(A/N): Okay, I feel as if I've risen from the dead. I haven't written in SO DAMN LONG. This is the first story I've written in over two years. Being as it is summer vacation, I took up playing Kingdom Hearts 2 for the millionth time and rediscovered my love for the relationship between Axel and Roxas. It's just so perfect. And honestly, (forgive me while I momentarily get vallygirl on you all) Axel's like...omghot.

So I've written the first chapter of a story I hope to continue and finish (unlike my other stories ;P). And before anyone criticizes me for it, it IS a take off of Girl, Interrupted, one of my favorite movies. It's angsty and crazy, just how I like it.

I don't own Kingdom Hearts or Girl, Interrupted.

So enjoy, please review, and let the show begin!

---

Life, Interrupted – Chapter 1

It wasn't as if he were trying to kill himself. He was simply tired. This was a fact that he couldn't get a single person around him to believe. They all just had to jump to outrageous conclusions. It had been quite a nice nap though; the first truly deep sleep he'd had in so long. However, he couldn't decide if it was worth getting what felt like a firehouse rammed down him throat, invading his insides, to have the entire bottle of sleeping pills pumped out of him.

"You need help," his always overly-polished mother had said to him as she and his father stood by his hospital bed. 'The kind of help your father and I can't give you. We think it's best if you spent some time under the care of…professionals.'

"WHAT?! You're sending me to a fucking nuthouse?!" Roxas cried out. He attempted to spring from his bed, only to fall back against his pillow weakly. The stomach pumping had really done a number on his strength.

"Don't take that tone with your mother!" his father scolded him as he placed an arm around his wife, who was wiping her mascara-stained tears with a cream-colored silken handkerchief.

'Tell him, Norm! Tell him that I am in no shape anymore to deal with his emotional ups and downs, his tantrums, his apathy! Oh, what will our friends think! All of their children are going off to Ivy League colleges, and our child? He's landed himself in Twilight Hill Psychiatric Institution! What will they think, Norm? What will they think?!"

This last sentence summed up the entirety of Mrs. Hart's life. Everything was conducted according to what everyone would think of her and her family. She wore the proverbial pants in the family. In all honestly, Roxas felt his father was terrified of her most of the time, and only opened his mouth when his wife, the puppetmaster, commanded him to.

"Roxas," his father began as instructed. "You've caused your mother enough pain. You need help, and you're going to a place where you will get it. And that's FINAL."

So here he was, sitting in the back of a cab with his suitcase in the trunk, being carted off to the loony bin. Though he felt like he could murder his parents in their sleep, deep down there was a strange sense of relief to finally be away from his mother's neuroses for the first time in his life. But, if being shipped to a factory for fruitcakes was the price, he could hardly bear it.

As tree after tree whizzed by the window, Roxas's glassy eyes stared blankly out at them while scratching at his wrists. The tingling pain began to seep into his brain, knocking out of his mindless trance. He glanced down to see he had scratched until he was almost raw. This was a nervous habit he performed constantly without realizing it. He wasn't even quite sure why he did it. Sometimes it felt good in dire times, but otherwise, he himself found it a little gross. 'Maybe I deserve to go to a nuthouse,' he mused. After all, it was supposed to be the best of the best, where only the privileged were treated.

But Roxas didn't have any more time to debate this with himself, for he felt the cab lurch to a stop. He looked out the window to be greeted with a several story, redbrick, building complex, surrounded by a courtyard and lush trees. A man clad in white trousers stood a few feet from the cab, his intense blue eyes peering at Roxas. His long blond hair spilled down over a dark jacket that was covering a white shirt. The man walked over and opened the cab door as the driver busied himself with Roxas's luggage. A long-fingered hand was held out to Roxas, and he looked up at the blond man.

"Roxas Hart, I'm Doctor Vexen, I will be one of your psychiatrists," the blond said with a not entirely sincere smile.

Roxas allowed himself to be helped out of the taxi as the cab driver handed him his suitcase and left without a word. "Welcome to Twilight Hill, Roxas. Follow me."

After stopping for a moment while Dr. Vexen checked him in at the front desk and then climbing a flight of stairs, Roxas found himself being led through a recreation room of sorts. There was a television with a couch in front of it where a boy with a strange blond mullet-like hairstyle sat perched in the lap of an older boy with icy grey-blue hair that fell to conceal his right eye. The boy with the mullet immediately stopped playing with the other boy's hair and both stared up at him as he passed by.

