His Skull Grinned Eternally Anyway
Axel was pretty sure he was a prodigy. At least when it came to color-smacking anyway. Other things like logic and thinking and putting things together in coherence were more Roxas' field, and he was mad good at them. So…Roxas could be a genius too. But art was easier to look at, to take in in an instant. The few times Roxas had let Axel read his stuff it took him a half hour to get through it. The stuff was good, there was no doubt of that, and Axel was motivated to get to the end and think about it after, a while after, but it took time and that just wasn't his thing. So when his teachers would marvel at his drawings and paintings and say he had a lot of talent but it all seemed so rushed and fast, he'd tell them to fuck off and that if they had any real talent they wouldn't be teaching in a public school with a budget a third of what would be horrifying. So…Axel was pretty sure he was a dick, too, but he had the sense to keep those comments to himself and nod politely when they burst in his mind like popcorn.
But out west in the last land of opportunity in the Land of Opportunity, he somehow found it worse when the mouths of people he could have respected dropped a little and their artsy little minds tried to wrap around what he'd put out for them and all the little girls and boys he should have been learning from turned out to be mindless and dumb, raving about his "energy", his "energy", what the fuck? He'd dumped a month to tour his major prospects and prune his premier picks for college and it turned out that he'd been better off smacking paint at wall while some faux hippie told him to slow down and think about things differently. They were worthless and beneath him and the crushing disappointment was enough to cover up his Roxas-pining for half a day. So…Axel was desperate for a mentor.
Axel was sure that if Roxas cared enough about his deep inner feelings he'd wax poetic on how Axel was both bored with being the best and yet terrified of losing the admiration of his unders; that his drive to improve was hampered by a lack of competition, yet spurned on by a mindless and all-consuming fear of being dismissed.
So…when Axel got back to Massachusetts, burned and upset, he found Roxas more or less the same, too thin and too pale and loitering around the edges of some kind of breakdown. And way up there in the cemetery on top of Mount Prospect, next to the not-worth-much gravestone of some nobody named Goodwin, Axel spoke to Roxas' deeps and Roxas spoke to his and the whole world seemed to matter just a little less and the fact that they were special and odd and better than the rest turned into a nice comfort, a blanket they could share there, underneath a cloudy sky.
And mocking, Axel splashed some blue up there and Roxas wrote a poem so that Goodwin could, in a rotting smile, have something to laugh about. And then they went on okay. Back home for a while and then way up north in one mother's car, to New Hampshire and the mountains where they could be alone together and laugh at the echoes their voices made along a narrow open road.
