Folk You, Too

by Falaphesian

Roxas is going to be a genius. Axel is going to ride motorcycles. At once a lame tale of love and friendship as well as a story of a couple of kids, a small town, and a folk song or twenty. AkuRoku and other friendly shenanigans.

And now for something completely odd. 'Folk You', Too is written along with—yeah, you guessed it—folk music. Each character has a song and artist and the overall story has a play list of entirely… folksy songs. It looks like it could be interesting if, you know, middle-of-nowhere adventure land is up your alley at all. The beginning of the fic is going to seem like a throwback to Marigold. That's because it kind of is. When I came up with that plotline a few years back, I was on vacation and thought of it while I was in the car and developed it while I was at the lake. Well, being the plot baby of another car trip, I decided to take that sort of beginning the other direction I could have taken it. With Marigold I went for weird and way over the top. With this I'm going to try and keep it more down to earth but still… I mean. It's got Axel as a central character, so it won't be too normal.

(x) (x) (x)

Folk You, Too.

'Track One: Get Out The Map'

What if you were to make true on all those threats you've spat out over the years? You say you'll run away or steal the car or go out anyway, go out anywhere, do anything to piss a person off. So what if you did it? Half the time you were exaggerating and the other half the time you were flat out lying to their face—your parents, your aunts, your uncles, your cousins, your authoritative figures in life. But what if you were good and true and honest? What if you did it? What if you mustered up within yourself the balls or guts or both (if you're cool enough with it) to really, fully, go right on ahead and make with your end of the deal?

You could be a great success.

It could give you confidence and certainly of yourself for once and for all.

It could be one of those life-altering experiences.

It could make you, for instance, a fine example of a gent like Axel.

Axel rolled into town on a Thursday, which—too bad for him—was the quietest day of all the week, though on no one day was the town ever particularly loud. On Sunday there were churchgoers going to their churches, on Monday there were book and knitting clubs discussing their books and their knitting, on Tuesdays there were bingo-nuts lined up outside the some poor soul's house (it rotated on a weekly basis, who this soul would be) for bingo night. Wednesday held a farmer's market extravaganza of maybe ten people at a given time on a busy day, Friday witnessed the frenzied lawn-care that always kicks off every weekend everywhere and Saturday housed the hammer-and-nails sounds of work and construction and repair—a day in which the town fixed itself up so it could function perfectly smooth for another slow-rolling week to come.

It didn't bother Axel that he'd shown up on Thursday. He'd been expecting to get to that area on Wednesday but had gotten held up in a bar nearly two hundred miles back by a particularly interesting conversation and had lost a good four hours' progress, though he had no real way of measuring it. He carried with him neither itinerary nor wristwatch and he was constantly asking what time it was—not because he cared, but because it was the one question that everyone was more than happy to answer. And more often than not, if you could get just one question answered, you could start up whatever kind of talk you wanted. Especially in small towns.

Now the one setback Axel had discovered about small towns was that they were often so small they were painfully easy to miss. He'd once seen an exit for a town called Norge—had made a mental note to stop there and had blown right on past the exit without ever even realizing it until he'd found himself in Norfolk, by which point he couldn't very well turn around and go back because he would be breaking his one and only cardinal rule: No turning back, no matter what. So small towns were difficult to catch these days, but blissfully unique if you managed to catch hold of one before it passed you by.

The other setback about small towns, however, was that they gave you absolutely nowhere to stay.

"No lodging for the next fifteen, twenty miles up the highway," a man told him. He was the man behind the counter at the gas station, though he'd slowly and steadily informed Axel upon first sight that he was not, in fact, the fellow running the place. He'd never worked a day in a gas station in his life, he said. He was a retired accountant and was only standing there for the sake of standing there while the real man in charge took a piss in the bathroom. Still, he was as helpful as he could be in that very slow, unhelpful sort of way, and Axel thanked him without really meaning it and headed out back towards his bike.

When it came right down to it, Axel hadn't been expecting a hotel. A bed and breakfast—maybe. Little towns were often secrets of weekend-retreaters, and a favorite of all such people were the tucked away B&B's of such towns. No luck there, though, and Axel just had to grin and bear it, though he would've grinned whether he had to bear anything or not. No place to stay meant no choice but to pitch a tent, seeing as he hadn't had a decent night's rest in four days and he'd just about had enough of staring at trees and roads and signs counting down the miles until the next depressing, major city on the map. Camping was a thing Axel never got tired of and he'd even developed a strange habit of purposefully missing turnoffs for one motel or another just so he could find himself stranded with nothing to do but put up the old tent in the most remote spot he could find.

x x x

Roxas was an extraordinarily ordinary boy. He had mousey brown hair by nature's demands that he'd promptly dyed blonde as soon as he mustered up enough rebellion in his little soul to go through with it. That had taken him almost fourteen years alone, and since then he'd rarely had enough moxie to act up much at al—his efforts were concentrated on maintaining that unnatural hair of his and sniping at friends, relatives, and obnoxious townsfolk with disguised sarcasm that no one seemed to understand, and therefore took no offense at. His parents were well known and fairly well liked—both authors with an extensive bank account and an even more extensive stretch of land up in the mountains where they lived. They chose a remote small-town kind of existence because it supposedly helped them write, and the only time Roxas ever saw much of them was when they either sought him out from guilt or a rare flash of parental instinct, or whenever he woke up early enough in the morning to catch them eating breakfast before they holed themselves up in their separate dens for the majority of the day.

But because we already know just how ordinary Roxas was, we then know that—like almost all teenage boys—he was never really awake early unless forced into it. So he really didn't see his parents much at all, but he was aware of their existence, and he contented himself with that much.

So the day Axel came into town was the same day that another boy also came in, and the only difference between their arrivals was that one was long expected and the other was not. Sora was Roxas' uncle under all terrifyingly technical terms. Roxas' grandmother had spontaneously decided to adopt the kid once she'd turned sixty-two, seeing as she was bored stiff with her lonely, widowed existence and never saw anything at all of her brilliant (yet socially impaired) daughter. Roxas' mother was so shocked to discover she had an adopted brother who was a year younger than her son that she actually managed a full-winded gasp on the day she found out—the day her mother came to visit and brought the boy tagging along with her.

Of course, that was all years back and Roxas' mother invited Sora to spend a month with them every summer, if only to keep up some sort of family ties she really couldn't have cared less about.

Roxas, however, had never thought of Sora as being his uncle, terminology be damned. He was some hybrid between a friendly long-distance neighbor and an obscure cousin from some even more obscure side of the family. So on the day Sora came to town, he reached Roxas' front door and let himself on in, as he was accustomed to doing. He headed up the steps at the exact same moment in time in which Axel was putting his motorcycle in park. He turned down the upstairs hallway as Axel shouldered his pack and headed into the woods. And he knocked on Roxas' door at the very same moment in which Axel found a spot, flung down his luggage, and started to make himself at home.

Roxas answered the door, one pair of blue eyes meeting another and both boys smiling—though Roxas' smile was of a far more reserved nature and only became more so as his juvie uncle threw his arms wildly around him in a sneak-attack hug that knocked the wind clear out of Roxas' lungs.

"Heya!" Sora exclaimed.

"Hey." Roxas freed himself enough to put a good foot or so's worth of distance between them, but the way Sora was almost dancing from foot to foot, it didn't do Roxas much good to stand in his way. So he shuffled to the side and Sora bolted past him and into his room and was all up and grinning as he talked about the train ride over, how little the town had changed in the past year, and how pretty and clean and removed from absolutely everything the place was. It was a thoroughly miserable topic of conversation if you asked Roxas, but no one did, so that little tidbit went unknown.

"How're your mom and dad?" Sora asked him.