Several chairs were scattered around the room. One chair in the corner held a boy with long blue hair. He was so still; Roxas almost didn't notice him at first. He would have thought the boy was a comatose if he hadn't been peering so intently at the window across the room. A large X-shaped scar cut across his face from his forehead, through the bridge of his nose and partly into his cheek.

There was a small round table, at which a frosty blond with a goatee was seated fervently, and almost compulsively arranging and rearranging the cards in front of him. He was so completely lost in his world of cards that he didn't even seem to notice the chair that supported his body.

"….eation room where you may spend your leisurely time," Vexen's voice drifted into Roxas's consciousness, making him realize he was gawking at everyone like he was visiting a circus freakshow. He also discovered he was lagging quite a few feet behind Vexen, who didn't notice this and was carrying on ahead. He quickly increased his pace to catch up, almost tripping in the process, while the two boys on the couch continued to gawk back at him.

They marched down a long hallway with about five identical doors on each side. Dr. Vexen continued to speak. "Your room is down this hallway. There are two patients to every room. We recently had a…clear up…so you will be sharing a room with Demyx. He was the blond boy you saw on the couch back in the recreation room." With this, he opened one of the doors on the right midway through the hallway, and motioned to the bed on the left as Roxas stepped in. "Your first appointment with me is tomorrow afternoon. I suggest you take the remainder of today to rest. Dinner is served in the dining room at seven in one hour, and we generally expect you to show up. Lights out is at 10:30. Do you have any questions?"

Roxas spoke for the first time since entering the ward. "No," he replied, his voice feeling slightly hoarse.

"Good. I look forward to our appointment tomorrow, and again, welcome to Twilight Hill." With that, Vexen exited the room, closing the door behind him, leaving Roxas alone.

Taking a deep breath, Roxas sat gingerly on his perfectly made bed and peered around the room. There were two beds, one against each wall, and two night tables between them. To the left and right of the door there was a bureau facing each bed. Roxas's side was completely bare while the right side of the room was covered with posters of guitars and posters of ocean scenes. There was a generally blue theme running through everything on the right side of the room, even the guitars in the posters were blue. One of the guitars in the posters seemed like it had originally been green, but it looked as if someone had taken a bright blue crayon to it to fix that problem. Someone was clearly obsessed.

"Jeez, and I thought I had problems," Roxas said out loud, but as he was finishing his thought, the door burst open and the boy with the mullet came bounding into the room, throwing himself onto his bed, bouncing a few times as he looked at Roxas with a wide grin.

"Who has problems?" he asked innocently.

"Never mind, don't worry about it," Roxas replied, getting up and unzipping his suitcase. He didn't really feel like dealing with such a ray of sunshine at the moment.

This apparently disappointed Demyx. He bounced off his bed and landed himself on Roxas's bed. Propping himself up on one elbow, he whined, "Aww, don't be like that. I'm just trying to welcome my new roomie with a little conversation. Come on, I don't even know your name."

Roxas tried to ignore the overly-buoyant boy resting on his bed, but upon catching a pair of wide blue-green eyes peering up at him earnestly, a pang of guilt resonated inside him. After all, Demyx was the first person to truly be interested in him. He turned towards the prone boy and attempted a half-smile. "Roxas."

"So whatcha in for, Roxas?" Demyx wondered, excited beyond belief he was getting some acknowledgement.

Roxas grabbed almost the entirety of his clothes in one armful and shoved them in the first two drawers of his bureau. "I'm sad."

"We're all sad here," Demyx responded, oddly reminiscent of the Cheshire Cat.

There was a long silence as Roxas struggled with what he had to say next. He thought he might as well, everyone would find out eventually anyway. "They think I tried to kill myself."

"Yeesh, that's rough. How'd they think you tried to off yourself?"

Roxas was started to get uncomfortable with these questions, so he decided to change the subject. "Who was that boy you were fondling?"

It was Demyx's turn to be uncomfortable. "Oh, um, that was Zexion. We're…best friends," he answered, attempting desperately to hide his blush.

"What's he in for?"

