Taking Undue Liberties

The first time the red-haired man shows up, Roxas figures he’s a lot like the rest of the perverts who cruise the slums in Sector Six. The kind of guy who offers him barely anything, a cheap meal, maybe, and then expects Roxas to be grateful enough to follow him off into an alley somewhere — instead of smart enough to kick him in the balls and run.

The red-haired man makes an impression for two reasons. One, he’s younger and cooler than most of the perverts. Two, after he buys Roxas a jumbo-size bowl of noodles from one of the stands at the edge of Wall Market, all he does is watch Roxas eat, and then wink and smile and say, “Catch you later, kid,” before walking off. It’s a nice smile, even.

About a week goes by before Roxas sees him again. It’s getting toward the end of autumn, and even under the Plate where there isn’t much weather, it’s turning too cold to be comfortable. All the kids Roxas knows are trying to find good bases where they can keep warm, and sometimes he stays with some of them — Hayner’s crew, down in an empty warehouse on Dog Street — but it’s never as nice as any of them would like.

So when the red-haired man shows up again, hanging out on a corner like he’s waiting for somebody, Roxas drops down off a fire escape to land on the sidewalk beside him. “You again, huh?”

“Me again,” the guy says, and smiles. His eyes are bright green, like a bliss junkie’s, but he doesn’t act like he’s fucked up. “You still hungry?”

Roxas shrugs. “Maybe.”

The guy laughs. “Stick around for a bit. I’ll buy you lunch.” He pushes off the wall and disappears through a door on the other side of the street, following some guy in a hood. Roxas thinks about taking off, but hey, a free meal’s a free meal, and last time this guy didn’t even try to touch him.

It takes about ten minutes before the guy comes back, and Roxas is kind of fidgeting by then, but it’s not like he had any place important to go, right?

“Didn’t mean to keep you waiting,” the guy says, and winks. “Come on, kiddo. Burgers sound good to you?”

Roxas rolls his eyes. “Do they ever.”

The guy doesn’t try to touch him that time either, just making conversation while they wait for their burgers and fries and Roxas’s huge milkshake. He wants to try something, it’s obvious just from the look in his eyes, but he doesn’t make any suggestions and he doesn’t make any moves.

Roxas gives him a little wave when the guy heads off afterward.

The next week or so isn’t real good. Hayner’s gang gets run off the Dog Street warehouse, and nobody has a place to stay while they wait for that mess to blow over. Then the first freeze comes, outside the city, and it starts to get really nasty on the streets. There aren’t as many odd jobs in the winter, and the perverts are always worse when it’s cold out, like they think they’re doing the street kids a favor by coming after them.

Roxas sees the red-haired guy headed down the street in the other direction one afternoon. He almost doesn’t recognize the guy at first — most of his hair is hidden under a scarf, but a few stray spikes stick out at the back, and there are those weird markings on his face.

“Hey,” Roxas says, jogging to catch up. “How’s it going?”

The guy smiles, sort of crooked. “Not bad. Not bad at all. How about you?”

“You know how it is,” Roxas shrugs. He’s still pretty sure this guy is a pervert, but he’ll keep pushing his luck as long as he doesn’t have to actually do anything gross. “Never all that nice when it turns cold, right?”

“Yeah, I guess not.” The guy turns, starts up the street toward the train station. “What’s your name?”

“…Roxas.” Can’t hurt to tell him, can it?

“Cool.” The guy nods. “Axel. Nice to meet you.”

“So.” Roxas jogs up the stairs toward the train platform alongside Axel. “Where we going?”

Axel grins. “There’s a little Wutai place a few blocks from my apartment. I was headed over there.”

“The food there any good?” Roxas asks. He hasn’t eaten today, but there’s no point saying that too soon.

“Not bad, if you like that kind of thing,” Axel says. “A little bland, maybe.” He shows his pass to get on the train, and Roxas shows his, following Axel down the aisle and sitting across from him. “Surprised you buy passes for the train.”

“Yeah, well,” Roxas says. “Easier to find work if you can get around, right? And not like you’re thinking, you pervert.”

“No,” Axel says, shaking his head. “You don’t look like you’re renting.”