"They're alright, I guess."

"I heard they were both working on new books at the same time." Sora grinned boyishly and Roxas wondered how he got his teeth so white and if it was physically possible for just any old person to achieve that level of whiteness. Meanwhile, Sora tucked his hands behind his back, one clasping the other, and he walked in circles around Roxas' room, making pointless observations as he went. "Hey, is this a new poster? I saw that movie. What'd you think? I mean, it was pretty cool and all, but some parts of it were kinda over my head. Really awesome film job, though. Hey, I like this guy, too! Have you heard anything by—"

"Hey, uh, Sora?"

"Yeah?"

"You know, Olette and Hayner were kinda hoping you'd call them, like, as soon as you got here." Roxas could've smiled at the way Sora's face lit up like it did, but he smothered it down to a crack of a grin. "If you want to, my phone's over there."

Not needing to be told twice, Sora crossed the room in all of two heartbeats, Roxas' cell in hand and going speed dial mad. While the phone rang, Sora looked up at Roxas with the most meaningful and honest expression, nothing but hope when he went, "You'll hang out with us, too, right?"

Roxas thought it over this time around, which was more that he usually did. Olette and Hayner were, more or less, his friends during the ordinary months of the year—eleven out of all twelve. But the month Sora came to visit, everything was thrown upside down because there was no one they'd rather spend their time with than Roxas' strange little uncle. The three of them fit together perfectly, flawlessly, in a way Roxas could never replicate whenever Sora went away for the rest of the year. He had pretty much convinced himself, by that point, that both Olette and Hayner were only friends with him so they would have access to Sora during the summertime. It was far from the truth and Roxas probably knew it on some level, but he never admitted it to much of anyone, least of all himself.

So he thought about it, but it only took him a matter of quick and speedy seconds to shrug his shoulders and shake his head. "Probably not," he said. "It's cool, though. They've been going crazy for two weeks 'cause I told them you were coming."

Sora laughed loudly at this and then he was on the phone with Hayner and his tone completely changed. With Roxas it was a softer, smoother sort of speech—still cheerful, but nowhere near as cheerful as it was around his other friends. With Hayner and Olette, Roxas had noticed, Sora was completely uninhibited. He was Sora in the raw, and Roxas couldn't help but be hopelessly jealous—of Sora, of Olette, of Hayner, and of all three of them put together.

Roxas just laughed and shook his head when Sora begged him to come out with them all one more time, but he made it as clear as he could that he wouldn't budge. He also made it as clear as he could in the depths of his own head that it was better this way, that Sora would have more fun this way, and that Roxas could hang out with his… uncle… whenever he wanted. After, of course, the little reunion scene of the dynamic trio. So once Sora left he returned to his book, realized he'd completely forgotten what it was about, and just lost interest then and there. The sun and breeze came in through the open window and Roxas tossed the book off to one side, hating summer with every bone in his body.

He knocked on his mother's office door, told her that Sora was here, and the response came through the wood as a shuffling of papers and a mumbled something that didn't make a whole lot of sense as far as Roxas could tell. This was followed by an, "Order pizza for dinner, would you? Two hours or so. That should be about right," which was silenced with, well, the usual silence of the closed door. For a second, Roxas considered crossing over to the room on the opposite side of the hall, where his father was similarly locked up, but then he thought better of it. His father was bound to care even less than his mother, and so without much else to do, Roxas headed outside, trying to pretend like he didn't regret sending Sora off to be with his two better friends.

For about the thousandth time that year, Roxas wished he owned a pet. Some loyal something-or-other that would follow him anywhere he went, tagging along at his heels and having a pair of eyes just fit to burst with unrestrained love and adoration. Olette had two coon cats that followed her around like sentries. "Why can't I be that lucky?" Roxas could've kicked himself for thinking out loud. Every time he did it, he drew that much closer to figuring he was going completely insane with isolation, or something like it. Whatever breed of isolation came alongside his particular scenario of house arrest without any real restraint.

Roxas' family had a system of yard care that hadn't failed them for years. Basically, Roxas' parents told him to mow the lawn and sometimes he even would when asked, and everything else basically ran wild. For all that they owned a good eight acres or so of thick trees and fertile ground and mountainous terrain, Roxas pretty much limited himself to the immediate area around the house and didn't give much of a crap about what went on elsewhere. He used the woods when he wanted to get lost, and right about then, getting lost seemed like a pretty good option. He'd never really gotten lost, but he always lived with the hope that one day he might.

On this particular day, however, he did not get lost, but he did find whatever it was he was looking for—he just didn't know it right then. He was strolling along through the woods and was suddenly broadsided by a dangling bag of pain that had obviously been waiting for him there all day, just to hit him and be mean about it. Roxas was so stunned he almost fell over, instead falling into a tree, which just ended up being all kinds of bad mixed in with skinned palms and dirty elbows. Roxas regained his purchase on all the world's acreage and stared up at his nemesis—a mesh bag holding a set of filthy looking metal dinnerware. The proper name for the thing was a drip bag, but Roxas didn't have the slightest idea what the hell a drip bag was—all he knew was that it was concentrated evil dangling from a tree-branch.

On the opposite side of the tree Roxas had just plowed into—tucked away quiet and discrete as could be—there was a pitched tent and a fresh fire pit that hadn't been lit yet. Roxas stopped, stared, and then stared some more, trying to figure out just what the hell to do. It could've been a hobo or a pervert or a cannibal or a prostitute or any number of other unsavory types held up inside that tent, just waiting for him to come on over. They could've just been sitting it silence, listening for someone to set off their ugly dinnerware alert system that would have them bearing axes and knives and other assorted cutleries in all of five seconds flat, ready to pounce should the opportune moment present itself. And Roxas was feeling an opportune moment coming on.

Really, it was so incredibly dangerous right then, you just couldn't begin to fathom it if you even tried.

He stared at the flap of the tent for as long as he could muster—staring at the thing and willing it to open to reveal whatever terror lurked inside because anything (being eaten alive by aforementioned cannibal, say) would've been better than awaiting your end in front of a pitched tent. He toed a stone on the ground, picked it up, and carefully rolled it between his fingers, never taking his eyes off the tent before him. Not like he would be able to take down a flesh-eating monster or ravaging pedophile with a single stone, but that kid from that Bible story had apparently duked it out with giants or something, so Roxas could've stood a chance, he figured.

"…Hello?" he called out warily. He gulped, said his goodbyes to the world—which was quite a short affair and all around rather anticlimactic—and then launched his trusty rock at the tent. Roxas had been aiming for the flap that served as a doorway, but he'd never had much reason to practice hand-eye coordination, so his stone sailed clear over the tent initially, right before rebounding off a tree and hitting a rather crucial looking strip of fabric which instantly snapped, caused the entire tent to shudder, convulse, and then completely collapse upon itself.

Roxas' reaction was both predictable and intelligent. "Whoa," he said, and then turned around to sprint into the trees from whence he'd come, instantly preferring the plotless novel he'd been reading to whatever angry beast he'd now awoken.

Only one thing stopped his progress, and that was a yelp and a scuffle and a flop of a noise behind him, all of which was followed by a scrambled voice, thick with sleep (or drugs, Roxas thought), that said, "Who the hell're you?!"

"I could ask you the same question!" Roxas wheeled around, hoping for a small boulder within reaching distance, but he saw none. What he saw instead was a very wiry looking boy who couldn't have been anything more than three years his senior. The boy wore an undershirt that was too big for him and a pair of faded boxers that could only be described as looking unnaturally comfy. Of course, he had funny little marks on his cheeks that Roxas at first took as being smudges of dirt, but then realized they were permanent—permanent black on this kid's very white skin. His hair was also some Crayola shade of red, but all this was a discredit to his normalcy, which Roxas found absolutely shocking all the same.

