Title: Rainbow-Colored Waters
Author: Riake
Pairing: Axel/Kairi
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Theme: #2 - news; letter
Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts or any of the characters. This is for entertainment purposes only.
Author Notes: AU. It's a lil' abstract, but I kinda like it. :3
Secret kisses in the backs of allies, quick and hot and desperate. Her father would kill her if he ever found out, but they're careful, so very careful.
Letters sent old-style, with pen and paper and often messily written on his part. She doesn't dare trust the computer and email, because it's all too easy to access her account and look at what she's sending. She doesn't have a cell phone, and he doesn't have a landline that works, so they resolve to be old-fashioned all the way.
He's a bad boy, violent and with a smirk on his face that tells the world he doesn't give a shit. She's the good one, an angel to most, kind and a model student. He eases into her life, slowly at first, then faster until she can never quite catch her breath. It was boring, before he came. Now her life is sparkled with rainbow-colored water that glints and shines in both the light and the dark.
She tries to reform him, after a while. She doesn't get very far before he tells her to stop. They don't see each other for a week after that, and when he returns to her, knocking softly on her first-floor window, he kisses her so gently she wants to cry. He doesn't apologize, and neither does she, and they pretend to forget. But he changes, a little. Not enough that most would notice, but she does. She sees the calmness settling into him, folding over his shoulders like a mantle, dissolving into his body as he stops going to his gang so much and instead begins looking for a job.
She sneaks out of the house with him, even though she knows it isn't good for her. He isn't good for her, but she can't stop.
They have sex on the night of her seventeenth birthday, and Kairi knows there's no going back. She's tangled up in him now, hopelessly ensnared, and she doesn't know whether or not to be afraid.
Graduation comes with roses and black gowns and he's not there. She's hurt, but she hides it, just like she hides him, pushing him deep-down inside her where her heart is.
He comes later, after the party, to kiss her and smile and ask in a still moment if she's ready to leave.
She knows she's not, and she says so. His face grows stormy, but he doesn't leave her. Not yet.
The last letter she receives from him contains only two lines.
I've decided to go to New York City, where there's better job opportunities.
See ya, babe.
There isn't any soft emotion in the letter, and she realizes that perhaps he hadn't changed so much after all.
She tears the letter up and lets it burn in the fireplace, but keeps all the rest in a box at the bottom of her closet.
A month later, after no contact and too many tears on her part because she can't get away from him and she thinks she loves him, she receives an envelope in the mail. There isn't a letter inside -- just the envelope, with the address he's offering her.
304 Brookside Apartments, 26th Street
It's written in a crazy, looping hand that she would recognize in an instant, and Kairi decides to take up the ballet offer in New York City after all.