Roxas gives him a look. Why’s the pervert buying him food, if he doesn’t think Roxas is going to give it up? “Thanks,” he says warily.

Axel smiles. “No problem. So, you’re coming with me for dinner, huh?”

“You’re lucky I’m not busy today,” Roxas says. Axel seems to think it’s cute when he’s kind of a jerk.

“Yeah,” Axel says. “I guess I am.” He watches Roxas with this look on his face, like he totally wants something, but he keeps his hands tucked in the pockets of his jacket and doesn’t say anything about it. Roxas has always kind of figured it was okay to take the free food as long as he doesn’t make any promises about doing stuff in return, and just letting Axel look doesn’t hurt him any.

They ride the train all the way to Sector Three, which is, you know, still probably nothing like above the Plate, but way nicer than the parts of Sector Six that Roxas is used to. “You live up here?” he asks without thinking as he follows Axel off the train. “What are you doing down in Six, then?”

“You know how it is,” Axel says, exactly the same way Roxas said it to him. “You go where the work is, right?”

There’s not much honest grown-up work in Sector Six, but Roxas doesn’t say so. He wraps his arms around himself, burying his hands in his armpits to try to keep them warm, and remembers, again, that he needs to come up with some money for a new jacket, since he gave his old one to Olette when he couldn’t fit in it anymore.

Axel is giving him a kind of worried look when they stop at this little place with a neon sign that says Happy Garden, and Roxas suddenly realizes that Axel might not be a pervert — he might be a sucker. And that’s kind of annoying too, but it’s a lot less dangerous.

It’s warm in Happy Garden, though, and it smells awesome, so Roxas figures he can wait on trying to sort that one out. A girl in a sort of pink robe shows them to a little booth, and brings them a pot of tea without them even asking for it.

“You know what you want?” Axel asks, pouring tea for both of them.

Roxas wraps his hands around the little porcelain cup. It’s already hot right through, and it feels so good. “I’m not picky,” he says, breathing in the steam from the tea. “What’s good here?”

Axel raises an eyebrow, like he can tell Roxas is kind of floundering, and just like that he’s back in the pervert category. “Most of the food here’s pretty good,” he says. “I’ll just get us a few different things, how’s that?”

“That’s good,” Roxas agrees, and takes a sip of his tea. It’s so good — well, it tastes okay, but more importantly it’s hot — that he closes his eyes for a minute to just enjoy that, and when he opens them again he catches Axel watching him. Yeah. Definitely a pervert.

But kind of nice, as perverts go, and pretty patient. He orders them a bunch of food, all these things with weird nonsense names, and when it comes out he mostly just explains what each thing is while Roxas half-listens and tries more than a little of everything.

There’s enough food that Roxas can’t finish all of it. When was the last time that happened? He sits there eventually, so full it almost hurts, staring at the rest of the food that’s left and feeling like he ought to be trying to finish it, because odds are he won’t see another meal like this for a while.

“You want to get the rest packed up?” Axel asks, saving him from the dilemma.

“Oh,” Roxas says, blinking. “Um, yeah.” Yeah, sure, of course he’d like to take the food with him.

Except, he realizes as they get ready to leave, he’s not so thrilled with the part where they have to go back outside now. He hunches his shoulders, trying to brace himself for the cold as they walk up to the door.

And then Axel does what Roxas has been expecting him to do for weeks.

“You want to come back to my place for a bit?” he asks as they step out onto the sidewalk, and the wind blows right through Roxas’s shirt and makes him shiver.

“Took you long enough,” Roxas mutters. “You think you were being subtle, or something?”

Axel looks down at him, raising an eyebrow. “I’m not making a pass at you,” he says.

Roxas glares back. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

“Totally serious,” Axel insists. “Just saying, you can come hang out with me for a while if you want to. I’m not going to try anything.”

“You’re really weird,” Roxas says after a minute. He knows better than to trust anyone, he really does, but Axel doesn’t act like anybody he knows, and it’s cold as Shiva’s breath out here. “Where do you live?”