He even took the liberty of saying as much, in a backasswards kind of way. "You don't… look… like a bum," he mumbled.

"I'm not." The boy furrowed his brows—a slightly darker, ruddier color than his hair, so perhaps he was a brunette by nature, like Roxas—and said, "You don't look like a bear."

"I'm not."

He gave Roxas a once over like he was sizing him up. There wasn't much to size. A combination of lethargy and a decent metabolism kept Roxas rather small, much to his dismay. So the boy was done with his once over, shot Roxas an impish grin, said, "…'Kay. So. Glad that's outta the way," and disappeared into the (thoroughly destroyed) sack of his tent once more, clearly having discovered that Roxas was nothing to worry about. "Later."

"Hey! You can't sleep here!" Roxas went. There was no response. He balled his hands into fists and scowled and seethed for all he was worth, but instantly quit as soon as he realized the stupid freeloader wasn't even looking. "Hello," he went.

"Zuhzuhzuhzuh, can't hear you," came the response.

"You can't sleep here. It's weird, okay? It's my backyard."

"Is it really?" The boy sat up, looking rather like a melted blue Cookie Monster back for revenge, all wrapped up in his tent like he was. He clawed his way back out to freedom then, interest apparently piqued and all that.

"Yeah, really. It's my backyard," Roxas told him.

The boy looked left, looked right, and even looked up. "I don't see a house nearby," he said. And then grinned rather wickedly and shot Roxas this idiotic kind of teasing stare while saying, "Unless you live in a hill or something. A cave dude. Or you must be a hobbit, huh? Extremely large feet. Or just fat shoes. Never can tell this day in age. You could just be compensa—"

Roxas scowled, resisted the urge to kick some generic forest debris in the boy's face, and pointed his hand wildly over his shoulder and slightly to the left. "It's my backyard," he grumbled again. "My house is over there, through those trees."

The boy squinted in the generic direction of Roxas' pointing hand. "Still not seein' it."

"Well why don't you just get up and go see for yourself! You're in my backyard!"

"IIIII don't think I am. I think you're a creepster and ya followed me here. Either that, or you prowl these woods on a daily basis lookin' for victims. Which is it, huh?"

"Neither." Roxas couldn't help but be a little more than mildly offended that he'd instantly become the creep in this entire scenario. He'd been the innocent all along. After all, he wasn't the one held up in seclusion in the hidden depths of someone's private property. But all the same, once the boy had voiced his opinion of Roxas, Roxas felt distinctly scummier than he had moments ago. "I went for a walk and nearly killed myself on your… thing," he added lamely, now gesturing over towards the mesh bag of dinnerware still floating midair.

"My plates," the boy said stupidly.

"Your plates. In a tree." Which is definitely not the place for keeping your plates, Roxas almost added, but was glad he didn't.

"You don't get out much, do you?" The boy grinned again, this time at Roxas' evident lack of a comeback, right before he hopped up, comfy boxers and all, and dug around the mess of his tent before righting himself with a tan shirt and a pair of jeans both in hand. Roxas fidgeted awkwardly while the boy dressed and talked, talked and dressed.

"Lookit. How abooout if you don't tell anyone I'm here and I'll tell you where I dug my hole for taking a dump and that way you don't step in it during your nature-bonding excursions into your stupidly large backyard?" he asked.

"Uh. Yeah. And how about I call the police and fine you for sleeping on private property."

"How about a can of beans?"

"I hate beans."

"Corn bread."

"…I like corn bread."

"You eat so much of it, it do that to your hair?"

Instinctively, Roxas' hand flew up to brush against a spiky chunk of his own bleached hair. "Huh? Uh. No," he went lamely.

"Yanno, you do that shit to yourself—your hair, I mean, bleach and shit—it'll all fall out by the time you're eighty."

Roxas narrowed his eyes, watching the boy pull a hair tie out from his angry red mane and go about repairing the snapped fabric of his tent with it. It was a pretty shoddy job, Roxas noticed, but it still held. And what Roxas also noticed was just how long the boy's hair was when it wasn't tied back. It must've hit at least four inches below his shoulders and was matted and tangled as anything. So he resisted the urge to call the boy out on his hypocrisy and started toeing rocks around in the dirt again. "It's okay," he said. "About losing hair, I mean. I'm gonna start going bald when I'm thirty anyway. Runs in the family…"

"Sucks."

"Yeah."

As if you would know anything about male-patterned baldness, Roxas thought to himself. The boy might as well have been a good cross between a male lion and a border collie, and Roxas couldn't deny that he felt a pinprick's worth of jealousy starting up in the pit of his stomach. But the boy had his tent good and fixed, and though it stood at a severe slant to the right (Roxas pretended not to feel guilty or notice the slant much at all), he didn't seem to mind it. He dove right back into the tent, leaving the door open this time and rummaging around something or other that Roxas couldn't quite see without craning his neck around the boy's rather bony ass.

So Roxas kept his distance and feigned disinterest when the boy started babbling away over his shoulder, over whatever he was doing:

"So get this," he said. "Two weeks ago I was outside Cincinnati and stopped at this drug store, right? And I was just talking to the locals 'cause this place was their watering hole apparently—about thirty middle aged guys all lined up at the counter smoking and drinking and blabbing away. And I start talking to 'em, yanno, making conversation 'n shit and this guy walks in and the dude next to me just starts laughing away to himself. 'What's up?' I asked him. 'That's Joe,' he told me. And I go, 'What's so funny about Joe?' The guy on the other side of him was laughing, too, and all of 'em were doing it and it was way over my head, it was kinda sad. But the other guy leans in and tells me, 'You know him? Nah, 'course you don't. That there's Joe Shit! No shitting. That's his name. Joe Shit.' And I guess Joe was kinda used to getting flak from these guys, 'cause he overheard 'em and just walks over, laughing, too. And he says, 'Nah, fellas, not anymore. That's not my name anymore. Changed it yesterday. Made it legal and everything.' So we all ask him what he changed his name to. Says he changed it 'cause he got so sick of people calling him Joe Shit all the time. You know what he changed it to?"

Roxas was so good at feigning disinterest that he'd actually gone and become disinterested and had zoned out somewhere around the mention of Cincinnati. His response to the question posed to him then was both truthful and a shot in the dark—both at the same time. Quite a miracle.

"I… have no idea," Roxas said.

The boy scrambled backwards out of his tent, a little box of cornbread mix in hand and a grin to kill spread across his face. "Henry!" he proclaimed, and Roxas was beginning to think he really had encountered a deranged lunatic in his backyard after all. "Henry Shit! Not kidding. Seriously. That bastard changed his name to Henry Shit. You should've seen those guys. I thought they were all gonna fall over laughing."

"Maybe it was one of those things you had to be there for," Roxas said. The boy's grin faded—he stopped smiling altogether, and he just sort of stared lamely at Roxas for what felt like the longest time. He was staring at Roxas for so long that Roxas even started staring at himself, and that just made him twice as self-conscious and rather rotten feeling. His socks didn't match, he noticed, and wondered if the boy had noticed, too.

"No offense, but you're kinda lousy company," the boy finally said.

"Sorry?"

"Don't you have any stories? Anything? That's what you do after someone's told you something. Generally, I mean. Generally speaking, to have a conversation, it usually takes two brains and even two mouths, if you're looking to get anywhere real, real fast. People have to swap stories and shit. That's just what you do, man."

Roxas thought long and hard about any interesting stories he might have stowed away in the far confines of his brain. When that was a no-go, he thought about interesting tidbits about himself he could divulge. And when it became apparent to him that he was about as interesting as rock moss, he just said, "My parents are authors?"

