[fic] My Girlfriend, Who Lives in Canada (AU, Part VIII)
Title: My Girlfriend, Who Lives In Canada (8/?)
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: T
Pairings: Axel/Roxas + others
Disclaimer: 不是我的.
Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single high school boy in possession of a good libido, must be in want of a girlfriend-or a pretend one.
Download: Feist - 1234
VIII.
*
“One, two, three, four
Tell me that you love me more
Sleepless long nights
That is what my youth was for…
Those teenage hopes who have tears in their eyes
Too scared to own up to one little lie.”
(Feist, “1234”)
*
The teacher had not yet arrived when Roxas entered the classroom, thank God for small blessings. He could not immediately locate Olette, though the huddle of loudly whispering girls at the back of the room gave him some clues that she might be possibly found somewhere within their tight enclave. Infiltration, then, was the only course of action, and Roxas heaved a small, bracing sigh before making a beeline for the group.
And was intercepted and nearly knocked over halfway across the room by a ball of raw panic clad in designer camo.
“I wouldn’t go over there just now if I were you,” Hayner whispered frantically, wild-eyed. “They’ve already got Pence.”
A cursory glance vindicated his claim, as Pence was indeed sitting somewhat on the peripheries of the thick female wall, looking for all the world like he was wavering between supportive and scared out of his mortal mind.
“Can’t help it,” Roxas sighed. “Until you and I give Rai the pummeling he so justly deserves, this is the only way to make things right.”
“You’re a brave, brave man,” Hayner said, laying his hand on Roxas’s shoulder solemnly. “Personally, I’m glad you two are going to make nice with each other. You were always the one Olette did all the girly stuff with. Did you know the other day she came up and asked me if I wanted to go to the bookstore? The bookstore, honestly!”
Partly out of self-abuse, Roxas decided to let that comment slide for the time being.
The human wall kind of shifted in a decidedly hostile manner at his approach, but at least they hadn’t started brandishing pepper spray and braying war cries or anything, so Roxas suppressed the urge to scamper in the opposite direction just long enough to cough quietly and say, “Olette, can I talk to you?”
All the girls began whispering in unanimously scandalized voices-perhaps they had expected him to grovel and beg for audience with their high priestess-but Pence gave him a sharp, questioning look. Upon catching Roxas’s eyes, he nodded with a smile, and with a few subtle nudges, managed to get the crowd to part and reveal Olette, pale but determinedly composed, both her hands folded tightly on the desk in front of her.
Slowly, Roxas repeated his request, not taking his gaze off her for one moment.
“I’m sitting right in front of you,” Olette said, staring straight ahead. Upon closer inspection, she looked tired and suspiciously red-eyed. “You can say whatever you want.”
“I was thinking, outside,” Roxas said patiently, wishing they could just skip this step and go for a triple-fudge sundae with extra cherries downtown, where they would trade dubious and scathing opinions of high school football and hobag cheerleaders until the smile came back to her eyes again. “Somewhere in private, maybe. Come on.”
Something seemed to click, and Olette looked up at him sharply, searching and completely laid bare. Her gaze gave another twist to the tight knot that had formed in his throat. It felt like the first time they’d made eye contact in days.
“Okay,” she said quietly, and got up without a further word. Immediately, the girls standing around them began buzzing in excitement, and Roxas had the sudden, depressing thought that this was going to be all over school tomorrow. Of course, he told himself immediately, short of at least a pregnancy scare or rumor of substance abuse, it wasn’t as if the gossip mill could possibly paint him in a more tantalizing light than they already had.
*
They came out of the building into the bright sunshine, and started walking aimlessly down the main path leading away from campus central. Roxas quietly racked his brain, and remembered that behind the school, there was a fairly spacious window ledge that few people ever visited, where you could sit and have a private conversation. It was outside the back window of one of the first floor ceramic labs, ensuring that no one would be intruding at this time of day. He began walking briskly in that direction, and could hear Olette following, a few steps behind. Neither of them had spoken.
Upon reaching the ledge, Roxas pulled himself up first, then reached down to assist Olette. It brought him a tiny margin of relief when she took his hand without hesitation.
Now, to begin. It was vital that he opened with something brilliant and appropriately conciliatory.
“Nice weather we’re having,” Roxas said, and cursed the verbal incontinence that came with being such a goddamn guy.
Olette just gave a vague nod, like she hadn’t heard him properly, and continued to look distant. She pulled her knees up and tucked them under her face, so that her chin was resting directly on one of the artistically ripped spots on her jeans.
“Do you think she’s pretty?”
“What?”
“Candi,” Olette said, in that strained, miserable way that was kind of starting to freak him out. “Do you think she’s pretty? Prettier than me, maybe?”
“No,” Roxas ejaculated, about two octaves higher than was probably necessary. He couldn’t help it, though, he was seriously spooked. The only time he had ever witnessed Olette’s freakish confidence even shaken in the slightest had been when Whatsherface Cotillard had actually won the Academy Award for La Vie En Rose.
“I mean,” he amended in a slightly less hysterical tone. “She’s not completely ugly-if you like dark roots and premature wrinkles-but any iota of attractiveness she might possess kind of evaporates the moment she, you know, opens her mouth.”
“Yeah, but still,” Olette said, fingering one of her shoelaces distractedly. “Everybody says she has nice eyes. Lots of guys think blue eyes are prettier than green…”
“I like green eyes,” Roxas insisted. “A lot.”
“Bet you do,” Olette said, and it was dumb but Roxas totally gave himself a mental high-five when he saw her lips quirk up. “Hey, Roxas,” she went on softly, and Roxas glanced over just in time to catch her sweet sideways look, familiar and loved and so long-awaited. He didn’t have to try to fight the urge to make a wisecrack about diabetic comas.
“I’m glad we’re talking again,” Olette said, smiling with her hair falling half in her face, and in spite of his ardent defense of Rai’s honor just awhile back, Roxas couldn’t help but think that the guy was really such a mind-bogglingly retarded Neanderthal with no social graces.
“Me too,” he replied, and it didn’t feel weird at all. Neither of them had apologized outright, which was just fine by him. “Anyway, don’t stress yourself over this. Relationships are hard.” Now he was aping his erstwhile shrink; he hated himself. “In fact, I’m going through a rough patch with, uh, with Anna myself. We’re kind of on a break, actually.”
He hadn’t yet decided whether he had let more of the truth out the gate than intended, whether he even wanted to go there, when Olette’s eyes went wide with empathetic concern. “I-I didn’t know. God, I’ve been so thoughtless. Are you alright? Did she cheat?”
“No, nothing like that,” Roxas said hurriedly. “Philosophically speaking, I’m almost entirely certain that it was mostly my fault-maybe.”
Olette seemed to deflate slightly. “I’ve been such an idiot. It’s just-I get so carried away with these things.”
“Olette, it’s okay-” Roxas began, but was cut short when Olette raised one hand and said, “No, I mean it. You know I care about you, Roxas.”
“I know that.”
“When you first came to town, I seriously thought to myself, damn, if I didn’t have a boyfriend…” she went on, and horror upon horror, appeared to actually be blushing. Surely the end of days could not be far off.
