[Fic] Axel/Roxas - pretend the world has ended
Title: pretend the world has ended
Series: Kingdom Hearts/The Hunger Games fusion
Pairing/Characters: Axel/Roxas, Axel/Saix, Axel/Finnick Odair
Rating: R/NC-17
Total length: 3327 words
Warnings: violence, sex, the world of Panem, forced prostitution, Roxas being FTM trans.
Summary: He isn't surprised when they come for him the day after President Snow is killed. In this brave new world of theirs, revenge means everything and forgiveness means nothing, the Districts hungry for the blood of those who hurt them.
Author's Note: Written for bibliophiliac88 over at my Kingdom Hearts writing meme. Prompt being 'We can hide away for days, pretend the world is ending', Hunger Games fusion. Set in an AU fusion where the proposed 76th Hunger Games involving the Capitol children was actually carried out.
When Axel turns eight, his mother lets him choose which tribute they're to sponsor in the 65th Annual Hunger Games. When they arrive at the demonstration he tucks himself into a corner that smells of spilt wine and chocolates while his mother feeds grapes to one of his father's acquaintances, her coiffed purple ("Amethyst, darling. This isn't a simple purple.") hair clinging to the corner of her messily glossed lips. She laughs and tumbles into the man's lap, giggling into his lapels when he hikes her gauzy emerald dress up her thighs and leers. When his hand slips between her legs, Axel turns away-eyes on the boy from District 2 who is meticulously decapitating all of the targets in the makeshift arena, smirking desperately over at the sponsors who aren't giving him the time of day. He'll get sponsorship, of course. Even at eight, Axel knows that the tributes from 1 and 2 almost always get the highest scores. It doesn't matter that the sponsors aren't paying him any attention. It doesn't matter that he's better than the girl from 1 who had gotten perfect headshots with the little pistol they'd given her. They expect things from 1 and 2, which is why Axel's determined to pick someone-anyone-else.
The other tribute from 2 drifts by as his mother is groaning audibly even though Axel is half a room away from her. She probably thinks that she's being discreet, but when he last glimpsed her, there was another man at her side, his mouth open against her bare shoulder-her artfully draped sleeves pulled down to expose one pale breast to the first man's curious hands.
The tributes from 3 are only notable in that they're far more intelligent than the prior four. The boy navigates the firearms with an expertise that speaks of long nights helping his father or mother create them, handling them like an extension of himself in a way that has Axel staring at him in awe. The girl from 3 though-she is brilliant. She spends the first minute or so tinkering with a gadget that Axel isn't familiar with, and the next few effectively setting up the most genius trap that Axel has ever seen, electricity casting a blue glow over her face that even has some of the other sponsors looking into the arena. Axel thinks that it will be her who wins, genius girl with her pixie-like black hair and caramel skin. She winks at him, waving before she leaves the arena. For a brief fifteen minutes, he wants her to win.
He thinks that he's made up his mind by the time the boy from District 4 drifts in, all sunburnt cheeks and bronze hair, waifishly thin with a strength to his frame that is deceptive at first glance. When he catches sight of Axel's mother he rolls his eyes, setting up shop and tying intricate knots, those intense sea-green eyes fixed on his audience the entire time. After a few moments of silence even the sponsors start to notice, gaze shifting from the food to the pretty boy on the floor, watching them with a smile. It's only when he has their attention that the boy picks up a weapon-a large trident on the wall that Axel is pretty sure is there for decoration rather than use. With it, he decimates the area, green eyes flashing and mouth open with laughter as he takes apart the targets.
By the end of it, even his mother has emerged from between her men, face flushed and lips swollen red. She meets his eyes, smiling when he nods.
.
It's his idea to send the boy the trident. He watches the Games spin into motion on his father's flat screen tv that takes up most of their living room wall, the house quiet with both mother and father in the center of the Capitol, watching from the big screens there as the Games take place just a few hundred yards away. He watches the girl from 3 bring her kill count up to seven before he reaches for the phone. It takes some convincing-tridents certainly aren't cheap, but in all his years watching the Games, since he was three years old and still thought they were fake, he's never wanted someone to win so badly. He makes some promises that he doesn't intend to keep, his parents valiant endeavor to raise the good son, and it's worth it, because when Finnick Odair from District 4 gets the weapon, he grins at the camera, breathtaking despite the flecks of blood across his teeth.
