Prologue: I've Got Four Stories To Tell, and I've Got Time for Two of Them.

A/N: I dunno if this is going to keep going, to be honest. I'm kind of a ball of inferiority right now. It's just, it was seeming more and more appealing. To write, I mean. Ha. I'm about as emotionally stable as plutonium, can you tell? If...plutonium...decayed into...emotions...instead of daughter nuclei.

-sob- I'M SO TIRED, YOU GUYS

Anyways. Commence with the angst. I'm gonna go watch like two seasons of Greek and do some incredibly stupid and time-consuming work while ranting about how nobody understands the genius that is Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight ("FINAL VENT MEANS I GET A FUCKING CAPE, YOU GUYS. YOU DON'T HAVE ONE OF THOSE, DO YOU? WHICH MEANS YOU WILL LOSE. IT IS THE CAPE OF JUSTICE" -paraphrased-)

We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.
- May Sarton


Zexion was not a very small person. He wasn't very large, either, but he was decently sized.

He wasn't a small person but he acted like it.

He was nearly six feet tall; five foot ten when he stood very straight against the doorframe and marked above his head with a pencil. People guessed that he was five foot five, six.

He hunched when he walked. Slouched in chairs. Never pulled the hood over his face, because it unnerved people, made it look like he was hiding something he wasn't. Or was, but not with the scratchy lint of the inside of a hood.

He had a whole system worked out, you know. Even down to the hair. It was too long in front, too thick to stay tucked behind an ear, always hung in front of one eye. With just a flip of his head he could change his sight: cover left eye, cover right eye, see with the right, see with the left. Flip, flip. On days when both eyes were black he tried to call in sick, but he'd always been clumsy, anyways. It helped if they thought he didn't hide them. It made it easier to hide them.

He cut thumb holes in the sleeves of all of his normal shirts. Didn't own short-sleeves, didn't see the point. Usually he was grabbed too hard around the wrist, slapped on the back of the palm, and it was too easy for a sleeve to ride up to your elbow. The thumb holes were like fasteners. Like a net for a tightrope walker. Like blinders for a horse.

It wasn't as if it happened often. And when it did it wasn't on purpose. Zexion knew it, he knew she was stressed, had been for so long, knew she didn't have any other way of getting it out. Knew she was sorry every time it happened, afterwards. "Oh honey, I didn't mean to. Oh, I'll never do that again, you know I'm not one of those parents who beats her children, you know that. Oh, oh my gosh. Here, let me get you some ice, okay?"

She meant it, was the kicker. She meant every word she said. She was only human. She was sick, and Zexion knew it. Couldn't be taken away from her, not when he knew that would make it worse. He loved her.

And it wasn't as if he was seriously in danger. Never more than a bruise, and black eyes only happened when she grabbed him and he fell.

She was a piano player, Zexion's mom. Played at clubs and weddings all the time. She tried to teach him piano, so he acted like he wanted to learn. It was just that she grabbed his wrist too hard sometimes. And what was he supposed to do? Fight back? Claw at a cripple?

She was a piano player.

And he'd always been such a quiet boy.

Sora was hungry. Roxas wasn't. Of course, that meant he had to eat.

Eight months ago it wouldn't have been a problem, naturally.

But Sora was dead now. Or, well – technically dead. Mostly dead. He was dead by definition of being in possession of his own corpse. By definition of not-checking-to-make-sure-the-alleyway-was-safe. Roxas told people that Sora was dead, because the truth took too long to explain, anyways.

When you're the identical twin of a dead person, they kind of don't die. You just…move in together. It's hard not to, or at least, was for Roxas. Roxas who had a running Sora commentary in his head. Roxas who didn't believe in God with a capital G, but only god with a small g, contained and private, cozy, sometimes a good listener. Sora was not a ghost. Or a spirit. A loose soul. None of these things. He was not waiting to make peace with his time on Earth before ascending to heaven. Or, if you were Sora, Heaven with a capital H.

He was simply there to be with Roxas, because that was how they did things. Separate together. Sora had taken his space in Roxas's head and made it bigger, and there was room enough for the two of them.

It would be this way until Roxas died. Not crazy. Simply contained.

So Sora expressed an interest, without using words, that he would care deeply for a bar of ice cream, and Roxas got it for him.

Enjoying yourself, he thought sarcastically as he took his first bite. The ice cream was cold and made his teeth hurt. A part of his mind hummed appreciatively.

A six-inch-wide fan set ticking in half a circle on a desk, gray clumps of dust caught in the metal cage around the blades. A tiny window, the lower pane slid up over the second so that a tiny breeze could wander its way into a tiny room. A tiny, hasty scrawl of 'Rudy wuz here' on the wall next to the desk.

A large man, six foot two and a half not counting the hair, hunched in a chair over the desk next to the tiny computer which blipped tiny words about credit cards and payments. He was bent over a piece of notebook paper with a pencil, trying to catch the girl before she ran away.

