I do not plan on sleeping or eating until I finish writing this. Let's see how coherently this will end.
FACT: THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO DOCUMENTED CASES OF PEOPLE HANGING THEMSELVES FROM A TREE BRANCH AND NO ONE NOTICING BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT THEY WERE A HALLOWEEN DECORATION.
There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. Axel Ninguém was his name, don't wear it out. Though his best friend, his only friend really, would raise an eyebrow and smack him up the head whenever he presented himself as such. Ninguém wasn't his real surname, you see, and, as Roxas put it, "You're not even Portuguese, man!"
ooo
It was a Sunday and Axel had been the first to arrive at the blonde's appartment, just before lunch, and Roxas' mother, a divorced seamstress who'd tailored all of Roxas' clothes, let him in with a warm smile. "Hello Axel. How ever do you do?" she asked as she received the psychedelic monstrosity Axel spent all morning preparing.
"Not too bad Ma'am, and yourself?"
"Oh, just preparing some tea. Would you like a cup?"
Axel, by reflex, wrinkled his nose. Roxas' mother always bought cheap tea imported from Wonderland and sometimes even from the Land of Dragons. The redhead once found a tin full of sawdust, dried and pow-dered hay, grass-seed, and departed but un-lamented insects. Moral – buy good tea, or go without. So Axel went without and respectfully declined the offer with a "No thankyou Ma'am."
"Roxas is still in his room Axel honey," she said stepping towards the kitchen, carefully carrying the psychedelic happy cake (but Roxas' mother wasn't to know that, shh,) that resembled unicorn vomit (afterall, Axel had made sure to use every colour in his food dye set) with the words "Happy 18th Birthday Rox-Ass" and underneath "You're finally non-jailbait buddy" all written in thick white frosting.
"He's slept through the whole morning!"
Chuckling, Axel walked over to his friend's room and burst in uncaring if he caught the boy in his birthday suit or not. "Happy birthday Blond-" but the words died on Axel's lips as he took in the scene. Roxas was quietly sitting on his bed, hunched over his crossed legs, dressed only in his Jack Skellington boxers, hands palm up resting on his knees, head bent over, blonde hair obscuring his face from view. Axel went rigid as he took in the thick cord knotted from a hook on the ceiling to his friend's neck.
It was taut.
ooo
"Axel, are there really that many ways to hang yourself?"
Both boys were sitting on the edge of the clock tower, overlooking the quiet town people tranversed but rarely stayed in. The sun was setting and bathed them in the dying rays of summer.
"Hmm. The people here are really superstitious about hanging. Some people believe that hanging yourself while sitting or lying down makes you immortal."
Roxas looked pensive, "But how can you hang yourself while sitting?"
"It's simple. Look, my hand is the rope around your neck. Simply, when sitting..." Axel placed his hand behind his neck, arm wrapping around it, "...you bow, the knot tightens from the weight, but you stay balanced. And you'd have to make sure that the rope is short enough to exert the necessary force on the windpipe. By the time your survival reflexes kick in, standing up may not be an option."
"And it's horrors like this that you study everyday?" Axel snorted and Roxas scowled in return, kicking his left foot forward and watching his flip flop come off and plummet through the air, twirling down to its target, whatever that may be. "I do not want to talk of this again, okay?"
"Roxas? Does it make you afraid of dying?"
"No. I do not care about living, but I have no reason to die. If I had a good reason... maybe... maybe I could die."
Axel felt creeped out at how serious his best friend sounded, a weird premonition settling heavy in his toes, weighing his legs down. Clearing his throat he decided to label it as paranoia induced by the vertigo of being perched so high up and babbled on without thinking, "It scares me. I read all this because I want to understand. But in the end, I've learned nothing. Roxas, what reason would you die for?"
Roxas never replied. A real saintly hypocrite.
ooo
Axel had stayed mute and staring, eyes never blinking, at the corpse of his best friend. He'd never be able to tell you how long he stood there but his eyes were dry by the time the doorbell rang and Roxas' friends from highschool came in laughing and talking loudly, footsteps heading to the blonde's room. The noise died down. Axel started when he felt someone brush past him and he exited the room, heading for the kitchen as a buzzing started, someone crying out "Roxas? Roxas?! What's wrong, why aren't you reactin– ROXAS?!" Axel walked into the kitchen, trying to put a distance between him and the buzzing, the angry wasps that would bite and sting, as Roxas' mother ran past him to her son's room. Approaching the happy cake Axel started stuffing it by the handfull into his mouth, choking and gagging, desperately trying to get a high, for this to be a bad dream.
Someone screamed.
ooo
The redhead had stayed in that kitchen long after the guests left, long after the police and paramedics had come and gone, comforting Roxas' mother without really meaning it, his entire being numb, mind blank.
A complete zombie.
Sometime between Roxas' mothers weeping dying down to a shallow breathing in and out and Axel heading out the door and tripping down the stairs, sometime in between those two moments, Axel had laid down in his best friend's bed, the bed in which he'd died, and fingered the cracks on the wall as he thought about Roxas: Roxas tying the rope around his neck, Roxas struggling for breathe, Roxas twitching as his body slowly shut down, Roxas, Roxas, Roxas, (did he have any regrets? any last words? did he feel any panic as he realised this was the end, that he was never coming back?) Roxas fucking dying while Axel was in some dirty alleyway fucking a blonde girl he'd picked up hard against a wall with the words "God died tonight" graffitied in black spray paint. Axel felt the bile rising up his throat and promptly threw up ove the edge of the bed and quickly exited the room.
ooo
Roxas had commited suicide on that crisp October day, ("Autumn is, like, the decay of summer, man." he'd always say,) and with Roxas gone, Axel had no reason to stay here. That night he left Tranverse Town and he never came back. Needless to say, Axel hadn't bothered attending the funeral.
