darling, you know, we're better unheard
It's still 8/13 somewhere, right?!
Right.
Thanks to my darling dear iki-teru for both hashing this out with me and filling my night with giggles. And porn.
savages
axel/roxas, NC-17, 2841 words
Saix doesn't get angry, not as such.
Instead, Axel has found, he settles into a still, unnerving calm, throughout which he stares at you like he's trying to leech out your soul by way of your eyes, and lesser men have been known crumble under the sheer weight of his gaze -- namely, Demyx.
Axel, however, lacks any sense of self-preservation and is of the general opinion that his soul wasn't worth much even when he was a real boy, so he has absolutely no qualm about looking Saix in the eye and cheerily advising him to go fuck himself before returning to his novel. He doesn't give it his full attention in the least; one eye stays trained on Saix, not bothering to rein in the immature desire to piss him off.
Saix, much to Axel's displeasure, doesn't get angry, not as such.
Instead, his lips purse just slightly and he snatches the book from Axel with a deft hand, not bothering to mark the page. Ass. Axel looks up at him irreverently, chin resting on his palms. "May I help you?" he asks, oozing politeness.
"You may," Saix replies. "This mission is crucial. The boy is young, and that makes him a liability."
"Among other things," Axel supplies helpfully.
"Yes. And you will accompany him."
"I'd better not. I think I have a touch of the flu." He coughs lamely into his fist. "Oh, my. I feel faint."
"The outcome of this mission will affect all of us. Even you, regretfully." Saix's hand rests softly on Axel's shoulder, not comforting nor threatening, merely a reminder of his presence. Remember your place: here, on marionette strings, nothing and compelled by no one. By Nobody.
"And it just breaks my heart that I won't be there to see it," Axel drawls. Saix's mouth twitches, just slightly, in the way that Axel has come to interpret as an almost-smile. Times like these, Axel can see them knowing each other, being friends. Once. The twitch lasts a half-second and Saix's face goes blank again.
"You will accompany him," he repeats. Once is not now, Axel remembers.
-
Axel also remembers, frequently and indignantly, that Saix is full of shit. He's pretty sure that nothing quite so heavy and golden-looking is going to be crucial to anything except making sure the Superior has full pockets, and it's definitely not worth Roxas nearly getting them killed over because he possesses neither a sense of timing nor an inside voice.
Axel dodges a portly, red-faced guard coming at him with a spear and tosses a chakram over his shoulder. He grins a little bit at the wet, squishy sound that tells him it hit its mark and ducks behind a crate to pick off the opposition as they walk by.
The thing is, he gets distracted. No, it's not him, it's Roxas; Roxas is distracting in and of himself, just like Axel's an asshole. It's just something that happens. So Axel nearly gets his head taken off a couple times because he's too busy watching Roxas swing, Roxas jump, Roxas's face pink with exertion and exhilaration. He looks very, very young, in that moment, and Axel's nauseous stomach tells him it's less like looking at a painting and more like watching a car crash.
"They're all dead," Roxas calls out, wiping his keyblade on his coat. "You can stop hiding now."
"I wasn't hiding," Axel says defensively, standing up slow to crack his neck and roll out his shoulders. "I was strategizing."
"Strategizing," Roxas repeats flatly. "From behind a crate."
"It's as good a place as any. What do you know, you just like hitting things. You're a by-product of a violent era, kid."
"I'm not a kid," Roxas says, something akin to an actual emotion twisted in his features, and Axel has the grace to look taken aback before sending a chakram whizzing past Roxas's ear. His small mouth falls open and the guard behind him falls to the ground with a whine.
"Missed one," Axel says snidely.
"I could have handled it," Roxas tells him, and pulls his hood up.
-
The trouble with Roxas is he's got roughly eighty-four thousand faces and Axel is never sure which one he's going to see when he rounds a corner. Half the time, he's the dead-eyed zombie boy he was when he arrived, wandering the hallways and common rooms like a ghost. Sometimes he's a scrawny little punk with a bad attitude, and those are the times Axel likes him the best. He doesn't feel guilty then, and sometimes he can pretend that Roxas is just a normal kid, and he can be his normal, age-inappropriate friend, pulling pranks on Zexion and bad-mouthing anybody that has the misfortune to come up in conversation. The times that really kill him are when Roxas goes all wide-eyed and ignorant; one second he could be slicing his way out of a veritable maelstrom of Heartless and the next he'll drop his keyblade and start shaking, or maybe someone will make a lewd joke and he'll just blink, confused. But they're all Roxas, and Axel spends more time than he should trying to wrap his head around it: around the physical improbability that one person can hold all that, can transcend the neat and convenient categorical system he’s developed to define away all of his new allies in this non-life. This one’s an asshole. This one’s a pushover. Roxas will only ever be Roxas, and it bothers Axel to the point of obsession.