“What’s weird is that I felt the exact same way,” Roxas said, his ears noticeably burning. “Well, except for the boyfriend part. But then you started shouting at me about beakers and I, uh, reconsidered.”
Olette laughed sheepishly. “You know that’s just how I show my love. Can’t help it that you have such pretty blonde pigtails, Roxas.”
“I always knew you were a secret bully,” Roxas pronounced, but thought privately, if relentless teasing actually indicated affection, then-
“It’s just,” Olette continued, the ghost of a frown coming to rest between her brows, under-the-skin tension. “You never say anything, Roxas. You always have this aloof air about you-no, don’t deny it, I’m telling you the truth. You’ve been here for six months and we hardly know anything about you. Example, I know you lived in New York before coming here, but you never talk about that either. So, I worry-”
She paused, and took a deep, shuddering breath, eyes closed.
“I worry that you’re not happy,” she went on, opening her eyes again. In the summer sunlight, they shone with an almost heartbreaking brightness. “I worry we’re not being good enough friends. You always seem happy when you’re with me and the guys, but I-I just don’t know.”
I’m happy, Roxas wanted to say. You guys are everything I’ve ever wanted, and I’m happy.
For some reason, the words just wouldn’t come, try as he might to push them out.
Olette sighed deeply. “But then things changed, and I thought, hey, maybe he’s found something that is good for him. Then I thought, maybe if I tried to help it along, you would be like that, for always. Was I wrong, Roxas?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anna,” Olette said, turning to look him in the eyes. “Did she make you happy?”
“Yes,” Roxas answered, totally unthinking, and remembered, bone-dry cappuccinos, April fireworks, a dozen blazing summer days and scores of chilling rides around the quiet streets of Amherst, this and that and everything in between, littered at the back of his mind. Happiness, too, was a many-splendored thing, confused and inseparable in component parts. “I think I was happy. Despite everything, I was happy.”
Olette grinned, small and sweet, and covered one of his hands with her own. “That’s pretty rare, you know? And you said it, relationships are hard. When people find someone that makes them happy, wouldn’t they want to keep that person around?”
Roxas hawed loudly, because there was only so much martyrdom he could endure in the name of friendship. “Anyway,” he said brightly, “since you currently seem to be without a date, would you mind doing the honor of accompanying me to the Junior Prom tomorrow eve?”
“Are you sure?” Olette asked, almost insultingly incredulous. “I mean, I’ve seen you glare at those banners like you want to set them on fire and all.”
“How’d you know that’s not just how I show my affections?” Roxas said tartly.
“Well, alright,” Olette said, once more business as usual. “You’ll have to double up with Pence, though. He told me he was staging a hunger strike until his parents let him come.”
*
So, wasn’t that just ponies and rainbows and lollipops?
Frankly, Roxas was much too relieved to care. On the downside, he now had the unpleasant task of digging his tux out of its deep catacomb and airing out the scent of mothballs before Saturday night. On the upside, Olette had gotten so excited about their awesome three-person entrance that she hadn’t noticed Roxas had been stealing cherries off of her sundae.
Roxas was wondering where he had stashed his old dress shoes when he suddenly noticed how quiet the house was, baked in the warm golden glow of late twilight. He was just getting out of the shower after coming back from playing basketball with Hayner, dragging a towel over his hair. His dad wasn’t returning until the next day, and Naminé had been conspicuously absent from the Internet this past week-probably something exam-related. Or perhaps she thought that would get him to call, in which case she clearly had another think coming.
It was quiet, sure, but the good kind of quiet, underlaid with the tiny, creaking whispers of old wood. What a difference little things made sometimes, he thought.
The fact that he had a clearly laid out plan for the evening ahead was just icing on the cake. First, there was ordering pizza-a vast improvement from Krispy Kremes, he felt-and then, he had the last seven chapters of The Cunning Man to keep him company.
Sometimes, Roxas felt he was possibly the most boring seventeen-year-old on Earth.
“At least I have a seriously hot date tomorrow night,” he muttered to himself, because apparently, crazy reclusive habits were hard to break out of. “Two, even.”
By nine thirty, he had entirely forgotten about his loserly lifestyle, and had shifted his attention over to speculating about the feasibility of resurrecting Robertson Davies and swapping his brain. He’d dabble in the dark arts just to be able to write like that.
With a soft sigh, he rolled over onto his back on the bed, and flipped to the beginning of the book. Again, his eyes caught the inscription on the flyleaf. Without you, I shudder to think.
Who are you, Addie? And did this book mean as much to you as it now does to me?
It was probably sort of weird to be so obsessed over a name on the flyleaf of some old book, but that was Roxas to a T anyway-he never gave up once his mind had latched onto some apparent mystery, not until it had got to the absolute bottom of everything. It was his favorite neurosis. Besides, the book looked as if it had been previously owned, kept and read with loving care, though of course it was not outside the realm of possibility that Axel had merely lifted it from a thrift store or-
“No,” Roxas moaned, dropping the book onto his face miserably. “No, no, no, no. Don’t think about Axel now.”
And he’d been doing so well. It would be overoptimistic to expect all the loose ends to tie themselves up just like that, but God, he wanted to be overoptimistic, and Axel had been. One great, consummate mystery, altogether. Even more so, in his silence.
Again, Roxas thought of Kerouac. He hadn’t really liked On The Road, hated its nakedness, the way it wore its outdated beauty on its jacket like an expiration date, a conspicuous lack of immortality. But Axel, with his wild hair and scheming glass-bottle eyes, his sewn-on sneer, was definitely a character out of that book. He would be one of those people Jack Kerouac had been so obsessed with, one of those mad ones, mad to live and mad to talk. Words and movements always unpredictable, but fascinating, a dynamic vitality that was slightly disturbing to be around.
Morosely, he glanced over at his cell phone, docile and maddeningly not ringing on his desk.
Idly, Roxas began pursuing a totally unsubstantiated line of thought involving him tracking down Axel’s whereabouts at Amherst College and hunting him like a dog on the street as he had promised to do so long ago. He had had a lot of time to think about this, and though he still had no idea what he would say to Axel if (when) he found him, perhaps knowing wasn’t the point. Perhaps the words would just come to him, as they had earlier that day.
I was happy. Despite everything, I was happy. Please come back.
But the problem with optimism was that it just didn’t hold up in the face of the cold, hard truth, and as Roxas pondered this fact, he was suddenly consumed with the urge to throw something. He stared at his hand instead, thin and full of angles under the overhead light, and thought, a bit desperately, that this wasn’t just going to go away. No, when friends made-and he had been trying to push this thought to the back of his mind for the past two weeks-sudden romantic overtures, things changed, and they wouldn’t just go back to the way they used to be just because you didn’t want to talk about it.
This did not necessarily mean that everything would go to shit like it had in New York, but he was very much aware of how the situation stood. Slowly, he brought his fingers down to his lips. What had it been like, the surprising warmth, the bittersweet of clove cigarettes…
“DON’T WORRY, DO YOUR BEST…”
Roxas fell off the bed.
He got up immediately and dove for his phone, nearly colliding bodily into the side of his desk. His heart was leaping to the point of inducing nausea. Without a tremor’s pause, he grabbed the device and flipped it open, scanning the message quickly.