"He's extremely antisocial, to the point where he doesn't even speak. He hasn't spoken since he was six years old. No one knows why."

"Then how do you know all this if he doesn't even talk to you?"

Demyx's face reddened further. "Um…we have a special way of communicating."

Not wanting to press anymore for fear agitating some unseen, unstable synapse in Demyx's head, Roxas switched subjects again. "So what about card boy?"

"Luxord? He's has some sort of obsession or addiction or something to gambling or whatever. He could honestly spend 24/7 in front of his precious cards; not eating, not sleeping, nothing. Personally, I just think he's a weirdo." Demyx stuck out his tongue playfully.

"And that guy in the corner? With the…" Roxas drew an X in the air in front of his own face. "…scar?"

"That's Saix," Demyx replied, sadness creeping onto his bubbly visage. "It's depressing really. Ever since he was very young, his parents used to make him feel ugly. They called him a freak, disgusting, revolting—you name it, he was called it. And he believed them. I don't blame him, if I grew up hearing nothing but that, I'd believe it too. When he was around 13 years old, he couldn't take it anymore, so he got a hold of his father's hunting knife and slashed a big ol' X across his face because he thought no one would look at him that way. You know when you draw and X over something, you're meant not to look at it? Well, yeah. But now that scar actually does make people stare at him, which is why he's so angry all the time. He's paranoid that people are staring, so my advice would be…don't look at him for more than two seconds."

Roxas was quiet for a while. Though he felt bad for Saix, he couldn't fathom how he belonged among these people, they were pretty damn extreme. But Demyx, aside from his overflowing excitement, seemed normal. "What about you, Demyx? What are you in here for?"

"I hacked my parents to death with a butter knife when I was four," came his simple answer.

Roxas had been closing one of his night table drawers when he heard Demyx's answer and promptly slammed it shut on his own fingers. He wheeled around to face Demyx who was now crouched on Roxas's bed like an eager puppy. "You what?" Roxas said, swallowing hard and backing away slowly.

"I'm also delusional and a pathological liar," Demyx added like it was a punch line to a joke he'd told earlier.

Roxas wasn't quite sure if this "punch line" made him feel better or worse, but he decided on the former when Demyx burst out into nearly insane laughter. "Calm down, Roxas, you're safe, I promise. Now, shall I escort you to dinner? I'm starving."

Dinner in the dining room was surprisingly uneventful. The boys' and the girls' wards shared the dining room, and Roxas met quite a few people. There was Xemnas who had an extreme god complex and felt the need to control even the air the people around him breathed, and there was Marluxia who believed deep down, he was truly a female. From the girls ward he met Larxene, a nymphomaniac who needed anger management, Xion, a schizophrenic, and Namine, an anorexic girl who chose to draw instead of eat, and if she ever ate, she would attempt to eat her paint. Despite their illnesses, most of them seemed really nice, none however, quite as jovial and friendly as Demyx, who practically dove in Zexion's lap the moment he and Roxas entered the dining room.

Roxas barely pushed around his food for a long while until a pretty, brunette nurse with a long braid hanging down her back approached him and kindly asked him to eat something otherwise it might create a "situation." He caught the name 'Aerith' on her nametag. After this, he managed to force a few spoonfuls down his throat. He just couldn't help but feel a huge separation between himself and everyone else.

After dinner, Roxas lay in his bed scribbling and doodling in a journal given to him by the psychiatrist in the hospital when he'd gotten his stomach pumped. At 10, he was forced, along with the rest of the patients in the ward, to take pills that would "aid him in sleeping." For the remaining half an hour before lights out, Demyx joined Roxas in their room and began blabbing about how "kick ass" it would be to have lived through Woodstock. Just before lights out, Marluxia poked his head into their room and looked at Demyx with a mixture of excitement and horror, speaking only two words before rushing towards the recreation room. "Axel's back."

Demyx wasted no time in sprinting out the door, but just before exiting, he turned to Roxas who was close on his heels. "Umm…maybe you should stay here for now."

Roxas didn't even have a chance to ask him why before he darted out the door. Who the hell was Axel? And why the hell was he supposed to stay in the room?

Just then, he heard a voice he didn't recognize shout from somewhere outside the door, "Get off me!" Despite Demyx's warning, Roxas couldn't help but poke his head outside the room to find out what was going on.

