Title: Moth Drawn to Flame
Rating: PG
Pairing: AxelxRoxas
Summary: "Swimming in the darkness, blind."
Notes: For Obscurity.
"What did you do now?"
The room is colder than it normally is. The fire theme isn't as welcoming and comforting as he remembers it to be, and the photos and the relics seem cold and empty - the hellfire heat is dimmed down to a lukewarm breeze. A faint light glows from the blood-red candles dripping along the walls and down the shelves, and shadows dance over the two faces, dark devils' ballet on false masks.
Trying to hide the truth.
Ruby blood glitters, jewels in the dark, on the out-stretched hands of the key as he sits, stoic, still and silent, a pale statue in the room. Perfect little rivets, lines in a map work of intricate designs along his palms, stand out from the blood refracting the light and sending a red explosion of shattered gems over his hands.
The blood rolls down his palms, drips along the curves of delicate, destructive hands, and splatters onto his coat. The fabric eats it up, dark stains on dark cloth, sticky and dry.
Branded.
"Give me your hands." He does as told, doesn't argue back, holding out the perfect little cuts. The hellfire's own hands are stripped of their leather shields, naked and slender and pale in the candlelight. They curl around his, jerking them into the light. He recoils. "You're not careful enough. Gonna get yourself killed if you don't become more careful, and then what am I gonna do?"
A cold, empty laugh answers. White strips of cloth, snowy and clean, emerge from the darkness in the slender hands of the fire-wielder - the hellfire wraps them around his palms, and the blood, stains on the white, soaks through and spells out a pattern in the dark, a brand.
"I don't want it." The red-haired one pulls tight on the bandages, destructively so, and the key winces, bites his lip, metallic tang on his tongue.
"You're stupid." Nimble hands draw the bandages up over his forearms, stopping halfway to his elbow. He tucks in the corner of one, pins it up with a shining silver clasp, and moves onto the next. "You're going to get turned into a Dusk, and then what am I gonna do?"
The second bandage is tighter than the first - he points it out, but the fire ignores him, pinning it up just as the other one, anyway. He fidgets on the bed, pulling his black sleeves back down over the white bandages, darkness swallowing light, and hides his hands from view, rests them in his lap.
Swimming in the darkness, blind.
"Why bandage it? It will heal on its own, even without the wrappings."
"Because I care." Slender fingers are on his face, spider legs trapping his cheeks and chin in a vice and forcing him to look up and into the molten green lava spilling into him.
"You can't care." Thin lips, a jester grin, fall on his face, press to his mouth, and pull out the gasps and the mumbles and the false feeling. The hellfire wraps him up in heat, pulls him close, and he clings, and feels tiny and needy, to his chest.
Like a moth drawn to flame.
