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Globalization Ch. 2, AxR

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Summary: Yes, we are terrible for each other, and yes, we are a disaster. But tell me your heart doesn't race for a hurricane or a burning building. I'd rather die terrified than live forever.

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insiduously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to seperate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Morning comes, and Roxas is up with the sun the way he always is. A quietness drifts over Sable, the holy period of early when the sky groans with effort. It's a respectful silence, and Roxas slips on his boots and his fuzzy black pants to go outside and bask in it.

A time of few words, the early morning.

"Good morning, sky," he says. "Good morning, sand. Good morning, tower."

He's got school for almost five hours straight off, followed by enough scouting duty to last him until nightfall. It isn't often that a longer school shift and afternoon farm work fall back to back on the same day, but it happens.

"Man," he mutters to himself. "Sable just hates me today."

But, as always, he laughs and tells himself that days are all the same length, good or bad. And this one will end just as soon as a good one will.

XXX

Midway to afternoon, Hayner collapses next to Roxas, leaning against the school building to face that tower.

"Hi," Roxas says. "Where are the, um." Yawns. "The other ones."

"Pence's got a messed-up schedule right now," Hayner frowns. "Got little-kid duty today, or something. Olette's just...probably talking to a teacher because she got a four on a paper or something." Hayner likes to add 'or something' to his sentences, as if covering his tracks, accounting for the whole world in two words.

Roxas laughs, because Olette swims in fives, the highest of six possible grades in the humanities, and anything less is an insult to her intelligence. He's got a handful in his life, never corresponding to the amount of work he puts in, but no huge amount. Fours like the rest of them.

"I know. It's like grades are the only thing she cares about. I don't know why." He frowns. "They don't really count for anything, do they?" It is, of course, hard to keep from getting caught up with her torrent of worry and grades – he's always been prey to these sorts of things. If someone is doing something important, it be important, in some way or another. He's been taught to think otherwise – believes otherwise – but putting it into practice always proves harder.

"I guess not. They don't matter if you stay in Sable. As long as you try, and don't slack off – I mean as long as you do the work – nobody gives a shit." He takes lunch out of his bag, a leafy sandwich on brown bread, wrapped in a thick sheet of paper. "Aw, seriously? I'm not a llama. I need starch or something, Mom."

"There's starch in bread, I thought."

"Shut up." Hayner plucks a leaf hanging off the side. "Would you want to eat this? This is so gorram unsatisfying."

Roxas shrugs, because he has beans and flavored rice and is quite happy with it, and offers some to Hayner. "I wouldn't eat all of it anyway. I'll eat some of your sandwich."

"Deal." Hayner mercilessly tears it in half, squishing the bread between his fingers in a few places, offering it to Roxas. He takes a savage bite of his half. "Hey, d'you know what's up with that tower?"

"Not more than anyone else. Some Empire thing, I guess," he frowns and tips his cup towards Hayner, who takes a sloppy spoonful of beans. "I met one of their soldiers yesterday, though."

"Seriously? Really? What was he like?"

All Roxas can respond with is a shrug. "Normal, I guess. He asked me some questions about Sable. To be honest, I don't remember it that well. It was only a few minutes 'cause he was patrolling and I was kind of scared, so I left." At this Hayner makes an utterly disgusted noise, a groan of "Aww, Rox-as, I would kill to talk to one of those guys!"

"They're not allowed to tell us anything anyways. I think like as a matter of policy. You know, since if they told us the not-scary stuff and didn't tell us the scary stuff, we'd always know when they were up to something bad because they wouldn't say anything. I mean. I mean it's obvious they're not actually gonna do anything."

"Yeah." Still, Hayner twists his mouth to the side, wiggles his toes in the sand. What a dumbass, wearing sandals in the midday sun, Roxas privately laughs to himself, loving his friend for his carelessness. "I heard they set up more or less the same thing in the Veldt somewhere. For training soldiers in harsh conditions."

"What's harsh about the Veldt? I thought it was grassland?"

