Naminé was becoming distant.
It started one morning when she'd called to say that she couldn't walk to college that day, and then didn't walk with her at all after that. They still walked home, at least to the railway station, but she was always locked in some kind of accusatory silence, and Larxene couldn't understand why.
"Okay," She said one afternoon. "What's up with you?"
Naminé, who had been staring at her feet, sighed heavily, shoulders sagging so much that Larxene imagined that her arms might simply fall off if they were to sink any lower.
"Nothing."
"Liar."
Naminé looked up, glaring into Larxene's baby blue eyes.
"Yeah. I'm fed up with being one. So I'll just shut up instead."
Larxene mused on this for a while as the continued to walk. She turned it over and over in her mind - what was Naminé lying about? What could she possibly be lying about? Eventually, Larxene realised that she could only imagine one possibility.
"You don't like me?"
Naminé stopped in the middle of the pavement, kicking a little at a crack in the stone with her foot. She didn't meet Larxene's eyes again.
"Let's just go with that."
And she turned a corner and was gone. Larxene backtracked a quicker way home that evening, like she even wanted to get back to Vexen and Marluxia giggling like idiotic little girls over something that she didn't understand, or pressed against each other somewhere with hands slipped around necks, up shirts and down trousers, or even worse with no shirts or trousers to press hands into.
He mood was foul when she found Vexen alone and tapping away at his laptop in the sitting room, half naked despite the chill of the typically underheated apartment.
"Put some clothes on, would you. Nobody needs to see that."
Vexen glanced up momentarily, biting his lip as he stood, setting his laptop down where he'd been sitting and making his way to the door.
"Sorry. I didn't think you'd be home yet."
Larxene didn't think that he needed an explanation as to why.
"Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint you."
"That wasn't what I meant," Vexen replied quietly, momentarily slipping into his room and returning with a long sleeved shirt and an old looking sweatervest. "I just..." And he didn't finish the sentence, settling down once more to the laptop and beginning to type again. Larxene felt like she was being ignored, and didn't like it.
"I had a shit day today," She announced, sitting down at the very other end of the sofa and flicking on the TV.
"That's nice," Vexen said and to Larxene he sounded disinterested.
"Maybe for a sick masochist like you."
Vexen didn't reply immediately, but his fingers stopped flying across the miniature notebook keyboard. He took a deep breath or two, then stood up again.
"I wish."
Larxene gave him the middle finger as he hung briefly around the doorway.
"Fucking poof."
Again, Vexen hesitated, looking at the laptop screen as though his half finished thesis was going to help him to come up with an equally biting reply.
It didn't.
"I don't see how that has anything to do with, well, anything."
"It has everything to do with everything!" Larxene exclaimed from her post at the TV. "You and all your sick, gay fetishes that I have to put up with day in and day out. It's dirty. It's sick and dirty. I don't even know why it's legal, the things that you and Marluxia think it's okay to do."
"In many countries," Vexen said, folding up his laptop with a neat click, "It still is illegal. People are murdered and nobody does a thing about it, just because they're gay."
"There you go hiding behind your statistics like that's supposed to make me feel sorry for you," Larxene scoffed heartlessly. She didn't really register Vexen biting on his lip so hard that it bled, or his knuckles shining white from his tightly clenched fists as he looked for anywhere to place his gaze that wouldn't be painful, desperate or weak. He hung around the doorway for ten, twenty, thirty seconds, then disappeared silently.
A minute or so later, Larxene found herself yawning. She needed a distraction, one that wasn't gay. Wasn't there are party going on tonight? She pulled out her mobile and made a few calls, and soon enough she was changing, pulling on nice shoes and applying a splattering of concealer and mascara, finding a breath freshener - just in case - and chucking her keys into her handbag, she was gone.
-
Marluxia came home from helping out at the local youth club to find Vexen in the kitchen, staring blankly at the wall and looking distinctly miserable. He gently slipped around behind him, laying his head on Vexen's shoulder and wrapping his arms around his neck.
"You look terrible."
Vexen sighed, brushing Marluxia away.
"I feel terrible."
"Larxene?"
"Larxene."
Marluxia sat next to Vexen and tried to take his hand, but again he was rejected.
"Just ignore her," He said softly. "Don't listen to her stupid lies."
"I can't help it," Vexen said helplessly. "She... she sounds just like my mother. She says exactly the same things sometimes. I feel so useless."
"She's just an ugly, vicious cow," Marluxia promised, a smile fleetingly passing his features - but it faded once he saw that Vexen had not been consoled in the slightest. "She's just jealous that we're happy and she's not. Don't let her bring you down."
