I'm sorry, i started drinking, and i forgot to stop. Don't own Kingdom Hearts or Emily Haines.


'Cursed with a love that you can't express,

It's not for a fuck or a kiss.

Rather give the world away than wake up lonely.'


Its 3 a.m. and it's still fucking dark and just maybe, it's his fault.

His cage of four walls, this nightshade ambience is entirely self-made. Moods blurring and fading into a far more sinister shade of dependency, dirty glares and filthy fingers, he's got pollution burned along the ghost white of his skin. Axel's fingertip vocabulary of 'maybe, maybe, maybe' traced along his thighs, his lips.

This is fucking ridiculous, he's pressing fingers, fists into his eyes, muttered mantra of 'cry, don't cry'.

Just go to sleep, you're embarrassing yourself.

The shadows are speechless, but only when they pretend not to hear him. Axel is still breathing by his shoulder, soft as a siren under pretense of having drifted hours ago. He's masking it all, smells like weed and sweat. All elbows and angles and, 'Don't do this tonight, Roxas. I'm tired'. And through the sounds of a world collapsing, Roxas picks out the delicate scratch of eyelids, lashes, Axel reading the warnings lining the ceiling, because he's faking.

Axel hasn't slept in days, hasn't touched Roxas in longer.

In his head, he hears echoes of Axel's school-boy words from weeks ago, 'Smile Roxas. Just smile'.

Sometimes Axel would drink, his breath some complicated weave of whiskeys and wine, smelling like a fucking chemical fire, looking like a fucking prince. Side-effects of faux bravery and eager fingers dialing their apartment before common sense hits him like a fucking runaway train. Sometimes he calls to try an 'I love you' and when he's feeling less brave, less stupid, less like a player, more like a pope he says, 'I know you. I think you're important'. And it's enough to placate the mind, the confidence, of some fire-fury teenage boy who's cataloging all of this, ready to spin it on its end.

Roxas who says, 'there's no such thing as 'friendly fire'. Not really.'

Lying in the darkness, sharing something as intimate as oxygen with the love of a past life, he watches the fading whisper-waves of ghosts throw phantom emotions ricocheting off the walls. He's blinking around their mute-verbal shrapnel. And they do not speak, nor feel, but they imprint him, leave heavy holes of remembrance in his head, his heart.

These ghosts restructure their latest vocal arena; they are the phantoms of affections that dwindled there, imaginary lips move in mimicry of allegations spat, shot and sung through air still thick with tension. And through their silver-shadow features, he thinks maybe he sees himself. Maybe he sees Axel. Axel with his vicious reds, his dark moods and Roxas squeezes his wonder-world eyes shut tight, saying, 'He was wrong. He's always wrong', thinks, 'He's needs to burn the fuck out. I can't touch him when he's blazing like this'.

Roxas thinks they've been tearing through the fairylands of a midnight mountain for too long, thinks maybe it's time to see the sun again.

'Smile Roxas. Just smile.'

It means so much, he deciphers so little, desperate for distractions, seeking the sounds to drown Axel's cigarette-stained wheezing. So he's collecting the songs of car crashes, of fist-kissing and teeth tinkling along tarmac.

The world outside his window is painted the colour of a childhood nightmares, shadows like fingers and he swears this night will steal him from beneath his sheets.

Streaks of light bleed across the carpets, the colour of cocktails and nail polish, neon streaks through the aftermath of their private conflict, and suddenly he's overwhelmed, realising just how small he is, how big Axel talks him up to be. He's trailing sticky fingerprints along the thin thread of some cigarette-burned blanket. He's searching, rolling silent swears from his tongue, his palms sweaty and his breathing hitching and catching and suffocating him and suddenly Axel catches his hand, cool fingers curling around his own, soothing away the shakes. Absolutely silent.


'I really don't love you'.

That's how it all starts, the words that bid Axel's world permission to crumble around his ankles.

Roxas is sticking love notes (but not really) to the ceiling again. Blunt and honest and definite, and he's shaking his head thinking, 'Totally open to interpretation,' because Roxas is poetic and brilliant, and Axel's convincing himself the kid's just playing hard to get.

