[AU Roxas goes to an expensive all-boys' high school. His new roommate is Axel, who is all he could ask for in a roommate. Axel shows Roxas a side of him that he (or the fangirls) didn't expect. AkuRoku. Don't like, don't read. WIP. Rated T for language and maybe some future kissing scenes. No smut/lemon. I would giggle MUCH too hard if I tried to write it.

Disclaimer: Don't own KH. But if I did...ponder

Notes: The AkuRoku will be only flash or light shonen-ai in early chapters. But, I promise it will get better. Trust me. I'm a fangirl. :P Also, this isn't a songfic. The title sounded good and it KINDA has to do with the fic in later chapters. Well..it will. I hope. Anyway! Enjoy

Wings of a Butterfly

By: ARandomFangirl or RF

Chapter 1 – New Beginning

I gaze up at the 3-story stone building in front of me, shielding my eyes from the scorching, August sun. Even wearing a black button-down shirt and faded jeans is too hot to wear in this heat.

I put my large trunk on the pavement and sit on it, trying to collect my thoughts and catch my breath. For someone who usually has such a choke hold on my life, Kairi, my mother --I only call her my mother if people ask how she's related to me and when I'm talking to her face to face. Otherwise, it's Kairi-- seemed quick to more or less threw me out of the car when she was dropping me off this morning. Which, by the way, was only slightly cooler than it is now.

My disorientation didn't get any better once I stepped inside the main hall of Cromwell Academy, a spacious corridor with arches and pillars with draping red and gold curtains adoring the wide white-frame windows. I don't remember the name of the black-haired guy who escorted me to what looked like a gift shop, tucked away into a corner of the hall. In a flurry of motion, a uniform was placed in my hands, my picture taken and an ID card given to me.

I spotted a group of guys all wearing basketball shorts and wife beaters. One held a worn basketball in his hands. When I tried asking them for directions, they talked down to me as if I didn't have half a brain cell. Rudeness aside, I still managed to find my dorm.

My breath caught, I shift my bag with my keyboard on it to my other shoulder and lug my trunk through the propped open door. A bored looking pale girl sits at a desk in front of me, absentmindedly flipping through some music magazine with a fishnet covered hand, her dyed black hair a curtain over her face. She looks up suddenly at me and asks, "Do you have ID?"

I think for a moment and realize what she's talking about. I fish through my deep jeans pockets, walk over to her, and hold it out. She peers at it and goes back to her magazine.

"Take the staircase to the right. Your room is the 5th on the left."

"Thanks." She scratches her nose in response.

I take her directions and gingerly walk up the winding, marble staircase, trunk in tow. It's oddly comfortable inside, for somehow the burgundy walls have a calming effect. Although there are no air conditioners in sight, the air is cool. Scanning the golden numbers on each of the doors, I finally see one that looks familiar. Stopping suddenly, I look at the card in my hand, at the number on the door, and back down again. Yep, they're the same. 302A. My hand is on the knob when I hear...Linkin Park? No way.

"I wanna heal, I wanna feel what I thought was never real. I wanna let go of the pain I've felt so long," says the door.

Yep. Linkin Park. But how? There's no way that fate would have me roomed with a metal-head. I ruffle my hands through my sandy blond hair and tug at the hem of my shirt and open the door

Inside, the music is louder. I look to the source and am so shocked to see a vibrant red head laying on the azure couch to my right, that I drop my one suitcase loudly onto the navy blue carpet. He has a plaid fleece blanket over him --I guess it really must get cold I here after awhile-- and he's staring up at the ceiling, mouthing the words.

Hearing my suitcase fall, he looks upside down at me with his sparkling emerald eyes. "Hey! You my new roommate?"

"I guess so. This is 302A, right?"

He nods and stands up to his full height while shrugging the blanket off of him, which is about 6 inches taller than me. Baggy black pants with red stitching and many chains dangling off of them adorn his legs, and a plain, black hoodie over a My Chemical Romance tee completes the look. His eyes are lined in black and his red hair is spiked up in all directions.

