open windows and closet truths
"I still have my window open."
Roxas stared. No 'Hello', no 'How've you been lately?', just Axel walking straight up and doing something so… Axel.
"Wuh?" Intelligence. That thing that Roxas lost after he turned 13. His ability to speak vanished two years later.
"My window is still open." Axel repeated, fully expecting Roxas to understand what he was talking about.
"Again. Wuh?" Roxas said, who, even though after over five years of friendship, and two years of something more than friendship, still had trouble following Axel sometimes.
"My window is still open. My closet is half empty. I don't even use my bed anymore, just a pile of blankets on the couch. There is still an old cereal box that is way, way over date in my storage closet, and I keep buying soy milk and throwing it out after a week. I'm so pathetic, the cats spend all their times lying on me because they think it will cheer me up, despite the fact that I feed them too much and therefore wake up because I'm being suffocated by them. My window is still open."
Roxas looked away in guilt. He used the window to get in, and after breaking it three times, Axel said he'd always leave it open. He used the other half of the clothing closet to store books. The bed wasn't really a bed to begin with, but a mattress with old clothes over it, making it smell like smoke and sex and sweat, which was kind of gross, but in a weird way, wasn't. Axel refused to eat cereal, saying that they tasted like cardboard to him, but because Roxas wanted it, he bought a box every once and a while so Roxas could munch on them in the morning, which was morning for them and afternoon for the rest of humanity. Roxas liked soy milk with his cereal, so when he moved in permanently, which wasn't that much of a change except there were more books, and empty pocky boxes, he made Axel promise to get him a bottle every week. Axel loved the cats. The cats didn't love Axel. Axel usually got scratched by cats, except the time that his laptop broke and he was devastated for a week during which the cats kept sleeping on him as some sort of weird comfort blanket. All four of them.
When he looked back up, Axel was gone. For a few moments, he wondered how Axel had found him in the first place. The city was big enough for him to walk around for a couple of years without anyone recognizing him. Then he shook his head, already knowing the answer. Of course Axel would be able to find him. He always did.
That evening, he crawled back into his empty, oh-so-very empty apartment that he shared with one cat. He left the window open before he left, so he wouldn't have to use the door. He opened the closet, half filled with books, half with clothes that would never be worn again, and grabbed a cheesy romance novel. At the moment all he wanted was happy endings and pretty lies, because the truth was nothing like it. Already starting to read, he walked to the kitchen, grabbing a pocky box that was next to the cereal that he always forgot to throw out, or so he told himself. He didn't have a refrigerator anymore, it was burned and somewhere on a garbage dump, so he grabbed the soy milk from the cooling box and threw it in the garbage, after having smelled it and deeming it unsuitable for anything not mutated. He looked at the half destroyed couch that was covered with blankets for the cat, and decided to go to bed again. It was somewhere around three am, and he'd spent most of the night skating around and smoking old cigarettes, just because the smell reminded him of the gone-old-truth that once was.
He put an old record on before he let himself fall on the mattress, not caring about the cat that was trying to scramble away for being crushed. He stared at the ceiling.
"Maybe I should repaint this place sometime," he wondered out loud, shifting his gaze from the ceiling to the walls. "It's been a while since I've done that."
"You wouldn't dare, you bastard." Said a voice somewhere from the room, his words sounding faded and like echoes in the darkness.
"I wouldn't?"
"I like the walls."
"Ax, you'd like anything that had to do with fire."
"So?"
Roxas sighed. Having your dead boyfriend (that was happily unaware, or happily in denial about his life, or lack thereof) haunting your apartment was such a pain in the ass sometimes. Literally.
Fini