It's past midnight, the flickering red letters on the bedside counter tell him they're running out of time, but he can't reach across the distance between them. Feels Roxas trace those nervous fingertips along the surface of some threadbare blanket, seeking out his skin for comfort. Tonight his knuckles warp to sharp edges and harsh corners and Roxas will find no relief within his palms.

He's got 'we're not working', he's got 'we should talk', all kinds of ammunition lining his lips, but Roxas with his fucking weapon mouth, a teenage-boy smile framing the sounds of a mid-life crisis, will shoot him fucking down before they can salvage any of this.

Street-lights shine pink-blue shadows on his face, he's staring into nothing, he hasn't slept in days.

"We should probably-" his own voice drifting into silence, because he really isn't sure how to verbalize anything.

They need to talk, to separate, to hold on.

Night after night they lie on some coffee-stained mattress, Roxas measuring the distance between them, precise and so dedicated in his attempts at isolation. He says, 'Don't touch me, not tonight' and it's some ribbon-wrapped attempt at sympathy, like maybe they could revive this, like maybe things will change tomorrow, or the day after that, and Axel finds he's living his days through white noise and a fog of concerned voices bleeding through the Roxas, Roxas, Roxas.

He's waiting for permission to get on with his life.


Axel can't remember how he got here.

He's got a head full of bad ideas, an obsession with fixing every habit he breaks, the rainfall ash of a forgotten cigarette burning the skin between his fingers.

In his mind's eye he's still seeing Roxas. Fangs and claws and those wild eyes, over-exaggerated hand-gestures and the ruins of their apartment spread like evidence around his bare feet. The soft pink shades of his mouth blending to alarming shades of gore, every little truth he's spitting, sharp diamond honesty.

Roxas losing his patience, losing his mind, hunched and rabid like some vicious animal, razor teeth proving less effective than the little secrets they conceal, he's saying 'My god, Axel, every day I'm falling further and further out of love with you'.

Zexion has been storing his words behind silence since Axel's arrival, his attentions spinning, unfocused, reading and re-reading the blurry lines of text, his tiny glass hands curled defensively around the yellowed pages of second-hand Shakespeare. His hair the colour of oil-slicks bleeding across his face, obscuring his eyes, and Axel thinks maybe he can feel him watching. Waiting.

Zexion boasting an eternal supply of patience, a very limited reserve of sympathy.

Axel remembers him from when they were kids, all wild eyes and tight fists, fighting the world with snapping teeth, back when 'dying' was a hobby only the old frequently partook in. Dirt smudged across his cheeks, he'd run barefoot through the wood, singing words and stories beyond his years, his lungs aching with the effort. Zexion would sit on the porch, refuse their invitations and shake his head with that sad-mock smile, tiny glass doll-hands waving them away, whispering, 'My mom says I shouldn't'.

Because Zexion was never just 'a kid'.

Axel's flicking through freeze frames of their high school years, scenes cigarette-burned and scratched. Zexion with his hair swept across his face, the pockmarked skin along his cheeks some war hero's badge, a testament to the youth he never particularly experienced. Always one step away from a bed-sheet noose in his mother's armoire.

He knew too much of the world to bother with some petty attempt at survival.

'It's Roxas,' Axel's saying, like it's not already blisteringly obvious. Like he has anything left to discuss, like there's anything else worth discussing.

And that boy is creeping under the layers of his skin and wrapping everything in that sunshine veil, cannibalistic and chewing through nerve endings cause, 'Fuck Axel, It's like you don't want to be happy'. He's thinking of slick-red teeth, eyes that bleed diamonds of daylight, streaks of blonde across his vision, strips of gold and blue.

Such a masterpiece painting of what his mom would say angels looked like.

Zexion's blinking blind, eyes laced with prescription meds for sleeping and dealing and living.

Fingers that remind Axel of spiders' legs and silver-thread cobwebs skim across pages of blurry font, of angry neon highlights and chicken-scratch pencil notes he reads at 4 a.m. when he's half wild, when he can still taste chemicals of encouragement lining his teeth.

