Notes: Like pretty much everything else I've been trying to update lately, this took a really long time. But, I'm finished with school till fall and that means it's officially the season of fanfic productivity! Particularly since the job market's looking pretty sad right now.

Anyway, as of this part we are more than halfway through this fic! It's another dismal one, dedicated in part to all of us who have to try a little harder to get up in the morning, but after this there are only three more failures before the life that works out for our fucked up protagonists. So the happy ending is coming into sight!

As always, I hope you enjoy (even if unhappiness abounds) and reviews are love.

Disclaimer: The song When it Rains belongs to Paramore. I'm just borrowing some lyrics and its title because they've got the right idea.

V. When it Rains

And when it rains on this side of town it touches everything

Just say it again and mean it

We don't miss a thing

You made yourself a bed at the bottom of the blackest hole

And convinced yourself that it's not the reason you don't see the sun anymore

After a certain age, mental illness just stops being interesting.

Axel remembers a time when he was almost proud of how crazy he was, when he chased Lorazepam with whiskey and got so fucked up on a regular basis that he'd sit in the shower with all his clothes on at four in the morning and laugh so hard he might as well have been crying. When he'd try anything just to feel something for a little while, something that wasn't not-happiness and not-sadness and not-anger. It had been frustrating, infuriating, exhausting. A living hell he'd put himself through every single day because he hadn't yet grown up enough to deal with his own flaws.

But finally, after years of knocking himself down and throwing months of his life away to residential psychiatric facilities that took his shoelaces and gave him pills in little plastic cups, that all faded away. He lost his slightly rabid, frantic edge. He stopped responding to depression with violent stupidity, stopped pretending periods of hypomania during which he stayed up all night doing stupid shit, slept for three hours, rinse and repeat, for weeks at a time were normal. He grew up.

He grew up and took the right pills in the right order and the right dose. He finished school and got a job and put together a life he could handle. And sometimes there were bad days, days when something as simple getting out of bed felt like climbing Mount fucking Everest, but he did it anyway because that's what he had to do. Eight hours of work? Try a half-hour sixteen times in a row.

Axel doesn't try to pretend this is ideal. He won't lie - he's still a little fucked up, more than a little on the bad days, and things are harder for him than they are for most people. But he's happy enough, most of the time, because depressed isn't the same as sad, and when he doesn't feel quite up to par, he just sighs and shakes his head and thinks well, here we go again.

And he's pretty okay with all of this, feeling pretty good about his life, until he meets Roxas.

They meet in a bar and, when he sees him, Axel could have sworn the kid, all blonde hair and blue eyes and soft white skin, wasn't old enough to be in there at all.

He watches him for awhile from a distance, sitting with Demyx at a table and glancing over every few minutes to check out the skinny kid leaning against the bar, drinking too fast and laughing too loud. He watches him first because the kid's fucking beautiful, but later because Axel recognises the guarded brittleness in his stance, the way his hand is just a little too still around the glass. He reminds Axel of people he'd known back when he was in and out of BHC, the kids who sit around and trade stories about why they've been committed, just because there's nothing better to talk about when your world's gone white and dull and empty.

Axel is a solid 95% sure the kid's spent time in psychiatric care by the time that blue-blue gaze turns on him and he finds himself being pulled into intoxicated conversation with the person who might have been the boy of his dreams had he not been so obviously self-destructive and on the brink of total collapse.

What's your name? The booze on the kid's breath is enough to knock a weaker man down, but Axel's had plenty of experience with that sort of thing and doesn't even flinch.

Axel. He smiles and leans closer, even though he already knows it's doomed. Yours?

Roxas.

Roxas' smile is like a spotlight from heaven and Axel tries as hard as he can to believe that there could be more to them than one night because, even if they couldn't have a life-long relationship or some such shit, it'd be nice to make it a few weeks with someone you're fascinated by. But he already knows better, with only half a dozen words exchanged between them. Roxas is what Axel was, a few years back, running too hard and trying to destroy himself at every turn because it can be so incredibly beautiful to sit back and watch your life burn.

Axel meets his gaze and sees the hardened secrecy and the dullness mostly hidden by the gleam of intoxication, and he knows exactly where this will go. Roxas will drink a little more on Axel's tab, offer Axel some of the pills he's got tucked in his pocket, or his bag, pull out a cigarette or two and laugh a lot, and then they'll leave together. They'll drive for awhile, sobering up, and then go back to Axel's apartment and have a good fuck. It'll feel right, like the first time with the love of your life is supposed to feel, and they'll have a perfect, bittersweet conversation in the early hours of the morning before falling asleep in each other's arms.

And, when he wakes up, Roxas will be gone because that's what kids like him do. Axel knows. He did it, too.

It's not worth the heartache.

So he shakes his head and smiles a little, knowing that it's the sort of smile novelists write about - a genuinely sad smile - and sets down his empty glass.

I'm sorry.

And he walks away.