The trouble with Axel is that he likes trouble.
-
The other trouble with Roxas is that he has this nasty, awful talent for always being the finder, never the found. If Axel wanted to talk to him, say, to harp on his height or violate his personal space just to see how angry he'd get, Roxas would be as good as dead; even better, because with a corpse, there's at least a tombstone. Roxas can float through walls, for all Axel knows, seeping through the cracks like smoke. Axel stops looking for him.
But Roxas is perfectly capable of searching for Axel when it suits him, and a good deal more successful than Axel had been. He's waiting outside when Axel comes out of Larxene's room, walking with none of his usual swagger and closing the door with a soft click. "Hey," Roxas says and Axel jumps three feet out of his skin.
"What the fuck," Axel tells him flatly, running a hand through his hair. "I thought we got past this whole lurking in the shadows thing. Save it for when you're on the clock."
"What were you doing?" Roxas asks, blinking.
"I'll tell you when you're older," Axel replies, dry as sandpaper, and starts walking down the hall.
"If we live that long," Roxas calls after him, staring at the harsh, blunt line of his shoulders against the white walls. Axel stops, makes like he's going to turn around, but a portal leaks from his outstretched fingers and he steps into darkness. Roxas stays behind, watching.
The next day Roxas follows him out on assignment, falling into step beside him on the slip-sliding sands of Agrabah. Axel, to his credit, sees him coming this time. "I'm not an idiot, you know," Roxas begins evenly. “I know why you where there.”
“Do you want a gold star?” Axel mutters, shoves his hands in his pockets.
"Don’t be a dick," Roxas complains, trying to catch Axel's eye. "Why her?"
"Why do you care?" he leers but there's no real feeling to it; he sets his shoulders and tries to concentrate on the mission and not the petulant curve of Roxas's mouth.
"Axel," he says, repeats it a thousand times before he gives into frustration and yells it, throwing his weight against him until Axel's back is flat on the sand and one of Roxas's impossibly small hands is wrapped around his throat, thumb pressing against his windpipe. Axel gives a choked laugh.
"There's not much of a difference, is there?" he rasps, and Roxas's face goes blank the way it does when he's scared, when he's too crazed to be present. "Fucking and fighting," Axel continues. "It's just contact, in the end, right? Force and violence and that dirty little rush you get -"
Roxas jumps away from him like he's been burned, portals out before Axel can even catch his breath. He lies on the sand, laughing.
-
Axel goes back to Larxene's not long after, not caring if Roxas sees; hell, he wants him to. She's on her bed throwing knives at the ceiling when he walks in, takes the care to aim one at his face before saying, "Get out."
"Missed you, too," Axel says, wincing when the knife grazes his cheek.
"I don't want to deal with you today," she says. She doesn't bother to sit up and look at him.
"I find that hard to believe," Axel says with a sneer. A step further earns him a nick on the arm.
"You're pathetic, did you know?"
"I've been told before."
Larxene rolls her eyes and pushes herself up on her elbows. "You're getting boring, too."
"Come on," Axel urges, stock-still.
"No." Her lip curls. "Do you think it actually matters?" Axel doesn't say anything. "You poor fucking idiot, you do." She rises to her knees and leans forward. "You think because I can hurt you that it makes you important. It makes you something if you can bleed, or burn. If you can die. It doesn't make you any more real. You don't matter. You can't think and you can't feel. The only thing you can do that's worth anything is fight and kill, and only then because someone else tells you to do it. But you don't even have the sense to realize that, do you? How completely insignificant you are -"
-
"Sorry about - that," Roxas had told him the next day, studying his shoes, face uncharacteristically flushed. Axel took a moment to appreciate, to totally understand the enormous amount of fun he could have with this, with this supplicant, abashed Roxas in front of him, before he smiled and said, "No, you're not."
Roxas looked up at him from under his eyelashes and cracked a crooked grin.
When Axel looks in the mirror now, he sees the black holes surrounding his eyes and a bruised ring of yellow and purple around his throat, like a collar. He lays a hand to the impossibly precise shadow of Roxas's thumb and winces.
-
"Not that it's any of your business," Axel tells him one gray day as they sit on the couch hiding from Saix, "but I don't give two shits about Larxene. Or anyone else here." It's too bold a statement for quiet conversation, but Roxas has never really caught on to the subtle art of discourse anyhow, so it doesn't bother him. "I am virtually celibate. Friendless and celibate."
"Good," Roxas says, picking at stray threads on the cushion.
Axel snorts. "Remind me to never ask you to play wingman," he says, but it's not a glib as it should be.
"I don't like thinking about you like that," Roxas tells him, slowly and evenly. Axel's about to make another retort, but something about the tangibility of Roxas's gaze on his face stops him, sobers him.