Watching Axel trace the lines along the skin of his palms, he's breathing these tiny half-breaths, ready to say, 'the kid's a psychologist's fucking wet dream. What do you expect?'

But Axel's eyes looks a little wider, like maybe he's ready to see more than then half-truths Roxas presses against the shell of his ear when the sunshine dies outside their window.

'Do you think Romeo and Juliet were real?' And it sounds like a weak ankle, a bad back, a lapse of defence and Axel's going to tear right in nails and teeth and all this misplaced aggression.

Axel's thinking, 'I believe I'm stuck in a fucking remake' but he's smiling this broken bottle smile saying, 'It's just fiction', swallowing back, 'You should get out more'.

Zexion trapped in his paper-back world of yellow-pages and two-dimensional characters. He's sweeping loose strands from his face, fine threads the colour of burned-out buildings and winter, thin porcelain fingers pressed against the clammy skin of his temple, his drug-induced silver shimmer glistening along his skin. Throbbing fingers flickering along the words of cursed love, he's tracing their letters, eyes still fixed on Axel.

He knows their words, loves them like something worthwhile.

'Exactly,' he says in his suffocating voice, heavy with a lethargy the thin red veins spell along the whites of his eyes, 'Just fiction'. Because he won't describe the picture Axel and Roxas have painted between them.

Modern-day society's answer to Romeo and Juliet, their story composed of alcohol and addictions far stronger than any drug Roxas' doctor may prescribe. Their affairs constantly bleeding through their paper thin walls. It's just a matter of time before they destroy each other, and what they lack in drive, they compensate for in desire, and theirs is a story that cannot possibly lead to a happy ending.

Glancing at the blurry figures of his watch, he's only vaguely registering the lack of stars in the sky tonight, fingertips skimming the debris of his desk, seeking out the rest of his peaceful night in pill-form, nodding towards the doorway, towards Axel, saying, 'It's not too late to fix this,' sounding like, 'It's not too late to leave him'.

For a few brief seconds, the blue-blonde ribbons fall from Axel's eyes, releasing him from his own teenage bullshit to notice he is not the only one to suffer beneath the weight of their years.

He sees his old friend transformed. A new person, a new friend.

Zexion with the white dust of some new experimental drug speckled along the cracked skin of his lips. The little bright boy doomed to watch on from the far side of everything. Isolated for his own protection, like paper chains, a glass sculpture and this world would tear him apart; smash him to useless little shards.

Instead, now, he drifts, wrapped constantly in his cotton-wool world of sedatives and sleeping pills. Pages and pages of the words and the wonders living beyond his windowpane, worlds he no longer has the energy to freefall into. And the people from these sheets have become passable company, Romeo and Juliet gradually replaced by Axel and Roxas and their 'I love you', 'Shut the fuck up and let me love you more'.

Axel thinks maybe Zexion is safer with his written word and silence, because people are cruel and fucking stupid and Zexion's beyond all that. He was always the kinda kid to do something irrational and intimate, and he'd tie all those pretty knots with his drug-shaken hands.

Reality would just kick the stool out from beneath him.

Zexion thinks maybe Axel's here to save him.

Axel's heaving himself off the floor, a symphony of popping joints and exaggerated yawns, fast word apologies of, 'I should probably get goin'. Roxas'll be wonderin' where I am.'

One look at Zexion propped in his pillow palace, duvets heaped across his knees, bookend battlements, he looks tiny. He looks ill and Axel's thinking maybe he should hug him, shake his hand? Steal him? But he's forcing small smiles around, 'Thanks, dude'.

Thanks for your lack of advice, your admirable lack of interest.

'Thanks for listening'.

Zexion's already burying himself under the wonderland of another book, a small flick of his chalk white hand offering his goodbye, and his lips are moving, but Axel's feet move faster. Words of advice falling wasted to the floorboards.

'If fiction couldn't get it right, Axel, what makes you think you can?'