The next moment, he was hopping into his trainers and rushing out of the house, post-haste.
*
Axel was waiting for him on the corner of East Street, which was the closest to the house Roxas had ever allowed. He stood reclining against a lamppost, bathed in a sodium vapor glow, his green scooter parked serenely on the side of the street. When he saw Roxas, he stood up straight, raised two fingers to his temple, and said, “Yo.”
Roxas blinked. Then he stepped forward, took Axel by the shoulder, and shoved him roughly back into the lamppost.
“What the blazes gives?” Axel shouted, struggling to retain balance and not fall down embarrassingly in a pile of long limbs. “Seriously, you’ve got to stop hitting me. At least you didn’t beat my head this time, I need that to graduate-”
“Are you fucking demented?” Roxas screamed back, savage, almost deranged. He could sense the bloodlust rising. “What gives? That’s all you’ve got to say, what gives?”
“Is that any reason to assault a person?”
“Oh cry me a river,” Roxas riposted, fighting not to reach maliciously for Axel’s neck. “What the hell have you been up to for the last two weeks?”
And the answer he received was, “Finals.”
“What?”
“I was doing finals,” Axel said, sniffing disdainfully as he rubbed at his shoulder in a show of melodramatic discomfort. He even winced once or twice for good measure. “Well, I was doing finals this week, and studying for them the week before.”
“Since when do you study?” Roxas boggled, fearing for the very fabric of reality. “Do you even own a textbook?”
“I am perfectly capable of borrowing from my hallmates, thank you very much,” Axel drawled, apparently quite pleased with himself. “And for your information, studying at the last minute is necessary when one hasn’t felt the need to attend a single lecture all semester.” Under his breath, he added, “Couldn’t cheat my way out of everything.”
“Somehow, I doubt that,” Roxas deadpanned, and thought, casual brutality and petty bickering, this was going along just swimmingly. “I doubt your hallmates will ever see those books you ‘borrowed’ again either.”
“I see you’re just as big a sourpuss as always,” Axel could be heard muttering, in what he clearly imagined was a discreet whisper. He reached up with one hand and brushed his hair back distractedly, which was the precise moment Roxas noticed that the sunset-red mass was not hanging all out in its usual mad disarray, but slicked back-with what, cement glue?-and tied loosely into a mid-height ponytail at the back of Axel’s head.
In fact, that was not the only thing different about his appearance.
From the top down, it seemed as though a fashion cyclone had attacked Axel and left him a changed man in its wake of devastation. He was, for one thing, wearing a nice, off-pink, perfectly sensible Oxford shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and two buttons undone at the top, exposing the strong, clean lines of his throat and the barest glimpse of sharp collarbones. The long hem of the shirt fell over a pair of tan khakis slacks which actually seemed to fit-both shirt and slacks were for the most part unsoiled, and appeared to have at least seen an iron press at some point in their lifetime. And the shoes…
The shoes were not green and beat up and squiggled all over with hieroglyphics, but were instead brown and nondescript and made of leather. In the light of the street lamp, they shone unassumingly. Evidently, the zombie apocalypse was near.
Roxas couldn’t help it. He had grown, no, had conditioned himself to be able to stand in Axel’s presence and not rip his clothing off in abject horror-a good thing, as that kind of behavior would probably have been taken in all kinds of wrong way, in retrospect. But the point was that, over the months, he had built up resistance to Axel’s taste in fashion, controversial at best and outright stomach-turning at worst as it was. Thus, in the face of this new still larger than life but incredibly PC-fied image, he did the only thing for which he had strength left in his soul.
He gaped.
Lapping up the attention, Axel leered, preening smugly. He blew softly on his fingernails, prima donna style. “Like what you see?”
“What happened to you?” Roxas asked plaintively. “Did you run out of clean clothes? Wait, but that wouldn’t bother you, so…”
This was clearly not the reaction Axel had been hoping for. “I decided to go for a change of image,” he said, sounding rather put out and almost shirty as a result.
“But-why?” Roxas boggled aloud, feeling more and more lost as the conversation went on.
“No reason, just felt like it,” Axel said with an elaborate shrug.
Not for the first time in their acquaintance-though for a distinctly different reason than usual-Roxas was struck dumb by the strangeness of the universe. He tried to recover by changing the topic, but in his state of reduced brain activity, was led to saying, “I’ve been trying to call you for days. I thought you were still mad about what happened at the mall.”
He kicked himself mentally the moment the words left his mouth, and again when he saw the line of Axel’s (off-pink) shoulders stiffen visibly. His insides felt sloshed about for a whole host of unspeakably humiliating reasons. Of course he had to go there.
“I wasn’t mad,” Axel said quietly, seeming to find a spot of unspecified shadow somehow immensely interesting. “Thought you were mad, actually.”
“What’d make you think that?” Roxas asked, and noted that his voice had gone all squeaky again. Must be some kind of tragic hormonal disorder, he should get that looked at.
Axel raised his eyebrow, and Roxas had to resist very hard the urge to check if said brow had been trimmed recently.
“Well, let’s just say you didn’t seem to take too well to-what I did that day.”
A few awkward segues passed in which neither of them breathed nor made eye contact with any part of the other’s body.
Roxas coughed. “It wasn’t bad.”
Axel’s eyebrow climbed to truly deplorable height.
“What I mean is, I wasn’t angry,” Roxas amended quickly, feeling his face burn in deep wretchedness. “You just-you surprised me, that’s all.”
“Really?” questioned Axel. “Is that all?”
“Well, yeah,” said Roxas, staring down at the pavement beneath his feet. “You could have given me some clue-some sort of warning sign beforehand. I had no idea.”
“You had no idea,” Axel repeated blandly. “Are you shitting me?”
Roxas looked up angrily. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“How could you not have any idea? How wasn’t it blindingly obvious?”
“Well it wasn’t.”
“I gave you my dead mother’s book!”
“And what is that-marriage proposal in Canadese?” Roxas shot back, but filed away the latest bit of information. So that was that, the identity of the mysterious Addie. Then, D.B. must be…
Axel did that thing where he shoved his hands into his pockets and kind of shifted uncomfortably on his feet, and the motion brought Roxas up short. All of sudden, he realized exactly what he had said, what they both had been saying. This was it, then, the moment when it all came out in the open. They were really going to do this. He’d be lying if he said that, deep down inside, some part of him hadn’t been painfully holding its breath for this.
“Look, I think this has gone far enough,” Axel said, sounding strangely subdued. His eyes were still fixed upon that unknown spot just outside the frame. “I got upset when your friends came around, so I kissed you to mess with your head. It was just a stupid joke. If it means that much to you, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
For some reason that for a long time would not become clear to him, Roxas could swear that, at that particular moment, he could hear something shatter very loudly in the distance.
Axel tried to make some faintly frustrated motion, then stopped midway, dropping his hands to his sides. All was silent, all was still, and Roxas couldn’t think. There was something here he was missing, he was sure of it. He tried to read into Axel’s expression, which was the usual poker face in the dim light, only misted over with odd gradations of tension. The thought suddenly occurred to Roxas: he’s lying.
But for the life of him he couldn’t think of one single reason why Axel would want to lie about this, not one single justification, so perhaps there were no gradations at all. Perhaps he just wanted to believe that, though that did not make much sense either.