Odair wins, finally taking out the girl from 3 in a bloody showdown that will surely please the Gamemakers.
.
Axel grows up a spoilt Capitol boy, son of one of the wealthiest families alive. He dyes his hair and skin dozens of colors, fuchsia, midnight, pumpkin-orange. When he turns thirteen, another tribute from District 4 wins, dark hair and haunting eyes that peer up at him from the wreckage she clings to as she floats down the stream, winner by default. To celebrate, he dyes his hair the color of Finnick's eyes and his skin a burnt umber that reminds him of the rich, earthy soil found in District 11. Earth and sea, with his own green eyes like the first leaf of Spring. He dresses in white to attend the after-parties, flowing garments that slip down his shoulders, golden jewelry around his neck and wrists. Thirteen years old and the surgeries his mother has talked him into has aged him to appear a rather short seventeen.
When he gets back home, the house is as quiet as it always is, save for a faint rustling from the kitchen.
Curious, he rounds the corner, ready to tell Charlize that she should probably leave before either of his parents return. The Avox that works for them isn't especially bright, but Axel likes her, and he hates his mother's punishments for the girl. When he gets there, Finnick Odair is rummaging through the cupboards on his tiptoes, an apple clenched between his teeth and a silk shirt riding up his ribs, flashing tantalizing glimpses of tanned hips. When Finnick notices him, he grins around the red skin of the apple, shutting the cabinets and removing the apple from his mouth.
"Sorry about that," he grins sheepishly. "You're mother said you might be home late, but I was getting slightly peckish in there."
Axel stares at him, and after several moments of silence, Finnick rolls his eyes. It makes Axel think of that first time he'd seen him, rolling his eyes at Axel's mother and her amorous suitors, uncaring that the other sponsors may have seen the gesture. "I take it she didn't tell you," he says, taking an enormous bite of the apple and drifting closer on bare feet. Axel backs away, bumping into the counter. It's not that he's afraid, he thinks. He's never really had a reason to be. But as someone who had seen what Finnick Odair could do, Axel's not so sure what he thinks.
"You don't need to be scared," Finnick purrs, taking two steps closer until he's caged Axel up against the counter. He's close enough that Axel can smell him, apple on his breath and sea salt on his skin.
"I hear that I have you to thank for my trident," he says, bringing his lips down on Axel's neck and mouthing the skin there, tugging playfully at it with his teeth. Axel's breath hitches, his hips stuttering inches from Finnick's. When he glances away from Finnick's bent head, the older boy ghosts his lips up Axel's neck, nibbling at his jaw in a way that has Axel's knees shaking.
"What are you doing here?" he asks, pretending that there isn't a quiver to his voice as Finnick threads his fingers through Axel's hair, dragging them through the snarls, nails scraping pleasantly against his scalp. Finnick laughs at the question, and when he pulls back, his eyes are just as bright as they were five years prior. He pulls a lock of Axel's hair up to his cheek, and nuzzles it, eyes wide open in a way that Axel damn well knows means that he hasn't missed the coloration and what it stands for.
"I'm told that you haven't been touched yet," he says, grinning when Axel shies away slightly. He lets go of the hair and grabs Axel by the hips, holding him in place as he wriggles in embarrassment. "Your mother wanted the best for you," he purrs, and his grip tightens enough that Axel knows he'll have bruises there tomorrow. "And I'm the best Panem has to offer."
His grin turns wicked at Axel's look of horror, and even though Axel protests-tells him that he really doesn't have to-he really doesn't, Finnick kisses him anyway. Reluctantly, guiltily, Axel kisses back.
.