He extends his hand. "Axel."

I shake it awkwardly, expecting my hand to break from his grip. "Roxas." Most guys these days just say, "Sup, Bro?" and do that half hug, half handshake thing. Very rarely do people shake hands anymore.

"Let me take your trunk," he says, picking it up easily before I can object. He turns and walks into a room in front of me and have no choice but to follow. It's always the nice ones that turn on you and dump your stuff out the window.

In front of me is a sliding glass door that leads to a balcony that shows the New England hillside, which is vibrant with the yet-unchanged leaves. I gaze to my left and see that Axel's side of the room is lived in, with his many interests displayed on the walls and the black linen sheets on his bed worn in the right places. He had obviously been here for quite awhile.

He places the bag at the foot of my bed. "Well, here we are. This is obviously our bedroom. The room we just came from is the living room and off of that is the kitchen...thing. Which no one's supposed to know about. Microwaves and such aren't allowed in the dorms. But how the hell else am I supposed to make bacon in the morning? The school's is awful."

"You cook?"

"I love to cook!" he says happily, with a hint of indignation. "I can cook everything, except cookies. I try to make them, but I always end up burning them."

I laugh and begin to unpack, putting my clothes into the drawers.

As I slip the bag carrying my keyboard from my shoulder, I notice Axel's eyes look curiously at the pack.

"It's a keyboard," I say simply, answering his unspoken question. I unzip the midnight black cover and show him the 88 ebony and ivory keys. Kairi had given it to me one Christmas. She must've had a boyfriend or something around then to be so generous.

"Do you play well?"

"You could say that..." I only practiced everyday for at least an hour playing works ranging from Bach to Ella Fitzgerald to Guns and Roses.

Glancing around the room, I noticed no other strange cases that instruments come in, nor the instruments themselves, so I had to ask, "Do you play something?"

"Does singing count?" he asks with a sly smile.

I didn't peg Axel as the singing type, but as soon as he said it, I realized how wrong my first judgment was. His smooth, relaxing voice seemed would translate well into singing. All I managed to say was "I suppose it does."

"You're already 10 times better than my last roommate," he says with a smirk, leaning against the wall.

I look up as I take out a pair of jeans and walk to my armoire, a bit startled by the random statement. "How's that?"

"Well, for one, you're a metal head!"

"How could you tell that?"

"When you walked in you started head banging." His tone is flat, but his eyes give away the joke hidden.

"I did...?" I didn't even notice. I had to hide my love of metal from Kairi to avoid her poison words. Apparently, I didn't hide it as well as I thought if someone who I just met could already tell it.

He nods, "And your sense of style is more like mine. Plus, I can tell you're not an asshole.My last roommate was a Born-Again-Christian and would constantly keep telling me what I should be doing as a 'faithful servant to God'." He made quotation marks in the air around the last words he said.

"Must be hard living with a devout Christian."

"Well, it's one thing if you're not Christian because all they'll do is try to get you to convert. But when you are Christian, they nitpick at you, telling you how you're not doing this or you should be doing this."

I try to hide my amazement, but it doesn't go over well. "You're Christian?"

"What? Don't tell me you've been brainwashed by society telling you that the only good people dress in bright colors." As he speaks in a somewhat sad tone, as proof of his faith, he pulls out a silver cross necklace with a stone in the center that I've never seen before.

I turn away, hiding the pink coming into my cheeks. One right after the other, he's shown me two things I never knew about before.

Almost like reading my thoughts he declares, "It's Morganite. It will change either pink or brown depending on how much sun it gets. And don't worry about the faith thing. I get it all the time."

This is the king of awkward silences, so I try to break it. "So, you like Linkin Park?"

He snorts, "That's like asking me if I breathe. Yes, I love Linkin Park. They put on a good show." By his joking manner, I can tell he's already put it behind him.

