Michele-bell is five kinds of awesome and I forced her to read through this once. If there are any mistakes, they are mine.
The Time is Out of Joint
(or: axel and his schizophrenia)
"I'm not sick," Axel said quickly.
The blonde boy looked up and raised one eyebrow. "I never said you were."
But you were thinking it, Axel almost snapped on reflex, before realizing that was not actually true. If anything, the other boy had shown as much interest in him as a marble statue would have. His blue-eyed gaze was cold and penetrated the thin layer of Axel's skin, seemed to pass right through his tissue and bones and come out the other side of his body unfazed.
Axel shifted in his seat uncomfortably. The sensation of being watched made his skin crawl.
"Sorry," he mumbled. "Never mind."
The boy blinked and turned back to his book. His expression had not flickered once during the exchange.
"All right," the boy said.
Axel drew his long legs up to his chest and sat quietly, watching the boy read. The act actually felt unnerving after a few minutes, like observing a creature carved from stone. He closed his eyes and tried to feel for the presence of another living being instead, a heavy breath or a soft sigh, anything to indicate he was not alone in the room.
His chest tightened after a few minutes of silence broken only by the sound of a turning page.
"You're...kind of weird," he said eventually. The words were definitely inadequate. They did not even begin to describe the confusion that threatened to tangle up his thoughts in a permanent knot.
"Fine," the boy said, not bothering to look up this time. His blue eyes darted across the page and his thin pale fingers lifted one corner and turned it delicately. It would have taken Axel at least another minute to finish the page and he felt a little impressed despite himself.
Axel stood up and announced, "I'm going outside now."
"Then go."
He fidgeted awkwardly, bouncing on his heels, delaying the act as much as he could while his mind tried to come up with a good reason to stay.
He left his own apartment after a few minutes.
!
"There's a kid in my place," Axel said to the rabbit. He sat on the edge of the curb and let his legs sprawl out in front of him, his heels scraping past the painted white line into a car lane.
The rabbit twitched and said nothing.
"He's pretty, in a fuck you kind of way," Axel continued. He waved one hand and made sloppy circles in the air, pretending to emphasize a point which he was half-certain did not exist. "I think he's the first person I've talked to in months. Pathetic, right?"
He peered down at the rabbit and reached out absently to stroke its soft white fur. "Of course I'm right. I have to be right. Being wrong sucks. It feels...itchy. But it's an itch I can't scratch at."
A car rounded the corner an instant later, its tires screeching on the asphalt, bright headlights flooding the dim street and flattening the shadows against the brick walls until everything looked bare and sharp and too real.
Axel did not retract his legs and he watched in interest as the car swerved to avoid him and almost hit a truck parked across the way. The driver screamed something angrily as she sped down the street, her windows rolled down and one hand stuck high up in the air.
Axel waved cheerfully back and said, "I don't even know his name. The guy in my apartment, I mean. How messed up is that?"
He glanced down at the empty patch of pavement where the white rabbit was sitting a second ago.
"...Hello?"
Axel decided to go back inside.
!
"I'm Roxas," the boy said. He did not hold out his hand in greeting.
Axel grinned and slipped his own hands into his jean pockets, closing the front door behind him with a nudge of his elbow. "I'm Axel. It's nice to meet you," he said politely.
"Okay." The boy, Roxas, turned around and walked back to the tattered armchair. He sank his body onto the creaking cushion and curled up, tucking his arms around his knees. Axel blinked.
Roxas looked very small.
"What are you reading?" Axel asked. Roxas was clutching a tattered paperback book in one hand, the same one he had the night before when they first met. The spine was creased in so many places that it was odd to see the pages still attached. Maybe Roxas had to glue them back in. He looked like the kind of boy who would try to fix things rather than discard them. His clothes were worn through and patched.
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," Roxas replied, a few beats too late.
Axel cocked his head to one side and grinned. "Do they?"
Roxas shrugged.
"Is it a good book?"
"Depends," Roxas said. He flipped a page.
"But do you like it?"
"It's all right."
Axel stopped asking questions.
That night, he tried to think about electric sheep and ended up dreaming about a contaminated city choking on radioactive dust instead. Roxas was there, standing next to him, his blue eyes shining bright in the gritty cloud and nuclear decay.
He decided it was a good dream to have and left it at that.
!
Axel sat in the bathtub with his clothes on and let his body float up a few inches, buoyed by the soapy water. His shoes weighed his legs back down so he was caught in a strange sort of equilibrium, and he wondered vaguely if he should have taken his clothes off first. That might have been an important step to bathing but his mind was a little fuzzy on the details.
