~Faty
A couple of years ago I started writing this thing... I dunno, I read after years and I'm like: "This is so cute!"
Have a look.
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.The Butterfly and the Fairy.
1. Red
Axel had woken up at six that morning, and that, for him, was surely a record worth to be published in his personal Guinness book. Unfortunately for him, everyone else was fast asleep, including Ariel, his beloved little sister, also known as his favorite cook. It was a good thing that his mother hadn’t kicked him out of the house yet; living alone meant making your own meals… With this miserable thought in mind, the redhead ventured out of his bedroom, trying to persuade himself to start training for his future.
He tiptoed out of his room attempting to not make any noise that could cause his roommate brother and mother to wake up and start some stupid inquiry, but that ended up being a complete failure since his slippers weren’t contributing to the being-as-quiet-as-possible condition. The boy – the young man, to be more precise – mentally huffed and puffed and went back inside the boundaries of his sanctuary (a.k.a. his bedroom) and promptly kicked his slippers off. Then he sprinted towards the door again.
Bad idea. The coldness of the floor pierced his feet like chilly needles, and for a moment Axel wondered why the hell the tiles weren’t made of ice per se. He put his slippers back on, to hell with the flop-flop sound, and made for the door. But before he could even get a hold of the doorknob, another interruption came rushing up to him. Swearing under his breath, he went to the bathroom instead. Good thing he got to own one out of the four bathrooms they had in their house.
Anyway, after he finished whatever he needed to do, he went outside again. He Pink-Panthered his way to Ariel’s room. He was first going to see if she was awake; if she was, he’d beg her to save him from dieing of hunger, and if she wasn’t, to hell with her.
When he entered the very small room, he saw her fast asleep on the upper bunk bed, the lower hosting the sprawled seven-years-old Rikku. Axel frowned, and just when he was about to turn around and flee, a hiccup escaped his throat.
Ariel twitched slightly, but didn’t wake up.
Axel twitched as well, but he was already awake.
Oh great, now he was hiccupping! He crept down the stairs with his sore feet and instantly found himself inside a spacious living room. Without any hesitation, he ran into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. He gulped as much as a bird could have, but that was enough to stop the hiccups. He internally thanked Kami and grinned maliciously at the fridge.
Sneak sneak, went the cat. Creak creak, went the door… but the fridge was empty.
As always.
He should have expected that… They never bought any instant crap anyway… Not after having moved from big city Radiant Garden to small town like Twilight, a month ago, after realizing that they would have to live on the streets if they did not start to save money a.s.a.p.
Axel sighed exasperatedly and walked towards the cupboards. When he reached them, he didn’t open them straight away. He dithered for some minutes, trying to think in a more realistic way.
Thought #1: What the heck, it’s not like there’s a readymade breakfast inside the motherf… thing!
Thought #2: So why in the world should I open it in the first place?
Thought #3: Because I’m dieing of hunger. There might be a little something… like coff-
Thought #4: HURRY UP ASSHOLE!
With a last resolute gulp, he yanked them open with the fierceness of the anorexic pyromaniac he knew to be.
But before he could even make out the complete profile of a coffee jar, the kitchen lights were turned on. Gasping like a burglar caught red-handed, Axel rapidly slammed the doors and gaped at the other intruder.
Seifer stared back at him with a competing jaded look on his face.
Axel frowned.
Seifer blinked.
Axel glared.
Seifer ignored him and went to the counter.
When had his brother woken up? Just a few minutes ago he had seen him perfectly unconscious, head hanging from one corner of the bed and a pool of drool collecting on the floor… eww. Axel decided to ignore him as well and jerked the cupboard open again, dived for the coffee jar, and slammed the damn thing shut, but not before a cockroach came dashing frantically towards the exit and landed right on his nose.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Axel gritted his teeth while enclosing the poor creature in a loose fist.