And then, Roxas thought, why did it matter? This was exactly the opening he had been hoping for. If he took it now, the last two weeks would go away, and everything would go back to the way it had been. All that sturm und drang he had gone through, those ulcers he had nearly developed, all those silent hours spent pushing speed dial three, they didn’t have to mean anything at all. It was even more perfect than he could dare to imagine.
Perfect.
“It’s okay,” Roxas said, swallowing around the ball somehow lodged in his throat. “Let’s just forget about it.”
Axel’s jaws held tight, all angles, no curves, but for a moment only and then he was quirking up his lips, trademark cocky grin firmly in place. Normal. Perfect. “Guess that’s that, then,” he said lightly, waving his hand in a very c’est la vie motion.
Then he turned and walked briskly towards his scooter. Roxas thought fleetingly that he was just going to drive off, but at the very last possible moment, Axel turned and asked over his shoulder, “Tell me, Roxas, have you ever been to a college party?”
*
“When you said ‘college party’, this was admittedly not what I had in mind,” Roxas said conversationally, dismounting from the backseat of Rosalina and making to remove his helmet. Around him, all was dark and eerily quiet.
Axel laughed and shook his head. “Nah, this is my dorm room. Got to pick up some stuff, d’you mind?”
“Not at all.” In fact, he was rather excited about the prospect. It was like stepping into the den of the tiger, or, more appropriately, uncovering another missing piece of the puzzle. He hadn’t given up on that Axel/great mystery analogy, and this was his reward.
Axel lived in one of those one-story building blocks they had littered around the Amherst campus, grey concrete and little windows, incredibly depressing in the daylight. At night, the purplish fluorescent lights that lit the hallways inside didn’t help matters.
Roxas followed Axel as he strode purposefully down the corridor. He stopped at the very last door on the left, and pushed it open-the catch had been held down with duct tape-waving vaguely at the surrounding, “This is it. La Casa. What’d you think?”
“It’s very,” Roxas fished around for a word, “neat.”
Axel chuckled. “Well, this is just the common room, and my roommate’s kind of OCD about cleaning. My room’s much more suitably disorganized. Have a seat, I’ll be right out.”
He indicated the futon, which appeared to be the centerpiece in the small but brightly lit and seriously very organized room, before disappearing behind one of the two doorways leading off from the common space. It was, predictably, the one that was crisscrossed all over with what looked like yellow police tapes stolen from actual crime scenes.
Bewilderedly, Roxas made himself sit down on the futon. As his eyes wandered around the room, he was suddenly taken with the thought that Axel had not even cracked a joke about Roxas joining him in his bedroom. He frowned slightly. How uncharacteristic.
He was still pondering this when the second door swung open, and a young man of medium height came out, swinging the strap of a black computer case around his shoulder. He had a pale, attractive face that at first glance didn’t evince any strong characters, an impression bound to change with a closer look at his dark, deep-set eyes. The most memorable feature about the man, however, was his hair, which fell haphazardly over half of his face and was a most peculiar shade of silvery blue in the light.
Their eyes caught across the room. “Hello,” the young man said, not seeming at all surprised by the sight of a complete stranger sitting in his dorm.
Roxas, not quite as gifted in matters of social etiquette, bolted up from his seat and began stammering like a total idiot, “Um, hi. I’m here with Axel-I’m Axel’s friend. You must be his OCD roommate.” He winced mentally, then fidgeted in awkward silence a little before holding out a hand falteringly. “Sorry. My name’s Roxas.”
The man shook his hand calmly, showing no sign of having been offended by Roxas’s faux pas. “Zexion,” he said politely. “I haven’t seen you around campus, Roxas. Are you a freshman?”
“Um, no,” Roxas said, finding himself coloring for no real reason. “Actually, I’m still in high school.”
Zexion just nodded coolly in reply. There was some sort of determinedly nonjudgmental quality in his handsome face that made all his expressions very difficult to read. His quiet air gave off even a stronger sense of mystery than Axel’s hyperactive lunacy.
The conversation was in serious danger of straggling on the vine-Roxas couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound ridiculous, and Zexion didn’t seem enthusiastic to take over the lead-when Axel came bouncing out of his room, buttoning up a fresh long-sleeved shirt. This shirt was even nicer than the previous one, form-fitting, sleek black material with some kind of iridescent undertone that made his eyes almost supernaturally green, jungle-dark and dangerous.
This, Roxas decided, was kind of a dumb thought to entertain, given the situation.
“Zexion,” Axel said brightly, in the distinctly saccharine tone he used whenever mischief was afoot. “Didn’t know you were in. I see you’ve met Roxas. Even he thinks you’ll make someone a very good wife someday.”
“Axel,” Zexion returned evenly. “If I could have a word. I respect your decision to upgrade your wardrobe, but please do not take that as permission to freely use my shoes. Especially shoes that you’ve taken the liberty of removing from my closet without my knowledge.”
“Come on,” Axel laughed, eyes glinting. “What’s a little sharing between friends?”
Zexion shrugged. “Sharing is fine. I just didn’t think you’d be so willing to advertise the fact that you share shoe size with someone you so often ridicule for his inferior height.” He paused, and added with significant, eviscerating intent, “Or perhaps you no longer believe shoe sizes are… indicative.”
Roxas had to bite the insides of his mouth to prevent himself from bursting out laughing, while Axel scowled darkly and choked/fumed/spluttered or some variation thereof at the repartee. Zexion did not seem to pay him any attention. “It was nice meeting you, Roxas,” he said, and headed for the doorway.
“Aren’t you coming to Demyx’s party?” Axel called out after him. “You know he’ll be ever so heartbroken if you don’t.”
“I have simulations to run,” Zexion said over his shoulder, and closed the door soundly behind him.
“Did he say he had to run simulations?” Roxas asked in mild confusion.
Axel sniggered to himself. “Yeah, Zexy’s a nerd like that,” he said, and Roxas made a note to never, ever divulge the details of how he had been spending his Friday night right before Axel had waltzed back into his life.
He looked up to the peculiar sight of Axel spraying some sort of misty liquid onto his chest. What was this fresh madness?
“What are you doing?”
“Applying cologne,” Axel said simply. “You know, scented water, used by some men.”
“Men who aren’t you.”
“Sure, I do,” Axel argued. “This is-Lacoste Essential, the new fragrance for men,” he said, reading aloud from the letterings on the bottle. He was evidently seeing the name for the first time in his life.
“Really?” Roxas asked facetiously. “Is it any good?”
“Who knows, I just bought it,” Axel shrugged. “Ready to go?”
“You’re the one who had to go off to complete his grooming ritual,” Roxas said tartly.
“You know, Roxas,” Axel said with an air of infinite wisdom, slinging an arm around Roxas’s shoulder. “Your problem is that you’re much too critical of others, and as a result, you’re not open to new experiences. You’re just like that character from Anna Karenina, what’s his name. Levin! You’re just like Konstantin Levin.”
Roxas couldn’t help raising an eyebrow. Plus, Lacoste Essential kind of made his nose itch. “Don’t tell me you actually read Tolstoy.”
“Of course not,” Axel said flatly. “I got it off CliffsNotes.”