Axel smiles. “This way.” He heads up the street, turns at the next corner, goes a few more blocks. Roxas tries to keep the turns memorized, keeps an eye out for safe places in case he needs them. When Axel stops at the door of one building and starts digging for his keys, there’s a little all-night grocery sort of across the street and down a little, and Roxas figures that’d be his best bet — if he had to run, he’d go there; it’s the nearest place where there’s light and he’s pretty guaranteed to find people.

They go up two flights of stairs and down a sort of dark, creaky hallway, and then Axel’s fiddling with the lock and flipping a light switch — and his apartment isn’t bad. Kind of small, and probably none of the furniture’s new, but it’s warm and dry and the couch looks comfy, and that’s about all Roxas could ask for.

“Make yourself at home,” Axel says, shrugging his coat off and dropping his scarf on the floor. “I’ve got sodas and stuff in the fridge, but you probably don’t want anything cold right now, do you?”

“Not really,” Roxas agrees. And hell, there’s no harm in asking, is there? “You have any hot cocoa or something?”

Axel laughs. “I might. I’ll check. Why don’t you go through the videos over there, see if there’s anything you feel like watching?”

Roxas nods. “Sure.” He doesn’t take off his shoes or his overshirt — he’s still not sure if he’s going to have to run for it, and it would suck to lose either of those.

While Axel pokes around in the kitchen, making banging noises, Roxas starts pawing through the video collection. Axel seems to like three kinds of movies: kung fu movies, spy thrillers with explosions, and pornos. Roxas wonders how he’s supposed to pick something out of all this.

“Find anything good?” Axel asks, coming back into the living room with a mug.

Roxas grabs one at random. “How about this?”

Axel grins, handing off the mug of cocoa. “Sure, we can put that on. That’s the one I’m in.”

Roxas looks down, alarmed, worried that he’s just picked out porn with Axel in it, or something, but he doesn’t think this one is porn. “What is it?” he asks, as he hands it over.

“Highlights from a big party topside a few months ago,” Axel says, pushing buttons on the TV. “You might like some of this stuff.”

“Yeah?” Roxas curls up on one end of the couch with his cocoa, wrapping his hands around it and not drinking from it just yet. In an emergency, he could throw it, he thinks — but it’s starting to kind of feel like there won’t be any emergencies, like maybe Axel really means it when he says he’s not going to start things. “What kind of party?”

Axel grins. “The kind you can’t get into until you’re older,” he says. He brandishes the remote, fast-forwards the first few minutes of the video. “Here, you might like these guys.”

It looks like concert footage, some kind of punk band or something. Roxas sips his cocoa, and watches. The band is pretty good — the main guy kind of flails a lot, but he’s not a bad musician, and they all look cool. “They’re not bad,” he says after a couple songs. “Friends of yours?”

“Kind of,” Axel says with a little shrug and the kind of grin that means Roxas is supposed to ask what that means, so Axel will have an excuse to say something pervy. Roxas doesn’t. “Never really hung out with any of them much outside clubs, but they’re pretty cool. Demyx especially is real…friendly.”

Roxas rolls his eyes. “Now I’m supposed to ask which one he is so you can brag, huh?”

Axel laughs. “You’re good at this. He’s the front man. Real sweet kid.”

“Huh.” Roxas shakes his head. “I didn’t ask, you know.” Still, it’s sort of cool, the idea of getting to hang out with somebody in a band. Hang out with, right. Like that’s what Axel meant.

There’s a change in camera angles that gets more close up, Demyx kind of smiling, all giddy, as the crowd cheers. He has glitter on his face, blue in the club’s lights. Then a voice-over comes on, announcing that that was Nobody’s Fool, and next in the lineup –

Axel fast-forwards the video again. “This next bit doesn’t really matter,” he says, skipping through a scene where some girl is doing a really…revealing…dance on stage. “You’ve seen one burlesque act, you’ve seen them all, right?”

“I haven’t seen any,” Roxas points out. Axel looks ready to pause the show, though, and that might be just a little too weird. “Keep going, though. What did you want to show me?”

“My act,” Axel says, making the video play again when it gets to the next black screen. “Check it out.”

