Top of the World
Characters: Roxas (destiny_hearts) and Axel (nobodywatchthis
Setting: Utopia hospital
Time: Tuesday afternoon
Description: Axel swipes a key to the roof, and gets Roxas to skip therapy to hang out up there with him. The conversation goes in unusual directions.
Style: AIM
Warnings: Language and pairing discussion
Axel never would have wanted to admit it, but he'd made a note to himself on his phone about which days were Sora's and which were Roxas's. It wasn't that he tried to avoid Sora; he didn't. It was just that maybe he tried a little harder to get their paths to cross on Roxas's. Which was why he'd chosen today to steal the roof key out of the custodian's office before Roxas's therapy session. He knew Sora didn't like going either, but... well, he wasn't beyond playing favorites on who he intercepted in the hall outside the group therapy room. "You excited about spilling your guts today?" he asked when Roxas came around the corner.
"Nope." Roxas looked up at Axel with a Sora-ish quizzical look. "Why, do I have a choice this time?"
"We all have a choice," Axel said with a smirk, pushing himself away from the wall. "I mean, I wouldn't recommend going with the hiding in the bathroom choice again, but yeah, you have one. I'm going up to the roof, if you care to join me." He was already walking off toward the stairwell.
Roxas jogged after. "Cool," he whispered. "I didn't know you had a key to the roof!" Then the stairway door closed behind him, and he dropped the Sora act. "Who did you mug to get that?"
Axel twirled the key around his finger and gave Roxas a broad smile as he started up the few flights of stairs to the roof. "I stole it from the janitors." He waved a hand dismissively as he added, "Like they need to be cleaning the roof anyway. Pfff."
"Hah." Roxas glanced over his shoulder. "This is twice in a row I've skipped group. The doctor's gonna be pissed."
Axel looked over his shoulder, and his expression faltered slightly. "You don't have to come if you don't want to," he said after a moment, though he didn't stop climbing. "I'm not trying to get you guys stuck here longer than you have to be or something."
"I didn't say I cared. I just said he was gonna be pissed." It wasn't like Roxas and Sora were going to let the doctors decide how long they stayed anyway. "I almost skipped anyway, except I thought they might figure it out if I used the same trick twice in a row."
"You might be giving them a little too much credit," Axel said as they reached the roof door. He unlocked it and had a bit of trouble pushing it open. "Then again, maybe not."
Roxas took a deep breath of non-hospital air. "Yeah, I dunno. Also, the trick I used last time might have been just as creepy as therapy."
"What did you do last time?" Axel asked as he tried to stop the door from slamming shut too loudly and didn't do a very good job of it.
"Remember my friend in the hospital? I snuck upstairs to visit him."
Axel vaguely remembered Roxas mentioning something about a friend in the hospital, though he wasn't sure on the details. "Is your friend doing all right?" he asked after a moment.
"He's awake and talking again now. He's still in bed, though, and getting fed through a tube." Roxas wandered over and leaned his elbows on the ledge at the edge of the roof. "And he's hallucinating. He freaked out while we were talking, and they had to sedate him."
Axel hesitated for a moment before responding. He was pacing a little, staring out over the island and kicking the gravel that covered the roof under the toes of his shoes. "So is your friend really messed up in the head, or is he just different like us?"
"If he was on your floor you'd have to tie him to the bed. Hopefully it's just something from hurting his head, that'll heal with the rest. I just... I didn't know you could seem that normal and be that messed up."
Axel smiled slightly to himself, unsure about how he felt that Roxas had missed the us he'd allowed himself to throw in there. Oh well. Maybe it'd occur to him later. "I'm not a psychologist, but I get the feeling the most messed up people generally seem the most normal," he said with a shrug.
Roxas gave him a look between dangling spikes of hair. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Axel looked at the ground for a moment, then let his head rock back and sighed. "Well, like... for example. You're two people. One body, but still. Two people. Right? I believe you, but even if I didn't and I thought you were just some nutjob disassociative identity case... who are you hurting?" He looked down at Roxas. "You're a good guy. On the other hand, you could be like one of those perfectly normal people out there on a streetcorner with a megaphone telling me I'm going to hell for being gay, right? Those guys are normal. But they're totally nuts, aren't they? Dangerous nuts. But there's enough of 'em, so they seem normal. It's all relative."
