Title: Prehistoric Punch
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts II
Pairing: Axel/Roxas
Rating: a light PG-13 for language
Word Count: 2,356
Warnings: language, AU
Summary: Axel is not a stalker. He just plans efficiently, because plans are pretty much all he's got.
Author's Note: Happy not-too-horrifically-late-yet birthday,
sparkleloli! Sorry I didn't manage to use either of the prompts; my muse is like a German Shepherd on a leash sometimes, and writing this yesterday was one of those. Hopefully it proves enjoyable all the same. ^^
PREHISTORIC PUNCH
Roxas worked at the ice-cream shop.
That was it.
That was the only thing Axel knew for a fact, unless you counted that Roxas had a friend called “For fuck’s sake, Pence!” who owned a cellular phone-although “Pence” could have stood for anything or could have been an elaborate code or could have indicated an upbringing in England where “pence” referred to currency, in a past remote enough to have worn away any trace of an accent.
Axel considered it fact that the little sun-god could walk on water if he tried, but there was probably some scholarly debate to be had on that point.
The facts were few, but the hypotheses were many: Axel surmised that Roxas was about to turn eighteen, because he always sauntered up from the direction of the high school with a black backpack swinging from one shoulder, but he walked with confidence. He looked to be of Nordic descent, if the freakishly bright blue eyes and the wheat-sheaf puff of gravity-scorning hair were anything to go by, and because the warm pink that suffused his cheeks and his forehead on summery days spoke to Axel of sunburn. He seemed to have a relatively whole and harmonious family-“Mom, I’m about to get to work; I’ll see you at six. Love you, too”-and his favorite flavor of ice cream was the slightly toxic-looking dark blue one, which stained his lips and his tongue and sometimes his fingers when he had it on his break.
Axel worked in the tattoo parlor two doors down in the downtown shopping center that was the only thing they actually shared. Axel was decent at drawing things, at depicting people’s fantasies and coaxing them to permanence, at rendering hopes and dreams and reminders in black or colored ink. He fared well, lived all right, and sent happy customers back out the doors, and it was good enough for some cherry-haired punk who had outgrown the bomb-shelter moniker of “kid.” It was certainly more than anyone had expected of him when he’d dropped out of school and started drifting, to the mechanic’s and then to the hardware store and then nowhere in particular, and it was more than he’d expected of himself when he’d toyed with the prospect of dealing to get off welfare. But then there had been the day he’d seen the girl drawing in the park, and something about her white sun-dress and the way she swung her sandaled feet off the bench had made him sit down next to her. And then she’d handed him the sketchpad and the pencil without uttering a word, and he’d taken in her castle and drawn her a dragon, likewise silently. By the end of the hour, they’d been friends, somehow, and by the time the sun went down, she’d dragged him into the tattoo place and introduced him to her father, who ran it.
So Axel had that. He had a lot of things, and he knew what they meant, unlike most people. Beyond just occupation and sustenance, he had a ring of black-ink barbed wire around his wrist and a burgeoning nicotine addiction, and he played in a band that even stumbled into gigs every now and then.
The band was Demyx’s deal, mostly. Demyx was always dragging him-them, but mostly him-into shit like that. Demyx was a brainless fuckoff, but he believed in things, and sometimes, when they’d all had a lot to drink, and Brainless Fuckoff was pontificating about hope, Axel started to think maybe that was enough. Maybe you could believe things into reality if you just tried hard enough.
Most of the time, he figured that the phrase “pipe dream” alluded heavily to sewers for a reason.
All the same, his philosophical outlook didn’t change what he did, only his perspective on the actions he took with mechanical-religious regularity.
Everyone at the tattoo place smoked like a chimney except when Naminé was hanging around-anybody who looked that desperately innocent, even if she had a wicked sense of humor, had the crew scrambling for ashtrays so as not to pollute her pink little lungs. The tremendous upside was that nobody really gave a shit if Axel slipped out for cigarette breaks now and again (and again, and again) when he didn’t have a customer, and Axel could schedule those outings pretty much at will.