"Happy?" Vexen echoed with a scoff. "Happy? I'm not happy, Marluxia. I'm Goddamn miserable."
Marluxia tried to kiss Vexen on the cheek, only to be pushed away by a cold, unsteady hand.
"We'll kick her out," He promised with renewed vigour. Anybody who could upset Vexen enough to stop kisses from being in order certainly didn't deserve a place to stay in Marluxia's eyes. "We'll kick her out like we should have done way back in September."
Vexen shook his head.
"It's too late, Marluxia. I can't take this any more."
"That's why we'll get rid of her," Marluxia promised again. "See how she likes it, the slimy bitch."
"You don't understand," Vexen insisted. "You're so fine with people flinging insults at you left right and centre that you don't understand that it's too late and I already feel like a useless shit who doesn't even deserve to live any more. Just like before."
Marluxia sighed a little, eyebrows furrowing as he remembered all too well trying to console Vexen the last time he'd felt so bad, back when he was just sixteen and Marluxia fifteen, in an evening that had started with conversation and turned to kisses and love bites and sleeping curled up together in Vexen's old, urine-reeking mattress (it couldn't even really be described as a bed), and three months of trying to summon up the courage to explain to his parents that he'd fallen in love with a boy without even realising that they'd known all along.
"Vexen," He said firmly, "Don't make me prove that you're anything but useful, and you deserve nothing more than to be content and happy for the rest of your life, because I will."
"How?" Vexen asked dully, and it was barely even a question, just a statement of his utter disillusionment. "Sex? Sex that'll just prove that Larxene's right, that that's the only thing in our relationship?"
"Don't try to pull that one on me," Marluxia said. "You know as well as I do that sex is just our way of saying I love you."
"Or is it just an excuse that we try to use because, deep inside, we know that we can't?"
"I love you," Marluxia said with such fierceness that he surprised even himself. "I love you, Vexen. I love you and your company and your body and your personality and your voice and your smile and your intelligence and your hips and your kisses and your laugh and your penis and your eyes and your hair and your jokes and every single other part of you. I don't care what Larxene or your Goddamn parents think is right in their perfect little world of heterosexuality, because I swear, if I know one thing it's that I love you."
Vexen looked away, sighing.
"I don't know," He eventually admitted. "I just don't know."
If Marluxia had expected anything to slip from Vexen's mouth, it wasn't that. He'd thought that maybe Vexen would apologise like he often did for things that were anything but his fault, or at the very least to confess back. He was even hoping, perhaps, for a hug or a kiss. But not that.
Not I don't know.
"I love you," He whispered again, furiously blinking back tears. Vexen was just upset, that was all. It wasn't like it was the end of their relationship.
Vexen stood abruptly.
"Stop saying that!"
"But-"
"Just stop! I don't want to hear that from a man!"
Marluxia bit his lip, unable to stare Vexen's wild green eyes down. He didn't know what to do. He'd never expected this. Not in his worst nightmares. He'd not even figured it into the equation, he and Vexen were just Together and that had always just been that.
"I'm sorry."
Vexen shook his head, long hair swinging.
"I can't take this any more."
"Do you want to give Larxene the satisfaction of having you succumb to her vile personality?" Marluxia snapped before he could catch himself, knocking his chair backwards as he stood too. It clattered to the floor, hitting Marluxia in the leg on its way down. He ignored the pain and the chair both.
"I already have!" Vexen screamed. Now that Marluxia finally brought himself to look, he saw the ugly red tracks that pouring tears had left on his lover's face, eyes puffy as more pushed forth and rolled down his cheeks, dripping from his chin like his face itself was simply melting away in grief. "I can't take this any more! I can't take being alone, knowing that my family hate me because of something I can't even control, and I can't take having you remind me every single fucking day that I'm a fucking homosexual like it's a good thing, and if you dare try to follow me, I swear..."
And Marluxia was still trapped in numb, shocked silence even as the front door opened and slammed seconds later. Then he took one deep, shaky breath, and began to sob.
-
Larxene felt much better when she dragged herself in through the door at three o'clock in the morning, drunk and exhausted, and she didn't really notice Marluxia rush out of the kitchen looking like a mess and then deflate as soon as he saw her, too focused on finding out where her bedroom door was. She slept well.
-
Marluxia didn't.
-
Vexen had left.
Vexen had left.