When Axel turns seventeen, he watches Katniss Everdeen outsmart the Capitol over Saix's shoulder-his legs locked round his best friend's waist as Saix muffles his snarls into Axel's collarbone, hips moving in a bruising pace between Axel's thighs. The timber wolf fangs that Saix had implanted several years ago, the same year Axel got the tattoos that stay with him no matter how many times he changes his appearance, close over Axel's nipple, worrying at the skin there until Axel cries out, flecks of blood dotting across his chest. Saix smirks up at him, the golden shine of lupine eyes glinting eerily in the moonlight. He stops for a moment, cock seated inside of Axel to the root as he laps up the blood, grinding his hips with every mewl that passes through Axel's lips.
On the screen, Katniss passes berries to her lover like some fucked up kind of ode to the older stories-the ones before Panem. Romeo and Juliet, Axel thinks they were called-come and watch them die.
Saix growls and drags his talons down Axel's front, ripping his chest open so thoroughly that Axel knows he'll have to rush to the surgeon's after they're done here.
The gamemakers cry out when the star-crossed lovers press the berries to their lips and the victors of the 74th Hunger Games are declared.
Saix comes with his teeth buried in Axel's flesh and Axel smirks at the screen. Good girl, he mouths to it.
.
He watches the Revolution unfold, horror in the Districts and assassinations in plain sight. The 75th Hunger Games comes and goes, with Finnick pulling through and spiriting the Girl on Fire away right under the Capitol's nose. His mother is killed messily in an explosion, another man's dick in her mouth and his father's in her cunt. His father lives for approximately an hour and a half before he succumbs to the burns.
He dyes his hair green and his skin pale as snow, and wears clothing the color of blood all year.
.
He allows rebels into his home, providing them food and water even as Larxene scoffs and calls him a fool. "They'll turn on you," she says the day before she's thrown into a live electrical field and fried on the spot.
Axel knows.
But it doesn't stop him from knowing a good cause when he sees it.
.
Word reaches him of the news of Finnick's marriage, his happiness with the one girl he's ever loved. Axel smiles for him as he dabs antiseptic on the burn wounds of one of the rebels.
When word reaches him of Finnick's death, he isn't surprised. Happiness never lasts very long in this world of theirs.
He still grieves.
.
When President Snow is overthrown, Axel dyes his hair a deep red-fire and blood and roses, everything that the Capitol represents. He lets his skin stay pale, and one by one, he lets the surgeries take him as close as he'll ever get to his real self again.
He keeps the tattoos.
Nowadays everyone is crying.
.
He isn't surprised when they come for him the day after President Snow is killed. In this brave new world of theirs, revenge means everything and forgiveness means nothing, the Districts hungry for the blood of those who hurt them.
Axel will be nineteen in two weeks and his parents are dead, but he is still from the most wealthy family in Panem. Of course they come for him. He bites his lip until it bleeds.
He gets no stylists. No show. No training. No mentor and certainly no sponsors.
Three days later he's thrown into the arena with twenty-three other Capitol children, shaking and scared with no knowledge of how to defend themselves. They're all frightened little boys and girls here, with baby soft skin and not a callus to be seen. For a moment they all stand still, watching each other as the buzzer sounds before the ground erupts into flame. One shaking little girl tries to reach the Cornucopia, grabbing a throwing dagger and whirling it at the boy who'd been standing next to her. By sheer luck, it catches-slicing through the side of his neck. He gurgles, blood painting the ground before him, and drops.
A cannon sounds.
The rest of them burst into action, each clamoring for the biggest backpack.
Axel doesn't take anything.
He runs.
.
He finds a cave on his first night, similar to the one that the Mockingjay and her pet had curled up in two years ago. He wonders if they'd done that on purpose, as a reminder. He takes a spot in the corner and listens to the cannons sound.
Seven cannons. Seven lives.
.
On the second day, he finds a backpack in a crevasse along the cave walls. A blanket, water, bread and dried meat, salve, a length of rope, and a bow.
Okay, so the place is definitely a reminder. Possibly even the same cave that Katniss and Peeta had stayed in that first time. He wonders if there are berries hidden in another crevasse.
.
It isn't a love story.
