His momma tells him it's just how his daddy shows his love and the most fucked up part is that, for a long time, he believes her. Roxas believes it; he believes that the awful slurs slung in whisky-dipped breath are love, and he believes that the bruises criss-crossing his arms and his torso and his thighs are affection. He takes the belt and the fist and, to him, they're picnics in a park, words of praise after he shows a report card.
Roxas's momma tells him that he can't tell anyone else, and so he believes that too. When he misses a week of school, he tells his teachers he fell while out rock climbing. When they look skeptical, he tells them to call home and his parents will assuage their suspicions – they always do. When his friends ask about the mottling blue-yellow skin, he shrugs and laughs. He tells them he must've fallen off the bed at night, and they all know how clumsy he is. He bats his baby blues and runs his fingers through his flaxen hair and he lies through clenched teeth and bites down on the bile threatening to spill over.
They stop asking eventually. His friends, and his teachers, and the nosy busy-bodies, they all lose interest eventually. He shows up to school with a bulging cheek and his eye swollen shut and not a person says a word. A month and a half later he lands in the hospital with his arm broken in two places and gets surgery to extract the shattered shards of bone. He informs the doctor that he fell out of his tree house when he's asked and Sora, in the room with him, looks away and doesn't mention that Roxas never had a tree house and that he never will.
He gets used to it. He grows older and the love doesn't stop flowing so he works around it. He discovers that his father is particularly affectionate when he's drunk and when he's tired; he figures out a way to sneak past the atrocious armchair without waking his father from his stupor and inflaming his passions; he uses his father's credit card to buy foundation and cover up the mars on his skin. It becomes commonplace, so familiar that it hardly even hurts anymore. His tears have long since dried up and he can't remember the last time he cried. He can't remember the last time he felt anything at all.
Roxas grows older. He knows from his friends – people he hangs out with for appearance more than anything else these days – that parents usually become less showy with their affections as they age. It's the complete opposite for him. In his household, he hits puberty and his father amps up his game. Fists are replaced with empty beer bottles broken over his head, the tiny crystals of glass bringing blood to the surface to blend and burn in with the leftover alcohol sluicing down his face. He goes cross-eyed and he goes down hard and he fights to get back to his feet, because he knows his father loves him the most when he shows weakness and when he gives in. The world spins and lurches away from him and he throws up, spewing heavy chunks of vomit all over his father's supple leather shoes.
He's messed up this time and he fucking knows it. He struggles to raise his head and look up at his father, sees the telltale glint of fondness in his eyes. His father tells him to go bathe and to get some rest, to send someone from the cleaning stuff to clear up this mess. His father tells him that he's such a good boy, such a darling boy. His father tells him that he's so perfect and that he loves him so much, so much that he'll get a surprise tomorrow.
He spends the next day spacing out, wondering what exactly it is that is in store for him. His friends nudge him and tease him. They ask him if he's thinking about his birthday present, if he decided to take Namine up on her offer to suck him off behind the bleachers during lunch. He grins where he's supposed to and makes a lewd comment where it's expected, but internally he recognizes that he'd completely forgotten it was his birthday at all. How old was he today? Fifteen, isn't it?
If anything, this makes him all the more confused and worried about his looming surprise. Despite his father being one of the richest men in the state, Roxas hasn't had a birthday present in the past seven years. He stays out with the same group of friends for a bit after school, as has become the custom on his birthday, before going home.
His dad's sober today and that immediately gives him pause. He can't remember the last time he saw his father this coherent, but somehow, he can't bring himself to feel happy about it. His father ushers him inside, wearing a smile as slick as his hair, and directs him into the kitchen. There's his mom at the table smiling with exhaustion behind a cake that's big enough to feed a family of four for a week.
"Happy birthday, sweetheart," his mom whispers, and her voice is wispy like the wind, like smoke furling from a fire, like the rustle of leaves on an evergreen tree. He looks at his mother properly for the first time in years and wonders when his beautiful, lovely, young mother became so ugly. Her hair, blonde like his, lays limp on her head. Her eyes, blue like his, are dim and defeated. There're wrinkles on her face that he doesn't remember seeing before and her skin sags, hollowed by time and gravity.
