A/N: My boss told me I'm a good employee but all I do here is make online purchases and write my gay little stories.

Chapter 4: Axiology

"Roxas," his mom called out for him, her soft voice muffled from outside the bathroom he'd holed himself up in. "Roxas, c'mon honey, we have to hit the road. It's a long drive home."

He was sitting in the dry bathtub with the shower curtain drawn, knees to his chest, still clad in his flannel pajama bottoms and ringer tee and mismatched socks. The lights were off but the warm light from sunrise filtered in through the frosted glass of the window. He stared ahead at the checkered tiles on the wall with scum in the grout. He'd been in the bathroom for hours. With a lock on the door and a curtain to hide behind, it was the only place he felt safe right then.

"Roxy," his mom tried again, rapping the back of her hand against the door. "Are you okay in there?"

Three weeks. That's how long they were there. It was supposed to be fun. A family trip to his aunt and uncle's midwestern farmhouse where they have acres of land, an above-ground swimming pool, a tire swing, and sweet corn fields that stretch as far as the eye can see. They made this trip every summer, and, for the most part, Roxas looked forward to it. He loved running around and climbing trees and going to the county fair and eating his aunt's home cooking. He loved catching lightning bugs with Naminé and hanging out in the garage with his uncle while he worked on cars and taught him about tie rods and carburetors.

What he didn't love, however, was dealing with his older cousin, Seifer.

Seifer is four years his senior and four times his muscle mass, and, for as long as Roxas can remember, has always been overly antagonistic towards him for no apparent reason. Growing up, every get-together would result in Roxas crying to his mom about how Seifer hit him, or called him names, or spit on him, or broke his toy. And his mom would croon comforting words while wiping his tears and tell him that Seifer didn't mean it, he's just older and rougher and is an only child and therefore doesn't know any better. But that didn't explain why Seifer would only target him. He was always so nice to Naminé.

The family trips were no exemption; every summer Roxas would have to eat dirt at least once. He quickly learned to spend most of his time during these trips near his mom, sister, aunt or uncle since Seifer knew better than to be blatant with his cruelty. He always tried his best to avoid him, but staying in the same house for weeks meant Seifer would always find some way to harass him: dipping his toothbrush in the toilet, dunking his head underwater in the pool when no one was looking, discreetly flicking the back of his neck as he walked by.

That specific summer, however, everything changed when he was delegated to an air mattress on Seifer's bedroom floor, making the hours of approximately 10pm to 6am the perfect opportunity for private torment that he couldn't do anything about.

When they were younger, he and Naminé could share the fold-out couch in the den, but once Naminé started showing signs of pubescence, it was decided amongst his mom and aunt that sharing the bedroom with Seifer was the more appropriate sleeping arrangement. Roxas tried to protest, but at twelve years old, he didn't want to seem like a sissy, and he had stopped tattling on Seifer years ago after learning that it only made things worse. So, he resigned himself to spending those three weeks ignoring the abuse as best as he could. He would just have to grow thicker skin.

The mild physical abuse was preferable to what actually happened that summer. An Indian burn would be forgotten about an hour later. A knot on his forehead would go away with a cold compress. Being called "loser" or "chicken wuss" wouldn't cause lasting damage. Maybe Seifer knew this and wanted to up the ante. Maybe Seifer hated him so much that he wanted to do something so foul that it couldn't be shrugged off or kissed better by mommy. And he made that summer a summer Roxas could never forget, no matter how hard he tried.

"Roxas!" Now his mom was getting frustrated, and her tone of voice made his bottom lip quiver as he tried to hold back tears. He wanted nothing more than to be held by her and comforted, but he was now untouchable. Vile. The jiggling of the door handle made him flinch and he knew he had to just suck it up, like he sucked up everything else over the years.

He closed his eyes, exhaled, and stood up, peeling the floral curtain back and stepping out of the tub. He looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. He looked the same as he did yesterday, which was the same he looked three weeks prior. But he felt like he was looking at a stranger. A monster. Something so disgusting that it nauseated him. Was this how Seifer had seen him all along?

Was this his way of showing him?

Before his mom could get more agitated, he unlocked and opened the door and mumbled "sorry" before pushing past her.