*
TBC
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Rating: T
Pairings: Axel/Roxas + others
Disclaimer: 不是我的.
Summary: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single high school boy in possession of a good libido, must be in want of a girlfriend-or a pretend one.
Download: Feist - 1234
VIII.
*
“One, two, three, four
Tell me that you love me more
Sleepless long nights
That is what my youth was for…
Those teenage hopes who have tears in their eyes
Too scared to own up to one little lie.”
(Feist, “1234”)
*
The teacher had not yet arrived when Roxas entered the classroom, thank God for small blessings. He could not immediately locate Olette, though the huddle of loudly whispering girls at the back of the room gave him some clues that she might be possibly found somewhere within their tight enclave. Infiltration, then, was the only course of action, and Roxas heaved a small, bracing sigh before making a beeline for the group.
And was intercepted and nearly knocked over halfway across the room by a ball of raw panic clad in designer camo.
“I wouldn’t go over there just now if I were you,” Hayner whispered frantically, wild-eyed. “They’ve already got Pence.”
A cursory glance vindicated his claim, as Pence was indeed sitting somewhat on the peripheries of the thick female wall, looking for all the world like he was wavering between supportive and scared out of his mortal mind.
“Can’t help it,” Roxas sighed. “Until you and I give Rai the pummeling he so justly deserves, this is the only way to make things right.”
“You’re a brave, brave man,” Hayner said, laying his hand on Roxas’s shoulder solemnly. “Personally, I’m glad you two are going to make nice with each other. You were always the one Olette did all the girly stuff with. Did you know the other day she came up and asked me if I wanted to go to the bookstore? The bookstore, honestly!”
Partly out of self-abuse, Roxas decided to let that comment slide for the time being.
The human wall kind of shifted in a decidedly hostile manner at his approach, but at least they hadn’t started brandishing pepper spray and braying war cries or anything, so Roxas suppressed the urge to scamper in the opposite direction just long enough to cough quietly and say, “Olette, can I talk to you?”
All the girls began whispering in unanimously scandalized voices-perhaps they had expected him to grovel and beg for audience with their high priestess-but Pence gave him a sharp, questioning look. Upon catching Roxas’s eyes, he nodded with a smile, and with a few subtle nudges, managed to get the crowd to part and reveal Olette, pale but determinedly composed, both her hands folded tightly on the desk in front of her.
Slowly, Roxas repeated his request, not taking his gaze off her for one moment.
“I’m sitting right in front of you,” Olette said, staring straight ahead. Upon closer inspection, she looked tired and suspiciously red-eyed. “You can say whatever you want.”
“I was thinking, outside,” Roxas said patiently, wishing they could just skip this step and go for a triple-fudge sundae with extra cherries downtown, where they would trade dubious and scathing opinions of high school football and hobag cheerleaders until the smile came back to her eyes again. “Somewhere in private, maybe. Come on.”
Something seemed to click, and Olette looked up at him sharply, searching and completely laid bare. Her gaze gave another twist to the tight knot that had formed in his throat. It felt like the first time they’d made eye contact in days.
“Okay,” she said quietly, and got up without a further word. Immediately, the girls standing around them began buzzing in excitement, and Roxas had the sudden, depressing thought that this was going to be all over school tomorrow. Of course, he told himself immediately, short of at least a pregnancy scare or rumor of substance abuse, it wasn’t as if the gossip mill could possibly paint him in a more tantalizing light than they already had.
*
They came out of the building into the bright sunshine, and started walking aimlessly down the main path leading away from campus central. Roxas quietly racked his brain, and remembered that behind the school, there was a fairly spacious window ledge that few people ever visited, where you could sit and have a private conversation. It was outside the back window of one of the first floor ceramic labs, ensuring that no one would be intruding at this time of day. He began walking briskly in that direction, and could hear Olette following, a few steps behind. Neither of them had spoken.
Upon reaching the ledge, Roxas pulled himself up first, then reached down to assist Olette. It brought him a tiny margin of relief when she took his hand without hesitation.
Now, to begin. It was vital that he opened with something brilliant and appropriately conciliatory.
“Nice weather we’re having,” Roxas said, and cursed the verbal incontinence that came with being such a goddamn guy.
Olette just gave a vague nod, like she hadn’t heard him properly, and continued to look distant. She pulled her knees up and tucked them under her face, so that her chin was resting directly on one of the artistically ripped spots on her jeans.
“Do you think she’s pretty?”
“What?”
“Candi,” Olette said, in that strained, miserable way that was kind of starting to freak him out. “Do you think she’s pretty? Prettier than me, maybe?”
“No,” Roxas ejaculated, about two octaves higher than was probably necessary. He couldn’t help it, though, he was seriously spooked. The only time he had ever witnessed Olette’s freakish confidence even shaken in the slightest had been when Whatsherface Cotillard had actually won the Academy Award for La Vie En Rose.
“I mean,” he amended in a slightly less hysterical tone. “She’s not completely ugly-if you like dark roots and premature wrinkles-but any iota of attractiveness she might possess kind of evaporates the moment she, you know, opens her mouth.”
“Yeah, but still,” Olette said, fingering one of her shoelaces distractedly. “Everybody says she has nice eyes. Lots of guys think blue eyes are prettier than green…”
“I like green eyes,” Roxas insisted. “A lot.”
“Bet you do,” Olette said, and it was dumb but Roxas totally gave himself a mental high-five when he saw her lips quirk up. “Hey, Roxas,” she went on softly, and Roxas glanced over just in time to catch her sweet sideways look, familiar and loved and so long-awaited. He didn’t have to try to fight the urge to make a wisecrack about diabetic comas.
“I’m glad we’re talking again,” Olette said, smiling with her hair falling half in her face, and in spite of his ardent defense of Rai’s honor just awhile back, Roxas couldn’t help but think that the guy was really such a mind-bogglingly retarded Neanderthal with no social graces.
“Me too,” he replied, and it didn’t feel weird at all. Neither of them had apologized outright, which was just fine by him. “Anyway, don’t stress yourself over this. Relationships are hard.” Now he was aping his erstwhile shrink; he hated himself. “In fact, I’m going through a rough patch with, uh, with Anna myself. We’re kind of on a break, actually.”
He hadn’t yet decided whether he had let more of the truth out the gate than intended, whether he even wanted to go there, when Olette’s eyes went wide with empathetic concern. “I-I didn’t know. God, I’ve been so thoughtless. Are you alright? Did she cheat?”
“No, nothing like that,” Roxas said hurriedly. “Philosophically speaking, I’m almost entirely certain that it was mostly my fault-maybe.”
Olette seemed to deflate slightly. “I’ve been such an idiot. It’s just-I get so carried away with these things.”
“Olette, it’s okay-” Roxas began, but was cut short when Olette raised one hand and said, “No, I mean it. You know I care about you, Roxas.”
“I know that.”
“When you first came to town, I seriously thought to myself, damn, if I didn’t have a boyfriend…” she went on, and horror upon horror, appeared to actually be blushing. Surely the end of days could not be far off.
“What’s weird is that I felt the exact same way,” Roxas said, his ears noticeably burning. “Well, except for the boyfriend part. But then you started shouting at me about beakers and I, uh, reconsidered.”
