Title: Crossroads Beginnings
Pairing: Axel/Roxas
Warnings: demonic possession, creepy things
Rating: PG13
A/N: written for the Dark Month, this takes place prior to the timeline presented here, before Roxas is possessed and is moved to New Orleans.
Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts or Supernatural.
Summary: Roxas remembers the time before he was a hunter only vaguely.
Long before Roxas rode shotgun in a heavily modified Camero beside his insane and insanely gorgeous monster hunter of a boyfriend, he was a boy terrified of the things that only appeared on the periphery of his vision. He feared the glowing red eyes peering back at him from the darkness of his attic, feared the slow, creeping shadows across his walls, the soft sounds of feet – or something – skittering across the wood floor while he hovered between wakefulness and dreaming.
Roxas could barely remember it, but there was once a time when he was frightened of the dark. Before he lost consciousness and control, Roxas lived in fear. It's not an origin story Roxas likes to tell, because it makes him feel vulnerable and weak.
But we all start somewhere, don't we?
0o0
If there was one thing Roxas was absolutely certain of, it was that his house was haunted. There was no other way to explain it.
On more than one occasion while downstairs watching TV, he turned the volume all the way down to listen to the sounds of footsteps – slow, soft, and deliberate – walking across the floorboards, even when he knew for sure no one else was home. But when he told his parents, his father insisted that it was the sound of the house settling.
Roxas only heard those sounds when he was alone in the house. Those were the only times he felt anxious, because when he was all alone the hairs on the back of his neck would suddenly stand up, a leftover primal reaction what whispered in his nerves, someone is watching you. Where Roxas had once slept sprawled out across his bed, half hanging over the edge in a deep sleep, he started sleeping curled up in a cocoon of blankets wrapped tightly around him in the center of the bed, with only his eyes and nose left uncovered and unprotected. It made him feel marginally safer.
0o0
It wasn't always this way, he remembered thinking. Roxas had lots of good memories of that house when he was young, and it wasn't until he crawled up the ladder to the attic when he was fifteen that things started going bad. He saw a pair of glowing eyes watching him from amongst a pile of sweatshirts, and the shock of the sight had sent him falling to the floor, where he broke his elbow.
Roxas never went up in the attic again, and soon after that Roxas started to feel unsettled in his own home. The little occurrences continued sporadically throughout the year, and Roxas tried to live a normal life beyond the weirdness he was experiencing. He came out to his parents (not the most pleasant experience, but they handled themselves well) and started dating a boy in his class, which distracted him and made him very happy.
For a while, Roxas thought that maybe things were getting better.
0o0
They got worse.
Things began to bother him so badly that others started to notice the changes in his behavior.
Hayner noticed it first, but initially he wrote it off as just a quirk of his boyfriend's. Roxas refused to do anything remotely sexual in his own house, and before Hayner could even think of getting his boyfriend's shirt off all the doors had to be shut and locked, along with the windows. Hayner kind of figured Roxas was nervous, because they were seventeen and fumbling around with each other's bodies, learning how to touch and make the other moan. Roxas didn't like being spooned, either; he was always the big spoon, wrapping himself around Hayner's body like a protective shield. Roxas never told him it was because the sensation of someone breathing on his neck terrified him to the very core of his being now.
He had no idea whether Namine was totally aware of what was happening because she hadn't spoken to him – or anyone, really – since elementary school, but he realized that she was watching him with wide, terrified eyes. She never approached him, but her gaze always seemed to shift between him and something just beyond him, or over Roxas' shoulder. He tried not to think about it.
Roxas was eating lunch with Pence and Olette when a man walking by on the street stopped, met his gaze, and promptly burst into flames. The man didn't even react to his spontaneous combustion, but Roxas, in Pence's words, 'flipped the fuck out.' By the time his friends had him calmed down, the fire was gone and the man was halfway down the street – and neither Pence nor Olette had any idea why Roxas was behaving in such a way. They seemed baffled by his description of the man bursting into flames, which left him wondering if he'd imagined the whole thing.
0o0
Roxas had thought for a long time that he was more or less safe in other people's houses. He'd never experienced anything strange while sleeping over Hayner's or Pence's, so it was a relief to be able to get out of his house and sleep in peace.