"Yeah, well, okay, but, there's crazy and crazy and crazy. There's the crazy like us where you're different but it doesn't really matter, and there's the crazy where you know what's going on and people don't think you're nuts but you think it's okay to beat a twelve-year-old and his parents to death. And then there's the third kind, where you hurt yourself trying to get away from the giant man-eating wolf that absolutely is not there." Roxas ran a hand through his hair. "If you're the third kind, it's... hard to figure out how locking you up is a bad thing."
"That's true," Axel admitted. "I still think the second kind is crazier than the third kind. It's a finely-calibrated kind of crazy, and that's the worst one." He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall around the edge of the roof, sighing slightly. "But I hope your friend gets back to being the first kind soon. Or none at all, I suppose."
"If he did, how would you tell?" Roxas asked. "He seemed fine before. How do you know the difference between 'my crazy doesn't mess anything up' and 'my crazy hasn't messed anything up yet?'"
Axel shrugged. "I don't know. How do you know the difference between 'my cancer is gone' and 'my cancer is in temporary remission'? You don't. You just hope for the best."
"Geez, aren't you a ray of sunshine." Roxas stared moodily out toward the harbor.
"I don't do pep talks," Axel said. He scootched down the wall a little closer to Roxas. "But you're not going to snap. My mom's been a psychiatrist my whole life, and I can assure you that most crazy people aren't that kind of crazy and never will be. And if you ever think you might be, come downstairs and I'll, you know... make sure you don't do anything bad. But I don't think you're any more likely to snap than I am, and I'm... not that kind of nuts in the first place. So relax."
"Why, what kind of nuts are you? I'm pretty sure hitting on fifteen-year-old boys doesn't officially count anymore. That's just creepy now, not crazy." Roxas was grinning when he said that, though.
Axel couldn't help but grin, though he tried not to. "I'm not hitting on you. I'm just naturally creepy toward everyone, Mr. Oh-By-The-Way-How-Old-Are-You."
"Hey! Even if I wasn't just trying to figure out exactly how creepy you were, how old you are could have been a 'would we be compatible' thing. You wanted to know when I stopped being jailbait."
"Or I'm just the kind of guy who worries about having enough time to find people the perfect birthday gift," Axel said, and if he wasn't really pouting a little he was doing a damn good job of pretending to. He waved a hand slightly as if brushing off the very idea of hitting on Roxas. "I don't even have enough friends to waste them by being a lascivious jerk, so I'll worry about that when I get more popular. You're safe."
"Yeah, safe for twenty-five more days." Roxas smirked. "At least I know I'll get dinner out of it first."
"I never said sixteen was old enough for me," Axel grumbled, rolling his eyes a bit.
"Yeah, I bet you commit petty theft and trespass for all the guys."
Suddenly Axel was feeling quite irritable with the conversation. He hardly ever got annoyed with anything, really, but now it felt like he was being teased over something that would probably end up hurting him in the end, and he didn't like it. "Look, I'm not after you," he snapped.
"I... okay." Well, that was embarrassing. It was a good thing after all that Roxas hadn't said anything to Sora, then. "Sorry. I wasn't... trying to be a jerk about it."
Axel cringed. He hadn't meant to snap; it'd just come out that way. He sighed heavily, then reached up and pulled out the tie that was holding his hair back, running his hands through it just to give himself something to do. "It's fine. I like you. I'll admit it. So just... don't make fun of me for it and I won't bug you about it."
Roxas thought about that for a while. "Are you always that easy to scare off?"
Axel paused and glanced over, quirking an eyebrow. "Scare off?"
"Yeah. I mean, it's not like I'm making a big point of mentioning a girlfriend back home or anything. I just cracked a couple jokes."
"Mentioning a girlfriend back home would be a pretty blatant shoot-down," Axel pointed out. "That's actually easier to handle."
