughts in black, scorched silhouettes he's never going to rub clean.
In the dream, he's standing alone, in the middle of an alleyway. In his right hand he holds a small cloth bag, creamy-tan in color, slung over his right shoulder, and, as he walks down the alleyway, through the shadows the buildings cast and free from the blaring sunlight that shines down on him from overhead, the weight of the bag slaps against his back and nearly knocks the wind from him until he adjusts to the motion.
The bag is stuffed with schoolbooks: he knows this without looking at the bag, although he isn't sure why or how he knows this, nor is he sure why this is so important. It's at the back of his thoughts, a fuzzy memory of something, but he can't bring it to the surface, not yet, so he lets it drift around his mind, trying to clean itself off of the murky confusion and stick.
He tightens his grip on the handle when it starts to slip from between his fingers. His hand is slicked with sweat, although it's really not that warm in the alley, and he realizes that, for some reason or another, he's nervous. There's something there telling him he needs to pay attention, something telling him that this dream isn't like the other ones Sora's put him in before, but he can't focus on what that is. Instead, he switches hands, and wipes his palm on his jeans, and keeps wandering through the semi-darkness of the alleyway, letting his feet carry him wherever they please.
After some time and several paces of unsure feet over soft dirt, he finds himself at a metal gate, and he stops, and looks up and down the entrance curiously. It seems familiar, and it takes him a moment to remember exactly why it seems familiar, why he thinks he's been here before, and even then he's not too sure he can place exactly why or name exactly what it is. The place strikes him as the most important place in the world. A little flare of something-or-another dances up in his chest, a feeling he hasn't had in a long, long time, and he finds his mouth dry and his chest tight as he walks up to the gate.
He looks at it slowly, letting his gaze trace every detail, every link of metal, and every spot of rust. He thinks he remembers a boy climbing up the fence, falling and scraping his knees; a teen smirking and taunting like he owns the whole world leaning against the metal; a man with a smile reaching to him and offering him something he never wanted in the first place. He isn't sure if he's remembering it, or if he's making it up. It seems surreal in his thoughts, seems impossible and awkward, and he thinks it couldn't be real, because none of that had been real. He's not sure which isn't really, though: the man with the Cheshire smile, or the teen against the fence, glowering at him proudly, broken-up green shimmering in the sunlight.
He stands there for what feels like hours, even though he knows it's only been minutes. The air is warm and thick around him, full of the buzz of the end of summer, the bugs that flitter through the air in their last month of life. Sweat beads on his brow, sticks to his hair and drips into his shirt, and he can taste the salty tang of it when he licks his lips a little nervously, wetting the cracked, dry surface.
And he becomes certain that this can't be a dream – maybe Sora had been a dream? Maybe he really is someone, he always has been someone, his own person, and Sora was just a figment of his imagination. His dreams got carried away and took him off for a while, and now he's finally woken up, and Pence, Olette and Hayner—
It's Hayner's voice he hears first, loud and warm and filled with bright enthusiasm and joy that's always present in his voice when he's talking to Roxas. It drifts out from behind the metal gate in front of him, around the curtain that's draped across the entrance to prevent the wandering citizens from peeking into their usual spot.
"Hey, Roxas! Are you coming or not?" The voice pulls him from his daze, and he shakes his head, slowly, to clear his thoughts. The action gets him nowhere, but he takes a deep breath and tightens his grip on his bag anyway, stepping forward slowly, like there're weights attached to his feet, pulling him down. He reaches out with his free hand and pushes the thin curtain out of the way, ducking his head a bit as he steps inside.
The place smells like sea-salt and sweat and summer and all of the strange scents a group of young teens' hideout should smell like. The curtain flutters down behind him when he steps away from it, ruffling at his back with the light breeze and blowing a bit of dirt about his ankles, and he stops staring at his feet long enough to look up and lock eyes with strikingly familiar blue.
"Took ya long enough."