Hayner snorts. "Ain't a monster alive that doesn't frequent the Veldt. It's like the scary thing clubhouse."

"Oh." With no reply for that, Roxas just turns to quietly eating his lunch. Hayner is probably exaggerating about the Veldt, he thinks, because that's what Hayner does. Everything has to be more exciting than it really is. If there is one boy in Sable who deserves an adventure, it's Roxas's best friend. Hayner is always going a little farther from Sable than he went yesterday, expanding his radius of desert inch by inch until it'll encompass the whole world and him in it, spinning around a little desert city. Hayner running around his playground turning over rocks and digging holes in the sand to see if he'll discover a monster he can fight. Of course Hayner wants to meet a soldier, and see what they're doing in the tower – he's never been satisfied with Just Because.

Roxas envies him for that.

"Hey, Roxas?" his voice has shrunk to a fraction of its volume, quiet and controlled.

"Yeah?"

"D'you like Olette?"

There's a funny hiccup in his voice that Roxas doesn't recognize. "Olette? Yeah, I like her well enough, why?"

"No, no I mean – do you like her."

Roxas blinks and raises his eyebrows, suddenly aware that he was treading on very shaky ground. "Romantically? No..."

"Really?" Hayner asks, leaning forward a little and still chewing on a piece of lettuce. "Are you sure?"

Rolling his eyes, Roxas shoves him in the chest. "No. I'm totally messing with you. I'm in love with Olette and we're going to elope to Kohlingen and have four thousand babies."

Hayner is silent for a moment, and then says "Thirty-seven years."

"What?"

"If Olette had a baby every nine months, it would take you thirty-seven years to get four thousand babies, except I think she'd run out of eggs."

"You – did you just do that in your head?" Roxas asks incredulously. "I mean that's a disgusting thought but did you just do the math in your head?"

"Yup!" Hayner crows, suddenly bright and cheerful again. "I am a super amazing fantastic dude like that. 'Sides, big numbers are still easier than writing."

It was true that writing has never been easy for either of them. Roxas can't get his words to come out the way he wants, and Hayner never has anything to say – they feel a sort of camaraderie there. But Roxas has always taken to Sable's native language better than Hayner, who calls it "clunky and funny-sounding".

"Tian chanka bunlabu," he says with a grin, nudging Hayner's foot.

"The fuck?"

"You're a very cute airhead," Roxas says. "I was going through my dictionary the other day and found it."

Hayner scowls at him and crosses his arms. "Dana, tian chanka fucktarded."

"That...doesn't make sense in either language."

"Why? What did I say?"

"'Well, you're a fucktarded airhead.' Isn't that a little redundant? And...offensive?"

"It's exactly what I meant to say and I mean every word of it, including the incorrectly pronounced ones."

He likes this, laughing with his best friend, just being there and spoken to and wanted, he likes it. He's childish, really. Roxas dislikes complications, but he loves stories. He loves good and evil, especially when the lines are blurry – or better yet, when the lines are clear and they are crossed by both parties. He loves stories of tricksters, because every culture has one, and stories where monsters and heroes have real conversations instead of fighting each other. Because it's Sable, and they teach their kids different than they do in Kohlingen or Figaro.

"Hey – Hayner?" Roxas asks.

"What?"

"Why'd you ask me that, about Olette?"

Hayner bristles and looks at him sideways. "No reason."

"You can tell me, can't you?"

He just shakes his head, rolls his eyes and looks at the sand, pulling it between his fingers over and over again. "It doesn't matter. As long as you don't like her I don't really care." Roxas gives him a shove and takes another bite of food, which he's nearly forgotten is there. Why is Hayner acting like this? Roxas racks his brain for their recent interactions, him and Hayner, him and Olette, all three of them. Yesterday can't have been it; they've had that conversation a thousand times. The day before they'd all been working on a humanities project, and he doesn't remember anything weird about that, either. The only possibility he can think of dawns on him slowly.

"Is this about what I told you?" he says, eyes narrowed.

"Huh?" Hayner finally looks him in the eyes. "What did you tell me?"

