Author's Note: I'm thinking that this story will end up being three to four chapters long just like the others I've been posting lately. That should be enough, right?

...HOW IS EVERYONE TODAY, BEFORE I GO ON WITH THE STORY. XD

I'll warn you now that in the next chapters to come, the content will become a little more graphic. But that's life, isn't it? In addition to that, the inspiration for the title of this story comes from my life as well, but I'll let you know that more towards the last chapters. I'd rather leave that for the wrap up, AI'ITE?

The Whiteboard
Part II | Winter

A Friday in April.

Senior party.

Sunny with highs in the mid 60's and overnight lows in the upper 30's.

Axel joined the guys when they went to the local pizza parlor and threw breadsticks at each other, muttering profanities and things undesirable.

Around 11 at night three guys from the group dared one of them to hit on a hooker in Tram Commons, but Axel backed out—limping away and complaining about three bottles of Pepsi; the perfect excuse that he had to take a wicked piss in the woods, when covertly he was scared shitless of hookers from the very moment one called him Sweetcheeks and called the platoon to flock for his ass when he was trying to buy ice cream—and so in the middle of things he ran back toward the high school.

Lo and behold there he spotted—what was his name again? Roxas?—who he guessed was Roxas anyway.

Cautiously he tiptoed up to the figure sitting with its back against the wooden fence. It was way too dark to tell if it was even a person or not.

"Uh...you all right there?" Boy, what a way to start a conversation.

He noticed the shadow twitch furiously in shock and he held his hand out to try and calm them down. "Whoa, whoa, easy there, man. Oh my god," he mumbled with a roll of his eyes. "I'm not gonna kill you or nothing. Christ, where's the street light when you need it?" When there was no response to his jabber, Axel fished around for something in the kanga pocket of his hoodie and returned with a flip open cell phone to shed some light on this guy's face. He would soon discover that maybe that wasn't such a good move after all...

It was Roxas all right, but he wasn't all right, at least he didn't look all right. Axel stood a good two feet away from the kid when the faint LED light spilled over his fetal positioned body—his head buried deep into his khakis and both arms hugging his knees close to his thin chest. It'd only been a few months since Axel saw the blonde, but he seemed to recall how much healthier he looked back then. If he wasn't mistaken Roxas's waistline had to be roughly the width of Axel's wrist—pretty much a freakin' toothpick relevant—and his cheeks weren't as full and tan as they used to be.

He had to admit that he knelt down on one knee that night out of concern for the kid. Was he even alive?

"Roxas?" he asked quietly.

"Go 'way..." was the response. He sounded like he'd been stuffed in the back of a trunk for a day if Axel had to guess.

Crickets chirped, trees crackled and moaned in the distance, but all the while Axel only heard and listened to Roxas's silence. What the hell was he supposed to do? He couldn't tell if Roxas was fucking crying. Maybe he was just tired? Lost? Sometimes he really did hate being an almost-adult, because that usually meant that he had to take responsibility for most things, kids' problems included in the Blue Light special. By that notion, Axel sighed roughly into the cold, dark night and with cell phone in one hand he scooted closer, but not too close, to the boy and lowered his head to get a better look at Roxas's face.

"Hey," he whispered. He wasn't very good at this. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

"Uh, ok...but you're not serious about that, right?" The redhead chuckled to try and get a pint of humor into the conversation, but Roxas still stayed as stone cold as ever.

He nervously ran a hand through his hair and looked away, searching for comfort words to pull out of thin air, because air was just so full of words, but the in end all he could do was sit down beside the kid on the freezing sidewalk, one leg pulled into his chest and the other stretched out long.

Maybe he'd tell him in a minute, or maybe he'd never tell him, but one thing was for certain and that was that Axel was having a better time here than he had been with the guys down at the Commons. After a moment of thinking, however, and staring up at the stars, Roxas's voice resounded in the darkness, breaking Axel's concentration.

"...Do your parents ever yell, Axel?" he asked, though this time his voice was a bit louder and less muffled since he'd brought his chin up from his folded arms.

The redhead raised a brow at that. "Yell? Well...I guess, yeah. Why?"

Roxas shook his head. "My parents were yelling."

"Do they...always do that?"

Again the blonde shook his head.

"So what's the problem?"

"Just that when it happens it drives me crazy. Dad even left the house again."