He blinked and a frog appeared by the side of the tub. It jumped in with a splash and Axel laughed, hunting around the bubbles for a slippery green body.
Roxas was perched on the tiny counter space next to the sink reading, and he glanced down at the sound.
"What are you reading and what's it about?" Axel asked. He dunked his head in and reemerged a few seconds later, his dark red hair plastered to his skull. He grinned up crookedly.
"The Man in the High Castle. The story's written like an alternative reality, or what could have happened if the Allies lost World War II."
"Oh, yeah? That sounds cool. And crazy."
Roxas shrugged.
"Can I read it?"
He was surprised when Roxas handed it over without a word. Axel thought the boy would be too anal compulsive to let the book get wet or even near a small body of water.
"Um. Thanks."
Roxas wandered out of the bathroom and left the door open.
!
After a few days of living with Roxas, Axel began to notice a few things:
Roxas never failed to answer his questions, no matter how obvious or stupid he made them. Roxas never elaborated on his answers, either, keeping the word count to a bare minimal. Axel approved of this practice and wished the rest of the world would follow it too.
Roxas liked to read old sci-fi novels by a man named Philip K Dick. Axel had never heard of that author before he met Roxas, but now he probably knew more about the man and his books than anyone else in the city, with the obvious exception of Roxas. His head hurt when he thought too much about the stories so he usually just watched Roxas read instead. That was nice.
Roxas wore faded t-shirts with obscure band logos and his hair smelled like almonds. Axel did not buy any almond-scented shampoos or soaps, so he decided it was the boy's natural scent and took the opportunity to sniff whenever possible. Roxas did not seem to mind and Axel pretended it was normal.
Roxas was not like the white rabbit or the frog in that he never disappeared in the middle of a conversation, leaving Axel talking to thin air.
Also, Roxas never smiled.
Ever.
(Not even when Axel kind of wished he would.)
!
Axel sprawled out on the sun-warmed floor and nudged Roxas with his foot. Roxas shifted a couple inches away but otherwise appeared unaffected.
"Who's your favorite singer?" Axel asked.
"Jason Tavner."
"Doesn't exist." Axel sighed and scratched the bridge of his nose. "He's from that book, what's it called, tears something...?"
"Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said." Roxas pulled out a copy from his battered messenger bag and held it out.
Axel took it and pretended to read the first few pages, his eyes blurring the words together into fuzzy horizontal stripes. He already finished it a few days before because he wanted to find out what was going on inside of Roxas's head. Not that it helped. Now he knew where the obscure references were coming from but he still had no idea what they meant.
"It's great," he said blithely, tossing the book back. Roxas caught it and tucked it carefully inside of his bag. "I really loved the part where Felix bangs his sister, the lesbian, and they have a son named Barry."
"Barney," Roxas corrected.
"Okay," Axel said. "It's great. Incestuous, and great. I mean, come on, KR-3 sounds like a really fucking awesome drug."
"I don't think so," Roxas said quietly, making Axel sit up in surprise. Roxas never volunteered information without being prompted, and Axel had not even been asking a question that time.
"Why not?" he asked, carefully keeping his voice disinterested. He wished with every particle of his body that Roxas would not back off now.
"Reality-warping sounds too dangerous," Roxas said blandly.
Axel thought about a world without Roxas and swallowed hard.
"Oh. Yeah. I totally agree."
!
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy was a novel stuck inside of another novel.
Axel thought that was hilarious when Roxas first explained what and where it came from.
"So, like, the guy wrote about an author who wrote another book based on an alternative reality which is based on the reality of our world?"
"Yeah," Roxas said.
"That's batshit insane."
Roxas tapped the edge of the kitchen table and remained silent.
Axel almost let an apology slip out before he realized he had nothing to apologize for. He felt off-balance, strange, and his teeth itched.
"Roxas?"
The boy looked up with a blank expression.
"I'm sorry."
!
The next day Kairi was outside of his apartment, pounding on his door, screaming words that made his head pound and his eyes water and he wished she would just go away.
Roxas stood up and walked into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. Axel had never seen him around other people before, and sometimes he wondered what that really meant. The white rabbit did not appear in public either.
Axel stood up to unlock the front door with trembling hands.
Kairi glared at him as soon as it swung open and he winced instinctively. Her red hair was a few shades darker than his own, but her eyes sparked with anger and he remembered why he used to pretend to love her and it hurt a little, the memories he had tried to throw away.
"Why did you change your lock?" she demanded. She held out a silver key and pressed it into Axel's palm where it sat cold and heavy against his skin. He took a step back and hoped she would not take it as an invitation to come in. "I've been worried sick about you. Your phone line is disconnected and the landlord said you haven't been paying your bills. Demyx has been coming by every month to do it for you, you asshole. Why haven't you called me?"