Accustomed to his preteen angst and obstinacy, she found nothing out of the ordinary with his behavior. "Get your bag from Seifer's room," she said, "Let's go."

Roxas has done so much over the years to try not to think about it, and so far, the only successful remedy has been filling his veins with heroin. Without hard drugs, these memories are free to fester, and a task as simple as a morning shower brings them to the forefront of his mind in perfect clarity like it just happened yesterday. He experiences a slew of emotions in rapid succession in no particular order—sadness, anger, disgust, arousal, apathy—and they continuously cycle until Roxas turns the hot water cold to shock himself back to reality. After his rinse, he dries himself off and shakes out his hair, hoping to shake out the memories, too.

When Roxas returns to his room, he picks up his phone from his desk to see he has a text message from Axel.

'Rox! Let's hang!'

It's been a couple weeks now since he and Axel officially became friends, but their friendship was limited to the confines of morning meetings and the occasional text exchange. Roxas messages back, 'Busy', like how he always does when Hayner reaches out to him. The concept of friendship is a lot easier to adhere to when no real effort has to be put forth. Social interaction is exhausting and Roxas's mood has already been fouled by rotten thoughts. He doesn't have the emotional capacity for banter and teasing today.

Axel texts back, 'No you're not. It's Saturday. You're probably sitting alone in your room staring at a wall or something. Do you like movies?'

'Hate movies,' he quickly replies before setting his phone back down and heading downstairs to the kitchen.

Naminé is there with a mug of hot tea clasped in her hands and she greets him with a gracious smile. "Good morning," she says, "Do you want to go to the mall with me and mom in a bit?"

"Why would I want to do that?" He bites. "Why are you always here? Don't you have your own place? Can't you go shopping with your friends?"

His frustrations are clearly misplaced, and his sweet sister doesn't bat an eyelash at his hostility. "Mom and I are getting outfits for my art exhibition next week," she explains. "I'd love for you to attend. You can bring your friends, too. I miss them. How's Olette doing? I saw on Facebook she studied abroad in Al Ain over the summer."

Having enough self-awareness to realize getting angry at Naminé isn't going to make himself feel better, he relents. "I don't know," he tells her with a huff, "Haven't talked to her." He had no idea Olette even left the country and the guilt of being a terrible friend weighed on him.

"What about Hayner? Pence?"

Roxas shakes his head as he heads to the fridge for the carton of juice.

"Roxas..." She drawls in the same disapproving tone their mom uses, "They're your best friends."

"Butt out."

"I see Hayner on campus all the time, you know."

"Seriously, Nami," he warns as stands on the tips of his toes to get a glass from the cabinet above her.

She softly sighs and leans back against the counter. "It would really mean a lot to me if you came to the exhibition."

"I'll think about it," he says to placate her, and she beams.

People always say twins have an extraordinary bond, but Roxas couldn't feel any more alienated from Naminé if he tried. He feels slighted and resentful. She has everything and he has nothing. Her existence feels like salt in the wound; she's beautiful, kind, smart, normal—everything that he is not and will never be. They were once so close, like twins are meant to be, but somewhere along the line the person he shared a womb with became a stranger. He briefly wonders if she looks at him and feels the same way, but then realizes he doesn't care.

Their mom joins them in the kitchen with her purse on her shoulder, not at all oblivious to the tension between her children. Most interactions with Roxas are tense and she knows this, so she, like everyone else, tries her best to ignore it. "Hey Rox," she coolly greets like nothing is amiss, "We're going to the mall, do you want—"

Naminé interjects, "I already asked, he's not interested."

She tilts her head to the side like she's addressing a small child. "You sure? We haven't done anything just the three of us in a while. We used to do everything together."

"Yeah," Naminé agrees, "I think the last time the three of us went somewhere together was when we went to auntie and uncle's like ten years ago."

Roxas tenses up, tightening his grip on his glass of orange juice.

"Why did we stop going?" Naminé asks.

"You guys got older," mom says with a shrug, "You guys wanted to do your own thing. Besides, I like it better when they visit us. There's more to do around here in the city. The novelty of cornfields and the scent of manure wears off very quickly, I don't know how my poor sister does it. Plus, I don't like leaving your dad alone for so long. You know he can't cook, and he never separates his colors from his whites when he does laundry. Last time he washed his white shirts with his red socks and ended up turning them pink."

