Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: Axel, the fisherman's son. Roxas, the fisher of men. On a quiet coast, Axel learns to love the sea.
Answer Key: 1.) T.S. Eliot, 2.) Victor Hugo, 3.) the necessity of things, 4.) the biblical salt of the earth.
Rating: T for purple prose and a little tenderness.
A/N: This was originally written for a friend, posted other places last December. We're not friends anymore, but I miss him. I'd dedicate it to his memory, but he'd rather be forgotten. (I'll never be able to, I would never, I couldn't, I can't.) This story is paired with a small mix I pieced together, called "De Profundis," link found on my profile. I'm proud of so few things I've written, but this story is one that means very much to me.
Enjoy.
From the Depths
The cry of gulls against the constant roar of the sea tore open the dawn, peals of bells like the cracking of ancient cities as Axel opened his eyes. The first breath of morning, ocean air into the lungs, the molded dust of an oceanside abode both familiar and distant, as if he hadn't spent the last eighteen years of his life waking up in the same four wooden walls. From the angle of the sunlight sailing through his salted, cracked windows, Axel knew he had fifteen minutes to join the living before the boat left without him. Foregoing his morning collapse into the tumbling surf, bar of oatmeal soap waiting obediently in the seashell dish just outside the front door, rickety stool providing it's only purpose (the throne of cleanliness), he slid into his clothes and moved as if dreaming through his family's home. His mother, awake before the sun and out to slave over the ovens at the restaurant down a barren stretch of the beach, still the only person Axel knew that rode a bike, left him soggy toast with fried eggs cooled to a distinctly rubber-band like consistency. Folding the piece of toast in half and choking it down, Axel hurried through the door, felt the food jostle about in his stomach as he ran for the docks.
A day like any other, seabirds squawking overhead, pinwheeling for scraps of flapping silver in the turbulent blue, except today Axel spied a blonde sitting in the surf, the gentle coaxing of the tide ineffective against his sandy seat. From the arrogant angle of his shoulders, Axel knew it was the boy a few houses down, strange transplant from, if the rumors were true, America, though he was more myth than real boy. In ten years he hadn't spoken to the boy, had hardly seen the proud little stranger elsewhere than frolicking in the surf, and he wondered why today, the one day he couldn't spare a minute to make his long overdue introduction, the boy had chosen to make himself available. Shrugging, Axel continued along his way toward the docks, mammoth in the distance with their darkened jut into the sea.
Despite how he immersed himself in writhing guts, slicing fish bellies open neatly with his father's knife, Axel couldn't rid himself of the blonde on the shore. After eighteen years of rising with the dawn, trekking to the docks, there was little to complicate his routine, twelve of the eighteen years making a detour to the only school on the small island aside. He'd learned to walk on a boat, earned his sea legs before he knew how to tell which house was his own. The arrogance of that bastard, that easy child of the sun. The blonde had probably never touched a fish in his life, Axel decided. Probably thought the sea that provided his meals was a novelty, delighted in the different textures of marine flesh with nothing more than a simple thank you, a moment of grace. Disgusted, distracted, Axel sliced into the palm of his hand. Blood pooling into the inside of a fish, it wasn't until Axel's father shook him by the shoulder that he set the knife aside, excused himself to be sick over the deck of the fishing boat, Love Song painted in curling black strokes under his chin as he lost his mother's best breakfast to the depths.
The sun was nearly set by the time the Love Song docked, his father raising nothing more than an eyebrow when Axel declined dinner at the restaurant, offering the excuse of smelling like the mouth of a fish, that he needed to bathe. Walking back to the house across the sand, Axel stared at his boots with a determination that bordered on ferocious. He would not look to the shore. He didn't care if the strange American brat had drowned. He didn't care, didn't care at all. Which was why, with reluctant hope, Axel tore his gaze toward the horizon when the dying sunlight flared brightly in the corner of his vision. There, of course, was the boy, sitting, perhaps dead, in his sandy seat. Hating the part of himself that stopped, the part of himself that wanted to know, that wanted to ask about America, Axel allowed his feet to take him to where the boy sat.
"Fancy hypothermia?" his voice called. It was a good start. The boy gave an imperceptible shrug, one that Axel found distinctly infuriating. "You come from America?" At least, Axel figured, he didn't beat around the bush. Straightforward, frank, no time for small talk on the sea.