Ah. So that's what it was. Axel himself hadn't experienced one of his parents walking out during a fight, but he had experienced a fight all the same and could understand what the kid was saying. Maybe he'd run away or maybe he'd been kicked out himself. Whatever the reason, Axel knew it must not have been good, and without thinking or saying a word he reached a hand out and placed it atop Roxas's shoulder in a gesture of reassurance to which the boy looked up...and smiled.

...The barriers between them were suddenly broken.

xxXXxx

For Roxas's twelfth birthday Axel got him something he thought a teenage kid would like, and that was some little trinket from the novelty store in the mall. It wasn't much more than miniature dart board with magnet darts that barely held when they were thrown, but Roxas accepted it gratefully and with beaming, beautiful eyes, later taking the redhead by the wrist to help him try it out on one of the park benches.

They hadn't known each other long...and Axel didn't know for how long they would, because the end of August would be there sooner than later and soon he'd be back to school, in college, trying to study while visions of blonde hair and blue eyes would invade his subconscious mind. Axel knew what he was up against and he knew that it wouldn't be easy...but he forced himself to see Roxas every day until the end.

Every day until the end.

xxXXxx

He'd go home and dream the strangest things...and often times they never made sense, but the pressing in his chest and the nagging urge to touch and scream was persistent and when he'd look at himself in the mirror he would groan and wonder why the hell it was so difficult to understand himself.

"Axel. Get it outta your head. Get it outta there, come on." He told himself this every morning, after every nap and before he'd head to bed at night, but no matter how hard he tried and no matter how hard he prayed, the image of eyes blinking twice and the sound of squeaky, rusty metal would enter his dreams. There were hills of Converse shoes, fences made of dart boards and flowers which laughed and blinked twice, and then twice more as he passed. Things would ask questions, stupid, innocent questions about the sun and about the rain and why the sky was blue. And in the middle of his dream after he'd spun around in countless circles...Axel would stop and there the world would shrink down to one little thing—one thing blinking twice and one thing dragging his heels into the disturbed bark of the playground.

Roxas.

xxXXxx

"It kinda sucks when you're away," the boy said as he walked with Axel down the empty halls of his middle school one day after classes were over. His parents had noticed that two had bonded—how could they not when Roxas talked about the guy as often as he did?—and had agreed to keep Axel as a part time babysitter for their son. Getting a job those days had been difficult anyway and with college taking up his time Axel barely had the time to search...and now that he had more opportunities to hang out with this kid while earning money at the same time, hell, he was sold.

The redhead, with Roxas's backpack slung over one arm and one hand tucked in his pocket, looked down at his younger companion with a look of amusement and...something else tinting those features. "I thought you couldn't stand me."

Roxas shrugged as they continued down the sun drenched hall towards the parking lot. "That was when you were a senior. Now you're in college, so you're different."

Axel didn't understand the difference there, but let the logic slide anyway. There was more silence between the two, only the sound of shoes shuffling down the halls keeping them awake, before out of nowhere Roxas stopped in his tracks and took off running, untied shoelaces dragging behind him, making Axel worry and stare—

"Race you!" the youth called over his shoulder and as the orange glow flowing in through the windows began to darken and lessen, Axel ran after him, not wanting Roxas out of his sight...

xxXXxx

The first time they hugged was when Roxas showed Axel his room for the first time over Thanksgiving break. Roxas's parents had invited Axel over and while the rest of the blonde haired and blue eyed family members flooded the main floor, Roxas took the redhead's wrist and dragged him up the stairs and to the right towards the smell of fresh cleaned laundry and white board markers.

"Here, here, I wanna show you my room," Roxas said as he kicked open his door and pulled the two of them inside. It was all a blur, really, because all the time they were running...all he could think about was that he was being held like this again; Roxas's smaller fingers were gripping at his wrist, tugging him forward, keeping him there...and it was at that moment that Axel began to think—

The boy's voice interrupted him yet again. "It's kinda messy, but I've been getting better at cleaning it up, I think."

"Heh. Better than what my old room was like, I give ya that, squirt." Axel settled himself at the edge of Roxas's bed at that comment and began to survey his surroundings from the pile of sneakers by the bookshelf to the blue tint of the ceiling which was peppered with glow in the dark planets and stars. Typical kid's room, right? So innocent...and simple. It wasn't like autumn which he knew he would always hate; it was warm and inviting and everything just seemed alive and constant. Roxas's room was like summer.

But even here, sitting here, comfortable and warm and under the glow of green planets...Axel couldn't help but question himself. Why was he there? Did he have the right to be there? He knew that Roxas's parents trusted him and he knew that Roxas trusted him, and yet deep down—deep down he wasn't all he seemed to be. He was unstable, unhealthy, and unreliable. But Roxas couldn't know that. None of them could, even though in the pit of his heart Axel knew that they had to. They had to.