"I mean it, Hayner."

"So do I!"

"That – last week, when I told you about me – you know, maybe not...liking girls as much as I should, was that – " he cuts himself off, not even wanting to finish the thought, and hating himself a little for jumping to this conclusion so quickly. It occurs to him that Hayner could very well like Olette and is just making sure the way is clear before pursuing her, and he feels like a jerk. "Or do you like Olette?"

"That's not it," Hayner says.

"Then what? Were you making fun of me?"

"No. Jeez, Roxas! I just wanted to ask you something but then we got sorta sidetracked!" Clapping him on the shoulder, Hayner laughs so hard a little bit of lettuce comes out of his mouth, and he wipes his face on his sleeve.

"Oh. What is it?"

There is a long, long silence during which Roxas can't get a single coherent thought through his head. Every time he tries, he turns back to what Hayner's about to say. "...well, now it feels weird," is what finally comes out of his best friend's mouth.

"Please, just tell me."

But they've been out here for too long, and someone inside is hitting the gong with slow, sure strokes. Roxas tries never to be late, but wonders if this isn't worth the exception.

"I just think I might – I think...the same as you...I might be –"

"Oh! Oh."

That's all they really need to say. It certainly seems to satisfy Hayner, who looks immensely relieved, although Roxas hadn't noticed him looking stressed. In the thirty seconds before they head back inside, there is a funny silence, a question, and an answer.

"Can I kiss you?"

"Yeah."

So Hayner does, and Roxas is mostly still for it, and it's over in a second and they head back inside and Roxas touches his lips and can't remember how it feels.

XXX

If you asked the nation state of Tzen, in the beginning, there was one. A point on a plane, composed not of matter, but only a specific location. The Origin, or sometimes translated as Order depending on the text – Roxas once asked a Tzenian passing through, who told him that there wasn't really a good translation for it in the Empire's official language, nor in Sable's.

In the beginning, there was calm. One. Order.

He exploded.

And rushing out came everything, with light leading the way. The everything sped around the void, and filled it up. Order, still in the center, was frightened, and huddled in on himself. He grabbed what he could see, and put it all into a pile, and shaped it as well as he could and kept it together with his power, and so the world came. But Chaos, who had been birthed, was jealous of the world and determined to bring pandemonium to it. In Tzen lore, the whole world was a battlefield for Order and Chaos. Chaos was more powerful, and was always winning, but Order was cunning and true and held his own.

The Tzenian Roxas has met, a thin man with long dark hair who declined to give his name, was reluctant to assign genders to them. He said that in his language, they were neither, and stressed upon this fact when he told Roxas the next part of the story. Order and Chaos had a child ("You see now, little one, two men cannot have a child, but they were neither of them men..."), the first human. Humans, he said, were ordered things with careful inner workings who strove for peace and calm. But he went on to say that they were never satisfied with monotony, that tearing things apart came easier to them than putting them back together no matter how they fought the urge, and fought for Order and Chaos at the same time. ("We do not dissipate into our component parts to whiz around the void, you see. Order fights Chaos for this every day, but still we do the work of Chaos. How many stories end in tragedy? There are more ways to kill than to heal, little one, oh, little one, how I like your little town.")

Sable has a very different answer for where men come from. Like any modern town, they say real answer lies in science, but their lore dictates simplicity: the wind blew the sand into the shape of a life by chance, and the monsoons gave it a mind, and it propagated. Roxas likes the Tzen lore. To him, it makes a better story. As a small child, his favorite pictures had been the ones of Order and Chaos because they looked like people, and didn't have lots of arms and legs and faces, and their magic never glowed – though that might have been the limitation of the artists.

Roxas groans at his desk and begins to think that Chaos is winning and that he is starting with Roxas's stomach, which is slowly evaporating.

He wants someone to ask if he's alright, but can't very well talk to Olette or Pence about something like this. He's riding flurries of emotions he hadn't known he had. He is excited, of course, but is it excitement about Hayner or excitement about the idea of the thing? And at the same time, he hates the idea, the principle of the thing.