Olette laughed sheepishly. “You know that’s just how I show my love. Can’t help it that you have such pretty blonde pigtails, Roxas.”
“I always knew you were a secret bully,” Roxas pronounced, but thought privately, if relentless teasing actually indicated affection, then-
“It’s just,” Olette continued, the ghost of a frown coming to rest between her brows, under-the-skin tension. “You never say anything, Roxas. You always have this aloof air about you-no, don’t deny it, I’m telling you the truth. You’ve been here for six months and we hardly know anything about you. Example, I know you lived in New York before coming here, but you never talk about that either. So, I worry-”
She paused, and took a deep, shuddering breath, eyes closed.
“I worry that you’re not happy,” she went on, opening her eyes again. In the summer sunlight, they shone with an almost heartbreaking brightness. “I worry we’re not being good enough friends. You always seem happy when you’re with me and the guys, but I-I just don’t know.”
I’m happy, Roxas wanted to say. You guys are everything I’ve ever wanted, and I’m happy.
For some reason, the words just wouldn’t come, try as he might to push them out.
Olette sighed deeply. “But then things changed, and I thought, hey, maybe he’s found something that is good for him. Then I thought, maybe if I tried to help it along, you would be like that, for always. Was I wrong, Roxas?”
“What do you mean?”
“Anna,” Olette said, turning to look him in the eyes. “Did she make you happy?”
“Yes,” Roxas answered, totally unthinking, and remembered, bone-dry cappuccinos, April fireworks, a dozen blazing summer days and scores of chilling rides around the quiet streets of Amherst, this and that and everything in between, littered at the back of his mind. Happiness, too, was a many-splendored thing, confused and inseparable in component parts. “I think I was happy. Despite everything, I was happy.”
Olette grinned, small and sweet, and covered one of his hands with her own. “That’s pretty rare, you know? And you said it, relationships are hard. When people find someone that makes them happy, wouldn’t they want to keep that person around?”
Roxas hawed loudly, because there was only so much martyrdom he could endure in the name of friendship. “Anyway,” he said brightly, “since you currently seem to be without a date, would you mind doing the honor of accompanying me to the Junior Prom tomorrow eve?”
“Are you sure?” Olette asked, almost insultingly incredulous. “I mean, I’ve seen you glare at those banners like you want to set them on fire and all.”
“How’d you know that’s not just how I show my affections?” Roxas said tartly.
“Well, alright,” Olette said, once more business as usual. “You’ll have to double up with Pence, though. He told me he was staging a hunger strike until his parents let him come.”
*
So, wasn’t that just ponies and rainbows and lollipops?
Frankly, Roxas was much too relieved to care. On the downside, he now had the unpleasant task of digging his tux out of its deep catacomb and airing out the scent of mothballs before Saturday night. On the upside, Olette had gotten so excited about their awesome three-person entrance that she hadn’t noticed Roxas had been stealing cherries off of her sundae.
Roxas was wondering where he had stashed his old dress shoes when he suddenly noticed how quiet the house was, baked in the warm golden glow of late twilight. He was just getting out of the shower after coming back from playing basketball with Hayner, dragging a towel over his hair. His dad wasn’t returning until the next day, and Naminé had been conspicuously absent from the Internet this past week-probably something exam-related. Or perhaps she thought that would get him to call, in which case she clearly had another think coming.
It was quiet, sure, but the good kind of quiet, underlaid with the tiny, creaking whispers of old wood. What a difference little things made sometimes, he thought.
The fact that he had a clearly laid out plan for the evening ahead was just icing on the cake. First, there was ordering pizza-a vast improvement from Krispy Kremes, he felt-and then, he had the last seven chapters of The Cunning Man to keep him company.
Sometimes, Roxas felt he was possibly the most boring seventeen-year-old on Earth.
“At least I have a seriously hot date tomorrow night,” he muttered to himself, because apparently, crazy reclusive habits were hard to break out of. “Two, even.”
By nine thirty, he had entirely forgotten about his loserly lifestyle, and had shifted his attention over to speculating about the feasibility of resurrecting Robertson Davies and swapping his brain. He’d dabble in the dark arts just to be able to write like that.
With a soft sigh, he rolled over onto his back on the bed, and flipped to the beginning of the book. Again, his eyes caught the inscription on the flyleaf. Without you, I shudder to think.
Who are you, Addie? And did this book mean as much to you as it now does to me?
It was probably sort of weird to be so obsessed over a name on the flyleaf of some old book, but that was Roxas to a T anyway-he never gave up once his mind had latched onto some apparent mystery, not until it had got to the absolute bottom of everything. It was his favorite neurosis. Besides, the book looked as if it had been previously owned, kept and read with loving care, though of course it was not outside the realm of possibility that Axel had merely lifted it from a thrift store or-
“No,” Roxas moaned, dropping the book onto his face miserably. “No, no, no, no. Don’t think about Axel now.”
And he’d been doing so well. It would be overoptimistic to expect all the loose ends to tie themselves up just like that, but God, he wanted to be overoptimistic, and Axel had been. One great, consummate mystery, altogether. Even more so, in his silence.
Again, Roxas thought of Kerouac. He hadn’t really liked On The Road, hated its nakedness, the way it wore its outdated beauty on its jacket like an expiration date, a conspicuous lack of immortality. But Axel, with his wild hair and scheming glass-bottle eyes, his sewn-on sneer, was definitely a character out of that book. He would be one of those people Jack Kerouac had been so obsessed with, one of those mad ones, mad to live and mad to talk. Words and movements always unpredictable, but fascinating, a dynamic vitality that was slightly disturbing to be around.
Morosely, he glanced over at his cell phone, docile and maddeningly not ringing on his desk.
Idly, Roxas began pursuing a totally unsubstantiated line of thought involving him tracking down Axel’s whereabouts at Amherst College and hunting him like a dog on the street as he had promised to do so long ago. He had had a lot of time to think about this, and though he still had no idea what he would say to Axel if (when) he found him, perhaps knowing wasn’t the point. Perhaps the words would just come to him, as they had earlier that day.
I was happy. Despite everything, I was happy. Please come back.
But the problem with optimism was that it just didn’t hold up in the face of the cold, hard truth, and as Roxas pondered this fact, he was suddenly consumed with the urge to throw something. He stared at his hand instead, thin and full of angles under the overhead light, and thought, a bit desperately, that this wasn’t just going to go away. No, when friends made-and he had been trying to push this thought to the back of his mind for the past two weeks-sudden romantic overtures, things changed, and they wouldn’t just go back to the way they used to be just because you didn’t want to talk about it.
This did not necessarily mean that everything would go to shit like it had in New York, but he was very much aware of how the situation stood. Slowly, he brought his fingers down to his lips. What had it been like, the surprising warmth, the bittersweet of clove cigarettes…
“DON’T WORRY, DO YOUR BEST…”
Roxas fell off the bed.
He got up immediately and dove for his phone, nearly colliding bodily into the side of his desk. His heart was leaping to the point of inducing nausea. Without a tremor’s pause, he grabbed the device and flipped it open, scanning the message quickly.
The next moment, he was hopping into his trainers and rushing out of the house, post-haste.
