Disclaimer: Kingdom Hearts belongs to the almightly Squenix -- embrace it as your way of life.

This is a giftfic for sad kuroneko who reviewed my story Call Me and was the 100th reviewer. She gave me a little challenge too: I had to use one or more of the following: panglossian, chatoyant, and metanoia... so and used all three. ;)

Shoot

The thing I remember most is that the first time I saw him, I fell in love with his hair. The way it shone like chatoyant in the winter sunlight stirred up all sorts of artistic urges inside me. I traced my fingers over the camera hung around my neck, contemplating whether or not I should snap a shot of him, whether or not I should immortalize the way he gazed out the window with such a blank, detached expression that it simultaneously scared and uplifted me.

And because I couldn't decide whether or not to take a picture, I just did it.

He laughs at my logic now, but I swear it makes sense to me! I know he doesn't mind, because if I hadn't taken the picture, maybe we wouldn't have ended up where we are now.

(Besides, if I had regretted doing it later, then I would have deleted it.)

I was so preoccupied with watching him that I realized that I missed my stop twice over. It was a Saturday, so there was no way I would be getting in trouble with anyone for being late – I was simply wasting my own time, after all. I stayed on the bus so long that I looped around the route twice, the second time watching him get off at the stop before mine. I snapped a shot through the window of him exiting the bus and walking into a little coffee shop by the street. He wore that dazed expression even after he got off. I tried not to think too much about it, but the way his bright eyes were so vague, so hollow, made me want to get off the same stop as him and keep following to make sure he was okay.

When the bus reached the Bridge, I exited and took my equipment with me. It was probably crazy-stupid of me to forget, but I ended up trekking across the thing three fourths of the way before stopping to catch the afternoon winter sunlight reflecting across the water. Something told me to stop there, I don't know what, but I'm grateful today that it did.

I don't think I really noticed him coming until I turned around to search for a new location on the expansive metal suspension bridge.

I was looking through the lens of the camera when he crossed into my line of sight, a cup of near-empty iced coffee in his right hand and a wrapper of a sea salt ice cream bar sticking out of his back pocket, walking so fast that just as I was snapping the picture, he was caught at the edge of the frame. There was something off about him, I noted, because people don't normally step into the frames of another person's photo unless they're extremely distracted or an asshole. This blond kid didn't look like one.

"I-I'm sorry," he stammered the moment he realized I was staring at him.

I didn’t' answer immediately, which forced him to stand awkwardly while I went through the photos in my camera. "It's not problem," I smiled back when I found the photo he'd interrupted. I handed the device to him so he could take a look. "It turned out pretty good anyway. It looked like you were just lost in thought and leaving because you were so far near the edge of the picture."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," I echoed. "Accidental perfection is the best kind."

The corner of his lips upturned slightly at my words, but quickly fell back down into the melancholy neutral they were before. I expected the blond to just walk off, but surprisingly, he took a seat on a nearby park bench.

Not staring was far more difficult than it should have been. I tried to focus on the light and the water thousands of feet below me, but instead I found my focus inexplicably drawn toward the teen again – like my camera had fallen in love with the way he looked.

After a while, I knew I'd stood there for too long, glancing at him while he sat on the bench alone, gazing at the water with vibrantly blank eyes. An hour before, he'd been licking his chapped lips on the bus, but he'd stopped now. Either he was too lazy or he forgot how badly the dried, sensitive skin could hurt if cracked the wrong way.

I raised my camera again and took a purposeful shot of his face being partly lit up by the setting sun. The purple-pink ribbons of color smoothed across his his features and his pale hair so fluidly that I could have sworn that he was sunlight personified.

"Is it a good picture this time?" he asked from where he sat.

I felt my body flush from embarrassment as I faltered. Clearing my throat, I answered, "Yeah, it's… it's really great."

The teenager didn't respond. Being caught was embarrassing enough. I stopped my photo shoot and hauled my equipment over by the bench so I could join him in his contemplation of the water beneath us.

"I'm Axel," I introduced myself.

"Hi, Axel," he responded politely.

I sat for a short minute waiting for him to continue, but he remained silent. I followed his gaze, which led my eyes to a cloud that was hovering placidly along the edge of the sky. The curve of its fluff was dyed a soft, alluring mix of purple and orange. By habit, I raised my camera ad adjusted the lens to capture the image twice; one shot accented the shadows of the clouds, the other blurred it – I could never tell exactly what I wanted with a photo later, so different techniques covered all my bases.

"What's your name?"

He smiled sadly and looked down at his hands. "It's not important."

Normally, I would've paused at his words, stopped and contemplated them before I spoke again, but this time I was unable to rest in my words. The small prick of loneliness I heard in his tone drove me to speak.

"Why isn't it important?"

"Because…" He paused and thought for a moment, the sadness in his blue eyes flickering through. "Because no one says it is."

Awkwardness ensued.

I sat, unsure of how to react. He smiled apologetically, standing up and walking forward to lean against the railing. I followed a few minutes later, placing my bag carefully at my feet as I did so, and came up next to him.

"I say your name's important, so what is it?"

"It's not important," he repeated. "So… why are you photographing me?"

I looked back down at the camera in my hands and smiled. "You're a very great photo subject," I admitted. "You're… inspiring, I guess."

An amused grin overcame his features and the blond's lips upturned in a scorning amusement. He sighed and turned toward the sky, his golden-blond spikes of hair bouncing gently in the wind.

" 'Inspiring' am I? What do you consider to be inspiring?" he questioned.

"Anything that makes me feel," I answered, like we were scripted to speak. "I like experiencing, ya know?"

His face fell and he looked away. "No, I don't know."