"That's cool. What've they written? Maybe I've read it."

"I dunno. You probably haven't…"

"Try me."

"Uh. Deep Dark Dirt and The Skip?"

"No shit. I've read both. Bestsellers, man. Nothing to laugh at there." The boy looked around like he was taking in the woods for the first time then, letting out a low whistle as he did so. "No wonder your backyard's huge," he said. "It probably takes up half the state."

"Something like that."

"So lemme guess… They home-schooled you through everything and are teaching you to be their little composition protégé. You spend your winters down in your remote vacation ranch in Texas, which is probably just as empty as this place here, and they're about a thousand and two percent certain that you're a genius who is going to revolutionize the literary world, all thanks to their wise guidance. Am I right or am I right?"

"Creepily right."

"Wanna know how I know?"

"You're a stalker?"

"No, idiot. It's on the book jacket."

"All that?" Roxas asked. The more he thought about it, the creepier it became. "My parents are freaks," he mumbled.

"Not all that was on there, of course, but it doesn't take much to put one and one and get two, right? They're just proud. To a fault, may-be. But you could be a brilliant stud in the making and then they'd have total bragging rights. Get to tell all their friends a fat-assed I-told-you-so."

"I doubt it."

The boy, whoever he was and whatever he was doing there—Roxas realized with a bit of a shock that he still hadn't asked either of those two very important questions—seemed to be making a game out of staring at him. It was, to say the least, completely unnerving and Roxas was starting to wonder if there was more wrong with him than just his mismatched socks and blinding hair. If there was anything wrong (which, with Roxas' luck, there probably was) the boy didn't say anything. Instead, he beat Roxas to the punch and asked him very simply, "What's your name, kid?"

"Roxas."

"Axel," he said, and Roxas almost asked him if he meant the part of the wheel thing that he'd learned about during the simple machines unit his parents had forced upon him in fifth grade. But the more he thought about that, the more he figured that the boy—Axel—probably got that from a lot of people and was almost as sick of it as Roxas was sick of people knowing him by his parents and their deep fiction.

Axel smiled away like this was some great step in the right direction and he drummed his fingers against the little blue box of cornbread mix he still clutched in his hand. With his other hand he tapped his chin and if it weren't for the god-awful hair and everything, he might even have looked a little thoughtful. As things were, he just looked like he was tripping. Or completely demented. Or just plain spaced out.

"Heyyy, there a grocery store or something nearby?" he finally went. "I'm feeling liiike… fire-roasted hot dogs. Sound good?"

Roxas shrugged. "I guess…" he said. He couldn't tell if that was an invitation for Roxas to eat… fire-roasted hot dogs, too, or if Axel was just seeking some kind of bizarre approval for his crappy menu of the evening. "There's the grocery store in town, but it's kind of a couple miles away," Roxas told him.

"Not a problem." Axel started walking—in the completely wrong direction, Roxas couldn't help but notice—and when he saw that Roxas wasn't following, he just flailed one arm around in some vague gesture that Roxas didn't quite understand. "Come on! I need your navigational skills, remember?" Axel said.

"We're walking? When I said it was a couple miles away, I meant, like… three… you know…?"

"We'll walk two blocks and ride the rest. Suck it up already, Rox-as." Axel looked pleased with himself or Roxas' name—Roxas couldn't tell. His name was pretty retarded as far as he was concerned. At least that was some common ground the two of them shared. All that was shot to hell as they ambled on through the woods though and Axel laced his hands behind his head and took a deep, deep breath. "Damn," he said. "It's gorgeous here."

Roxas wondered if Axel or Sora or any outsider understood just how claustrophobic this place could make a person. Just how isolated. Everyone knew your business and you knew everyone else's—even when you didn't want to. Whatever friends you made were the friends you had to keep because it was unlikely that the town was going to get a whole new batch of curious souls rolling on in. Whoever was there was there. Whoever wasn't was out of the picture. It was a terrifying place, really, because Roxas wanted to leave, but knew that in order to leave, he would be giving away his place in the town forever.

Some other rich, child prodigy would slither in and take his place. That much he was sure of. He would take up with Hayner and Olette where Roxas had left off, and there was a good chance that whoever his place-taker was would end up doing a much better job of being their friend than Roxas had. Mostly, this was because Roxas did a real shit job of it and was more than aware of this.

But all places and friends aside, he couldn't seem to figure out one particular thing in his head, try as hard as he might to do so. So he just up and asked, "Uh. Why exactly are you here?"

Axel cast a sideways glance at him down over his shoulder. "In your backyard?"

"Well. …Yeah. That's a good place to start."

"I'm here," Axel said, "'cause I'm on a road trip. This epic cross-country self-discovery bull that most guys don't get the craving for 'til their mid-life crisis. Guess that just means I'm destined to die young and leave a fuckin' hot corpse, huh?"

"Creepy," Roxas admitted. Though if you wanted to leave a hot corpse in your wake, he figured that smearing your guts and motorcycle bits across a highway wasn't a very good way to go about it. He elected, however, not to tell Axel this, instead focusing on safer topics. "Are you in college?"

"Nope. Not yet, anyway. Your parents would go ballistic if you were me, huh?"

"…Actually, they'd probably think I was deep."

"I'm not deep. I just like doing stupid shit that'll probably kill me or leave one hell of a good story. Or scars." Axel paused, thought, and then beamed. "Or both, even," he said. "The more the merrier."

"Those aren't scars, are they?" Roxas meant the little black marks Axel sported on his cheeks like crusty burnt tears—which he sincerely hoped they weren't, because that would just be above and beyond the limits of weirdness.

They turned out to be something far simpler. Axel shook his head and tapped one mark with his finger. "Nah. Tattoos," he told Roxas. "They were gonna be clubs, but the guy with the needle was high, so they came out as diamonds. At least they weren't hearts, though I guess spades woulda been pre-tty sweet." When Roxas didn't say anything, Axel laughed—a surprisingly deep and mellow sound that Roxas, for some reason, just hadn't expected at all. "You believe me?" Axel asked him.

"Uhh, honestly? No."

"Good. At least I know you're not a complete idiot. Here we are!"

They were, as it turned out, by the side of a road that looked about as cared for as every abandoned puppy Roxas had ever seen on Pet Rescue: Houston. The thing had weeds coming out cracks that wound through it like spider webs, but none of that was the point of their trip, because beside the road and parked in the underbrush was Axel's motorcycle. It was a nice little contraption and Roxas could see why—if you were going to choose to die by machinery—it was a good way to go. What he didn't see, however, was how the hell Axel managed a road trip on so small a thing. It looked like it would barely be able to hold Axel, let alone all the junk he carried with him.

Or Roxas.

But he just kind of nodded his head, said the expected, "Cool," and waited to see what Axel would do. It didn't take long, because soon there was a helmet shoved in his hands and he was being lifted—yes, lifted, of all the indignities poor Roxas could be forced to suffer in one day—onto the back seat. He was about to grumble about how he couldn't gotten up himself (thought he wasn't sure he could've—he was terrifyingly small and everything), but didn't get the words out because Axel had crammed the helmet in Roxas' hands right over his head before the boy knew what hit him.

One thing was becoming clearer by the moment. Axel was far too much of an extrovert for the likes of Roxas.

"And here we go!"

And off they went.

All things considered, it wasn't the worst experience of Roxas' life. Granted, he hadn't had too many similar experiences to compare it to. …In fact, there just weren't any. Roxas didn't even know how to ride a bicycle, let along motor along on some wee little scooter that passed itself off as more.

"SO! HOW YA DOIN'?" Axel hollered.

"You don't have to yell!" Roxas yelled.

"WHAT?"

"I SAID YOU… NEVERMIND."