He could see down the hallway into the recreation room where several male nurses were restraining a tall, thin young man with fiery red hair as he kicked and pulled to free himself. The white undershirt and skinny black jeans he wore accentuated his muscular, but very lean frame. His captors finally let go when Dr. Vexen approached him.

"Hey, Vexy, baby," Axel's smooth voice cooed as he twisted a strand of the blond doctor's hair around a long finger. "Miss me?"

Dr. Vexen caught Axel's wrist in a strict hold. "You never learn, do you, Axel? You're going to have to face the consequences for your actions."

Axel withdrew his hand from Dr. Vexen as he handed over the contents of his pockets to one of the nurses. "Ooh, Doctor, don't be so rough with me, my poor fragile wrists might break, or worse…my mind might snap and I'd do something…" Axel made a sudden movement at one of the nurse, who surprisingly cowered for a moment. "…crazy," he finished, as he laughed menacingly at the nurse.

'What's with this guy?' Roxas thought. He was definitely different than every other patient he'd met today. He seemed almost…confident. There was something captivating about him. Roxas found himself drawn to Axel and subconsciously stepped outside his bedroom.

This was when Axel noticed him. Roxas was surprised to see his face light up. "Sora?! Is that you?" He called out to Roxas and began briskly walking towards him, his boots clicking loudly against the linoleum floor.

"Umm, Axel, that's…" Demyx attempted to stop him, but Axel pushed him aside.

A feeling of utter terror filled Roxas as Axel neared him, for midway through, the expression on Axel's face morphed from one of excitement, to one of complete hostility and rage. "Wait, you're not Sora! Who the FUCK are you?! Vexen, who the FUCK is in Sora's room?? WHERE'S SORA?!" In a wolf like manner, Axel bounded towards Roxas and grabbed him by his collar. He backed him into the bedroom and slammed the door shut, shoving a chair under the knob. Wheeling on Roxas, he grasped his collar again and threw him against the wall, pinning him. His striking face was inches away from Roxas's own.

"What the fuck are you doing here??" Axel screamed as the nurses outside made a futile attempt at ramming open the door. "Where is he?? WHERE'S SORA?! TELL ME!!!"

Roxas could hear his heart pounding in his ears as he fought to speak, but couldn't find words. Axel's wild eyes were as green as the venom Roxas knew Axel would spit if he could. He could feel Axel's heavy breath on his face. Suddenly, something seemed to dawn on Axel.

The nurses finally succeeding in slamming the door open, breaking the chair holding it shut in the process. Several hands were immediately upon Axel, pulling him away from Roxas, who stood watching dumbfounded.

"Let go! Let go of me! How'd he do it, Vexen? How'd Sora do it?!"

"You ran away for three weeks, Axel Reno. A lot of things happened here since you left," Vexen answered him coldly. Axel continued desperately to yank his arms away from the nurses as they held them back and kick any other nurses who approached him.

"Get his legs!" one of them shouted.

"Someone please sedate him!" Vexen commanded. "Take him into the room and do a strip search. You know the treatment afterwards."

"No! No!! Please, Vexen, please! No! NOOO!!!" Axel cried in anguish as a nurse managed to inject the contents of a large syringe into his upper arm. His movement became sluggish and Roxas could see tears stream down his face as they carried him away.

Dr. Vexen then turned to Roxas. "Are you alright, son?"

"Yeah, I'm fine thanks," Roxas replied, still shell-shocked.

"Alright, well it's time for lights out. I suggest you get some much needed rest."

A few moments after Vexen walked away, Roxas felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Demyx. "I told you to stay in the room. So…that was Axel."

"What are they going to do to him?" Roxas wondered.

Demyx was silent for a moment before he sighed. "Shocks."

---

(A/N): Oooh! How exciting and suspenseful right?! :p I do hope that wasn't too long and you all feel like you need to be shipped off to a nuthouse. I just COULDN'T end the chapter before Axel showed up! He excites the audience.

Please review so I know whether to keep truckin' with this story. I will try to get the next chapter up as soon as I can. I already have it all planned out.

Also, if you would like me to read/review your work, please do let me know.

XOXO

P.S. - Thank you so much Jess for beta-ing this!