Roxas sighed. "Fine. I'm not - I'm - I'm interested, okay? I've been thinking about stuff. You. Stuff."
Axel looked over at Roxas out of the corner of his eye, then smiled very slowly. "Well, Rox," he said quietly. "You know how to get a guy to keep making you dinner and sneaking you away from your therapy sessions."
"Good." Roxas slid to the side, a tiny fraction closer. "You're a good cook."
Axel laughed a bit, shrugging off the compliment. He was pretty sure being a good cook by Roxas and Sora's standards wasn't the most difficult feat in the world. "Thanks. I try." He propped his arms on the wall behind him, slid down a little to get a better look at Roxas's face. "Hey, um... don't get offended if this is a dumb question. But... on the outside... do you look more like you or Sora?"
Roxas blinked. "How did you know about that? This," Roxas waved at himself, "this is Sora. Especially these clothes."
"I didn't know anything. It was something I was thinking about the other day, that's all." Axel looked at the clothes, and at Roxas's face which apparently wasn't Roxas's, and said, "I wanna see you sometime."
Roxas told himself, very firmly, that he wasn't blushing. He couldn't be, since he wasn't a twelve-year-old girl. "I've never really... I'd have to bleach the hair."
"You're blond?" Axel asked. He hadn't expected that. He turned his head to the side a bit and squinted. After apparently thinking deeply for a moment, he concluded, "Okay, I can get behind that."
"Do you really want me to?" The idea was... actually sort of cool.
"You're just trying to get me to say that I do so that when Sora wakes up looking like you you can pin all the blame on me."
"I'd ask him first," Roxas protested. "I'm not a total jerk."
Axel grinned. "Then I won't argue. And he'll know I'm playing favorites, but that's fine. I'd love to see you."
Not blushing. Absolutely not. "Okay, then. I'll ask him. He can always dye it brown again later."
Axel could see Roxas blushing. It was making him blush, and he didn't even have anything to be embarrassed about, in his own estimation. Damn it. He pushed himself up off the wall enough to turn around and lean over it, taking a look at the drop on the other side. "I'm a terrible employee, aren't I?" He sounded pleased.
"Yup. It's okay, when they fire you, you can move in with us and be the cook."
"Hey, if they fire me I'll just show them my disorder and I'm sure they'll let me stick around as a patient," Axel said with an almost bitter smirk.
"Wait, what?" Roxas straightened up. "I thought you were kidding. Do you really have something?"
Axel looked over his shoulder, smiled, then leaned over and wrapped an arm around Roxas's neck. The fingers of the hand that ended up in front of his face snapped, and a little flame appeared on their tips, burning there of its own accord and with seemingly no fuel. "Roxas, I was going to make a pun about getting fired, but I couldn't come up with a really good one in time."
Roxas stared for a few seconds. "That's not a disorder. That's either a superpower or a completely non-funny prank."
"It's not a superpower," Axel said quickly, extinguishing the flame. "That's... ridiculous. It's just this thing I do."
It was also a thing that comic characters did. Roxas could think of two or three right off the top of his head, without even counting the American comics. "… if you say so. But why'd you say they'd make you a patient if they knew? It's obviously not a disease or anything."
Axel shrugged slightly, reaching up and scratching the back of his head. "My mom doesn't know. She deals with people that are, um... kinda like me. Sometimes. That's why I had her get me a job here. I'd rather figure out what they're doing from this side than... um. Than from having her send me here herself. Because this is where she's sending her patients."
Roxas frowned. "That... explains a lot of things I've seen around here, actually. All those people like Ion who are in the hospital but not sick, they've got... um, things they do, don't they?"
"I think so. I don't look at people's private records or anything, though. I just... watch. I don't have the best feeling about this whole place, but my feelings have been known to be wrong."
Roxas snorted. "I have a terrible feeling about this place," he said. "Secure mental hospitals are creepy. Secure mental hospitals that don't allow communication and keep their location secret are scary as fuck. We've been planning our daring escape for weeks."
Axel looked over, sighed slightly. "Let me know if you need help, then. And don't leave without saying anything."
