055 - Payment
You're nearly out of the door for the third time this week when Marluxia's there in the hallway, leaning on the doorframe to his room. This is the second time you've nearly been caught and usually you'd be quick to slip away, but your body is aching and your heart is dead so when Marluxia speaks, you find your hand frozen halfway up to the door handle.
Where do you think you're going?
The hotpants are a little loose around your legs, actually, but you dared not alter the shape for comfort or style. Larxene's straighteners you stole for the tiny curls always forming at the fringes of your face, and it's her make up that's suffocating and masking you. You've got a coat but your legs are still bared and naked. You're quick to take shelter in the gloom.
Just going for a walk.
At midnight?
Can't sleep.
You never sleep any more.
Your knuckles tighten around the door handle and everything swims. You wonder where you've disappeared off to in a night where sanity sleeps and you're the one skulking around in shadows waiting for a call.
What's that supposed to mean?
Marluxia steps forwards and your muscles curl as though you could somehow make yourself smaller, or cease to exist entirely.
How much do you charge?
The question is far, far too personal and you are quick to leave the skin-deep warmth of the house. You'd run, but your muscles are still tight from two nights ago, and the air is so thick it's like treacle. When Marluxia catches your arm you twist, but he's too strong to let you go.
Your dying eyes meet his.
Why?
Let me go.
You struggle but he's stronger and you're caught between a rock and a hard place, and he pulls you easily back into the light, bared.
Is this what you've reduced yourself to?
Just leave me alone.
You can't avoid my questions forever. Don't think I don't know where you've been going.
You think you can, and you prise his fingers from your chilled skin to head again for the door. You don't want to go, you never want to go, but you've still got twenty left to make up the rent and if you're lucky you can get that tonight and take the weekend off.
How much do they pay you?
Marluxia catches you by the wrist this time, and you can't meet his eyes again. His fingers find your chin, force you to look.
Why?
You don't know. You honestly don't know.
What happened to him?
For a split second you don't understand what Marluxia means but then realisation dawns. You bark a laugh, because it's too ironic, too ridiculous, too much hurt and nothing worth another night in somebody else's bed for a handful of petty cash. So you laugh until your ribs collapse and water traces grooves in your pretend face.
He's been dead for a long time.
Marluxia catches you when your legs snap in half; when everything breaks he's the only thing keeping you from falling apart.
How much?
You tear yourself away. The night is old, your determination and hopeless denial lost. It would have hurt like hell and it always does. Better to wait another night and search again on Saturday. You stumble up the stairs, slam the door shut and wait in cowering silence for tomorrow to arrive. Instead it's Marluxia, petulant and pestilent, by the door.
How much do I have to pay to keep you off the streets tonight?
You curl.
Twenty?
Something lands weightlessly by your heaving chest and it takes you a second to realise that it's a note, a twenty pound note with the Queen's own face expressionlessly mocking you.
Fifty?
More bills land around you.
A hundred?
Marluxia's voice is rising. Not in anger or disdain that you've grown to accept with weary submission. It sounds like... desperation.
A thousand? Two thousand? I can pay.
You gather the energy to roll over, still in your old cagoule and little else, to give the other man a blank stare like you left your heart to freeze in the rain and the man lying amongst more money than you've ever owned is nothing more than a toy.
I don't want your charity.
Marluxia, usually so elegant, stomps over. He points an accusing finger and yells, loud enough to close the last beating fibres in your chest.
You'd rather lower yourself to this?
He seems to catch himself, shoulders dropping and a tender hand brushing across your fragmented cheek.
Oh, Vexen.
You broke and age ago and all that's left it a hollow, clattering carcass. But that still seems like enough for Marluxia to shift around the softly crumpling twenty pound notes and find you underneath ruined mascara and too-tight clothes. And it's you he kisses, without haste or fury, until the steady thrum of your mind is drowned out by your heartbeat's pulse against the very man who broke you in.
Vexen, Vexen, Vexen.
And he breaks you again, into his arms; if anything is right it isn't here. But what is here is Marluxia, and even if his tight embrace is the last thing you want, you need somebody - and Marluxia for all your failings is somebody, so your fists clench in his shirt until the sun spangles and you feel alive.
Curiously enough, part of an extrapolation of the Blondes-verse, where Vexen became a prostitute and Marluxia threw money at him. I've long since decided against it for the final story, but it made a nice idea for this prompt. "The sun spangles and you feel alive" is a quote from the poem November by Simon Armitage.
