Dress

Axel and Roxas have the kind of arguments where chairs and toasters get thrown out of windows and the neighbours call the police. Roxas has got it down to a fine art though; shimmying out the window and down the fire escape just as the knock on the door comes and he can slip out from under Axel's gaze. If there's only one person there, it doesn't count as the type of domestic disturbance that it really is. It's just Axel having a hissy fit. The police always look suspicious, like Axel's knocked whoever over the head with a skillet and was halfway through stuffing them in the freezer when they knocked, but all the magazines and blogs get a hold of is that Axel's got a temper, and Axel's having a constant breakdown, and Axel never likes his furniture.

The next day Roxas has almost the exact same argument with his parents and ends up back at Axel's, picking around the three dining chairs and two electrical appliances sprawled out in the tiny green square of grass framed on all sides by high-rise high-cost apartment blocks. He sits on the fire escape outside Axel's window for two hours, leans back and watches birds pinwheel through the cut of clear blue sky he can see, before Axel finally gets his arse out of bed and opens the window.

"Goddamn," he says, and whistles through his teeth. "It's this kinda shit that makes me happy I'm around for your teenage rebellion phase." He reaches forward to tug at the strap of the dress Roxas is wearing, but Roxas flicks his hand away.

"I'm not a fucking teenager, Axel," he says, and takes the last drag off his cigarette before crushing it into the metal beside him and climbing in over the sill smoothly.

He pins Axel face first into the wall by the open window, hitches the little black dress up around his hips and fucks him there, with no messy sort of preamble like words or apologies or explanations. Axel and Roxas have the kind of violent make-up sex that means they're pretty much always breaking up, teetering on the edge of what is and what isn't what they do. Axel ends up on his back on the floor, stretching out loose muscles like a cat in the honey slats of warm sunshine streaming in on him. Roxas finds his camera where he left it, on the coffee table, and takes about twenty shots of Axel fucked out and smeared with come, eyes hazy and acid-cut green, bare skin, curled fingers.

"The dress is for Halloween," Roxas says. He takes his time scrolling through the shots, examining the play of light and shadow, the taut edge of colour. The dress was the only thing in his wardrobe this morning when his father started bitching him out over his cereal, so the dress was the thing he grabbed before climbing out his bedroom window and climbing down the trellis outside.

Roxas, since he met Axel, spends a lot of his time climbing in and out of windows.

Axel grins, raises one hand over his eyes to shield them from the sunlight. Roxas takes another five shots, the shutter whirling. "Man, you need to start doing your own laundry," Axel says. Roxas hums to himself, adjusts the zoom.

Two weeks later, the morning after Halloween, Axel goes out for coffee and comes back with the tabloids. There's three pictures, one from the back, cut off just under his arse and Axel's arm around his shoulders hiding the square set of his body, and two half shoddy facial shots, a partially blurred mess of turning facial features and the gaudy neon makeup Naminé helped him slop on. It's enough for the 'journalists' to declare him a P.Y.T and wonder more about where Axel managed to pick her up than why she doesn't appear to be wearing a Halloween costume when everyone else is.

"See, they agree with me," Axel says. "Pretty pretty." He mouths and nips at Roxas' cheekbone until Roxas pushes him away, careful to rescue his coffee from Axel's hand before it gets out of reach.

He chews at the split in his lip where Axel bit the thick turquoise lipstick off his mouth the night before, folding and creasing the magazine page until he can just see the photos, not the text. After that it takes him less than a minute to decide that he takes much better photos of Axel, anyway, and he discards the magazine somewhere across Axel's bedroom floor like the garbage it is.