A/N: Sorry for the lateness, I'm moving into the dorm room at my college tomorrow so I wanted this finished. Something important I want to point out, if you haven't noticed, is the double meanings that are laced through this story, mainly the term "nobody". If you read the sentence with both meanings in mind, it still works.
Thank you! And reviews are greatly appreciated. You guys motivate me ridiculously so.
"How old were you, when you died?"
The question leaves Axel's mouth before he's prepared and the look he gets from the fragment of a human being next to him shows that the other was hardly prepared as well. A pale finger reaches up to absentmindedly touch his lips before the boy turned to face the redhead properly.
"Well, fuck." The other says, voice flowing like a corpse upstream, which Axel supposes, isn't far from the truth. "I don't really remember."
Axel shuts off the TV that was entertaining the two before shifting on the couch and giving the other a hard look, green eyes moving from the cheap flannel the other male seems to permanently wear, the beat up jeans, the pale skin and blond hair. Axel remembers seeing him for the first time, four weeks ago. He remembers how soft his hair looks but when he reaches out to touch, he grasps at air. It leaves a hollow taste on his tongue and he finds himself holding back the urge once again.
"What do you mean you 'don't remember'? Isn't that some vital shit you need?" The other shakes his head, fingers moving through blond hair, a small look of worry crossing the other's face.
"Yeah, nothing's coming up," is the whispered response, matched by urgency in the next sentence. "I don't remember anything."
Axel's eyebrows rise to attempt to touch his hair before he gets up off the sofa to pump the nearly empty bowl of popcorn away. The ghost -Axel hates using that fucking word- follows him into the kitchen, the twisted look remaining on the other's face. "Not even your name?"
"Nothing." There's a pause where Axel turns to rinse the bowl out in the sink, making sure to remove all the cornels and placing it to dry before he looks the other in the eye again. "Axel," the other croaks, and it's like trees banging against glass, it's terrifying and the shiver it pulls from the redhead has him resting on his heels. "Who am I?"
They've been together for four weeks. Axel first saw him swinging in the park, thought nothing of it. Until he remarked it to Demyx, the two having come to buy ice cream from the local vendor. Demyx gave him the weirdest look, eyes wide before laughing, telling him to stop fucking with him, he can't handle horror films, let alone ghost stories.
It wasn't until that night that Axel realized that nobody was there.
It was like a chain of events erupted from that small encounter. The next week, he's waiting for the bus and so is the boy, all thin body and blue eyes. The first thing Axel notices is how he's underdressed for the harsh winter weather, that red flannel and jeans don't count as cover from the snow. Without meaning to, Axel stood next to him as he waited, and wondered why a dead person would need to get on public transportation. He didn't think he asked out loud but he must have, because soon the blond was sitting next to him on the bus. Nobody moved to sit next him, despite the bus slowly crowding. It was almost as if everyone knew that something was there, whether they believed it or not. Axel shifts awkwardly in his seat and tries to focus on the moving scenery before a voice rings in his ears, clear as day despite the chatter.
"You can see me, can't you?"
Axel didn't verify him with an answer, but a glance and that's all it took before the boy was smiling at him. Axel felt cold.
Four weeks, the boy hasn't left him alone in four weeks. He's there when Axel comes here and there when he leaves, he's in the living room for family movie nights and he pretends to brush his teeth with Axel before bed. It's unnerving but Axel has this great ability to adapt and soon, the ghost was just another part of his life, just as having to go to school every day.
Right now, Axel wonders if he's really adapted. The boy is floating about - something about that thought already agitates him - frantically, and chills erupting in his spine each time he gets close.
"You've never thought of this?"
The question, Axel thinks, lands on deaf ears until he's shocked to hear an answer. "There was never a reason to, I don't fucking know." Axel feels that being eighteen years old, and thus having already wadded through the majority of shit life has to offer someone his age, he has every right to tell the boy to calm down and that really, Axel doesn't care.
"You're not even the least bit curious?"
Axel shakes his head before making his way upstairs, the fleeting temperature close behind before he kicks the door open to his room. There's a groan from his dosing brother across the hall but both ignore it in favor of continuing their earlier conversation.
"Not even the tiniest fucking bit. Look at the facts. You know you're dead. You know you're a male. You know who I am. What does any of that other shit matter to you?"