The second night he's there, a boy creeps in, shivering and drenched-covered in blood. He takes one look at Axel and flinches, rainwater rolling down his cheeks and blood in his yellow hair. He's got a knife in one hand that Axel thinks he's forgotten about and he looks all of twelve years old, though he's probably closer to a short fourteen. Fifteen at the very most. Axel's mother had taken the approach of aging him, but there are other families who'd taken the opposite route-choosing to keep their children young and prepubescent well into their late teens. Whether that was to prolong their youth or sell them as trophies to the highest bidders depended on the family.
Outside the rain cools the heated ground, steam rising like an orchestrated fog. The boy's feet are blistered and bloodied, and when a cannon sounds outside, he flinches again, knife clattering to the stone floor.
Axel rolls his eyes and lifts a corner of the blanket.
If he were anyone else, he would have killed the boy the second he saw him. But he isn't anyone else, and he doesn't care anymore. They're all dead anyway, and if this boy wants to kill him, so be it.
The boy scurries forward, ducking under the blanket and tucking himself up against Axel's chest, trusting as a baby bird. The warmth of another body is startling in the cold, and he runs a soothing hand down the boys spine before pillowing his head against his arm. He falls asleep only when the boy stops whimpering.
It's not a love story.
It really isn't.
.
Except for how it kind of is.
Over the next few days, eleven more cannons sound. They spend those days talking in quiet voices, waiting for the world to end. Four more besides for them, and they pass their time cuddling under blankets and learning how to tie knots the way Axel had seen Finnick do so long ago. Axel applies the salve to the boy-Roxas's feet, and they nibble on the bread until their stomachs cramp, so unused to starvation. Capitol kids, after all, always had food at their disposal.
He discovers that Roxas was a Snow-the President's grandson, all trussed up and baby-eyed. He'd been passed off as a girl for years, he tells Axel. That his family had balked when he'd tried to come out to them, refused to let him have that particular surgery for fear of a scandal. Roxas parts the buttons on his shirt as he tells Axel his story, touching the faint scars on his chest. The surgery hadn't happened until a year ago, though the hormones had come a year before that, when his family was far too distracted by the Mockingjay to care whether their only daughter wanted to become their only son.
Axel flinches when Roxas tells him his parentage. Like him, Roxas had always had a spot in this last game, because if there was anyone that the District would truly wish to punish, it would be a Snow. They didn't care if he was a boy or a girl, they just wanted his blood.
On the sixth day, two more cannons sound and Axel learns that Roxas knows how to hunt. That he'd set up traps in the back garden with his cousin until he was ten, when his grandfather had started to complain that all the rabbits were disappearing.
On the seventh, they run out of food.
Another cannon sounds on the ninth day, and then another on the tenth. Axel thinks that there probably wasn't any fanfare to those either, just kids starving their way to death or making mistakes. On the tenth day, when the cannon sounds, Axel and Roxas look at each other for a long moment and then shrug. Axel wraps an arm around him and settles back into the blanket. It doesn't matter that they're the last ones left.
On the eleventh day, Roxas kisses him. It isn't for the camera, Axel tells himself, because he's damn sure this kid doesn't have a malicious bone in his body. So he kisses back.
On day twelve, they go hunting. Roxas manages to catch a small hare somehow with a crappy trap he'd constructed from sticks and rope. The only other thing they find are, ironically enough, the star-crossed lover's poison berries. Axel laughs until he's sick in the bushes, and Roxas kicks him lightly in the side and pockets the berries. "Just in case," he whispers. Axel just laughs harder.
Days thirteen through sixteen pass by slowly, and Axel wonders why the gamemakers haven't done something to them yet. They ration the hare until it starts to rot and Axel goes out to collect some nuts that hopefully won't kill them.
On day seventeen, they run out of water.
This is also the day that the gamemakers finally get bored of them, and nearly collapse the cave on their heads.
Axel makes it out with a giant bruise on his cheek. Roxas makes it out with a crushed foot.
They lay together in the grass and stare up at the fabricated sky until it starts to blur into one big yellow blob. Wordlessly, Roxas offers him a handful of berries. Axel laughs and leans over to kiss him. They breathe each other in-the smell of the soil and the moss around them.
He wonders if the Mockingjay is sane enough to save them the way that she and Peeta had been saved. He thinks that his luck has never been that good.
They press the berries to their lips and feedback crackles through the arena.
