Author's Note:

I should probably be working on At Birth but I had to get this in because it's been in my head for so long. It's based on Nijuukoo's picture for Akuroku Month Day 14. She's one of the most amazing artists in the world, genuinely. The picture deserved a good story.

A Reason For Fighting

Three counts; that's all it takes.

One.

You see him under you, a defeated man right before you and you never knew what it looked like close up because you never looked in the mirror. He takes a breath, and you think it's all over but you're determined. He won't get up, he won't get better, because if you can't heal then why should he.

Two.

Your heart's racing like a systematic machine, it's thoughtless and orderly, but you're so disorganized you can't even think for a second what might happen if you make it. You breathe, your sweat falls to the floor along with your last ounce of energy and you wonder how much longer you can go on if he gets up, if he has the will and the patience to look into your eyes and tell you that he knows how you feel, because he feels it too. He knows that we're not fighting each other, and we're not waiting for the count.

Three.

We're waiting until one of these fights ends it all.

Until it's over.

When you ask us why we fight, it's not really a question of why. It's a question of us and our power to keep going. Why has nothing to do with it, because we stopped asking that question years ago.

I was sitting on a stool by the ring, shirt slung over my back to cover the kaleidoscope of bruises. There was a sort of pride in them, because they were mine, but I didn't want anyone commenting on them because they were personal. I chugged down my water and scrunched up the plastic bottle when it was finished, rubbing the sweat and sleep out of my eyes. And when I opened them, there was this guy in front of me who looked like he was pretty sure he ruled the world.

"You gonna finish that?"

The hand that wasn't in his pocket was pointing at the empty water bottle, scrunched up and ruined in my hand. The necklace he wore moved uncertainly around his collar bone as he tapped his foot.

"You gonna eat the plastic?" I asked, staring up at his finger.

"Tempting, but no." He smirked, and his face betrayed his appearance. There was something about his expression that was intimidating, despite the idiocy of his questions, "You left some water at the bottom. Kind of wasteful, if you ask me."

I tried to avoid his eyes because I wasn't really a confrontational person, in conversation anyway, but there was no way in hell he was gonna let me look away. I rolled my eyes and gave in, "Sure, if you're that desperate."

I went to hand it over to him but he seemed hell-bent on having a conversation with me and it was really starting to piss me off, "You get any sleep last night, kid?"

Shoving my filthy-blond hair out of my face, I let my hand linger over the bags under my eyes. I'd never really noticed they were there, but their presence didn't surprise me, "What of it?"

He grabbed the water bottle out of my hands without a second thought and started to chug down the water that I hadn't even realized was still there. It begged the question, how the hell had he seen the transparent liquid in a basically destroyed and crumbled up water bottle from a distance like that?

When he was done, he looked down at me from where I was sitting, "You don't have a very healthy lifestyle do you? Wasting water, wasting time when you could be sleeping, you could do better."

I almost laughed out loud.

"Thanks for the lesson, man, but I've got stuff to do."

"You want your water bottle back?" He asked as I got up, and got ready to walk away.

"It's on the house." I smiled, but there was just barely an ounce of amusement in it.

As I started to walk, he caught up with me and shoved the water bottle in my face, just inches from touching my nose, and I grabbed it out of his hands the instant I realized it was so close to me.

"What do you want?" I snapped, clutching the water bottle so tight that it made a popping sound but I didn't even spare it a glance, "What's your goddamn problem?"

"You're a hell of a fighter up there." He said it without even skipping a beat, and I really got a good view of his face now because we'd walked into some light.

He was looking at me with bright green eyes that looked so excited it almost gave me a heart attack from the sheer anticipation of my response. When I looked down, I saw that he was fiddling with that necklace he wore, one hand was doing that and the other clutching my wrist as if to make sure I was going to answer him before I got away. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail, long and red like the fire that burns the sun into your eyes, and all I could think about was how sweaty my palms were getting just from his look. I kept my stance, didn't back away because I was one for a challenge.

"It doesn't matter," I said, not wavering in my gaze, "What makes you think it does?"

"Thought you should know," he let go of my wrist, and I hadn't noticed how tightly he had been grabbing it, "So I can feel more proud of myself when I beat you."

And if the fire red hair and the stupid puke green eyes hadn't told me anything, this did. He didn't belong here. No one from this dump would ever say something like that.

