Notes: First of all, I did a slight edit to my ffn pen name to match my standard username (lelekia to Lelek), so... if you noticed a difference, that's why. Just saying, to avoid any confusion about who this writer is. I'm still me, I swear!
Second, this took awhile. I seem to be saying that about everything these days, but it's true. I'm just so damn busy this term with my ridiculous course schedule and overachieving ways that writing gets pushed farther and farther back. But, here I am, back at it with doomed life number four. The style is a little different, a little dreamier and a little sadder, it's a little shorter, and alcohol/drug use is a theme. So, yeah, be warned.
Disclaimer: I don't own the rights to Sleep Well by the band Lydia. Also, the bit of poetry quoted about halfway through is from Eliot's The Wasteland. I'm an English major who likes the Modernists, okay? I gave Roxas some of my literary sensibilities.
IV. Sleep Well
Roxas has train wreck potential.
Axel knows it, can feel it in every nicotine-stained breath shared between them, can see it in the way Roxas' white skin clings paper-thin and taut to his bird-frail bones, can hear it in the half-whispered dreams Roxas has always been too honest to keep to himself.
He's beautiful and tragic and lethal and young and one day his hopeless devotion to True Love will kill him, or Axel, or both.
If Axel doesn't cut ties first. And he might, one day, when he gets too tired to walk a knife's edge with the boy who fascinates him more than anyone else he's ever seen. It might be love, or it might be something else if everything Roxas believes in is wrong and love doesn't exist, after all. Axel doesn't know what he believes, because Axel is just a disaffected kid from the suburbs who got bored with safe inanity and went off one sunny day to the city where he could fall in with a rougher, edgier crowd.
And that's where he met Roxas. Roxas with his golden hair and blue-blue eyes and soft voice and little pauses in his speech, like his mind works faster than his mouth can follow, so he has to stop and translate his thoughts into a language normal humans can understand. Roxas who's like razor-wire dipped in honey, sharp and sick-sweet and deadly.
It's nights like this, when the heroin is humming in Roxas' veins and Axel is tossing back shots of the cheap Aristocrat vodka that always burns his throat until he's done enough shots that even his teeth have gone numb, that the melancholy hits and he asks himself why am I here?
He told Roxas once that he was probably depressed. Roxas just laughed because, in spite of everything, he knows Axel, probably better than Axel knows himself.
You just think you're sick, he'd said, leaning intimately close so that all Axel could see was extraordinary blue. You want it, to look out at the world and see nothing but a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water.
And then he'd laughed again, loudly and freely, because he's Roxas and the only person Axel knows who can slip depressing poetry into his drunken conversation and find the whole thing hilarious.
But that's part of the appeal, isn't it? The recklessness verging on insanity, doused in alcohol and pulled through smoke and shot through with heroin just for good measure.
Axel wouldn't want him any other way.
And it isn't like Axel couldn't just leave at any time. He has a home to go back to, in secure suburbia, where Demyx still plays pointless little gigs in pretentious little coffee shops, dreaming of fame and fortunate and going nowhere fast, holding back his boyfriend who could be brilliant if he'd finally accept university funding and get the fuck out of Dodge. Axel could go back there. He'd dazzle them all, with his carefully crafted edge and hint of city-bred danger. He'd be dark and mysterious, just like he'd always dreamed of.
Yeah, he could do that.
But then he looks at Roxas in the sickly light of endless early mornings and all he can think is I will never get over you. And it's such a pity, such a travesty, because that sort of commitment isn't what he wanted at all, they're too self-destructive to keep going like this indefinitely, and Axel is left empty and aching at the necessity of Roxas' loss.
He doesn't think those thoughts when it's dark. It's daylight that makes him honest, and so he sleeps late and spends his nights killing brain cells with the boy he really can't stand save for despairing at the thought of living without him.
They're sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall on either side of the bathroom door, blowing clouds of acrid blue-gray smoke into the still air and talking about emptiness and continuity, and it takes Axel a minute to realise that Roxas is on his feet and leaving the room, the back of one trembling hand pressed to his colourless lips.
He leaves the bathroom door hanging open, but doesn't turn on the lights, and by the time Axel's followed him and flicked the switch, he's already spitting in the sink so he won't throw up. His lips thin for a moment, tense and pained, but then he looks at Axel in the mirror and his eyes are feverish and darkly amused as he shakes his head and laughs like he's never seen anything so funny in his life.
And Axel just stares back at him, blankly, as a single line from a song he doesn't really know by a band he's never really listened to starts running over and over again through his head.
Darling, you fucked up.