The first time he realized that he wasn't imagining things – that something was actually following, haunting him – was at Hayner's house. It was supposed to be a great night, with Hayner's parents away for their anniversary so they had the house to themselves, but they'd started fighting sometime after dinner. Roxas spent most of the next hour on the couch sulking, until Hayner tugged him up the stairs to his bedroom, begging forgiveness in the form of an enthusiastic blowjob. They fell asleep watching reruns of some cartoon, and Roxas felt relatively content until he woke in the middle of the night clutching his thigh as the muscles seemed to seize all at once. Roxas had experienced Charlie horses before, but nothing like this. Eventually it subsided, and the pain was numbed.
In the morning, after he rolled out of Hayner's bed and used the toilet, he found Hayner blatantly staring at him – but not in the way that usually excited him. It was horror and fear etched on his face, not lust. "Did I do that?" he asked, voice small and horrified.
Roxas was confused, and looked down to see what on earth Hayner was staring so morosely at. When he saw it, Roxas wanted to puke.
Right where the muscle cramp had occurred during the night, there was a deep, purpling bruise in the shape of a handprint, right across his upper thigh.
"Roxas, did I do that?" Hayner asked again, his tone higher and more fearful.
Roxas shook his head, bewildered, and left in a hurry not long after.
0o0
With the bruise still fresh on his thigh, Roxas did something he thought about doing ages ago: he went to the library.
He took out all the books he could on haunting and angry spirits – not that there were many in the first place. But none of the books seemed to mention all of the things that were happening to him, and he grew frustrated quickly.
(He didn't read the newspaper, so he had no idea that the surrounding counties had been experiencing strange storms and abnormal cattle deaths, signaling the arrival of something much more sinister than a ghost or a poltergeist. He never thought to use salt or holy water, though he was assured later that those might have only briefly hindered the demon.)
When he told his parents that he thought something was haunting him, Roxas watched as his parents exchanged vaguely terrified looks before they confessed that they had been experiencing some things too: they'd heard voices whispering terrible things, heard someone pacing the halls when no one else was home. They promised they would find a way to fix everything soon.
That night Roxas woke to find a figure burning on the ceiling over his bed. He screamed, staring into the blank holes where the figure's eyes should have been. By the time his parents came in to see what was the matter, the figure was gone.
0o0
Roxas broke up with Hayner the next day, and the day after his parents announced that they were moving to New Orleans at the end of the week.
Then he got sick. Roxas' temperature spiked, and he stayed curled up amongst blankets while his mother fed him broth. In his fever-ridden state, his vision blurred and he saw something move in the shadows of his room. It grinned from the darkness, red eyes glowing as it swayed to and fro, watching and waiting. More appeared as the night continued, but none were as big as the first.
It is weak, they whispered. It is ours for the taking.
"No," Roxas murmured deliriously. "No, no no."
There was a low growling sound, and Roxas distinctly heard one say "No, it is mine."
Curled up within his blankets, Roxas rocked back and forth with his eyes squeezed shut as he muttered over and over the phrase, "monsters aren't real" – trying desperately to ignore the way his bed dipped as something climbed on the mattress and came towards him.
Then it spoke, and Roxas gasped for air in shock. It was right above him, mere inches from his face, but he dared not look. "Do you really think whispering that to yourself will make us go away?" it asked, voice low and sinister and everything his nightmares were made of.
Roxas bit through his lip as he fought back a sob, blood dripping down his face as he felt something grab his chin and force his mouth open. Thick smoke filled his esophagus and lungs, tasting strongly of sulfur and coal. He felt sick and horrified and disgusted all at once, and then all was dark.
Epilogue
The demon kept him under complete control, contorting and riding his body – his meatsuit, that's what the thing called him – to the brink of death and keeping him there, suspended and lethargic in a body thin from starvation and stress. When Roxas tried to fight, the demon beat him down until his soul was a badly damaged mess. He resigned himself to death, and was fully prepared to let go when a young priest arrived, unsolicited, and offered to exorcise the demon. Roxas looked at him and saw salvation in his electric green gaze and his earnest face, but the demon roiled within him and hijacked his mouth, hissing, "he's mine."
Though Axel was able to finally pull the demon from him, the darkness was never gone from his life – he just didn't fight it alone anymore.