If you have fifty loves, you will have fifty woes. If you have no loves, you will have no woes.

He breathes in and out, very slowly and carefully. When he tries to look up at the chalk board he can't make sense of any of the symbols, and buries his head in his hands again. He needs to go find someone who knows things, and he won't find anyone here.

XXX

Little boys aren't allowed in military bases. Especially foreign little boys. Nasty blue-eyed little monsters with sticky fingers and slippery accents, wickedly beautiful farm equipment strapped to their backs. But Axel can't help it when he sees Roxas again, this time without the birds, without a friend or a lantern. Roxas is dressed the same as yesterday, but now there is a sickle in his hand. It shines in the moonlight, silver and blue, with a carved black handle made of some sort of mysterious desert wood. Roxas wields it like a real farm boy, with no malice in his grip, just a tired wariness.

"Hey," says Axel, steering the Magitek armor to greet him. He's hoping that Roxas's abrupt abandonment yesterday was just a time constraint, not a snub, and he's rewarded.

"Hi," says Roxas.

"Was wonderin' if I'd see you today. Where're your feathered friends?"

Roxas looks utterly confused for a few seconds before saying "Oh! The chocobos? I don't have that tonight. I just...felt like walking."

"You always walk with weapons?"

"Yes."

Axel's honestly a little taken aback by that, though he doesn't show it (the academy actually has classes on how to hide your emotions, or cover them up with different ones. It's a creepy class taught by a creepy doctor but it's useful as hell). He takes in the way Roxas holds the sickle, and once he really thinks about it he realizes how unthreatening it is. The blade itself is terrifying – it's a cruel curve, and the sharpened edge gleams, the reflection of Axel's headlight mockingly warped on that long, sharp grin. But the hand that controls it is loose and relaxed. Axel's just biased. The kid has probably never used this thing for anything other than harvesting crops.

That's when he notices the eight-inch dagger strapped to Roxas's thigh. It's still beautiful, engraved with something he can't see from this high up, and the handle is so black it practically disappears in his pants, but it's thin and pointed and menacing in a way the sickle just isn't. It sits there quietly and stares at Axel like it's just waiting for him to try something.

Axel wets his lips. "Can I ask why?"

But Roxas, he just stares at Axel with those eyes, fine China stained with India ink and encased in glass, and he smirks and looks out at the desert, away from the tower and from the town. "You go out there," he says. "You go out in the desert alone. Don't bring nothing, just yourself. You do that and tell me you aren't scared it'll eat you up."

Axel stares at him for a while. Just stares at this kid, a stuttering mess yesterday and now standing here with sharp blond hair and a long blade, all black and white, reminding Axel with a sickening crunch to his psyche of another blond with another blade far away from here. He pulls himself out of that memory as fast as he can, because Roxas has nothing in common with that aside from hair, and he finds himself wishing those eyes were on him again.

He does, he looks at Axel with that same smile, and he spins the sickle in his hand around once in a smooth motion.

"I thought you guys weren't afraid of the desert," Axel confesses. He's much higher than this Sable native with his machine, and would probably tower over him even if they were on even ground, but he sure feels like he's shrinking. "You all dress flashy."

"Yup. If you get lost, nobody'll find you while you're wearing brown. But nothing in nature looks like this – " Roxas shakes the stripes on his hands and arms; they make grey blurs. "We stick out. Like funny little growths."

"So you're all afraid of getting lost?"

Roxas frowns. "It's a desert," he says. "I might live in it, but that doesn't mean it'll take care of me. It'll swallow me whole if I let it." He takes a step toward Axel, who watches this little desert monster with fascination. "I've seen it swallow whole buildings."

Axel clears his throat, breaks eye contact briefly, and fingers the watch around his neck. "You're sure different from yesterday," he says.

When he looks back, Roxas is just staring at the ground with his eyebrows furrowed, breathing slowly. "I'm in a funny mood," he says. Wow, that mouth. Axel's always been one for dramatic features, big eyes, strong arms, confident sweeps of noses. That mouth is small (not delicate, but small), the lips are round, not full, not pouty, not anything, even the skin is the same color as the rest of his face, but the way words fall from them and the way words shape that mouth, it's fucking art.