Prefaced by a chuckle about her father's cliché lack of household dependence, she asks, "On the topic of auntie and uncle, how's Seifer doing? He hasn't kept in touch. Did his wife have her baby yet?"

Before their mom can answer, the sound of shattering glass makes them both whip their heads towards Roxas. He's standing stoic, unreactive, eyes looking straight forward at nothing at all, as large glass shards fall from his hand and orange juice forms a puddle on the tile.

"Roxas!" His mom exclaims, scurrying to grab one of her decorative towels hanging from the oven handle to address his now bleeding hand. Avoiding the mess on the floor, she goes to his side and cradles his hand as she wraps it. "Are you okay?"

He looks down at his hand, now stinging from the acidity from citrus getting into the fresh gash on his palm. Blood soaks through the thin towel, the budding blotch blending in with the 'red delicious' apple pattern print. Naminé quickly grabs another towel and starts cleaning up the mess before someone slips or shreds their soles.

"Nami, can you go get the bandage wrap from the medicine cabinet?"

She nods after getting up most of the mess and hurries off to the bathroom.

Once she's out of earshot, his mom sadly asks him, "Do you hurt yourself on purpose, Roxas?"

He doesn't answer. He keeps thinking about Seifer, how he's soon going to be a father, how after what he did to him he was so easily able to go on about his life; move out, start his career, marry a beautiful woman. Does Seifer ever think about what he did? Does Seifer go home to his wife and touch her the way he touched him? These thoughts make him want to smash his head against the wall until his brain is pulp.

How is he ever supposed to get better when, even a decade later, these thoughts still plague him daily? He needs, among other things, a distraction.

Axel is admittedly bummed that Roxas never wants to hang out outside of the bullshit early morning meetings he forces himself to attend. They are beyond dull and the only opportunity for socialization comes in the window of time after Roxas's mom drops him off and before she picks him up, during which they exchange quips like they're in a direct-to-video teen comedy. The two of them seem to get along well enough; Roxas is usually receptive to his off-color jokes and lighthearted teasing, but Axel is clearly being kept at arm's length and he knows it. But that's okay, Axel likes the challenge. He likes playing the game.

He loudly yawns and puts his phone down next to him on the arm of couch he and Ventus financed from Wayfair back when they first moved in, before changing the TV channel from the weather report to a reality show about catching cheating spouses. Swathed in his gran's old knitted afghan, he dozes off and starts to dream.

There's a clocktower at sunset. The sky is a mixture of oranges and reds, like fire. He's had this dream before. He's sitting atop the tower on the ledge above the clockface, long legs dangling over the ant-sized people below. Beside him is Ventus.

This tower is a real place—an old, abandoned west-facing train station from his hometown—but in his dreams it's larger, lively, and serves as the apex of the world where he can watch over it like a benevolent god. He and Ventus don't share words, they just look out at the horizon, watching the red sun dip below the skyline. There's a peace despite the finality, and he wishes this translated into reality. His last moments with Ventus were not so peaceful.

He's woken up by his phone beeping. Roxas wants to hang out after all. He smirks as he wipes the sleep from his eyes. He has to call his boss and tell him he's not coming into work today.

"What happened to your hand?" Axel asks him as he climbs into the passenger seat of the station wagon.

"Orange juice accident," Roxas says simply as he faces forward.

"How does someone who barely exists manage to get themselves injured so frequently?"

"Brain damage, most likely."

"Seriously though, are you okay?" His tone is sincere, lacking any sort of jest or irony, and it briefly catches Roxas off-guard.

"Uh, yeah. I'm fine," Roxas says as he glances down at his bandaged hand, "It's no big deal." He was a rambunctious child, always climbing trees and trying new skate tricks and having stick spars with Hayner and such, so his mom had perfected the art of basic first aid and bandaging his cuts and scrapes. The main difference now is the lack of a motherly kiss on his boo-boos.

"Where do you wanna go?" Axel asks him as they start to drive off from the meeting spot Roxas designated a few streets away from his house.

He puts his gimped hand down on his thigh and shrugs. "Doesn't matter."

