Disclaimer: Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight…I wish I may, I wish I might, that I could own Kingdom Hearts? Please? No? Damn.
A/N: Totally just saw Captain America opening day and I am like, in love. He's been my fictional-character-crush since I was like, seven and now I saw the movie and I just about died. I was all, ACK!
Thanks to everybody who reviewed! You guys made me want to get this chapter out super fast! I wouldn't expect updates this quick in the future, though. Sorry
Enjoy! Review!
Chapter Two: Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes
"So boycott love
Detox just to retox
And I'd promise you anything for another shot at life
Imperfect boys with their perfect lives
Nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy."
- Fall Out Boy, 'Disloyal Order of Water Buffaloes'
Dinner was an awkward affair. Roxas had emerged from his room a while later to find Sora shutting the front door on the pizza guy's retreating back. Precariously poised on his arm were several large square boxes, the top of which proudly declared MARTY'S AUTHENTIC ITALIAN TO GO in bold read letters. At Roxas's questioning look, Sora glanced at the pizza boxes and grinned sheepishly, admitting, "I didn't know what to order, so I just picked out some of my favorites."
Roxas nodded and averted his blue gaze away from the matching one on Sora. "I like cheese," he supplied helpfully.
"Oh." Everything on Sora, from his brunette spikes to his face to his shoulders, seemed to fall slightly. "That's the one kind I didn't get…you never really liked it as a kid, so I just thought…"
"It's, you know, okay," Roxas awkwardly tried to assure his brother. "I like other kinds, too." Not really.
Sora nodded deafetedly, moving towards the kitchen. Following behind, Roxas watched as Sora laid the boxes along one side of the stove and Cloud effortlessly reached above the middle Strife brother to grab three plates from a cabinet above his head. It amazed Roxas just how tall Cloud had become. When the two left, he was a lanky teen lucky to reach five-foot-six with his spikes. Now he must have been over six foot tall and had to work out regularly. Sora, on the other hand, was still slight, though he'd grown a few inches and well defined, graceful muscles were visible beneath his skin. It made Roxas feel small by comparison, even if the two were the same height.
"Come and help yourself, Rox," said Sora, grin back in place. The perpetual smile almost made Roxas want to do the same; at least that hadn't changed. The brunette would have so many laugh lines later in life.
Roxas hesitated for a moment, but then his stomach rumbled loudly and he admitted defeat, grabbing a plate from Cloud's pale hands and looked over his options. To say that Sora had questionable tastes would be too nice. On one pizza, several dead anchobes lying on beds of spinach and bacon bits stared at him, their dead eyes eerie. On another, a fried egg sat in the middle bleeding yolk, and on yet another grape, pickles, and pepperonis all sat together as though it were the most normal thing in the world. Shuddering down his repulsion, Roxas grabbed the most normal looking piece he could find (it had chicken, mushrooms, shrimp, and bacon), figuring anything he didn't like he could pick off (which would be most of the toppings, though they would probably still leave a weird aftertaste…damn). Once out of the way, Roxas watched with mild disgust as Sora took one or two pieces of each type. Cloud grabbed some of the fried-egg monstrosity (gag) and the three trooped to the well worn wood table sitting catawampus between the kitchen and living room, as the apartment lacked an actual eating space besides a two-seater breakfast bar.
The only noise filling the tension laced silence was the sound of chewing and swallowing. The only one who seemed unaffected was Cloud, who kept his eyes trained on his plate and the gooey mess of egg yolk it held. Roxas could barely look at his or Sora's food without gagging. His own plate held several piece of discarded mushroom and shrimp, neither of which he could stand. At one point, all three brothers reached for the bottle of ranch in the center of the table at once. A chuckle dislodged from Sora's throat.
"Still eating ranch on your pizza, huh, Rox?" he asked easily. "Us, too."
"I figured," he said, wrenching the bottle from Cloud's now slack grip. Sora winced at the harsh tone, which made Cloud glare, which in turn made Roxas feel a little guilty; it had come out a little more irritated than intended. He opened his mouth to apologize, but Sora had apparently had enough of the silence and was continuing to talk.
"You got a girlfriend?" he asked with a sly smile toying on his lips. "Bet you do – the Strife man charm, you know."
Biting back a rueful smile, Roxas resisted the urge to blurt, 'well, if by 'girlfriend' you mean a six-foot-four guy with a penis the size of Zimbabwe, then sure.' Instead, he thought for a moment of Setzer, the guy he'd been sort-of seeing for a while. Setz was about sixteen, only about a year older, and had hooked up with Roxas after a struggle match that the younger had lost, badly. In fact, a little less than a week ago, Roxas lost his virginity to Setzer. The memory wasn't one that brought him a loving warmth, or anything: the two had been making out in the back of Setzer's car, one thing lead to another, and it was sort of a wham, bam, thank you ma'am after that (except without the ma'am part). It'd hurt like a bitch, too. In the recent insanity, he'd just about forgotten.
Unwilling to admit that he was gay to his brothers, Roxas shrugged and said, "More of a…friend with benefits, I guess. Nothing serious."
Sora and Cloud's eyebrows both rose at the mention of a 'friend with benefits' but neither said anything.
"What's her name?" Cloud asked. As what was becoming per usual, his soft voice startled Roxas.
"Uh, it's, uh, Serena." Smooth, Rox. Real smooth. "She's sixteen. Silvery hair – she dyes it, I think – and purple eyes. Really dramatic. Does Struggle. That was how we met. Absolutely rockin' body."
"How far'd you get?" Sora asked, smile turning knowing. "Second base? Third base?"
"Home run."