"You're new here," I said, "Not surprising." I pulled at the back of the shirt over my shoulders for some reason, and a part of me thought that maybe I didn't want him seeing my bruises, maybe I wanted him thinking that I was invincible. God only knows why the urge hit me.

"It doesn't matter," He said, and for a second I thought that maybe he was mocking me, "You have incredible form. Of course, not that it makes a difference to you." He thought he had me pegged. What an idiot.

"Exactly."

"But hear me out, I want to train with you."

Train? What the fuck did he think this was?

"You have the wrong idea."

"Think about it," He whispered, and it was such a change in volume from him that I paid more attention to what he was saying, "Do me a solid."

"I don't even know you."

"How unfortunate for you. If that's a problem, then maybe this is a good opportunity to get to know me, don't you think?"

This guy was absolutely infuriating.

When that thought occurred to me, I pulled myself away from him and stormed off into the back room, ignoring him and his smug little smile because I just wasn't in the mood for it. If he thought that this was about training, then he was going to find out the truth the hard way whether or not it was via me or anyone else around here. What gave him the right to try to talk to me like that? Did he just expect me to trust him and do what he said? I tried not to think too much about it, because answerless questions were pointless.

But some questions and faces find a way to haunt you through the night, whether or not you want them to.

…

He came back to the ring for five days.

Maybe he was a regular and I'd never noticed him or maybe he was just trying to drive me crazy. Either way I found myself down for the count about a million times because I kept seeing his high and mighty smirk from every corner of the room. I tried to avoid it the way you avoid going to jail because something about him made me feel guilty. Like I owed him something. Swinging my blood laden fist into the stomach of the man in front of me, I tuned the guilt out and focused on the rage emanating from the both of us in this ring, both directed at the outside world rather than each other.

Upper cut, duck, swing back to lock and load, don't let go of your fear, don't let go of your memories because they're never going away. And this fight; this fight is forever and nothing all at once.

"Look out!"

The call came from the one person that had the goddamn balls to shout in the middle of our silent fighting, breaking my concentration and the shell I'd built around me, because the blow I'd just been prepared to block had now been pointed out to me point-blank like I was some sort of idiot. He'd said it to distract me, but I hadn't thought of that until after the fact.

The guy I was fighting got my face, my arms, everything I had to my name was bloodied by the end of the match. I was on the floor, my hair matted around my face like the most pathetic display of anger you could ever hope to see in your life. And I just laid there, unable to get up, rage and hatred flowing through the veins were the blood had left to sunbathe on my cheeks.

I was furious.

"Are you okay?" The match was over and the green eyed demon was leaning over me, wiping the blood from my face like he had the right to, and I acted on the only thought that ran through my mind.

I punched him square in the jaw, jumped up from my sprawl on the ground, and pinned him against the wires of the ring.

"I hate you… so much!" It came out like an accusation, the words seething through my teeth, and when he tried to say something, I screamed, "You shut your fucking mouth!"

I was shaking.

I didn't know what to do, beating him up seemed too impersonal and suddenly there was no physical way for me to express my hatred, no way for me to scream because I didn't have the words, so I just stood there helplessly and made sure he could see the murderous expression I wore like a mask. We were breathing for what felt like years and I was holding his arms until his wrists turned white because I wanted him to feel everything—

"Axel."

I stopped squeezing his arms, looked him dead in the eyes until he forced me to ask the question.

"What?"

"My name."

He didn't ask me for mine, didn't say a word. Just looked at me with wide eyes as if to see what I was going to do next.

"Axel," I breathed out the name, let go of his arms and addressed him personally for the first time, "Fuck you."

…

The next day, I couldn't believe what was in front of me.

Dancing around the ring as if he was born and raised on the floorboards, he was cutting and grabbing the air around him like nothing I'd ever seen before. A beanie was covering the back of his head so I couldn't tell who he was, all I knew was that I'd never seen him in my life.

The only way to describe his fighting style was…beautiful. And it was disturbing in the fullest sense of the word. It was lacking in the desperation, the raw impact didn't draw him closer and inspire him, and he wasn't fighting the world. It wasn't even fighting at all, if you looked close enough.

It was a sport to him.

When he won, I could see the smile crack, the eyes light up even if they were in shadow. He didn't even have to remove the beanie for me to figure out who he was.

My voice caught in my throat when he saw me, and he shed the beanie on the floor and raced out to meet me.