Axel smiles.
Series: Kingdom Hearts/The Hunger Games fusion
Pairing/Characters: Axel/Roxas, Axel/Saix, Axel/Finnick Odair
Rating: R/NC-17
Total length: 3327 words
Warnings: violence, sex, the world of Panem, forced prostitution, Roxas being FTM trans.
Summary: He isn't surprised when they come for him the day after President Snow is killed. In this brave new world of theirs, revenge means everything and forgiveness means nothing, the Districts hungry for the blood of those who hurt them.
Author's Note: Written for bibliophiliac88 over at my Kingdom Hearts writing meme. Prompt being 'We can hide away for days, pretend the world is ending', Hunger Games fusion. Set in an AU fusion where the proposed 76th Hunger Games involving the Capitol children was actually carried out.
When Axel turns eight, his mother lets him choose which tribute they're to sponsor in the 65th Annual Hunger Games. When they arrive at the demonstration he tucks himself into a corner that smells of spilt wine and chocolates while his mother feeds grapes to one of his father's acquaintances, her coiffed purple ("Amethyst, darling. This isn't a simple purple.") hair clinging to the corner of her messily glossed lips. She laughs and tumbles into the man's lap, giggling into his lapels when he hikes her gauzy emerald dress up her thighs and leers. When his hand slips between her legs, Axel turns away-eyes on the boy from District 2 who is meticulously decapitating all of the targets in the makeshift arena, smirking desperately over at the sponsors who aren't giving him the time of day. He'll get sponsorship, of course. Even at eight, Axel knows that the tributes from 1 and 2 almost always get the highest scores. It doesn't matter that the sponsors aren't paying him any attention. It doesn't matter that he's better than the girl from 1 who had gotten perfect headshots with the little pistol they'd given her. They expect things from 1 and 2, which is why Axel's determined to pick someone-anyone-else.
The other tribute from 2 drifts by as his mother is groaning audibly even though Axel is half a room away from her. She probably thinks that she's being discreet, but when he last glimpsed her, there was another man at her side, his mouth open against her bare shoulder-her artfully draped sleeves pulled down to expose one pale breast to the first man's curious hands.
The tributes from 3 are only notable in that they're far more intelligent than the prior four. The boy navigates the firearms with an expertise that speaks of long nights helping his father or mother create them, handling them like an extension of himself in a way that has Axel staring at him in awe. The girl from 3 though-she is brilliant. She spends the first minute or so tinkering with a gadget that Axel isn't familiar with, and the next few effectively setting up the most genius trap that Axel has ever seen, electricity casting a blue glow over her face that even has some of the other sponsors looking into the arena. Axel thinks that it will be her who wins, genius girl with her pixie-like black hair and caramel skin. She winks at him, waving before she leaves the arena. For a brief fifteen minutes, he wants her to win.
He thinks that he's made up his mind by the time the boy from District 4 drifts in, all sunburnt cheeks and bronze hair, waifishly thin with a strength to his frame that is deceptive at first glance. When he catches sight of Axel's mother he rolls his eyes, setting up shop and tying intricate knots, those intense sea-green eyes fixed on his audience the entire time. After a few moments of silence even the sponsors start to notice, gaze shifting from the food to the pretty boy on the floor, watching them with a smile. It's only when he has their attention that the boy picks up a weapon-a large trident on the wall that Axel is pretty sure is there for decoration rather than use. With it, he decimates the area, green eyes flashing and mouth open with laughter as he takes apart the targets.
By the end of it, even his mother has emerged from between her men, face flushed and lips swollen red. She meets his eyes, smiling when he nods.
.
It's his idea to send the boy the trident. He watches the Games spin into motion on his father's flat screen tv that takes up most of their living room wall, the house quiet with both mother and father in the center of the Capitol, watching from the big screens there as the Games take place just a few hundred yards away. He watches the girl from 3 bring her kill count up to seven before he reaches for the phone. It takes some convincing-tridents certainly aren't cheap, but in all his years watching the Games, since he was three years old and still thought they were fake, he's never wanted someone to win so badly. He makes some promises that he doesn't intend to keep, his parents valiant endeavor to raise the good son, and it's worth it, because when Finnick Odair from District 4 gets the weapon, he grins at the camera, breathtaking despite the flecks of blood across his teeth.