The light comes up, sort of — there are torches on either side of the stage, and in between them a kind of dim yellow light that Axel steps into. He’s shirtless, and the pants he’s wearing ride low so he shows off this kind of black spiky wheel tattoo around his belly button. He’s carrying a pair of wheels that look a lot like the tattoo except bigger, and when he gets to the front of the stage he reaches out to the sides with both of them, and they catch fire.

Roxas feels his breath catch in his throat despite himself. On screen, Axel spins the fire wheels, tosses them, plays with them, fire trailing after him as he moves. The light gleams against his skin, shines, and he looks totally entranced in what he’s doing. His eyes glitter with the flame.

“It’s better in person,” Axel murmurs from the other end of the couch, as the TV version of him breathes a huge glowing burst of flame. “You can feel the heat from three rows back in the audience.”

“Wow,” Roxas says. “That’s,” really cool, is what it is. “Not bad.”

Axel snorts, like he can hear what Roxas didn’t say. “Thanks.”

“You ever set yourself on fire?” Roxas asks.

“Keep watching,” Axel says, and then there’s some tiny girl in an even tinier costume on stage with Axel, wiping him down with something, it looks like — and then he spins his fire-wheels, and his whole body blazes up with blue fire for a second before all of it goes out.

“Wow,” Roxas says again, with a lot more feeling. “…Didn’t that hurt?”

Axel looks way too pleased with himself. “Mostly,” he says, “it just looks fucking cool.”

Too late, Roxas tries to wipe the look off his face. Last thing he wants is for Axel the pervert to think he’s impressed, or something. Even if he kind of is.

The party video bores Axel within a few more minutes, probably because he’s not in it anymore, and he turns it off in the middle of some kind of weird fashion show where all the clothes seem to be made of straps and buckles. He puts on a movie instead, some action thing about a man from Wutai who lost all his family to the crime syndicates, or something, and goes on a campaign to get revenge. The plot’s dumb and kind of hard to believe, but the fight scenes are good, and Axel’s couch is comfortable, and the cocoa tastes good once it’s cool enough to drink.

And Axel himself still hasn’t tried anything, sitting at the other end of the couch and not trying to get closer, not making any creepy offers. At the end of this movie, Roxas figures, he should probably take off, and he’ll see if Axel is still nice then. But it can wait for the movie to be over, at least, because it’s comfy here, and for once Roxas isn’t hungry, and he’s so warm, and maybe he’ll just close his eyes for a minute, while the hero talks to somebody. Just for a minute. That’s all.

* * *

Axel wakes up just a little bit after dawn with a hard-on, and for a minute he thinks he can hear people having sex in his living room. Then he wakes up a little bit more, and he remembers that he left the little street kid asleep out there, curled up on the couch, when he went to bed last night. The kid looked so exhausted, so badly in need of rest, that Axel just draped a blanket over him and left him out there, figuring that the only really valuable thing in the living room was the TV, which probably weighed more than Roxas, so the kid wasn’t likely to run off with it.

Now it sounds like Roxas has gotten into his porn. Axel rolls out of bed, tugging on a pair of soft black pants so he won’t totally spook the kid when he goes out there. He’d kind of expected Roxas would just take off when he woke up — if the kid’s still willing to hang around, Axel doesn’t want to screw that up in a hurry.

Not that he could explain why. Axel’s used to being a loner, more or less — guys like Demyx are fun every once in a while at clubs, and stuff, but it’s not like he gives a fuck about them. But there’s something about the look on Roxas’s face, the wary hope in shock-bright blue eyes, that Axel hasn’t been able to forget since the first time he ran into Roxas down in Sector Six. How a boy that pretty has managed to get by on the street without selling his ass, Axel has no idea — unless everyone is as weak to that hungry stare as he is.

Standing here obsessing over the kid is really fucking lame. Axel runs a hand through his hair and opens the bedroom door.

Roxas is curled up on the couch under the blanket that Axel left him, watching Gold Saucer Bi Night and eating the leftover chow mein out of the carton. He looks up sharply when he hears the door open, his eyes wide and startled.

“You drink coffee?” Axel asks.

“Probably,” Roxas says, through a mouthful of noodles. He swallows, his eyes flicking down to Axel’s bare chest for a second and then back up to his face. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d be a morning person.”

