Kingdom Hearts Fan Fiction ❯ Alkalinity ❯ Radium ( Chapter 6 )

A/N: This story won't leave me alone. I'm thinking about while I'm doing homework, in class, at work, even when I try to read other things or just listen to a song for a few minutes. It is crack.

 

 

I keep stepping back to try and look at this story objectively. I'm really not in control of what happens at this point XD This is shaping up to be nothing remotely like what I had envisioned - but I think I like it more.

 

 

Disclaimer: Roses are red, violets are blue; me no own, so you no sue!

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

“The flowers you gave me are rotting and still I refuse to throw them away.
Some of the bulbs never opened quite fully
They might so I'm waiting and staying awake.
Things I have loved I'm allowed to keep
I'll never know if I go to sleep.”

 

“The Flowers” by Regina Spektor

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

Roxas tried to remember the sensation of being ripped apart, but as days passed it became less immediate; remembered pain rather than pain itself.

 

 

He wished that more carnal memories would become equally two-dimensional. So of course they revisited him during his waking hours with unparalleled urgency. He tried to hate the memory of the man who had killed him, but found himself remembering instead the taste of helpless tears.

 

 

More and more he began sending Namine to spend time with Kairi, lashing out when she was reluctant to leave him. It became too much, watching her try to alleviate his pain when he could not begin to find the words to explain it to her. Before they had always existed on the same dark plane; now he found himself falling far beyond her.

 

 

He knew he wanted to drag her down with him, and so he sent her away.

 

 

 

It was not that he feared being alone. It was that he feared who was waiting for him.

 

 

After two more days of drinking bitter coffee by himself, he went looking for Axel.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

He had stopped measuring time in hours, so he was mildly surprised to find the chemistry lab full of students.

 

 

This didn't stop Axel from walking out of the class and leaving them to their own devices.

 

 

Roxas was dragged by a hot hand clamped around his wrist until they reached an elegant room with no apparent purpose other than the display of expensive furniture.

 

 

“You hide sometimes.”

 

 

Though Roxas could feel searing green eyes looking at and through him, he found himself unable to tear his gaze from a flickering candle that had been left on the mantelpiece. It had burnt down to a wide pool of wax, and soon it would die.

 

 

He wondered what happened to candles when they died.

 

 

He wondered why he was there, and if the answers he might find were worth knowing.

 

 

“Sometimes you hide, and sometimes you find me. Sometimes you love me, and sometimes you hate me; either way, you're always one stubborn sonofabitch.

 

 

“Sometimes you run away, when hiding fails you.”

 

 

Roxas did not know when Axel had moved, only that he found himself pressed into a wall, the corner of a gilt frame digging into his shoulder.

 

 

Axel's face pressed against his neck. The lips that murmured and gusted humid air over his skin formed and almost-kiss. His broken, strained voice reverberated along Roxas' nerves and sent desperate messages of danger and flight throughout his body.

 

 

“I can't look at you until you stop trying to hide.”

 

 

Then he was gone, and Roxas wondered if he had always felt so very cold.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

He spent so much time outrunning death he would forget what being alive was.

 

 

The sweating, reeking behemoth shoving a tongue down his throat certainly wasn't helping him remember. Neither was the sweating hand fumbling in its attempts to creep beneath his clothing. They were only a few feet away from the street; The Drunk had seemed to think that setting foot in an alley meant instant invisibility.

 

 

The passerbies were not particularly shocked or appalled. It was Paris, after all. Their bored glances and raised brows did seem to indicate, however, how little they thought of his choice of `clientele.' It made him want a sign in flashing lights:

 

 

Wait and see what happens next.

 

 

There wasn't much waiting left. It was fortunate, as Roxas had just about reached his slobber threshold.

 

 

Thin, black-gloved hands danced spider-light over the heavy shoulders from behind. Roxas watched them a felt the first stirrings of the sensual anticipation that had been so absent throughout the ministrations of The Drunk pressing against him.

 

 

When the fingers clamped down into the fleshy throat, Roxas slipped smoothly away. The show was always better appreciated with a little distance.

 

 

Alexis waited until The Drunk was dizzy and weak from lack of air. Then he neatly drove a thin blade through one bloodshot eye and beyond to the delicate tissue of the brain. The man screamed, jerked, and fell still. Alexis let the body fall. Part of the jellied eye had come away on his knife, and he slid it off mutely, watched it land on the grimy cobblestone.