The one single thing that Marluxia had never thought would ever happen, because he and Vexen were closer than close, always had been and always would be, and here he was alone in the kitchen and Vexen had just left. Just stormed out in a fury of anger and self loathing and Marluxia hadn't even been able to stop him. Hadn't been able to say "No, you're wrong, being gay is a good thing. Haven't I taught you that? Haven't we proved that you can be gay, and happy?". Hadn't been able to just capture Vexen in a hug whether he liked it or not - a hundred million things that he could and should have done buzzed around Marluxia's head like flies, incessantly from the moment the door slammed right up until the moment he passed out in the kitchen at five thirty in the morning, convinced that he'd hear the door open and Vexen return, just in five more minutes, five more minutes, five more minutes.
When he woke again out of fitful nightmarish agony - and an awful headache from hitting a chair on the way down to the floor - he was desperate to crawl into bed, but he knew even as he propped himself up against the wall that he couldn't because there was no way he could ever sleep there without Vexen's limbs poking him in uncomfortable places, and his hair fanned across his face and tickling his nose. So there he lay, staring blankly at the tiles on the opposite wall that they'd painted sweet little personal jokes from their early days onto, then looking at the love poems made out of magnetic words on the fridge when that got to painful. Here was a post it note in Vexen's handwriting, punctuated by a love heart that seemed like an ironic mockery now, there was the toaster still covered in rude jokes from marker pens. There was even a doodle on the ceiling, a rude remark or three with an arrow pointing to a mysterious stain on the white, untextured plaster. It was too much. Everything was just covered in memories of Vexen.
But closing his eyes was even worse because then images flickered like tantalising could-have-beens across his mind, of Vexen and Vexen and nothing but Vexen. At least when he looked at the fridge it was just a fridge. He longed to pass out again, sleep in blissful denial that Vexen was there, was going to be there, was never going to leave again.
When Larxene found him she was hung over and less than sympathetic.
"What's up with you? You look like you've just seen somebody die."
"I think," Marluxia said, his voice cracking with every syllable as he pinched the bridge of his nose, "I have."
Larxene gave him the kind of look normally reserved for hoboes and druggies off the street, and nodded disbelievingly.
"... Right. Your phone charger's broken, by the way. Tried to use it this morning, I think the wire's snapped somewhere."
"Kay." Marluxia said.
"Where's Vexen? Left for Uni already? I thought he had Thursdays off like me."
"I dunno."
"You always know where Vexen is," Larxene insisted, a frown settling on her features. "You follow him around like a lost puppy."
Marluxia closed his eyes to block Larxene out for as long as he could bear to see Vexen imprinted on the back of his eyelids. And then when he was forced to acknowledge her, he blurted out -
"He's gone."
"Gone where?"
"I don't know. He just walked out. Last night. And now he's gone."
Larxene actually had the downright cruelty to laugh.
"I'm not surprised. You're pretty annoying."
Marluxia tried to say don't say that! but the memories of last night flooded back because that was what Vexen had said, and the words caught in his throat and he couldn't. Instead as Larxene pottered around the kitchen in disinterested silence, he managed -
"He loves me."
"Hardly."
Marluxia looked up with the most heartbroken expression that pretty much summed up everything he felt. Larxene did not see it.
"But-"
Larxene, who was grabbing something that would hopefully stop her head pounding from the medicals basket in one cupboard, scowled and interrupted.
"Who are you trying to kid, yourself? Vexen never loved you and you never loved him. All you had was sex. Sex, sex, sex. Every day, because you had to cover up for the fact that you couldn't even love each other, sex. Fucking sodomy, that's what it was. Nothing more than that. You two had nothing. Just loads and loads of Goddamn sex. If there really is a hell, you fucking deserve to go to it."
She walked out and numbly, Marluxia realised that nobody had eaten dinner and yesterday's candles were still unlit, so he picked up the matches and struck one, lighting now the smallest of the candles, then using it to spring the others to flaming life, too. Here in the late morning sunshine they didn't light up the room, unable to compete with the strong light of the sun. They looked so pathetic, so weak like when the darkness came they'd be blotted out entirely.
Marluxia waited until they'd melted down a little and then snuffed them out with his fingertips until he burned.
-
"Hey, Marluxia. It's Vexen.
Look, I'm really sorry that I walked out last night. I was just feeling awful, although that's probably no excuse for how much I must have hurt you.
I need some time away from Larxene. I just can't deal with her right now; I'm stressed enough with University work, I don't need her making things difficult too. It's not your fault. I'll come back in a few days. Maybe a week. I'll understand if you don't want to talk to me until then. I wouldn't want to talk to me, either. But I really do love you, whatever I said. I'm staying with Lexaeus and Zexion. I kind of miss you already, but I need the time away."
And uncharged lay Marluxia's phone, in a crack down the side of the sofa, the voice mail unreceived and unheard.