Hayner is smiling at him from his normal spot. He is perched upon the metal pipes in the back of the room with his hands dangling between his knees and his face lit up with that warm, summer expression of his, and he is watching Roxas as if he has never left, waiting for him to have some response to the playful jibe tossed his way.
Roxas doesn't answer. Instead, he looks away, focuses on Olette at his side, curled up in the corner of the dark green couch she and Pence always claim for themselves, a bright blue bar of ice-cream clutched between her slender, tanned fingers, a grin in her eyes. Pence is beside her, unsurprisingly, watching him with an unspoken question plastered upon his face, two identical treats clutched in his fingers, the light blue liquid melting in the remaining summer heat down his fingertips, leaving a faint, sticky residue behind.
He offers one to Roxas, and he steps forward, and takes it, slowly, uncertainly.
There's a soft thud as Hayner drops down from His Spot and comes over to Roxas, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, pressing close enough to be a little bit more than friendly, and, for a moment, Roxas doesn't know what exactly Hayner is doing until he hears the thwap of his backpack as it hits the pile the group started before he arrived.
"Sit down already." Hayner says playfully, shoving at Roxas' chest and pushing him back toward the wooden crate that had been labeled as his spot some time ago. He sits down numbly, watching the blue of the ice-cream pop as it spills down his fingers and sticks to his skin, and the entire thing feels real. Not just that fake almost-real that he's been feeling since even before he became one with So— what is his name? Why can't I remember? – ago, but a feeling that creeps into his skin, makes him realize every breath, makes him feel the summer in his chest and not just on his skin. Makes him realize he's real, too, and he can almost ignore the voice in his head that tells him he's not when he feels like this.
He sits in silence, listening to the others speak around him, savoring the sound of their voices and the familiarity of the entire picture even if he isn't registering exactly what it is they're talking about.
At some point, he finds himself wondering. What if this is all a dream? What if this really isn't a dream and everything else was? What if he opens his eyes and looks up and he'll be staring into the vast, warm blackness of Sora's resting mind, and nothing more? What if he looks up and he's still here?
He tests it, once or twice. He closes his eyes and opens them again moments later, and not once do the voices falter, not once does the liquid from his untouched popsicle stop dripping down between his fingers. He tests it for several minutes, the others chattering away around him like he's not there. Each time he closes his eyes tighter and holds them shut longer, an almost desperate ardor to his actions, and each time he opens them again, and each time he's still in the middle of their spot with the salty-sweat snack clutched in his hand.
"Roxas?" Olette's voice is warm with concern and maybe a tiny twinge of irritation, and Roxas realizes that he hasn't heard a word any of them have been saying at all, and wonders if she has been calling to him for some time now. He looks up from the dirt and the back of his eyelids and locks eyes with her, and smiles faintly.
"Yeah? Sorry, guess I zoned out." He laughs lightly. "What?"
"We were wondering if you wanted to come shopping with us. There's some stuff we need for school, and Pence and I figured it'd be nice if we went down to pick it up now." He pauses, listening to her explanation, and then he glances to Pence, who nods and grins at him happily, and then he looks to Hayner, who looks a little less enthused about this plan but who still glances at him in that expecting way he sometimes does. Roxas thinks for a moment, and decides it'd be nice to get out and move in the fresh air, anyway: maybe all of this thinking is just because it's stuffy in here, and they've been locked up in school all day, and he needs to get away from it and get out in the open to clear his head.
He realizes after he's thought that that he didn't go to school today, but he can't place that thought for long, and it flitters about in his head restlessly, unable to stick in place, like a leaf caught in the wind.
"Yeah, sure." He says quietly, and Pence and Olette both smile brightly at his words, prying themselves from the torn green folds of the couch and climbing to their feet. Olette stretches languidly, stifling a yawn behind a delicate hand, before she nods at him and Hayner, smiling contently, like a little house cat on a warm summer day.
"Alright, then. Let's go get it over with so we can have time to get through that 'beginning of the school year' paperwork the teacher's always hand out." She states before heading out of the door, and Roxas stays where he's sitting, watching Pence follow after her a little begrudgingly. The two of them vanish beneath the wavering mass of the cloth, and Roxas can hear the faint tap-tap of their heels as they walk away from the spot, heading off toward the shopping district.
