Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts.

AN: I attempted this years ago, but now I am officially revamping "Flipped." This is a remarkably simple tale of a romance told from two points of view; time gets thrown all over the place, but I'll keep you on track. I will clarify twice in each chapter update: my punctuational and general conventional elements are all correct, whether they follow the "rules" of grammar or not. I get horribly peeved when I am "corrected" on my grammar when, really, it is the wielding of punctuational weapons that bolster a good writer. So. We begin with Axel. Hope you enjoy.

2013 – Axel Burke

Dear Roxas—

We've never met in the proper light, I don't think.

I cleared my thoughts, shaking.

Nope. I can't recall a time when we didn't meet and one of us wasn't either a) being an asshole or b) emotionally frustrated or c) sexually frustrated. But it happens, I guess. Bad timing. We grew up, grew together, and became different people from who we originally thought we would become. Thank god, neither of us got mixed in with those hipster-weed-orgy groups. Or chess club. That would've been bad—even worse than my being in the Assembly of Science, and the president of it, at that. Aside from those years in which we fought pettily, I find that the time from sixth grade to my sophomore (and, sadly, your freshman year) year was relatively self-actualizing. It was so innocent—I mean, we still are—but back when I had those tiny reindeer mittens, life was cake.

I'm sorry for beating around the bush. I'm also sorry for using clichés—I know you hate them—and I'm sorry for speaking in such pedestrian language and for apologizing so much and for misusing coordinate conjunctions because I know you hate that, too. But that' what I do—I anger you and you anger me. Sorry that I don't know the English language as well as you do. I apologize that I don't understand circumlocution. I know lab jargon, and that's about it. You don't even know what the basic concept of electron affinity is, which blows, because that means you'll never understand my "you're my Fluorine" jokes, even though they're not actually jocular at all but rather quite serious in matter and content. You couldn't even manage to successfully titrate a whole liter of sodium chloride with me—a whole damn liter! That gives you huge room to make folly error, Roxas; I would have thought that with your type-A personality that you would have been more apt to just listen to my directions and have done the lab correctly.

Roxas, I don't know if I can forgive what you've done to me, either—from rewriting one of my most personal memories in the New York Times, to implicitly severing out friendship for the sake of a rebirth of one between you and Riku—but Roxas, you can't forgive me, either. I understand why. It's okay. Really. I get over things quickly—remember? I feel like vomiting when people coddle me. It's disgusting to let another person into your solipsism. It's a defense mechanism and I know it (it doesn't make it okay, though) and, well, it's something I'll have to take care of. I don't know when, but sometime, I will cure that sad sickness.

Roxas, I'm so sorry for each individual thought of malevolence that I've directed your way. From time to time, I lose sight of myself and you, and I mentally block out all that I know about you so it's easier for me to judge and brood. Silently, of course. That is the only correct way to brood—and one must have alcohol in one's possession when brooding. Suffering in thin air without a rational thought. Silent.

But what's not silent was when you actually spited me (in return for what, exactly? Kairi?) by taking a detour from my house to Riku's that one night, that's not fucking silent. It's sociopathic. What's not silent was me when I called your aunt, who is a Yale chairperson, and told her that you were too young to interview Yale—a little sophomore, you were—in lieu of your hacking into our school's computer system to alter your only B to an A. She was forced to tell the Board, and they predestined your fate for senior year: no Yale for you. The Board takes that type of "crime" pretty seriously. I'm an insane and selfish asshole. I mean, you still will obviously get into Columbia, so what the fuck's the big deal?—and it's funny because I know perfectly well what the big deal is; it is that Yale has been your stronghold since you were twelve. You asshole. Fuck you. Yet you're still that short blond kid across the street who writes a bit too much and broods when he misses his target on the first aim. You have honey gold hair and a prose like Hugo. You have a hold on me, and really, there is no reason to look past anything we've done to each other except for the fact that I now know what you were saying when you left Hawthorne's note on my doorstep that night so long ago, and that you know who paid the community park service to replant that damn Oak Tree for you, fully mature and a whopping $5000, in the middle of the park at the end of the street. And also ? Every time I see you I want to vomit.

So my junior year is about to begin, and I'm realizing that I only have eighteen months before we essentially separate from this neighborhood and each other forever. I'll likely go to Massachusetts for college, you to New York; we wouldn't be that far, but the distance would be cold. I'm not. Cold, I mean. An important thing I've learned is that man, alone, bears the burden of having the fear that time will run out. We quantify an ever-changing endless space; we try to tack on invisible paper to nonexistent walls. Man assigns imaginative names and dates for a force that cannot be stopped, a force that cannot even be seen, so we fear the day that the time will run out for good.

I fear time's hold for the next eighteen months… So I'm stepping up. I'm assigning a name to this "time." Yes—it's bullshit. Nonetheless, time moves forward; I cannot bend time, Roxas, not yet at least, so I think it is due time that after six fucking years of dealing with you every day, I finally own up to it: I love you.

I see you across the street from my window of the second story of my house. You're raking leaves or something—making a mess? I could tell you now… But I don't know if I can.

I quickly throw down my pen and run to my window, flinging up the glass. "Roxas!" I shout.

He looks up at me quizzically, blue meeting green, and my heart stops. "Yeah?"

I fumble; what do I say? "It was Winter of 2006!"

Now he just looks flat out pissed. "What are you talking about?"

"It was when I-" He's the poetic type, he'll know what I'm saying in a heartbeat—"when we first met!" I laughed loudly and closed my window, running back to my desk.

You'll understand that later.

Roxas, Roxas… After seven years, I think it's time that I finally stop kidding myself and just fucking admit that I'm as crazy for you as you were for me in sixth grade.

Sorry for taking so long.

I've always thought of you as a science project—observing you here, qualifying, quantifying, judging, determining fitness. I treated you like a phototroph; I adjusted the lighting of the lab, changed the hues of the rays while pulling your roots this way, moving the soil to the left, checking the water reservoir daily. Some days you were unusually amiable, but what's this?—now you're glowering at the world, we ought to change that. I'd trim your plant leaves, maybe even completely snip them off, just for laughs. And when I got really good at biophysics, I began to alter the directionality of the light rays that your chloroplasts so hungrily absorbed; I changed the luminary. But now, I want to stop the theorizing—I want to stop manipulating the light. I want to meet you under that natural sunny sky… but will you respond to the environmental conditions as necessary? Am I guaranteed that if I, for one moment, step back from this massively complex science project, that you will flourish as needed based on environmental interaction in your economic domain? I will no longer have the power to adjust the electric currents nor the luminous intensity—but I might just be able to observe you if I can let go of this silly science experiment, existing purely in my head. If I can fully function like a friend to you rather than an entity, then you may accept my utterly self-deleterious confession to you because I have finally, after six years, grown up from that melodramatic kid I once was. I mean, really, Roxas—what does a kiss from you feel like, anyway?

With apprehension,

Axel Burke

AN: Comments of all types welcome.