His hair was the color of the blood on his knuckles, and there was something that was nagging at the back of my mind. Whether or not he didn't understand the real reason for fighting, there was something I couldn't shake.

He was the best I'd ever seen.

"Hey, Blondie," I clenched my fists as he approached me, "How's it going?"

"Shitty." I answered, barely opening my mouth.

"Ah, glass all the way empty, broken in shattered pieces on the floor, I see. Ever the optimist," He smiled and threw the beanie so that he was sure I could catch it, which I did reluctantly, "You up for a round?"

"I'd rather die."

"A little dramatic, are we?"

"No. 'We' aren't anything."

"Then do you want to beat the shit out of me, or what?"

His smile dropped, faltered in its own uncharacteristic way. He dropped his arms into his pockets, waiting for a response because he had wanted me to fight him all along. He wanted to assess me, see where I rank in the little hierarchy of his head because he was a self-serving idiot. But I could see in his eyes that he was going to keep showing up here, going to keep fighting everyone else until there was no one left for me to fight.

"Yeah," I said, throwing the beanie smack onto his chest. It hit hard, with a painful sound, "But not here."

He looked around at all the people watching us, wanting to see our next move because they'd all witnessed the near murder that had taken place only yesterday.

"Let's take it out back then," He said it in such a calm and even tone that it was almost scary, "I'm ready for a real challenge."

We walked for what felt like hours out to a chain link fence by the dumpster out back, next to the parking lot. He tied his hair back slowly, taking his sweet time as I brushed the hair out of my face and focused on his weak spots, timing my moves beforehand with the precision that fire has when it burns.

We each waited for the other to make their move first, and from an outside perspective it might've looked like we were being polite. But we were counting the seconds and timing the specificities of our movements. He was choreographing his blows, but I was feeling them.

He moved first, up against me in a minute and he was so fast I blindly went into his grasp, and I would've tugged on his shirt if he was wearing one but he was smart and slammed me against the fence that surrounded us with a sickening clinking sound.

He smiled, and I took advantage of the time and thought it took him to do so as I slammed my fist against any point that I could to make him topple over, with slight success as he backed off. I was overcome with rage and fear and thoughts so disorganized that they were clear and precise.

We grabbed each other, neither falling to the floor, and he was strong, quick, and perfect with his form and planning but I was passionate. I slammed myself against him, hit him so hard that he crashed into the fence as I had mere minutes ago.

"Yes!" He shouted as he made impact, "You're so fucking good!"

He was thirsty for the challenge because I had one to give, and that desperation clung to his expression like a child lost in a crowd.

He came back hard, thrusting me into a position that any mediocre fighter wouldn't have been able to get out of, but I was smaller than him and smarter than the majority, so I turned the tables more than once in our little war.

For a moment, he embodied everything that I once hated about myself. Ignorance, a knowing smile, and a confidence that belonged to no one except God. We went fist to fist and I felt my arms getting heavy with the effort, but I knew that we were equally matched but for the most opposite of reasons.

There was a pause in our movements, when we'd both backed away from each other enough to balance ourselves, and we were at a momentary standstill to see who would risk a hit first.

"I never did catch your name," He grinned like he knew he would win even though his hands were shaking.

"Roxas," and it was loud and confident because I was ready to see him fall and drop that smile that hung on his face like a sickness. I let out a war cry and ran for him clumsily, my desperation outweighing my strength, and he tossed me aside and landed a few on my face, my stomach, my sides, anywhere soft and vulnerable that he could take advantage of.

"Roxas," he shouted with a snide tilt to his voice, "Fight, fight, fight."

He barely gave me a moment to recover, unleashed layer upon layer of well-thought-out beatings to my crumbling body, heinously venting something that was mathematical, systematic, organized and brutal.

I fell to the ground in an instant that felt like forever.

I couldn't breathe. I felt the life leaving my body in a daze, the gravel mixing with the blood in my mouth and all I could think about was if this man with the confident smile and uncertain necklace was going to kill me. I felt his weight crushing me, and I was limp and lifeless enough to not even attempt to defy him. He whispered in my ear three numbers that ran down my ear drums like the blood ran out of my veins.

"I won," He said, and when he turned to look at me on the ground he wasn't smiling. I thought for sure he'd flash me the biggest, most disgusting smile I'd ever seen if he'd beaten me, but he was almost sorrowful. As if the second he looked at me he pitied this thing lying at his feet gasping for air, nearly convinced it was going to die because of some smug asshole with a competitive streak.

