Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: This is a story you've heard a million times. It is never any less worth telling.
Rating: T for adult language and content, sexual situations, and grammatical paradoxes.
A/N: Unless you're brain dead, you'll have heard about the Queensland floods. Livejournal's waltzmatildah put together a Fic For Relief effort that I brazenly threw myself at. After a bit of a bidding war, ravewalker over on lj came in as the highest bidder donating to charity at $52, and I have cleverly used a phoenix down in order to write this fic as a just reward for her. Hundreds of fanfic writers put themselves up on the auction block, and while I'm not sure what the total monetary contribution is at this point, I know that it is significant.
If anyone reading has been affected by this disaster, know that as long as your heart is beating, there is hope.
Love you all so much. Thanks for coming back again and again.
Spilled Milk
Somewhere on the fevered collision course with his inevitable end, between the dizzying shots of loose canons and sputtering, whirling balloons, there was an idea to make a living off bad acoustic YouTube covers of Top 40 hip hop, slapping ironically ringed fingers against a hollow body and stuttering endearingly over a chorus that would be rude if it was rapped, but given that sad indie slur, was the stuff wet dreams are made of. That was the plan, past cigarette fingers and five in the morning, clutching the remains of tattered plans, eyeing the still empty bottle of Abilify and wondering if anyone back home was wondering about him.
"Huh?" he asks distractedly, someone leaned down too close to his face and smelling like Chanel No. 5.
"Chicken farfalle or Eggplant parmigiana?" Raised eyebrows and politician lips, a silk scarf obscuring sagging cleavage.
"What are you asking me?" he sighs more than says and tries to focus on her face. A stewardess. Correction: a flight attendant.
"What would you like to eat, sir?" Her teeth are overbright with the strain of trying to keep calm, as if his B.O. and stale alcohol breath could try the patience of anyone. How could it, when he's so charming?
"Your dripping twat."
And that was the end of that for some time, though he wasn't sure how he ended up in Spain, running around from bulls or drinking wine that scored his throat and purpled his vision. Horns bearing down on his back, the exhalations of hot bull breath on his ass, and that is how it feels to come that close to being a bloody smear. That is how it feels to be that close to dying, a bull's horn three inches from your ass as you fling yourself across a chasm, hands grappling for the crumbling plaster on someone's balcony. They mutter at you in Spanish, a class you failed in college because you were too busy lurking beneath the Chamber Choir risers, accumulating a fortune in upskirt shots of college girls to add to a lucrative Internet business venture. You say something in Italian, or Latin or Ancient Sumerian, and they cheer. There is more purple-eyed wine to nurse away the reckless behavior, and later you fuck someone—a wife or a daughter—and it's wet and moist and feels like the breath of a two thousand pound bull breathing down your neck.
Again he wonders if anyone at home is wondering about him, dick itching, and maybe it's a good time to see a doctor. But waking up in Oslo and waking up in Tehran and waking up in a field somewhere, smelling like an animal shit in your chest cavity, and it's hard to find the time. Between the jet lag and the overdrawn bank account and the empty orange bottles he left on the tarmac at Heathrow, Axel almost forgets he is a real boy at all.
"Again." The clock ticks and tocks like an automatic rifle, cut through with the tap of a pen against a clipboard. The pulsing techno of a nightclub shot with color rises up in his mind and he says it again.
"Axel Spence, twenty seven, upstate New York." The plastic bracelet itches against his right wrist, looks kinda artistic against the septic vacuum of hospital ambiance. This is not real. This is a movie. He is not a real boy. This is someone else with a problem and a pissed off family and thousands of dollars of debt. He raises his line of sight to the shrink with eyes like a chicken hawk, beaky around the nose, shriveled neck and disgusting failed actress fingers. She has the "go on" look, and he wonders how bad it'd be if he grabs that clicky pen and stabs it through her left eye.
"And I have Bipolar Disorder." A Kalashnikov of time, a barrage of the stuff spilling into his eardrums, kicking his heart into a ramrod straight line as they march together.