Odair wins, finally taking out the girl from 3 in a bloody showdown that will surely please the Gamemakers.
.
Axel grows up a spoilt Capitol boy, son of one of the wealthiest families alive. He dyes his hair and skin dozens of colors, fuchsia, midnight, pumpkin-orange. When he turns thirteen, another tribute from District 4 wins, dark hair and haunting eyes that peer up at him from the wreckage she clings to as she floats down the stream, winner by default. To celebrate, he dyes his hair the color of Finnick's eyes and his skin a burnt umber that reminds him of the rich, earthy soil found in District 11. Earth and sea, with his own green eyes like the first leaf of Spring. He dresses in white to attend the after-parties, flowing garments that slip down his shoulders, golden jewelry around his neck and wrists. Thirteen years old and the surgeries his mother has talked him into has aged him to appear a rather short seventeen.
When he gets back home, the house is as quiet as it always is, save for a faint rustling from the kitchen.
Curious, he rounds the corner, ready to tell Charlize that she should probably leave before either of his parents return. The Avox that works for them isn't especially bright, but Axel likes her, and he hates his mother's punishments for the girl. When he gets there, Finnick Odair is rummaging through the cupboards on his tiptoes, an apple clenched between his teeth and a silk shirt riding up his ribs, flashing tantalizing glimpses of tanned hips. When Finnick notices him, he grins around the red skin of the apple, shutting the cabinets and removing the apple from his mouth.
"Sorry about that," he grins sheepishly. "You're mother said you might be home late, but I was getting slightly peckish in there."
Axel stares at him, and after several moments of silence, Finnick rolls his eyes. It makes Axel think of that first time he'd seen him, rolling his eyes at Axel's mother and her amorous suitors, uncaring that the other sponsors may have seen the gesture. "I take it she didn't tell you," he says, taking an enormous bite of the apple and drifting closer on bare feet. Axel backs away, bumping into the counter. It's not that he's afraid, he thinks. He's never really had a reason to be. But as someone who had seen what Finnick Odair could do, Axel's not so sure what he thinks.
"You don't need to be scared," Finnick purrs, taking two steps closer until he's caged Axel up against the counter. He's close enough that Axel can smell him, apple on his breath and sea salt on his skin.
"I hear that I have you to thank for my trident," he says, bringing his lips down on Axel's neck and mouthing the skin there, tugging playfully at it with his teeth. Axel's breath hitches, his hips stuttering inches from Finnick's. When he glances away from Finnick's bent head, the older boy ghosts his lips up Axel's neck, nibbling at his jaw in a way that has Axel's knees shaking.
"What are you doing here?" he asks, pretending that there isn't a quiver to his voice as Finnick threads his fingers through Axel's hair, dragging them through the snarls, nails scraping pleasantly against his scalp. Finnick laughs at the question, and when he pulls back, his eyes are just as bright as they were five years prior. He pulls a lock of Axel's hair up to his cheek, and nuzzles it, eyes wide open in a way that Axel damn well knows means that he hasn't missed the coloration and what it stands for.
"I'm told that you haven't been touched yet," he says, grinning when Axel shies away slightly. He lets go of the hair and grabs Axel by the hips, holding him in place as he wriggles in embarrassment. "Your mother wanted the best for you," he purrs, and his grip tightens enough that Axel knows he'll have bruises there tomorrow. "And I'm the best Panem has to offer."
His grin turns wicked at Axel's look of horror, and even though Axel protests-tells him that he really doesn't have to-he really doesn't, Finnick kisses him anyway. Reluctantly, guiltily, Axel kisses back.
.