 

 

Then they met halfway, and Alexis kissed him until his lips bled. He couldn't take his eyes off the prone figure with its twisted face.

 

 

He had killed three people with his own hands in his life. They weren't experiences he cared to repeat. They had been before he met Alexis, anyway.

 

 

Alexis had killed innumerable times. Roxas had seen most of them. And it was only nights like this, involving Roxas, a dark nook, and greedy hands, that he saw Alexis take a brutal pleasure in the dispatch.

 

 

He would keep to this particular method just to watch the wrathful sneer that crept over Alexis' face, and to be kissed with such desperate ownership afterward.

 

 

When they broke apart Roxas realized his eyes had closed. They shivered and laughed sharply in the night air, giddy with adrenaline. They caught a greasy pickpocket trying to disappear with The Dead Drunk's purse. They broke two of his fingers and sent him on his way.

 

 

Once the purse was safely tucked into one of the hidden pockets of Alexis' stained coat, they slipped away between shadows and light.

 

 

They did not walk as quickly as they should have.

 

 

They were going to get caught one of these days.

 

 

They would be caught, and probably hanged, and Roxas knew that in the moment before his short and final fall he would feel everything he now felt in halves: passion for the extraordinary, sensual man who would die with him, fear that was lacking, exhilaration that was coated in translucent lethargy.

 

 

He would stop running and welcome death, because in that moment he would remember what living was.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

Aule was tired from the day, but it was the opium that Roxas had slipped into his wine that made him sleep.

 

 

Another man, after pulling farmer's plows when their oxen were lame, and carrying old women over rivers to visit other old women, and building houses, and mending fences, and doing anything else that was asked of him, would have room for nothing but sleep when he finally reached his home.

 

 

Instead, Aule would kiss him softly, ask him if he needed anything, wanted anything, and no matter how many times Roxas said no he spent hours nurturing before finally sleeping so that he could rise with the sun the following day and do it all again. And again. And again.

 

 

The wicked were sleeping in the shade.

 

 

It was the virtuous for whom there was no rest.

 

 

So Roxas broke him.

 

 

He cut the tendons in his ankles, behind his knees, cut deep into the powerful muscles. He tied the careful incisions tightly, glancing up at the sound of every unsteady breath.

 

 

Finally, he cut off Aule's fiery hair - so if he were left alone after this, he would have something left.

 

 

As he wrapped the bundled strands in undyed muslin, he heard the breathing from behind him change. He felt rather than saw Aule's eyes open, heard the tight gasps of pain. He found himself standing beside the bloodied bed.

 

 

The wide eyes that found him were panicked, uncomprehending.

 

 

Roxas laid a trembling hand over them, knowing that he could never say what needed to be said otherwise.

 

 

“They'll make do without you. They always could. They'll make do, and forget about you, because it's not you they love.

 

 

“I'll be here, and I don't need you to be good or strong. I just need you.

 

 

“I'll take care of you now.”

 

 

He moved his hand to cup the side of the strong-boned face, looking at the arch of one brow instead of directly into the eye beneath it.

 

 

Though he shook with the strain, Aule slowly turned his head and placed a wordless kiss into his open palm.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

Roxas reoriented himself smoothly, exchanging his handhold on the bar for a strong grip with his knees.

 

 

He counted the exact number of seconds as he swung, and was ready when Axel was thrown to him across the great divide, was already flying forward to catch him.

 

 

The exclamations and murmurings of the spellbound crowd were indistinct but present. They always seemed to like the lack of a net, the lack of safety. Roxas knew that every time they watched the trapeze, they watched because there was a chance that someone would die.

 

 

He didn't care if he died. He didn't care about most of the troupe.

 

 

But Axel was gripping his hands so tightly and he could still feel him slipping. Roxas knew that the sweat on his palms was soaking through the chalk, his fear overcoming their safety measures.

 

 

Axel slipped.

 

 

Axel fell.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

Roxas woke, stretched, and made a cup of coffee. He played a few games of solitaire on the computer.

 

 

When Namine woke up, he was already half-dressed and preparing to go to class.

 

 

And so began the Great Forgetting.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

A/N: I can't remember if I mentioned this already, but leijhana tu'sai means “thank you” in Cheysuli, which belongs to Jennifer Roberson aka Not Me.

 

 

To be clear, the three dreams were NOT related. Different times, different places, different circumstances.

 

 

So… Leijhana tu'sai to all readers and reviewers.