Yawns. This is why I hate living at a boarding school. Our internet is shit! It always pisses me off when I'm right in the middle of a good Angel Sanctuary fanfic and, kaput, there goes the world wide web.

Luckily enough for you guys, when I don't have internet, I work more on my fanfics as I wait for it to come back.

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Vexen's eyelashes fluttered open as he slowly returned to consciousness. He could feel pain in various spots of his body, which included his wrists and ankles, not to mention other private places. A slender hand was in his hair and there was soft murmuring coming from somewhere above him. "'luxia?" he asked through a half-yawn.

"You slept for a long time," the botanist commented, calmly. "Don't worry, you're all cleaned up. I wouldn't leave you sleeping in that kind of mess." He leaned down and kissed Vexen softly. "You have no idea how happy you made me tonight."

The blond was confused for a moment until he remembered what had happened before he fell asleep. He jerked away from Marluxia and looked at him horrified. "You!" he snarled, "you little bastard!"

Marluxia blinked, surprised. "What did I do?"

"What did you do? You sat by and watched as that fucker raped me!" The botanist blinked again and Vexen pulled his hand back, slapping Marluxia clean across the face. The blond panted for a few moments before hitting his partner again. Marluxia whipped a hand out and caught Vexen's, making sure that he wouldn't be hit a third time.

"Now I think that was a little unnecessary," he told him, bluntly. "You're over-reacting."

"Overreacting?!" Vexen shrieked, "I'll show you overreacting!" He tried to pull free from Marluxia, but the botanist was more of a fighter than he was and kept his grip firm.

"Calm down!"

"I didn't want that! You sat by and watched while he forced me, and it was you that stopped me from defending myself in the first place!" Though the scientist hid it well, he felt like he was about to start bawling. "I trusted you! I never thought you would betray me like this, you bastard!"

Marluxia tightened his grip, furiously, and the blond could feel the bone under Marluxia's hand shift. "Stop it! You're going to break my wrist!"

When he did release Vexen's wrists, there were already bruises. "We're Nobodies, Vexen. We don't have hearts, we don't feel lover, betrayal, or anything like it. You're embarrassed and angry, and I understand that, but you are never to hit me again."

"You kept pushing me and pushing me and I'm through!" The blond got up and grabbed his cloak. Thorny vines climbed up his thighs and held him absolutely still. "You aren't leaving without talking this out, IV."

"Or what?" Vexen asked, tone as cold as his element, "next time you'll let Luxord rape me?"

"I thought you'd enjoy it. You always got even more turned on when I'd do something that would make you blush." Marluxia stood up and walked over to him. "What about this upset you so much?"

"He raped me and you just sat by and watched! This is serious, Marluxia; if Xigbar lets a word of what happened slip, I'll have no choice but to kill you, and Superior won't stop me!" Vexen zipped up his coat trying to calm himself down simply because it was embarrassing to be the only one shouting. "I'm leaving." He opened a portal and walked through, leaving Marluxia standing there, looking upset.

The botanist couldn't believe Vexen had just walked out on him. Over something so little! He felt it was no big deal; he had threatened to say 'fuck rank' and cut of Xigbar's fingers one by one if he ever told a soul, so Vexen's already poor reputation would not suffer much.

He decided to shrug it off; his little Snowflake could be a temperamental love when he was upset about something. Vexen would probably rant and rave about his labs for a few hours then return without a second thought, possibly with some kinky agenda of punishment that Marluxia just might let him enact.

With retribution to come under the business end of a hand-paddle later of course. Groaning, Marluxia had to readjust the front of his pants.

Vexen, however, had no plans to return to Marluxia. His pride was hurt, damn it!, and he felt perfectly within his rights to persist with his temper tantrum. At least no one had stopped in to bother him yet; as it was, he was sure he would implode in shame the next time he even caught a glimpse of II.

How dared Marluxia? Didn't Vexen deserve to have any rights as a human? It was part of what had existed between them to begin with that he hadn't panicked when Marluxia had tied him down in the first place, then for him to use that against him? It was uncalled for and cruel.

Unfortunately, he couldn't go complaining to any of the other members this time. Xigbar would say something crass and crude or possibly even try to get 'seconds' and Vexen would be damned if he would ever tell another living soul about what Marluxia had done to him!

No, the scientist would have to bare his shame alone, simply because it was not in his nature to go whining to others when things didn't go his way, unlike a few of his precious little peers.

Vexen growled and picked up his papers, trying to get some work done and take his mind off of the whole fucking mess. With a highlighter in hand, he wasted a good two hours color-coding everything of marginal importance in three stacks of papers that Zexion had left on his desk.

