Today was move-in day and Roxas was the only one done.
In the month since Xehanort's defeat; Roxas, Xion, and Axel had been living in the castle at Radiant Garden. They had been invited to live there for as long as they wanted, but after a couple of weeks Axel had started to get antsy.
"It just doesn't feel like home," he said. Roxas was unsure what he meant. Living in that castle felt no different to him from living in the castle that never was. Xion agreed, but that was the problem for her.
"I don't like being here," she admitted to him one night after he had noticed she seemed reluctant to go to sleep. "It reminds me too much of being back there. Every morning I wake up and see the marble ceiling and think I just dreamed everything that's happened and I'm still…" She trailed off, but her expression told him enough.
When Axel brought up the idea of moving to Twilight Town, Xion agreed instantly and Roxas went along with it because he saw no reason to disagree.
It took a while to find a place they could all rent together and get all the legal matters sorted out, apparently Axel had been declared legally dead years ago as Lea and naturally there were no official records of Roxas or Xion. But, with help from King Mickey, the disciples of Ansem the Wise, and an old duck named Scrooge who Roxas didn't know but apparently had a relationship with Sora and his friends along with connections to the higher-ups of Twilight Town, it all got sorted out.
Today was the day they officially moved into the three-bedroom house they were renting. As soon as the keys were in their hands, Axel claimed the westmost bedroom. To make sure the sun didn't wake him up in the mornings, he said. Xion picked the bedroom on the second floor in the front of the house, the one that gave her a view of the neighborhood. She said she liked seeing wide open spaces. So, Roxas took the one that was left and didn't think much of it.
The beds were delivered shortly after they had arrived and the trio assembled each of them together, getting pretty good at it by the time the third had built in Axel's room. Then they put everything away in the kitchen. After that, Axel declared they should each go unpack and put the rest of their rooms together. For Roxas, that just involved him dressing the mattress, hanging up his clothes, and putting a small folding table at the head of his bed. He was done in no time.
He went to Axel's room to ask if he needed help but when the door opened Roxas could see the bed was made, the clothing put away, and the makeshift bedside table put up. But there were still boxes in the room.
"What are those for?" asked Roxas.
"Oh these?" Axel replied as he pat the side of the box he was opening. "Just some stuff to put up on the wall, y'know? I found them while we were shopping for the beds and stuff last week."
"Do you need any help putting them up?" Roxas asked.
"Nah, I'm good," Axel said as he pulled a thing that looked like a wooden torch but filled with a glowing liquid of some kind out of the box. "Thanks though. You might wanna ask Xion if she needs any help, she had way more stuff than me."
Roxas nodded. "Thanks Axel."
"Hey, no problem. Oh, let's get ice cream at around six after all the unpacking is done. I wanna try to find our house from up on the tower."
Roxas agreed and left to go try to help Xion.
"Thanks Roxas, but I really want to make sure my room is just… mine. Does that make any sense?" Xion asked.
It didn't, not to Roxas, but he nodded anyways. Xion's bed and table and even floor had a plastic sheet covering them. The girl herself had a white smock covering her that was stained with blue paint, the same shade as that which crested into facsimiles of waves just above the baseboard. "What's that?" he asked as he noticed a jar of something pale yellow on the desk.
"It's sand and some seashells I found on the beach and cleaned. I want to stick them to the wall on the waves."
Out the corner of his eye, Roxas saw a small pile of shopping bags and boxes. Xion followed his gaze and looked down shyly.
"Umm…," she murmured. "Vexen didn't let me decorate my room in the castle. I guess I went a little overboard, huh?"
"I don't think you're going overboard," Roxas said. Just because he didn't understand that didn't mean he couldn't be supportive. His gaze swept across her room, unfinished waves and cartoony clouds on the ceiling and all. "It looks nice."
Xion smiled softly. "Thanks."
"Oh, Axel wants us to meet up for ice cream at 6. Also something about looking for our house?"
Xion tilted her head to the side in confusion. "But it's right here."
"I don't get it either. I'm sure he'll tell us when we get there."
"Okay. I should be about done by six anyways. Thanks Roxas."
"I'll see you then, Xion."
Roxas went back to the room that had been left over. It felt different.
That wasn't right, it felt the same as before. Just… not right. The blank walls and curtainless windows and big empty space on the floor. When they were building the beds, every room looked the same more or less. Roxas hadn't had a problem with the room looking like this then.
He laid down on the bed and checked the time on the gummiphone he had been given. Hours to go before it was time to meet up.
Roxas didn't feel right doing nothing. It just didn't sit well with him. The first time he had had free time like this, Axel told him to do what he liked.
He thought hard about what it was that he liked to do that he could do alone. Suddenly, he remembered something from his time in the fake Twilight Town.
"Skateboarding was fun…"
Fifteen minutes later he was on a tram heading for Twilight Town's shopping district. He kept his ears open for the announcement of his stop, but other than that he got lost in his own thoughts.
There had been something in Axel's eyes when he had pulled the torch out of the box. Something in Xion's shoulders while they were talking. And something about their rooms. They weren't just the room on the westmost side of the house and the room near the front anymore. They were Axel's room and Xion's room.
Axel's room, Xion's room, and the other room.
"Shopping District. Next stop: Poaceae Park," came the announcement over the tram speakers. Roxas managed to exit the tram without getting too crushed by the flood of people getting on and getting off.
There was a map nearby and he followed its directions to find the skateshop. He couldn't tell the woman behind the counter anything about what type of skateboard he wanted, but she was very professional. After asking him a few questions about what he wanted to do on the board and where he expected to be using it, she showed him a board that looked similar to the one he remembered from the fake town.
He paid for it, filled out a satisfaction survey she handed him, and headed back to the tram stop. Standing at the edge of a crowd of people also trying to leave the shopping center, something caught his attention out the corner of his eye.
~~6:04pm at the clock tower~~
"There it is, you see it?" Axel asked, pointing at a red roof off in the distance with his free hand.
Xion nodded. "That's amazing."
"When I was a kid, me and Isa used to sneak up the castle walls to try and find our houses. There's just something about being able to see your place from so far away."
"Yeah. Oh!" she said as she heard the maintenance door creaking open. "Roxas," she said with a smile over her shoulder.
"You're late buddy," teased Axel as he handed Roxas the ice cream stick he had been holding onto for him.
"Yeah, the first tram at the shopping center got too full and I had to wait for the next one," Roxas said as he leaned his skateboard against the wall behind them and took his seat between his friends.
Xion noticed the small box under his arm. "What's that?"
"Oh this?" He put the ice cream bar in his mouth and held it with his lips as he undid the flap on the box so he could open it. "It's something I saw when I was waiting for the bus to come. See?" He pulled the item in question out of the box, showing it to was a small island head with tissues coming out of its nostril. "It made me happy, so I bought it."
"Let me have a look," said Axel as he held out a hand for it. Roxas handed it over and Axel held it up, turning it and looking it over with a chuckle. "It's pretty funny," he said as he handed it back.
"Thanks." Roxas packed it back into the box and tucked it under his arm once more. "I'm gonna put it in my bedroom."
Axel nodded and the subject changed to Xion pointing out their house to Roxas as they ate their ice cream together.
A/N: In writing this I found out that according to math, if you assume the day off in 358/2 corresponds to christmas which it seems to roughly align with, Roxas' birthday is August 29th and Xion's is September 5th
If this goes over well, I'll try to write some more oneshots about Roxas learning about his new life and himself as a person.