“Yeah, well.” Axel shuffles into the little kitchen and runs water in the coffeepot. “I wouldn’t want to miss the double anal scene, or anything.”

Roxas hunches down further, so Axel can barely see a solitary tuft of blond hair over the back of the couch. “Sorry.”

“Nah, it’s cool.” Once the coffee’s brewing, Axel comes over and sits down on the arm of the couch. Roxas gives him a wary look from the other end, but doesn’t actually bolt once it’s obvious that Axel isn’t about to pounce on him or anything. “I don’t mind sharing my porn with you.”

“Pervert,” Roxas mutters, giving him a little sidelong glare. As if on cue, the next scene of the porno starts to really get going, the girl moaning when one of the guys starts giving it to her. Axel grins, and Roxas blushes. “Why do you like this stuff, anyway?”

Axel glances over at the TV in time to catch the reaction shot when the guy in the middle first gets the other guy’s cock up his ass. “Why’d you put it on, if you don’t like it?”

Roxas mumbles something that might be, “Curious,” and blushes a little more. He looks away from Axel, but that means looking at the porn, and after only a few seconds of that he looks back at Axel again. “What do you want?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Axel lies. He doesn’t go for kids this young, doesn’t go for people who make him work for it, doesn’t go for the idea of having his stomach do a slow lazy roll when he thinks about slipping his tongue between Roxas’s lips. There’s no way he’s going to push this one.

“Oh, come on,” Roxas says. “You think you’ve been hiding it? You’re about as subtle as a brick to the head. Why haven’t you tried to get in my pants yet?”

Don’t flatter yourself, Axel wants to say. “You’ve been acting like you didn’t want me to,” he answers instead.

Roxas stares at him disbelievingly. “And that’s enough to stop you?”

“Don’t sound so upset about it.” You’ll make me change my mind. “If you decide you want your cock sucked, let me know, but I’m not going to go chasing after you.”

“You….” Roxas looks lost for words; Axel’s hard-on, which hadn’t ever gone away completely, suddenly feels a lot more pressing. “You would do that?”

Axel shrugs. “Sure.” It’s not usually his favorite thing, but Roxas’s pupils dilate and he takes a startled little half-breath, and Axel decides this would be a good time to make an exception. “You want me to?”

Roxas squirms on the couch, and Axel can practically watch his common sense lose the fight with his…everything else. “That’s all you want?” he asks eventually.

Axel pictures Roxas chained to his bed, limbs spread and trembling, cheeks flushed, mouth open on a moan. “It’s all I’m asking for.”

“I could change my mind any time,” Roxas says, shrugging the blanket off and setting his food down on the floor, but it sounds like a question.

“Any time,” Axel agrees, sliding off the arm of the couch and crawling toward Roxas. They’ll see about that.

“Pervert,” Roxas says, and leans forward — slowly, like something out of a fucking romance — to kiss him.

Axel is immediately, completely sure that Roxas has never kissed anyone before. He’s awkward and slow, like he doesn’t really know what he’s doing and like he’s fascinated by how a kiss works, too. His lips part, soft and smooth, and he makes a tiny, needy sound at the touch of Axel’s tongue. He learns fast, though, pressing into the kiss, his tongue meeting Axel’s hungrily — like he wants to take control, like he wants to be the one pushing, so Axel lets him.

Roxas reaches up and rests one hand against Axel’s bare shoulder, leaning into him, deepening the kiss further. Axel purrs into his mouth, sliding an arm around Roxas’s waist to pull him closer. The kid’s all skin and bones, more delicate under his baggy clothes than he looks, but it’s hot, having him practically in Axel’s lap — and rocking his hips for friction as he gets hard. Axel reaches down and palms the front of the kid’s pants, feeling for his cock, and Roxas makes a fucking gorgeous little moan.

And then he turns his head, breaking the kiss abruptly. “Stop,” he says, sort of shaky but certain.

Axel pulls back, trying to catch his breath, his cock aching hard. “What’s wrong?”

Roxas gives him the little feral kitten stare. “You going to let me leave now?”

