"Hey, um, can I ask you a question?"
The man bent over a standing desk littered with leaves looked up. "May I help you?" he asked, flicking a lock of pink hair out of his eyes with hands concealed with garden gloves and grasping pruning shears.
"Yah…" the original man said, looking around the shop with some observational awkwardness. Tall, with outrageously spiked and vividly red hair, and decked out in skatepunk finery- cropped vest over a graphic tee, checkered vans and belt, and the skinniest of jeans clamped firmly around his shapely buttocks. And all of this stood inside a placid green shop, small and circular, and covered from floor to ceiling with plants of all colors and species. Fair pink orchids and ruddy ferns, arranged by light daises and the plucky little aspen, wisteria climbing to the florescent lights hanging above, all around him. He felt extremely out of place. Axel in a pansy shop. Who'd have thunk it?
He looked back to the employee, who was brushing slivers of snipped sunflower leaves from the front of his logo ("13th floor Flowers" written in white script around the image of a scythe cutting down a rose) -emblazoned apron.
"Well, so I want to get some flowers-" Axel started up again.
The employee rolled his eyes, "No, really? Lucky you wandered in here!"
Axel ignored the sarcasm, plowing onwards with a slightly raised voice, "I want to buy some flowers, but I don't know what I ought to get. I'm not… this isn't something I do much." He rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly.
'I really ought to do things like this more often,' he thought to himself, 'He's such a sweet boy… I'm not good enough to him. I should be buying him flowers just because of him, not just because-'
"Well what is it you're buying the flowers for?" the man asked suddenly, interrupting his thoughts, "Is this décor for a party? Or a gift?"
"It's for my boyfriend," Axel clued him in. His tone was guarded, defensive, as it usually was when he mentioned his boyfriend. A person had to be careful.
But the man only nodded, going on unperturbed, "Well romantic flowers, then." He started walking out from behind the desk, striding over to the racks of flowers.
Axel could have slapped himself: a man, with pink hair, working in a flower shop, and with that walk! No need to worry about him flipping out over a pair of boyfriends.
He stopped and gestured to a stand of flowers. All sorts of roses greeted him, a rainbow of romance. The employee flitted a hand over the diverse colors.
"They mean different things," he clued Axel in, studying the flowers rather than the customer, "Yellow… for friendship." 'That's out,' Axel thought at once.
"White… for innocence." 'Psh. I'm not that cruel.'
"Blue… for people chemically altering flowers," he turned around and smirked, checking to see if Axel got the joke. He did, and smiled, and the placated man moved on to more decoding. "And of course, red, for romantic love."
"That's the one!" Axel said, gesturing and nodding immediately. "I'll take a dozen! How much?"
The man seemed to be having some secret joke with himself as he named a price- and Axel cringed. Ouch.
"That much?" he demanded, "For some plants?"
"That's what they all say," the pink haired man sighed, "Roses aren't cheap."
Axel started to run fingers through his hair, only to be stopped by the stuff crunch of thick hair gel. Damn.
'I want to make him happy… after all I've done to him, he deserves it. But I'm a bartender! I don't have the cash for something like this. But- but-'
He looked at the roses, and then thought on the last weekend. "Fuck."
The guilt! Oh the guilt! He'd been messing around for, oh God, months now.
Sora… oh, Sora.
Axel had met him ages ago. On the job, of course. Axel tended bar at this club- 'Never Was'- and Sora had sauntered in one night. Well, not so much sauntered. More, tip-toed, nervous, skittish, glancing around like a kid messing around in the 'off limits' closet that every house seemed to have. Underaged. Axel could spot one a mile away. And he knew the law. He was required to report the kid. But he empathized. And he hadn't ordered anything bad yet. Axel figured that as long as he could keep the boy talking, rather than sipping, the less illegal it would be. Maybe he could get him to leave it well enough alone.
But it was a slow night, and the more the boy talked, the more Axel felt himself drawn in.
Sora was a runaway. He'd left an empty and family-less home with his two best friends, Kairi and Riku. But those two had quickly taken up with one another, and gotten into some things that the still largely innocent Sora didn't want to mess with. Now Kairi, he said, was more or less a pointless lump. And Riku was horrible, mean and hanging around with all the wrong people.
Sora didn't know what to do. He was alone, and so he'd thought that maybe he ought to try what everyone else seemed to be trying: get something strong and drink it off.
Axel felt for him. He really did. He'd had all too similar of a time when he was a teenager. It had just been a mess. He'd been so lucky that his best friend had stuck by him, and gotten him this job. He wondered sometimes what he would have done if Saix hadn't been there, and what if he'd never met Xemnas? (Xemnas owned the Club that Never Was, and had been Saix's boyfriend and Axel's employer for years now.)
His heart went out to this lost, confused teenager. And so he'd invited him home- only as a place to crash, of course.
Well, one night of crashing had turned into a week… which turned into a month… which turned into two months… and before either knew it, they were sharing a bed and shopping for groceries.
And it was great! Axel loved Sora, loved him so much. He was still a bit young for him, but it was legal by now, and anyway, after two years together, they were clearly not just a fling.
