[RATED M FOR LANGUAGE, ADULT THEMES & VIOLENCE.]
This steadily gets more violent by chapter so watch out.
& this is currently in progress.

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Namine met Marluxia when she was fifteen. At that time, she had just escaped from the high-class lifestyle she had always lived and begun living what her parents warned her as the "street life." At fifteen, she was already experiencing the horrors of being an adult with nowhere to live. At fifteen, she felt like thirty, with the eyes to prove it.

Marluxia was twenty and his story is much more complicated. After two years of formal college education, he dropped out and got himself involved in the drug business but never got his hands dirtied with the blood of someone else. For that, there was always Axel. He was merely the schemer, the architect behind the killings.

Both were from prestigious families. Had they reluctantly given in to their parents' demands, they would have been living luxuriously, indulging in their parents' wealth but both chose to drop out of the life their parents' had planned for them although for different reasons.

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For Namine, it started with her love of art and things of aesthetic value. From the beginning, she knew she was different. She saw things differently from her parents and despite her parents' attempts to crush her moralities in order to toughen her up for the business world, this one thing did not change about her.

Her parents owned several companies, rights to a couple of commonly used products and invested wisely in stocks and shares. Throughout her entire life, she would only see her parents maybe a couple of times a year due to the fact that their work took them away from home and often away from Marseilles where she lived. In the future, she was to be expected to take their place in the business world. Her parents explicitly made sure that would happen. With every day tutors, renowned teachers, training her in preparation for her to claim their industries, the only thing she really learned in the end was that she was never meant to be a corporate manager.

She knew her calling in life was to become an artist, but her parents' strongly rejected her dream, her passion. "You'll never be able to live off with such a meager salary," her mother had said in scornful tones, "You are our only child and a child is expected to obey their parents' wishes. You are to run our business someday. Put all these silly dreams aside."

When it became clear that her parents' adamant nature propelled them to support her dream of becoming an artist, she ran away to Paris with the money she stole from her parents' back. At first, it was enough to pay for the shabby apartment she rented and enough food to last for a while, but once the money ran out, she was forced to live in the streets, relying on passerby to pay for the few paintings she had to show during the day. So far, few had bought them and when they did, it was only out of pity and the money was only enough to last for a couple of days. After weeks of living this hostile lifestyle, she was beginning to understand what her mother said about an artist having a meager salary.

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For Marluxia, his rebellion from his lifestyle "officially" started when he was sixteen, old enough to realize life was much more than stark business suits and scouring the dictionary for impressive vocabulary meant to impress people – just to make a living. Unfortunately, for his parents, this was their life. They believed that intelligence equaled to success in life and to live without it, was to live a life of a fool.

Understandably, they trained their children to think this way as well – that all of life's problems could be solved with logic and understanding. Marluxia couldn't remember the last time his parents' had taken him and his brother out for something recreational like a visit to a park or the movies. Now, whenever he tried to think of something fun he had done in his childhood, he couldn't think of one instance. For him, it had always been textbooks, technical terms drilled into his brain by his parents' instruction and constant streams of tutors and personal teachers.

Although his brother embraced this kind of lifestyle without a complaint, he had always rejected it deeply in the inside but never did anything to betray his true emotions until he was sixteen. At sixteen, tired of living as his parents' guinea pig, he dyed his once red-brown hair, a shocking shade of pink that directly went against the way his parents' raised him.

At first, his parents didn't know what to say of his sudden, rash action. They went to psychologists, suggested pills for him to take for his "teen angst" and went to every source of help that they could find. Marluxia would never forget the time how his mom tried to wash the pink dye off his hair but failing to do so. Also, he would never forget the rush of adrenaline in his veins when she stepped out of the barbershop, with hair that turned heads and made him stand out in a crowd of people. It was his way of telling others that he was different from his stiff-necked family members.

The second act of rebellion was the drugs. Marluxia remembered the first whiff of marijuana a student offered him on school campus – the rush of high and then low. He remembered buying bags and bags of these stuff and getting stoked at home, his mind a cloudy haze and his surroundings a blur. It wasn't long until he became addicted and his parents quickly rushed him into rehabilitation where he humored all the facilitators, while secretly he planned his next smoke, his next high when he got out.

The third act of rebellion was the sex. He didn't have it as often as Axel, but once he did, he liked to take control of the one he was overpowering. He liked to watch their faces crumble once they realized he wasn't the fine gentleman he had portrayed himself to be, their hearts broken once he left them. The last person he had sex with was only fourteen while he was eighteen -- and even though he had gotten her pregnant, he refused to help her out once she confessed to him. Three days later, she killed herself and her parents who were unaware of their daughter's previous relationship, found out soon afterward and blamed him for their daughter's death. It caused quite a scandal within his family for some time [much arguing had broken out] but like the hair dying and the drugs, his parents were once again, powerless against his actions.

After that, he made his rebellious nature known and his parents became unable to stop him. Their last attempt to "moralize" him was sending him to a prestigious private school where they hoped that the pressure of college would lead him away from the lifestyle he had chosen to get himself into. In the end, even this attempt proved futile. He dropped out of college two years after being admitted and disconnected from his family all together. It turned out that they were the fools in the end – for trying to mold him into the person he could not be.