He was only interrupted by the opening of a dark portal into his laboratory. Scowling visibly, he threw the papers down. "What do you want, Axel?"

"Not a thing from you," the fire-wielder replied, smirking with his arms over his chest. "Just playing messenger boy."

"Something about you and a game of post office makes me want to lose my dinner," Vexen replied, turning away from the red-head.

"Very funny, Grandpa. Just wanted to tell you that if you and your master keep Roxy and me awake all night again, I'll barbeque your ass from here to The Pride Lands and back then set his holiness's flowers on fire."

"You do that!" he snarled, angrily, "but don't count on getting your fun any time soon! That flaming homosexual flower pansy and I are finished!"

The red-head actually took a visible step back-wards. "You serious?! Where in the hell did that come from? I thought he had you thoroughly whipped, if you know what I mean," Axel said with a half-hearted lewd hand motion.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?!" Vexen shrieked, probably drawing the attention of everyone in the organization straight to his labs, though he wouldn't care about that until he had ripped this neophyte to shreds.

The red-head started laughing. "Oh my god, you thought we didn't know?! Hell, Vexen, baby, whenever Roxie and I want to do something kinky, we have to sneak into Marly-bai's 'toy box' and hope to not come out traumatized! Of course, anything with… DNA on it, we leave alone. We're not that perverse!"

"Get out!" With a fury like a thoroughly soaked cat, Vexen lunged at Axel, fingers tipped with icy claws, and he started shoving him, harder and harder, towards the door, pushing it open and shoving Axel through.

A few other nobodies - Zexion and Demyx in particular - were standing outside the door with confused looks on their faces, though only someone who knew Zexion well would have noticed that.

"What?!" he shouted, puffing up to his full height which was thankfully a good four inches taller than every other Organization member except Xigbar. Axel scrambled up to this feet and his hands started to glow with red heat. Ignoring him, Vexen stormed back into his lab and slammed the heavy metal door shut behind him.

"Stupid Marluxia!" he raged, breathing heavily and trying to calm himself down since he felt like he might do something crazy. "Well… well, I suppose I don't have to worry about the Freeshooter keeping quiet when everyone already seems to know. And someone as paranoid as he is, he would have to know that Axel was rooting through his things!"

He paced back and forth across the laboratory floor for some time, taking long, deep breaths to try and get back to being the academic he was and not act like, well, Saïx in berserk mode, but he just couldn't.

Marluxia had been strong and dominating and had haughtily announced that he alone was the one who would break Vexen. Vexen, who, as a child, had faced life as the bastard son of his mother's infidelity. Whose older half-brother had thought there was something entirely right about taking his revenge on the then nine-year-old boy after his parents' divorce.

Vexen remembered it quite clearly, the first time he had been kissed, touched, and tortured, and how it had only gotten worse when puberty hit until his college years when he was halving his time between a biochemical engineering major and sleeping with every guy who would give him a glance.

The one bit of stability in his life had come in his later human years, already one of Ansem's apprentices and helping ambitious Xehanort behind his master's back. Perhaps it was the remnants of a lifetime of acting like an S&M whore, but the only company he could stand was the pretty young prostitute, Armulai, who liked to flirt with everyone, but Even in particular.

He thought it was some kind of poetic justice that, after the experiment, it was Breig, or Xigbar by then, had the brainstorm to turn proud Armulai into the heartless Graceful Assassin. Of course, he had never even realized that he was dragging Vexen's old lover along by the wrist, and Vexen had no intention of ever letting anyone know. It was a tribute to his own good acting skills that Xemnas believed, with apparent humor, that Marluxia had a 'crush' on one of his superiors.

Either way, Marluxia hadn't given up for an instant and had ended up pursuing Vexen to such a point that the blond figured that he would be better off if he were just to give up and get a bit of peace from the metro sexual creature! The one person who knew the details of his past and had promised, eyes darker than the night sky, to make him appreciate everything that had happened to him.

"He didn't do a very damn well job of it," he bitched, hatefully. "I've never been more humiliated in my life!"

He knew that, to regain any of the respect that Marluxia had ripped away from him during his short years amongst Organization XIII, he would have to do something horrible to the pink-haired botanist, something that would be equal to or worse than masochistic sexual submission. But what that would be, he didn't know.

There was all serious behind his earlier threat; he knew that, even if Xigbar had run around telling everyone he encountered that Marluxia had let him have his way with the proud loner Vexen, he would have been able to find it within himself to demand the blood retribution that would be rightfully his. But he wondered what would happen when he really did have Marluxia under his control, able to do anything to him. Would he be able to stop?

He cursed thoughtfully. Would he want to stop?