"I won't," Roxas said. "And it's gonna take a while, don't worry." Especially if Karol didn't get better soon. "But if you could tell me what time zone we're in, it would be a big help. No one seems to know, which has to be on purpose."
Axel winced at that, suddenly feeling very foolish. "You know, I... I don't actually know. I can try to find out for you, though."
Roxas laughed, sounding a little bitter. "Good luck. If they told us the time zone, we'd know which friggin' ocean we're in, so obviously they have to keep that secret."
"I'll do my best," Axel reiterated after a moment of thought. "I don't really know how much I can do on the whole, but I can at least look out for you and Sora."
"We can take care of ourselves," Roxas said automatically. Then he thought about it for a second. "But it couldn't hurt. Thanks."
Axel looked away and shrugged one shoulder. "Yeah. No problem." He pushed himself up away from the wall, pulling his hair back into its ponytail.
Roxas watched this process carefully. It was... interesting. Which sort of said something about Roxas, because the tying back of hair should have been a pretty ordinary thing. "So, if Sora says it's okay, I'll let you know when I'll be doing the bleach and stuff. Maybe you could cook something, once it's done, and I'll come over?"
Axel had been looking pensive (over something as simple as time zones, but, well... strange times), but that managed to get a bright, genuine smile out of him. "Yeah, it's done, just tell me when."
Roxas was fairly sure he'd just gotten a date. With a guy. Okay. "Sure." He looked out at the scenery. "I dunno if you care, but I think my group is over. I'm okay to go home."
A quirked eyebrow. "If I care? I'm in no personal hurry, but if you're trying to get out of here, I gotcha." He smirked slightly and crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm actually not even on duty."
Roxas smirked. "Hah. All right. I've got homework, but there'll be enough time for that after it gets dark."
Axel leaned against the wall again when he realized Roxas wasn't planning on running off just yet. "Sounds good. Just remember to tell Sora first. I don't wanna be on his bad side if I can't technically tell which one of you is headed my direction with a blunt object."
Roxas leaned over beside him, and watched the sun setting.
Setting: Utopia hospital
Time: Tuesday afternoon
Description: Axel swipes a key to the roof, and gets Roxas to skip therapy to hang out up there with him. The conversation goes in unusual directions.
Style: AIM
Warnings: Language and pairing discussion
Axel never would have wanted to admit it, but he'd made a note to himself on his phone about which days were Sora's and which were Roxas's. It wasn't that he tried to avoid Sora; he didn't. It was just that maybe he tried a little harder to get their paths to cross on Roxas's. Which was why he'd chosen today to steal the roof key out of the custodian's office before Roxas's therapy session. He knew Sora didn't like going either, but... well, he wasn't beyond playing favorites on who he intercepted in the hall outside the group therapy room. "You excited about spilling your guts today?" he asked when Roxas came around the corner.
"Nope." Roxas looked up at Axel with a Sora-ish quizzical look. "Why, do I have a choice this time?"
"We all have a choice," Axel said with a smirk, pushing himself away from the wall. "I mean, I wouldn't recommend going with the hiding in the bathroom choice again, but yeah, you have one. I'm going up to the roof, if you care to join me." He was already walking off toward the stairwell.
Roxas jogged after. "Cool," he whispered. "I didn't know you had a key to the roof!" Then the stairway door closed behind him, and he dropped the Sora act. "Who did you mug to get that?"
Axel twirled the key around his finger and gave Roxas a broad smile as he started up the few flights of stairs to the roof. "I stole it from the janitors." He waved a hand dismissively as he added, "Like they need to be cleaning the roof anyway. Pfff."
"Hah." Roxas glanced over his shoulder. "This is twice in a row I've skipped group. The doctor's gonna be pissed."
Axel looked over his shoulder, and his expression faltered slightly. "You don't have to come if you don't want to," he said after a moment, though he didn't stop climbing. "I'm not trying to get you guys stuck here longer than you have to be or something."
