And I've got some issues to work through

There I go again

Pretending to be you

Make-believing

That I have a soul beneath the surface


"New kid, huh?"

"What a scrawny waste of space."

"What's your game, kiddo? Go fish?"

"Ah, leave off. Maybe he can kick all your asses."

The last speaker, a redhead with too much garish eye makeup, throws his arm nonchalantly across Roxas' thin shoulders, but Roxas is already in a foul mood so it's less comforting and more creepy. It doesn't help that everybody in the room is leering at him. Menacing, every one, especially the "friendly" redhead.

"I'm Axel," he adds with a wink as though it's some big favor, divulging his name.

"I don't care," Roxas tells him with cold honesty.

A dirty blonde leaning against the wall whistles. "Ooh, I think you just got frostbite, Axel. Maybe he doesn't play on your team, if you know what I mean?" He waggles his eyebrows suggestively and Roxas shoots him a glare.

"You're a moron."

"No, I'm Demyx." The guy beams like he didn't hear a word of the insult.

Axel has taken the kid's distraction to slide the invasive arm down to around his waist, and leans into him like some sort of crutch. One shot across the bow: Roxas pulls back his fist. Apparently it isn't very threatening, because instead of backing off, Axel scoffs. "Oh-ho! Kid's got fight in hi–"

Roxas lays him flat and gets in a solid knee to the general area of Demyx's crotch before the others are on him.

--

Each floor of Castle Oblivion is supposedly the personal domain of its resident, but Roxas quickly discovers that this is a privilege to be earned, not a right.

When he wakes up to the cold of his room, several somethings throb and he immediately wish he'd just gotten hazed submissively, but more important at the moment is the fact that he's not alone in the room. Axel, eye swelling and an angry violent mark already showing on his jaw, is sitting at the edge of his bed.

Roxas must be staring, because Axel says, "I don't look half as bad as you, trust me." He gives Roxas this cheeky little grin and scoots forward. "After what you pulled earlier, you'll need a friend and it isn't likely to be anybody in the welcoming committee. Whaddaya say?"

Skin still tight with pain and bruises, Roxas summons the strength to pick Axel's very forward hand off of his thigh. "Like fuck, asshole."

"Okay," Axel says amenably, perfectly calm and Roxas wants to punch his face in again but he steps away into a portal that came out of nowhere, leaving Roxas in the dark.

--

Roxas' next visit is from a peroxide-blonde whom he recognizes as having made the 'go fish' comment. The room is still dark, but this man doesn't just appear creepily like Axel, sitting there and watching him sleep for – fuck, just how long was Axel there? Like a normal person, he uses the door, even if he doesn't have the manners to knock.

He sits down on the bed, too (that's when Roxas realizes there aren't actually any chairs or other furnishings), and ruffles Roxas' hair good-naturedly. "So, how about that game of go fish?" he asks, pulling a deck of cards out of nowhere. Roxas decides maybe the man will go away if he's ignored long enough.

It sort of works because eventually he gets up and goes to the door, pausing there.

"I'm Luxord, and I just thought you should remember that a Nobody who shuns even other Nobodies has no one at all."

Then Luxord shut the door behind him and Roxas is in the dark.

--

He's bent over double, retching in the sink – his bathroom is sparse and white, like everything else on his floor, and maybe it's all the white that made him sick, or did he do it to himself? – and Axel pops out of the wall. He chokes, cursing and stumbling away backwards, but Axel just reaches out a hand to steady him.

"Sorry, I'd kind of hoped to walk in on a different kind of bathroom ritual," the redhead jokes, grinning obscenely. There's a half-hearted effort on Roxas' part to flip him off, overwhelmed at the last moment by another wave of nausea.

Instead of making a witty comeback, his face disappears beneath the toilet bowl's rim.

Axel kneels next to him, holding his hair back, and when Roxas is finished there's another portal and the cool hands on his temples are gone. Then he throws up again.

--

Luxord sort of catches him or maybe Roxas lets himself be caught, but either way they're in the same stairwell at the same time and Luxord's grip on Roxas' arm is just enough stronger than Roxas' will to break it.

"Are you still a loner?"

"Are you trying to do me a favor?"

"You're lonely, aren't you?"

"...Shut up."

It occurs to Roxas that maybe the cold was making him sick – cold walls, cold floors, cold white everywhere, cold pit where his heart should be – and Luxord's lips are the warmest thing he's found in the castle so far, and maybe he'll get better by just giving up. It's the strangest thing, though; he feels sicker under the sharp tug of Luxord's hands in his hair, even with the warmth of his lips everywhere (they're in a goddamn stairwell, and some one could come along any minute), and Axel's cool hands on his temples made it go away.

--

"Your talented mouth going to get you out of this one?"

"Shut the fuck up."

"Ooh. Well, you can't bribe my silence with a couple good fucks. That must be hard for you to understand."

"Bitter, ugly old bitch," Roxas mutters just loud enough for her to hear. Her face doesn't change at all, but she grinds her heel into the top of his boot. Now here's something he has a little control over; he knows how to get to one person in this castle, instead of everyone else owning him. "I bet you've never gotten a fuck at all, have you?"

She leaps at him and it's worse than Demyx, Luxord, and Xigbar all together on that first day, because Larxene knows how to make sure he's conscious for all of it.

--

Luxord's heat is starting to burn and Roxas still gets sick.

He thinks about humbling himself in exchange for the comfort of Axel's cool hands again but instead he thinks there must be another solution and since his body isn't worth anything anyway he can give it away to anyone he pleases.

Marluxia flat-out turns him down, but Xigbar finds the prospect vaguely interesting and fuck, Roxas hates everyone in this castle so fucking much. His shoulders shake like everything trembles when he's stretched out under Xigbar's lunging thrusts, and his head spins and he's still finding himself huddled over the toilet.

Something about the rough way Xigbar uses him, doesn't even pretend he's enjoying it, (it's just a release, everything's just trying to release something else so that thing can roll downhill and build and build and build until it crashes into –) is a sickness on its own, and maybe it will devour the other illness. Or maybe it'll just take what's left of him. Roxas doesn't care anymore, if he ever really cared, so he lets it go.

It turns out distancing his body by ruining it and handing it off to others isn't distancing the sickness at all and one day Roxas wakes up sick, sore angry and lonely all at the same time.

Where the fuck are those hands now?

You might say it's self destructive

But, you see, I'd kick the bucket

Sixty times before I'd kick the habit