Axel was not normally moody in the mornings, but when he was, life made sure to instantly become too tough for him to live. For instance: when the apoplectic redhead banged a glass of water into the microwave, life decided to apply some resultant force and made half the water go splish splash. Axel’s eyebrow narrowed a little more at that, but let it slide. Too bad life had not finished yet; when Axel was retrieving the water, she made it go splish splash again and almost burnt the poor cockroach trapped between the guy’s fingers... Axel cursed her, but he left it at that. Then came the coffee making; with a sly snigger resounding from her invisible silhouette, life first evoked a shortage of sugar (this resulted to a big black spurt surging from the victim’s mouth), then she tipped some extra coffee in it (this resulted to a gigantic fountain erupting from the already mentioned source). In short, life sneered while watching him restart the strenuous process with an impish little rub here and there, but when Axel finished with a huge thankful grin on his face, he realized that his brother had been staring at him wide-eyed during the whole five minutes of arduous wartime… er, labor.
“What?” he struggled to sound indifferent; it was very difficult to do so when you really are worried about your brother when he looks at you with a taunt mask of terror, something quite uncommon on a tough and manly face like his.
Seifer put his glass down and leaned on the counter towards Axel like a predator snake slithering up to a rather dangerous enemy.
“Did you just call me ‘sweetheart’?!” He hissed incredulously, his open mouth dallying over the countertop.
Axel glared poisonous daggers, kunais, and shurikens at him for the second time that morning, but when he semi-opened his left fist to fling ‘sweetheart’ into Seifer’s open mouth, he hesitated.
The poor creature was a terrified little piglet shrouded by the darkness of his palm, but while watching it more attentively, he realized that it was of a burgundy color.
Hmm… a red cockroach? Might as well…
… The thought was left incomplete, for Axel quickly fled from the kitchen with his newfound friend crawling over the tips of his fingers.
But not before leaving a last wave and a kiss in midair for his stupefied brother to decode.
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Meanwhile, in a place not so far away, Roxas scratched his hand, his not-so-sharp nails grazing across a particular red spot. His dark blue eyes narrowed at the irritating bubble that had just formed at the back of his hands, just below his pinkie. Stupid mosquito… There it was, flying straight towards his nose! But before Roxas could properly aim, the insect rapidly changed direction, making the boy slap himself right on the bridge of his nose, his glasses burying painfully into the corner of his eyes.
“Bloodymotherfuckshitholeasspudding…” He hissed furiously and got up from his bed, off to teach that insolent flying shit a lesson.
He sniggered maliciously while his fingers rotated a certain button. Hah, let’s see how it deals with the fan revolving at the highest speed… As expected, when he returned to sit on his bed and got back into whatever he was doing before the mosquito declared war, he did not feel a single bite at his precious skin. He smirked at the thought of the puny insect trapped in a vortex right over his head… And justice for all!
… No, Roxas didn’t listen to Metallica. Nor was he mentally challenged. The truth was… that he became a different person whenever he was alone. Especially at six in the morning. Especially when he’s frustrated with annoying things like mosquitoes and homework… but let’s not get into that. Let us all return to a saner world.
Roxas glared at his computer screen intently before closing the Microsoft Word document he had been working on; he’ll finish his assignment later… For now he needed to relax a little from all the working he had been doing since 3 a.m. This happened to him many times, though irregularly; he would wake up just before dawn from the same old nightmare and be unable to close his eyes for the following hours. And those were the times when he would suddenly start to act weird… Like talking to himself, cursing nonsensical swears at mosquitoes and then shouting (in his mind) the names of albums of metal artists he didn’t even enjoy listening to.
