Axel and Marluxia had been walking in silence for a good twenty minutes before either of them spoke. The pouring rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, and Marluxia had begun to shiver from the cold, despite his best efforts to conserve his warmth by wrapping his arms around his torso, hands in his armpits. "You're cold," Axel noted, and felt a stab of selfishness as he realised that while he himself was wrapped up in a warm coat, Marluxia's bare arms, shoulders and midriff were exposed to the chilly rain. He awkwardly shrugged off his jacket and hung it over Marluxia's shoulders. It hung off him, ridiculously large for his small frame. Marluxia looked up, surprised. "You don't have to – " he said, but Axel cut him off.
"No, you wear it. It was getting too hot anyway." He looked around, relieved that he recognised the neighbourhood, and he noticed that they had stopped on a street only a few blocks from his apartment. "It's not far to my place," he said, almost to himself, and motioned for Marluxia to follow him. Marluxia hesitated, then pulled Axel's jacket tighter around him and followed at a slower pace than before.

A short time later, Axel stopped on the street infront of a great, hulking redbrick building – his apartment block. He looked up affectionately at it, then turned to Marluxia, who stood clutching Axel's jacket around himself, eyes downcast. "If you want, you can come in and uh, I can give you a towel or something so you can dry off, then I can drive you home…" he trailed off, and Marluxia kept his eyes fixed pointedly on the wet concrete underfoot. "Where do you live?" Axel asked, and a slow flush crept up Marluxia's neck and covered his face.
"I… well, I…" he faltered, and blushed even more, refusing to meet Axel's eyes. Axel, however, caught on to his stuttering with a sharp pang of pity, mingled with slight horror. Marluxia was homeless! But then where did he sleep at night? How did someone like him wind up working in a strip joint and living on the streets, or if he could, staying the night at a stranger's house in exchange for sex? Axel knew what it was like to be poor: he himself lived off his band's profits and the quarter-yearly support payment from his parents, and occasionally he needed to take money from his bank savings account – but he could only imagine what it was like to have no home to go to, sleeping in a dirty alleyway downtown or in a stranger's bed every second night.

"On second thoughts… no worries. You can stay here tonight," he said kindly as he could, and Marluxia nodded shamefacedly, and followed Axel silently up the concrete stairwell. Axel stopped infront of a wooden door marked VIII and began rifling through his pockets for his keys – the numerals on the door were painted black and bolted on carelessly; so that the numbers were not entirely juxtaposed, and the face of the door to which they were attached was rough, the cream paint chipping and flaking off all over. Axel found his keys and drew them from the back pocket of his jeans: Marluxia stared, amused, at the cutesy Hello Kitty keyring he held. Axel fitted a key into the door lock, twisted it, rattled the door handle a few times with his other hand and then bumped the door open with his shoulder. "It gets stuck," he said to Marluxia, and held the door open for him.

Marluxia stepped into Axel's apartment and looked around. A wide, beige-tiled hallway stretched out for a few metres before him, presumably leading to the bedroom, laundry and bathroom. He stepped cautiously down the hallway and turned through the door frame on the right. Axel had closed the front door and now he brushed past Marluxia, flicking on light switches as he went. Now able to see, Marluxia studied the room – Axel's living room: It was covered in an almost threadbare cream-coloured carpet, with two almost identical old couches occupying most of the room; each splaying outwards along a wall from the corner of the room closest to the front door. An old television set sat on a stand on the far wall, surrounded by the tangled black cords from several out-of-date gaming consoles. Next to the television was a long, narrow table along the wall, on which sat an ancient stereo, a table phone, a small fishbowl and a cage half-covered by the old towel that had been thrown over it. Oddly, there was a cluster of black balloons tied with red string in the corner near the narrow table. To complete the room; a battered hardwood coffee table stood on four squat legs in the middle of the room, its polished surface chipped, scorched, scarred and cluttered – cans of beer, three brimming ashtrays, several battered books, a tower of CDs, two stained coffee mugs, a coke-bottle-and-hose-pipe bong and a sketchbook all crowded on top of the table. In the far left corner of the room was a small kitchenette, marked by the dirty rectangle of linoleum on the floor and the bar-like counter that separated the kitchenette from the main part of the living room. Marluxia could see that a small fridge and stove were jammed in between the spaces of kitchen cupboards. Two high old wooden chairs, of similar make to the coffee table, sat facing the kitchen counter, seemingly where Axel ate most of his meals. Or perhaps not, Marluxia thought, glancing again at the coffee table.

Marluxia sat down on the edge of one of the couches. It was made of a sickly-coloured orange vinyl, and was ripped in places so that the pale greyish-green stuffing poked out, but Axel had thrown a soft old blanket over it to counter this. Axel was busying himself filling an old electric tea-kettle with water and cleaning out dirty mugs. "Coffee?" He asked Marluxia, who nodded, then Axel flicked the switch on the kettle and said, "Oh, I'll get you a towel," and left the room. Marluxia then took off Axel's wet coat, rather guiltily, and edged forward in his seat. He picked up a handful of novels and looked over them: they were all battered and dog-eared, some falling apart at the spines. He read the titles: A Brief History of Time, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Magician's Nephew, Harry Potter, The Other Side of Midnight… one book he flipped through and found a half-squashed cigarette inside. He absently squashed it back into shape as he put down the novels and picked up a handful of CDs. Some of them he recognised, but others were artists he had never heard of – Trivium, Avenged Sevenfold, Skinny Puppy, Mindless Self Indulgence, Opeth, Windir… the list went on.

