It seemed like every day of Axel's life that someone was telling him to sit down and shut up.
"You look ridiculous," they'd said when he first dyed his hair his favorite color. A color that suited him, he thought, and presented him to the world as who he was and who he wanted to be seen as.
"You didn't think this through," they'd said when he got two teensy little tattoos beneath his eyes, after years of agonizing over the pros and cons of it, comfort in himself eventually outweighing any negatives.
"You need to settle down," they'd said when he got his tongue pierced, bought a motorcycle with his own money, started wearing combat boots, collected more and more tattoos.
Where were they, he wondered, when he'd graduated top of his class from high school, then from college. When he put a down payment on his own place and started paying off his student loans, with the money he had worked tirelessly for all the while.
"Axel, who?" In his brightest hours. Hood-rat, street-punk, talk-of-the-town in his darkest.
Sit down and shut up.
Then Roxas happened.
"Aren't you going to do something?" Roxas asked, the first time some ignorant tool threw slurs at them during a date.
"Are you ever gonna get a new tattoo?" Roxas asked, the time that Axel had spent 8 months abstaining from ink and piercings for the sake of some flimsy idea of "normal."
"What about the bike?" Roxas asked, when he found him on the internet one day looking at mid-size sedans for sale in their zip code.
Roxas never told Axel to sit down or to shut up. Actually, Roxas had been the cause of at least a dozen bar fights, the driving force behind several ironic tattoos, and these days he was the one who touched up Axel's blood-red hair when it started to fade.
Roxas loved Axel for everything he was, clearly. Obviously, considering the small kisses he'd place against broad, bony shoulders every morning with a smile, even though mornings were the worst and both of them knew it.
Something about Roxas was the most comfortable, normal thing he had ever felt, would ever feel.
He'd never sit down and shut up.