He leans over and blows out the candles. It takes three huffs of air before each tiny flickering light is extinguished and the room is thrown into shadowed darkness. His father shows him a small pile of presents. There's a brand new skateboard amongst them and he tries to summon the enthusiasm he knows he ought to feel. Neither of his parents seems disappointed when the joy doesn't come. He eats his cake around a roiling, turbulent stomach and absconds up to his room. His father follows him up.
His father locks Roxas's bedroom door behind him.
His father pushes him down onto the bed and touches him. Roxas wonders if he should resist, considers shoving him off while his father paws off his clothes, contemplates running when they're both bare as the day they were born. In the end, though, he doesn't. He doesn't move at all. He doesn't like it but he reminds himself, as his father splits him open and the pain comes raw and jagged and so different from any other pain he's felt before, that his father loves him. His father is only showing him how much he loves him.
He sees his mother the next morning at breakfast. She's looking at him with sad, dewy eyes. There's a handprint stained on her face, shiny and new. He takes in her cigarette stained teeth, the frown lines on her forehead, her protruding stomach and her scarecrow arms. Roxas wonders if his father loves her as much as he loves him. Roxas wonders if his father loves her the same way he loved him yesterday, in the dark and secret night. She's old and ugly now, he thinks. Maybe that's why he started loving Roxas instead.
He skips school. Instead, he rides his new skateboard until he reaches the forest not too far away from his house. He walks until he's deep enough that the sunlight comes splayed and blotted by leaves, until he looks up and can't see the top of the trees. Then he sits, back against an evergreen, butt cushioned by spongy moss. He wraps his arms around his legs and pulls them to his chest and for a moment he can forget to think. He focuses on his breathing, in and out, in and out, and he stops thinking. It's the most peaceful he's ever felt.
His father takes to loving him that way more often. After a few times, he starts to even prefer it. It's still not good, and he still hates it. But the way he sees it, the effects are easier to hide and after a while, his friends, his teachers, nosy busy-bodies stop looking at him sidelong. After each time, he goes back to the forest.
He's seventeen when his forest burns down. He's standing amidst the flames when the firefighters find him, staring at his burnt palms and feeling blank. He finds out later that it's a forest fire, that it was spontaneous and couldn't be helped. He can't shake the feeling that that is a lie. He was there when it happened, after all. Maybe he lost time and razed it to the ground himself. He checks himself out of the hospital that he is brought him to. He goes home. He packs a bag. He leaves. He wonders why he didn't do it before.
He takes nothing but that small bag of clothes, his board, and the crisp bills he finds laying around the house. He uses it to hop on a bus going to somewhere he's never been, somewhere that he's nameless, and he doesn't stop to look back.
He's on the road like that for a while, moving from place to place. He eats when he can, stays the night wherever he can find, works when odd jobs are available. He stays for a while in some small town called Twilight Town. It's the view he stays for; each day he climbs the clock tower and watches the sun set over the horizon in streaks of vibrant, bursting color. He's enamored with the lights, and with the wind rushing against his face, and with the ant-like people so far below. He stands, arms outstretched, face upturned, feet toeing the edge. Despite the clock chiming and the bell tolling behind him, it is quiet.
He's been in Twilight Town for maybe a month the first time he runs into someone else up there. "You gonna jump?" The words are enough of a surprise that he almost does fall over the edge, but the stranger grabs one of his windmilling arms and pulls him back. "Easy there. I don't wanna be found at a crime scene, so save that until after I'm gone, will you?"
Roxas shoves him off but he pauses when he sees the stranger's face. His eyes are green like the evergreens of his forest, shrouded by hair as red as a raging inferno. It's like being back in his forest again, watching it burning to the ground again and again, a quintessential moment captured infinitely in this person's visage. When his head turns minutely, Roxas can see the flames spit and crackle the way they did that day. The scent of burning wood fills his nostrils, thick and heavy and welcome.
"So you gonna jump or not?" he says.
"I think I was talking myself into jumping," Roxas admits. For the life of him, he doesn't know why he's telling this stranger this, but then the orange of the sunset alights on his hair, animating the flames once more and he forgets to care. "Maybe I was talking myself out of it."
"Sounds to me like either way you don't want do it," this stranger says. "Come with me."
And Roxas, maybe from curiosity, maybe from boredom, maybe from something he else he can't name or explain, takes this stranger's hand. They find a diner and split three orders of fries drenched in cheese between the two of them, because Roxas finds himself suddenly ravenous. After, the stranger leans over the table and says, "Let's fuck."
