St MONSTER says:
This is an apology story for taking so long to get the next chapter of Carousel Horses up. For those of you who haven't read that one, I hope you enjoy this one regardless. Reveiws are not necessary or requested because I write for my personal enjoyment as well as to make other happy :) This was also written partially on a whim and because I hadn't written any Akuroku yet, so, unfortunately, I've paid a little less attention to this one, and I was getting so impatient to have it done it is less than wonderful. Nevertheless, I hope it's enjoyable. Any mistakes are entirely my fault, as I'm still to shy for a beta and, once again, didn't bother with it. -goes and hides- Oh well. It's just for the entertainment value. Much love, peeps.
Dedicated to FrostFromFire, who is endlessly helpful and encouraging 3
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The unmoving, passing days of my life are made up of many smaller miracles, which is not uncommon, but I often forget it nonetheless.
Some people live their lives as one long moment of excitement or anger or misery. Others- of which I count myself one- live each day as another is another is another. I've moved away from regarding my days individually and find myself respecting each week as one long day. The duties of MondayTuesdayWednesday are pushed back until I've reached the end of the week and everything's been done in its own time.
It was in the middle of one of these very long day-weeks that Roxas came to our school. He was a freckle-tanned boy of bleached spikes and wide eyes. He had a bored curiosity in his expression that was more of being new and unaware than being of a stony personality. I knew from snagging bits of his conversations with others in the hallways that he always knew the time, the date, and where he was meant to be, but never what was going on. Without knowing it, he'd saved me from being late and being wrong many times.
At the time, those were many of those small miracles. He himself turned out to be a big one that never ended. He was like the days that defied me- never ending and continuously keeping me beyond reality until I was tunneled into only him.
*
Axel and Roxas' lives collided together on accident by way of Axel's stepsister, Kairi, who thought Roxas was absolutely hot. As an added bonus, he didn't show any signs of being a jackass, which sat well with Axel, protective older brother he was. She went for the shorter, spikier brand of boy, as it turned out, which didn't surprise anyone in the least.
Axel had never really cared she hung out with him and hadn't taken too much notice of the boy, but when he started showing up around the house more often, there was really no way of staying out of each other's paths. Roxas never set foot inside the house itself, but he and Kairi walked home together a lot and she liked to seat him down on their porch swing for warm half-hours at a time.
Over time, Axel found himself outside with them more and more frequently until Roxas started expecting both of the redheads outside with him. The more Axel learnt about him, the more interesting he became.
Roxas claimed the sticky-coarse texture of his hair was from the buildup of California sea-salt. He loved everything about sea-salt, a fact the blond was quick to explain, or simply make evident through his constant consumption of it, to anyone. Roxas also claimed his blonde wasn't entirely natural- that he was a more sandy brown by birth- and had come from years of ocean water and sunlight. Swimming a lot had made him blond and freckled tan.
Axel loved him for just being Californian. It was only one state away, but he loved how, if Roxas was any indication, it seemed to have its own air. The newcomer seemed to carry it around with him.
Axel wasn't originally from Washington, either, he was proud to admit. He had been shipped out of Seattle, the home of grunge if you cared about that kind of thing; and had only been living in the very north state of Washington for two years now. Roxas was impressed by this, being that he found nothing interesting in the state as of yet, nad wasn't sure if he'd last that long. Kairi agreed with a roll of her eyes.
One day Kairi didn't come home with Roxas. The blond boy still showed up at the house, but his redheaded counterpart had been nowhere in sight. Axel saw this through the window of his work room upstairs and rushed (um… walked, is what we mean, because he wasn't really that excited…) outside to meet Roxas.
"Where's Kairi?" he asked with the door hanging open behind him.
"She went home with Namine," Roxas informed in his slight smile way of talking. "She said they were going to dye her hair. Kairi's," he elaborated, shrugging a shoulder and sitting on their porch swing. Axel joined him on the cushions with a look of far-off understanding, curious if she would be washed out by her new colour, as something to think about. Kairi tended to copy the hair colours of those with whom she spent a lot of time. Not out of jealousy, but because she liked familiar change.