"You've been to one of their concerts?"

He nods excitedly, "Snagged some tickets over the summer. It was awesome!"

"Lucky! My mom HATES metal. She doesn't think it's 'satanic' or anything, but she doesn't want me to 'get into that scene.' Which sucks, because I really want to.'"

"What about your dad? What does he think of it?"

Taken aback, I try to find words. I don't even know if he's alive or not. Anything I know about him was information I gathered from the other mothers of the neighborhood since my mother is very secretive when it comes to my father. She keeps no pictures of him and whenever I asked how come I didn't have a daddy as a child, she would get angry and say, "Roxas, it doesn't even matter what happened to your dad, he's not here and that's all you need to know."

"All I know about him is that his name was Sora, he looked kind of like me in an older version and that he and my mom were friends as kids," I finally manage.

Axel's turn to feel uncomfortable, "I'm sorry, I didn't know."

I shrug as I say, "It's okay, it doesn't bother me. It's hard to miss something that you've never known."

I feel a presence next to me. Gazing up, my eyes are struck by the most beautiful shade of green. In my chest, my heart skips a beat and I forget to breathe.

I know he's not used to opening up, for his voice shakes slightly as he says, "I know what you mean. I never knew who my parents were and I never had much of a childhood. I was just dropped off at an adoption agency one day. All I know about my parents is that my mom loved Guns and Roses, which is why my name is Axel. I don't know anything about my dad. I don't even know if either of them are alive or not."

All of a sudden, I act on my random urge to pull Axel closer to me and rest his head in the crook of my neck, so my head can rest on his. The smell of bacon wafts into my nose, which I assume is from his hair. I need to ask him about that later. What does this guy use? Bacon shampoo? Or just slathers bacon all over himself?

His continued speech startles me and brings me back down to Earth from my thoughts. "I moved from foster to foster until Saix decided to take me in. He's a single guy, so he has a lot of women over, and since I didn't really want to burden his social life or hear the bed shaking, no one should ever have to hear their bosses bed shake." His breath ruffles my shirt with every word.

"He's your boss? Where do you work?"

"Quasimodo, that goth-ish store in town. I can get you a job there, if you want. The people are really nice, you can wear whatever you want and it pays pretty well."

"Sounds good!" Even if the people were assholes, the uniforms were dorky and the pay was crap, I would probably work there. I can't help but have a deep longing to be around Axel, even though I haven't been around him more than a few minutes.

He breaks from my embrace, all the pain wiped off of his face. A devious smile crosses his lips, "You know what we have to do to celebrate?"

I say what I have always wanted to, after being pent up inside Kairi's health food haven for so long."Get assloads of Monster and stuff our faces with SmartFood popcorn and Snickers?"

He looks at me with wide eyes and his mouth open agape. "I...love...you." I blush, but laugh to take attention away from my red face.

After rummaging through the closet on his side, he pulls out a shiny, black helmet that covers your entire head and throws it at me.

Blinking and trying to react quickly, I catch it. "What's this for?"

"You'll see..." he says, grinning from ear to ear and a fire burning in his eyes.

A/N: I swear this is like the 10th time I've edited this chapter. I just want it to be perfect and I'm not sure if I have it right. So, this may not be the last time. If anyone would like to Beta for me, that would be great! I need someone to help me get my ideas out. T.T

As for Cromwell Academy, I was trying to think of a name for a ritzy academy that doesn't have a religion attached to it. It was originally Merriweather Academy, but one day, I was in English and someone did a project with a poem by someone with the last name of Cromwell. I was just taken aback by the name. I liked the sound of it and the fact that it was from poet added to my love of it. So, if someone used the name in one of their stories or if it's an actual school, it was purely a coincidence.

And there really are high schools with dorms in them, by the way! There's a private school in my town that does. You all may have known that, but I know I wouldn't have known that if I didn't live in my town.