"Uh."
He noticed distantly her puffy eyes and the translucent beads dotting her eyelashes, caught like raindrops in spiderwebs. Kairi blinked furiously and scrubbed at her face.
"I'm serious Axel. I was worried about you and you didn't even care."
He fumbled around for something to say and glanced at his bedroom door unconsciously.
"I didn't mean to," he said. "I'm sorry." The words felt like a lie even though he knew they shouldn't be.
After an agonizing pause, she sighed and said, "Just. Don't make me come up here to see if you're alive, okay? And give me your new key. I'm going to make a copy just in case."
He handed it over wordlessly and watched her march down the dim hallway, disappearing by the flight of stairs at the end.
When he woke up a few hours later, the refrigerator was fully stocked and an envelope stuffed full of green bills was tucked under a fruit bowl on the kitchen counter.
Roxas wandered into the room and asked, "Who were you talking to?"
Axel barely noticed that it was the first question Roxas had bothered to ask him in the history of Roxas. He trailed his finger around the lip of the fruit bowl and ignored the choking feeling in his throat, tried to concentrate on the waxy feel of the apple's skin as he dug his nails in until they pierced through to spongy flesh.
"Axel?"
"An old friend," Axel mumbled. He stood up suddenly and said, "I don't feel so good."
He felt eyes on the back of his head as he hurried to the bathroom and locked the door.
!
The rabbit stared at him unblinkingly as he kneeled before the toilet and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"What?" he snapped. The tiles on the floor felt comforting and cool so he pressed his cheek against it for a few blissful seconds. Then he sucked in a breath and sat up again, his mind swimming from the sudden movement.
"I'm not sick," he said.
The rabbit hopped forward and stopped, its whiskers twitching. Its red eyes shone bright under the naked bulb hanging overhead.
"I'm not," he insisted hopelessly, and tried to stop breathing because his head was pounding and each inhale burned his lungs and made the room fade for a split second of nauseous gray.
"Axel?" Roxas's voice, drifting in from the other side of the door. Axel squeezed his eyes shut and heard more emotion in that one word than he ever thought possible coming from the boy.
His chest hurt.
"Axel? Hey, open up."
Axel.
Axel Axel Axel.
He drifted off to the sound of his own name, the two syllables beating into his brain like a song on loop. It had never sounded lovelier.
!
This was...odd.
A pair of blue eyes greeted him as he squinted blearily at the face hovering a few inches above his own. Which made no sense until he felt the hard press of the floor beneath him and he realized he was still lying flat on his back in the bathroom.
Roxas sucked in a sharp breath and let it out. "Fuck," the boy said, rocking back on his heels. His face was stark white, dragging up thoughts of bandages and hospital sheets and sterilized dead things.
Axel groaned and tried to sit up.
Kairi appeared beside him and bent down, not even bothering to hide her tears this time as she smiled and tucked her hair behind one ear.
"God, Axel. I think I would kill you if I didn't love you so much." She laughed and a few tears dropped onto his face. Her small hands hooked under one of his arms and Roxas took his other side. Together, they pulled him up and positioned him so he was propped up against the wall.
"You're real?" Axel mumbled. He reached out and fumbled around until he found Roxas's hand. Roxas gripped back painfully hard and nodded.
Past the sound of the approaching sirens and the normal city clamor, Axel could hear Roxas's soft voice saying,
"As real as you are. Fucker."
"Oh." He blinked and tried to focus on the pale face before him, the blue eyes trained on his own. He whispered, "Then I think I might be in love with you."
Just before he blacked out, he thought he caught a glimpse of Roxas's brilliant white smile.
!
"I'm sick," Axel said. His body was strapped down to the bed with strips of old leather, worn soft from years of restraining bodies. He wiggled his fingers and Roxas placed his cold hand over them, squeezing quickly.
Roxas said, "I know. I just don't care."
"You're the crazy one, then." Axel laughed and saw an answering twitch in Roxas's lips. His chest felt light, so light, lighter than a hot air balloon. Axel was ready to fly out of the building and never come back but something was holding him down.
"Maybe," Roxas said, leaning over him, each breath tickling Axel's face. He whispered, "What are you going to do about it?"
Axel arched up and kissed the smirking face fiercely, claiming it for his own. In the back of his mind, he heard the snap of a blade being drawn and then felt a brief tug before the leather straps slipped away.
"Ready to go?" Roxas asked.
Axel nodded, felt his breath catch in his throat.
He had found the cure to everything and it was fucking beautiful.