"Did you tell the MILF that we're hanging out or are you breaking the rules?"

"Number one, gross. Number two, no. She went to the mall with my sister. They spend all day there. And my dad is at work. So I'll be back before anyone even knows I'm gone."

"Wow. A mom, a dad with a job, and a sister. Must be nice to have a nuclear family," Axel remarks. "I always wondered what that's like."

"It's like... I dunno. I have nothing else to compare it to." For someone like Axel, who mentioned a dead mom and being raised by his grandmother, a basic family structure probably seems appealing. But to Roxas, it's dull. Suffocating. Curious, he asks, "What happened to your dad?"

Axel raises his eyebrows but doesn't take his eyes off the road ahead. "Oh, intrigued about my tragic backstory, are we?"

Roxas rolls his eyes and scoffs. "Not anymore. Never mind."

He laughs and tells him, "I never knew my father. Never really knew my mom, either. She died when I was like three. Everything I know about my parents I learned from my gran but she didn't like to talk about it. My mom was her only child and she got herself killed. Or at least that's how gran phrased it. I'm guessing my mom didn't have particularly good taste in men, considering one impregnated her and dipped and another literally murdered her."

The indifference in his tone when talking about the topic wasn't that far off from Roxas's indifference when he told Axel about what Seifer did to him, so Roxas assumes Axel is hurting and hiding it, just like he is. He feels a kinship, a small empathetic connection. When was the last time he could relate to someone or vice versa?

"I feel bad," Axel continues, "I was a difficult kid, always getting myself into trouble. Ran my poor gran haggard. I remember this one time I stole her cane and hid it so she couldn't come into my room and tell me to stop playing PlayStation and go to bed. She just yelled at me from the other side of our trailer, 'Axel you little shit!'." He chuckles and sighs wistfully. "I miss that crazy old bat. She died when I was eighteen. I'm pretty much all alone now."

"Why are you telling me all this?" It wasn't a rude interjection; it was an analytical one.

"Dunno," Axel says. He turns into a busy shopping center parking lot. "Why'd you tell me about your past?"

Roxas can't answer because he doesn't exactly know, either.

"Have you talked to anyone about it? I mean, like a professional. Someone with a PhD."

Roxas barks out a dry laugh. "Obviously not."

Axel whips into an empty parking spot and lets the car idle. He faces Roxas. "Do you wanna talk about it?"

"Yeah, I totally want to recount an awful childhood experience to some fucking lunatic who's been blatantly stalking me the past few weeks." He rolls his eyes before looking out the window to examine their surroundings. "Why are we here?"

"You didn't specify what you wanted to do, and you said you hate movies, so I decided you're coming grocery shopping with me." Axel pulls the key out of the ignition and twirls the keyring around his index finger, flashing Roxas a sideways smile. "Ya'know, they give out free cookies to kids at the bakery. You're small enough to pass. Do you like chocolate chip or sugar cookies best?"

Experiencing a sense of conversational whiplash, Roxas blinks a few times while staring at his goofy grin. "Is there something wrong with you?" He asks him.

"Aside from the obvious?"

"Yeah, like did you ride the short bus or anything?"

Axel reaches over to tousle Roxas's already disheveled hair, ignoring the slight flinch upon contact. "Your insults are endearing. C'mon, I just need a few things."

Roxas reluctantly follows Axel into the grocery store, pulling his hood over his head as they breach the automatic double doors. Axel grabs a cart and glances at Roxas, who's lagging behind on account to his short legs, from over his shoulder.

"Wanna ride in the cart?"

"What?"

"Did I stutter? Get in, it'll be fun. And it'll be faster."

"I'm not getting in the cart," he deadpans. People walking by are already shooting them looks.

"Roxas," Axel playfully whines, dragging out the second syllable of his name and stomping his boots. "What if I haggle? Two-hundred bucks off your debt to me if you let me push you around in the cart."

"What?"

"You really need to get your ears checked, dude."

"You're a clown."

"Yes. Now get in."

Roxas eyes the cart warily before conceding defeat. He's not in a position to turn down a little bit of debt forgiveness. The two-thousand bucks he owes looms over their strange friendship, and whereas Axel usually just mentions it in jest, Roxas knows it's only a matter of time before he's hounded to pay up. Money makes people mean, as he's learned the hard way. But strangely enough it wasn't the monetary aspect that bothered Roxas, it was the prospect of losing the approval of the first person to treat him like he's an actual human being in a while.

