Rating: K+
Summary: The sunsets in Twilight Town blaze red and Olette has irresistibly green eyes. AkuRoku, Olette/Roxas
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I own nada. Zip. Zero. Zilch. D:
Sunset Horizons
~o~
There is something completely breath taking about watching the sun linger on the horizon of Twilight Town, dipped just barely below the ground and still enough to light the town in a warm, golden glow. Roxas comments on this, once, watching the hues of red, orange and yellow trace shapes in the sky above the Clock Tower. Hayner leans back – it's just the two of them now, Olette and Pence having left for the night – and licks the last traces of Sea Salt Ice-cream from his lips.
"I guess," he says, swinging himself forward (Hayner's always restless, burning with bundled energy and Roxas is just waiting for him to explode) and somehow manages to not fall off the edge. Roxas has long-ago decided not to wonder about gravity when it comes to their edge-of-the-world hideaway. "It's just a sunset, though. You've seen it every day for your whole entire life, haven't you?"
Roxas scrambles in his mind and thinks he can remember spending fifteen years in the cozy embrace of twilight. The feelings are muddled, feeling oddly nostalgic and sweet like caramel – sticky and full and hard to breathe through. He shrugs, lacing his fingers together. "Yeah."
His best friend grins and for a brief second, Roxas thinks how his best friend's smiles are all teeth and stretched lips and nothing like his own soft, small grins. Even Pence's smiles are wide and full of joy and meaning. "See you tomorrow," Hayner says, slapping the boy on the shoulder in good-bye as he gets up. He turns to leave and Roxas can hear his footsteps echoing on the stairs in the silence of the evening, marking his descent.
He turns back to watch the sun hovering just above the Earth, bathing them all in a translucent glow, and thinks that Olette (with her giggles and knowing eyes and pink lips) has a smile that sometimes stretches on for miles and he can see glimpses of pearly white teeth hiding behind the flesh. It sends a shudder through his spine, this shark-like smile and her twinkling eyes and accounts it to be a Girl Thing.
He sees a smile without a face in his dreams telling him stories in words he can't hear, and wakes up clutching at his sheets to the blazing red of the sky outside.
Olette walks in on him one lazy day while he's still in bed, hesitating before his door before she pushes it open. She never wants to admit it but the sight before her eyes (maybe, sort of, completely) takes her breath away – the golden of Roxas' hair bleeds onto the pillow with the shadows of the sky outside, his limbs all tangled up in the sheets and his lips parted slightly open as he sleeps. She just stands there rooted to the spot, thinking oh God, this boy is beautiful and she's known this fact before; the way heads follow Roxas as he walks down the street, the whispers and longing glances of students in their high school, and even her own lurching heart when he stares straight at her with his lose-yourself eyes, making her knees go weak.
She doesn't know how long she stands there for, gazing at this boy who looks like something out of a fairytale as he shifts in his sleep. Slowly, as the light moves across his face, he blinks open one eye, chasing the last tendrils of sleep away – he doesn't seem surprised to see her in his room (she chalks it up drowsiness) and there's a silence between them, heavy in the air, before she giggles and tries not to lose herself in his blue, bluer than the sky outside eyes.
"You look like a sunset," she blurts out, flushing. He stares at her, silent at the uttered words, and she wonders for a second if he even heard her. Then, slowly, his lips curl up into an amused smile and he sits up, shifting his weight onto one arm as he leans on it.
"Thank you," he says, and Olette knows in the way only women do that his eyes are focused on something that she can never see.
Roxas dreams of sitting at the Clock Tower with a bitter taste in his mouth (he thinks it might be Sea Salt Ice-cream, but the taste is all wrong) and the person whose smile he sees in his recurring nightmares crouches next to him. In the way only dreams allow he can't force his head to turn to face this stranger head on, and the smile chuckles as if it knows what he's thinking. It speaks – gibberish words that promise answers that he never understands – and the hot breath against his neck sends a tremor down his body.
