So, I wrote this a while back, but just posted it to livejournal today in honor of AkuRoku day. It's a two-shot. It's posted to my lj thatnobodygrrl, and also the the community on lj axelxroxas. Check it out?
One forty seven in the morning, and I'm out of bed, putting my pants on, and rubbing sleep out of my eyes
One forty seven in the morning, and I'm out of bed, putting my pants on, and rubbing sleep out of my eyes. Why, you ask? Well, because someone's knocking on the door of my shitty little apartment, and doesn't seem to want to give up. So yes, I'm opening the door at one forty seven in the morning, and chances are it's Demyx, looking for a place to crash, yet again. I love the kid to death, but it's like he doesn't know how to show up at a respectable hour.
So when I open the door – shirtless, might I add – expecting Demyx, you can't blame me for yelling 'Fuck!' and practically falling over when I see some lady in hysterics with a police officer behind her. I'm not a criminal or anything, but I'm a twenty one year old living in a total shithole. Yes, I've got one or two reasons to fear the cops at my door.
The sobbing lady lunges forward and grabs me by the shoulders before I even have time to say anything. The officer makes a motion to try and pull her off me, but she swats him away. I recognize her now, and I'm overcome with an urge to shove her off me and slam the door in her face. And I would have done it too, if not for what she said next.
"He's gone! Roxas… he's… my baby… he's gone!" She bursts into a fresh round of tears, and my heart stops.
It doesn't restart again until she starts weakly hitting my chest with her balled-up fists. "Give… give him back." She mutters. "GIVE HIM BACK!"
Alright, so freeze-frame for a second, and let me tell you what I know. Roxas used to be my boyfriend, until his mom, the hysterical lady currently intent on waking up the whole building, forbid him to see me. The kid was only seventeen, and she said I was a dirty, gay, pedophile-rapist or something like that. She hates me, and I haven't seen Roxas since. That was two months ago.
So anyway, hit 'PLAY' again, and this lady is still screaming at me to "give him back", and I can only assume she means Roxas.
I pull her off me. Even at this hour of the day, I'm stronger than a hysterical woman. Not to mention that the very act of her saying his name jolted me completely awake. I look her straight in the eye. "Look, lady, I don't have Ro… your kid." She just looks at me blankly.
"'Calendar Girl'." She says. Man, this lady is just crazy! I have no clue where she's trying to go with any of this, and it's way too early for crazy shit like this to be happening to me anyway. I need a smoke.
So I tell her so. I tell her "Hold on, I need a smoke." And she just gives me this look like I slapped her in the face or something. We're both quiet for a few seconds, then she snaps again. "My son, my only son is missing, and all you can think about is smoking? That's it?!"
Woah.
Something kinda just… clicked in my head when she said that. My mouth got all dried up, and my chest felt really constricted. Like I couldn't breathe, or swallow. "He's missing?" I whisper. She nods slowly, as if she were just realizing it too. Dazed silence.
She's pushed me back into my apartment by now, but the cop is still standing outside the doorway. I motion for them to come in and sit at the scratched up card table I call a dinning table. They guy looks around once or twice, but the lady just flops into the folding chair like a broken rag-doll. I grab the lighter and packet of cigarettes off the counter, lighting up before dropping them on the table. I have to stand, because I only have two chairs.
So there we are, me and my ex-boyfriend's mother who hates me smoking, sitting in silence with an uncomfortable-looking armed officer when I remember something she said. "'Calendar Girl'?" I ask. She nods, digging into her pocket and pulling out a carefully folded piece of notebook paper. Written on it in all-too familiar handwriting are the words 'Calendar Girl'. That's it. "This is all?" She nods. "That's all he left me."
It sounds vaguely familiar to me, but I can't place it. Like when you've got a word right on the tip of your tongue, but you just don't know what it is. "Do you know what it means?" I shake my head 'no'. She looks disappointed. We sit in silence a few minutes longer.
"Why'd you come to me? I mean, why not one of his other friends? Hayner, Pence…" I trail off. She looks at me, straight in the eyes. It's creepy. "Because he talks about you. He talks about you all the time, and he hasn't talked the same way to me since…" She trails off, but we both know what she means to say. "Oh." My head hurts… my chest hurts. I thought he'd forget about me.
So with the renewed sense of determination of a guy who just found out the ex-boyfriend he's been pinning over still missed him and was in need of his help, Axel resumed thinking about the note. 'Calendar Girl'… 'Calendar Girl'! "Wait right here." He told his two "guests" as he ran into the next room.
He came out with a cardboard box so full it looked like it was going to fall apart very soon. With an "umph", he dropped the box on the table, not caring about the lighter or cigarettes underneath it. He got a confused look from the mother, and answered her unspoken question. "It's my Roxas-box."
He didn't notice the startled look on either her or the cop's face, because of the pain in his chest. Just saying the kid's name physically hurt him. "Yeah. Anyway, that 'Calendar Girl' thing sounds oddly familiar." She nodded.
Axel began looking through the box for clues. Movie stubs, bus tickets, books, CD's, comic books… he skimmed book summaries, read track names, tried to remember things about plotless films they had seen together… Looking at all the items he had collected just made him want to curl up in a ball and scream, or cry, or do anything but continue this masochistic search, but he persisted. He didn't find anything until he was almost at the bottom.
"Yes!" Everyone looked at him in shock. In his hands, he held a CD: 'Set Yourself On Fire', by Stars. "It's that CD of fairy-music he gave me once. Never my thing you see, but he was trying to convince me…" He stopped talking when he saw the looks he was getting. Instead, he just handed the lady the CD.
1. Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
2. Set Yourself On Fire
3. Ageless Beauty
4. Reunion
5. The Big Fight
6. What I'm Trying To Say
7. One More Night(Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead)
8. Sleep Tonight
9. The First Five Times
10. He Lied About Death
11. Celebration Guns
12. Soft Revolution
13. Calendar Girl
She handed the CD back to him with an expectant look on her face, and he dug his laptop out from under a heap of dirty laundry. The time it took to boot-up and load the CD passed by agonizingly slowly, but soon Amy Millan's voice flooded the space.
If I am lost for a day; try to find me
But if I don't come back, then I won't look behind me
All of the things that I thought were so easy
Just got harder and harder each day
December is darkest and June is the light
But this empty bedroom won't make anything right
While out on the landing a friend I forgot to send home
Who waits up for me all through the night.
When the first verse finished, Axel hit the space bar to pause the music. The kid's mom wasn't the only one about to cry. You have to wait forty-eight hours before filing a missing persons report with the police, don't you?
He broke the silence. "How long?" She thinks, checks her watch, thinks again. "Eleven and a half hours." I look at her, slightly confused, and wondering when the whole forty eight-hour policy had gone out of style. She seemed to understand. "This is Adam, my neighbor. He insisted on coming with me for… safety reasons." Adam, as I now knew he was called, gave me a hard look. I see, I thought to myself. She's afraid or me or something, so she brought muscle-head to keep me in line. My dislike for her grows. I put the music back on.
Calendar girl who's in love with the world Stay alive
Calendar Girl who's in love with the world Stay alive
I dreamed I was dying; as I so often do
And when I awoke I was sure it was true
I ran to the window; threw my head to the sky
And said whoever is up there, please don't let me die.
But I can't live forever, I can't always be
One day I'll be sand on a beach by a sea
The pages keep turning, I'll mark off each day with a cross
And I'll laugh about all that we've lost.
The song continues on in the background, but we start talking over it. This time it's the cop who speaks first. He's looking at me: "What do you think it means?" Well, that's the million-dollar question, isn't it? Through the whole song, I've been picking up on things, and stringing them together. Nothing definite though.
"Hear me out until the end, okay?" They both nod. "I think…" I take a deep breath. "I think Roxas is gone because he's trying to get over… me." She opens her mouth to speak, but I speak sooner. "I think he thought it would be easier to forget me than it turned out to be," Yeah, that's what I thought too, kid. "And I think he wants you to know he'll be okay. Like, he's not going to kill himself or anything stupid like that." The officer's face darkens, but hers looks as though a huge weight was just taken off her shoulders.
"They mentioned the beach in the song." She says. "Do you think he's there?" No, no I don't. "Maybe." I shrug. "I'll go there now." I just nod. I'm extremely relieved to see her and her burly friend walk out and rive off.
As soon as I lose sight of their taillights, I slump down on the floor and let out a huge breath I didn't know I was holding. It's just a little past two a.m., and I'm just wondering how. the. fuck. I got dragged into something like this already. And what his mom had said about… about him missing me. About him talking about me. God, did I ever miss that kid.
I collected myself as quickly as I could; I hate being a blubbery mess. Not that I cried, mind you. No, I didn't cry. But I was about to.
I put on some decent pants, and grabbed a shirt out of the Roxas-box. Taking the CD with me, I set out to go find the kid. "I'm coming for you, Roxas." I whispered into the darkness.
I sat in my car, thinking about where I was most likely to find him, playing the song on repeat, and sniffing the musty box-scent of my fairly neglected Foo Fighters T-shirt. The song talked about the beach. Well, that ruled out the actual beach, towards which his mother was now speeding. Too obvious.
So then I started thinking about everything he had ever told me about the beach. He loved it there. I can't count the number of times I brought him… There were probably only two places he liked more. Well, it used to be three. The clock tower, his grandparent's place in France, and my apartment. Be sand on a beach by the sea. I decide that these are my best bets. Now, I can rule off one, maybe two of them, because I know he's not at my place, and I don't see how he could manage to get to France without anyone finding out. Then again, he was a pretty damn clever kid.
Clock tower. It's this huge clock in the center of town, and the two of us used hang out up there a lot. He liked the view. It was pretty amazing. You could see the whole town, the tram making its never-ending rounds, all the way up to the water he so loved. The sunsets were pretty breathtaking too.
I drive way too fast through the small streets to get there, and when I do, I leave my car – still idling – "parked" on the sidewalk. My lungs are burning 'cause I'm a smoker, and smokers were never meant to sprint up so many stairs, but I keep going. I just have this feeling like he'll be up there. I'm not thinking about what I'll do if I find him or what I'll say, I'm just concentrated on getting there, and getting the kid.
When I got up there and realized he wasn't there, I was just about ready to fling myself off that fucking tower.
Honestly, you have no. clue. how it felt to realize he wasn't actually there. I was so sure he'd be there. Just… I wanted to lie down and not get back up. I wanted to give up.
And then it started to rain.
Oh yeah, that was the icing on top of the cake. So who can blame me? I gave up. I got in the car and headed towards home. That boy had broken my heart one too many times, and at the time, it didn't look like he wanted me to find him. Fine by me.
It was pouring, and I wondered briefly how his mom was doing out on the beach with muscle-head Adam, or if maybe she had given up on him too. In the time it takes to get from parking lot to door, I'm drenched.
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