The why-are-you-making-me-do-this-again disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts. Really.
A/N: Yes, another one-shot ^^". Hammered out last night and this morning. I might come back and revise it sometime in the future, but the plot bunny was trapped and I just had to let the poor thing out!
Reviews make plot bunnies (and authors) very, very happy.
"We don't have an eternity to realize our dreams, only the time we are here"
- Susan Taylor
The sky was a wide, open azure on Friday morning, which Roxas observes from his favorite spot atop the local clock tower. It's hell to get up there – eleven flights of stairs that are without ventilation – but Roxas figures his legs could use the exercise and it's worth it when he steps out and takes that first breath of delicious sky-air. Sometimes a low flying cloud will pass. He'll reach out and touch it, and his inner child always felt giddy, because he was touching a cloud.
This is how Axel finds him when he goes to clean the clock face.
"Holy fuck," he says, caring very little about blasphemy, "It's cold up here."
Roxas, stunned to here the sound of another person's voice, whips around and stares at the man with bright green eyes and a mess of red hair. Axel, equally shocked, stares back. The last thing he'd expected when the window-washing company that so graciously pays his bills (in return for a life of staring into people's windows) had given him this job was to find a cute blonde kid on top of the tower.
It almost, kind of, makes it worth it.
"You, uh…" Roxas says, clearing his throat. "You should bring a jacket next time."
"Yeah, no shit." He pauses for the length of exactly one heartbeat. "I'm Axel. Got it memorized?"
"Roxas."
"What're you doing up here, Roxas?"
"This is my spot. I come here every day." He smiles, and Axel thinks it's the most serene smile he's ever seen. What is this kid, Buddha?
"Oh. I don't. I mean, obviously." He pauses again, feeling a little sheepish. "See, here's the thing about big clocks. They look all pretty and antique and all, but they get kinda dirty being exposed to the elements like they are, so someone's gotta clean 'em. Today, that's me."
So Axel cleans the clocks and talks to Roxas about manual labor with great, obscene hyperbole, and Roxas laughs in this adorable way and listens to everything he says. Axel thinks the kid would be a great therapist.
"Hey, Axel?" He says, as Axel is heading for the stairs.
"Yeah?"
"You should come back sometime. I mean, when you don't have to clean the clock."
"Yeah. Okay."
.x.
The next time Axel comes, off the clock, he brings a jacket.
The time after that he and Roxas touch a cloud.
.x.
The fifth time, Roxas brings sea-salt ice cream, which he thrusts eagerly into Axel's hand, insisting that it's 'like heaven in your mouth'.
Axel takes a bite. It's delicious, sweet and salty all at once.
"It blends well with the taste of the air up here, don't you think?"
"Yeah." He agrees. Roxas has a way with words, and Axel just has a lot of them, so from then on he starts depending on Roxas to articulate the things he can't quite get out right.
.x.
The fifteenth time Axel meets Roxas on the clock tower, Roxas coughs into his hand and it comes away bloody. Axel stares, panics, reaches for his phone. Roxas stops him.
"Axel," he says, "I have cancer."
.x.
The twentieth time, Roxas tells Axel that when the pain gets too much to bear, he thinks he'll just step off the edge of the tower, so that his last sight may be falling through the sky.
.x.
The thirtieth time, they kiss inside a cloud, and they get damp and cold, except they laugh so hard into the kiss that they can't be bothered about it. They kiss until Roxas coughs and Axel tastes the tang of blood on his lips.
.x.
Their first time is in Axel's shoebox apartment on the bad side of town. There are roaches and the occasional rat, cracks in the ceiling and a leaky roof, but Roxas doesn't seem to mind. His eyes have the soft hue of observation as he takes in the environment in which Axel lives.
They watch old sitcoms on the fuzzy television screen, snuggled together. When the Mad About You marathon ends, Axel kisses Roxas furiously until they are both hot and hard and then Axel is watching strains of sweat slide down a tan body and trying not to think of the disease eating it up from the inside.
The cry Roxas makes at the climax is the sweetest song he's ever heard.
.x.
"You know," Roxas says, dangling his legs over the edge of the tower. "I think I've done everything I was supposed to do." The look he gives Axel is meaningful. Axel feels it in his heart as he studies the fine but sturdy line of Roxas' jaw.
The clock lets out six even chimes. Roxas looks at the hands, stands up, touches the clock face and looks like a child understanding there's something much bigger than themselves.
"I'm not afraid of time anymore." He says quietly.
.x.
The fiftieth time it is raining, and Axel finds Roxas with his head tilted back in exaltation and his arms open as if embracing the world.
.x.
Axel notices how thin Roxas has gotten, and how the color in his cheeks has faded. "Could I visit you sometime? I mean, when you're in the hospital."
"Axel." He says, voice even. "I stopped taking treatment before I even met you, and I won't start again. My time is my time. I'm ready."
And this makes Axel so angry that he stalks home and tears his apartment apart; he throws dishes at the wall and overturns a kitchen table, smokes a pack and a half of cigarettes in three hours and thinks about how much Roxas would hate that. He's angry because Roxas is dying. He's angry because Roxas won't fight, fight for life, fight for love. Angry, because Roxas has accepted his fate, something he's never been able to do.
That night, he cries for the first time since he was twelve.
.x.
The sixtieth time, Axel brings the ice cream and lets Roxas lean against him as they watch the sky fade from red to black.
"Axel."
"Yeah, Rox?"
"I love you."
.x.
Axel never asks Roxas how he feels, because he's afraid to know the answer.
.x.
The seventy-fifth time, Roxas is too weak to climb eleven flights of stairs, so Axel carries him on his back.
.x.
The ninety-third time, it hurts Roxas to talk, so they have a conversation with their eyes.
.x.
And on the one-hundredth time they meet on the clock tower, Axel watches his blue-eyed angel stand on the ledge and wants to plead for more time, but Roxas is not afraid of time and he is in pain and when you love something, you let it go.
Roxas spreads his arms, leans back, and falls.