"I don't like thinking about you like that with other people," Roxas finishes carefully, and Axel's mouth goes very dry.
-
Neither of them is surprised, in the end.
Axel does not wake up at the creak of the door opening, because he's been wide awake for hours. Roxas doesn't try to muffle his footsteps, quiet his breathing, because he knows better than to think that Axel is actually sleeping. He rests gingerly on the corner of Axel's bed, watching, waiting. Axel refuses to give him the satisfaction of sitting up, so he counts on Roxas's patience to be as short-lived as ever.
He lies there for five minutes before Roxas climbs over him and kisses him square on the mouth; Axel surges up to meet him.
Roxas is sloppy, like he expected, but also fierce and unrelenting, which he should have expected but didn't. These are not the lips of a teenaged kid, he is reminded viciously, painfully, as Roxas settles himself over his hips. These are the lips of someone who shoots to kill. Axel welcomes it, bites and hopes he bruises in return. He wants the imprint of his fingernails clawed into Roxas's back when he grabs at him for purchase; wants to see bitemarks on his neck for days afterwards. Roxas isn't any gentler: Axel's shirt rips when he pulls it off of him, and the blown look in his eyes when he pulls back is feral and unforgiving. Axel fights the immediate urge to draw him closer into their haphazard wreck of bony limbs and keeps his hands on Roxas's shoulders, stares into his eyes instead of at his swollen mouth, holds firm when Roxas's small, deft hands grasp at his elbows hard enough to hurt.
"Do you want this?" Axel murmurs, shuddering when Roxas grabs one of his hands and presses biting kisses to his palm, his fingers. "You have to tell me, you have to say it." I have to hear it is what he means, but Roxas is firm and unwavering in his surety, in the press of his hips against Axel's thigh.
"Yes," Roxas breathes against his neck, breaking through Axel's feeble barricades of flesh and restraint. He bites at the stretched-taut tendons of Axel's neck, grabs his wrists and pins them against the mattress. "I want this," he says into the dip of his clavicle. "Want you," against the hollows between his ribs. Axel groans, flexes his fingers. One of Roxas's comes up to tickle his palm, but his grip stays firm.
"Let me," Axel rasps, not sure what he's asking permission for, uncertain of everything that isn't the flaring heat of Roxas's skin against his, the wet pass of tongue over his navel. "Fuck, just let me."
Roxas looks up at him, rests his chin on Axel's sternum. "You think you can?" he says, half-amused. Axel ruts up against him, strains his entire body up and is met with terrifying, exhilarating claustrophobia, unable to uproot Roxas from his perch. Then all of a sudden he just lets go, like it's the easiest thing in the world, and Axel's freed wrists feel naked and exposed. He scrambles for the hem of Roxas's shirt and pulls it over his head frenetically, like he's not sure that this will last. Roxas's liquid movements answer Axel's electric ones; they're a closed circuit, here.
Axel does not so much flip Roxas over as Roxas consents to be moved. The same principle applies when Axel flicks open the button on Roxas's trousers, when he slides them down Roxas's legs, when he bites at his hipbone. There's no shock in Roxas's eyes, only appraisal, the occasional streak of gratitude. When Axel licks a dirty, wet stripe up his cock, Roxas's mouth falls open and a strangled half-noise leaks out, but his gaze is steady and even and it sends chills up Axel's spine. It just makes him try harder.
Roxas lets out a slow breath when Axel slips a spit-soaked finger inside him, and he squirms when Axel adds another. He is quiet and still, however, when Axel pushes into him for real, and Axel has enough restraint to quiet himself and lean his forehead against Roxas's and ask, "Is this -" before Roxas wiggles his hips and says, "Move."
Axel does.
Roxas is not delicate. He is not gentle or tender or sweet, and Axel doesn't fuck him like he is. He's almost positive that half the time it's actually painful and he almost stops more than once, but then Roxas grits his teeth and twists like he's got something to prove, and Axel remembers who he's dealing with. He's seen Roxas on the battlefield, bloodstained and battered. He's seen him tearing through the air like wildfire. He's seen him as total decimation, as murder, as genocide. Fucking is like fighting, he said. There are no winners.
Roxas comes first, gripping the sheets white-knuckled, with one of Axel's hands on his cock and the other fisted in his hair. Axel pulls out and ruts against Roxas's hip until he follows, the shaking muscles in his arms just barely holding him up.
They don't talk, afterward. Axel rolls over to his back and Roxas clings to him, like they have to keep touching. He rests his head on Axel's chest and closes his eyes, but Axel knows better than to think he's sleeping. There's nothing there - no comforting rhythm, no metered beats. All he'll find is the siren song of a phantom limb, an echo of what should be but isn't, and the hollow ache of feeling nothing, owning nothing, belonging to no one.
Axel falls asleep.
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