Roxas sighed tiredly and decided to open the windows. As much as he loved darkness and his beautiful blue and violet curtains, he also liked to avoid headaches. His wish was more than granted: for the first time in days, he felt sunlight penetrate into his room in a way it seldom did before. On the white walls of the neighbor’s house he could see light orange rays, yellow even, from the newly rising sun… It was a pity that he could not see the dawn from his room. But hey, he had this huge balcony with glass doors just outside his bedroom facing the west, i.e. the lime green hills behind which the sun would start to hide every day during twilight. It was a really nice scenery, one for which Twilight Town
Somehow this morning was special, Roxas realized when his nose detected a faint scent of something he liked very much. That scent… it was his favorite scent, but he was surprised to smell it so early in a summer morning. His eyes squinted in search of the source of the scent, in order to confirm it. In a few seconds he did – flashing ethereally against the first sunlight, he noticed minute and thin droplets of rain falling from a cloudy sky. But in a matter of what seemed like seconds, the rain was gone.
“Wow,” Roxas whispered out loud this time, unable to contain his surprise.
He surprised himself with his surprise. He wasn’t a person who could be astounded so easily. But somehow, the mere scenery of the neighbor’s wall hit a little something in his brain. How was that possible? Things like this happened only when you are high or drunk…
Then something just occurred to Roxas: it’s freakin’ six in the freakin’ morning! He was not in his right mind at this time of the day, never… and he knew it. He was too stunned by his unusual character quirk to talk about it to his friends and family, but he was man enough to admit it to himself. He was crazy. Temporarily, yes, but crazy nonetheless.
There was a reason he was like this, he believed. Yes… it must be because of the bigass hit in the head that he had experienced two years ago. The one that made him forget everything, what was that condition called? Amnesia. Retrogade amnesia, maybe. Sure, he forgot his name and the face of his own mother for a while, but hey, he still remembered how to read, fry eggs, and use the shower. (Never mind the fact that he still had doubts about certain things such as the utility of rubber ducks.) It had taken him some time, but after some months of drama, anger, and training from both his and his acquaintances’ parts, he was finally able to lead his pre-hit-in-the-head life again. But then again, there were still some problems (forget the rubber duck for Pete’s sake) left unsolved… particularly those concerning his behaviour. At first, his friends said that he had changed a little, but just a little – he was able to get rid of weird habits (such as shaking random people’s hands out of the blue) and maintained some other new habits which were not so bad (such as uttering an average of five words per hour). At last he got used to his old but new friends and they got used to this old but new Roxas. His friendship life was okay, his friends would comment on his grown-out-of-amnesia high maturity once in a blue moon, but those comments were negligible. They liked Roxas, even if he was a little different from the old Roxas. They understood that people changed, especially in adolescent years and when they hit their head against a really hard thing such as good old concrete.
But there was one person who refused to welcome the newborn Roxas with open arms or with a small but genuine smile at least – his mother. Okay, maybe she was upset about her own son treating her like a stranger for some days, but that was temporary. In fact, later on, Roxas learned how to spell out her name (C-A-S-S-E-E-D-E-E) and even remembered her extraordinary talent at cooking. Come on, every mother likes their son to arrogantly announce that his mother’s cooking is the best. But in Mrs. Highwind’s case, whenever she saw Roxas drooling over her perfectly cooked meals, her eyes would well up with tears.
“You’re not supposed like French fries! You’re supposed to hate potatoes! You’re supposed to like pasta!” she would whine and then leave the dining room, a confused Roxas staring after her while licking his salty lips.
Notice the italicized word present in all the three sentences Mrs. Highwind had mentioned; in fact, she mentioned this word frequently when talking to or about her ‘disturbed’ son. Supposed to? What the heck?! Roxas liked whatever he liked, there was no supposing. Sure, pasta was good too… as long as it had potatoes in it.
But apparently it wasn’t only potatoes that disturbed his mother. There was also the sudden increase in his maturity level… Well, that’s how his teachers called it anyways, although Roxas personally thought that it didn’t have much to do with maturity. Just because now he’s quieter than before, pays more attention to classes, gets better grades and is quite formal with anybody didn’t mean that he had ‘matured’. There are people who act like retards who are more mature than they let everyone else know. Roxas vaguely remembered an event, among a good quantity of others, that had occurred a few years before he hit his head; it was his thirteenth birthday and he had stolen his friend Olette’s piece of the cake and had savagely devoured it in public. Everyone had laughed at his prank, even Olette and her mother… But after the guests had gone home Mrs. Highwind had slapped her son with the fury of a fairytale evil stepmother. Apparently she had not liked her son’s behavior, something that had embarrassed her to life. She seemed to forget that it had been Roxas’s birthday, and that all she had given to him genuinely as a present was an angry slap.