"I wanted to ask you something," says that mouth, and Axel jerks back to reality. It has been far too long on the military base full of men with shaven heads and really unflattering armor.

"What is it?"

"Does your language have a word, where you come from, for men who like other men?"

Axel just blinks at him, unsure whether he should believe this question is even coming out of this kid's mouth (that mouth, what the fuck is wrong with him today?) or if he should be immediately suspecting a trap. Either way, he just can't think straight with this jarring behavior. "Yeah," he says. "You mean sexually? We call them gays."

"Oh." Roxas nods and turns his eyes to the sickle again, holding it up to let moonlight skate along that sly curve. "I see."

"Why, what is it in your language?"

He shrugs. "We just call them people."

"Uh, can you – put the sickle down? I feel like you're about to murder me." Roxas lets the tool fall to his side again and he looks up at Axel with a funny smile.

"I'll put it down if you get out of your monster," he says gently.

After a second of stupid deliberation Axel realizes that he means the Magitek armor, the assigned Magitek armor for every private on a patrol shift so as to use intimidation before actual force, and he laughs to himself that he's sitting in the goddamn robot suit and he's the one being intimidated by a kid with a knife. "I can't do that," he says.

Roxas nods, and his grip tightens. "Then I'm sorry," he replies.

"It's called Magitek."

"What?"

"The armor. The thing you called a monster. They're called Magitek suits, and they're not alive."

"Oh. Does something have to be alive if it's a monster?"

Axel sighs, growing a little weary of this game, but unable to up and leave. He can't even suggest curtly that he has better things to do than to talk to naive little boys. And then, of course, he realizes none of those words really apply to the person in front of him. With a start, he realizes that Roxas is even wearing a black turtleneck. It's a little uncanny.

"I suppose not," he concedes.

"If you won't come down, can I go up?"

Axel just stares at him. He feels a little creepy, now. It's creepy, he thinks, to have sexual thoughts about someone who's currently acting like a five-year-old, no matter if the military has been the longest and biggest turn off of his sex life.

"Well? Can I?"

"If you put down the weapons and get up on your own you can."

He's seen native villages from the forests. He can't remember any of their names, not that they would matter anymore anyways, but their children jump around on the trees and make hammocks and scuttle around from branch to branch, and it's amazing, really it is, but damn if the little desert brat isn't just as fast and genius as they are when it comes to climbing things they shouldn't climb. In an instant he drops the sickle, slides the knife off his thigh and clambers into the belly of the beast.

There's barely enough room, of course, but Roxas is slight and Axel is used to cramped corners.

"Hi," he says.

"Hi," Roxas says.

He shouldn't be doing this. He really shouldn't, oh, it's against a lot of rules, it really is. This guy is a native and this is military equipment, and every extra minute he spends talking to him Axel risks letting something slip that could get him court-marshaled, and this kid sure as hell knows his way around a sickle and probably that knife too, climbed into Magitek armor like it wasn't a deadly machine, what the fuck is he doing.

Maybe it's the desert. He's a redhead; they don't take too well to sunlight. And the whole place is just so big, and so empty, he believed Roxas when he talked about getting swallowed up. The desert is making him even lonelier than usual. It doesn't really help that this is his first tour of duty so far from home, either. He'll take what comfort he can get.

Then Roxas smiles at him. "I've never seen someone with red hair before," he says.

"They ain't that common. Besides me and my brother, I've only ever met a few."

"I know. It's a recessive trait. I just..." his eyes trail upwards, staying on the mane of red hair of which Axel's really quite proud. "I've heard of it, but I never imagined it would be so red."

"Thanks, I think." Roxas laughs and scrunches up his nose, and they just look at each other for a minute on even ground. Black, and silver, and white, and blue, and sand. Those are the colors in Sable. Green and red. Roxas is fascinated, Axel can just see it, and he takes a real slow pleasure in that.