"Are you socially retarded?" the boy asked in a grinding tenor. The bitterness was like a whaling boat to the face.
"Freeze, for all I care," Axel spat, turning away.
He didn't see the boy again for an entire month.
The cry of gulls, saltwater lining his lungs, and Axel awoke like an arrow shot, hand flying to his mouth. It was the third dream he'd had of a watery end, the ocean filling up the chambers of his heart, bursting in his lungs. Shaking the terror from his limbs, Axel slid from his bed, moved like dreaming through the house. Today there would be enough time for a frigid bath, eyes bleary in the pre-dawn, the bar of rough oatmeal soap akin to a peel of oak against his skin. It was of course today, naked as Aphrodite against the morning waves, that the blonde decided to materialize again.
"Don't you have a tub?"
Axel, forcing his body to continue washing, not giving the bastard the credit for catching him unaware, called over the roar of the surf. "We can't all live in the lap of luxury, America."
"I wouldn't call plumbing a luxury," the blonde said, taking a seat on the sand.
"How lucky for you," Axel snarled, dragging the soap across his body, scrubbing savagely across his legs, shoving a hand in the cleft of his ass. Let the boy watch. He hoped it filled him with disgust. Not sparing even a flicker of eyesight at the boy on the ground as he walked back to his house, Axel said, "Do you take pleasure watching fisherman bathe? Not much of a pastime, is it."
"You don't know me," the boy called out behind him.
"Let's keep it that way," Axel said to himself, wanting nothing more than to kick sand at the boy.
"You're the only person on the island I don't know," the boy said, now walking behind him. Axel thought he could feel the boy's eyes on his body, the saltwater trailing down the small of his back. "Your mother gives me free clam strips. She puts them in red baskets for me. Your father gives me wrapped fillets for my father."
"Good for them," Axel said, the clawing feeling of betrayal swallowing his guts. How dare they.
"What's wrong with you?" the boy asked, sprinting ahead to stand in front of Axel.
"Nothing. I have work. Why don't you make a sand castle or something, isn't that what you do? Some of us have jobs."
"Your mother told me you don't have any friends. Is that true?"
"Fuck you," Axel spat, surprising even himself. The shocked face of the boy, no more than sixteen, made him feel a curl of guilt that Axel quickly toed aside in favor of irrational dislike. "Bring me the heart of a fish, then talk to me about truth."
The cry of gulls and the wail of the only ambulance on the island, a night of drowning, and Axel woke with a spiraling in his chest. His father, arm around his mother and rubbing out her shaking sobs, sat in the kitchen and explained that the docks were closed today, the fishing magnate granting leave to his employees to sit at the hospital bed of his son. The blonde boy, his mother gasped, had almost drowned.
"What a little fool he is!" Axel's mother wailed, wringing her hands. "He isn't right in the head, the poor boy. Won't you see him, Axel?" Nodding at the basket on the table, his mother swabbed at her eyes with a sodden cloth. "I fried this for him, won't you take it and give his father our regards? They found him under the docks, for godssake, and do you know what the poor boy had in his hands? The guts of a fish!" A fresh wave of sobs overtook his mother, his father patting her lightly and staring a command at Axel. Before Axel could make it out the door, basket in hand, his mother ran at him, smothering his face in kisses.
"You good boy, you good, good boy."
"Yes, ma," Axel breathed. He would never be the boy in a hospital bed, half-drowned with incompetency.
The walk toward the clinic took the better part of two hours, the basket of food making Axel's shoulders ache with strain. Deciding halfway that there was no way the boy deserved this much food for only half-drowning, Axel stopped to inspect the contents. Fried fish, fried clam strips, fried squid. The boy, Axel decided, deserved to be fat, only sneaking a few rings of squid before he continued. It was too bad he hadn't drowned, then he could stop fluttering incessantly at Axel's thoughts. He needed to be drowned and fat and ugly, a bloated corpse face down on the sea. Maybe then, food for the gulls, Axel would be able to stamp out the painful hope that had begun to burn away in his chest.
"Roxas," the boy said with cracked lips, licking at the dried salt scaled across them when Axel offered the basket. Useless arm at his side, swatch of medical plastic against his wrist proclaiming Roxas Jacobs, the boy unclenched his fist, a congealed mess of fish guts in the center. "Don't know if I got the heart. Didn't know what it looked like."
