Dislaimer, et al: It lives! Thanks to everyone who's reviewed or favourited so far: you guys make my day. I apologise for the wait, since my computer died and decided to take everything with it. (There was smoke, and a bit of fire, I shit you not.) I think this chapter is dreadfully boring, but if you can possibly enjoy I won't hold it against you.
#02 H2WTF
While I'm blaming the universe, I should say that I've never been able to drag myself out of bed before I'm good and ready. I don't know much about DNA, apart from liking the sound of the words double helix, but I'm going to point the finger at it for this problem. When Wednesday morning arrived and I had to wake up at six am, I had to stare at the post-it I'd stuck to my alarm clock for about five minutes to understand why I'd written H2WHOA on it. There wasn't a lot of light coming in through blinds, my ankles were tangled in the mass formerly known as my sheets, and it wasn't until six twenty-seven that I managed to convince myself to get out of bed and hunt for a pair of swimming trunks.
We'd sat in the lounge for most of Tuesday, since Axel had the foresight to buy the essentials for the morning after while he was loading up the car with enough beer to render us comatose. The remains of the epic hangover were still in evidence in the lounge: empty soda cans peppered the floor now along with the empty bottles of beer, and they'd obviously had a little party of their own next to the right leg of the couch. I prodded the stain there. It had completely dried. My party hat remained in its new place on top of the digibox.
I stared at it for a minute. It was purple and gold, with only a few of the streamers still attached to the tip. Axel had laughed when he saw it on Tuesday, and proclaimed that if the digibox couldn't be useful, then it could damn well be pretty.
I love everything about pools. I even love the smell of chlorine. I know the changing room floors are a breeding ground for verrucas and all sorts, but I ignore that. I got changed quickly, showered and headed towards the entrance. I wanted to dive in right away, but Larxene was standing by the lifeguard's chair, glaring at me because I was ten minutes late. I thought the best plan would be to make my way over to her and the rest of the group as quickly as I could without slipping on the wet tiles.
Even this plan was bound to sabotage itself.
The baby pool was directly beside the exit from the lockers. It was filled with little kids shouting and throwing balls and splashing each other, and I remembered my dad dumping me in the pool in our back garden, my arms crushed by the armbands my mother insisted on me wearing. I remembered him teaching me how to swim and me teaching him how difficult it was to catch me and get me back indoors once I'd mastered it. I waved at a little girl close to the edge of the pool, and laughed when she submerged her head, popped up and roared at me.
A woman, presumably her mother, scowled at her and said, "Delilah, don't scream at the man!"
Delilah stuck her tongue out at her mum and patted her hands on the top of the water, and some tiny ripples edged out. I smiled at both of them and turned to leave. I could practically feel Larxene's rage filtering through the chlorine in the air.
"Hope you get those armbands off soon!"
She gave me a baby-tooth-bright smile, but as I turned to walk away I bumped into a burly man who was still wearing a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt.
"Uhm, sorry man," I muttered to him, and when I heard Delilah's delighted laughter at my graceless exit, I turned to smile sheepishly at her.
That was when I saw him. There was a man, one I guessed was probably a little older than I was, floating by the ladder and drawing me daggers with such intensity that I assumed his grip on the side of the pool was due to anger at me. I'd never seen him before in my life; I would have remembered, because his hair was such an odd shade of blue or grey or violet that I would have told Axel he had a contender in the bizarre hair stakes. I looked around to see if he could be staring at anyone around me, but there was no one nearby. Even the big guy I'd bumped into had already gone to sit on one of the spectator benches that led up the north end of the hall.
I was confused as to why a random stranger looked like he hated me, but as soon as I frowned back at him the expression on his face evaporated, which mystified me even more. He swam awkwardly, using only his arms, to the opposite end of the pool, and when he turned back around he didn't even look at me properly. I eventually started to walk over to Larxene, but I couldn't stop asking myself why someone would spend so much energy glowering at someone and then completely dismiss it.
"All right, get in there," Larxene sniped, and I took her advice. I dived into the deep end opened my eyes under the water. My lung capacity wasn't as good as it had been in high school, so I could only stay under for a little while, and when I immerged the sun had started to puncture the windows, finally reaching the water. I dived again and rolled in the water and looked up: the surface was sparkling. Everything was shifting.