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The circumstances in which Namine met Marluxia were peculiar. Out of no where, after many weeks of living on the streets and coming to think that life wasn't going to get any better for her, Marluxia appeared and offered her a home, a shelter. He saw her as a potential tool to use in his next scheme – one that involved the leaders of the mafia he was connected to, the notorious Organization. Namine saw it as an opportunity to escape from the streets. She was so desperate for a way to get herself back on track again, she might have accepted any kind of help even if it was from a stranger.

At first, Marluxia was kind to her. It was this kind personality that she fell in love with after many weeks of living on the streets. She remembered spending time with him, growing roses in small gardening pots they placed on the windowsill. By and by, the roses would bloom and she would chart their progress with the sketchbook he bought for her. Every day, she would draw a new picture of the roses until she reached the very last page of the sketchbook. On this last page, the roses had blossomed into fully-grown beauties, their petals a dusty shade of red – the type of red that wasn't the color of lipstick but rather the color of worn carpet, a type of red that had a beauty of its own.

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The first time, Marluxia kissed Namine, he was high off a mixture of crack, marijuana and alcohol. Namine was fully aware of Marluxia's addiction to drugs, but it never bothered her before – until now. She wrenched herself free of those drugged lips. Didn't he know that he was too old for her? That the age difference from fifteen and twenty wasn't something that you'll brag about? She watched him stagger towards her, cobalt blue eyes dilating into black, feverish and unfocused. When he stumbled and snagged his toe on one of the rattraps he had placed earlier on the corner of the room, Namine quickly hurried to remove it from his bruising large toe. He passed out while she was trying to remove it, probably unaware of what had just happened.

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The second time he kissed her he wasn't drugged or drunk. He was frustrated with how she was trying to evade him for the past few days after the incident. While she was watering the flowers they kept on the windowsill, he fiercely spun her around and locked his lips with hers. She had tried to pull away, but he had one hand clamped around her jaw, pulling her towards him. When it became clear that resisting was futile, she stopped trying to pull away and let his lips slowly pass over hers over and over again, tracing the skin around her mouth, stopping only to kiss some other part so that he made sure it wasn't missed.

When he pulled away, he cradled her head with his hands and looked at her with cold eyes. "I hope you're still not mad at me because you and I are going to be here for a long time. You're going to have to get used to it. Are you satisfied now? You made me kiss you." He released his hold on her head. "I thought that is what you wanted."

She immediately twisted her head away from him, turning red. She focused her attention on watering the flowers although the can was empty and the soil in the pot was already soaked. She only dared to look back when she heard Marluxia walk away from her and begin lighting a bong with the marijuana he stuffed in it, apparently wanting to forget what had happened.

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The third time he kissed her, he wasn't drugged or drunk. He wasn't frustrated either. It had blossomed out of pure need. He had just come home late at night, waking her up with the slam of the door. She heard the fridge opening, the clink of a bottle being opened and the sigh that followed after he had taken a great swallow. A few seconds later, he had entered her room, pulling the blanket down to reveal her already open eyes and mouth. He appraised her for about ten seconds or so before he bent down to brush his lips to her own. Their lips were only joined by the thinnest of flesh and skin, but she allowed him to kiss her this time. She rose up from her sheets like a pale ghost to press her hand against his that was just lying not too far away from him.

Later, he threw away the blanket to the floor and began pressing his lips harder against hers, arm pressed against to her back, lifting the fabric of her shirt. Choking for breath, she pushed him away.

"What are you doing?"

Marluxia swept her pale blond hair away from her cheeks, the threads of her hair still clinging to his fingers. "I thought that's what you wanted."

"N-no," she stammered, backing away from him. He moved in closer, clamping a hand on her arm. "I don't think I'm ready for all of this –"

"Well, that's a problem," he said, moving impossibly close, close enough for their faces to touch. His lips grazed the soft inside of her ear. "Because I'm ready for all of this."

"Please," she begged, trying to free herself away from his grasp. Her hands only managed to pry one finger free. "Stop."

His smile was like a blade slicing through the darkness, illuminated by the glow of city lights outside her window. "That's too bad," he drawled, unzipping his pants, dropping them to the floor. "Because it's already happening."

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The next day she was cold, the type of cold that needed the warmth of another body to satisfy. She curled closer towards Marluxia, head resting on the crook of his arm. He had left purple and blue bruises on her arms last night, bruises that he had apologized for over and over again, but they will heal. Bruises always healed. Right?

In the beginning, she had been agitated, trying every bit of effort to resist him, but once she tired herself out by trying to remove those hands locked onto her arms to keep her from moving, she relinquished herself. Now, she touched the parts of her skin where it swelled. If she hadn't been so resistant, she wouldn't have gotten these bruises in the first place.

She tried to fall back to sleep, listening to the steady sound of Marluxia's breathing as a way to lull herself back asleep. The clock ticked nearby, telling her of the minutes that had passed since she woke up. Finally, unable to lie around any longer, she got up, dressed and made her way to the kitchen to get herself something to eat.

After she had eaten her cereal, she went to water the roses as part of her daily routine. When she bent down to tip the water can towards the flowerpots, she made a shocking discovery.

The roses had begun to wither.