(Kairi's move into freshmen year had been stressful on her, and as a result, the siblings had been spending plenty of time together in the beginning. Hence why her hair had been a pretty tomato red for the past few months.)
Apparently, Namine had been doing good for Kairi in recent weeks; Axel figured she would probably go blond this time. Axel went through this thought process in his brain.
"How come you came anyway?" Axel wondered out loud, looking to the California ocean eyes of Roxas with blank sincerity.
"Because I still like you," the other replied with a grin. He grinned with one side of his mouth curled more upward than the other in a playful way so that his eye squinted a little. Somehow, this was the cutest thing Axel had ever seen on a boy. Maybe ever, because only recently had he been able to admit girls did not, in fact, have cooties and that they could, in fact, be cute.
The redhead laughed and shook something imaginary out of his wild hair with his hand out of distraction. He sat down next to Roxas and twisted his long body to lay his head in Roxas' lap, where the two watched each other for a moment. Roxas fell back into the porch swing with an exhale of sea-salt breath.
"…you know. When I was in California, I…" for some reason, he didn't go beyond this. Roxas often didn't finish his sentences and more often he was interrupted, but Axel knew for a fact he thought a lot as well. California was one of their favourite topics. He sat quietly while Roxas worked out what he wanted to say, and after a while gave up on waiting for him to continue.
Axel started falling asleep right then and there. It was warm and soft outside and Roxas' sticky coarse hair was blowing out a smooth sea-salt scent. Axel imagined California had to feel like this sometimes- all burnt blue sky and pretty ashy ground.
"…are you a faggot?" Roxas asked when Axel was nearly asleep. Axel exhaled syllables of a chuckle, assuming it had been a joke on the easy level of comfort he had found with his head in the others lap. (And besides, it's not like it was hard to tell, even if Axel had never said anything, that he most certainly was flamingly, glaringly a faggot.)
But Axel still felt the need to look up to see if Roxas was just kidding. The ambiguous look of joviality on the blonds face didn't really help him with this at all, but the smile made it safe to answer all the same.
"Why?" Axel smirked in question, nearly laughing. Roxas rolled his eyes.
"In California, I" and there was barely a pause of hesitation, deciding if he really wanted to admit this. Maybe he didn't, but he did anyway, but a little too quietly, "…dated this one guy you kind of remind me of," Roxas explained, looking up and sinking into the porch swing. Axel wasn't really sure if he had just eased into whatever he had wanted to say in the first place, feeling he had been sufficiently answered, or if this had been his reason for asking what he had.
Axel nodded his head, figuring it was all the same either way, and leaned into Roxas' stomach pensively. He considered this new information. (The more Roxas said, the more interesting he got.)
"It's been a while."
Axel didn't have to ask what this meant, or what exactly it pertained to, because Axel kind of felt the same way. Even if he hadn't, the hand in Axel's hair would've told him anyway. He wondered if Roxas realized he had put his hand in the red mane or if he knew how much trouble he would be in if Axel didn't just happen to like him so much.
"We've known each other for a while, huh?" The redhead asked.
"Yeah. I think so." Please say what I think you will…
Kairi came running up the road with Namine in tow before Axel could say anything more. He sat up and looked down the way when Kairi screeched out Roxas' name and waved to her as she came up the steps of the house.
"I forgot to tell mom I'd be going, so I rushed back here real quick," she laughed in explanation. She and Namine slipped through the still-open door quickly. Axel and Kairi's house was one of those vintage old-style ones that only existed in small communities people forget still exist. As a result, there was a screen door in front of the wooden one that slapped shut in the girls' wake. Axel loved this sound.
The boys on the porch swing could hear the conversation they were having with Axel's mother through the screen door and crack in the wooden one. It was the only sound for a while, before Roxas exhaled some more sea-salt breath in defeat. The redhead sat up carefully, almost unsteadily.
Axel slid down the swing so he was a little closer than boys usually were and looked at the space just past Roxas' collarbone. "Um… you're pretty cute, you know?" Some Alice in Chains started up in the muffled background to indicate Namines phone had gone off. (Funny how a girl like that is into grunge. Maybe it's a side effect of being friends with a girl from Seattle. Music flutters around like that.)
