A/N: Slightly edited for grammatical errors and reposted for your viewing pleasures. Only because Axel makes a delightful pedophile and Roxas is perfect jail-bait.

Solar Plexus
By: Castles

I'm sitting behind him on the bank of the dazzling creek, watching him run his fingers gently through his flaxen spikes as he tries to comb out the moisture to prevent frizz. It's summer time and the humidity is thick enough to hack with a saw, so it's no wonder the both of us had lost most of our clothes hours before and were now sunbathing in our boxers. I can't help but to trace the muscles in his back with my lingering gaze, resisting the substantial urge to run my hands over every inch of his pubescent body.

He's just so fucking beautiful.

"What are you thinking about, Axel?" He asks me suddenly, as if he can read minds.

How I'm just some sick pervert who fantasizes about your skin against mine, I think wearily to myself. However, I just reply with, "Nothing, really."

He picks at the blades of grass beneath him and smiles that pristine smile that just emphasizes the sheer innocence he possesses in every fiber of his being. That purity and incorruptibility that I admire so much, transfigured into a being of exuding aesthetic appeal. I can't help but to smile too. It's just contagious, y'know—that boy's smile.

"When you go away to college," his grin fades as he begins, "I'm going to miss you terribly. You have to promise to write me every day. I want hundreds of your words in an envelope. Hundreds of words that mean something."

"Only if you write back," I say with a halfhearted laugh.

"And I want pictures too. Tons of them."

As every pedophile probably acclaims about their underage victims, Roxas is unlike any one of his age group. His articulacy and mindful vernacular is way before his time, and the unintentional symbolism he radiates can put even the greatest poets to shame. It's not too hard to forget he's only fourteen sometimes. It's not too hard to forget how unhealthy my attachment is to him.

"Pictures, eh? I don't have a camera."

"Then draw me some."

"You know I can't draw," I mumble.

"Oh, please. You can do anything you set your mind too." And with that he stands up and stretches before turning around and facing me with sunburned cheeks and chapped lips. He smirks and plops right in my lap, albeit rather unexpectedly. "Now promise me beautiful pictures or I'll squish you to death with my big butt."

"Easy there, tiger. You're like sixty pounds…soaking wet. I can easily pick you up and toss you into the water."

He laughs, and it's a melodious sound. I can feel it reverberate through my lap and to my fingertips. "Psh. You're one to talk. You probably weigh the same as me, if not less. And you're seven years older."

Seven years older. Is that a lot? I sigh, because it's all I can do at this point, and wonder what people think when they see us together. Maybe to the untrained eye, we act just like brothers or close cousins. Or something of a similar facsimile thereof. I mean, it's not like people can just glance in our direction and come to the brash conclusion that I'm hot for a fourteen year old boy. Emphasis on the boy.

"You're doing it again," Roxas says.

"Hm?"

"Thinking."

"Oh."

He adjusts his position and ends up splayed in front of me with his head in my lap. Subconsciously, I reach out and begin running my hands through the soft blond tresses, which have the same texture as down feathers and, presumably, clouds. The figure in front of me is a gem. Nothing more, nothing less. He's the one person that I'd die for again and again and again.

And I always knew that somehow he'd be the death of me anyway.

"Why are you so beautiful?" I whisper into the whirlpool of amber and vandyke reds that is the onset of the evening sky. He looks up with me with those big azure eyes of his, inexplicable like the sudden absence of a star.

He says, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." As if that justified his unprecedented splendor. We watch the sky change colors as the sun dips down beneath the chartreuse hills beyond us, an overwhelming sense of realization over our numbered days together hits me like a Greyhound bus. And I have to hum an off-kilter melody to distract myself from my misanthropic thoughts.

You're wrong, I say in my head, you define the very concept of beauty. You just don't see it.

But I do, and always will.

It was once we had gotten up and gathered our belongings that the comfortable silence between us was broken. As we trudge up the hills in dark, back to our places of residencies, Roxas stops and looks up at me with a businesslike expression plastered on his delicate features.

"I've come to the conclusion that we're angels," he says seriously.

I quirk an eyebrow and give him an incredulous look. "Oh really? How do you figure?"

"I can just feel it, Axel. There's no death, because you and I are angels, disguised as people as to not torture the retinas of the common folk with our substantiated radiance."

"What fortune cookie did you pull that one out of?"

He scoffs and puts his hands on his hips, a pose that makes him appear a lot more immature than he probably realizes. "I'm pouring out my heart and soul for you, Mister Axel. And for your information, it wasn't a fortune cookie. It was an old 80's movie that was on HBO the other night."

"There was nothing good on Cartoon Network?"

"Piss off," he grumbles. But I know he doesn't mean it. "If you're so old and wise, what are you doing hanging out with some kid whose balls just dropped a few months ago, eh? Chris Hansen would have a field day with this."

"Touché, Roxas. But it's not like I'm trying to my dick in your britches or anything. Maybe I just happen to enjoy your company."

He chuckles and bites his lip before shyly looking up at me. "But what if I want your dick in my britches?"

The world momentarily stops spinning as I try to process his obscene words and implication. I give him a hard stare, my eyes straining to define every architectural detail of his body in the murk. I want to yell at him for even joking about that sort of thing, but instead I give him the dirtiest look I can muster, and walk away. I can feel his eyes on me, but I don't even turn back.

When I'm finally home, I stomp pass the kitchen where my mum is prepping dinner, ignoring her usual greeting of, "Welcome home, baby. How was your day?" I don't even stop to pet my cat, Ozzie, when she rubs up against my leg. Up in my bedroom, I plop onto my too-small bed facedown. How dare Roxas say something like that. I'm only human after all.