She was missing her water only now that the fountain’s gone, was all Roxas came up with as an explanation. But somehow, even that did not make any sense because his mother still pushed him into doing things such as delivering pies to the neighbors, setting him up with ‘nice’ girls from well respected families, buying dorky clothes for him, insisting on making him ‘pull up’ his pants, giving him sweaters for Christmas, etc. God, couldn’t she just make up her mind?! Old Roxas or new Roxas? What was her problem?!
It was a good thing that she was not about to make him visit a psychiatrist. His teachers disagreed with this choice (they likey new Roxey), and his mother didn’t want to ruin her reputation by letting everyone know that he son was retarded, abnormal, whatever… Crazy suited Roxas just fine. But only Roxas called himself crazy. That’s because in front of everyone he was a nice young boy, but then… at times like this (the clock just signalled seven in the morning), when he was all alone, after killing a mosquito and cursing his homework and witnessing a 5-second rainfall with the neighbor’s house as background… he felt different.
Simply different.
… Well, let’s just forget about this for now and concentrate on… breakfast maybe? Roxas’s tummy grumbled just in time.
When he got downstairs to the kitchen, he saw that his mother was already up and the smell of toast was filling the air.
“Good morning, sweetie,” Mrs. Highwind smiled in a way that reminded Roxas of a certain girl in Roxas’s class who ate sugar all day long.
She poured some apple juice and handed the glass to Roxas. Oh God, not again… Roxas stared desperately at the juice; should I drink you or should I not? Am I supposed to drink you? … Nah, drinks can’t talk, unfortunately. So Roxas sought advice from the only other available advisors – his instincts. What could possibly make both him and his mother happy?
Carefully, Roxas handed the glass of juice back to his mother.
“Sorry, mum,” he frowned, avoiding looking at his mother’s face, “I don’t drink juice in the morning,” I don’t think anyone does ‘cause, I mean, eww… “And besides, I don’t like apple.”
Nobody said anything for a while, not even when little Ven came rushing into the kitchen and shouted for waffles. Roxas kept nibbling at his lower lip, waiting for his mother to make the first move (wait, that sounds odd…). At last, he felt her walk away. He looked up; he was facing her back while she set the glass on the table, just in front of Ven.
The 7-years-old boy, so similar to Roxas that they could have been exchanged for brothers, pouted. “I don’t drink in the morning, Auntie. And besides,” he said with the same tone Roxas had used earlier when uttering the same thing, “I thought we all hated apple.”
Roxas’s eyes widened in realization. But of course! Now he remembered! The whole Highwind family hated apples! No wonder he never saw the name of the fruit in the grocery list! And there never was a sign of the fruit in the whole house… Roxas bit his lips. What was his mother trying to do? Testing him again? But this was crossing the line. Potatoes were different – no one had problems with taters except the ‘old’ Roxas. But apples – everyone in this house, no, this family hated them and his mother just wasted 50 cents on buying a whole bottle of apple juice! On purpose!
Gritting his teeth, the dirty-blond marched to the fridge and grabbed the milk. He angrily poured some on a bowl and after his cereals were ready, he went back to his room without a word. No way in hell he was going to have breakfast in the same room as her, with the disgusting smell of apples in the air (which wasn’t very strong, but whatever) and the unbearable view of a glass of juice which is to go to waste along with the rest in the bottle. Grr…
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That's it!
P.S. Tell me again, was it love at first sight, when I walked by and you caught my eye? Didn't you know love could shine this bright?! I'm sorry I ever tried, deer in the headlights!
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