His hands are clammy in the gloves he's wearing and he can't glance down to see why he's wearing gloves in such hot weather, either, and he thinks the dream-him is kind of an idiot. The scene takes its course and he wonders what he had for dinner as the smile rambles on, sounding low and throaty next to his ear. He almost wants to call it seductive but laughter breaks him from his distracting train of thought and he finally turns in the direction of the voice – the person is unbelievably close to him, so close that his forehead has the sensation of bumping against another as he stares into green, green eyes.
"If you keep staring at that sunset, you might just get whisked away," the eyes and the smile making his heart freeze suddenly purr, and he's so surprised that he finally understands that he's pulled out of his dream-world.
Light beams flicker against his skin and he almost groans in despair, (but his senses are on alert and he can sense another person in the room, why the hell is A—) but a floorboard creaks, ever so quietly and he looks up into the eyes of his best friend.
The girl's tanned skin flushes at his gaze, and her words – "You look like a sunset." – make something inside him churn. He gazes into her green (jade, emerald, bottle green, sea green,) eyes and feels traces of the smile's breath at the nape of his neck, invisible hands curling in his mane of golden hair.
"Thank you," he says back in answer (because it's only polite, and what is Olette doing with the smile's eyes anyway?) and swears he can see a gangly figure in the shadows of his bedroom.
"I want you to kiss me," Olette says to him one day at their Hideout. Hayner and Pence have gone out for something or the other (he thinks he caught Seifer's name in there somewhere) and when he turns to face his best friend in surprise, he can see the determination it took for her to say those words scattered freely across her face.
He wants to say no, because she's his best friend and he's definitely not interested, but he opens his mouth and says, "Okay." Her hand on his arm as she moves closer sends nothing of the hot shock he thought he'd feel, and his insides are frozen as she closes her eyes and leans in.
Olette's lips are soft against his and a small part of him imagines he's kissing the other person with her mirror eyes, and wonders why he expected the kiss to taste like ashes. He doesn't feel anything, and when Olette moves back, there's an odd sort of smile on her face as she watches him.
"I see," she says, brunette bangs falling across her face, and Roxas can't say anything to comfort her.
He sits on the roof of his house one day – morning, afternoon, evening, night, he feels like he can never tell anymore, trapped in this everlasting world of orange and yellow and red. The orange sky is blinding above him as he watches the clouds move sluggishly around the atmosphere, barely touching with the waning sun. Crimson bleeds out in vibrant fingers across the heavens and there's a melancholy sort of piece within him, making him think of rain and what the stars look like when they're immersed in darkness and the moon. He realizes he's never been outside of Twilight Town before.
He rolls onto his stomach and gazes down into the streets, watching the passing by people loitering below. A deep sigh escapes him, and he thinks – it's summer vacation soon, isn't it? Maybe he can hitch a ride somewhere outside, or make enough money to catch a train ride to the nearest city.
"No one would miss me," he mutters to himself, trying to sound convincing. He's not thinking of Olette and Hayner and Pence because those three have each other, and a sort of longing calls for him to escape for a while. "No one would miss me." He repeats, just for himself.
There's a whisper of wind over the cobblestone pavement, and his ears pick up the faintest of sounds – "I would," someone calls, and Roxas decides that it's just his imagination trying to guilt-trip him into staying.
That night, he dreams of his body burning and the smile at his ear flickering, flickering, turning into noisy static. BzzzZZzzzzztttt his mind echoes, and he wakes up with the most awful goddamn headache ever.
Later that day, as he and Olette wait in line to buy ice-cream for all four of them, he catches himself turning to her and says, "You have very pretty eyes." He grins, because indeed, the color makes him think of Twilight Town's grass shimmering on the hills in the summer and of his favourite stuffed dinosaur he received when he was seven.
Olette smiles in answer, flattered. "We should visit the beach this summer," she suggests, and Roxas nods, wondering if the waters will be just as green as her eyes.
The skies blaze red against her silhouette as she orders at the cart, and Roxas takes a step back to watch from afar. He thinks that there's nothing else he'd rather be doing this summer.