"Good," she whines, wheezes into the cancered air between them. "Very good, Axel. Very good."
He doesn't shake her hand or return her crypt keeper smile as he gets on the bus, everyone head down and staring at the remains of their fucked up lives. Thirty six months in treatment, and the best he can do is keep his hands to himself as some lily-skinned girl slides in next to him, butcher scars on her arms that he imagines feel like dried out worms on pavement after a good, hard rain.
"I'm Axel," he says, and it's got that frantic burst, all charm and promise. A halfway house with Lily and her wormy arms won't be so bad, swigging the two percent alcohol mouthwash and working his fingers into her cunt while they do some laundry. Not bad at all except how she looks at him with dead person eyes, smiling meth mouth filled with what used to be teeth. Maybe he'll pass on this one.
His dad visits after the third month, cuts him a fat check and cries in his car after he leaves. Axel doesn't see that part. He sees the payoff, the dismissal. It's so much easier to ruin your life when it feels like no one gives a flying fuck, so he gives the finger to the residential manager, grabs a jacket, and walks out, spitting in the general direction of the tree that Lily with the wormy arms hung herself off of after the first week. Three months with a bunch of broken weapons, all of them firing blanks at the sky, and it was enough to drive him… well.
Greyhound busses feel the same, a familiar comfort as he races his shadow west, thousands of miles from quiet country trees and Wal-Mart minimum wages. They stop in the middle of nowhere for a smoke break, and he heads to the truckstop bathroom. Someone's getting blown in the last stall, and he reaches into his jeans for his handful of pills. Not enough forever, but enough for tonight's dose. He watches the stranger in the mirror place the pill on his tongue, thinks the thirty six months at least brainwashed him enough to get this part right, and swallows. His cheeks hollow, unexplainable scars on his face, memories he doesn't he remember, his hair grown out too far to be anything but rebellion. He doesn't feel as haunted as he looks, doesn't feel that dark-circled vulnerable, that flinching wince as the last stall bangs open and a dirty blonde boy with a reddened mouth stalks out, dragging the back of a hand across his face. There's come in his hair.
"What the fuck you looking at?" the kid says in a voice too young and Axel flinches all the way back to the bus.
And that's how it goes, generally. You meet people when you leave your front door, and you never see any of them again. Excepting, of course, when they climb out of the baggage hold when the bus stops on a balmy night in Southern California, scratching their hair and walking up to you like you're best friends.
"Suck your dick for a twenty," the boy says. Axel flinches like he was born with a disorder, the boy frowning in confusion. "You got some problems, man?"
"I'm Axel," he says, automaton-like practice sending the rehearsed speech to the front of his teeth. Twenty seven, upstate New York. I have—
"You got twenty bucks?" The boy smells like someone who hasn't bathed in years, looks like the dark side of Thailand alley.
"You smell like shit," Axel says, flinching.
Shrugging, the boy walks past him, a cloud of stink wafting by. The bus station empties rapidly and Axel soon finds he's alone, at night, in a city he doesn't know the name of. A train that says Pacific Surfliner races by, and it's loud enough to make him cover his ears and head for the street. It's warm enough, looks safe and bright. He tries to have a memory of this, searches his muscles for recollection, but nothing comes. He must've taken a bus to nowhere a million times, but he never remembers these parts.
"Fuck," he says, and starts to walk. It was so much easier in practice, halfway house hero swagger and the idea that it would be touch-type easy, that it would just come to him. To be untouchable again. Patting his pocket at the little sabotage pills, Axel sees someone on the sidewalk ahead of him. Jogging to catch up, maybe ask for directions to somewhere or a bank to cash this check his asshole father wrote, the person stops and wheels on him.
"Stop following me," the blonde boy snarls. "I'll call the fuckin' cops."
"I didn't know it was you," Axel admits, angry that this little smelly faggot thinks it's okay to be a dick to him. "This is the street with all the lights on it, asshole. Didn't know you owned the entire fuckin' city. I'll walk across the street if it'll give your ego enough room." He's halfway across the street, talking loud enough for his voice to bounce back to him from the buildings, before he even realizes he's speaking.