"YOU'RE NOT DEAD YET?"
"…NO. … … SHOULD I BE?"

"WELL YOU'RE ABOUT TO DISLOCATE MY GODDAMN HIP."

Roxas hadn't realized he'd been hanging on so tight, but chancing a glance down at his hands was a bad idea. Not only could he see himself clearly white-knuckled and clinging to Axel's boney middle for dear life, but he could also make out the ground zipping by beneath them, and it caused a curious stomach-pitching, reeling, throat-clenching feeling he'd never felt before and would much rather never feel again. He swallowed the throat feeling away, but the rest of it stayed. And then, as an afterthought, he tried to loosen his grip on Axel, but almost fell off in the process and let out a terrified yelp before bashing his helmeted skull into Axel's spine as he resumed his former clingy position

"…SORRY!" he yelled. And he thought he heard Axel laugh, but it might have just been more of a gasping curse or noise of pain coming from his mouth—Roxas wasn't quite sure. He hoped for laughter, left it at that, and started shouting directions over the angry hum of the motor.

"LEFT… RIGHT… UP AHEAD…"

They sped past all the features of Roxas' town that he hated and the exceptional, rare few that he actually liked. A glimpse of the river flashed by, followed by the dirt path that led up to a large meadow that the townspeople used for just about everything from football games to harvest festivals—neither of which were particularly exciting. And though it all somehow managed to look reasonably new and interesting from this different point of view, Roxas didn't have time to look into it all that much because they were in town before he knew it. Rows of wooden building lined the narrow streets and everywhere he looked Roxas could just make out that very fine layer of brown that the place just had about it. There were no bright colors—at least, none that lasted more than twenty four hours—because the earth seemed very particular about keeping this one piece of nowhere all to herself.

The grocery store wasn't that hard to miss. There was only one, after all, and it sat fat and heavy in the center of town like a farmer's prize cow might sit in the middle of some pathetic pasture or another. The sad thing was that the grocer's probably was the town's prize cow, seeing as it was one of the few shops that had stayed in business for more than ten years and was also a den for local gossip.

Axel slowed the motorcycle down and pulled it into one of the twelve dinky parking spaces (that weren't even marked as such but which were obviously empty because they were waiting to be filled with nonexistent vehicles.) Roxas pulled off his helmet and Axel took it and tucked it under his arm before letting out a low whistle like he'd never seen anything like this place—like Roxas' place. …Of course, he had. In fact, he'd stopped in town before he had motored on up to Roxas' endless backyard, but Axel figured that it wouldn't kill him to look at least a little impressed. Maybe it would Roxas feel better about the shitty locale he was flung in life.

"Check it out. Looks like the set of To Wong Foo," Axel said. This wasn't really what he'd been meaning when he'd been trying to look impressed, but at least that was a comparison between crap-town and little-known comedy films.

"Or something like that, I guess," Roxas mumbled, not having the slightest idea where Axel got off thinking that his town looked like some hokey Asian action scene. Or whatever that movie was. He didn't have the slightest idea about that either, but there was one thing he knew for certain and he laid it out in the open as soon as they entered the grocery store. "Hot dogs are in the back," he proclaimed, "in the fridge."

Axel took a few steps forward, stopped, turned, looked at Roxas, blinked and Roxas, and then jerked his hand around in a silly looking motion to prompt the kid to accompany him. "Come on then," he said, and Roxas did come on then because there was simply not much else to do. Such was summer in the… very small town.

There's no point in describing the grocery store because everyone has been to a grocery store and this one particular grocery store was so thoroughly unremarkable that it put Roxas to shame the minute he set foot in it. He couldn't help himself—walking alongside Axel, wondering about all the amazing placed he'd probably been and theorizing about where his town ranked on the craptactor scale. Which didn't exist, but really should have, if only so Roxas' town could be marked as the very bottom level, labeled for convenience's sake as 'Off the map in a very, very bad way.'

They hadn't made it more that two aisles' into the store before they bumped into someone Roxas knew. He had kind of expected that, of course, but what he hadn't expected was the very same trio he'd bailed out on that very same afternoon.

Olette grinned ear to ear the second she saw him, like she hadn't seen him in ages, though it'd been less like ages in reality and more like a very breezy eighteen hours. "Heyyy, guys," she said, thought it came out funny and strange when she said it, because her moth had made to form a 'hey you' when she saw Roxas, but had to do a little double take when she realized that Roxas and Axel were together. In some way, shape or form.

Roxas wasn't quite sure how he felt about that.

"Roxas, what're you doing here? I thought you were home…" Sora said, holding a jumbo bag of equally jumbo marshmallows in each hand.

"I was. I mean. I'm going right back." There was an awkward silence that gave Roxas time enough to mentally berate himself for ever learning how to speak—he should've been born a mute because nothing good every happened whenever he opened his mouth. As though to further prove this point, his moronic mouth just opened itself again and wildly, stupidly declared: "This is Axel?" as though Roxas wasn't quite sure it was.

Axel made a pathetic attempt at disguising a laugh as a cough and the promptly made with all politeness and gave a lazy, how-do-you-do sort of nod towards the three in front of him. "Heya."

Hayner either hadn't been listening or didn't much care for actually having to look upwards to make eye contact with a person, because unlike Sora and Olette, he was all grins and smiles the second Axel made his greeting. "Who're you?" Hayner asked him, and Roxas wondered for about the five-trillionth time why on earth he knew Hayner in the first place, or better still, why he somehow managed to spend time with the boy on a pretty regular basis.

"His name's Axel. That's what I just said."

"No, I mean, he's not from here."

"He's visiting."

Axel suddenly made as though he were very interested in one particular jar of okra sitting on the shelf and Olette suddenly made as though nothing the least bit tense had just taken place. And though Axel really did try hard at keeping contact with the okra and nothing else, it didn't save him from female persistence—which Olette had a terrifying amount of.

"That's cool! How long're you staying for? And how do you know Roxas? I always thought of you as kind of an antisocial recluse, Rox. Not trying to hurt your feelings or anything but, well, let's be honest."

Roxas was, surprisingly, a little bit hurt by that. And he was about to make up some bogus story too-- "Actually he—"—all about how Axel and he were great friends and had been for a long time and how on earth had he never mentioned him to Hayner or Olette, it must have just completely slipped his mind… But alas, someone beat Roxas to the bogus story, and that someone, oddly enough, was Axel himself.

"Roxas and I met over the internet," he explained. Roxas' slack-jawed, gaping expression just screamed 'LIAR!' but no one seemed to care or notice.

"Awesome!" Sora said. And then it looked like Axel's words actually went through the whole processor and he puckered his lips and then added, "I mean, kinda sketchy, but awesome."

"Through some porno congregation site?" Hayner jabbed.

Roxas blinked and then proceeded to flat out lie with a guilt-free conscience, seeing as he hadn't had to lie about Axel after all because Axel lied about himself. So he cheerfully said, "I don't watch porn," and at least Olette believed him because she was the only one present who didn't know for a fact that all males above the age of thirteen have watched porn at least once.

"Not a porn site," Axel corrected Hayner, who just kind of raised an expectant eyebrow in response. Roxas was fairly impressed that Axel didn't falter once, waving the whole ridiculous matter off with a careless toss of his hand. In fact, Roxas almost started liking Axel, up until Axel said: "Nah, we met through a dating site. You know. eHarmony and shit."

The two other locals in the store—both of whom were rather elderly women—stopped what they were doing and remained dead silent all for the sake of listening. Roxas knew it, he knew everything, he knew precisely what they were doing and what they were thinking… And yet for the life of him, the one thing he didn't know is why Axel had just decided to royally screw him over like that.