*
Axel was waiting for him on the corner of East Street, which was the closest to the house Roxas had ever allowed. He stood reclining against a lamppost, bathed in a sodium vapor glow, his green scooter parked serenely on the side of the street. When he saw Roxas, he stood up straight, raised two fingers to his temple, and said, “Yo.”
Roxas blinked. Then he stepped forward, took Axel by the shoulder, and shoved him roughly back into the lamppost.
“What the blazes gives?” Axel shouted, struggling to retain balance and not fall down embarrassingly in a pile of long limbs. “Seriously, you’ve got to stop hitting me. At least you didn’t beat my head this time, I need that to graduate-”
“Are you fucking demented?” Roxas screamed back, savage, almost deranged. He could sense the bloodlust rising. “What gives? That’s all you’ve got to say, what gives?”
“Is that any reason to assault a person?”
“Oh cry me a river,” Roxas riposted, fighting not to reach maliciously for Axel’s neck. “What the hell have you been up to for the last two weeks?”
And the answer he received was, “Finals.”
“What?”
“I was doing finals,” Axel said, sniffing disdainfully as he rubbed at his shoulder in a show of melodramatic discomfort. He even winced once or twice for good measure. “Well, I was doing finals this week, and studying for them the week before.”
“Since when do you study?” Roxas boggled, fearing for the very fabric of reality. “Do you even own a textbook?”
“I am perfectly capable of borrowing from my hallmates, thank you very much,” Axel drawled, apparently quite pleased with himself. “And for your information, studying at the last minute is necessary when one hasn’t felt the need to attend a single lecture all semester.” Under his breath, he added, “Couldn’t cheat my way out of everything.”
“Somehow, I doubt that,” Roxas deadpanned, and thought, casual brutality and petty bickering, this was going along just swimmingly. “I doubt your hallmates will ever see those books you ‘borrowed’ again either.”
“I see you’re just as big a sourpuss as always,” Axel could be heard muttering, in what he clearly imagined was a discreet whisper. He reached up with one hand and brushed his hair back distractedly, which was the precise moment Roxas noticed that the sunset-red mass was not hanging all out in its usual mad disarray, but slicked back-with what, cement glue?-and tied loosely into a mid-height ponytail at the back of Axel’s head.
In fact, that was not the only thing different about his appearance.
From the top down, it seemed as though a fashion cyclone had attacked Axel and left him a changed man in its wake of devastation. He was, for one thing, wearing a nice, off-pink, perfectly sensible Oxford shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and two buttons undone at the top, exposing the strong, clean lines of his throat and the barest glimpse of sharp collarbones. The long hem of the shirt fell over a pair of tan khakis slacks which actually seemed to fit-both shirt and slacks were for the most part unsoiled, and appeared to have at least seen an iron press at some point in their lifetime. And the shoes…
The shoes were not green and beat up and squiggled all over with hieroglyphics, but were instead brown and nondescript and made of leather. In the light of the street lamp, they shone unassumingly. Evidently, the zombie apocalypse was near.
Roxas couldn’t help it. He had grown, no, had conditioned himself to be able to stand in Axel’s presence and not rip his clothing off in abject horror-a good thing, as that kind of behavior would probably have been taken in all kinds of wrong way, in retrospect. But the point was that, over the months, he had built up resistance to Axel’s taste in fashion, controversial at best and outright stomach-turning at worst as it was. Thus, in the face of this new still larger than life but incredibly PC-fied image, he did the only thing for which he had strength left in his soul.
He gaped.
Lapping up the attention, Axel leered, preening smugly. He blew softly on his fingernails, prima donna style. “Like what you see?”
“What happened to you?” Roxas asked plaintively. “Did you run out of clean clothes? Wait, but that wouldn’t bother you, so…”
This was clearly not the reaction Axel had been hoping for. “I decided to go for a change of image,” he said, sounding rather put out and almost shirty as a result.
“But-why?” Roxas boggled aloud, feeling more and more lost as the conversation went on.
“No reason, just felt like it,” Axel said with an elaborate shrug.
Not for the first time in their acquaintance-though for a distinctly different reason than usual-Roxas was struck dumb by the strangeness of the universe. He tried to recover by changing the topic, but in his state of reduced brain activity, was led to saying, “I’ve been trying to call you for days. I thought you were still mad about what happened at the mall.”
He kicked himself mentally the moment the words left his mouth, and again when he saw the line of Axel’s (off-pink) shoulders stiffen visibly. His insides felt sloshed about for a whole host of unspeakably humiliating reasons. Of course he had to go there.
“I wasn’t mad,” Axel said quietly, seeming to find a spot of unspecified shadow somehow immensely interesting. “Thought you were mad, actually.”
“What’d make you think that?” Roxas asked, and noted that his voice had gone all squeaky again. Must be some kind of tragic hormonal disorder, he should get that looked at.
Axel raised his eyebrow, and Roxas had to resist very hard the urge to check if said brow had been trimmed recently.
“Well, let’s just say you didn’t seem to take too well to-what I did that day.”
A few awkward segues passed in which neither of them breathed nor made eye contact with any part of the other’s body.
Roxas coughed. “It wasn’t bad.”
Axel’s eyebrow climbed to truly deplorable height.
“What I mean is, I wasn’t angry,” Roxas amended quickly, feeling his face burn in deep wretchedness. “You just-you surprised me, that’s all.”
“Really?” questioned Axel. “Is that all?”
“Well, yeah,” said Roxas, staring down at the pavement beneath his feet. “You could have given me some clue-some sort of warning sign beforehand. I had no idea.”
“You had no idea,” Axel repeated blandly. “Are you shitting me?”
Roxas looked up angrily. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“How could you not have any idea? How wasn’t it blindingly obvious?”
“Well it wasn’t.”
“I gave you my dead mother’s book!”
“And what is that-marriage proposal in Canadese?” Roxas shot back, but filed away the latest bit of information. So that was that, the identity of the mysterious Addie. Then, D.B. must be…
Axel did that thing where he shoved his hands into his pockets and kind of shifted uncomfortably on his feet, and the motion brought Roxas up short. All of sudden, he realized exactly what he had said, what they both had been saying. This was it, then, the moment when it all came out in the open. They were really going to do this. He’d be lying if he said that, deep down inside, some part of him hadn’t been painfully holding its breath for this.
“Look, I think this has gone far enough,” Axel said, sounding strangely subdued. His eyes were still fixed upon that unknown spot just outside the frame. “I got upset when your friends came around, so I kissed you to mess with your head. It was just a stupid joke. If it means that much to you, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
For some reason that for a long time would not become clear to him, Roxas could swear that, at that particular moment, he could hear something shatter very loudly in the distance.
Axel tried to make some faintly frustrated motion, then stopped midway, dropping his hands to his sides. All was silent, all was still, and Roxas couldn’t think. There was something here he was missing, he was sure of it. He tried to read into Axel’s expression, which was the usual poker face in the dim light, only misted over with odd gradations of tension. The thought suddenly occurred to Roxas: he’s lying.
But for the life of him he couldn’t think of one single reason why Axel would want to lie about this, not one single justification, so perhaps there were no gradations at all. Perhaps he just wanted to believe that, though that did not make much sense either.