She'd come in a few minutes ago, had to tap on the screen covering the open part of the tiny window to get Axel's attention because there wasn't any self-service at this station. So far out in the middle of nowhere, a rest stop on a highway. Axel was never here. This place was not a here; it was simply on the way to here wherever your here was. You only ever stopped by the gas station on your way to somewhere else.

She'd come in a few minutes ago and she had a pretty dull face, but it was the most original one he'd seen so far today (of the thirty-seven customers, he didn't count people who went to the food court at the rest station) so he was drawing it. Had to do something with his time. Had to practice so he could draw the right face, the one he'd been drawing for three months.

He eyed the half-empty pack of gum on the desk. He kept brushing his elbow against Trident Wintergreen Cool Refreshing Burst. He always had gum with him because Roxas liked to chew gum.

His parents had hated when Axel chewed gum. They thought he did it to cover up the taste of alcohol on his breath, bitter and pungent like formaldehyde.

Roxas liked to chew gum. Roxas was a little guy, he could fit in the gas station office most of the time if he stood in the other end.

Sometimes when he sat in the office and waited for weary cars to pull in, bedraggled mothers to soothe kids and family pets that they were just paying the nice man for the gasoline and would be back in a second, he wondered if he should have stayed. College was college. Fifteen minutes away from the parents who wanted to know why you'd missed three points off of a two-hundred-point test, the older sister who was happily married and successful at age twenty-five, he couldn't have lasted another three years? Could've found a job then, moved away then with a degree. An arrow, this way to happiness.

Sometimes when he sat in his office and waited for weary cars to pull in, he looked out the tiny open window at the clouds like wistful white smoke. What a waste, he'd think of the clouds, tittering their lives away. He fancied a big machine somewhere high above them all, a disorganized beast adorned with bells and horns and tubes, huffing and puffing and chugging out the clouds like a cloud factory. He fancied there was a Cloud Master, who with his apprentices plotted the course of the clouds down to every last wisp that curled like the tail of a happy cat. The way they inched across the sky like rolling slugs. The shapes they took. He fancied they wore suspenders and hats like train conductors and had someone to oil the gears of the cloud factory, pulled levers and pumped things. He fancied it was a waste that all that work went into something and people sat down, stared at them and claimed they looked like fluffy things, that they looked like bunnies and lambs.

Because he was a control freak, and wanted to imagine there was an order to it.

He laughed when he thought that. Where did they go, he wondered, the things I was going to fight for? Passed like a plastic bag blown across an empty rest station parking lot. My life should be more than this.

Unhappiness was like a brown spider setting its eight feet against the inside of your stomach. Tick-tick-tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick-tick.

The spider was scared of Roxas chewing gum, hid when he came into the booth and sat on Axel's lap and told him about Sora. Scared of the way Roxas's jaw clenched when he chewed, the muscles in his cheek, fine tendons like ropes in the hollow of his jaw when it was clenched and released. Scared that Axel would someday soon get Roxas-chewing-wintergreen down on a piece of notebook paper perfectly, turn it into an ad, be famous, go back to college and quit his job.

The spider never stayed away for long when Axel went back to his cheap studio apartment after his shift.

And every night, before he went to bed; tick-tick-tick-tick. Tick-tick-tick-tick.

There was still a sign, graffitied, bent on its metal pole, stained from cars rushing through puddles, which stood in front of what was left of a wire mesh fence surrounding the old tennis courts.

"Slow," it said, "Children At Play," even though there weren't anymore. Of course not. There were big sharp holes in the fence, and the door had rusted shut. The playground wasn't one.

Every time he walked by it, Demyx closed his eyes and smiled. It wasn't a playground anymore. But it was more beautiful than anything.

When the rotting building behind the dirt patch that wasn't a playground was an elementary school, nine-year-old Demyx had spent all of recess every recess he could catching the whirligigs that spun to the ground. Not because it was fun, though it was; he did it because he knew that they each held a Tree Baby. He wanted one. He wasn't allowed to have a real pet, or even one of those computer game virtual pets that kids gave batteries and clicked buttons for. He would catch the whirligigs which fluttered down like confetti because they had pockets of Baby, pouches like momma kangaroos.

He must've caught a hundred before he found the perfect one. His Tree Baby.

He planted her in the dirt next to the sand pit, because nobody went near the sand pit; everyone knew that was where the smokers dropped their cigarette butts.

A decade later and there was a tree there. Demyx's Tree Baby was almost four feet tall and more beautiful than anything.

A/N: Well, crapbuckets, if I can't write, doesn't mean I'm not going to. I get the feeling you don't like this. Meh. My head hurts and my eyes sting and I should stop caring if people like me.

Anyone else up for cocoa?

Watch me look back on this in one hour like "wow Nitlon, way to act like a thirteen-year-old whose hamster just died"

...to be fair I would so be sobbing if one of my cichlids died but that's DIFFERENT.

Anyways. Review?