A/N: I claimed Marluxia/Roxas over at the livejournal claim community 10hiddenrealms. The point is to write 10 AU drabbles about your pairing.

# 1 – ne'er shall the couple meet

Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, all of the events expressed in my work are purely my own ideas

He had a dream about him that night.

Quivering fingers and sweaty chests, tangled hair and moans loud enough to wake up the entire apartment building. If you could even call it that – the rundown place was cramped and dirty, located in one of the poorest parts of town. One of the parts of town where no one was ever clean, sober, or a virgin.

Oh, but they wouldn't have sex in his bed, Roxas told himself. They would curl up in the older man's silk sheets and soft quilts made out of rare fur in the middle of some foreign country – India perhaps, or Brazil! God knows how many places that man had been.

Roxas looked back up at his ceiling from his place on the dirty mattress he considered a bed, staring up into the dark eyes of his perfect fantasy lover, a perfect name written in curly-cues above a perfect smirking face. The poster was ripping in some places and someone had scribbled a moustache under the beautiful man's nose – it was a second hand poster, after all – but that poster was all Roxas would ever need in life.

Besides Marluxia himself.

Marluxia, a name that belonged in a Shakespeare novel, not on the ratty ceiling of his decaying bedroom. Marluxia, a name that deserved to be whispered by a woman with long blonde hair and a Europe accent, not a fifteen-year-old with a dirty face and no shoes. Marluxia, the name he moaned over and over and over again into his plaid sheets, while he thrust fruitlessly against the mattress, or sometimes the queer-headed girl that lived down the hall. She didn't speak much and her head was always lolling one way or another, and she wouldn't care if some boy was screaming someone's name other than her own – if she even knew what her name was – as he rode out passionate orgasms.

The boys at school often teased him for always scribbling Marluxia's name in his notebooks or muttering during classes as he slept, so Roxas quit going to school period. Not like his parents would care. They were the ones who had bought the stupid television. They were the ones who had brought home that damn poster of the famous singer, famous environmentalist, famous pianist, famous public speaker, famous everything and oh, he was everything Roxas wasn't and Roxas was absolutely head over heels and Marluxia would never know.

He was poor, after all. So desperately poor, too poor to buy his own train ticket to L.A. to meet his idol, to live those fantasies that danced in his head day in and day out, driving him into some sort of obsessed psychosis. Even the day Marluxia was pronounced dead of an overdose and it was all over the news and the newspapers and everyone's lips, Roxas was still fucking the brains out of an already brainless girl and fantasizing about the love that he knew he jut had to get from Marluxia because it was just meant to be.