Sora's jaw dropped and Cloud's eyes just barely widened.
"B-but –" Sora stuttered, looking desperately at Cloud. He gawked for a few moments like a fish before Cloud very calmly reach over and clicked shut Sora's jaw with his fingers. It was slightly comical.
"Did you use a condom?" Cloud said, as if he weren't totally blown away by the news.
"Yup." Which was true. And lots and lots of lube. But these two didn't need to know that their little brother was not actually the one doing any boning.
Cloud nodded. Sora's jaw dropped once more as he looked back and forth between the two.
"B-but, you're only like…fourteen! That's really –"
An irrational anger filled Roxas at Sora getting his age wrong, even if it was only by a few days. And was it really so shocking? He'd figured out in more recent years what those marks on both Sora and Cloud's chests and necks when they came home from the movies were. And seriously, even if they'd been gone eight years, Roxas still remembered both of their birthdays like someone had taken a knife and permanently engraved it into his mind.
"Fifteen, actually," he snapped. Though, had his thinking not been clouded by his suddenly furious haze, he'd have realized that in all actuality, he had only been fourteen at the time. "Or have you forgotten that, too?"
Sora looked confused. "Rox, I know you're fifteen but –"
"So why'd you get it wrong?" Roxas interrupted, raising his voice. He gripped the edges of the table, not meeting either of his brothers' eyes, which he could feel burning into his skull. "Eight years with zero contact is a long time, Sora, and I just want to know how you can sit here and act like you guys never did anything wrong at all, like everything is normal, when it most definitely is not?"
"Roxas –"
"No!" The loud screeching of chair legs against linoleum went off like a gunshot as Roxas burst to his feet. "No! I know it's been a long damn time since we last saw each other, but I'd have thought you'd remember my birthday considering it was the day you decided to run away! I'd have thought you'd want to document the best day of your lives in history, or something like that, because it sure seems to me like you were happy without me or Mom considering that you never even called, not even once, and left me with no way to get in touch with you –"
"Roxas!"
"Shut up!" he was shouting now, years of pent up emotions he'd thought himself over and done with bubbling up from somewhere deep inside him. "I don't know if you guys remember this or not, but you two were my heroes! You two were the only things stable in my life. Do you know how many guys mom has lived with in the last eight years? How many times I've found her drunk or passed out or had to cancel plans to take care of her? It wasn't my god damn job, and –"
"Shut the hell up."
Sora and Roxas's heads snapped around to stare and glare respectively at Cloud's soft voice. Anger danced like sparks of a fire in his blue eyes, a storm raging over the sea.
"You don't know anything, Roxas," he hissed, venom in his every word. "Do you think we wanted to leave you? No. But we were fifteen and seventeen and we didn't really feel like getting charged with kidnapping. Do you know how many times we came home to find Mom passed out or drunk or had to cancel plans to take care of her?" His voice was an awful falsetto of Roxas's and the younger boy winced. "Didn't think so. So shut your god damn mouth because you don't know the half of it, kid."
Fury and humiliation made Roxas's blood boil and he let loose an almighty scream, picking up his plate of half eaten pizza and throwing it to the carpet. It bounced off, no damage done other than a grease stain now on the carpet thanks to the pizza. Roxas cried out once more and stormed away from the table, towards the front door. He wrenched it open and the knob banged against the wall with the force he let loose upon it. He sped across the threshold, stuffing his hands in his pockets so that he didn't hit anyone should he come across someone who pissed him off in the hallway.
"Roxas! Roxas, wait!" he heard Sora call. "Roxas!"
He quickened his pace with no intention of slowing down or waiting for Sora to catch him. He took the stairwell because the crummy elevator was Temporarily Out of Service, according to a taped up sign that looked as though someone had off handedly scribbled it. Sora had informed him that it had been 'temporarily' down for nearly a year and a half.
A rush of cool night air hit his sweaty face like a hard slap and it was so refreshing, so without tension or forced conversation, that he wanted to drink it in like soup. He turned right on the sidewalk, towards where a sign said was downtown. As he walked, his heart rate slowed and his skin cooled, making the cold fall air no longer pleasant but uncomfortable, and he drew his black Say Anything hoodie closer to his body.
Okay, so maybe getting that angry had been a little over the top. And maybe wandering around in a city he didn't know at all wasn't the smartest of options. But he was upset and tired and he just wanted to go home, back to Twilight Town, back to his best friends Namine and Hayner and Pence and Olette and even the Disciplinary Committee of Seifer (who totally wanted to bang Hayner), Fuu, and Rai who hated his and his friends' guts. Hell, he even wanted to see Setzer again, if only for some familiarity.
But most of all, he just wanted to see his mom again. He missed her terribly, which was pathetic because it had only been a couple of days since he saw her last. Not to mention, she'd kicked him out of her life. He couldn't help it, though. Because even though he'd had sex and tried to act all grown up, the fact of the matter was, he was fifteen years old and had been rejected by his mother and he'd probably never see his home again. He'd pissed off Cloud, which in and of itself was a feat, and he'd upset Sora, whose big sad eyes wouldn't get out of his head, so now his brothers probably didn't want him, either. He was a dumb gay kid who didn't know when to keep his dumb mouth shut.
Biting his lip hard enough to draw blood, Roxas wrapped his arms tightly around himself and sat down on the curb, trying his damndest not to cry.
So this chapter's a little longer. I don't know if it's good or not; it's like, almost two in the morning and I really want to get this up for you guys and I'm being lazy, so I don't know if it's fantastic. Axel's coming in really soon, promise ;P. Hope you guys liked! Review, please!
