Author's Note: Hm. ^^;
February
He glances over at the guy sprawled on his bedroom floor. Little red furrowed eyebrows, lips and teeth worrying the pencil's eraser as he concentrates on his homework. Roxas' fingers rub the corner of the page pressed between them, but his eyes aren't on his history textbook. A branch clatters against his window, thrown there by the whipping cold wind outside, but he can't see past the glass into the dark, blustery winter night.
A monotone grunt from the floor draws his eyes again as Axel scribbles something on his paper. The lamplight paints his hair in deep, bloody shadows and bright, fiery highlights…but it's only an ordinary lamp, placed there to help a friend see his math assignment for tomorrow. It's all as ordinary as ever – the room, the slightly-shag carpet, the borrowed pillow under his best friend's elbows. The ordinary school night in winter. The everyday friendship and easy silence as they both study things they don't really care about, because…because it's what's done.
And Axel doesn't hear the branch clatter against the glass again, and he doesn't look up, and that's just fine, that's very good, because sometimes there's this something inside Roxas, and he doesn't always hide it well. Mostly it's quiet and he smiles and laughs and forgets it's there. But sometimes, in a still moment, he'll look at Axel and it's back. The room slips away, and everything real and solid fades into a distant, faded snapshot, tossed in the darkness of something wilder than a February wind and just as impossible to grasp and control. And he can't breathe and he can't move because if he moved he would break and if he breathed he would scream because he wants, he wants, he wants, he wants and he doesn't understand or know what to do, but oh God he wants, but it doesn't make sense so he holds it back with a dark, desperate ferocity. Thank God, thank God Axel doesn't look up, because he knows his face is etched with the strain and his eyes are burning with the wanting in his veins, and if Axel saw, if he saw, oh God what would happen if he saw…
But he doesn't look up. Math isn't easy. And slowly, slowly the feeling seeps away, slipping into the vast darkness of a winter night, and the warm light from the lamp reaches around the room and makes everything solid again, and it's just Roxas sitting on his bed forgetting his place in the history book and glancing at Axel, his best friend, and thinking it's getting late and it's a school night, they should get to bed.
Tomorrow will be an ordinary day.