"UMM." He wondered if he could grab the nearest thing sitting on a shelf and cram it in his mouth in such a way that he would instantly start choking to death. For were Roxas to stat choking, there was a pretty good chance of everyone momentarily forgetting the topic at hand in favor of leaping to Roxas' aid. Of course, there was always the chance they wouldn't do a damn thing, but Roxas was thinking it was a chance he'd be willing to take right about then.

He was stopped short, however, by the only real response that Axel's words created—and it was the exact response that Roxas had feared most.

"How come you never told me you were gay?" The way Sora was staring at Roxas with those ginourmous, glisteny eyes of his, you'd have thought Roxas had just stabbed his kitten with a pair of rusty scissors. Such was not the case, but try telling Sora that. His face showed nothing but pure, honest-to-god sadness and betrayal, and damn but if it didn't just about break Roxas' heart five times over.

"We're not. We didn't. He's kidding. Axel's such a kidder. Isn't he? Just the funniest? You've ever seen?" Roxas looked desperately to Olette and then, almost desperately to Hayner, before he realized that would do him no good whatsoever. So he focused his attention on Olette again, shooting her a please-get-me-out-of-this-somehow stare that only caused her to shrug sympathetically. No way in hell were either Hayner or Olette going to fess up to the fact they'd known for ages. In fact, Roxas couldn't help but wonder if Axel knew, too. Because as weird and creepy and completely disturbing as it would be, how else could that rat bastard have pinned that comment so perfectly on Roxas? Roxas, of all poor little people, who had never tried to stand out as being anything in his entire life?

His so-called friends were no good. They were absolutely shameless, in fact, and started lying through their teeth. It was all out of spite—Roxas was sure of it.

"Well, I always kinda thought you were queer," Hayner admitted.

"We just want you to know we fully support you," Olette said.

"Hey, speak for yourself."

"What Hayner really means is, 'It's cool with me, but just don't feel my—'"

Roxas wished he could kick both of them in the head without causing a ruckus or feeling guilty about it afterwards.

Meanwhile, Sora was still in shock and Axel looked like he was about to laugh himself right back out the door (bumping into those two charming old ladies as he did so). Roxas turned to look at his uncle-of-sorts and couldn't have looked more ashamed if he possibly tried, even after Sora said, "I can't believe you never told me you were gay."

"I—Sora, look. I don't even know this guy. He just showed up."

"What'd I tell ya, huh?" Hayner went. "Porno congregation site. Come on, Roxas, you can cough it up to us. We're all friends here, after all."

"Would you shut up. I don't watch porn. All he wanted was some hot dogs."

"Isn't that all any guy really wants, Roxas?" went Hayner.

"Shut up!"

Olette sighed her sigh like she always sighed. It was the kind of sigh that indicated that she'd dealt with those kinds of squabbles between Roxas and Hayner countless times, but Sora was still too shell-shocked to realize this. Axel eased his way out of the aisle backwards before zipping off to some unknown location, though it was presumably somewhere around where the hot dogs were. Hayner looked suddenly bored and Sora still managed to keep that devastating look going, even when Olette stared really hard at all three of the boys remaining around her. "Hayner, cut it out," she said first. And she would've said something to Sora second, but she didn't know that there really was anything to say to Sora, so she moved onto her third target.

She dropped her voice down to a whisper and moved in close to Roxas where she hoped that at least Sora might not be able to hear. "What's the deal, Roxas? I thought you were actually going to have a… you know. A real talk with him."

"There isn't a deal. There's just a huge, butt-ugly understanding," Roxas hissed. "I mean, a misunderstanding."

"I think you stumbled when you said butt-ugly. You can't even say ass with a straight face."

"Thanks for that, Olette."

"You're welcome." She pulled away from him again, but apparently did it without thinking of what she was about to say next, because if Sora heard what came out of her mouth—which he undoubtedly did—than there was probably a pretty good bet that the little old ladies who were straining their hardest to hear anything also picked up on it. "You know," Olette said thoughtfully. "He is pretty cute and I guess he could…"

Roxas blinked. He couldn't see how anyone would call Axel 'cute' at all. More like strange, eccentric, or possibly—if you were going to stretch things—roady. Which Roxas was fairly sure wasn't a real word, but if it was, it would describe Axel all right enough. Olette wasn't continuing her sentence though because she'd gone and started blushing like a maniac and Roxas was still kind of left dangling on her last word, so he prodded her along.

"Could…?"

"Be, um, nevermind."

"He could be packing is what she's saying," Hayner told him.

"Packing what?"

"Oh, Hayner! Stop it already!" Desperate for a redirection of attention, Olette turned to Sora, only to find a little pillar of empty space where all three of them could've sworn he'd been standing just moments before. Her green eyes widen with that unmistakable distress that only Olette could possess for a friend getting lost in a grocery store. "Where'd Sora go?" she asked.

Hayner shrugged. "Probably to sign up for PFLAG. Or something similar."

"What's PFLAG?" she asked him.

"Potential fags, lesbos, asexuals and gypsies."

"You're absolutely terrible, you know that?"

Hayner just grinned something wild and elbowed Roxas in the ribs, which kind of tickled in a way that elbows shouldn't have really made possible. "Roxas," he went, "you know I don't mean it, don't you?"

"…You're only trying to buddy up with me so I'll get Olette off your back."

"Pretty much. But I mean… deep down. You know." Roxas stared very, very blankly as Hayner dropped his voice an octave or twelve and started walking his index and middle fingers up Roxas' arm as he crooned, "In that… part of you. That… deep, back door part of—"

"HAYNER!" Olette yelped.

Thoroughly disgusted with everything in the grocery store now—people included—Roxas made a beeline for the door, passing the shocked and awed faces of those two obnoxious biddies on his way out. Were he more of a delinquent, Roxas would've flipped them off as he passed by, but instead he just kind of thought about doing it and satisfied himself with that. The man at the cash register looked up and asked if he needed any help with anything as he all but ran out the front door, Olette and Hayner tagging along behind.

"We were just leaving," Roxas told him, and hoped that would be enough and that he wouldn't want to know how his parents were doing, how their books were coming along, and whether or not he'd settled on a college to go to in more than a year from then. Axel, conveniently enough, seemed to be waiting for him outside, a little plastic bag holding his prize hotdogs in hand. It was all Roxas could do not to punch Axel as he walked by, and it occurred to him that he was going to have to get a grip on all these violent urges of his before he really broke something. …Which would probably be one of his own bones.

Pulling to a stop in front of Axel, he made his voice as threatening as he could, though he sounded more like he was scolding a dog that trying to instill the fear of God in anybody, which was kind of what he was going for.

"I hate you, by the way," he said, "and if you're still in my backyard tomorrow morning, I'm setting your tent on fire. And your little bike, too."

"Oooh, I'm scared."

"You sure as shit better be," Roxas grumbled. He looked left then right and then heaved a sigh of frustration and asked anybody who would listen: "Where's Sora?"

Hayner shrugged. "Dunno. Olette?"

And Olette just rolled her eyes and shook her head. No one ever listened to her. "Don't look at me," she told him moodily. "I was too busy being disgusted by your awful sense of humor and I completely missed it when our friend left upset. Ignoring the fact that I pointed it out, like, three minutes ago. So thanks a lot, Hayner. He just got here, too."

"It's not like there's an endless amount of places he could—what are you doing?" Roxas cut himself off midsentence as he watched Axel just start ambling away, around the side of the store. It wasn't that he was hurt or offended that his creepy backyard neighbor would just up and walk out on him, it was just that it was rude to do, and rudeness was something that kind of irked Roxas, way in the back, back depths of his mind.

"Nothin'," Axel told him. "You go on ahead. I'll catch up with you later, Roxy."