Something about Axel's indifference must strike a nerve in the blond because soon Axel finds himself alone. He rolls his eyes and mutters something about drama queens and how nobody pays attention to the stupid things. Nobody needs a name, he thinks off handedly. Because nobody wasn't really nobody but rather somebody who used to be a somebody and Axel is tired with this wordplay.
It takes Axel twenty minutes to get out the door, spending five throwing clean clothes on and ten glaring at the blaring discoloration under his eye. The trip to the library is a long one and after trudging through large piles of snow, Axel glares at the records in his hands. The years aren't far, he went back thirty tops. Nobody had to have died in their small town, there's no way he'd haunt it otherwise.
The papers are moist under Axel's frozen fingers and he feels so out of place with the soccer moms and college students. The librarian eyes his hair suspiciously but he shoots her a winning smile and makes his way towards a table. Judging by the boy's clothes, he couldn't be that far behind the times, but then again, Axel remembers his horrid fascination with a flat screen television and groans outwardly. He obviously hasn't died recently. It makes him pause, how nonchalant he's acting about all this. That boy, the ghost, the visible phantom that plagues his days, was once a teenage like him, and he died. He kicked the bucket, fucked out of life. The thought's unsettling and Axel wonders if his fingers were twitching to keep warm or out of something he doesn't understand himself.
He cracks open the records.
He spends three hours there, reading names and dates and places and reasons until the words hurt and Demyx won't stop texting him about some music event. When he returns the book to the front, gives the old lady another crooked smile, Axel feels hollow. Like he's failed a task that only he can do. Nobody doesn't appear before him, though and Axel doesn't see him all night.
There's a sinking feeling in his stomach that he can't quite place.
The morning is loud and Axel nearly fall out of bed in shock when his desk chair flips itself to the ground with a crash. His body slants and soon, he's looking up at the soft face of no one in particular.
"'morning," he greets.
"Ditto," Axel groans out, righting himself and popping his shoulder back into place. He's dying to ask where the other went, what he did, he's a fucking ghost for Christ's sake what could he possibly be doing but the redhead holds his tongue. Instead, he scratches the itch that tickles the back of his scalp.
"Did you find anything?" The thought that the other knew that regardless of what Axel had said the day before, he would still look into it.
"Despite what you and this perfect peaceful world thinks, there's been a bunch of young teenage boy deaths in the last thirty years. Personally, I blame the drug craze."
Nobody rolls his eyes before crossing his legs in the air and Axel feels something akin to jealousy for a moment. "Shit, I wasn't really thinking. Is there some way you can identify me?"
"Blond hair and blue eyes are hardly original this deep in the south."
The boy makes a tsk sound, hanging his head in thought and Axel notes that it almost looks like a noose is what's holding him up.
"Does your body have any scars?" This gets the phantom's attention and soon he's raising an eyebrow at the redhead's direction, looking as if he starting to doubt Axel's intelligence. "You know, like in the movies, a mark showing how you died or some shit."
"How I...died?" Nobody lets his body sink until he's almost standing on the wooden floor. Axel watches him pad himself down, pull up his sleeves, roll up his pants. After a moment, the boy looks up shaking his head. "I'm not finding any. The theory is bullshit."
"Or maybe you died by invisible means."
"How scandalous."
"You know what I mean," Axel groans out, stretching his legs from under him. The boy shrugs his shoulders, obviously giving up on the theory.
"Wait, remember when you first followed me home?"
Nobody rights his office chair and sits in it, or hovers, whatever. "It wasn't that long ago."
"Remember when you first saw my TV?"
The thought strikes the male too and soon they're both standing up. Axel can't tell where this excitement it coming from but the blond ghost is giving him a small giddy smile and it's infectious. "Yeah, I've never seen anything like it."
"What else have you never seen anything of?"
"I've never seen your style of microwaves. Or iceboxes."
"They're called fridges."
"Sure, whatever."
They spend two hours writing a list of all the things Nobody hasn't seen before. They go through even the mundane objects, electric toothbrushes and hand dryers.
It takes Axel another hour at the library to estimate when the boy died, the weary eyes of the librarian narrowing at him as he rushed harshly against worn pages. Axel leaves when the library closes, texting Demyx that he'll be there for the concert. He deserves a moment of peace in a loud place, their first clue already arriving in his hands. Judging by the technology and the time period, nobody had to have died around twenty years ago.
It's cold outside but the cigarette feels warm on his lips and Axel smiles at nothing.