And for a short time, I forgot about the look the man had given me.
I stayed longer than anyone else on the team: long after they'd abandoned the lanes Larxene reserved for us. The lifeguard didn't seem to notice me, since his focus was, naturally, fixed on the baby pool, so I put off leaving until exhaustion crept into my limbs. After I showered and collected my things from my locker, the guy I'd bumped into passed me in the changing rooms, and for a minute I thought he was going to beat the crap out of me, but he wandered past me without any acknowledgement.
When I sat down in the changing cubicle and locked the door, I realised all the relaxation from swimming had dissipated. The guy was three times bigger than me, and I know it was ridiculous, but he put me on edge. I've never been much of a fighter. Axel is scrappier than I am. Even when we were in high school, he was the one who made things happen, and I was the one who waited for things to happen to me. He was the one who beat up the kids who picked on me, even when I told him I didn't mind. I'm a passive person, I suppose, the most recent evidence of this being that it had taken Axel, a note and a truly frightening girl to convince me to rediscover something I loved.
I didn't understand at the time, and I don't really have any explanation for it now, but I kept my royal blue, time-stamped wristband from that day. I tore it off my wrist carefully before I got changed, and tucked it away in the side pocket of my bag. I don't tend to hoard things, so I had no place to keep it for the months it remained with me, but it did sit on my bedside table for a while.
Axel had, miraculously, tidied the lounge when I returned. It might have been to make room for all the folders and books that had migrated, along with him, from his bedroom after classes, but I was still grateful. I slumped onto the sofa beside him and disrupted a collection of notebooks that were balanced on his knee. He pushed aside the set of badly scribbled notes he was fighting to understand days after having written, and turned to me.
"So it went?"
"It was good. A bit... weird," I started, and I remembered the moody man in the pool. I forced a smile. "There was this one guy. He had weird hair. Even weirder than yours."
Axel gave me what I think of as his dignified expression, which involves raising his eyebrows, looking down his nose at me and fighting to keep the smirk off his face. "That's a lot of weird coming from a guy who can't even classify his..." he looked at the top of my head, and the smirk finally arrived. "Hairstyle."
I crossed my arms and scowled at him. "Well it was weird. It was blue."
"Is he on the team?"
"What? No. He was in the baby pool."
Axel stared at me, and for once he was speechless. It only lasted a few seconds. "Trust you to notice his fucking hair is blue and ignore the fact that there's a dude swimming with a bunch of kids," he said, then leaned back and stretched his legs out over my lap. "You going to go back?"
I smiled and nodded.
He grinned back at me and shoved the notebook he was scrutinising earlier over to me and said, "What do you make of this?"
"The drawing? That-that's Rox--God, Axel, I did not need to see that!"
He took the book emblazoned with doodles of Roxas in various compromising positions, and whacked me across the face with it.
"Not that, the fucking writing. I can't make it out!"
When I couldn't stop laughing at him, he threw the notebook onto the coffee table and shook his head.
"So, what are we doing tonight?"
I felt a grin spread across my face, and Axel immediately said, with great vehemence, "I don't care what you say; we're not watching A fucking Hard Day's Night again."
I went to bed before Axel that night, but I couldn't sleep. I watched each hour of the clock go by and became increasingly frustrated. I twisted in my sheets and couldn't work out why I was so antsy, so I got up, opened the window and sat at my desk. My computer flickered to life and I checked my university e-mail account: nothing but updates from my tutors about next weeks' topics and the impending doom of essays, and a solitary unmarked email that was flagged as urgent. I didn't recognise the e-mail address.
Hey Demyx, it's Roxas. New address, hope you don't delete this thinking it's spam. Or porn from Axel. Anyway, there's a party at Mullholland House on Friday, 6pm. Don't tell HIM.
Mullholland House was one of the university dorms Axel and I had ruled out in favour of having a flat, since Axel couldn't stand the idea of set meal times. I replied to Roxas and told him that I'd be there, but that I couldn't promise that Axel wouldn't find out about it, because if he could find a boy who so obviously wanted to disappear, he could get information out of a guy he spent every day and night with.
And I've never been good at keeping secrets.