Claire felt a pang of remorse as she watched Toby leave, but it wasn't a big pang, more of an insignificant twitch. It was wrong to lead him on, yes, but she didn't expect him to actually help in any way and she'd really just wanted to get him out of the flat. He was a sweet guy deep down, and in the grand scheme of dicks, idiots and twats he wasn't so bad, but he was still annoying and Claire had a headache.

Pingu quietly locked the door and moved nervously around to sit in the chair opposite the sofa, cradling his coffee cup as though he was worried he might spill it. His thumbs were still bandaged and splinted and carrying anything required intense concentration and Claire watched Pingu with sympathy. She didn't understand why he chose to hang out with Toby or work with Nathan, but maybe he just didn't know what else was out there for him. It must be hard to be so socially awkward and not know how to stand up for yourself, she supposed, but Pingu should learn to be more assertive. The pity she felt so often in his presence could get annoying.

"Thanks, Pingu," she told him, once he'd put down the coffee and was sitting comfortably and he nodded but didn't look at her. "For letting me crash here and all. It'll only be for a day or two."

"It's fine," Pingu said in his usual quiet voice. "Stay as long as you need."

His voice was just on the wrong side of too soft for Claire but maybe that was just because she'd gotten used to living with Jones' racket. It was odd to be in a flat so quiet and still, but at least there was enough electronic gadgetry and piles of cables to make her feel at home. Her second night at the House of Jones she'd walked in to find Dan spooling extension cords around his forearms while Jones sat on the floor attacking some sort of battery pack with a screwdriver and talking about the different sounds caused by rough joint circuits compared to double clipped spacers, while the most irritating techno played from the corner. Dan had been nodding and grunting in response and Claire had given him a sympathetic look because Dan hated having to listen to mindless idiot drivel, but he'd just glared back at her and kept spooling cable like it was his favourite job. It'd been confusing but she'd thought Dan was pretending to enjoy himself out of spite. Turned out she was wrong.

Just as she was starting to enjoy the silence of Pingu's flat a beat started up somewhere in the building, just loud enough to be annoying, and Claire huffed, getting to her feet and pacing around the small space.

"God, I hate this city."

Pingu looked surprised, and then embarrassed, like it was a personal insult and he was responsible to the behaviour of all of London and it made Claire want to throttle him and tell him to stop being so self-absorbed all the time.

"You know what I mean," she argued. "Dan was right when he said we'd been taken over by idiots. No one cares about anyone else, they're all out to grab some cheap fame rather than working for things that really matter! You can't walk down the high street without having to dodge trendy twats on stupid bikes and wannabe indie rockstars carrying guitars they don't know how to play! And now it turns out Dan's the king of the idiots and is secretly in love with one of them!"

She wanted Pingu to say something back so that she could keep yelling but he was Pingu, so he didn't. Instead he sat there looking nervous, wiping the sweat from his palms onto his tracksuit pants and wincing because he kept bumping his thumbs.

"And you're just as bad, Pingu," Claire told him, hating herself as she did it but unable to control the need to just purge herself of every frustrated feeling and thought that had built up over the last three months. "You put up with all this rubbish and keep propping up idiots like Barley when you could be out there in the real world, getting a proper job, for Christ sake!"

"Is that," Pingu stuttered, staring hard at his coffee cup. "Is that why you're angry at Dan? Because you didn't know about him and Jones before Jonatton went and printed it?"

"I-" Claire sat down with a thump, her anger gone so fast she felt dizzy. "I found out the day before. From Jonatton. His mystery 'source' is me. But I didn't mean to... I didn't want to..."

Pingu nodded, his face going thoughtful as he pressed his lips together the way he did when he was trying to figure out how to turn Barley's random pieces of footage into something that Nathan would approve of but that Pingu would be able to put up on the internet without feeling that he was the worst editor in the world.

Pingu could actually look quite attractive, a voice in Claire's head told her, if he made that face more often, rather than the look of extreme anxiety that he usually wore.

"But the photos are yours?"

"Yeah," Claire whispered, as Pingu's soft manner began to rub off on her. "But I didn't know any of that stuff about his age or his name or how long he and Dan had been going at it. They could have told me when I moved in, really, that would have been polite."