There's a moment of silence, and Roxas stays on that wooden crate, marveling the feeling of the coarse wood through his jeans and the little prickle of splinters that jab at his legs when he moves, the feeling so new yet so familiar that it just kind of cancels out, and he's left in a pleasant state of blissful ignorance. Hayner breaks him out of it with a soft "Hey" and, out of the corner of his eyes, Roxas can see the other boy step up to his side, and he looks up and locks eyes with him. He waits for a moment to see if Hayner will say anything to him, and, when Hayner doesn't speak at all, he shifts his weight uncomfortably, and tries to ignore the prickle of splinters that's more annoying now than mesmerizing, and wonders what exactly the two of them are waiting for.
Then it occurs to him: the others have already gone, and it's just the two of them there, dumbfounded, watching each other through wary glances and hazy eyes and muddled understanding of something, completely at a lose for words, and there's something he should be saying.
Roxas thinks he'll say something to Hayner to see if this is really a dream or not, thinks there's got to be some way he can reassure himself one last time that he's really here and none of that every happened, and he really does own this life, but he can't think exactly how he'll word it, so he keeps his mouth shut. Hayner is waiting for him to speak with an impatient quirk of his eyebrow and, after a moment filled with an awkward silence and a smothering curiosity and painstaking thought, Hayner breaks the silence, ever the leader.
"Is there something wrong?" It's simple, but simple is really all Roxas thinks he can handle. Regardless, he's not sure how to respond to this, either. He opens his mouth as if he's going to speak, thinks he knows what he's going to say and thinks he can taste the words on the tip of his tongue, then snaps his mouth shut once more. He repeats this pattern – open, close, open, close – over and over—
"I'm fine." He finally says, and knows his words are too hollow and too meaningless to be taken seriously.
"You're not 'fine.' I can tell." Hayner tilts his head to the side, as if he's trying to get a better look at Roxas, and he folds his arms over his chest, an indignant look set upon his face. "You've always been a terrible liar, Roxas."
Roxas frowns.
Hayner has always been able to tell; Roxas isn't surprised he can tell now, even though he's beginning to forget what exactly it is that's gotten him so upset in the first place. He thought he knew – something about dreams, and summer, and smiles – but he can't seem to remember it any more.
He chooses not to dwell on it and, instead, shakes his head slowly to Hayner's persistent badgering.
"I guess I'm just nervous about school. Summer seemed so short this year."
"Yeah, well," Hayner smiles at him now, that wide, pointed smile that's so remarkably Hayner Roxas can't even begin to imagine it on anyone else without that person morphing into Hayner in his thoughts, and that isn't exactly what he wants to think about right now, "There's nothing to worry about." He laughs and brings a hand down on Roxas' shoulder in a friendly, comforting gesture, and the stability in that action, the reality of the warmth of Hayner's touch, is more than he could ever ask for at that moment.
"I'll help you." Hayner says, and he offers Roxas his hand, a promise between them, a bond they've always had, from the very beginning, and Roxas has forgotten entirely about whatever it was that had upset him, and he thinks that this year is going to be a good year, overall, as long as Seifer and his gang doesn't get up to anything again. He takes the offered hand, smiles freely up at Hayner, a bright, fresh smile that's struggling to find it's place on his face after so long of hiding away, and he lets Hayner pull off the box and into an awkward state of contact that's as close to a hug as either of them will let themselves get.
"Yeah, I guess it's not going to be bad at all." He laughs, and backs out of that hug, and cherishes Hayner's laugh in return more than he's ever done before. "Who knows: something interesting might just happen."
Hayner nods, and they walk out of the hideout together, Hayner pushing, and playing, and laughing, and Roxas laughs right back, and smiles brighter than he's ever smiled before, and dreams things he's never dreamed before, and doesn't remember why he was ever upset in the first place: summer's end really isn't that bad at all.