And then, Roxas thought, why did it matter? This was exactly the opening he had been hoping for. If he took it now, the last two weeks would go away, and everything would go back to the way it had been. All that sturm und drang he had gone through, those ulcers he had nearly developed, all those silent hours spent pushing speed dial three, they didn’t have to mean anything at all. It was even more perfect than he could dare to imagine.
Perfect.
“It’s okay,” Roxas said, swallowing around the ball somehow lodged in his throat. “Let’s just forget about it.”
Axel’s jaws held tight, all angles, no curves, but for a moment only and then he was quirking up his lips, trademark cocky grin firmly in place. Normal. Perfect. “Guess that’s that, then,” he said lightly, waving his hand in a very c’est la vie motion.
Then he turned and walked briskly towards his scooter. Roxas thought fleetingly that he was just going to drive off, but at the very last possible moment, Axel turned and asked over his shoulder, “Tell me, Roxas, have you ever been to a college party?”
*
“When you said ‘college party’, this was admittedly not what I had in mind,” Roxas said conversationally, dismounting from the backseat of Rosalina and making to remove his helmet. Around him, all was dark and eerily quiet.
Axel laughed and shook his head. “Nah, this is my dorm room. Got to pick up some stuff, d’you mind?”
“Not at all.” In fact, he was rather excited about the prospect. It was like stepping into the den of the tiger, or, more appropriately, uncovering another missing piece of the puzzle. He hadn’t given up on that Axel/great mystery analogy, and this was his reward.
Axel lived in one of those one-story building blocks they had littered around the Amherst campus, grey concrete and little windows, incredibly depressing in the daylight. At night, the purplish fluorescent lights that lit the hallways inside didn’t help matters.
Roxas followed Axel as he strode purposefully down the corridor. He stopped at the very last door on the left, and pushed it open-the catch had been held down with duct tape-waving vaguely at the surrounding, “This is it. La Casa. What’d you think?”
“It’s very,” Roxas fished around for a word, “neat.”
Axel chuckled. “Well, this is just the common room, and my roommate’s kind of OCD about cleaning. My room’s much more suitably disorganized. Have a seat, I’ll be right out.”
He indicated the futon, which appeared to be the centerpiece in the small but brightly lit and seriously very organized room, before disappearing behind one of the two doorways leading off from the common space. It was, predictably, the one that was crisscrossed all over with what looked like yellow police tapes stolen from actual crime scenes.
Bewilderedly, Roxas made himself sit down on the futon. As his eyes wandered around the room, he was suddenly taken with the thought that Axel had not even cracked a joke about Roxas joining him in his bedroom. He frowned slightly. How uncharacteristic.
He was still pondering this when the second door swung open, and a young man of medium height came out, swinging the strap of a black computer case around his shoulder. He had a pale, attractive face that at first glance didn’t evince any strong characters, an impression bound to change with a closer look at his dark, deep-set eyes. The most memorable feature about the man, however, was his hair, which fell haphazardly over half of his face and was a most peculiar shade of silvery blue in the light.
Their eyes caught across the room. “Hello,” the young man said, not seeming at all surprised by the sight of a complete stranger sitting in his dorm.
Roxas, not quite as gifted in matters of social etiquette, bolted up from his seat and began stammering like a total idiot, “Um, hi. I’m here with Axel-I’m Axel’s friend. You must be his OCD roommate.” He winced mentally, then fidgeted in awkward silence a little before holding out a hand falteringly. “Sorry. My name’s Roxas.”
The man shook his hand calmly, showing no sign of having been offended by Roxas’s faux pas. “Zexion,” he said politely. “I haven’t seen you around campus, Roxas. Are you a freshman?”
“Um, no,” Roxas said, finding himself coloring for no real reason. “Actually, I’m still in high school.”
Zexion just nodded coolly in reply. There was some sort of determinedly nonjudgmental quality in his handsome face that made all his expressions very difficult to read. His quiet air gave off even a stronger sense of mystery than Axel’s hyperactive lunacy.
The conversation was in serious danger of straggling on the vine-Roxas couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound ridiculous, and Zexion didn’t seem enthusiastic to take over the lead-when Axel came bouncing out of his room, buttoning up a fresh long-sleeved shirt. This shirt was even nicer than the previous one, form-fitting, sleek black material with some kind of iridescent undertone that made his eyes almost supernaturally green, jungle-dark and dangerous.
This, Roxas decided, was kind of a dumb thought to entertain, given the situation.
“Zexion,” Axel said brightly, in the distinctly saccharine tone he used whenever mischief was afoot. “Didn’t know you were in. I see you’ve met Roxas. Even he thinks you’ll make someone a very good wife someday.”
“Axel,” Zexion returned evenly. “If I could have a word. I respect your decision to upgrade your wardrobe, but please do not take that as permission to freely use my shoes. Especially shoes that you’ve taken the liberty of removing from my closet without my knowledge.”
“Come on,” Axel laughed, eyes glinting. “What’s a little sharing between friends?”
Zexion shrugged. “Sharing is fine. I just didn’t think you’d be so willing to advertise the fact that you share shoe size with someone you so often ridicule for his inferior height.” He paused, and added with significant, eviscerating intent, “Or perhaps you no longer believe shoe sizes are… indicative.”
Roxas had to bite the insides of his mouth to prevent himself from bursting out laughing, while Axel scowled darkly and choked/fumed/spluttered or some variation thereof at the repartee. Zexion did not seem to pay him any attention. “It was nice meeting you, Roxas,” he said, and headed for the doorway.
“Aren’t you coming to Demyx’s party?” Axel called out after him. “You know he’ll be ever so heartbroken if you don’t.”
“I have simulations to run,” Zexion said over his shoulder, and closed the door soundly behind him.
“Did he say he had to run simulations?” Roxas asked in mild confusion.
Axel sniggered to himself. “Yeah, Zexy’s a nerd like that,” he said, and Roxas made a note to never, ever divulge the details of how he had been spending his Friday night right before Axel had waltzed back into his life.
He looked up to the peculiar sight of Axel spraying some sort of misty liquid onto his chest. What was this fresh madness?
“What are you doing?”
“Applying cologne,” Axel said simply. “You know, scented water, used by some men.”
“Men who aren’t you.”
“Sure, I do,” Axel argued. “This is-Lacoste Essential, the new fragrance for men,” he said, reading aloud from the letterings on the bottle. He was evidently seeing the name for the first time in his life.
“Really?” Roxas asked facetiously. “Is it any good?”
“Who knows, I just bought it,” Axel shrugged. “Ready to go?”
“You’re the one who had to go off to complete his grooming ritual,” Roxas said tartly.
“You know, Roxas,” Axel said with an air of infinite wisdom, slinging an arm around Roxas’s shoulder. “Your problem is that you’re much too critical of others, and as a result, you’re not open to new experiences. You’re just like that character from Anna Karenina, what’s his name. Levin! You’re just like Konstantin Levin.”
Roxas couldn’t help raising an eyebrow. Plus, Lacoste Essential kind of made his nose itch. “Don’t tell me you actually read Tolstoy.”
“Of course not,” Axel said flatly. “I got it off CliffsNotes.”
*
TBC