Roxas laughed and Axel breathed out a chuckle at the ringtone. Roxas calmed down and leaned into Axel's face saying, "You sound like Rai."
Axel leaned in as well asking, "Who's Rai?" rather quickly.
Roxas smiled as he reached up to grab the back of Axel's neck and breathed out "Not my ex," before smashing his lips against Axels excitedly. (Roxas did a lot of things excitedly- it was his personality disorder, he always said. Easily bored, easily amused.)
Kairi and Namine walked out just before they separated and they heard Kairi say "Aw man!", which made them both turn around out of shock at the voice and slight embarrassment on Axel's part. She grinned haughtily at them both while Namine was wiggling around her to get down the steps.
"Fine. I guess you win, Axel," she said good-naturedly in the way a sister does. She didn't seem that disappointed… or surprised. Namine waved at them both from the bottom step after Kairi came to join her, and like that they were gone- aware and apathetic.
Roxas tilted his head sideways. "I didn't know she liked me," he said off-handedly, gazing off into the opposite direction in which the girls had gone.
"Doesn't matter now," Axel replied unthinkingly, hoping he was right. It was so sudden, so unexpected, so quickly done and yet they had both been feeling this come for weeks now. Like watching a train, speedy and loud, but on the way up it feels like forever.
"No, it doesn't," Roxas agreed with a blink. He grabbed Axel by the hand, effectively shocking the other boy, and decided they should do something boyfriend-like in celebration. Axel reveled in the screen door's shutting sound (loved the sound behind him and the excitement in front of him) and smiled to himself.
So our relationship came to be.
*
Axel was half-Thai, but Kairi was not, being that she was only his step sister. For this reason, it was always easy to tell what cutlery belonged to who. Axel ate nearly everything with chopsticks, but Kairi quite enjoyed the ease of a knife and fork. (She was a very neat eater, as she knew how to use them like it was her profession. Her and chopsticks were not messy, merely less convenient for her less than nimble fingers.)
Kairi and her friends liked to eat with the new couple partially because watching them was like watching a flower grow, but much quicker, but primarily because they had opposite extremes of eating style.
Roxas was a little bit of a pig when it came to food because he loved foods one could really only eat properly with one's hands. His mouth was almost always occupied with a double-flavoured lollipop or a pretty green string of licorice or sea salt ice cream bar or fries or chips or a hot dog. "All-American health foods," he liked to say. This meant nearly all of his lunches at school consisted of a burger and an ice cream bar. He also picked fries and tator tots off the trays of unsuspecting others. As far as he was concerned, it was their fault for not guarding their food better.
Unsurprisingly, the lean man he was steadily coming to love avoided all these foods. It wasn't out of anorexia or environmental concern; it was just that he was picky. Axel, on the other hand, had hands made for chopsticks. His large hands situated chopsticks gracefully in his palm and his boney fingers gripped them firmly. It was almost one of Roxas' guilty pleasures to watch Axel's hands when he ate.
He never got to take food from Axel, though because the redhead hated school lunches ("I refuse to waste my mother's hard-earned money on grease and lard!" he doth proclaimeth). He brought his own lunch from home. It was usually some fancy variation of rice: rice and fruit, steamed rice, egg fried rice, rice and beans, chicken fried rice, and once cherry-chocolate rice on Valentine's Day, but that had been before Roxas' time.
The redhead also had his own special vibrant-coloured chopsticks. He collected them.
Roxas would occasionally stop making a mess of his food long enough to address Axel's freakishness for only eating rice. Axel would frown at his large mound of grainy goodness with deep regard at whatever meaningless comment Roxas had made. He would then kiss Roxas on the cheek (and Roxas would wipe his cheek with joking disgust) and drop some rice onto Roxas' plate.
"That's why I'm not a fatty," the taller would respond, feeling victorious. Roxas liked to get indignant about being implicatively fat because he was actually a huge drama queen on the inside, and Axel loved to watch this and laugh.
The more they were together, the more interesting they were.