When Axel gets back to the apartment, Roxas has repaired those beautiful bad habits of his, decided to once more confide his deepest secrets in thin plasterboard and mould-encrusted wallpaper. A post-it note arrangement of words that Axel thinks should maybe hurt a little deeper, but this all feels like petty revenge, a school-boy prank, Roxas standing by his masterpiece with that brilliant flash-bulb smile, saying, 'Just in case you forget'.

Cold coffee cup in one hand, the remains of his sticky-note pad clenched in a white-knuckled fist, he's stepping around Axel, too close, breathing heavily and smiling like the one who got away.

And he may hate him during the day, but he misses him when the night falls.

'I don't love you'.

The phone's ringing, echoing around a head void of thought, and he hears Roxas slip into some style of humanity acceptable beyond their privacy. The high-pitched greeting, false smiles and terrible acting.

Roxas who cannot tell a lie. Stroking the counter-tops with magic marker stained fingertips, smiling something too cynical and jaded to fit his too-young face, saying, 'Axel, it's your mom'. An offered lifeline, and Roxas is just bitter enough to collect their snippets of conversation through the extension line in the kitchen, scribble their words like gospel across his neon-coloured notepad, litter them about the floorboards as evidence of the storms that rage behind their closed doors.

Roxas who can't remember what he wants.

Lonely Roxas who maybe sold his sanity for the friends that fight to escape him.

Receiver pressed against his ear, eyes following Roxas through dim-doorways and dismal mood-swings, he hears, 'How've you been, baby?' and his mouth's moving but he knows he's telling lies, 'Oh yeah, fine, fine,' Roxas sitting down the hallway with some contorting smug grin smothering any trace of innocence left across his features.

She's reading through rehearsed lines hundreds of miles away, the same scripted questions she asked last week, the same bullshit stories she fabricates about brothers and sisters, glorifying their home life and attempting to lure her little boy home. Away from 'him' at least.

'Still with Roxas?' and it's only light inquiry, tinted a little exhausted, a subtle shade of hopeful, and Axel can't hear her thoughts over the sound of Roxas slamming the receiver into it's cradle in response. He can hear the heavy golden-breath-panting from his perch among the wreckage of their bedroom.

Bare feet still sound like thunder kicking up a fucking storm in the kitchen, his poorly disguised tantrum, the sound of cutlery and plastic, running water all blending over any hints of distress in his mumbling.

He's saying, 'I gotta go, Something's up with Roxas,' and he knows Roxas would cradle him in his child-like hands if he thought maybe he could hold fire behind the cage of his fingers. Axel only slightly panicked - This has never happened before?! - fumbling with the phone, missing his mother's parting shot of, 'there's always something up with Roxas'.

And there he is, that beautiful sunshine boy, his hand-made battlefield, standing among the ruins, wearing water-weak smiles like the height of fashion.

Plastic containers and rotten food spread about his feet and he's torn through the cupboards, the drawers, the fridge, still hoping to capture Axel's wandering attentions.

'Your mom still doesn't like me,' he's whispering, his voice hoarse, colour draining from his face, a white-blonde mess, clammy-skinned and dark-eyed and Axel thinks this is what Roxas should always be, weak and young, these are the long-lost threads of innocence reappearing beneath the dirt of city-layers and a teenager's tendency to over-exaggerate.

Roxas who changes moods more often than meds, Roxas who's here and there and nowhere, suffocating and secluded all at once.

'You worried she'll try make me leave you?'

Roxas glaring up beneath his bangs, fists curled tight by his sides, the audible slide-crack of bone beneath the pale paper layers. Maybe feeling a little spiteful, a little stupid, maybe, and Axel's got this self-confident smile that doesn't fit the dimensions of his face, 'cause he knows how terrified Roxas is of being left alone.

And Roxas knows they can't fix this without the sacrifices, smiles that familiar half-smirk, says, 'But what If I left you?' (not for real, just imagine) and Axel's kissing the skin along his jaw saying, 'that won't happen, we both know that'.

Roxas sighing into something reassuring, smiling at maybe a double bluff? With Axel's scorching the skin of his throat, it's hard to say who's playing who. Roxas the sore loser, with his unfailing obsession with honesty.

And maybe his question was more of a confession.

Just maybe.