Pure
Axel, the slayer. Demyx, the hopeful. Zexion, the vampire. The undivinable Superior. The world they live in his hardly pure, but still they struggle to make sense of it. Spinoff to Tainted but Beautiful, series of drabbles.
Pairings: Assorted. In this drabble, onesided Vexen/Zexion
Rated: M
Warnings: Everything for Tainted and then some. This drabble deals with incest (in a way), daddy issues, and, in a very roundabout manner, corporal punishment.
Notes: No inspiration on Tainted, but I wanted to explore the world again, so this crapped out. Plus, I have writer's block on my main project. Which is the reason I wrote this story so I could get out the word to you.
I am embarking on an epic, 100+ chapter project titled Broken Memory. I may have advertised the prelude to the story in Tainted, I don't remember. Anyway, I want you all to read it. This story will have time traveling and dimension traveling and zombies and dragons and master/servant relationships and more mindfuckery than Birth by Sleep. And that's a lot of mindfuckery. The heart of the story is a heterosexual couple, and I know you're all going, "Ewww, het!" and you'll probably ewww more because it's a married couple and the hero is in his thirties. Ewww ewww. But whatever, there are some slash side pairings and even a bit of femslash. So there's something for everyone. Plus, the main character is bi. SO GO AND READ IT ON MY FICTIONPRESS, BICKAZER.
On a completely unrelated note, it seems this site has screwed up the formatting on Dear Diary. Like hell if I feel like fixing it.
i. Father
Among vampires, children are rare. Strictly speaking, children are not even necessary, since pureblood vampires are immortal. But even purebloods, so confident that they will live to see the Apocalypse itself, know that some of their number get culled every year. Mostly from those horrid vampire slayers, unnatural half-human creatures who can fight purebloods on even ground. Abominations. Vexen has devoted much research to the existence of slayers, and he knows they are a scourge on this earth, as unnatural as those gas-guzzling, carbon-belching machines humans are so found of.
Vampires, purebloods especially, exist to be humanity's natural predators, keeping humans in check. Slayers disrupt the natural balance of this ancient system, and like any disrupted ecosystem, once the slightest tremor touches it, it falls apart like a house of cards.
But the slayers exist much as purebloods hate them, and so purebloods know they must propagate their kind. Among purebloods the fertility rate is astronomically low. Marriages are common, arranged to link together families (though the family system has technically been overtaken by covens, it still exists to a degree), but children are so, so rare.
Children are such a joy.
Vexen hates it when he has to visit the few vampire children currently extant in this world. There are seven. Six under the control of the Coven of Thirteen, of which Vexen is a part, of course. So every year, when the entire coven gathers to celebrate and feed, the children are dressed in their finest and paraded in front of the highest-ranking coven members by beaming-with-joy parents, all the while the Superior pontificates on how the children represent the new hope of the coming generation and other such nonsense.
He hates it. Every time he looks at the children, their sweet, pale faces, their huge, unblinking eyes, he sees his own son.
Vampires don't like grave markers because they reminded them of humans. Vampires commemorate their dead with a feast in his honor and never discuss him again.
But Vexen commissioned a gravestone--a small, nondescript one, with just his son's name carved in it--and he visits it every year. The day before the coven gathering, if he can help it. He visits and sits on his heels in front of it and imagines.
This year his son will be almost a century old. Vexen can imagine him dressed in the Northern Coven uniform, resplendent in furs, his pale face filled with the haughty beauty it was already beginning to develop when his life was cut so tragically short.
As the years go by, though, he finds it more and more difficult to see his son's face. Instead, he sees another haughtily beautiful face. So beautiful it's almost mocking.
Zexion.
Oh, Zexion. One of the finest examples of an incubus, if not the finest, that Vexen has ever met. In ordinary circumstances Vexen would never find himself attracted to an incubus. He knows what incubi and succubi--truly the lowest-ranked among purebloods--are like. Giggling, empty-headed fools dreaming solely of the one act they are meant to perform. Such nasty, nattering things who are too fond of teasing him.
But Zexion is different. Zexion is beautiful as they all are, but his is a cold beauty, the beauty of an ice statue. He is thin and pale and his full lips pull up easily into a sneer, and his eyes, oh his eyes are deeper than the lakes in the cold northern land in which Vexen grew up. It only takes one look, one glance, into those eyes before he finds himself hopelessly entranced.
He loves Zexion. He wants Zexion. He wishes he were Zexion's lover. He wishes he were Zexion's father.
He wants Zexion to be too many things. Vexen is aware of how terrible a burden it is, but he wants it.
He tries to justify it. Says that Zexion is so young, less than a century (just as his son would have been, had he not been killed in his seventeenth year!), and he has no vampire to really mentor him. No one wants to mentor an incubus, after all. Incubi learn to do what they must from their instincts. But Zexion is no ordinary incubus. He thinks. He reasons. And he is so, so, painfully vulnerable.
Vexen says he must step in and take charge of Zexion's education. To act as his mentor, his parental figure even, in order to guide Zexion through the ways of the vampire world.
"I am not a child," Zexion hisses, leaning forward so that their noses are almsot touching. "Don't you understand? I am not a child and I am not your child! I've survived this long without you sticking your nose into every damned thing I do!"
Vexen gets angry, and when he gets angry he gets defensive. "I am only trying to do what's best for you!"
"You don't realize, do you? You don't understand. You don't know what's best for me. Aeleus doesn't know what's best for me. The Superior doesn't know what's best for me. I do, and I alone."