"Whatever," the kid shoots from across the street, muttering something that sounds like "prick" before continuing down the road toward the skyscrapers littering the horizon. Their footsteps lay out a tempo in the wide corridor of the city street, Axel practicing dance moves in his head like they're in a music video, side by side shots of their heels clicking on concrete cut with glass. He needs a bank and a beer and someplace to sleep, but all the banks are closed and he has no money, just a check from an asshole father for ten thousand and change. Axel's wondering where the nearest airport is, wondering if anyone is wondering about him in South Africa where it might be nice to buy a two thousand dollar ticket and hunt zebras or elephants or blood diamonds or whatever it is they do on that part of the map, when the boy stops at an idling torta truck, pulling some bills from his shoe. Axel's stomach howls with a deathly rage and he walks over.
"Hey," he says as the boy orders something in rapid fire Spanish, winking all over his face at the guy in sweats and a backwards baseball cap manning the truck. Something something chorizo, something something asada. "Hey," Axel tries again, nodding at the back of the boy's head. "Can I borrow three dollars?" According to the cardboard sitting on the counter, tacos de camarones cost three dollars, and it sounds like something someone with balls would eat, cajones, but the kids glares at him so bad Axel's sure he's imagining killing him with bare hands and a torta. "Hey, I'll pay you back," Axel says, and he flashes his asshole father's check, watches carefully as the boy's eyes dilate.
A long, distrustful squint, then the boy turns and rattles out more beautifully purred Spanish. "Hope you like meat," the boy says, mouth quirking with his own private joke. He doesn't look so bad under the torta truck's medicinal fluorescent light, bruise-eyed and beaten up like he was born to smoke heroin. Axel nods, feels like a lighter that won't light. An uncomfortable silence falls as the meat sizzles, the Mexican manning the truck whistling Top 40 hip hop into the night air. "…So," the boy says, staring at the pocket Axel's asshole father's check is in.
"My name's Axel," and it sounds just as easy and practiced as it ever had, frenetic current daring him to say more, to do more, be more, touch taste and feel more. But the kid, he's lead. He's dead weight, impediment and unimpressed.
"Yeah, you already said that." And, without any preamble, the blonde reaches into Axel's other pocket, the one full of sabotage. "What are these?"
"Medicine," he says automatically, flinches as the boy pulls out the entire handful and drops one.
"Why, you sick?" The blonde squints at the letters and numbers imprinted tiny on the face of the pill. The boy licks his lips, looks Axel in the eyes.
"Yep," Axel says. Twenty seven, upstate New York. I have—
The boy shrugs and hands the pills over, the pile of them pretty in his palm. "Bummer." Grabbing the paper trays with their tortas, the boy gets down on the curb and sits, nodding up an invitation to Axel. "You got an heir for all that cash when you go?" It's the worst forced nonchalance Axel has ever heard.
"Ten thousand dollars is hardly 'all that cash.'" Axel bites into the torta, sauce dribbling down over his chin, and almost cries from how good it tastes. "Ten K gets you halfway around the world, gets you a rental for a couple months, and gets you wasted inside those couple months. Then, if you get lucky, you make your way from there." He talks with his mouth full, half devouring the food, half sucking up night air.
"And if you don't?" The boy eats like someone civilized, and Axel thinks they could be a work of performance art, the savage rebel slob and the refined gutter slut. Wiping at his mouth with a napkin, Axel almost laughs.
"You die." Swallowing the last of his torta, Axel shrugs. "Not a bad way to go, really. Lost somewhere you don't know. It's like a fucking"—and there's a mental shudder here, where the boy licks his sauce laden fingers—"like a fucking metaphor or something."
