Thanks to spiralheaven for the beta-ing!
Notes:
Have I already apologised for OOC Axel? I wrote this before playing CoM, so I didn't realise how sadistic he could be. But…I just couldn't rewrite my fic with that Axel. It spoilt the fic. So I hope that you can see, in this circumstance, how this Axel can come to be.
Lastly…comments and criticism is very much loved!
"Are you crazy? It will never work. He values truth more than his own happiness."
Roxas opened his eyes to the sun trying to scorch his eyeballs out.
"Bloody summer sun," he grumbled under his breath, rolling himself off the bed to resume his sleep on the cooler parquet floor. That had been some weird dream though, he thought sleepily, a flash of black haze through his mind jogging his memory. He had a funny sense of déjà vu. For all the heat of the summer, his dreams always seemed to make up for it by being dark and cold.
Roxas eyes blinked slowly open, focusing dimly on the spinning globe at the far corner of his room. Dark…? He shook his head quickly and sat up, a sudden sliver of anxiety playing in his stomach. No way, his mind must be playing tricks on him again. Breathing deeply, he closed his eyes again.
"Okay, come on, Roxas, think," he ordered himself firmly. "What does your house look like at night? It's not hard, just think black, and grey…" His eyes flew open, mind swirling with images in brown and orange. In a swift movement Roxas was off the floor, barreling down the stairs and out of the house.
"Axel! Open up! Axel!"
The door clicked open and Axel yawned down at the boy in front of him. "Roxas, it's nowhere near one –"
"Axel, what does your house look like at night?" Roxas demanded in an unnaturally flat voice.
One of Axel's eyebrows quirked upwards in a silent question, and even with the butterflies in his stomach he noted with envy the sublime arch of Axel's eyebrow and made a mental note to practise the art of eyebrow-quirking sometime soon.
"So…" Axel asked, breaking into Roxas' (frivolous) thoughts. "Are you going to tell me what's up or am I just going to go back and watch my Disney cartoons now?"
Roxas' initial train of thoughts derailed entirely. "No way, Disney? How old are you, man?" He asked, pushing past Axel to walk into his sitting room.
"A good 21 cm older," Axel said tersely, following.
"Darkwing Duck!" Roxas exclaimed, ignoring Axel's oft-repeated jibe at his height. "Awesome, I haven't watched that in millennia."
Roxas plunked himself on the sofa directly in front of the television. "Man, I wish I had cable," he said. "Thank you Axel, you are a godsend! A blessedly sentimental one."
"It has nothing to do with sentimentality!" Axel said in aghast, glaring at Roxas' intrusion of his sofa and dropping himself on an armchair instead. "It just happened to be, you know, on the television."
"Sure," Roxas said breezily, watching in fascination as the duck onscreen flapped his wings menacingly.
"So," Axel asked pointedly, toeing a footstool over and propping one leg on it. "Since you so kindly interrupted my morning TV routine, and insulted me, would you like to tell me why you randomly showed up on my doorstep with cryptic questions about houses at night?"
"Oh, that," Roxas' brow furrowed. "I dunno, I think I'm getting forgetful or something. I couldn't remember what my house looked like at night, and I started getting freaked out because I thought I couldn't even remember what night looked like."
"But you can remember now?" Axel asked.
"Well…"Roxas shifted uncomfortably, staring a little too intently at the television. "Actually, no, I don't think…but I mean, it's probably just because I see it so often I don't take it in, right?"
"Yeah, probably," Axel said, frowning a little.
"Can you remember what night is like? What your house looks like at night?"
"I think so. I mean, I've never really thought about it before," Axel said slowly, scratching his head.
"Yeah, probably the same thing here. I just overreacted a bit," Roxas said, sounding more relieved. The residual worry lingered on his face though, even as he turned his eyes back to the television.
Axel stared at him for some length, then spoke. "Hey Roxas, how about this, after we have our popsicle we'll go over to your house and wait for night together, alright?"
Roxas broke into a grateful grin. "Sounds like a good idea," he said. "This is so silly though, I should stop scaring myself."
"Honestly, I'm having problems remembering what my house looks like at night too, so it's not just you," Axel said. "We're probably just so used to it we can't think of it in the sunshine. Especially when the sun is blazing away like this."
Roxas nodded eagerly. "Yeah, I know. I don't even know why this is bugging me so much."