"I didn't say I cared. I just said he was gonna be pissed." It wasn't like Roxas and Sora were going to let the doctors decide how long they stayed anyway. "I almost skipped anyway, except I thought they might figure it out if I used the same trick twice in a row."
"You might be giving them a little too much credit," Axel said as they reached the roof door. He unlocked it and had a bit of trouble pushing it open. "Then again, maybe not."
Roxas took a deep breath of non-hospital air. "Yeah, I dunno. Also, the trick I used last time might have been just as creepy as therapy."
"What did you do last time?" Axel asked as he tried to stop the door from slamming shut too loudly and didn't do a very good job of it.
"Remember my friend in the hospital? I snuck upstairs to visit him."
Axel vaguely remembered Roxas mentioning something about a friend in the hospital, though he wasn't sure on the details. "Is your friend doing all right?" he asked after a moment.
"He's awake and talking again now. He's still in bed, though, and getting fed through a tube." Roxas wandered over and leaned his elbows on the ledge at the edge of the roof. "And he's hallucinating. He freaked out while we were talking, and they had to sedate him."
Axel hesitated for a moment before responding. He was pacing a little, staring out over the island and kicking the gravel that covered the roof under the toes of his shoes. "So is your friend really messed up in the head, or is he just different like us?"
"If he was on your floor you'd have to tie him to the bed. Hopefully it's just something from hurting his head, that'll heal with the rest. I just... I didn't know you could seem that normal and be that messed up."
Axel smiled slightly to himself, unsure about how he felt that Roxas had missed the us he'd allowed himself to throw in there. Oh well. Maybe it'd occur to him later. "I'm not a psychologist, but I get the feeling the most messed up people generally seem the most normal," he said with a shrug.
Roxas gave him a look between dangling spikes of hair. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Axel looked at the ground for a moment, then let his head rock back and sighed. "Well, like... for example. You're two people. One body, but still. Two people. Right? I believe you, but even if I didn't and I thought you were just some nutjob disassociative identity case... who are you hurting?" He looked down at Roxas. "You're a good guy. On the other hand, you could be like one of those perfectly normal people out there on a streetcorner with a megaphone telling me I'm going to hell for being gay, right? Those guys are normal. But they're totally nuts, aren't they? Dangerous nuts. But there's enough of 'em, so they seem normal. It's all relative."
"Yeah, well, okay, but, there's crazy and crazy and crazy. There's the crazy like us where you're different but it doesn't really matter, and there's the crazy where you know what's going on and people don't think you're nuts but you think it's okay to beat a twelve-year-old and his parents to death. And then there's the third kind, where you hurt yourself trying to get away from the giant man-eating wolf that absolutely is not there." Roxas ran a hand through his hair. "If you're the third kind, it's... hard to figure out how locking you up is a bad thing."
"That's true," Axel admitted. "I still think the second kind is crazier than the third kind. It's a finely-calibrated kind of crazy, and that's the worst one." He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall around the edge of the roof, sighing slightly. "But I hope your friend gets back to being the first kind soon. Or none at all, I suppose."
"If he did, how would you tell?" Roxas asked. "He seemed fine before. How do you know the difference between 'my crazy doesn't mess anything up' and 'my crazy hasn't messed anything up yet?'"
Axel shrugged. "I don't know. How do you know the difference between 'my cancer is gone' and 'my cancer is in temporary remission'? You don't. You just hope for the best."
"Geez, aren't you a ray of sunshine." Roxas stared moodily out toward the harbor.
"I don't do pep talks," Axel said. He scootched down the wall a little closer to Roxas. "But you're not going to snap. My mom's been a psychiatrist my whole life, and I can assure you that most crazy people aren't that kind of crazy and never will be. And if you ever think you might be, come downstairs and I'll, you know... make sure you don't do anything bad. But I don't think you're any more likely to snap than I am, and I'm... not that kind of nuts in the first place. So relax."
"Why, what kind of nuts are you? I'm pretty sure hitting on fifteen-year-old boys doesn't officially count anymore. That's just creepy now, not crazy." Roxas was grinning when he said that, though.