"What's a metaphor?" the boy asks, scrubbing at his mouth with the napkin. There's a ring around where he's eaten, the grime softened up and wiped away. Axel's about to answer when the boy laughs—a happy, foreign sound—and smiles. "Just kidding. I know what a metaphor is." A pause for the joy to drain away, tossed in a dumpster along with their torta tray trash behind a long-closed Laundromat, and the boy says, "Don't you need to take your medicine?"
"Already did," Axel says, rubbing at his arms. He's aching, desperate for the soothing hum of commercial flight engines.
"Roxas," the boy says. "That's my name. Thanks for asking, asshole."
"Oh, I didn't—" Axel begins, but realizes he doesn't know what he didn't. Didn't ask because he doesn't care? Didn't ask because…
The boy shrugs. "Let's get a room."
It's a quiet affair, the dirty boy called Roxas locked in the bathroom, steam pouring out from the quarter inch of space under the door while Axel stares at scriptless softcore porn on the free HBO. The room is the size of his asshole, tight and circular and lit for the blind. It smells of rust and sausage, but the look on the boy's face when Axel balked at the $60 a night room kept his mouth shut. Rolls of bills came out of the kid's shoes—tired Vans slip-ons, faded plaid and skulls looking dusty and pissed on—and while Axel had the common sense not to ask, it didn't stop him from imagining three hundred truckers with their pants around their ankles getting intimate with Roxas' cavities. Suffocating in his skin, tiny mound of Abilify sitting on the nightstand, Axel's already pissed out the window waiting for the dirty boy called Roxas to get the fuck out of the bathroom already. Banging on the wall, he calls, "Hurry the fuck up!" The shower cuts out abruptly, the tear of the shower curtain across its pole, and the door unlocks. Roxas is strangely quiet, smelling soft and soaped as Axel walks past.
"You're sleeping in there," Roxas says in clipped tones, head down and dripping. He has no clothes to change into, towel wrapped around his pre-pubescent body. Axel shrugs and closes the door, searching his pocket quickly for the check. Whatever red flags and cop car sirens that typically kick in when rooming with a stranger with ten grand in your pocket had been mysteriously disabled up to that exact moment, and even then Axel's chief concern is the kid will try to give him herpes or something even less sanitary. AIDS, probably. Frowning at the damp, soap scrubbed clothes, he notices a pair of underwear is not among Roxas' drying things. A nondescript shirt, a scuzzy jacket, a pair of weird cargoes, and socks—all in varying shades of homeless chic. Himself only slightly better, he slips in and makes do with the lukewarm water, sloughing off the body oils and confusion he's been carrying around with him. Strange to think that just two mornings ago he was getting off his shift at everyone's favorite supercenter, grinning at every short skirt and eye rolling hair toss like the social reject he is. It's around this point he realizes he's showering fully clothed, shrugs, and soaps up his clothes. Laundry detergent, he thinks, will be his first buy in Johannesburg.
When he emerges from the bathroom, towel slung gallantly around his waist like a caveman, Roxas is fiddling with the television remote, guilty looking like he's been caught watching free softcore on HBO. Eyes sliding to the nightstand, he sees Roxas has, for reasons unconscionable, deposited his remaining pills in a glass ashtray.
"It's drying," he says distractedly, worried that Roxas might have taken one with hopes of recreational entertainment.
"Huh?" Roxas says too quickly, two towels wrapped possessively around him.
"The bath. You told me to sleep in it, but it's wet."
"Oh," Roxas says. "Well, whatever, I'm going to sleep." Crawling quickly under the scratchy sheets, Roxas shoots him a death glare. "And don't get any ideas. I don't do charity."
"Don't fucking flatter yourself," Axel spits back, turning into the bathroom to pull on his dripping clothes. "You're a scrawny little boy with no fucking tits. What the fuck are you, anyway, fourteen? That shit's sick."
"NINETEEN," Roxas thunders, flinging the sheets over his head.
"Fourteen, nineteen, whatever." Soaking, Axel reaches for the front door. "I'm getting a fucking drink. See ya."
He's halfway out the door when Roxas shouts, "You don't have any money, dumbass."