"I don't even know your name," Roxas says.
The stranger shrugs. "Does it matter?"
And it doesn't, in the end, really matter at all. They go back to Roxas's shitty studio apartment that's not cluttered because Roxas doesn't have enough worldly possessions to fill even that small face. They collapse onto the mattress and they fuck. The stranger doesn't leave the next morning, or the morning after that, or the one a month after the first. Roxas finds out eventually that this stranger's name is Axel.
They fuck a lot, Roxas and Axel. Roxas gets on his knees, gets on top, does it on his side, over a table, up against a wall. He never gets on his back, though, and Axel never makes him or asks him why. They've got secrets that they won't tell each other. They know next to nothing about each other. Roxas knows that Axel makes money, but couldn't say how he gets it. He knows that Axel's got a tattoo under either eye, but doesn't know what they mean or when he got them. He knows that Axel's got healed over scars up and down his arms and burns blemishing his pale skin, but he can't tell where they came from or how he got them.
His birthday swings around. Roxas doesn't tell him, but he knows that Axel knows. "So how old are you?" he asks that morning.
"Eighteen."
Axel rolls over on the bed and covers his eyes. "I've been fucking a minor," he laments. Roxas rolls his eyes and shoves him onto the floor; Axel swings a remote he finds at Roxas's head. That's all there is to discussions of his birthday. There's no well wishes, no gifts, no special surprises. It's just an everyday night, spent home in their boxers with day-old pizza. He doesn't know how Axel knew that that was he needed, but he's grateful all the same.
Enough time passes that Roxas can't remember how much time has passed. They're still in Roxas's shitty one-room, fucking in between marathons of Halo and instant ramen. Axel presses Roxas face down and goes for the buckle of his pants. "I love you," he murmurs into the nape of his neck.
Roxas's eyes flies open and he shoves Axel off of him. He's redoing his zipper without thinking about it, desperate to leave. He takes a minute to readjust his shirt before he's out the door. He sees Axel on his way out, looking dazed and confused on the bed. His hair is wild and mussed from Roxas's hands, more out of control than usual.
What he has isn't love. It can't be. Love is tears and pain. Love isn't what he wants – it's what he escaped from and he never wants to go back to that. Axel smiles at him in the mornings and kisses him through his foul breath. He holds Roxas when he gets anxious and depressed and murmurs soothing words into his ears. He leaves Roxas to himself when he needs space, making him breakfast and lunch and dinner so he remembers that he's not alone. That's not what love is.
He finds himself at the clock tower, climbing the winding stairs. Maybe an hour passes up there before Axel arrives, bearing a jacket to drape over Roxas's shoulders because he'd been in too much of a hurry to bring one himself.
"The way I see it," Axel says, looking over the skyline instead of at him, "coming here means you wanted me to find you. "
Roxas says nothing. It's as close to a confirmation as he can get. Axel tangles their fingers together. "You went through some shit, okay? I know that, and you don't need to tell me what exactly happened until you're ready. But love doesn't have to hurt," he says.
That's a lie. Love hurts, if Roxas has learned anything at all in his years of life, that is the one thing he knows to be true. Love hurts like nothing else ever can; it hurts down to your core, sears through your veins, blazes in every atom that makes up a person's being. It's like being hacked into pieces and drenched in salt, and then being sewn back together all lopsided and wrong. It's like drifting out to sea with no anchor and no paddle and no fucking boat, with rocks tied to your feet and being told to get to shore. Love is agonizing and painful; it makes a person scream until their throats are sore and bloody, makes them drag their nails into their eyeballs and rip them from their sockets, makes them fall to their knees and pray for a god they can't know even exists. There's no pain like love.
"Do you hear me?" Axel says, clutching Roxas's hand tight in his own. "Love doesn't have to hurt."
Roxas opens his mouth to speak. His tongue feels swollen and leaden, too heavy to form words. His eyes burn – not with unshed tears, but with a fire that rages through his veins. "I hear you," he says. Roxas hears him, but he doesn't believe.
Originally written for last year's Akuroku Anthology. I kind of sat on this for a while before accepting that that wasn't going to happen anymore. I appreciate her attempts to make it work, and understand that she was no longer able to make it happen. But I still wanted to get this out there because I'm really quite proud of it.