*
As luck would have it, Roxas' hair grew like a weed, and with all the time they spent together, Axel only noticed when it got cut. He got used to seeing it as it grew out- seeing it become more and more disheveled and windswept, its undone California beaches look getting ragged and thick. When it got short again, it took Axel about two days to get used to not seeing it in Roxas' eyes again.
He was no longer near the ocean and no longer spent long, lazy days underwater and bleaching/tanning himself, so it took all of three months for the sandy brown of Roxas' natural hair to dominate most of his head, sprouting roots upward like weeds breaking free. Axel noticed all of the back and sides were no longer brown, but the longer front bits of the spikes were still blond-ended.
When he pointed this out to his boyfriend, the other merely shrugged and grabbed Axel's hand to pull them out of the store they'd been in.
The next twenty eight minutes of their impromptu walk downtown had been spent looking for an available walk-in appointment that finally landed them in a tiny shop Axel only knew because one of his old friends would only get his hair cut there.
"He's got a weird spikey thing going on up top but long bits in back, so only she could do it. She knows what he wants by now; you know, the whole "Give me the usual" thing," he explained, dragging Roxas into the shop a bit wearily.
Yuffie, who cut Axel's friends hair, was working that day and had been oh so excited to have another Axel-buddy coming in. Roxas almost ran back out of the shop, he had been so scared of all her excess energy, but he was too tired to say no to anyone who was willing to cut the rest of the blond off.
"So you just want the natural colour all back in?" she smiled into his reflection politely.
"Yeah. It's just kinda weird with the blond bits still in and all," Roxas sighed, leaning into the worn spinny chair he had nearly been thrown in. Yuffie didn't say anything; just spun him around to wash his hair and begin the job. At this point, Axel left to buy a soda from a store up the road, which Yuffie took as her cue to make small talk.
"You know, I love the boys Axel brings in here. His friend Demyx with the Mohawk thingy- he's the first of them that came in here. Since him, I've met lots of Axel's friends, but you're the cutest one, I think!"
Roxas didn't really know what to say to this, so he smiled at the girls reflection as she snipped off a bit of the side.
"What do you think of him?" She asked, rather arbitrarily.
"He's absolutely amazing," the blond replied with an honest smile. Yuffie didn't miss the glimmer in his eyes. She grabbed a lock of hair from the front to contemplate the texture of the boy's hair. It wasn't that soft, but Axel had never brought in boys with soft hair.
"He's not a normal boy, is he?" the dark-haired barber asked lovingly, straightening the lock in her fingers to cut it.
"No, but I like that about him." It was true. If Axel had been any less like himself, Roxas would've missed the boy he knew now. Axel wasn't meant to be like any other person nor have friends any less strange as he. Roxas figured this, and smiled into his own reflection with this revelation.
Axel came through the door once again with a Fanta in hand while Yuffie was grabbing a pair of thinning scissors. The taller boy sat in one of the waiting/visitors chairs to stare at the short-haired nape of his beloved Roxas. Halfway through his Fanta, Axel's eyesight had memorized and crawled down the whole expanse of Roxas' head and face through the mirror and was starting to register the amount of hair that was ending up on the floor.
"Woah, woah, woah!" The skinny teen cried out suddenly, hopping up from the chair using his stomach muscles and fast-walking next to Yuffie. She had halted her movements above his head and Roxas was looking at him over his shoulder now.
"What the hell, that's a lot of hair, isn't it?" Axel asked frantically, pointing at the floor. Yuffie looked to the space around her sneaker-clad feet and curled her fingers in out of relief.
"Geez, Axel, don't scare me like that. I'm just thinning it. People with thick hair often get it thinned. I'm just keeping it from getting really unruly and stuff. Not that it is or anything," Yuffie informed. She ruffled some of the hair around his crown and smiled at the cute spikes it was settling into due to the water.
Axel was eyeing Roxas' hair doubtlessly, looking admiringly through Roxas' reflection into the blonds blank stare. (Neither were sure if they'd ever really noticed Roxas had shaggy hair, but he was an islander and somewhere along the line, wooliness made fair sense.) Roxas smiled at him with underlying anxiety at what thinner hair would look like, but unworried. His thin boyfriend shrugged with a final glance at Yuffie before turning to sit in the chairs again.