But, sure as a seven-year-itch, Axel had started to grow restless. He found his eyes straying, and his mind wandering.
And then along came the other boy. Roxas. Damn. He and Sora could have been brothers, for how similar they looked. But they were so different at the same time. Where Sora was sweet, Roxas was sexy. Where Sora gentle, Roxas was passionate. Where Sora was vanilla, Roxas was… freaky.
Axel went in for a taste, and became addicted. He wanted him, he wanted more of him. All the time. He couldn't get him off his mind- couldn't take it! Even when he was with Sora, all he could think was Roxas.
And so the affair had crept up on him, much as his original relationship had, and a one time thing turned into a three-month long affair, and counting.
Axel was so guilty. And so obsessed.
He opened his eyes, looking back at the man in the apron. "Ok. I'll pay it."
The man nodded, and went back to ring him up.
'There go my car repairs…'
† † †
As the redhead left the building, he thanked the flamer and started down the street. The pink haired man stood at the door, watching him leave.
"Hey, sweetie," called a light voice, and its owner skipped up the stairs to the door. A young girl, very blonde, in a white sundress and sandals. She stood on her toes to kiss the taller man on the cheek, and he wrapped an arm around her.
"Who was he?" she asked, nodding to the man walking away.
"Another guy cheating and regretting it," he laughed, knowing he'd seen it all before.
"Another? Why don't they just do what we do and open it up?" the girl tutted knowingly.
"I don't know, love, I just don't know," he said as they turned and started back inside, "Speaking of which, did you tell Vexen we need more cereal?"
† † †
Guilt gnawed at his insides as Axel walked up the street. A chain jangled, looped from his belt, attached to a now-empty wallet (a dozen red roses hurt!), and the flowers themselves were tucked gently under his arm.
'I ought to tell him,' he lamented nervously, 'I really, really should. Ah- but he'll be so hurt! I don't want him to hurt because of me…'
Ignore the fact that Sora already WAS hurting because of him. He just didn't know it yet.
Three months of the affair, and the primary victim remained without a clue. It tore at Axel's innards, sure as red hot claws raking at his stomach. It hurt him to know how much he was (or ought to have been) hurting Sora.
'At least if I tell him it will be out in the open. At least then he'll know. What if he hates me because of it? But what if he leaves me? I don't know if I could stand that. After I've come to need him so much…'
In the space of two short years, a mere blip on the world scale, Axel already was incapable of imagining life without Sora. He could not recall how he functioned without his young love and lover, and a future without him seemed incompressible.
But he was hurting him so badly with this. The least he could do would be to tell him. After all of this, he at least owed him some honesty, didn't he?
Honesty is the best policy. Unless it left him all alone…
Axel was biting the inside of his cheek as he rounded the corner. He felt overheated and strange; odd, as he'd been keeping such a cool head in the face of all of this. He'd actually been doing a bang-up job of keeping himself seeming absolutely normal while he'd been philandering. But he felt almost ill as he trotted up the three flights of stairs that would take him to their apartment.
'I'll tell him,' he decided as he started the final stretch from the stairs door down the long hall to their home, 'Just… not yet. I'll try to break it off with Roxas first, then I'll tell him… just… not yet.'
He needed one more time. One more night with Roxas. Then he'd be done. Totally quit. For good. Honestly. Really.
Really?
He tried to hide the fact that he was wavering from himself as he inserted his sharpied key into the lock and turned it, making the door click softly and open without a creek.
The man stepped inside, shutting the door behind himself with another light click sound as he glanced around. Hmm… empty, apparently. At least the front room was. And the kitchen, too, from what Axel saw from the door-less frame to the next room. But the television was on. That was odd- it wasn't like Sora to leave things running. (The childlike cartoons, however, were all him: endearingly immature. They made Axel smile to himself, even now that the quirk was old habit.)
'He's probably in the bathroom gelling his hair more, or grabbing something from our room,' he figured with a shrug.
"Love?" he called, shifting his grip on the roses, fixing the paper where it had crumpled in his hand, "Sora?"
With a charming smile sliding into place on his countenance, Axel headed for the back two rooms. The bathroom door was wide open, so that was clearly out. But the door to their bedroom was shut.
'Maybe he's fallen asleep…?' Axel wondered to himself. But he opened the door all the same.
"Sora, darling, I-" he froze, door half open but enough to make the insides of the room obvious. Sora. In bed. Not napping.
The door swung open wider of it's own accord, giving Axel the complete picture:
His boyfriend, in bed, naked and sweating as he was latched in a death-close grip with another man. He was panting, moaning some name as he faced the door, eyes tightly closed. But with the rush of cooler air from the open door, his eyes snapped wide. The color drained from his face as he saw Axel.
"Sora," Axel said, horrified.
"A-axel," Sora replied, pushing his lover away quickly, scrambling to wrap himself in the sheets. "I-I didn't- you're home early! Oh God…"
"Sora…" he repeated, not knowing what else to say, what else to think.
The blonde with whom Sora had been in bed turned around.
His first action was not, as one might expect a discovered lover, grabbing his clothes and running. Instead, he winked. "Hey there, sexy."
Axel froze.
"Roxas?"