"Don't worry about it. Everything will be okay by nightfall, trust me," Axel said, standing up and clapping a reassuring hand on Roxas' shoulder. "Now, can I get you anything to drink? We have some time till the ice cream man, I'll go pop us a bag of chips."
"I'm fine," Roxas said, smiling. He was looking forward to the ice cream man. It was one thing he always knew he could count on. Besides Axel and his amusing sappiness, of course.
Middle
'In a different world all that were once pipe dreams are reality.'
"Roxas, I have to admit, though I've often said your room is boring, it contains an excellent stash of anime," Axel said, his eyes glued to the tiny screen at beside the door to Roxas' room.
"Hey, my room is not boring!" Roxas said, offended. "Look, I have a rotating fish stand…thing," he said convincingly, pointing at the said object at the head of his bed.
Axel threw it a cursory glance, then returned his eyes to the anime they were watching. "Right."
Then, "Awesome," Axel said, as the woman in the television suddenly split into several pieces, blood spattering everywhere.
Roxas cringed slightly. He didn't really like violence. "I forgot that bloodthirsty side of you," he said. "I can't believe someone so sappy can also like blood and gore so much."
"I am not sappy!" Axel said, annoyed. "We've been through this before!"
"You are," Roxas said adamantly. "You watch reruns of cartoons from childhood, you cling to old habits like no tomorrow, you smile in your sleep –"
"Wait, wait, hold up there," Axel said, now completely distracted from the television. "How is smiling in my sleep sappy?"
"It's just a very sappy thing to do," Roxas said firmly, as if it were the most irrefutable fact in the world.
"But you smile in your sleep too, and I don't hear you saying you're sappy!"
"Ah, but I don't watch cartoon reruns –"
"Because you don't have cable!"
"But I don't go to your house every morning to watch cartoon reruns!" Roxas said, as if that solved everything.
Axel did a pretty good impression of goggling at him. "Anyway, smiling is hardly considered sappy. Everyone does it."
"But in their sleep?"
"So? It's just an extension of smiling when you're awake. It probably just means I'm happy. Or something."
"Or sappy."
"Whatever!" Axel said. "I don't have a problem with my smiling in my sleep. You must be the one insecure about it."
"Why should I be?"
"How would I know!" Axel said in exasperation. "Maybe you don't want to be happy, who knows!"
"Now that argument holds no ground," Roxas said in a lofty manner.
"Like yours did," Axel groused.
"Hey, Axel."
"What?"
Roxas had gone completely still, staring out the window. "Look. It's sunset."
Axel turned, his eyes widening in some surprise. The sky was aglow in red and purple streaks, reflected by the arc of long, flat clouds that pillowed across the sky. The sun had dipped till it was almost swallowed by the town buildings, a large orange disc that glowered with a last defiant fading light. The tips of the town buildings were lit with a hazy gold outline, but the buildings themselves were now almost indistinguishable in the gloaming, casting a long corridor of shadow across Roxas' house.
Axel blinked, shook his head, and blinked again. "Wow," he said finally. "I don't remember it looking like this."
Roxas nodded fervently. Excitedly, he got up from the rug they had been sitting on and ran down the stairs out of his house. After a moment's hesitation, Axel followed.
"So this is what my house looks like at night," Roxas said, sounding almost ridiculously in awe.
"Yep, like how it looks in the day…just at night," Axel quipped.
"Shut up!" Roxas laughed, punching Axel's shoulder lightly.
"So, a great weight off your shoulders, huh?"
"Yeah. Dumb, but yeah," Roxas said, unable to keep the grin off his face. He wasn't sure why he was so bothered by this, but he was more than glad that nature had proven to him he had nothing more than a faulty memory. He could now put this silly worry behind him.
"So, shall we go back and finish the anime?" Roxas asked.
"Well…I kind of want to see what my house looks like at night," Axel said, a little embarrassedly. "My memory seems a little cottony too."
"No worries," Roxas said, smiling. "I'll go with you. I think I need to refresh my memory of that too."
"Alright," said Axel as they started the five minute walk to his house. "Hey, how about we detour to the park for a bit? If we're quick we can see the park in sunset. I don't seem to ever remember having done so before."
"Sounds like a good idea," Roxas said, the white grin of his teeth obvious even in the waning light.