A/N: Nickelback's overplayed but still pretty "If Everyone Cared" inspired this. Add some nostalgia for summer and just wondering how awful it would be for Roxas to leave this forever and that's it. Review if you like; it's fun!

Alive

Every night they come to the top of the twilight clock tower, watching the trains come together and fall away, seeing the purple and pink boxcars and wondering where they're headed. Pence likes to make up stories of where they're going and what they'll see, and pretty soon the rest of them fall into the habit, too, talking more about strangers than themselves.

Pence likes it because he's always wanted to go on adventures, like he's read about his whole life. Hayner likes it because it makes Olette forget about the homework due two months from now. Olette likes it because since the boys are in good moods, she can get at least one of them to agree to shop with her the next day. And Roxas likes it because it gives him something to talk about, to drown out the silence of the big question mark that's his past.

And they sit up there, the four of them, legs dangling and swinging above the sparkling pavement and pristine trimmed roofs, in their train stop town where they're perfectly content to be, just be, forever. They look to the sky and confuse stars for satellites and realize just how small they are. And when it's cold they come closer together, pointing out like a compass in all the directions life will take them.

They talk about dreams and memories and songs and catching fireflies in bottles, they talk about Struggle preliminaries and things from the shop they're saving up for, and about anything but school and growing up. Their breath spins out cotton candy stories from sea salt lips, and this is what it's like if everyone cares about something.

Roxas is the newest out of them, and so he's still trying to get used to it, this strange feeling that comes from being with them. And in Olette's smile and Hayner's eyes and Pence's camera, he can see it: happiness, light, life.

It's nothing like he's ever seen before and oh, he knows he'll never leave them for anything, because Roxas feels so alive.

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