Axel pauses, chest tight with unexplainable fury. He can't remember the last time he's actually been angry. Horny, yes. Numb and reckless, sure. Despairing, always. But angry? Is that why he feels like storming back in and throwing the kid out the fourth story window? "Fuck," he mutters, letting the door swing close as he walks back in. The tension is like a suffocating block of ham insistently shoving itself up his nostrils and down into his throat. Resisting the urge to gag, Axel slams his way into the rapidly cooling bathroom, throws a damp towel into the tub and climbs in. This is what he gets, he thinks, for asking some dirty whore for three bucks. Good job, Axel.
The bank on the corner opens at ten, and by that time Axel's awake and starving but he'll be damned if he asks the bratty fuck for a single cent. Waking up cramped and smelling faintly of mildew, he'd all but stormed into the room to grab his morning dose. The noise must've wakened the kid, passed out like a plague victim, because he'd sat up guiltily, watched through bleary eyes as Axel dry swallowed an Abilify.
"Wheregoin?" he'd mumbled through a yawn.
"The fuck you think?" Axel bit back, raking a hand through his hair. Stranger's hair, stranger's clothes, stranger's face. He's spent so long running, he left himself behind. "Bank's open."
"Wait," the boy said, staggering off the bed, clutching the towels to himself. "Lemme get dressed."
"Whatever," Axel said. What he'd meant to say was, "You're lucky I didn't wipe my ass with the clothes you left in there." Now, bills stuffed in his pockets with the kid looking at him expectantly, Axel wishes he had.
"What do I owe you?" Axel asks, fanning out some bills.
Roxas quickly plucks a hundred, winking. "Interest."
Axel debates punching him the face, but shrugs. The kid fed him, put him up. It's only thievery if you feel robbed. "Know which way's the airport?"
"No," Roxas shakes his head. Axel hears Roxas' stomach grumble. "Where you going?"
"Nowhere," Axel says, walking away. No footsteps follow him, and the sensation upon this realization is more… weird anger that he can't place. Who the fuck cares what the dirty kid's going to do now? Not so dirty all showered and scrubbed, fresh skin like a Neutrogena commercial, bruises on his neck from whiskery-mouthed truckers getting some roadside assistance. The idea makes his stomach turn.
"Hey!" Roxas call out almost a block away, running to catch up. It's a funny run, makes him look younger, scared. "Wanna get some breakfast?" He pauses to let Axel think it over, and goddamn if he doesn't look so hopeful like he hasn't just forced Axel to sleep in a wet shower all night. "I'll treat," he says, waving the hundred dollar bill airily.
The café serves bitter coffee and greasy eggs that Roxas devours with abandon while Axel nurses a cup of putrescent caffeine, poking at petrified bacon with unfocused hostility.
"You left your medicine," Roxas notes, nodding across the street at their rundown motel. Axel is surprised at how the idea had entirely skipped his mind, ready to board the first flight he could hustle and threaten his way on.
"Shit," he says, swiping at the runny yolk on Roxas' plate with a piece of bacon, chewing thoughtfully. A saboteur, sabotaging his sabotage.
"Is it bad?" Roxas asks, pushing his plate across the table to allow Axel free access to the congealing insides of his eggs. "Your disease?"
Axel thinks it's sorta funny how Roxas describes it. It's a disease, sure, but he makes it sound so terminal. Cancer or cardiomyopathy, like he's got six months left and… well, putting it that way. In some ways, being fucking crazy can be fatal. "Yeah, it's bad. It ruined my life." Ruined at seven years old, throwing his room into a landfill of childhood chaos, coloring murals on the walls in the middle of the night, his father trying to belt the bad out of him. Ruined at fifteen, strung out on no sleep and wearing big, fluffy rabbit suits to sophomore English class while the teacher screamed at him to get off the desk and sit in his seat, Spence, now, or you're out of here. Ruined at eighteen, waking up in Vegas with a cock ring on and his feet handcuffed to a bike rack at the corner of Excalibur and New York New York, not a fucking clue what day or month it is. Ruined, ruined, ruined, an illness that hijacked his life and left him in the dust, coughing somewhere on a flight from LAX to O'Hare, his father's stolen credit card in his back pocket.