I'm only human. A human who's twenty-one and in love with a boy who's seven years my junior.

It's difficult to say when exactly the cogs of fate began to turn in my disfavor. In other words, it's hard to remember when I first fell for the little blond-haired, blue-eyed incubus that has my entire solar plexus captivated by his charms and big-boy words nowadays. Sometimes I wonder if he's just fucking with me on purpose, because he knows now how to make me squirm. And I'm just a sinful masochist, being pulled along by my puppet strings because I'm just that enamored.

Or maybe he's the puppet. And I'm just the twisted monster who's been manipulating him since the day five years prior when we had first met.

That was definitely it. I'm just a monster. A monster who's twenty-one and in love with a boy who's seven years my junior.

"Mum, I'm a pedophile," I say with a much undeserved sense of pride as I walk out the front door. I'm not quite sure if she hears me or not, but that's the least of my worries right now. Basking in the faint glow of the streetlamps, I make my way down the empty street on the same exact path I traveled just about every day for five fucking years.

The small yellow house on the corner is quite an eyesore. But it's a comforting sight, to say the least.

I knock twice on the polished heartwood door before it is answered nearly instantaneously by Roxas, almost as if he'd known I was coming; almost as if he'd been waiting.

"Axel," he says in a breathy voice.

"Your parents aren't here?"

He shakes his head and beckons me inside.

His house is quaint and traditional, as if the entire interior had came straight out of an IKEA catalog, and it smells of sterility and citrus. I stand awkwardly in the entryway, looking down at Roxas with an unreadable expression as he leans against the archway to the living room. His eyes look particularly blue under the intense light the CFLs above us give out, like expansive oceans with currents that lead to a forbidden paradise never reached by anyone before.

"I'm sorry about what I said," he says unsurely. "I swear that was the hormones talking."

I shrug and take a step closer to him. "It's okay. I shouldn't have overreacted, I suppose. It's just…" I inhale deeply, "…you drive me so crazy, it's nuts. Sometimes I don't know what to do with myself because I'm just some sick—"

"You're not sick!" He interrupts. "You're the nicest person I've ever met and you actually get me. I'm so dependent on you, Axel. I'm afraid of losing you. Isn't that what love is? Knowing you can't live without that person?"

"You're fourteen, Roxas. No one expects you to know what love is."

"I love you."

"I don't think you do."

"You love me."

"Hardly makes a difference."

He runs into arms, clinging to me as if I were his life buoy, his lifeline. I hug him back with the same fervor and we remain like that for what feels like forever, until I can feel his warm tears permeating the front of my hoodie. He's broken, and I know this. He's been broken for a long time, and all I did was build him up and tell him he's okay.

Complex after fucking complex, we try to build each other up to stay afloat in the flood. When all we do is break each other even more. Two wonderfully flawed monsters taking solace in another's loss of way, radiating the epitome of discontentment.

Our kiss is awkward, but perfect all the same. His chapped lips crushed against mine and his arms encircling my waist. He's on his tippy-toes, and I'm leaning down quite a bit to make up for the drastic height difference—but it's faultless. I know he has no idea what he's doing, but that's okay. Because I have his first kiss.

We pull away and avoid eye contact with one another.

"I'm a pedophile," I murmur into the dead silence of the house.

"Are not," says Roxas.

"How am I not?"

"I'm not just some five year old you lured into your van with promises of candy and video games. I'm not some naïve waif who followed you to help look for your lost puppy. I'm sure I know right from wrong, Axel. You're not a pedophile."

I look down at him and give a half-hearted smile because his sheer presence never fails to make my heart do cartwheels. Defective or not, he's so utterly perfect that I can't stand it. So it's no surprise that I reach down to press my lips against his once more. We fit together so perfectly and I know for a fact he's my better half.

"Four years," I promise after we detach.

"Four years?"

"I have to go, Roxas. But I promise, in four years everything will be alright. But until then…"

He looks as if he'd just been slapped in the face. "Y-you're leaving? Right now?"

"This isn't healthy. I think we both have some growing up to do."

"No…no! This is ridiculous! You can't just waltz into my life and then leave just like that! It isn't always about you, y'know. I have feelings too!"

I sigh. "What do you want from me then, Roxas? We can't be together. Not now."

"Spend the night with me, please."

"I'm not stupid, Rox. We both known what will happen."

He glances around the room, looking for something; an idea, an epiphany, a reason for me to stay. He looks me dead in the eye and points to the butcher block in the kitchen. "If you leave, I swear I will kill myself."

"Don't be so melodramatic," I scoff.

"I'm serious."

I roll my eyes. "You are not. You think much too highly of yourself, and you know it." I grip his chin between my thumb and forefinger and slouch down to his eye level. "If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't—"

"They were never."

"Exactly."

He looks away and pouts like a petulant child and I can't help but to find endearment in the scene. I release my hold on his face and, with the same hand, I reach into the pocket of my jeans for a folded envelope. He watches me conscientiously with a curious expression as I present it to him, and takes no time to take it from my hand.

"Don't open it until I leave," I tell him.

"What's in it?" His voice is small and distant now, and to say it breaks my heart would be an understatement.

I turn to leave but not before casting one final glance over my shoulder. "I promised you a beautiful picture. So I gave you the most brilliant picture in my possession." And with that I make my exit into the dark summer night.

It wouldn't be long until Roxas would tear open that envelope and see the picture I had given was none other than himself. Because he defines the very concept of beauty. He just doesn't see it. But I do, and I always will.

Fin.