Axel has the giddiness of a kid coming downstairs on Christmas morning as he holds the cart steady while Roxas steps up on the bottom metal bumper and swings his leg over the side of the basket. He hoists himself up and into the cart, settling against the front end and facing the back so he doesn't have to see the inevitable stares. Sitting in a shopping cart makes a wave of nostalgia hit him square in the face, and he remembers the grocery shopping trips with his mom and Naminé where the two of them would take turns riding in the cart and could get a candy at checkout if they didn't bicker about it. Now that he's bigger, albeit not by much, he realizes just how uncomfortable sitting on metal slats is.

"All set?" Axel asks him as he takes up the mantle of cart driver, wrapping both hands around the germ-infested handlebar.

"Can you just hurry?" Roxas huffs.

Taking that to heart, Axel takes off, pushing him with rapidly increasing speed into the main part of the store, zipping past other shoppers and only narrowly avoiding hitting product displays. He's laughing as Roxas grips one side of the cart for dear life with his one functional hand. Once enough speed is gained, Axel steps up on the bumper and lets the shopping cart coast towards the furthest aisle, only stopping when he puts his heel down to brake.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Roxas frantically asks once they come to a standstill by the eggs.

Axel is trying to catch his breath but it's difficult between laughter. "You said fast, I went fast."

"I want to get out. Let me out."

"Don't be like that. I won't do it again, I promise." He slowly walks the cart down the dairy aisle and stops in front of the milk refrigerator to grab a half-gallon. He hands it to Roxas. "I can't let you out, I haven't gotten my money's worth yet. Plus, you're in charge of the groceries. This a team effort."

Roxas looks at the bottle in his hand and grimaces. "Ew, why do you drink skim milk?

"Because it's low-fat."

"You're already a rail."

"Exactly. Because I drink skim," he says, the 'duh' implied. "My gran always got skim, so I'm used to it."

"Milk water," Roxas repugnantly quips as he sets the bottle against the opposite end of the cart. They continue down the dairy aisle and onto the next. As they go through the aisles, Axel hands him various standard grocery items; margarine, sliced bread, a small jar of grape jelly, some noodles, a box of generic corn flakes. "This is what you live off of?" Roxas asks him.

"Yep. Toast, cereal, and butter pasta if I'm feeling especially culinary."

"How are you not dead from malnutrition?"

"How are you not dead from malnutrition?" Roxas narrows his eyes at him but doesn't answer. "And I get food from work to supplement. Sometimes the kitchen screws up and makes the wrong thing, or a customer sends something back, or I just feel like eating shitty fried food and order it myself. We get employee discounts."

"You work?" Aside from knowing he's a gay orphan in community college, Roxas doesn't actually know that much about him.

"Yeah, I'm a host at the Chili's by the mall. It pays the bills. And debts." Axel has not actually finished paying off Larxene and instead has been ignoring calls and texts from her and her underlings. Not that he's going to tell Roxas, of course. "I don't have the luxury of being babied by my parents while recovering from addiction," he teases, "Or having a charming six-foot-six saint pay off my heroin tab."

"Fuck off."

"Don't be so hostile," he teasingly scolds as he wheels him to the deli/bakery section of the supermarket. He parks the cart off to the side by the prepackaged bundt cakes and cream horns. "Be right back, okay? Don't go anywhere."

"Whatever," Roxas grumbles, feeling even more like a fool sitting in the cart by himself without a freakishly tall redheaded weirdo to take some of the attention off of him.

This embarrassment is amplified when a familiar, tentative voice beside him says, "...Rox? Roxas, is that you?"

Roxas's blood runs cold. He's got his hood up and was so sure he'd be unrecognizable. He turns his head slightly to see Pence standing next to him with a baguette cradled in his arm. "Hey, dude," he greets, no hint of emotion in his voice. "What's up?"

Pence shifts his bread baby from one arm to the other, looking at Roxas with the wide-eyed pity he has been trying so hard to avoid. "How've you been, man? You doin' alright? Did you get a new number or somethin'? I've been texting you. We all have."