Roxas mumbles something into his frigid coffee. "…Can't believe you almost got on a plane without your medicine."
"Yeah, well," Axel shrugs. "You finished?"
Roxas stares awkwardly at the table between them, the remains of his yolks painted into schizophrenic mimicry of his features, bits of bacon used as the paintbrush. "Cool," he says softly, grabbing the bill and heading to the register. That little word, that small utterance, just that and Axel's insides are smiling. Weird how he cares so much.
But then, all it takes is just that one time. Just one time to be lost in the dark and finally find a light.
Ashtray upended into his jeans' pocket, Abilify solidly stowed, and Roxas does a funny dance under the cheap motel's awning. "Still don't know where the airport is."
"It's cool," Axel says, flinching as a horn blares behind them. "I'll ask around." A beat or two, Axel trying to figure out the least cheesy way to thank the kid for hooking him up for the night for no reason at all. Why had he done it? Out of some misplaced obligation for a mistaken teenage runaway? Axel hadn't been nineteen for a long time, but Roxas didn't appear to register that. So why? Why that unselfish, unafraid, opened and extended hand? "Thanks… for this," Axel nods at the motel over Roxas' shoulder. The kid just shrugs.
"Know where you're going yet?" Roxas blurts out, almost like he's shy.
"No," Axel lies. "Around. Maybe east."
"East like New York?" And he sound so hopeful again, like they're friends and he hasn't just paid for breakfast with money he basically stole out of Axel's hands.
"Nah, east like the French Riviera." Axel flicks his eyes away from the street to get a good reaction shot from Roxas. The kid doesn't disappoint, mouth dropping open a couple centimeters.
"That's…"
"Dream big, kid."
"Okay," Roxas says without missing a beat. "Guess I'll…" he trails off. See you around.
Axel nods, does an approximation of a smile, and starts off. Roxas NoLastName, nineteen at the top of his lungs, born in a truckstop restroom. He'll remember him. Hopefully, anyway, since it's starting to become a habit, this remembering of things: the way the Greyhound mock satin seat feels against his back, the taste of California air on an empty street, how to be alone and hungry and starving for comfort. Running is hard. Even harder when there's something you're actually running from.
Roxas is standing in an alley beside the motel when Axel walks back up. "What are you doing?"
"Working," Roxas says, throwing a cigarette down.
"When do you get off?" Axel says, and he gets the feeling in his chest of flicking a lighter open in one smooth, steady motion.
It's not easy at first, working in the middle of the night in a frozen stockroom at Costco, carrying fifty pounds of paper plates and frozen french fries around a warehouse in uncomfortable clothes. It's not easy, splitting up the rest of his Abilify until his benefits kick in, feeling the panicked tug of ghost hands at the edges of his mind, fraying the bits of security he's finally built up. The need to run comes in on the air, to chase the undulating dragon out across the oceans, but Roxas walks in to their sixty dollar a night room with his lips chapped and reddened, abused mouth slack, and the feelings suck right out of him.
It gets easier at work, the hours spent unthinking with aching hands and slowly building muscles while Roxas does God knows what in his bed with God knows who for that night's share of room rent. Beats back alleys, but a blowjob is a blowjob whether is happens in the dirt or on a bed. At least there's that, two beds now and no impossible faux ivory every night, the leaky drip of the sink on his feet. The room smells like sex and strangers every morning Axel gets off shift and pours himself into scratchy sheets, Roxas a dead, pretty thing upside down in his bed. It gets easier, benefits kicked in and his orange bottles lined up on the bathroom sink in a pyramid Roxas tends to while Axel isn't around. A funny, obsessive habit, but it's the least Axel can do, putting up with unspoken worry. The kid isn't any nicer—not at three months, and not at six—but they're almost friends now. Almost friends that text each other on the pay-as-you-play cellphones Axel picked up at work, pre-paid and indestructible as Roxas proved after dropping his in the toilet no less than seven times. Texts at one, two, three in the morning, just after Axel shelved twelve rolls of paper towels: "I think I have enuff $$ to get a place."