"So how does your monster work?" he asks, and reaches out whoa there fucking immediately around Axel to start fiddling with the controls, which is, Axel's sure, more or less totally illegal and really very dangerous. He flicks a switch and the thing lurches sideways and swivels with a series of metallic clicks and whirs toward the tower. "Oh I swear to God kid – "

"What kind of gods do you have?" Roxas says brightly, drawing his arms back in close and not touching anything. He watches Axel mess with the controls, in out, up down, shift this and pull that with long bony fingers.

"Don't touch the controls, kid. I'm already riskin' enough trouble letting you up here," he flashes a quick grin at the blond behind him.

"I'm sorry," he says, though he reflects that smile in his own strange desert brat way.

Axel just lets that smile wash over him, and lets himself be just Axel. Not a damn appendage, a flagellum of the military. He quits thinking about the bastard he bunks with, his fucked up commanding officer, Reno's smile while he watched his little brother learn how to fight with real goddamn weapons, the family talking over his head about five years down the road Axel honey, a proud military man with a career and a wife and kids, finally delivering on that childhood promise those how many years ago –

Fuck no. Right now he's got no past and no fucking history; he's a foreigner with exotic red hair, face to face with an attractive and at least bicurious native. Reno is probably the only one who would approve of this.

The kid practically does his work for him. "That word you mentioned – gays – are they...common?"

"Common enough. Why?"

Roxas doesn't say anything, just flexes his hands. Axel starts the Magitek up again, and it sloughs through the sand with mechanical groans. But it keeps to a steady course. He struggles to find something to say. "There was a whole big deal about 'em, maybe five hundred years back – you know, before uh." He grunts, because he hates saying it. "Before all that world of ruin crap."

That gets a really confusing look from the kid, but Axel keeps going. "Some people thought it was unnatural for one reason or another. Since animals aren't like that, I guess. And then obviously the people who were like that couldn't do shit about it and wanted to be able to live normally, and they won out in the end, and now it's not really unusual." He pauses, and refrains from mentioning that while it's not unusual, it's still not good. "Why do you ask?" he adds.

"A boy kissed me today. I thought you might know what to do."

That just hits Axel right in the face. Either fate's on his side or, he reasons, Roxas sought him out tonight because of this instead of conveniently falling into his lap. But oh, damn, he doesn't sound too happy about being kissed by "a boy", does he? Axel groans inwardly.

"Really?" he asks, slowing down the Magitek to conserve fuel. He might just get back in with enough to shirk refill duty.

"You're a soldier, you come from a city in the Empire. I figured, if anyone would know, it would be you," Roxas mumbles.

"Well, do you like him?"

This is surreal.

"He's my best friend," Roxas says brokenly.

"Do you like boys, in general?"

"Yes." He sounds so sure, but then, going by his earlier comment ("We just call them people."), it's not nearly as big a deal here as it is back home. Axel grins and hides it immediately, because really, he's a good guy. He doesn't know this kid at all – at all at all – for all he knows, Roxas has a good chance at a real, healthy relationship.

Well. For the next few weeks, at least.

Axel winces.

"Do you want to kiss him again?"

"I want to understand it. Love must be pretty fantastic. Even Chaos and Order fell in love, so I always thought it would feel more...important. Even just the kissing."

Axel shrugs, confused by 'chaos and order fell in love' but refusing to show it. "I dunno what to tell you. I've never met this kid and I barely know you at all."

Roxas nods, and then he puts his forehead on Axel's back, delicately. It's just this tiny little circle of pressure, meaningless, if a little strange. But oh, God, it does things to Axel's stomach that he hasn't felt in months. "Sometimes it's easier," Roxas says, "To be yourself with someone who barely knows you. They don't expect anything from you."

"True that."

He giggles against Axel's back, but Axel doesn't mind. "Do you do that on purpose? Use funny sentences?"

"A person might say you use funny sentences too, you know." He snorts. "Deserts eating people and all that."

"Axel? Private Axel?"