She took a sip of her cold tea so stop herself from yelling again and Pingu mirrored her with his coffee.

"But they were sharing a bedroom already," he pointed out, still looking down. "And they do act pretty much like a couple. It's not that much of stretch to think that maybe they're... lovers."

He blushed as he said the word and Claire tried not smile at the sweetness of Pingu's language.

"It couldn't have been that obvious if I'm not the only person to have missed it. I had ten people stop me in the street on my way here to ask me about it. They think it's mad, like Dan's some sort of dominatrix and Jones is his pet! They were calling Jones Choir Boy. It was messed up."

"People don't tend to notice other people unless it's pushed in front of them," was all Pingu said.

"That's what I was saying! No one around here gets it, they're all so wrapped up in their own little worlds!"

"Yeah... I-"

"You know I thought it'd be Dan who went mental over this, but it was Jones who freaked out. Which is ridiculous, right? I mean, even if people have started calling him the Choir Boy, it's just an offshoot of Dan's humiliation. And why would he even want to hide the fact that he's bisexual. I mean, it's not like he's actually gay. He was quick to set me straight about that."

Claire was still bristling from that dressing down. She was up with her gay terminology and being lectured by someone like Jones was irritating, even though she did know her opinion came second to his understanding of himself. It was just hard because talking to Dan or Jones individually was frustrating enough. And trying to talk to Dan and Jones together was bloody infuriating, especially now that she could see the ways that they used one another's presence to avoid confrontation and social interaction in general.

"Did you... did you know lots of gay people then? Growing up?" Pingu asked, sounding anxious again and Claire frowned.

"What? No, not really. But our parents raised us to be compassionate. And liberal thinkers. And I don't see-"

"Well, Jones got beaten up a lot in school for looking a bit like a girl."

"Oh."

"And the whole DJ Jones thing was never that much of a secret, I thought, with the name and the age and all. It's just that most of the people we went went to school with have moved or forgotten, or smoking crack, so no one really remembers that he has another name. Same as me. There's new prats to put up with now. I don't know if one's worse than the other."

Claire shut her mouth and stared incredulously. She'd never heard Pingu talk this much, not even about video games, and it was strange. He actually sounded quite intelligent. And he knew Jones.

"You... you know Jones?" she asked, hating that she sounded so nosey but unable to help her curiosity.

"Mm-hm," Pingu replied.

He checked his coffee cup, saw it was empty and put it back on the coffee table, fidgeting as though he couldn't decide whether to run and hide in the kitchen under the premise of making more or staying put and making the most of talking to someone who probably wasn't going to pull a prank on him that would end with a trip to A&E. It seemed like a tough choice but eventually he put his hands carefully in his lap and started talking again and Claire smoothed her features into her earnest listing look.

"Jones was a few years below me at school but we got along. He kipped on my couch a bit after he left his mum but then I lost my lease and had to move in with my parents again for a bit so he moved on. He didn't talk much, and I don't talk much. He's pretty rubbish at video games too, so..."

"Moved on where?" Claire asked, trying not to sound like she was doing an interview.

She didn't want Pingu to freak out and stop talking. He had a nice sounding voice actually, once you got used to the fact that you had to lean in to hear him properly.

"You know that bus shelter at the end of the street? Near the newsagent?"

"He was homeless?"

Pingu thought about it a moment and then nodded, like it was a fairly straight-forward concept to grasp.

"Yeah."

"But-" Claire fought against the tightness in her throat. But helping the homeless is my Cause! her brain screamed at her, and she felt her face begin to flush in the way it always did when her emotions started to get out of hand. "My god! Why did I not know any of this?"

Pingu frowned again and cocked his head to one side and Claire shuffled on the couch, uncomfortable with how he was looking at her. She didn't care about people staring at her body, that happened a lot and she was not above using her breasts to make idiot men do what she needed, because if they were going to be distracted by mammary glands they deserved what they got, but Pingu was staring at her like he was trying to rearrange the facts he knew about her and she felt like she'd just come up short.

When Pingu came around to sit next to her on the sofa, shoulders hunched and hands still held protectively in front of himself, Claire didn't think about how he was probably just looking to feel her up like every other man who sat next to her was. All she could think of was how Pingu looked quite small and a bit vulnerable, and how Jones had looked the same way when he'd sat next to Dan, and how Dan had kissed him on the temple like loving someone enough to be affectionate in front of others was the easiest thing in the world if you wanted to badly enough.