Axel couldn't help but grin, though he tried not to. "I'm not hitting on you. I'm just naturally creepy toward everyone, Mr. Oh-By-The-Way-How-Old-Are-You."
"Hey! Even if I wasn't just trying to figure out exactly how creepy you were, how old you are could have been a 'would we be compatible' thing. You wanted to know when I stopped being jailbait."
"Or I'm just the kind of guy who worries about having enough time to find people the perfect birthday gift," Axel said, and if he wasn't really pouting a little he was doing a damn good job of pretending to. He waved a hand slightly as if brushing off the very idea of hitting on Roxas. "I don't even have enough friends to waste them by being a lascivious jerk, so I'll worry about that when I get more popular. You're safe."
"Yeah, safe for twenty-five more days." Roxas smirked. "At least I know I'll get dinner out of it first."
"I never said sixteen was old enough for me," Axel grumbled, rolling his eyes a bit.
"Yeah, I bet you commit petty theft and trespass for all the guys."
Suddenly Axel was feeling quite irritable with the conversation. He hardly ever got annoyed with anything, really, but now it felt like he was being teased over something that would probably end up hurting him in the end, and he didn't like it. "Look, I'm not after you," he snapped.
"I... okay." Well, that was embarrassing. It was a good thing after all that Roxas hadn't said anything to Sora, then. "Sorry. I wasn't... trying to be a jerk about it."
Axel cringed. He hadn't meant to snap; it'd just come out that way. He sighed heavily, then reached up and pulled out the tie that was holding his hair back, running his hands through it just to give himself something to do. "It's fine. I like you. I'll admit it. So just... don't make fun of me for it and I won't bug you about it."
Roxas thought about that for a while. "Are you always that easy to scare off?"
Axel paused and glanced over, quirking an eyebrow. "Scare off?"
"Yeah. I mean, it's not like I'm making a big point of mentioning a girlfriend back home or anything. I just cracked a couple jokes."
"Mentioning a girlfriend back home would be a pretty blatant shoot-down," Axel pointed out. "That's actually easier to handle."
Roxas sighed. "Fine. I'm not - I'm - I'm interested, okay? I've been thinking about stuff. You. Stuff."
Axel looked over at Roxas out of the corner of his eye, then smiled very slowly. "Well, Rox," he said quietly. "You know how to get a guy to keep making you dinner and sneaking you away from your therapy sessions."
"Good." Roxas slid to the side, a tiny fraction closer. "You're a good cook."
Axel laughed a bit, shrugging off the compliment. He was pretty sure being a good cook by Roxas and Sora's standards wasn't the most difficult feat in the world. "Thanks. I try." He propped his arms on the wall behind him, slid down a little to get a better look at Roxas's face. "Hey, um... don't get offended if this is a dumb question. But... on the outside... do you look more like you or Sora?"
Roxas blinked. "How did you know about that? This," Roxas waved at himself, "this is Sora. Especially these clothes."
"I didn't know anything. It was something I was thinking about the other day, that's all." Axel looked at the clothes, and at Roxas's face which apparently wasn't Roxas's, and said, "I wanna see you sometime."
Roxas told himself, very firmly, that he wasn't blushing. He couldn't be, since he wasn't a twelve-year-old girl. "I've never really... I'd have to bleach the hair."
"You're blond?" Axel asked. He hadn't expected that. He turned his head to the side a bit and squinted. After apparently thinking deeply for a moment, he concluded, "Okay, I can get behind that."
"Do you really want me to?" The idea was... actually sort of cool.
"You're just trying to get me to say that I do so that when Sora wakes up looking like you you can pin all the blame on me."
"I'd ask him first," Roxas protested. "I'm not a total jerk."
Axel grinned. "Then I won't argue. And he'll know I'm playing favorites, but that's fine. I'd love to see you."
Not blushing. Absolutely not. "Okay, then. I'll ask him. He can always dye it brown again later."
Axel could see Roxas blushing. It was making him blush, and he didn't even have anything to be embarrassed about, in his own estimation. Damn it. He pushed himself up off the wall enough to turn around and lean over it, taking a look at the drop on the other side. "I'm a terrible employee, aren't I?" He sounded pleased.