"Just call me Axel. If a civilian starts calling me 'private' I'm gonna shoot something. What is it?"

"What should I do?"

Fuck if it matters, kid. This is gonna seem like the most hilariously small problem in the world for you pretty soon. Axel sighs and, with that in mind, decides to throw caution to the wind and just say whatever he feels like. "Do you have romantic thoughts about this kid?"

The pressure on his back rocks back and forth. "I'm...not sure. Maybe."

"Does he get you hot?"

Axel stifles a snicker. At least this gets a reaction out of the weirdo. "What – what?"

"You know. Hot and bothered. Sexy. Does thinking about him – " oh, he's such a messed up fuck of a private. Axel's in all sorts of moods tonight. " – make you feel the impulsion to give in to your primal urges?"

Roxas blinks a few times. "You're making fun of me," he says suddenly. Coldly. A spark of malice in those gorgeous eyes.

"I am not."

"You grew up in a city. You think this is a joke. I'm dealing with all this as calmly as I know how, and you think it's funny, because my problems seem so small."

Okay, fine, Axel tells himself, trying to back into the other end of the very small cockpit of the armor. He's a cute little desert brat who's a good fucking guesser.

"I'll tell you something," Roxas says, leaning in toward Axel really, really close, "I'll tell you something. I've seen the world begin and end more times than you've breathed in this desert. Maybe I never took the time to learn your social conventions, but that doesn't give your people the right to dismiss mine."

"Jeez, kid!" Axel is quick to leap to the defensive, maybe because Roxas has expanded the discussion to their people, past the individual. That makes him feel a little guilty. But he hides it; he's good at that. "Jeez, would you calm down? You're the one who came to talk to me. You're the one who said being from the Empire meant I might know what to do. Alright?"

He blinks some more, and twists his hands in his lap and just stares lot. He breathes in, really slowly, and looks back up at Axel with those eyes. There's a calm set to those eyes; they are settled so firmly in Roxas's face, and they don't shake or shine. They absorb all the light that comes into them and let it back out the same color as that silver blue shine of the sickle. Axel's positively hypnotized. "I'm sorry," he says. "You're right, you really are.

"And it's not important, is it? These sorts of things. I won't even remember this a year from now."

As for Axel – he just can't say anything, can't talk. What happens in that head? He just looks that face, with a fine smile and eyes, and those words start making sense. The desert swallows up everything, doesn't it, Roxas? Even the bad things.

"You're a really strange guy," he says at last.

Roxas laughs. "You should see me when I'm calm. My mom says I act twice her age then."

"And don't I believe it."

They talk for a while about anything, nothing, about what a person does in the desert all day to wile away the time, or the exciting things that happen in a city on a daily basis. About the weather – really, the weather – and about history, and Espers (here they've all got individual names; back home they're just different types). They make a full circle and when that unforgettable glimmer in the sand comes around again, and Roxas hops out real fast.

Axel sees another guard coming towards him, and thanks his lucky stars for the timing. Perfectly innocent, other guard, look, just appeasing the natives. Haha, the silly natives. They'll never see it coming, right, other guard? Haha.

Shit.

Roxas stills when he hears that clunking noise, angry and unnatural, veering closer. He picks up his sickle, and looks at the moon very briefly before looking back in the direction of the noise, motionless. Right out there in the open. He slides the knife onto his thigh and hides the shine of the blades behind his back, and when Leo comes through, arms crossed and armor on autopilot, he doesn't hide. Roxas just stands there and watches.

Leo doesn't notice him. "Hey Ax," he says.

"...hey."

Clank, clonk, clunk. Bye, Leo.

No recognition. He just walks right on by Roxas, immune to that stare, or maybe because of it. He whistles to himself and looks up at the night sky, arms crossed behind his head. Roxas watches Leo with a cool fascination, with cold, curious eyes and a barely-there smile.

Roxas is...is...

...unsettling.

"Thank you for the ride," Roxas says, turning to Axel, once the other guard is out of range. "I think you must have helped me, in some way or another."