"Then you should go out and travel. Go see the world!" I suggested.

"What would be the point of that?" he asked, unamused. "We all die anyway, so the meanings of our interactions will have been meaningless."

"There is no such thing as a meaningless life! Do you understand me?"

The blond snorted lightly and turned his head away somewhere to a spot on the lower left corner of his vision. We stayed in place for a pregnant moment, listening to each other's breath as we gazed out toward a mutual beauty. An hour later, we were still silent.

He didn't break his eyelock with the ocean and whispered his name out in such a hushed tone that I was afraid the light, summer evening breeze would carry it away before it had a chance to reach my ears.

"I'm Roxas, by the way."

"Roxas…" I repeated, intrigued. 'That's a beautiful name…'

I looked from my clasped hands back up to him only to find that he was now leaning over the edge of the railing, more than he should for a person who was merely looking over the edge. As I watched in horror at his slowly descending upper body, my panglossian tendencies took hold and, unable to stop myself, I grabbed his wrist and pulled him back.

"What the hell are you doing?" I breathed, panicked and worried and angered and confused all at once.

"I'm not important," he murmured, staring into my bright green eyes with his empty cerulean ones as if somehow looking into those eyes were supposed to stir up a great epiphany in me and let him jump.

But I'd heard this one before; mother said that just before she passed.

"You fucking idiot!" I panicked, grabbing him by the shoulders. "You can't just… you can't just walk off the edge of a bridge. No one as gorgeous as you should be doing something as stupid as this! No one as… as… oh my God… No one who looks the way you do should be doing this. You're so young, can't you see? You've got an entire world laid out for you, an entire world to explore and help create and you're walking off a fucking bridge?!"

I could hear the desperate, hysterical laughter bubbling from the back of my throat off the edge of my lips. Roxas's eyes widened in fear at the sudden outburst.

"Jesus Christ, it's one thing to be depressed, but it's another to be suicidal! You look, what, seventeen? Twenty, max! Even so, your hormones are gonna fuck with you, and your parents will drive you crazy 'til you're twenty-six, and you'll think no one knows shit.

"Wake, up from your pity party, alright? You think interaction between two people doesn't do shit? Do you realize what people have done to each other in the past? Do you fucking realize what it's like for the people left over to wonder if your remains got swept out in the ocean when they can't find your body?"

"People won't miss me," he whispered. "I don't have parents anymore, my brother's got his boyfriend… no one would miss me."

I fumed, not letting go of his sides as I dragged him back to the bench on the pavement.

"I would miss you," I whispered fiercely.

To this, he scoffed lightly in disbelief. "You don't even know me."

"My camera knows you," I laughed humorlessly. "In fact, I think my camera loves you. If I still have the photos, I would see you and remember you and I would miss you, alright? There are people you see everyday that would miss you. You can't just meet someone and not have it affect both parties!"

He turned away, ashamed. I watched his face, fervently as his expressions shifted from annoyance to anger to sadness.

"Roxas?" I whispered. "Rox-"

"Give me a reason to stay then,” he challenged. "If you can't find a good one, I'll jump. I'm fast, I can break this grip," he stated. "Give me one little simple reason for why I should stay – and don't make it that emotional 'the world has more to offer' shit because I've already got enough of that from the other idiots in my life."

I didn't measure the words, I didn't try to think out what it meant, but I said it regardless:

"Model for me."

Roxas's eyes widened slightly at the proposition. "Are you really that desperate?"

"Maybe I am!" I retorted. He was just… there was no way I was going to let him go.

Then, straight out of the blue of those lost, aqua eyes, he began laughing. It wasn't a quick snicker or a rambunctious guffaw, nor was it a girlish giggle or an amused chuckle.

It sparkled.

At that moment, Roxas's genuinely happy laugh was the most beautiful sound in the world.

"Come get coffee with me." I wasn't asking a question. It was more like begging under the guise of an order.

"Alright," he replied, still smiling, "Shoot me."

"What?!" I nearly screamed. Was he insane? I was trying to save his life here and he was just… Hell, I didn't even own a gun!

His grin grew wider as I stared at him in horror. Part of me now likes to think that it was endearing for me to stand like a gaping fish.

"I meant I'll model for you," he clarified, highly amused. "Now let's go get coffee."

We left the bridge together at a leisurely pace, crossing back across three-fourths of the way to get to the end where we'd both started. Eventually, we made it to getting coffee, but somehow that transformed into a dinner date and setting up another time to meet and have a little photo shoot.

That photo shoot transformed into a second date in the park, complete with a walk around an ice cream stand and me learning that sea salt-flavored ice cream really wasn't as awful as it sounded. And when he kissed me, I decided the taste of vanilla mixed in with a little salt and a lot of Roxas was my most favorite flavor in the world.

We've been together a year now, so for our anniversary, I gave him a photo collection of every picture I'd ever taken of him. Tears welled up in his eyes after every page turn. When he reached the last page, it proudly displayed the first photo I took of him on the bus. At that moment, he finally cried, hugging me so hard I thought my ribs would break, as he pressed his lips feverishly over my face and neck.

"I love you, Axel," he gasped in a ragged, shaking, utterly beautiful voice. "I love you, I love you, I love you…"

And the truth is, that's probably all we needed for this kind of metanoia.

All we needed was to be loved and happy.

I hope you enjoyed that. I originaly wrote it in Roxas's PoV as a memoir, but then I realized it needed to come from Axel. And then somehow Axel became a photographer. It wasn't really planned...

This story was inspired by the documentary The Bridge, which is about suicides that take place every year at the Golden Gate Bridge in California.

Bisous, Minikimii