When Axel turns seventeen, he watches Katniss Everdeen outsmart the Capitol over Saix's shoulder-his legs locked round his best friend's waist as Saix muffles his snarls into Axel's collarbone, hips moving in a bruising pace between Axel's thighs. The timber wolf fangs that Saix had implanted several years ago, the same year Axel got the tattoos that stay with him no matter how many times he changes his appearance, close over Axel's nipple, worrying at the skin there until Axel cries out, flecks of blood dotting across his chest. Saix smirks up at him, the golden shine of lupine eyes glinting eerily in the moonlight. He stops for a moment, cock seated inside of Axel to the root as he laps up the blood, grinding his hips with every mewl that passes through Axel's lips.
On the screen, Katniss passes berries to her lover like some fucked up kind of ode to the older stories-the ones before Panem. Romeo and Juliet, Axel thinks they were called-come and watch them die.
Saix growls and drags his talons down Axel's front, ripping his chest open so thoroughly that Axel knows he'll have to rush to the surgeon's after they're done here.
The gamemakers cry out when the star-crossed lovers press the berries to their lips and the victors of the 74th Hunger Games are declared.
Saix comes with his teeth buried in Axel's flesh and Axel smirks at the screen. Good girl, he mouths to it.
.
He watches the Revolution unfold, horror in the Districts and assassinations in plain sight. The 75th Hunger Games comes and goes, with Finnick pulling through and spiriting the Girl on Fire away right under the Capitol's nose. His mother is killed messily in an explosion, another man's dick in her mouth and his father's in her cunt. His father lives for approximately an hour and a half before he succumbs to the burns.
He dyes his hair green and his skin pale as snow, and wears clothing the color of blood all year.
.
He allows rebels into his home, providing them food and water even as Larxene scoffs and calls him a fool. "They'll turn on you," she says the day before she's thrown into a live electrical field and fried on the spot.
Axel knows.
But it doesn't stop him from knowing a good cause when he sees it.
.
Word reaches him of the news of Finnick's marriage, his happiness with the one girl he's ever loved. Axel smiles for him as he dabs antiseptic on the burn wounds of one of the rebels.
When word reaches him of Finnick's death, he isn't surprised. Happiness never lasts very long in this world of theirs.
He still grieves.
.
When President Snow is overthrown, Axel dyes his hair a deep red-fire and blood and roses, everything that the Capitol represents. He lets his skin stay pale, and one by one, he lets the surgeries take him as close as he'll ever get to his real self again.
He keeps the tattoos.
Nowadays everyone is crying.
.
He isn't surprised when they come for him the day after President Snow is killed. In this brave new world of theirs, revenge means everything and forgiveness means nothing, the Districts hungry for the blood of those who hurt them.
Axel will be nineteen in two weeks and his parents are dead, but he is still from the most wealthy family in Panem. Of course they come for him. He bites his lip until it bleeds.
He gets no stylists. No show. No training. No mentor and certainly no sponsors.
Three days later he's thrown into the arena with twenty-three other Capitol children, shaking and scared with no knowledge of how to defend themselves. They're all frightened little boys and girls here, with baby soft skin and not a callus to be seen. For a moment they all stand still, watching each other as the buzzer sounds before the ground erupts into flame. One shaking little girl tries to reach the Cornucopia, grabbing a throwing dagger and whirling it at the boy who'd been standing next to her. By sheer luck, it catches-slicing through the side of his neck. He gurgles, blood painting the ground before him, and drops.
A cannon sounds.
The rest of them burst into action, each clamoring for the biggest backpack.
Axel doesn't take anything.
He runs.
.
He finds a cave on his first night, similar to the one that the Mockingjay and her pet had curled up in two years ago. He wonders if they'd done that on purpose, as a reminder. He takes a spot in the corner and listens to the cannons sound.
Seven cannons. Seven lives.
.
On the second day, he finds a backpack in a crevasse along the cave walls. A blanket, water, bread and dried meat, salve, a length of rope, and a bow.
Okay, so the place is definitely a reminder. Possibly even the same cave that Katniss and Peeta had stayed in that first time. He wonders if there are berries hidden in another crevasse.
.
It isn't a love story.
The second night he's there, a boy creeps in, shivering and drenched-covered in blood. He takes one look at Axel and flinches, rainwater rolling down his cheeks and blood in his yellow hair. He's got a knife in one hand that Axel thinks he's forgotten about and he looks all of twelve years old, though he's probably closer to a short fourteen. Fifteen at the very most. Axel's mother had taken the approach of aging him, but there are other families who'd taken the opposite route-choosing to keep their children young and prepubescent well into their late teens. Whether that was to prolong their youth or sell them as trophies to the highest bidders depended on the family.