The words cut, they cut and cut and cut like knife after knife being driven into his frozen heart. Heated knives. Zexion lurches in his vision and he doesn't see Zexion any longer. He sees his son, the beautiful blonde boy with eyes just like Zexion's. The boy who said the exact same things.
You say I'm too weak and too naive to do anything. So does Mother, so does the Superior. But you don't really know. None of you know. Only I know.
"Go to your room," he hisses, caught in the regrets of the past. "Once you're standing in the corner with your hands to the wall I'll come in and I'll--"
"You cannot do anything to do me, old man," Zexion says, his voice infinitely cold.
"Enough with the attitude! Silence, unless you want to take your punishment right here and now--"
"As I said, you cannot do anything."
He feels it. The pain blooms across his face, sharp and acute, and Zexion is smirking while he holds his claws in the air, dark blood trailing down their pearly lengths. Vexen's blood. Vexen feels at his face, numb. Not just from pain, but from surprise.
"Good night," Zexion says, and walks away with those delicate, mincing steps that are unlike anything Vexen's son would have affected. And Vexen remembers. He remembers that Zexion is not his son; Zexion is a pretty little incubus whom he has been trying and failing to court.
Of course, an incubus attacking the head of a pureblood family is a crime. And crimes must be punished. Not by fathers but by constables.
The constable spends an inordinate time alone in a room with Zexion. When they come out, Zexion is clinging to his arm, snaking his own slender body around the constable's much broader form, and keeping up a stream of seductive whispers into his ear. The constable's face is pink and he lurches when he walks, like he's drunk.
"Unfortunately we must be parted soon," Zexion says, loud enough for every stunned passerby--Vexen included--to hear. "But do keep in touch, won't you? My beautiful, my strong--"
"Oh, I will," the constable says with a laugh, and kisses the top of Zexion's head. "Don't take flight too soon, little bird."
Zexion sighs and twirls on the spot. It is so unlike Zexion. But such silliness is expected of an incubus. Only Vexen can see Zexion's desperation. Zexion seduced the constable to save himself from punishment, a punishment he knows will involve the Superior.
He is diabolically clever, that boy.
But he is still a boy.
Later that evening, as outraged murmurs flutter through the halls of the Northern Coven and rumors fly of a new constable, one of the special cut ones who were created solely to deal with incubi and succubi related crimes, arriving soon, Zexion knocks on Vexen's door. His knock is soft, tentative. It reminds Vexen so much of his son that his heart breaks.
"Ienzo," he says.
Zexions steps in, his head lowered, his hands clasped behind his back.
"I am truly sorry," he says. He sounds sincere, but Vexen no longer knows. Not after he witnessed that show Zexion gave the constable earlier. "I attacked you and that was wrong. And then I escaped the punishment I know I deserved."
What does Zexion hope to gain from this? For a brief moment, Vexen allows himself to hope. To hope that maybe Zexion really is contrite and regretful, and that he will obey Vexen from now on. Even as he thinks this Vexen knows it isn't true.
"Is that all?" he asks, carefully.
"No." Zexion looks up. "You know what I want, don't you? I want you to punish me."
Oh, those words. How Vexen has longed to hear them. How he has dreamed of this moment, of Zexion finally submitting to him, of promising to be an obedient son or lover or even worse, both. Vexen trembles. He suddenly wishes that he were dead. Death cannot be as complicated as this.
"I'm sorry," Vexen says, stepping back. "But I cannot."
"Why not? Please...Father?"
He looks up, a teasing smile dancing at the corners of his lips, his eyes so deep and unfathomable and horrible. This is a game. Vexen sees it, in one instant, with the crystal clarity of the ice he so loves. All along, Zexion has been playing a game. He may be more intelligent than other incubi but that doesn't change his basic nature. He uses his intelligence to go beyond mere seduction.
He wants to manipulate. To tug at a person's hearstrings and make them dance, just like a puppetteer. Zexion doesn't get off on sex. Zexion gets off on power.
"Get out," Vexen says coldly. "Get out get out get out! Out, this instant, you little...monster!"
Zexion laughs as he flees, his laugh becoming hysterical when Vexen starts hurling objects after him. Breaking the mirror that was his wedding present. Shattering the clay mug that his son molded for him. He hurls objects after Zexion and curses, curses that beautiful face that is too much like his son's.
But Zexion comes back. He always does. Not one or two nights later or even a fortnight. But he does. He comes back and slinks into Vexen's lap and throws his arms around Vexen's shoulders and murmurs that he's sorry. He's shivering. Vexen can feel every up-and-down movement of his shoulder blades, that's how thin he is.
It's a game, Vexen knows. But he's weak and his son's loss is still too recent, will never heal.
He will take care of Zexion, time and again, even when he knows Zexion doesn't deserve it. After all, the boy needs a father.
Why is this in present tense? Because I've just finished reading The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, and I liked the immediacy the present tense gave to the storytelling, so I'mma go try it out. And speaking of which YOU SHOULD ALL GO READ THOSE BOOKS THEY ARE FUCKING GOOD. Seriously. A certain scene in The Hunger Games actually made me cry--the first time a book has ever done that to me. You'll know when you get to it, because you'll cry too. If you don't cry you don't have a heart. Good and safe, good and safe indeed.
If you haven't gathered already, this is meant to be a series of drabbles with each centering around a different character. I plan on all the stories taking place before the events of Tainted, since I don't want to spoil the ending that is a long time coming.
Remember to review. And read Broken Memory, too.