When I caught my breath, I tried to sit myself up from the pavement, but I just fell back down and before I could hit the ground he caught me in his arms. I tried to tell him not to touch me, but the energy just wasn't there and he probably wouldn't have cared anyway.

He held me like that for a second, let me breathe and come to my senses.

"Hey," He said when I was breathing normally. I opened my eyes and looked up at him, "I'm sorry."

"Like hell you are," I muttered, "Are you happy now?"

"Sort of," He had this goofy smile then, and I had to double take.

This was his real smile. Crooked, genuine, and friendly. It took me completely off guard, and I think I stared for a little too long.

"What?" He said, "Did you break my nose? Is it crooked?"

"No," I said, and whether or not I wanted them to, the corners of my mouth curled up a little, "Just your smile."

It widened into a grin, a well-meaning one, and even though I felt like complete shit something inside me felt a little better, just for a second. It didn't change anything, though, I still hated him with everything I was.

"Come on, Roxas," The name hung from his lips pleasantly, "Let's get you cleaned up."

…

He took me to the back room of the ring where I'd retreated from him on that first day, and sat me down on a stool in the center of the deserted room. Hunting through the cabinets with the ferocity of a sloth, he took his time finding some first aid and cleaning himself up. He redid his ponytail, adjusted the necklace that hung from his neck like a memory, and cleaned his cuts with a cheap washcloth. I saw him glance at me through the corner of his eye, and he sped up a little, but it wasn't out of intimidation. A part of me liked to think that it was courtesy.

He threw on a shirt, mine was still around my shoulders to stop some of the bleeding from the concrete, and wrapped some thin strips of ace bandage around his wrists. He told me in a soft voice that he was a fast healer and didn't feel like wasting as much as I liked to.

"Thanks," I said it as a reflex when he pulled another slightly taller stool from the corner of the room and sat down across from me. I sort of felt like he grabbed the taller one so he could feel superior, but from the look on his face I had a feeling it was just so he could get a better view of my wounds.

"Did I do that?" He said, wrapping the bandages around my right wrist, "This is the worst part of fighting, isn't it?"

"Cleaning up afterwards?" I said, glaring.

"No," He breathed, smiled a little, and looked at me, "Realizing what you've done."

He didn't say anything after that for a while, even as he bent down off the stool and wrapped more bandages around my feet. There was a silence that was lingering, and a part of me was getting fed up with it. Maybe he felt bad about beating me up, but he'd wanted to do it in the first place. Wincing from the pain in my feet, there was this unspoken tension between us, because no matter what he said he still didn't understand.

"Good game, Roxas."

He said it like it was supposed to reassure me, like it was supposed to make some kind of difference in what I thought of him, and when he finished with my feet and grabbed my other hand, I tightened my grip and gave into myself.

"You don't get it, do you?" I said it so loudly that he nearly jumped off of the stool, "You fight because you want to win, right? You fight because you want acceptance, you want the world and the future on your fingertips. And the people here, the people like me? We fight because it's all we have," My voice was painful and full of hatred, but he was still holding onto my hand, and I didn't have the energy to rip it away, "Don't you—" My voice broke for a fraction of a second, "Don't you fucking get that?"

He opened and closed his mouth, trying to find the words, but we were both drowning in ace bandage and silence.

"Roxas," He said my name, and for a second the goofy smile was there when it had no right to be, "Everyone has their reasons for fighting."

He went back to wrapping the ace bandage around my wrist, and I was just looking at him. Something about him looked pitiful, like there was a rhyme or reason to it all that he had believed in from the start. That's why he planned his punches, why he choreographed and perfected it down to a science.

I dropped my head down to look at my feet, mouth hanging open with leftover blood because I didn't have the strength to keep it closed. I felt Axel's miserable expression still focused on me, his hands gently fixing the cuts, trying to fix everything. The victor was looking at the defeated, but it didn't feel that way anymore.

The next thing I felt were fingers on my chin, and then I realized that he was lifting my head up and we were kissing.

I didn't have time to process it, to decide whether or not I loathed him or loved him for proving me wrong, all I could do was accept it because it was just an instant. We kissed for what felt like forever and nothing all at once.

I counted the seconds in my head like they were years.

One.

Two.

Three.

And it was over.