No one seemed to notice that people who had to go out for a cigarette at intervals usually didn’t wait until five minutes past two for the first one, pitch the second right around four-fifteen, and take the third one just after six.
It was, all things considered-and Axel had considered them all-impressively stupid to be in love with someone when all you had was a rounded face with a pointed chin, overheard phone calls, and really kind of creepy fantasies about little plastic ice cream spoons. Axel had been stupid before, in so many ways and from so many angles that he’d lost count, but this was a particularly good streak. If Roxas even noticed him, he probably thought Axel was a fucking stalker.
Axel kind of was a fucking stalker.
That was the part people didn’t tell you about being in love, probably because they figured you’d kill yourself preemptively if you knew.
Ten past six. The sky was going a sort of dark and muddled purplish, and Axel sympathized. Roxas worked at the ice-cream shop, an ice-cream shop that was humming happily behind its advert-plastered windows, an ice-cream shop just fifteen feet away from Axel’s back where he was sitting on the brick of the planter wall, an ice-cream shop from which you could sometimes hear him laughing. Two months ago, right after he’d taken the job, right after Axel had first caught sight of him, he’d reemerged at ten past six still peeling off his burgundy apron, and Axel had eagle-eyed the nametag through his eyelashes, because he knew he might not ever get another chance. Yes, Roxas could help him today-not that, in his right mind, he’d ever want to.
Axel had been entertaining some vague kind of hope that having a name would dampen it-that pinning the sun to “Helios,” reducing a blazing element to a word spelled out in letters that preschoolers understood, would make it manageable, but it didn’t change a thing. The kid who worked in the ice-cream shop was called Roxas, but he was still everything he’d been before the name. Words were approximations, and, if anything, they were worse than images alone, because once he had Roxas, Axel could call up all of its implications in two tiny syllables. He could summon the spirit with the spell.
Roxas could have had no name or any name. You could call it a nightmare or a phantasmagoria or Mommy I had a bad dream again, and you still woke up scared shitless.
It was funny, though, about this thing-and it was a “thing”; it obviously wasn’t a relationship, and “stalkership” was still a little too harsh-and how weirdly pure it was. Axel had had girlfriends before, because having girlfriends was something you did to make society like you, and he was in a band. And it wasn’t that his girlfriends had been bad; and it wasn’t that he wouldn’t have gladly taken an opportunity to throw Roxas down on his creaky bed and ravish the living hell out of the kid, whether or not the might-not-be-eighteen-yet detail gave him pause. It was just that this was something bigger than that, something layered, something that tasted like cigarettes and sounded like the trashy pop station they played in the ice-cream store. It was something that made him happy even when it made him want to jump off of a cliff.
Eleven past six and no sign. That wasn’t too unusual, and he’d been at this long enough not to get depressed. Axel stabbed out his cigarette and resisted the urge to spit.
And then the bell on the shop door jingled, and his mouth went dry.
“-always a guy from the tattoo place.”
And Axel was starting to wonder, as he let the cigarette butt slip from his fingers and fall to the cement, if there really was a God, because random chance seriously could not fuck with him this much.
Whatever I did, I’m sorry already, he attempted, glancing upward just in case.
And then Roxas was sitting down next to him, and looking at him, and Axel was looking back, and he hadn’t died. That was a start. It was important to put these things into perspective.
Roxas had one of those big, white, cylindrical tubs in his arms and a pair of oversized spoons in his hand, and he didn’t waste any time.
“Hey, sorry-this is kind of awkward, but do you want some ice cream?”
Axel blinked. “I don’t really have any money on me.” He cursed his wallet for having the gall to rest with his tattered shoulder-bag in the tattoo parlor’s back room. Fuck that fucking wallet and its numerous failures.
“It’s totally free,” Roxas said, baring his teeth a bit in a sardonic grimace. Axel recognized a lot of the boy’s facial expressions by now, but this one was new, and close, and Axel could claim it as his. “It’s, like, a promotional thing for some stupid-ass movie that’s coming out, and nobody would touch it all day. Now we’re just trying to get rid of it. Do you want some?”
