Disclaimer: Not mine, don't own.
Author's Notes: Written as gift fic for Shoshana. I don't actually ship Xemnas/Zexion, er, at all-- hopefully I did okay anyway. xD
the middle (of the end)
Zexion, of course, knows where it all began. There is some black humor to be found in the fact that it began just before the end—before everything fell apart, only to come together again in a parody of what it had once been.
Before all this, Zexion's trust in Xemnas was unwavering. Before, in another time or maybe another life entirely, when they were Ienzo and Xehanort, when they had beating hearts and the emotions to with them—then, Zexion trusted. It's just that now, there's nothing left to trust, and he has nothing left to trust with.
"Idiocy," Zexion mutters, and slides his fingers over the ink in the dictionary. "Utterly senseless or foolish behaviour. A stupid or foolish act or statement."
Idiocy, indeed.
the beginning (of the beginning)
He was sixteen when Ansem found him, barely out of school but smarter than his whole class combined. He was sixteen, and well on his way to some kind of career in one brilliant field or another, except Ansem intercepted him halfway there and redirected his thoughts.
Ienzo, that was his name then.
There were five of them. Six, if you included Ansem's omnipresent but always silent assistant. There was Braig, who was brilliantly intelligent but prone to laziness; Dilan, who valued his independence; and Even, who, for all his pretense, was actually chillingly clever.
And then there was Xehanort, of course. Xehanort, who understood everything and commented on nothing, whose word was near to law and second only to Ansem's. Xehanort, whom Ienzo trusted with his life (and in the end, with his death, as well).
In the end, there was only ever Xehanort.
the end (of the beginning)
Ienzo, who had memorized pages of the dictionary by the time he turned ten, recited definitions to himself when he felt anxious. "Paradigm," he said. "A set of forms all of which contain a particular element, esp. the set of all inflected forms based on a single stem or theme. Behold, to observe, look at, or see. Melancholy—" and here he rolled to his side, raked his gaze down the bare back of the man laying to his right— "sober thoughtfulness. Pensiveness."
He reached out and touched Xehanort's back. Ienzo's skin was almost breathtakingly pale against Xehanort's, and his hands almost pathetically small. He drew his fingertips down the bumps of vertebrae, counting them. One, two—
"Idiocy," he whispered. "Utterly senseless or foolish behaviour. A stupid or foolish act or statement."
And one more definition that he did not speak aloud.
the middle (of the middle)
Xehanort was there when Ienzo threw his life away, and he was there when Zexion came out the other side. There had never been much question, really, about what Ienzo—Zexion, now—would do if Xehanort asked it of him; there was an unspeakably, crushingly heavy trust between them. It began when Xehanort asked him his name, was strengthened when Ienzo told him, and now was being tested in the only way that they know how.
Experimentation, Xehanort said, and sent him through the Door to Darkness.
"Success," Xemnas said when they emerged on the other side.
And the first thing that Ienzo-now-Zexion noticed, when the haze cleared from his mind, is that he no longer admired the man that used to be Xehanort. The second thing he noticed is that he no longer felt much of anything, and it was with a distinctly hollow feeling in his chest that he realised his heart had stopped beating.
"Something upsets you?" Xehanort-now-Xemnas asked, peering into Zexion's eyes.
"No," Zexion replied, honestly. "It's just that I've forgotten how to be sad."
the beginning (of the end)
For a long while, Zexion contemplates the mechanics of feeling pleasure. It is more of a coping mechanism than anything else; he uses it to distract himself from the hollow, empty ache in his chest and the accompanying ache between his legs. Can one feel pleasure without feeling emotions, or is physical sensation too closely tied to one's interpretation? He draws his fingernails down Xemnas' chest and notes the way that the body beneath his arches up into the touch. Conditioned response, or honest reaction?
Thinking, Zexion decides, is no less dangerous than focusing.
Later, he ignores the sweat cooling on his stomach and thighs and multiplies numbers by two until his head is too full to hold anymore. Four million, one hundred ninety-four thousand, three hundred and four—or is it three hundred and six?
It doesn't matter, he decides in the end. Nothing matters anymore.
the middle (of the beginning)
It happened all in a rush, or so it seemed.
Xehanort came to his rooms, one day. Ienzo was on his floor, surrounded by papers and books and research notes, and Xehanort knelt on top of all of them and kissed him, fast and hard. It was so sudden that Ienzo hardly had time to think—and later he realized that he never needed it to begin with—and then Xehanort's hands were in his hair, at the back of his neck, on his shoulders.
Ienzo shuddered against him and went liquid, his own hands resting somewhere between Xehanort's shoulderblades. It was strange, this sudden shift in Ienzo's worldview. Xehanort had never been a sexual being to him—he was cold, calculating, aloof. Disinterested, in every sense of the word.
And yet there he was.
Xehanort reached out and coaxed Ienzo, with a series of whispered words and skillful touches. And despite his academic side, despite his calculating intelligence and quick, clever wit, Ienzo was putty under his hands as Xehanort explored places on Ienzo's body that he hadn't even known existed.
Beneath them, Ienzo's notes and books and papers were forgotten.
the beginning (of the middle)
In some ways, it was Ienzo's fault that the Door to Darkness ever came into existence. Or—it is not so much his fault as it was him that planted the seeds in Xehanort's mind.
It was during one of their talking times. Sometimes they talked all throughout, and other times there was no room for thought except in one-word flashes (Mm. Yes. There. More.). Xehanort moved inside Ienzo and contemplated the intricacies of the human heart, and Ienzo arched against him and parried his ideas.
"I suspect that Ansem shies away from the darker secrets," Xehanort said, with the air of someone confiding a secret. Ienzo gasped, his fingers slip-sliding across Xehanort's neck, and nodded his agreement.
"It's rare that he discusses it, if it's mentioned at all."
Xehanort bends forward and presses his mouth to the flesh above Ienzo's heart. "There must be some way of discovering it, don't you think?"
"If there's a door to—yes—the light, then there must be a door to the darkness as well."
Later, he regrets those words more than he's ever regretted anything.
the end (of the middle)
It took a long time for them to fall back into their patterns, but their bodies remembered, even if their hearts did not. It took two months of Nothingness before Zexion found his way to the Superior's room, before he knocked on the tall door and waited to be summoned.
"Enter," came Xemnas' voice—the same voice that Ienzo once delighted in hearing—and Zexion slipped into the room, silent as a shadow.
Xemnas was watching the moon again, as he did so frequently. Zexion was sure that if he had a heart with which to hate, he would hate that moon; if not because it is garishly mocking in its brilliance, then simply because he would not be able to stand to see Xemnas the way he was now, obsessed to the point of delirium and breaking because of it.
His skin was still breathtakingly pale, and his hands still pathetically small as Zexion curled them around Xemnas' neck. "It will still be there tomorrow," he murmured, and drew his fingertips downward.
Xemnas caught his wrist before the hand could make it past the collar of his cloak. "So will you," he said, fixing Zexion with a stare. "So will you, Number Six."
It was the first time Zexion had heard the Superior call him by number instead of by name. The sound made the hollowness inside him echo its discontent, and he turned to leave, silent as he'd come.
the end (of the end)
And then Zexion dies.
It happens suddenly, as much of his life has. It happens in a basement room of Castle Oblivion, alone in the darkness with only Axel and the Replica for company—Riku glares acid into his eyes and rips his body to shreds, and Zexion wonders, with his last fleeting thought, what Xemnas will do when he hears of the incident.
"Idiocy," he murmurs, as he fades into wisps of blackness. "Utterly senseless or foolish behaviour..."
Idiocy, indeed.