Outside the rain cools the heated ground, steam rising like an orchestrated fog. The boy's feet are blistered and bloodied, and when a cannon sounds outside, he flinches again, knife clattering to the stone floor.
Axel rolls his eyes and lifts a corner of the blanket.
If he were anyone else, he would have killed the boy the second he saw him. But he isn't anyone else, and he doesn't care anymore. They're all dead anyway, and if this boy wants to kill him, so be it.
The boy scurries forward, ducking under the blanket and tucking himself up against Axel's chest, trusting as a baby bird. The warmth of another body is startling in the cold, and he runs a soothing hand down the boys spine before pillowing his head against his arm. He falls asleep only when the boy stops whimpering.
It's not a love story.
It really isn't.
.
Except for how it kind of is.
Over the next few days, eleven more cannons sound. They spend those days talking in quiet voices, waiting for the world to end. Four more besides for them, and they pass their time cuddling under blankets and learning how to tie knots the way Axel had seen Finnick do so long ago. Axel applies the salve to the boy-Roxas's feet, and they nibble on the bread until their stomachs cramp, so unused to starvation. Capitol kids, after all, always had food at their disposal.
He discovers that Roxas was a Snow-the President's grandson, all trussed up and baby-eyed. He'd been passed off as a girl for years, he tells Axel. That his family had balked when he'd tried to come out to them, refused to let him have that particular surgery for fear of a scandal. Roxas parts the buttons on his shirt as he tells Axel his story, touching the faint scars on his chest. The surgery hadn't happened until a year ago, though the hormones had come a year before that, when his family was far too distracted by the Mockingjay to care whether their only daughter wanted to become their only son.
Axel flinches when Roxas tells him his parentage. Like him, Roxas had always had a spot in this last game, because if there was anyone that the District would truly wish to punish, it would be a Snow. They didn't care if he was a boy or a girl, they just wanted his blood.
On the sixth day, two more cannons sound and Axel learns that Roxas knows how to hunt. That he'd set up traps in the back garden with his cousin until he was ten, when his grandfather had started to complain that all the rabbits were disappearing.
On the seventh, they run out of food.
Another cannon sounds on the ninth day, and then another on the tenth. Axel thinks that there probably wasn't any fanfare to those either, just kids starving their way to death or making mistakes. On the tenth day, when the cannon sounds, Axel and Roxas look at each other for a long moment and then shrug. Axel wraps an arm around him and settles back into the blanket. It doesn't matter that they're the last ones left.
On the eleventh day, Roxas kisses him. It isn't for the camera, Axel tells himself, because he's damn sure this kid doesn't have a malicious bone in his body. So he kisses back.
On day twelve, they go hunting. Roxas manages to catch a small hare somehow with a crappy trap he'd constructed from sticks and rope. The only other thing they find are, ironically enough, the star-crossed lover's poison berries. Axel laughs until he's sick in the bushes, and Roxas kicks him lightly in the side and pockets the berries. "Just in case," he whispers. Axel just laughs harder.
Days thirteen through sixteen pass by slowly, and Axel wonders why the gamemakers haven't done something to them yet. They ration the hare until it starts to rot and Axel goes out to collect some nuts that hopefully won't kill them.
On day seventeen, they run out of water.
This is also the day that the gamemakers finally get bored of them, and nearly collapse the cave on their heads.
Axel makes it out with a giant bruise on his cheek. Roxas makes it out with a crushed foot.
They lay together in the grass and stare up at the fabricated sky until it starts to blur into one big yellow blob. Wordlessly, Roxas offers him a handful of berries. Axel laughs and leans over to kiss him. They breathe each other in-the smell of the soil and the moss around them.
He wonders if the Mockingjay is sane enough to save them the way that she and Peeta had been saved. He thinks that his luck has never been that good.
They press the berries to their lips and feedback crackles through the arena.
Axel smiles.