“Shit.” He doesn’t have to. He could pin Roxas pretty easily, hold the kid down and drag him out of his clothes and fuck him, and it would be hot as hell. Roxas would probably keep fighting the whole time. “If you want to go, yeah. I won’t stop you.”

“Okay.” Roxas nods once. “Thank you.” He reaches up and wraps a hand around the back of Axel’s neck, following through with another kiss, rough and clumsy, crushing Axel’s lips against his teeth. “You still want to — to s-suck my cock?”

Axel shudders. “Yes,” he breathes, “yes, yes,” pawing at the buttons on Roxas’s pants, tugging them open and sliding to the floor between Roxas’s thighs. Roxas is gasping for breath, his pupils huge, his cock hard in Axel’s hand. Axel takes a second to just stare, to make sure he’s got this moment memorized, and then he leans down to take Roxas’s cock in his mouth.

Roxas makes a helpless little mewling noise at the first touch of Axel’s tongue, and Axel shoves one hand down his pants to get hold of his cock — there’s no fucking way he can stand to wait until Roxas is done, no matter how fast the kid gets off. Not with the way Roxas sounds, broken and hungry and lost, and the way his hips move in little needy jerks, and the way Axel finds himself a lot more turned on than he wants to be by the fact that Roxas’s cock fits so easily in his mouth.

He reaches up, groping for one of Roxas’s hands, and guides it to the base of his skull, folding Roxas’s fingers closed in his hair. “You want,” Roxas says, and trails off, so Axel moans around his cock, looking up at him, daring him to go ahead and do it.

The kid learns fast. His grip tightens, and he pushes Axel down, shivering when Axel doesn’t resist and just lets Roxas’s cock slide down his throat. It gets really good after that, the easy, spit-slick glide of flesh against Axel’s tongue, the taste of salt, the giddy tightness at the base of his cock as he gets closer — and Roxas is almost there, too, tense and trembling, his thighs flexing with each little thrust, and then he’s making a high thin keening sound in his throat, his grip faltering, as he comes down Axel’s throat.

Axel coughs, sputters, swallows awkwardly, pulling up and panting for air as he jerks himself off, fast and hard, still bent over Roxas’s lap. “Oh,” Roxas breathes, “oh god, you’re,” and his fingertips brush the line of Axel’s collarbone carefully and for some reason just that, just being touched, just having Roxas pay attention to him now, is enough to finish him off and he’s fucking doomed, doesn’t have a goddamn chance, because he’s coming so hard he’s seeing stars just from having the kid’s cock in his mouth.

“Oh,” Roxas says afterward, “wow,” and Axel looks up to find him staring, like he’s just as stunned as Axel is, like he has no idea what to say.

Probably a hell of a first time, Axel figures. “Yeah,” he says. “Pretty much.” He sits back on his heels, wondering what the hell he’s supposed to do now.

Roxas sort of shifts, too, shrinks back into the couch. “Is this the part where you toss me out? Now that you’ve gotten what you were after.”

Axel blinks a few times, and he thinks he might finally understand what Demyx means when he says something about being fucked stupid, only Axel hasn’t even been fucked, yet, and — and he’s just sitting there staring up at Roxas like the kid’s from outer space, not answering the damn question. “No,” he says, swallowing hard, his voice still hoarse from the abuse his throat’s just taken. “I’m not — you can stay, if you want.”

“Maybe,” Roxas says guardedly. He looks like he’s still waiting for something to go wrong, trying to figure out how Axel is taking advantage of him. “What if I don’t want to?”

Axel feels dizzy for a minute. There’s no way I’m letting you walk out of here, he wants to say. “Then, ah, I guess maybe I’d see you around…?”

Roxas nods, and fumbles for his pants, his hands shaking a little as he buttons back up. “I can,” he says, “I guess, I mean, maybe I could at least stay for lunch.”

“Won’t be lunch time for a while,” Axel points out, tugging his pajamas back up. “You, um, want to watch a movie or something before then?”

“Yeah,” Roxas says slowly. “I guess that’d be okay.”

“Cool.” Axel smiles. He can totally convince Roxas to stay, in that much time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Crossover, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts, Sex Drugs and Rock n Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.