Like with Naminé, this person he grew up with and considered one of his best friends now felt like a stranger. "Uh, no, same number. Sorry. I've been alright. Just...busy." Aloofness is difficult to achieve while cross-legged in a cart with foodstuff and a busted hand.

Pence raises his bushy brows high on his forehead. "Busy sitting in a shopping cart with a tub of 'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter' on your lap?"

Roxas's cheeks flush, but before he can come up with something to say, Axel returns with folded wax paper in his hand and doesn't initially notice Pence standing there. "You didn't answer my question earlier, so I just got you a sugar cookie with sprinkles and I got myself a choc—" He finally notices Pence, who's staring right at him. "Yo, you gotta problem?" Axel raises his voice and squares his shoulders, but it's hard to be intimidated by someone holding baked goods in their hand. "Never seen a man buy a cookie for another man sitting in a cart before?"

"I know him," Roxas says, "Relax."

After inspecting Pence with narrowed eyes, realization dawns on Axel. "Oh, I recognize him. He's the kid from the photo."

"Photo?" Pence asks but is ultimately ignored.

"He's your friend, yeah?"

"Yeah," Roxas says for the sake of brevity.

There's a short awkward silence. "Welp, I'll leave you to it, Rox," Pence tells him, an unmistakable dejection in his usually chipper tone. "I'll tell Hayner and Olette you're doin' alright. Take care." He shuffles off with his bread without another look in their direction.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to scare off your buddy," Axel tells Roxas as he hands him his cookie. Zombie-like, Roxas takes it without much acknowledgement, still staring off in the direction Pence went. "I'm just used to people taking issue with me and mine, ya'know?"

Roxas doesn't say anything to that or his implication. He's too busy hating himself. He knows his old friends still care about him, he knows they've been trying to reach out and be there for him, he knows that his loneliness is purely self-inflicted.

He can't fathom the magnitude of the hurt he's caused them, but he saw a glimpse of it with Pence. The four of them weren't just casual acquaintances, they were best friends since childhood, and Roxas threw away fifteen years of friendship for smack and people who happily beat the shit out of him.

He looks up at Axel who's watching him with a curious expression. Under the warm white lights above, Roxas notices things he never noticed before; his black roots, a faded scar on his chin, the dotting of stubble between his eyebrows. His eyes are cat-like, mischievous, and they bear into Roxas with unrivaled intensity almost as if he's trying to look inside him. To aid in his inspection, Roxas admits, "I'm a bad friend."

"Yeah, I was able to glean that from that short interaction. Drug addicts are never good friends. Anyway, eat your cookie. I tried to tell the lady at the bakery you're mentally challenged in hopes she'd give it to me for free but no dice." He shrugs and takes a bite out of his own cookie. "I wanna fatten you up. You'd look cute with some meat on your bones," he says as he chews, "Right now you look like a crackhead."

"Suck me," Roxas mumbles as he unwraps his cookie from the wax paper.

"Huh? What was that, Roxas?" Axel performatively cups his hand behind his ear. "You want me to blow you? You want some sloppy toppy?"

Roxas is unamused. "Are we done here? I'm ready to get the fuck out."

"Yeah, yeah." He starts steering the cart towards the row of checkout lanes. "I doubt you're a bad friend, Roxas. You're probably just not a very good one."

"What's the difference?"

"Intent," Axel says.

Roxas stews on that and takes a small bite of the cookie in his hand. It's still soft and warm and there's an accompanying comfort to the sweetness. He takes another bite.

The cashier ringing up Axel's groceries looks at Roxas in the cart but has minimum-wage indifference. She hands him the bagged groceries and tells them to have a nice day. The asphalt of the parking lot is not nearly as smooth as the grocery store linoleum and Roxas feels like his bones are rattling together during the bumpy ride to where the station wagon is parked.

Back in the car, Roxas pulls his phone out of his pocket to check the time and make sure no one is looking for him

"Do you need to get home, Cinderella?"

"Not yet."

"Well, then you're coming to my house because I can't leave milk and margarine sitting in my trunk for too long."

Roxas doesn't protest.

