He hated perfect things. Perfect, pure, pristine, pretty things. People wondered why he liked fire so much, if fire, to him, was the prettiest thing of all. But it was not perfect and pure and pristine. It was dangerous, sneaky, tempting.
Fire wasn't his only obsession, though. In fact, it was more a means for him to accomplish his true goal. Those perfect, pure, pristine, pretty things; he loved breaking them. Ruining them. Tainting them. He would need all his fingers and toes to count how many of those pretty little things he had broken.
It all started with this girl, this redhead. He tried to break her, but he didn't know how, he had no idea the workings of ruination as he did now. He'd failed, and thus moved on, moved up.
There was this bubbly girl, happy, a pathetic romantic named Selphie, the eternal second banana to that cursed redhead. After he'd finished with her, she would laugh at the idea of skinning a Moogle and wearing its skin; no one ever knew if she was really joking or not.
The next was this standoffish girl, a secretive girl who called herself Paine. He got to her and suddenly she was spilling her secrets left and right, and once he'd proven he didn't care she became an isolated misanthrope.
Somehow her friends didn't learn from this lesson. He moved on to Rikku, a peppy little sexy thing that didn't seem worth breaking at first, but as soon as he got her all hot and bothered he decided it wouldn't be too out of his way. He heard she became a kleptomaniac.
Then was the leader of the "YuRiPa" entourage, Yuna. An elegant, conservative young woman, afterwards he had her dressing in revealing low-cut tops and itty-bitty short shorts, apparently now into shooting stuff and flaunting what she had -- he'd seen it all, so it didn't matter to her anymore.
And, Tifa. Wonderful, gorgeous, hot Tifa. She was quite the handful at first, but her persistent "dilly-dally, shilly-shally" made him equally so, determined to drain that optimism out of her. She wore all black now and spent most of her days moping about some guy, Cirrus or Stratus or something.
Yuffie had always been a little bit off, honestly. He tempted her in and now she was addicted to this strange stuff called Materia. So that's what the kids were calling it nowadays.
That flower girl, though, Aerith? She was an absolute delight. A serene flower girl with the slightest feel of mystery about her, she perhaps shattered the most beautifully. She ran herself through with a blade apparently belonging to some guy from her past. He was pretty sure that didn't count as murder, right?
Olette came after that. A sunshiny scholar, now she was failing most of her classes pining over some boy whose name she couldn't even remember, eyes eternally fixed on a shining green crystal that seemed to be grafted to her person. He almost went for Larxene following Olette, but quickly discovered that she was way too psycho and thus impossible to taint.
And then there was Xion, a cutie, if a bit quiet. He lured her in with promises of best-friendship and ice cream, and now she was unsure of even her own gender, sometimes saying she was some kid named Sora and sometimes not even acknowledging herself as "he" or "she". Only an "it"; a puppet.
Naminé followed Xion, and so far, the little artist was his favorite. She was quiet, shy, kind of an enigma, and a complete sweetheart. She stopped coming to school after he got done with her, and soon after was admitted to the closest asylum. All she ever did in her cell was draw pictures.
Now he had come full-circle. He knew who his next would be, and it was a certain pretty little redhead who'd evaded him so long ago. She'd not changed a bit, serene and sweet one minute and telling him to go fornicate with himself the next, only not in those words. Though she talked tough, she was ultimately completely pure, perhaps even more so than Naminé had been. She was the most difficult task he had undertaken. She still adamantly refused him until he held a lighter under her throat and told her she had until it burned through the bottom of her mouth to change her mind. She actually resisted for a while after that until the pain was too much to handle and she was sobbing from the seared, raw wound. Full of phrases like Fine-fine-I'll-go-with-you and You're-a-fucking-psychopath and other not-so-nice profanities, but he didn't really care. After he had gotten her in bed and thoroughly flayed that innocence from the inside out, she was never the same, and afterwards, he never saw her again. Most people assumed suicide, but what did he care?
He finally got to break his little princess.