Just Passing By
You said you'd wait. But I think maybe, just maybe, you're too out of touch to touch me now. AkuRoku.
"So. It's still 'Roxas', right?"
In the muffled, untainted silence that enshrouded the streets at this early hour of sunset, that lone, desolate voice was hauntingly familiar.
Kind of.
Not really.
Maybe.
He didn't know anymore. Nonetheless, it kept coming, and it did nothing short of hitting him like a ton of bricks.
"Been awhile, huh?"
That clean-cut, lazy drawl—hiding so many unfathomable emotions at one time… Oh, he got pretty good at it, really. No, he was a goddamn professional—that was the only term available in his repertoire of sinister words when it came to this deviant phantom. But Roxas wasn't about to give him fucking a medal of honour for such a foolish talent. The boy supposed it shouldn't have come as such a surprise that the spine-tingling voice itself held no ounce of true cadence nor feeling. Even here. Now. At present.
Too used to the quintessence of heartlessness, he believed.
Alright, fine. So he wasn't expecting to hear it in the slightest. At all. Not here. Not now. That one voice wasn't the voice that the blond had been even abstractedly prepared to hear for years and years—maybe decades—lifetimes—to come. He had waited so long. So long that this felt too soon. But perhaps today was just as good a day as any. Whatever the case, his demeanour didn't change as he tilted his head just a fraction to the left so that he caught the man's reflection in the huge glass window of the unlit boutique store, closed for the evening—the window he'd been mindlessly staring at for what passed as an eternity.
Bloody pinpricks of luminosity and shafts of undulating scarlet light from the disappearing sun pierced the mirror image, making Roxas wonder for a moment if perhaps this part of the day was just some kind of fickle dream. Some sick, sick, twisted fantasy. He'd had many of those in the past few years of his boyhood.
He—the man—was standing almost directly behind him with an air of utmost patience. The epitome of serenity in its entirety. A tall pillar of self-possession and composure. It seemed almost ridiculous and remarkable and unsettling; but mostly just ridiculous.
He just stood there and stared back through the green-tinted glass, red hair swaying gently in the non-existent breeze. Such patience. Where did he learn such damned patience?
Roxas let out a soft, indescribable sigh that bordered on a quiet moan, and slowly turned around to face him after what seemed like an hour or two (maybe more) of indecision.
"I was beginning to think something—wrong—happened," the boy finally intoned tactfully, with a lot more caution than was necessary, subtly taking in the face of the man before him for the first time in true. There were so many differences. Slight and delicate. But many.
The man's thin, pale-in-comparison lips quirked up in a small, intimate smirk at Roxas' staunch reply and stoic expression and he couldn't help but look almost affectionately back at the boy. He didn't let the blond see that his fingers were curled tightly in his deep pockets, sharp nails digging into damp palms painfully, knuckles chafing against faded blue denim. He didn't want to cave in now. He wouldn't let himself.
"Would you have cared?"
Roxas lifted an eyebrow. That was the last thing he would have expected out of the redhead's mouth. Then again, this entire situation was the last thing he thought he'd stumble upon today.
"Are we seriously going to have this conversation?" he muttered, disbelieving.
Axel shrugged a shoulder, eyes still fixed on the boy before him. Ruby-red sunlight seemed to have settled across Roxas' face, making the boy appear colourless and ghostly. And the redhead realised that Roxas was carefully concealing deeper emotions from him. He knew just how much Roxas hated being read like an open book. Of course, that was before. This Roxas that stood before him now; Axel didn't know him at all. But he was pretty sure it didn't matter. He couldn't be any different, surely.
"We don't have to if you don't want to," was the redhead's simple reply.
But Roxas could tell that the man wanted a genuine reply. Because now, they were fully capable of that: a genuine reply. Now, they were capable of telling something like truth. Now, they were capable of proper reactions towards emotional situations like these.
So long as they didn't lie.
But they were good at lying. They'd learnt the fine art of it a lifetime before. Surely Axel wasn't expecting a straight answer from him, knowing he could just lie.
The redhead glanced to the side, through the glass panes behind the boy, and his eyes came to rest on the motionless, faceless mannequin standing on display, looking asinine and outlandish as it posed sophisticatedly. It was wearing a chic black leather coat, matching leather gloves and pretty, pretty black boots. The blond had been staring at it for a long time a few moments before and Axel had watched him from afar.
The silence that reigned bordered on awkward, but it was Roxas and only Roxas who felt self-conscious. The boy pursed his lips for a long, faltering moment.
Then, as though he had irrevocably decided on something, his entire frame sagged a little with fatigue and weariness—kept inside himself for something like forever.
"… Are you real?" he asked at last, voice faint, as though almost fearful of the answer. "That… that's all I need to know. Are you real?"
That was the one question Axel had been waiting to hear, and the redhead finally cracked an open smile.
"Compared to last time? So much more real than you think."
Like a heavy weight being lifted, Roxas exhaled deeply and returned the smile with a weak and feeble one of his own.
"Reality is such a chore," he said dismally.
"So's life. Which is why I kinda need to live it with you."
Roxas laughed. It was a lot closer to a sob.
"Alright… Alright, Ax. Let's try this again," he murmured softly. "Let's do this one more time."
End.
Author's Notes: YDCF update next, I promise. :)
This was written as an experimental artistic piece with some of my own real-life experiences thrown in. Kinda. Reviews would be wonderful. Maybe include some of your thoughts and such. I kind of believe that this one was a pretty hard-to-interpret one-shot, but that could just be me.