When Axel returned to the living room with a towel, he found Marluxia sitting back on his couch smoking a cigarette placidly. Coffee forgotten, Axel took two cans of beer from the fridge and offered one to the bedraggled waif on his couch, along with the towel. Marluxia accepted the beer and effortlessly cracked it open. "What are the balloons for?" He asked, in that soft voice of his.

"Leftover from my birthday in August… you know, you should probably do something about those cuts," Axel said suddenly, studying the cuts on the other's face. Marluxia shrugged and muttered, "I'll be fine. They're superficial wounds." He sipped his beer to fill the silence and took a deep drag on his cigarette, then stubbed it out in an already full ashtray, set down his beer and began drying his hair with the towel. Axel watched, sipping his beer, and when Marluxia put down the towel and began to remove his top, Axel hurriedly sprang to his feet. "I'm putting on some music," he said gruffly, and slid a CD into the stereo.

Then he settled back down on the unoccupied couch and closed his eyes, letting the familiar music wash over him. Leave your pain on the bedroom floor again, bring a smile to survive. And do you think that you have that in you? Take a chance 'cause I know you want to. If only you'll hold on, just hold on, I'm here and I'm with you, I'm here too, I feel you, we'll get through; I know this, I've seen it – a hundred times, a thousand times – just one more time, with you and I, I'll pull you close, and then we'll say goodbye… Axel was halfway through his second beer and beginning to sing along. "You should be in a band or something," Marluxia said, and Axel opened one eye to look at him. The other boy was sitting with his legs drawn up to his chest, facing Axel, one hand holding a beer and a cigarette simultaneously. He wasn't wearing a shirt, but the towel was draped over his shoulders. "I am," Axel said.
"Oh. Well, you're good… you're a good singer."
Axel shrugged, grinning. "Thanks." He groaned exaggeratedly as he rolled off the couch and headed to the kitchenette, returning with a lit cigarette in his mouth and a bottle of vodka. "Let's do shots."

Half an hour later, the two of them were good and sloshed, and Marluxia had, thanks to the alchohol, loosened up quite a bit. Axel had produced a joint and the two sat around in a cloud of marijuana smoke, talking and laughing about high school. Axel had never seen or heard Marluxia laugh, and it came as quite a surprise to him when he heard it first. Marluxia had a slow, sexy laugh that heated Axel's blood, and his smile was almost as good: those rosebud lips curving upwards at the sides, evoking a faint pair of dimples that made Axel delirious with pleasure – though he excused it as simply a side-effect of vodka and pot, choosing to ignore the nascent feelings stirring in him. Eventually their conversation turned away from highschool and they began to talk about music, books and the finer points of peeling a potato. At first Axel carefully avoided the questions that he really wanted the answers to – why was Marluxia working as a stripper? Why was Marluxia homeless? What had happened after he left highschool? – But soon the questions slipped from his mind, forgotten, and he focused on the stupid, disjointed conversation they were having. Axel was describing a scene from one of his favourite movies to Marluxia, who was talking about the time he got lost in the supermarket when he was a kid. Neither of them really cared that the other wasn't listening, and soon all their words stopped making sense and they lapsed back into taking vodka shots.

It was sometime around 2 in the morning when they finished the bottle of vodka, and just as well. "Tired," mumbled Marluxia, and he scrubbed at his face absently with the towel. "Sleep," he added, and Axel nodded. The room was swimming in his vision, and he stumbled stupidly into the hallway. He turned around to speak and saw that Marluxia had passed out on the couch, and then momentarily forgot what he was doing – ah, right. He stripped down in the hallway, leaving his clothes on the floor, and almost tripped over the bath mat as he got into the shower. He stood for a good ten minutes, leaning against the glass cubicle wall and letting the pelting drops of tepid water wash over him. When he felt sufficiently cold and slightly more sober, he turned off the water and stepped out onto the cold white-tiled floor of the bathroom, quickly drying himself with a towel and, shivering, he rummaged in the laundry basket for a pair of long, black sweatpants, pulling them on quickly. He was insanely tired, but forced himself to drink a glass of water before stumbling across the hallway to his bedroom.

Not bothering to turn on the light, he almost tripped on a stray boot by the doorway, and collapsed into his bed. He pulled the covers up to his chin and rolled over – discovering that, somehow, a very drunk, stoned and sleepy Marluxia had made his way down to Axel's room and crawled into his bed, and was now fast asleep. Too drunk and cold to care, he shifted closer and encircled Marluxia in his arms, pulling him near and burying his face in the mass of pinkish-brown hair that smelt like cinnamon and cigarettes, and he closed his eyes. The boy in his arms shifted slightly. "Axel?" Marluxia murmured, turning his head slightly. Axel grunted softly, and Marluxia whispered, "Thankyou."