They had their longest kiss to date when Roxas walked out of the barber shop, hair spiked professionally and eyes looking even wider without the ruffles of hair in his face. The pretty mirror of his eyes and flawed teenager-growing-into-his-skin smoothness of face was right at him. Axel hadn't stopped staring at him since Roxas had stepped out of the chair.
"Yuffie has good ideas," Axel barely got out before Roxas smashed into his face. (It was how Roxas kissed: too excited to take it slow.)
*
Roxas' dad was absolutely huge. The blondie was the son of a muscular ex-air force man and a long-haired librarian. Needless to say, Axel was impressed and nervous before he even walked through the door. Just the information and mental images were enough to shake him.
Currently, he was actually in front of them, living proof Roxas didn't lie, and had actually stepped through the door by now.
He was freaking out. (On the inside, of course.)
Several things were on Axel's mind when he arrived inside the foyer of the more modern home in which Roxas resided. First was the fact it was not overly clean like he would have thought, nor did it smell of sea salt- making it purely a Roxas scent, which was exciting and intimate. Secondly, he noticed Roxas's mom and dad did not meet him immediately. The whole dwelling had a relaxed notion of casualty for which Axel hadn't prepared.
He didn't know why- because when you really think about it, parents aren't waiting for you with huge smiles and tea on a tray when you come over- but he'd expected it to be a suffocating atmosphere of formality to which he'd never accustomed. The seven minutes it took for either adult to show up had eased him out of his initial tension.
Roxas and his redheaded love had been sitting side by side on the couch, hands connected, when the jingling came through the front door. The smaller boy bolted upright to greet his parents once they had walked into the house. The two were guided into the living room behind their son and smiled at the 17-year-old remaining on the couch.
Axel had met his boyfriend's parents twice before briefly. They had dropped Axel off at his own house after a mall date a little under two months ago and had been properly introduced on their second meeting in the school concert hall when the family had gone to see Axel's duet in the choir concert.
Those first two times had been impromptu and stress-free, being that Axel had left within eight minutes of conversation. Under his current circumstance- one against a whole family in their own living room and trying not to look as scruffled as he suddenly felt- this was much scarier.
But Roxas' parents weren't scary, as it turned out. His sandy brown-blonde mother spoke about half a notch above normal level when she introduced herself and took Axel's hand in a firm shake. The redhead shifted to regard the pecs and biceps of the woman's husband, who shook his hand almost crushingly and laughed into his greeting. At some point between these happenings, Roxas had taken his usual place next to Axel and wrapped an arm around the tiny waist of the other.
"It's nice to meet you guys," the taller boy said, realising too late he should've said 'you both' or something along those lines. Despite the small informality, Roxas' parents didn't seem to notice or be bothered.
"Eh! Eh! Get your hands off my son!" The muscled man protested, which caused Axel to jump away from his solid flush against Roxas' side. Roxas pouted at his dad and pulled himself against Axel again, leaned over a little to hug his taller beau's side.
"He's just joking," the blond informed his boyfriend, then pecked said boy's cheek.
Roxas' parents laughed heartily and his father patted Axel on the shoulder to confirm what his son had said, before plopping onto a couch to turn on the TV. He scanned the channels a bit until he found a comedy movie. Upon noticing Roxas having to force Axel to sit down, he smiled at them both and said, "Axel, don't worry, it was just my unappreciated humour. I'm funny, dammit." Then laughed, and his wife giggled from her seat to the left of them all.
Axel was still a little on edge, but Roxas' family's apathy set him into a happy smoothness.
His parents insisted Axel sleep over, surprisingly enough, but he had to decline.
"It means they love you," Roxas informed Axel when they had been ushered to say goodbye for the night. Outside, under the light from a waning lightbulb, Roxas' pretty sand hair was silky and his eyes were rolling like the ocean. Axel leaned down to smash his face against Roxas' in imitation of the way Roxas always kissed him. The shorter one smiled against his face.
"I love you, more, though. By the way."
*
Namine started spending more time at one particular country-style house on a small avenue as the school year wound down. This may have been due to an interest in all things vintage; maybe she quite enjoyed the back road walk that gave her time to think and enjoy the world; perhaps she was simply a stalker, or a squatter even.