"It's ok, Claire," Pingu told her quietly, still not actually close enough to be invading her space, and Claire sniffed and failed to hold back the feeling that she was about to cry. "You haven't been here that long and you've been... busy?"

"I've been a self-absorbed twat, you mean."

Pingu gave a little laugh, and Claire looked up in time to see him smile.

"A bit. Nathan does that to people though. He's such a dickhead he makes everyone around him short tempered... and short sighted."

"Except you," Claire pointed out, shuffling herself a little closer.

"Well, well, um," Pingu stuttered and Claire felt another pang of sympathy when he looked down at his bandaged hands. "I don't think I'm a great example of how to deal with Barley."

"Well, maybe," she smiled, leaning her shoulder against Pingu's until he smiled too. But the feeling of happiness was short-lived. "I've really screwed things up with Dan and Jones haven't I?" she sighed, putting her head on Pingu's shoulder. "Should I be calling him Jones? Or Thomas? Or Tom? What do his friends call him? Not that he'd consider me a friend."

She was rambling but Pingu let out a happy noise that was almost a laugh and that stopped her.

"What?"

"Jones. I just remembered. He used to say that he and I should be out tracking down Dick."

"What?" Claire sat up and turned to face Pingu, who was smiling now, his lips twitching like he was trying not to laugh. "Why?"

"Well," Pingu's voice cracked as he tried to talk and Claire found herself grinning right along with him, simply because Pingu laughing was infectious and she'd never really heard it before. Not like this. "His name's Tom, and mine's Harry. He thought we should find a guy named Dick and start a band. But he used to say it like we were trying to, you know, do something else. It was funny."

He gave that snuffly sort of laugh again, like he was embarrassed that he still found Jones' joke so funny and Claire realised that Pingu looked really sweet when he laughed, even when he was covering his mouth and closing his eyes. He looked... sweet.

"That sounds like Jones," she said quietly and Pingu nodded, pulling himself together and even glancing at her face.

"What does Dan call him?" he asked, suddenly serious again.

"He calls him Jones as far as I know. In front of me at least."

Claire frowned but Pingu nodded, and looked up at her again.

"Then I think we should keep calling him Jones," he said simply. "If he wanted to be called Tom we'd probably know about it."

Claire agreed but it was hard to concentrate on what was being said. She'd realised how close she was to Pingu again, and that the way he was holding her gaze made her feel a bit drunk. She moved her head forward a bit more, until their noses were almost touching and she could hear Pingu's nervous breathing.

"And what about you? What can I call you?"

"Huh?" Pingu murmured, his eyes almost shut and his body beginning to shake.

"Can I call you Harry?"

She closed the space between them and let her lips push against his, taking his bottom lips between her two and sucking it until he opened his mouth and she could deepen the kiss. Pingu, Harry, whoever he wanted to be called, made a surprised noise into her mouth which quickly turned into a moan when Claire pushed her fingers through his hair and ran her nails across his scalp and Claire smiled, pulling back to look at him before diving in for another kiss.

She didn't know why she was doing it, other than that it had felt like the right thing to do just now, and while it was a bit weird to be kissing Pingu of all people, that didn't mean she was going to stop.

"Harry," he gasped when she pulled back for another breath. "You can call me Harry. Please."

Claire smiled. She could see that Pingu - no, Harry, she corrected herself - was hard, his track pants did nothing to hide it, and wondered how frustrated he must be, with both hands bandaged and no one around to help him out.

She pushed against his erection with her hand and felt a shiver go through her when he moaned her name.

There was a lot of things she needed to sort out and the next few days were going to be hard and emotional, and probably humiliating, but right now she needed to get rid of the tension that had built up over the past two weeks and the stress of the last few months. It was only reasonable.

She pulled Pingu - Harry - to his feet, smiling again at how strange the name sounded in her head. People around here had too many secrets, and tomorrow she'd sort that, but not just now.

"Come on, Harry," she said, kissing him until he started to make high pitched whimpering noises through his nose. "Show us your bedroom. Time for you and I to get properly acquainted, don't you think?"