Axel leaned over a little to peer into the container, and Roxas tilted it towards him. Once he managed not to be distracted by the pale hands cradling the spoons-there was a checkered cuff bracelet on the left wrist, and two rings to go with it-he saw in the failing light that the contentious ice cream was a sickly neon greenish color, and it might have been ever so slightly luminescent.
“It looks radioactive,” he observed.
Roxas grinned. “That’s probably why they’re trying to get us stuck with it.” He raised his eyebrows and one of the spoons.
Axel took it. “If this gives me cancer…” He angled the spoon reproachfully at Roxas and then dug it into the greenness-which, at least in consistency, bore a promising resemblance to edible things. “I’m never going to buy from you again.”
Roxas was still grinning, though a little bit nervously as Axel bit the bullet, hoping that analogy wasn’t about to get too accurate.
Remarkably, however, the stuff was tart and smooth and tasted like lemon-lime sorbet with maybe just a hint of pineapple.
“It’s kind of good,” he reported, unnecessarily given that he was reaching for another spoonful.
“Really?” Roxas said, tipping the bin to give him leverage. “It was called ‘Prehistoric Punch’ or something, and we weren’t sure whether that meant ‘fruit punch’ or ‘punch to the intestines,’ and by then we were too scared to find out.”
“If you like piña coladas,” Axel said with a straight face, “and getting caught in the rain-”
Roxas laughed, brightly and delightedly, and Axel was pretty sure his next spoon of ice cream would melt the second it met his tongue, because everything in him was flooded with warmth.
Cautiously, Roxas applied his own spoon, but his dubious expression segued into approval, and then they were sitting outside the ice cream shop, scarfing Prehistoric Punch together in silence.
“My mom’s going to kill me for spoiling my dinner,” Roxas decided after a while.
“Just tell her I tried to sell you heroin,” Axel said, trying not to sense the ripple of the could have been, “and you convinced me that we should have some ice cream instead, and then we sat around and sang ‘Kumbaya,’ and you saved my soul.”
Roxas snickered, and that, too, was rich and unique, and Axel tucked the sound away so he could marvel at it properly some other time.
“You think I should get a tattoo?” Roxas asked. “I was thinking about it.”
“You’ll have to get your parents’ permission if you’re under eighteen,” Axel said, and the way Roxas’s face scrunched up, he knew he was sunk.
The hell with it. Being stupidly in love with a minor wasn’t a punishable crime.
“I guess I’ll work on that,” Roxas said, dragging his tongue along the hollow of the spoon. “She might be okay with it as long as it wasn’t anything Satanic.”
“Too bad,” Axel said. “Satanic runes are my specialty, after butterflies.”
Roxas grinned again, but then the bell on the door jingled, and they turned to see a silhouette shout, “Just drop the demon flavor and run!”
“All right, all right!” Roxas yelled back over his shoulder. “I’ll be there in a minute!” He shot Axel an apologetic look. “I’d better go; they’ll take my tips. Do you want this?” He hefted the glorious bin of demon flavor that had brought them here.
“Nah,” Axel said. “Thanks, though. If you’re still selling it tomorrow, I might have to stop in and get some.”
Roxas beamed, and it lit up the settling night. “We will be. See you around!”
Axel made some sort of salute-like wave, and Roxas bounced back into the shop, one arm around the ice cream, the spoons clasped in his other hand.
Axel got to his feet and rescued the cigarette butt he had dropped a thousand years ago, the better to toss it into the nearest trashcan. He managed to refrain from glancing at the ice-cream shop’s window as he headed back to work, and he thought about drawing Satanic butterflies in Sharpie on Roxas’s inner forearm and how they would howl with laughter at the thought of the poor kid’s mother’s face.
Axel shoved his hands in his pockets and grinned. It was going to be a bitch telling Brainless Fuckoff that he was right.