Mostly likely, it had something to do with the previously redheaded girl who lived there, the gay brother who'd always welcomed her, and the sweet-savory Thai food said brother liked to make. Namine's now angel-blonde best friend was waiting on the lowest of two porch steps for her one Sunday in a warm Washington May.
Kairi's back pocket started vibrating against the worn wood panels, effectively shocking her out of a heat-induced daze.
"Hello?" she answered anxiously, assuming it would be Namine (having temporarily forgotten she lost her own phone last Thursday and that this was Axel's she was borrowing).
"Uh… hi, is this Axel?" her brother's California obsession asked, hesitantly.
"Oh, sorry, yeah. I'm just borrowing it for now because I lost mine," she replied, disappointed and brought back to reality.
To her delight, Roxas laughed sweetly. "Ah! Again? So where is Axel then; do you know?" Kairi couldn't help but smile at the notion that her brother and the boy on the phone were so close any phone conversation had to involve both of them in some way or another. It was assuring, for her as a sister, to know Roxas absolutely couldn't be distracted from his boyfriend for more than three sentences.
"Oh, uh… probably up in his room, hold on." She stood up and ran inside to find Axel walking down the stairs just as she stepped into the dwelling. His eyes flashed to the screen door to watch it close the way he always did (and sometimes she had to roll her eyes at his fascination with the object).
"Roxas wants you," she quickly told him. He smirked, an occasion she no longer noticed or found to be of any interest, and said something she really should have seen coming: "He always wants me." And Kairi just had to roll her eyes at this, true though it may have been.
Remembering the phone in her hand, she placed it to her double-pierced ear and said, though she doubted it needed to be said, since the phone had been uncovered anyway, "He's here."
Roxas smiled into the phone- somehow Kairi heard it- and asked to have speak to the other boy. Wordlessly, she handed it over to its proper owner and walked back outside, hearing Axel say, "I heard you want me. How bad is it?" in his feigned cockiness that probably wasn't that feigned.
Namine was coming up the road then, and Kairi's face broke into a large smile as she ran to meet her best friend.
"You would not believe those two," the angel-blond told her naturally fair-haired friend.
"I love how I already know what you're talking about, though you're being real vague," and she didn't know it, but so did Kairi. It meant, to her, they were a kind of close she had missed since losing many of her good friends to high school. Namine continued, "and that they're the first thing other people talk about. They're so in love, it's insane."
Kairi, as a sister, was only assured by this.
*
Only two malls were anywhere near close enough to the couple's village to make any sense visiting, and only one of them had a huge children's section. It was in this particular mall the boys often found themselves, being that it was ten minutes closer and almost as good.
Axel and Roxas liked to rendezvous in order to mess around and terrorise the workers. They often found themselves inside expensive stores from which they never bought anything to try everything in it. Big department stores were the most fun because they would often grab all kinds of clothes, lock themselves in a dressing room and start pulling on whatever was in front of them. Roxas went the most crazy with it because he was such a casual dresser. Axel often ended up finding fun new clothes from these excursions.
Much of the couple's favourite part of doing this was that they unashamedly couldn't keep their hands off each other. Roxas would pull off Axel's shirt and start kissing the boy's collar bone while he was putting on a new pair of jeans. The tall boy would buckle up his belt and start kissing Roxas back once he had decided whether or not he liked the jeans.
On more than one occasion, the people in front would hear them giggling or a particularly loud groan, realize they had snuck into the same stall, and bang on the door to get them out.
Axel would laugh at Roxas' flushed face answering whoever had knocked before guiding him out by the hip and winking at the intruder.
*
Out of nowhere, Roxas made a comment Axel almost didn't hear.
"I think I'll survive here in Washington."
It was the day of their two year anniversary. They kissed again, one of many, but in a lovely new way.
Slowly, calmly, daring the world to tear them apart. Roxas had spent two fully eventful years in Washington without a break back to California, and Axel was learning other foods existed outside of grain. It was just a couple of the many things that broke down and built their lives.
Don't forget, don't forget. I could never forget.