Echoes of Sorrow: The Fatal Rose

Chapter 2

"Order up!"

Roxas looked gratefully at the bar, away from the two middle-aged women dressed in an overly provocative manner unsuited for the cold midwinter weather. They had kept him at their table for the last five minutes under the pretense of needing minor adjustments to their cappuccinos, without which the drinks would be undrinkable.

Larxene looked back at him, one finely-plucked eyebrow raised on her youthful face (the product of many surgeries), tapping a candy-pink fingernail on the greasy countertop. There was a plate of fried seafood beside the elbow she leaned on the counter, lying in turn beside a well-thumbed manga volume, its cover showing two improbably beautiful scantily-clad men in an intimate embrace. The book was Larxene's: the only thing she ever read was the stylized cartoonish erotica from her home world. The food was meant for the grizzled fisherman Riku sitting in a corner table: the bar's only customer who looked likely to eat anything that wasn't vegan.

"Excuse me, ladies," Roxas said politely to the fluttering women, two of three locals among an unlikely crowd of nine who currently populated the cafe in this off-season and odd hour, too late for lunch but too early for liquor. "But I have to-" He forced a smile and ignored their protests as he practically ran to the bar.

"Popular with the ladies as ever, Pretty Boy," Larxene smirked, pushing the plate toward him with a delicate finger. Up close, it was clear that she was older than she was trying to look, though her manner and energy were closer to fifteen than her probable forty. "Hmm, and not just the ladies," she added, eyeing a table that two male nobodies had been occupying for the past couple of hours, ordering coffee after coffee. "Those two are here almost every day."

"Are they?" Roxas asked, well aware that this was true but not particularly inclined to talk about it.

"Really, Pretty Boy? I'm surprised you haven't felt them burning holes in your backside every time you turn around."

"My name is Roxas, Larxene," Roxas said, blushing furiously. "Not Pretty Boy."

Larxene smiled, flicking her long, blond ponytail over her shoulder. "Well, if the shoe fits-"

"Larxene," Roxas growled as the customers looked on with interest, "I am not one of those boys from your gross books! I don't even look anything like them!"

"Hmm, debatable."

"Besides, aren't stories about pretty boys for little girls?" Roxas couldn't help the jab-he took enough of them from her.

Larxene smirked. "Little girls, big girls, not girls at all-what does it matter? All of us like a pretty boy. Which is why I keep you here."

Roxas picked up the plate. "Riku's fish is getting cold," he said, turning away from her.

She chuckled, eyes sparking with humor. Whatever she might say, Roxas was certain that the main reason she kept him on was to tease and bicker with him. Well, that and her cut of his admittedly substantial tips. He began to maneuver his way through the tight spaces between the packed-in café tables, toward the man waiting in the corner. After what Larxene had said, he couldn't help feeling all of the eyes in the place following him, like so many surveillance cameras. He sighed. She was right, he was used to it, but it didn't make him any less self-conscious.

Roxas wasn't much given to thinking about his looks, but he still knew that they drew attention. He hadn't met his parents-his mother died during his birth, his father not long after, to the care of his aunt Kairi and her great-grandfather who were family friends, who had raised him. Roxas knew from pictures, though, that he looked like his father, and Sora was a striking man. Or had been, before embarking on the ill-fated journey that had killed him and lost the family all of their money. In the few pictures of him that Kairi had kept, Roxas saw the same fair complexion, bright blue eyes with the only difference being his father brown spiky hair while he has blond spiky pointing hair.