"Don't say that, kid." God, don't say that. You'll make it worse.

"Why not?"

"Just don't."

He can't make eye contact, but jumps out of the armor and onto the ground all the same, just to prove he can. It's the first time he's really truly set foot on the sand – the base is all concrete and steel, and he always gets into the armor before going out to patrol. He'd gotten here after the grunt work, the mindless tedium of setting shit up. Oh, no, of course he did. Son of the commander. He only gets to come in for the fun part. He would rather have it the other way around.

"Whoa," he says.

"What is it?"

"Walking on sand feels shit weird is what it is," Axel says, rocking back and forth on his heels with little success. "How the fuck do you do it?"

"Fuck?"

Axel splutters. "W- no, jeez, kid, I'm pretty sure that doesn't change between cultures – "

"Oh. That's what it means." Roxas seems a little disappointed it's something so crude, but Axel doesn't feel too apologetic. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and steps a little closer. "Wait. You've been here this whole time, and you never touched the sand?"

"Didn't say I never touched it. It gets fuckin' everywhere. Just never walked on it." He takes a few more steps, circles Roxas. He imagined that his footprints would stick in the sand, engraved there, but he just leaves little dents that cave in on themselves.

"That's awful."

"Why?"

"It's so fun. It's how I imagine the ocean might be, if you could make it into the ground. It wouldn't ever really stop moving, so it would be like this, almost solid, but not really."

"You ain't never seen the ocean, have you?"

"Is it that obvious?"

Axel laughs and claps him on the shoulder; Roxas lurches forward and stumbles a little before righting himself. "It is, kid. You can't ever talk about the ocean going solid once you've seen it."

"Oh."

He's feeling stupid for saying that, and Axel considers going all out with it. He thinks about this kid's nervousness about kissing a guy, his indecision. He briefly toys with the idea of kissing Roxas with that hungry fire in his belly, spread the flame to this strange desert soul, show the kid what a real kiss was like and why he should have no hesitation about something like this. But he'd feel stupid for doing that, even if he did succeed it leaving Roxas dumbfounded.

But he's already lost his chance for the last word. Roxas takes it right from him.

"Axel?" he says, getting real close and looking up, half his face hidden in a shadow.

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you want me to thank you for helping me?"

Axel gulps and tries to look away, but he doesn't. "None of your business."

"Axel?"

"What?"

Roxas smiles at him. A tiny little thing, stretched out small and delicate over that mouth. So fragile. He smiles and he says, "It'll be okay, you know."

Axel just – he just – stares.

"What?"

Two hands, one on either side of his face, those bright calm eyes on nothing but him. Axel doesn't know anything about Roxas. He wants to tell him everything.

"It will be okay," Roxas repeats. His voice is so, so soft. "I know it doesn't seem like that. And it'll be bad for a long time, I know that too. It'll be really bad, for a really long time. But you'll be okay. Everything will be okay."

They don't even know anything about each other. If it were any other situation Axel would punch the dickhead telling him "it will be okay" and tell him that if he needed a mommy he would've stayed in Kohlingen, but here, now, after coming from that meeting and seeing those – those huge – things in the storeroom, he's never needed it and hated it more in his life.

"You shouldn't say shit like that," Axel says. "It only gets more depressing when it isn't true."

"It is true, though. Sometimes it's right around the corner and sometimes it's twenty years from now, but it always comes." A cool, small hand strokes the side of Axel's face. This is so fucking creepy and wrong but he can't pull away. "I know these things."

"You don't know everything," and this time it's Axel who sounds broken, who bends over practically in half to rest his head on Roxas's shoulder. This is so fucking creepy. He doesn't even know this kid. What the fuck is he doing. He can't stop. What is this place doing to him? "You don't know what – " he stops himself. "What might happen."

"No," Roxas admits. "But I still know this."

Very gently, he removes Axel from his shoulder, and smiles and picks up his sickle (when did he drop that? Axel's so out of it), and he leaves without a word again.
Preview image what.

Ughhh this annoys me.
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