"Yup. It's okay, when they fire you, you can move in with us and be the cook."
"Hey, if they fire me I'll just show them my disorder and I'm sure they'll let me stick around as a patient," Axel said with an almost bitter smirk.
"Wait, what?" Roxas straightened up. "I thought you were kidding. Do you really have something?"
Axel looked over his shoulder, smiled, then leaned over and wrapped an arm around Roxas's neck. The fingers of the hand that ended up in front of his face snapped, and a little flame appeared on their tips, burning there of its own accord and with seemingly no fuel. "Roxas, I was going to make a pun about getting fired, but I couldn't come up with a really good one in time."
Roxas stared for a few seconds. "That's not a disorder. That's either a superpower or a completely non-funny prank."
"It's not a superpower," Axel said quickly, extinguishing the flame. "That's... ridiculous. It's just this thing I do."
It was also a thing that comic characters did. Roxas could think of two or three right off the top of his head, without even counting the American comics. "… if you say so. But why'd you say they'd make you a patient if they knew? It's obviously not a disease or anything."
Axel shrugged slightly, reaching up and scratching the back of his head. "My mom doesn't know. She deals with people that are, um... kinda like me. Sometimes. That's why I had her get me a job here. I'd rather figure out what they're doing from this side than... um. Than from having her send me here herself. Because this is where she's sending her patients."
Roxas frowned. "That... explains a lot of things I've seen around here, actually. All those people like Ion who are in the hospital but not sick, they've got... um, things they do, don't they?"
"I think so. I don't look at people's private records or anything, though. I just... watch. I don't have the best feeling about this whole place, but my feelings have been known to be wrong."
Roxas snorted. "I have a terrible feeling about this place," he said. "Secure mental hospitals are creepy. Secure mental hospitals that don't allow communication and keep their location secret are scary as fuck. We've been planning our daring escape for weeks."
Axel looked over, sighed slightly. "Let me know if you need help, then. And don't leave without saying anything."
"I won't," Roxas said. "And it's gonna take a while, don't worry." Especially if Karol didn't get better soon. "But if you could tell me what time zone we're in, it would be a big help. No one seems to know, which has to be on purpose."
Axel winced at that, suddenly feeling very foolish. "You know, I... I don't actually know. I can try to find out for you, though."
Roxas laughed, sounding a little bitter. "Good luck. If they told us the time zone, we'd know which friggin' ocean we're in, so obviously they have to keep that secret."
"I'll do my best," Axel reiterated after a moment of thought. "I don't really know how much I can do on the whole, but I can at least look out for you and Sora."
"We can take care of ourselves," Roxas said automatically. Then he thought about it for a second. "But it couldn't hurt. Thanks."
Axel looked away and shrugged one shoulder. "Yeah. No problem." He pushed himself up away from the wall, pulling his hair back into its ponytail.
Roxas watched this process carefully. It was... interesting. Which sort of said something about Roxas, because the tying back of hair should have been a pretty ordinary thing. "So, if Sora says it's okay, I'll let you know when I'll be doing the bleach and stuff. Maybe you could cook something, once it's done, and I'll come over?"
Axel had been looking pensive (over something as simple as time zones, but, well... strange times), but that managed to get a bright, genuine smile out of him. "Yeah, it's done, just tell me when."
Roxas was fairly sure he'd just gotten a date. With a guy. Okay. "Sure." He looked out at the scenery. "I dunno if you care, but I think my group is over. I'm okay to go home."
A quirked eyebrow. "If I care? I'm in no personal hurry, but if you're trying to get out of here, I gotcha." He smirked slightly and crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm actually not even on duty."
Roxas smirked. "Hah. All right. I've got homework, but there'll be enough time for that after it gets dark."
Axel leaned against the wall again when he realized Roxas wasn't planning on running off just yet. "Sounds good. Just remember to tell Sora first. I don't wanna be on his bad side if I can't technically tell which one of you is headed my direction with a blunt object."
Roxas leaned over beside him, and watched the sun setting.