Roxas scowled after his retreating shape, and someone amidst all the various problems and curses and little tiny bubbles of resentment floating around his head, he did manage to secure his mind around the word, "Asshole," just long enough to say it.

"Tight," Hayner said. Olette looked confused and Roxas just punched him in the arm before turning and leading the small pack up them up the street.

"Just freaking stop, would you? Jesus."

"Hey man. Cool it. So what, you think Sora headed back to your place?"

"I guess. Man, I feel awful."

"He was gonna find out sooner or later, Roxas. Hayner was just waiting for the right chance to tell him," Olette said. Roxas, in spite of his many flaws, could manage to look very disgusted when caught in the right moment and under the right circumstances, and that was precisely the look he threw in Hayner's direction right then.

"I was not," Hayner muttered. "…Don't look at me like that! I wasn't. Swear."

"Somehow I don't believe you."

"Come on, Roxas. It was pretty hilarious. You have to learn how to laugh all this stuff off sometime, because otherwise it's just gonna start eating away at you. Eating away, eating away…"

"Knock it off!"

Olette stole one look at them and let out another terrific sigh and said, "I miss Pence."

Pence was their fourth musketeer in a way. He was round and happy and all too susceptible to superstition for his own good, but that was usually what made him so fun to be around. There was nothing that quite beat messing with Pence and his ridiculous mind. But every summer he was shipped off to some relative's house or another—something like Sora's case, only when it came to Pence, he never enjoyed his stay and always came home tired and out of it.

Roxas stopped thinking about Pence the second Hayner's palm came down and slapped him on the back in what Roxas figured what supposed to be a friendly gesture. "Sora, Olette 'n me were gonna kickstart summer with roasted marshmallows and crappy old mix CDs from the nineties. You in?"

"Thanks, but I'll pass."

Hayner raised an eyebrow and allowed himself a smirk, which Roxas didn't think took a whole lot on Hayner's part. Smirking was his second most-used expression, only second to scowling. All the same, he said to Roxas, "But you usually love processed sugar meets processed sugar meets refined… sugar. What gives?"

"Because your mix CDs from the nineties basically contain—"

"The Backstreet Boys. Back when they were good, of course," said Olette.

"Were they ever good? I don't remember that part." Olette just sighed. But at least Hayner laughed at his pathetic attempt at humor, Roxas figured. There were some things he was glad Hayner was around for and… well, although laughing wasn't always one of them—in fact, it usually wasn't, because Hayner was usually laughing at him—it was still nice to feel like even with Sora around, Roxas could still be appreciated by his friends.

The walk back up the country road was infinitely longer by foot than it was by motorcycle. It was just that Roxas had never noticed it because he'd never had the two side by side to compare like he did now, and suddenly he was even kind of regretting leaving Axel behind like he did. Even though Axel was a creep. And even though Axel was still probably going to magically produce an axe in the middle of the night and come chopping him up in bits and pieces.

Still. Roxas wished for him and his motorcycle right then.

The feeling quickly subsided as the trio approached the river, which ran up alongside the road for a time before it would wind back in through the hills.

"Hey, what's up here?"

"Not againnn…" Olette groaned. Her eyes instantly flickered from the crowd by the river towards Hayner's slowing figure in front of her. She picked up her pace to walk beside him, linked her arms with his, and picked up her pace further still. "Keep walking, Hayner," she told him, and had Olette not been a girl and not been on such good terms with him, Hayner would've most likely clobbered her en route to the gang under the trees.

Instead he just grit his teeth and narrowed his eyes and muttered something that sounded to Roxas like, "Fuckers," which, when Roxas thought about it, it probably was. He wasn't shocked or impressed by Hayner's flare of anger—in fact, once he'd recognized Seifer and his gang, he'd seen it coming long before it actually, well, came. Hayner was the only one who hated Seifer more than Squall—another kid from school—and Hayner and Squall were the only ones that hated Seifer more than Roxas. It was just that between the three of them, all of them expressed their hatred in different ways, especially when it was between Hayner and Roxas. Hayner was the sort to kick ass and swear and make it perfectly, publicly clear that he hated the air Seifer breathed.

Roxas found himself reasonably content to daydream about all the horrible things he could do to Seifer were he a.) a mad scientist, b.) a heavyweight champion, c.) a rough equivalent of Spiderman, or d.) all of the above. It was both a nice way to pass time and a good creative exercise, so as far as Roxas could see, nothing could be more productive. He was, however, inclined to hit back when he was hit first—he was Hayner's friend in spite of it all, and he had just about as much spine as any kid.

…The only problem was that whenever Roxas hit back, it never seemed to do a whole lot. All it really did was signal the oncoming darkness that came about when Seifer got really pissed and knocked Roxas unconscious. He was pretty sure he'd sustained brain damage from several such incidents and was willing to bet that said brain damage was at fault for him not being that mad scientist of his daydreams who could engineer countless horrors to put Seifer through.

"Now what're they doing?" Roxas grumbled.

Olette glanced over at him like he was outrageously slow—which, right then, he probably was. His mind was preoccupied with strangers and uncles and the respective problems with each. "Haven't you noticed?" she told him. "They took over our rope swing."

Roxas tried to disguise a look over his shoulder and back towards the riverside again, but the bad thing about looking over your shoulder is that it is what it is, and trying to disguise it as anything else is pretty much setting yourself up for failure. Seifer caught his eye and then grinned ruthlessly, flipping him the bird like it was the only sensible thing to do in that position. But sure enough, Roxas saw that where the gang had set themselves up along the river was right there in their usual spot—the spot that Roxas, Hayner, and Olette had always thought of belonging to them. One of Seifer's cronies, Rai, even had the nerve to be swinging on their rope.

Roxas hoped it snapped. …When he was safely out over the water, of course.

Facing forward again, Roxas realized that Olette was waiting for him to say something. Only he didn't know quite what to say, so all he got around to saying was, "Okay," which seemed appropriate enough, but apparently Hayner didn't think so.

Hayner just rolled his eyes and shook his head and said, "Roxas…" in that way that made Roxas both expect more of a sentence from Hayner and feel like crap about himself at the same time.

"What?" Roxas went. "Just get it back, if it bugs you. You know the only reason they hate you guys is 'cause of me."

"Look, Roxas. It's not like we're going to renounce our friendship with you just for the sake of some rope and a tree branch," Hayner told him. Though Roxas was pretty sure, at some point, if all this dragged on long enough, it wouldn't be past Hayner to at least consider it. Like he guessed at what Roxas was playing at inside the vast depths of his head, Hayner shot him another look and added again with emphasis, "It's just some rope and a tree."

"And my sitting rock," Olette added gloomily. Hayner swung one arm over and around her shoulders in some kind of comforting gesture, but it nearly knocked Olette over in the process. Not that either of them seemed to notice all that much. Rope swing or no, they were happy as clams on crack and Roxas wouldn't have had it any other way, he supposed.

"Anyway," Hayner was saying, "it wouldn't work. We've thought of something better. And, well, now that Sora's here, we've got enough people to put our plan into action."

"…I hope you're not dumb enough to challenge them to a fight," Roxas said.

"What, and get arrested? Right. I've thought of something even better."

"I didn't contribute at all," Olette said.

"Okay, Olette helped."

"Oh, a little."

"We both thought it up, happy now?" Hayner grinned to make like he was just playing and Olette bought into it without a doubt. Roxas was reasonably sure he'd claim full responsibility for the whole thing if it wound up spelling out success, but he decided not to point it out to Olette—then or at any other time. They'd reached Roxas' house and for some reason Roxas was under the impression that he was starting to think the absolute worst of people and there was no way around it. It was like when you had oldness in your bones and all you could do was make a mess of things and bitch at people and wait for something exciting to happen so you could yap about how it wasn't really exciting, how no one knew anything anymore and how everyone was entertained by stupid shit.