His response: "When do we move?"
The apartment is a beast, and splitting the utilities is a nightmare, but it's good to live somewhere that isn't a motel room the size of his asshole. Better an apartment the size of a closet in the gentrifying area of the bad part of a good city. Better a meal of herbs, making do with value menu dinners at fast food drive-thrus until one night there's applause as Axel clocks in. Axel Spence, Night Shift Supervisor. Roxas is only slightly more enthusiastic at this development than he was when Axel brought home a co-worker and fucked her in the shower while Roxas ate an entire box of cereal in his bed with his shitty clock radio blaring.
"Congrats," Roxas said both times, once after Axel walked out dripping wet and naked, again after Axel walked in with a tie and a card and a slice of cake.
Axel tries to identify the point at which it all became inevitable, maybe when Roxas walked in with a black eye and a bleeding mouth, maybe when he pulled out a box of condoms from under the bathroom sink, maybe when he ran back to the motel where he'd left the kid with a couple fancy words and hardly a goodbye. Or maybe after some tortas and talk of illness, maybe then. But it happened. He cared. Cared way too much, way too fucking much for Roxas to joke about sucking dick. Way too much to get it up for the girl on the night shift who was a good fuck, but looked nothing like a willful, petulant blonde who prefers boxed mac and cheese to overpriced restaurant food, prefers bad acoustic YouTube covers of Top 40 hip hop to actual Top 40 hip hop.
Roxas walks in fucked out with his eyes unfocused and Axel's sitting there at 10pm on a Tuesday. There's a card with Axel's name on it somewhere on the counter, "Congratulations On Your Promotion!" emblazoned in glitter and neon.
"Hey," Axel says, sipping a bottle of beer. He's been dreaming about Roxas every night for a week.
"No work?" Roxas asks, fussing around the inside of their fridge.
"Got promoted. I'm on days now." The approach of a shoe falling from a hundred stories up, and Axel can feel it about to hit. Roxas staring at him during that movie they watched last week, four in the afternoon and that lazy, lusting stare sliding over Axel's arms, his chest. Roxas wanted quietly, wanted in that backwards way grade school kids want—all shouting, kicking, and screaming. If you like someone, dump an armful of sand over his head. If you like someone, accidentally spill a pint of milk on his shoes. If you like someone, act like you can't stand the sight of him.
"Nice. Good job, worker bee," Roxas says, pulling out a bottle of beer and twisting the cap. He wasn't old enough last year, and he's still not old enough this year, but Axel never made an issue of it. Not Making An Issue of Things was Axel's strong suit when it came to Roxas. Until now. Pausing at the kitchen counter, Axel can hear the way Roxas deliberately sets down his bottle of beer.
"Wait. Before you—"
"What the fuck is—"
"Wait, Rox, just wait—"
"What the fuck is this?" Roxas asks, the fury only barely restrained as he lifts the GED book off the kitchen counter. "This is supposed to be funny, right?"
"Rox, listen—" Axel tries, hand out and open.
"It's Roxas, asshole. Don't take any fucking liberties. I'm not your fucking… we're not…"
"Yeah, I know we're not," Axel says, and there it is again: the roar of anger, disappointment, regret, lust, fear, hope. With Roxas, there was no shortage of just how he cared too fucking much. "How the fuck could we, could I or anyone when you act like a pissed off cat ninety nine percent of the time."
"Great. Let's innumerate my flaws, like I don't ALREADY FUCKING KNOW," Roxas screams. He never sounds more broken than when he's at the top of his lungs.
"It's not a flaw, Roxas, I'm just saying no one's lining up to carry your fucking baggage. No one lined up to carry mine, and I have an island's worth." Weird how it's so difficult to speak when you care too much, how it builds in your throat and stampedes around there, choking you out with the weight. "But you have to give a little to get. You have to give me a little."
