He rolls around in a field of personified emotional complexity, high in the air where everything is thin and unsubstantial and the clouds rub up against you like big cats.
He stays there, weaving inconsistent chains of this and that.
Crowns his own head with blades of grass.
Cuts his carotid with blades of truth.
Stops his ears with bits of heaven to pretend like it isn't getting through.
"Tell me the truth, Axel."
And he's such a pretty little boy.
Soft and young and lithe and lissome, fashioned out of silver clasps and gold leaf.
He's such an intelligent little boy.
Sharp eyes and dark lashes and a quick wit, words like poison and a steel barb tongue.
But he doesn't understand.
"You don't want to be in love, Rox," he hums. Hums to a song that only he really knows because it doesn't exists at all, but it isn't as if he makes it up as he goes. "Love is Hell."
His eyes flash knife fast, cold and blue and terrifying.
Axel's body tightens, dodges with an evasive smile that falters when the disgust and the pride come into play.
Pulls in the cracking pieces of his façade tighter, one, two, slip through his fingers and shatter on the floor.
Indecent exposure, Roxas looks like he'll vomit.
"Give me mine back and go there!"
And he walks away.
Hips swathed in darkness sway, one step.
Two step.
Can catch him yet.
One.
Two.
Slip through his fingers.
And shatter on the floor.
א
He plays in his substance-less sky field, somewhere hidden in the backs of Roxas' eyes.
Quick agitated blinks jostle him until he's paying attention.
To the quiet little phantom sitting on his bed and falling in love with him.
"You look tired."
Calling him on a weakness is a fault in his own right.
Got to keep him down.
Gotta weight him down.
The second Roxas realizes he's the center of the universe he's gonna get up and leave.
Like quicksilver.
Slow down?
"Sleep. Dream of me."
Weight him down?
He's got his feet on the ground.
"I don't go to sleep to dream."
And he fades.
Wraith.
Wraiths.
Wraiths.
The screeches of the damned reach his ears, all the way where he's hiding in his quietly manufactured heaven of air and ice.
א
The mirror is warped and broken and the kaleidoscopes turn and distort.
Until he's not at all what he seems.
And the girl made of ozone and the boy made of earth are his new companions in the field made out of fragments of Roxas' eyes.
Painstakingly mined with every angry glance to ward him off.
The day he'd walked away had been all wrong.
The determination…
But he'd always had his feet on the ground.
"I've got my own Hell to raise."
The wrong words to the wrong tune at the wrong time.
No one would miss me.
"I would!"
What?
Already gone.
א
And heaven and sky and helpless, hopeless, hide-and-seek amongst the clouds of malformed thoughts and unfelt emotion.
This mirror is warped and broken.
Except for its perfect imperfection.
The kaleidoscope turns without changing.
The hidden secrecy of his salvation is gone, gone, gone.
Roxas.
Fight! Fight! Fight!
"We're not playing a game any more."
To the silently missing memories.
And while Axel pants for breath from running like a fool to be by his side, Roxas steals back all the love.
The indignation and the surge of pride and rage and fucking, fucking, nothing.
I'm so flattered!
"Don't make it a big deal, don't be so sensitive."
What it should have been.
How it should have been.
Instead of losing him, sky-gold hair and metal-blue eyes and soft-alabaster skin and hard-velvet lashes, and all to the heaven of his choosing.
"Give me mine back and go there!"
The rush of malignant anger.
What he wanted.
Expected.
Craved
Warp.
Twist.
"Take the sorrow you gave and all the stakes you claimed and don't forget the blame."
Axel, in the next life…
Going straight to Hell.
Standard Disclaimers