"See that whiteboard up there?" Roxas brought up, flopping down beside Axel as he pointed across them to where, indeed, a plain whiteboard sat upon the wall. The redhead eyed it with a raised brow.

"Yeah?"

The boy laughed. "Whenever something funny comes up or something that I want to remember, I make sure to write it down up there."

"Seems like a pretty tiny space to write, Roxas."

Roxas shook his head and got up once again to stare up at the whiteboard. "Nuh-uh. There's loads of room."

"Then why haven't you written anything?" Axel asked with a chuckle to which Roxas simply reached out and snatched a black whiteboard pen from a nearby holder. No sooner had he done that did the sound of squeaking and the scent of markers mix into the air, making Axel...dizzy, perhaps, and lightheaded. He wasn't even really focusing on what the boy was writing, but more in the way he wrote. There were pauses and subtle strokes, up and down—some letters were rounded and others were sharp and squared, and when it was all said and done Axel noticed how neatly he wrote as well. Was this kid for real?

"See?" Roxas said as he stepped back to show off nothing more than two words: 'Hey, Axel.' As simple as it was, as absurd as it seemed, the words made Axel smile and his heart feel so heavy. He didn't belong here, but to the boy...he always would. Thinking it, he stood from the bed and followed to snatch that same black pen away from Roxas so that he could scribble his own little message. Nothing more than two words as well.

'Hey, Roxas.'

"There," he said, capping the pen as if it were the period at the end of a sentence. "Like that?"

...And from there the younger could only smile and laugh before throwing an arm out to wrap about Axel's frame. It meant little, it probably meant nothing at all, and yet Axel knew that this had to be the second time that he'd touched Roxas and the first time that Roxas had touched him, so in reality...it meant everything.

"Thanks, Axel. You're the best."

No, he wasn't...how could he be?

But Axel just sailed on through, eventually bringing his own arm around to lie across Roxas's shoulders and hold him close against his side. There were no barriers.

And he was surely losing control.

xxXXxx

The whiteboard was near full by the time February ended and by April there was nothing left but a corner at the lower right corner. Colors ranging from red to blue, purple to orange scattered the once pristine white surface, quotation marks, exclamation points, faces, doodles, abbreviations—

Hey, Roxas.

Hey, Axel.

Imagining it, realizing what part he had played in creating it...Axel would bite his lip until his blood ceased to flow. He was angry yet docile and when his emotions collided he would internally explode. He was impatient, writhing and lying awake at night under his own, plain ceiling without the green stars and without the blue background. He didn't have the scent of whiteboard markers or the constant squeak of pens and playgrounds, or the warmth of an arm about his body or the admiration and the sheer beauty of those eyes—

...The first time he had cried in a long time was when his body shook with orgasm without him even telling it to do so, during a hot summer night in mid-June.

Roxas was still 12. Axel was now 19.

And beneath these sheets and underneath all the darkness he was keeping so many things locked away within his body, hoping that they would never be found. And yet he cried so much. Wouldn't his parents find out when they would see his pillows soaking and their son shaking with bloodshot eyes? And why had he fucking come from something as stupid and innocent as—?

"Roxas..." he whimpered into his wrist before biting down and trying, trying so hard to forget the pain.

xxXXxx

When Axel quit his babysitting job, Roxas's parents didn't quite understand the reason, but they were certainly more understanding than Roxas himself. The moment the boy came downstairs to the sound of Axel's voice in the kitchen he overheard the conversation and then promptly ran back to his room, shutting the door and more than likely huddling under his covers like he always did when he was upset. Roxas's mother had said that Roxas would get over it—that the boy would adjust and still talk to Axel when he would call or stop by every so often when he had the time—and though the redhead had smiled and stored the information, he knew that he had to keep as far away from Roxas as possible.

It would be difficult, like changing the tide or the rise and set of the sun, but Axel was persistent and he was desperate...so he would limit himself to phone calls until he would get better. But how would he do that? How did people like him get better?

And as he left the house that day, descending the white steps towards the brick pathway, Axel swore that he could hear the faint yelling of a certain boy from behind the family door.

"I want Axel! Where's he going? I want Axel!"

...It took all his strength and then some to refrain from busting that door and holding that boy in his damn arms.

...And now I want ice cream. It's one AM. :c

you're so fucking special,
kokoro77