"I don't know what you're saying," Roxas says, and he's shaking. The sight of it makes Axel want to throw things.
"I'm not going to hand my heart over to you just so you can throw it in a blender. You have to give me something to work with."
"Why?" Roxas asks, and it's the most lost Axel thinks anyone has ever sounded. "I'm a piece of shit and you're… fucking you're…" the rest of it lost into gasping breaths. Axel realizes he's never heard Roxas cry.
"An asshole?" Axel asks, walking up to the shaking, shivering mess. The desire to put his arms around Roxas, to touch him, is unspeakable. In a year and half, he doesn't think they've so much as shaken hands.
"DYING!" Roxas shouts, raising a fist. The blow doesn't come, his shaking fingers uncurling and lighting softly on Axel's chest. "You're dying and I'm worthless, so I don't know what you expect."
The fury is like whiplash. "Is that supposed to be some kind of twisted logic rationalizing why you don't like me? You can just fucking tell me, y'know, instead of giving me this hippy philosophy bullshit," Axel says, arms rigid. Twelve thousand ways to escape filter down into his head out of the air, how he'll buy tickets for the first flight anywhere but here, how he'll just grab a jacket and go, leave Roxas and this whole stupid makebelieve life behind. Egypt. Jakarta. Seoul. The world is large, and he was born to run.
"No," Roxas whispers, and the whole world gives way. "Your… sickness. Your medicine. You're sick." Roxas is just the shapes of sounds, no longer whole words. "What am I going to do when you die?"
The horror of what's actually happening finally forms in Axel's mind. "You think I'm… you think I'm dying from what exactly?"
"I don't know," Roxas whispers. "Cancer or a brain tumor or whatever. I never asked you. I know it's not easy to talk about. It's okay," he sniffs, swiping at his eyes. "I'd rather not know."
"I have bipolar disorder, you fucking moron. I'm dying like you're dying, like we're ALL FUCKING DYING, but I'm not dying because I take pills everyday, Rox."
There's a pause while the dust settles, and Roxas licks his lips. "What's bipolar disorder?" Axel stares in disbelief, two seconds away from screaming, when Roxas smiles. "Just kidding. I know what bipolar disorder is."
It gets easier a hell of a lot quicker after that, though Roxas has his test anxiety moments of threatening to burn the book and Axel to cinders. It's easier coming home to a softly studying boy with no bruises on his body and no stray body fluids caked on his skin or in his hair. Easier counting the ridges on the roof of Roxas' mouth with his tongue, memorizing the curvature of Roxas' spine as he sleeps. The first kiss was the hardest, overcoming the But I Like Girls chorus in his head as he tore the GED book out of Roxas' hands and slid his tongue into a mouth that tasted like cigarettes and someone else's come. But when Roxas doesn't taste like the seedy underbelly of a third world country, he tastes like strawberry ice cream and boy spit, quakes like the end of the world when he comes wrapped around Axel like a second skin.
They have so much putting together to do, patching up holes and picking out splinters of themselves. Some days Roxas is a curse, a hurricane that has no center, no solace. Some days Axel is, too. On one memorable day Roxas has him barricaded in the bathroom after he found an electronic ticket stub for a flight to Italy, fifteen hundred dollars of unexplainable purchases in their monthly statement, and Axel howling the lyrics to a Bruce Springsteen song while he smashes their bathroom mirror into a million pieces. After that, Roxas learns to spot the signs of slippage sooner, learns to fuck Axel to sleep, learns to be patient, to be kind.
There is only so much perfection one can take in a study of broken things, splintered lines where the glue has done its job, but just barely. A recreation of what should be, but never exactly as it was, as what could have been. But those cracks of heavy history, the spiderwebbed tracery of two boys gone wrong and then gone right, they are just chronology—a manic episode, a chance encounter, a fight or five hundred, a first kiss—just a reminder that where something was once broken, something has been mended.