Axel's apartment is nothing like Roxas expected. It's nicely decorated, with curtains and matching throw pillows and a fake croton plant in the corner. It's clean and bright and there's the faint smell of sandalwood from a candle previously burned. Axel is in the kitchen putting things away as Roxas looks around. For as strange as Axel seems to be, his home is completely normal—almost impersonally so.

Roxas is looking through a bookshelf in the living room when Axel comes up behind him and asks, "Find anything interesting?"

"I didn't know you can read," he says and then turns to face him. "Your place is boring. Where do you keep the corpses?"

"In the walk-in closet," he tells him without missing a beat.

Roxas continues poking around as Axel watches, amused by his blatant childlike nosiness. He picks up a decorative cannister, inspects it, and sets it back down. "There's no way you live here," he concludes.

Axel quirks an eyebrow. "What makes you say that?"

"You have dyed cherry-red hair and tattoos and work at Chili's and drive a car that's older than you."

"And that means I can't have good taste in interior decorating?"

"There is no way you picked any of this out. I don't mean that offensively, it's just very clearly not your style."

Axel sits on the arm of the sofa. "You know my style?"

"I know it's not this," he states matter-of-factly, gesturing towards a wicker basket by the couch with folded up throw blankets inside of it. "Do you have a boyfriend or something? Some real fruitcake who likes HGTV?" Roxas being so close to the truth makes Axel burst into raucous laughter that borders on maniacal. "What's so funny?"

"No, I don't have a boyfriend," he finally says once he has regained composure. "It's just me, myself, and my right hand. You're actually the first person who's been in my apartment in a while. I'm a private person."

Roxas takes a seat next to him on the couch. Unconvinced, he asks, "Are you? You've basically told me your entire life story in the span of a couple weeks."

"That's because I feel like I've known you for years," Axel says. He stares off into the blank screen of the TV in front of them, seeing himself and Roxas faintly in its reflection. He looks down at the real Roxas and smirks. "Maybe we knew each other in a past life."

Roxas snorts. "Yeah, and maybe we wore trench coats and had magic powers and looked up at a heart-shaped moon, too."

Axel softly nudges him with his elbow. "All joking aside, I feel comfortable telling you stuff, and you feel comfortable telling me stuff. It doesn't have to make sense. We're just two lonely souls, ya'know?"

And, Roxas figures, maybe that's all it is. He's lonely and desperate for some kind of connection, something new, something exciting. And regardless of cause, he likes Axel. He feels comfortable around Axel. He doesn't have to hide parts of himself that he hides around others; Axel knows he was abused, Axel knows he's an addict who OD'd on a bathroom floor, Axel knows he's a bit of a shithead. And yet, Axel shows up to his morning meetings and jokes and teases and insists on pushing him around in a shopping cart. As weird as he and the circumstances that surround him are, Axel is just what Roxas needs right now. A distraction.

A friend.

As soon as Axel drops off Roxas, he pulls a cigarette from his visor pack and smokes it down to the filter before he even gets to the intersection Roxas lives off of. He flicks the butt out the window and gets another, hoping a nicotine buzz will calm his racing thoughts. When it doesn't, he wishes more than anything that the car stereo worked so he could at least drown them out with a staticky FM station playing pop hits on repeat. Instead, he's stuck thinking thoughts he doesn't want to think. He's stuck fighting an internal battle between his heart and his consciousness who were once in cahoots but now want different things. Or rather; want the same thing, but one is willing to do anything for it while the other says, 'Leave that boy alone before you hurt him'.

Roxas isn't Ventus. Roxas isn't soft like Ventus, vibrant like Ventus, loving like Ventus.

But that doesn't mean Roxas can't be made to be like Ventus. He's lost in life; damaged, alone, desperate for something. He can be molded.

'You're sick,' his consciousness says, 'Go see a fucking shrink'.

His heart says, 'What's the big deal? What's he got going for him otherwise?'

Axel wishes life was easy. He wishes gran was still here. He needs her now more than ever to call him a little shit and tell him to get his act together. He needs some sort of guidance because without her and without Ven there is nothing saving him from himself.

His phone buzzes in his pocket and at the next red light, he pulls it out.

'Thanks for the cookie,' it says, and the voice his brain reads it in isn't Roxas's. It's Ventus's voice.