A/N: Written during a rolling fever and Emilie Autumn's Opheliac album on repeat. I can't promise consistency or even purpose. One conversation based entirely from a thread between Marluxia and Naminé in said RP.
Needless to say, this is a companion of sorts to west side story. You can read it without it, if you want, but know it's the same universe: mafia Sicily, four families (Licata, Machiavelo, Verquera, and Giordiano), the last of which holds our hero and heroine for this story.
Basic Italian scattered throughout; translations provided at the end, as before. Review if you like; it's fun!
inwards
It starts again when she wanders the streets, unusually restless. She looks a little worse for the wear while she wanders the Sicilian streets, pale and small and very much afraid. She weaves in and out of alleyways, dodging puddles and tiptoeing past broken glass. If she is seen she disappears with a twirl of white skirts and pale hair. If anyone cares to see her before she is gone, they see eyes red with tears, heart heavy with knowledge.
She has received another mission from the Don, one that all who call themselves Giordiano must complete. It stretches from the under-bosses to the greedy little rats. She did not think much of it at first; the mission was simple and straightforward: to spy upon the Machiavelos, an ancient family tied deep into la vita della mafia, when she came to the list of known members.
Her pretty boy Roxas, the boy she kissed in the alley who tasted of gelato and had bright blue eyes, is not Giordiano, as she had feared. He's one of them, a Machiavelo.
She knows now that she has little to no chance of ever seeing him again, much the less on friendly terms. If she is seen with him then she is a traditore, worse than a rat, worse than anything: a traitor.
And she will be punished by one of the many assassins in the Giordiano family: a man simply known as Hook, fond of impalement during his dock executions; or Il Duce, a fallen nobleman who cut traitors' hearts from their chests (or so the stories say); or the Angel of Death, a hooded man with a scythe rivaling the Reaper's, who always painted pictures on the walls with his victims' blood―
Her phone vibrates silently in a back pocket in her skirt to break her train of thought. She fishes it out, a sleek silver thing hardly bigger than a colored pastel stick.
The caller ID gives her the name Marluxia. He's a Giordiano caporegime who has often associated himself with her lately. Her parents say she should find this very flattering.
She simply finds it strange that someone so important should worry about her, when she's prided herself on almost never being noticed.
"Hello?" she asks as she pulls the phone open, making her voice quiet so as not to attract attention.
Marluxia's voice is lazy poison in her ear. "The don told me you weren't with your parents, Naminé." (She loathes the way he says her name: like she's a princess, like she's being announced on a stage.) "Where are you running off to now?"
"The basilica," she says quietly into the receiver. She does not tell him which one, which should buy her some time if he decides to hunt for her. "The stained glass is pretty to draw."
"It would be lovely to have more drawings on these walls," he says, his voice alarmingly agreeable.
"I'll do my best," she says very quickly, hoping that he thinks she's busy.
He only laughs, a sound which sends shivers down her spine. "What walls am I talking about?"
She's stunned silent. She hardly dares to breathe.
She can hear him smirking. "Have you any idea of my whereabouts, Naminé?"
(She remembers the don's face in shadows after the mission, a question from him for her.
Do you wish to know where Marluxia is, my dear?
Thank you, but…no, sir, she had said.)
She said it then and she says it now: "No, I don't."
She could hear him sighing, disappointed, on the other end. She strives to correct it. She cannot have a caporegime upset with her, lest he take out his frustration on her family.
"I'll get the drawings to you, if you want them," she offers, hardly realizing what she's done before she's done speaking. She lets out a shaky sigh, defeated, and then whispers, deathly silent: "I promise."
"I do want them," he says simply. And then, almost cryptically, he adds: "May the word of mouth lead you here."
She bites her lip nervously and then chokes out a reply: "I'll listen carefully, Marluxia."
"Good girl," he commends, before hanging up over the sounds of gunfire. She can't believe he'd be so confident to call when a lotta di fuoca is starting. She has never been in one herself and she hopes never to be: the bullets, the blood, the nightmares that are borne of both.
She tries not to think of it, and when she sees the basilica she is so happy, so relieved to find a place to call sanctuary. He cannot touch her here, nothing can touch her here in this holy place where her fearsome God is watching.
She opens her sketchpad and begins to work feverishly, the stained glass swimming before her. Her fingertips become stained with colored pastel and 2B pencil lead, and in the corners she is careful to sign her name indescribably small, for it is not her name which matters: it's the glass on the paper, that's the only thing that will ever matter.
---
One of the altar boys, the younger one who calls himself Peter, comes up behind her when she's drawing. He keeps her company after midnight mass and the customary babbling of the devil is over, as he calls it.
He keeps the candles brightly lit for her, and she can't help but notice he looks somewhat like Roxas: both of them have blond hair, blue eyes, both are a little taller than she is. But he's not Roxas, he never will be; Roxas' danger lay in his eyes and his lack of a smile while Peter is so bright-eyed and quick to smile.
In spite of everything he makes her laugh and says she's a good artist, and she gives him one of her drawings, depicting the stained glass of the birth of the Messiah, adoring parents and wise men and animals surrounding the Christ child.