Axel felt strangled, chest caving in as he set the basket at the foot of the hospital bed and pulled out a handful of fried squid. "We aren't friends," Axel said as he fed Roxas a golden ring, crumbs tumbling down the boy's chin that Axel absentmindedly brushed aside with the back of his hand.
"Who'd want to be friends with you," Roxas said, opening his mouth for another.
Roxas was willful, petulant, and stubborn, demanding Axel show him how to gut a fish properly, requiring a lesson on which part was the heart, the stomach. He was picky, arrogant, and insufferable, insisting Axel use his bath, leaving a package of thick cotton towels outside the door to Axel's house. Despite what mistrust and misgivings Axel dragged along with him, it was soon very clear that he could no longer stand to be very far away from the bastard. Despite the mantle of near regality Roxas wore, there was an undercurrent of awe that Axel felt press at him, child's hands at his sides, in his hair, perfumed whimsy that rode the crests of the waves, Roxas toeing sea foam that he promised Axel was mermaid's breath, poking at bubbles and asking him to listen, shhh, listen to their voices. Because despite having lived his life by the sea, Axel had no great love for it, felt trapped to die by drowning in what was boundless, unyielding.
"It's my mother," Roxas said, taking Axel's hand and curving it over the horizon, a rounded belly, a watery womb.
"Where's your real mother?" The tip of the blonde's nose was pink, too cold for either of them to watch the sky greet the sea, winter fast approaching.
Roxas, eyes on the line at the end of the world, Axel's wrist in his hand, carving out bits of the sky, said, "She died. But isn't it amazing? There's treasure out there."
Real treasure, sunken ships, and the fruit of the sea, the entire foundation and economy of their small island. The sea that promised to be Axel's whole life, that had brought Roxas to him, out from the depths. "Is there?" Axel asked, wanting nothing more than to kiss Roxas on the mouth.
Roxas smiled indulgently, turned Axel's hand toward them and traced its lines with a single finger. "You have the sea in your veins, see? Here," Roxas pointed, tracing faint blue webs through Axel's hands, "here, and here. Even if you go someplace far away, you'll always smell like the ocean."
"Like a fish," Axel laughed. He meant for it to sound light, joking. The sound tasted bitter even in his mouth.
"No, just like the ocean. Like salt, like life." Turning his head to look at Axel, Roxas scraped up a handful of sand, let it sift between his fingers. "Do you hate it that much?"
"You have choices," Axel said, moving his hand to capture the sand slipping through the blonde's fingers. "No one asked me. I was given this life."
"This life," Roxas said, testing the words. "It's not a curse. This isn't your prison."
"Easy for you to say, America."
"Is it? The world is wide. The sea goes everywhere. Nothing's stopping you."
Axel thought of his proud father, his quiet mother. "Not nothing." He thought of Roxas with his running water, his pastel bath towels and opulent home, out of place on the beach, a glittering jewel against a bleak landscape. "I'm good at cutting fish. I'll do it until I can't do it anymore. Until the salt devours my bones."
A press of lips against his jaw, chapped with salted air. "The salt of the earth," Roxas breathed, "the gold of whole coasts. Before, a prince would trade his entire country for an empire of salt." Licking his lips, Roxas shook his head. "You can't see what you have. Salt preserves, it seasons. Toilers of the sea, they know how to endure." A tentative arm wrapped around his waist, Roxas' voice warm in his ear. "You do the work of kings."
"And what do you do?" Axel dipped a hand under the hem of Roxas' shirt, felt an expanse of golden skin.
Roxas smiled up at the frothy clouds. "I build sand castles."
Later, marveling at the feel of oriental rugs under the pads of his feet, pacing nervously in the guest bedroom of Roxas' house, Axel felt a stillness descend upon him, his entire body listening, inclined toward some auditory sunlight. Roxas drifted into the room in the middle of the night, Axel sitting, awake, wearily in bed, the ocean tumble dulled by properly insulated walls. Finger to his lips, pointing above their heads at his father's bedroom, Roxas pulled him down the hallway, into the study where the remnants of a fire smoldered in the fireplace. Silent, Axel wondered when Roxas had become a poet, his body like poured cream, fine literature and pretty, aching vowels. Roxas, too, smelled like the sea, moved like a perfect storm and anchored him in the middle of a swirling gulf, teasing out articulations of want, need, obliterating his loneliness with a singularity that bordered on devastation, leaving nothing but raw, damp skin and eyes blinking back the glory of the sun in its wake.