…The only problem with this was that Roxas wasn't old and he shouldn't have been acting like had carried around the deadweight of old bones in him, because he didn't. He just couldn't help it though. He blamed the heat and the sour turn of the day's events, and hoped he'd wake up a little younger tomorrow and a little less grumpy about everything.

"Well. It's a good plan," Hayner assured him. "But that's not for today, okay? You've got some uncle relationship work cut out for you. If Sora's bummed, he won't come hang out with us. So go fix it already, and remember. Marshmallows. You know you want it."

"Right, sure," Roxas said.

"Well then remind Sora, at least."

Olette place one hand gingerly on his forearm and smiled sweetly, though her eyes had to go all squinty because of the setting sun just shooting over the top of Roxas' house and into her face. "Please come, Roxas," she told him before taking her hand back from him to shield her eyes. She laughed, probably aware of how silly she looked, and then added, "You can even bring Axel."

"Um. Think I'll pass on that one." Roxas didn't much feel like burning Axel's tent to the ground—he'd already kind of broken the damn thing anyway—but he wasn't exactly about to go bringing the guy to hang out with him and his friends. That wouldn't just be weird. It would also be stupidly dangerous to put both Hayner and Olette in harm's way if Axel turned out to be the axe murder that Roxas figured he really was.

Trying to get bloody image after bloody image out of his head with a mental sponge, Roxas just shook his head. "Thanks for the offer though, Olette," he said, and turned to go inside.

"There's still time to reconsider. I have faith in you!" she called out after him.

Roxas made a quick tour of his house, searching every inch of it thoroughly for some sign of Sora, but the more he searched, the more concerned he became. Aside from Sora's battered old duffel bag still lying by the front door where he'd dropped it, the house was as it always was any other time of the year. The TV wasn't on, there was no one ransacking the kitchen, and there wasn't the usual teenage boy in the basement, trying to make a replication of the Eiffel Tower out of sticky tack and pool balls. He even went so far as to listen at the door of his parents' studies, but the only sound coming from each of them was the quiet clack of fingers on keyboard.

So, not really having a backup plan, he headed back out to the front yard, intending to wait on the porch swing until Sora showed up and he could beg for some kind of mercy or other. But instead of sitting on the porch swing, he found his eyes landing on a shock of red hair and a motorbike propped up against the porch rail. Axel turned and looked up at him, still holding that plastic hot dog bag in the one hand he raised to greet Roxas. "Yo," he said with a grin.

"Have you seen Sora?" Roxas asked him, because asking him why he was alive and seemingly dead set on destroying everything Roxas held dear—well, that seemed like a bit much.

"Can't say I have. I offered him a ride though," Axel said.

"…You mean he was back in town when we left?"

"Uh, yeah. He was right outside the store by the icebox. …Thing."

Roxas blinked. "Shit," he said. He'd never even thought of looking around the side of the store for his cousin. Uncle. Thing. It was so unlike Sora to wander off upset like that, so it was no wonder Roxas didn't have the slightest idea what to do when such a thing actually happened. The more the got to thinking about it, though, the more he realized that he was kind of an asshole, treating poor, sweet little Sora like he had. Roxas sighed. "I gotta go find him."

"What's the big rush?" Axel asked lazily. "He's coming back here anyway."

"If he decides he doesn't hate me too much, yeah, I guess you're right."

"Oh come on already. The kid doesn't hate you. He was just… caught off guard, is all. I mean it. I talked to him."

"Thanks, I kinda figured that out already."

Roxas and Axel stood in silence for a moment. Then Axel's eyebrows shot up like he'd just been struck dead on by the most brilliant thought of all thoughts. He put one hand on the seat of his motorcycle and the other hand on his hip and he shot Roxas a winning, beaming, slightly sadistic grin.

"Hang out with me," he said.

"Huh?" said Roxas, who was either at a loss for words or always socially impaired like that.

"What, don't speak English all of a sudden? Ay-eee wannnt toooo hang out with you. Hot dogs don't froast themselves."

"Did… did you just say froast?"

"No. Hell's wrong with you? That's not even a word. This way!" Axel turned and started walking his cycle down Roxas' very extensive driveway, and for a few moments Roxas actually found himself following along behind him, every bit the gullible speck of prey he was. Then he realized what he was doing, thought about Sora, and thought about his own self, the jackass, once more.

"What about Sora?" Roxas asked Axel quietly.

Axel stopped, looked over his shoulder and just sort of shook his head and raised his eyebrows and everything about his face was so responsive it was a wonder the entire system didn't collapse entirely and fall twitching and broken to the ground. "He'll come around eventually," he told Roxas. "Besides. You didn't want much to do with the kid this afternoon. What changed?"

Roxas' face turned a dull shade of pink and he was hoping Axel wouldn't feel the urge to turn around and make eye contact anytime soon. He also couldn't help but wonder what else Sora had told him about during their little chat. "Nothing, I just…"

"You need to take a breather and calllm the hell down. Hot dogs. I'm tellin' ya."

And Axel didn't turn around again. He didn't bear witness to Roxas' pathetic guilt and he didn't bear witness to Roxas much at all. But Roxas bore witness to Axel's retreating back and the undersides of Axel's sneakers and the spinning spokes of Axel's motorcycle and he decided right then, right there: to hell with it. Axel was the most interesting thing that would probably happen to him all summer. He quickened his pace, straightened his face, and fell into step beside the taller, crazier looking boy in relative silence, up until they reached the main road—if you could call it that—and Roxas said:

"You know, the more I think about this, the more I think there must be something seriously, seriously wrong with my mental health."

"How so?" Axel asked him.

"Well. Logically—if I were, yanno, thinking logically or anything—I would be putting as much space between you and me as I possibly could. Because logic says? You're a weird guy who shouldn't really be so into talking to me like you are."

"I'm also a weird guy who's been riding it pretty much solo for the past couple months."

"Even more to my point. You're probably crazier now than you were to start with."

"Mmm, ya got a point there, Roxy. But I'll tell you what else I am. And that is hella lonely. Now you can't turn down a guy who says that, now can you?"

"Well, I… I couldn't turn down a girl who said that, either."

"Did I ever imply anything remotely like that? At all? Focus on the prize, Roxy. Just on the prize." Roxas would have been completely and utterly confused by this statement had Axel not taken to waving that bag of hot dogs around in the air like he did right then. As it was, although Roxas knew what Axel was talking about, something just felt entirely weird and entirely wrong about the whole picture. People don't wander off into the woods alone with strangers. Period. Amen. It's just not a thing you do. And though Roxas' mind kept telling him this and telling him this, he wanted to believe Axel.

He wanted to believe Axel was exciting and adventurous. He wanted to believe that Axel was just a passing glimpse of the outside world. And more than anything else, probably, he wanted to believe that he, for some strange and unexplainable reason, was as interesting to Axel as Axel was to him.

"This is too weird," Roxas mumbled. He kicked at a rock along the road and watched it bounce in the dirt, watched it kick up dust and roll off into the grass.

"Too perfect, you mean," Axel said. "Lonely small town boy meets road-winding motor-man."

"Motor-mouth more like."

"Anyway. We're perfect company. Or some crap like that. Turn off here. Little ways up ahead. There's the tent. Damn, you did a number on it. What the hell'd you do anyway? Do you walk around with knives in the woods and just go hacking things to pieces. I need that tent, man. Well, whatever. Alright, we just need to shut up and neat now because I'm starving. Get that wood over there. Time to burn these babies."

(x) (x) (x)

Input, please? Interesting? Yes? No? Maybe so?