"There's no devil on it," she says with a smile. "So it's for you."
She also knows that James Byron, a mutual friend of theirs (another Giordiano), attends the first mass in the morning, so she tears out another, and says it's for a present and could Peter please give it to him?
He says he will, gives her a kiss on the cheek goodbye. She whispers arrivederci amico, and he disappears behind the altar after.
---
It is only when Peter's bright laughter is not around her that she hears the rumors running rampant from pew to pew.
Did you hear, did you hear?
There has been a massacre in a slum just outside Machiavelo territory, nearby another basilica, named for the Holy Family. It's hardly fitting to call such a heartless string of murders a multiple homicide, says one lumpy-faced woman she presses for details, and why should you be worrying about this anyway, my dear? Little girls like you should be asleep.
"I'm older than I look, signora," Naminé lies, knowing it's a sin to break a commandment in her Father's house. She thanks her informant, useless as she was, and begins to think.
May the word of mouth lead you here is what Marluxia had told her.
She knows it's dangerous, but if he requires her presence, then she must do what she is ordered to. For the sake of her blood family, and for the sake of her more important family, for the people who control whether she lives or dies, happily or unhappily, forever or just for one more day.
The candlelight ushers her shadow out until it's nothing at all.
---
She checks the place thoroughly for police before she dares approach it. The house on Maria Bella, where the massacre took place, has seen better days. At the very least it must be at least two centuries old. The paint is peeling, inside and out. The locks are loose, which makes it almost too easy for her to slip through the back door.
When she closes the door she has to bite back a scream.
Because inside the house are nine men dead, but not customarily dead in the ways of the Giordiano firefight. Instead they are all executed, as if the Reaper himself had come. And she does not dare to look at any place but the floor. But she has a feeling that if she looks up, she will see pictures drawn in blood, masterpieces that are simply to die for.
Someone, something, notices her. In the shadows it moves: a hooded man with a scythe.
"Mio signore, you did this?" she asks, curtsying meekly. For everyone must be meek in the face of the Angel of Death.
She hears his horrible laugh. "Treason is not a crime to take lightly, Naminé."
Then she realizes the voice is Marluxia's.
Marluxia is one of the Giordiano assassins. But Marluxia isn't just any assassin.
He's the Angel of Death.
She tries not to scream help me, help me, he's killed these people. He has, he has, and he'll kill me, too.
"But it's hardly a thing for you to worry about," says Marluxia, the Angel of Death who will not show her his face. He draws his hand over her collarbones, leaving a smudge of blood on her skin.
"You have other things to concern yourself with. Did you do what I asked?"
She withdraws her sketchbook from her bag.
"They're yours," she says quietly, heart beating so fast she feels that she may die. "All of them."
He removes his blood-stained gloves and takes the sketchpad from her gingerly, brushing the pages apart carefully. Internally she is happy with how he is treating them: as if they are really special. But somewhere inside she is still shell-shocked that he's the Angel of Death, that when she makes her sidestep it could be his scythe coming down on her neck.
"All of them," he repeats, "except for these." He runs a clean finger along the perforated lines, evidence that she's not giving everything to him.
"Who did they go to?" he presses, hand tight against her shoulder.
"One of them was for James," she says.
"James Byron?" he asks, into her ear.
"Yes," she replies, stretching her neck away from him.
"I see." He withdraws, neither pleased nor displeased. "And the other?"
"The altar boy at the basilica," she says with a smile, remembering his bright eyes and face. "Peter."
His face falls. He informs her that there's no trusting that boy; he's not one of theirs, not a Giordiano.
She can't bite back her reply; she has become very brave.
"But he helped me with the drawings," she informs Marluxia. "He's my frien―"
He backhands her before she can even apologize, and she feels pain blooming on her cheek like the flowers he's so fond of. She is lucky he didn't simply kill her for such a statement.
"Your little meeting with that boy is not to be mentioned again," he says, authority cold in his voice. "Is that clear?"
"…I understand," she says, tears glittering in her eyes.
Marluxia only smiles and purrs to her that she's a good girl, but that she arrived too late to hang her drawings on the dirty dirty walls.
"Why don't you follow me, bambina?" he asks in a fake, courteous voice. "I know where you can hang these, where they'll look abbastanza."
She nods her agreement and takes the arm he offers. He pulls her inwards, closer and closer to her, because he's determined to keep her within the family.
To keep her with him.
Where she belongs.
TRANSLATIONS
la vita della mafia: the mafia life
traditore: traitor
caporegime: Marluxia's role in the mafia. For those unfamiliar with the layout, a capocrimine is essentially head of a crew of soldiers. There can be ten of these crews in every family. They're in charge of their own "subfamily" within the large family, which means that Marluxia's technically a powerful man in the large Giordiano family just because he's in charge of so many people.
lotta di fuoca: firefight, or essentially, "fight of fire"
arrivederci amico: goodbye, my friend
Mio signore: My lord (a title of respect)
abbastanza: (very) pretty