the little bird in her own way follows her will to sing.
what came of picking flowers
Marluxia does not suffer the tawdry likes of forget-me-nots or birds of paradise in Naminé's tower-room; instead he clips her sprigs of foxglove and white hydrangea, twining crowns out of candytuft to place atop her hair. Nights past he had seen her scribbling away on her canvas, creating vast, garish swathes of red and blue and yellow as beach-hibiscuses and sky and skeleton keys.
He knows where she has seen these things.
"Perhaps you ought to stick to familiarity; these flights of fancy are unbecoming on you," Marluxia says. "Draw me something pretty, won't you?"
Dutifully, she draws him white poppies and pale buttercups, culled by sickle-blades; she draws him fields of daisies and citadels upon lilac hills—all her primary-coloured childhood familiarities.
He fashions her a ring of tiny woodruff blossoms, milky and wan, and slides it onto her left hand, bending back her silver-lace bird-bones until she stutters; he kisses each of her red knuckles, mouth wet like garden-dew; he prunes and grooms her as he would a rosebush.
"Don't tremble so," he says, and smoothes out her hair, cocoon-soft.
She is bare and downy as a silkworm, creeping white and silent as a witch; someday she'll emerge as some poor, flightless creature.
fair, brown and trembling
Marluxia brings her lily-of-the-valley and violets in the morning, and she watches as he presses them between the pages of her sketchbooks, between pastel still lifes of vodou and black magic and the destruction of worlds she's never seen—red flowers made of thunder, tall as bell-shaped girls; bayous of bones and potions and mambos; coral reefs and green shafts of sunlight. They join his older specimens, monkshood and nasturtium and petunia, pressed brown between her wax witchcraft like the wings of silkmoths.
Of course, lepidoptery was always more Vexen's domain; he catches moths and butterflies and pins them beneath glass as Naminé watches, and she draws them in fanciful colours, feeding on nectar as though they still lived.
She seems to find the preservation of flowers less brutal, and so she sits with her white hands folded in her lap and does not tremble as he leafs through the pages one by one; he does not mind the wanderings of her imagination when they're directed toward fruitful things, and so he smiles as he lays the heads of primroses atop her drawings of princesses in towers.
She twists the flower-ring around her finger, blossoms burnt brown with body heat.
three may peaches
Green grows the grass in Marluxia's garden. He brings her there now and again, guiding her by the hand through goldenrods tall as she, as the flowers rustle and coo as skylarks do. He plies her with sweet pears and tart citrus in the shade of a myrtle smooth and pink as a princess; her mouth is purple with mulberry and dewberry, her belly full, her skin fair as a nightingale's breast, white lashes like the petals of mock orange.
Her little-girl knees are skinned from kneeling in his crocus-fields, but her mouth is sweet and pliant; the ring of flowers he had made for her has long since crumbled, but the sugary pap on her lips and teeth makes a perfect band around his finger on her tongue. It is bright like the markings of flora or fauna; to warn, perhaps, or to attract mates.
She watches the glass of his greenhouse ceiling as he peels away her eucharis-white dress, a chrysalis she no longer has need of; his fingers leave warm, dark smears on the backs of her apple-pale calves, the inflorescence at the junction of her thighs.
He likes to think he could transfer something into her, as the bees do to the safflowers; her flesh is cold and reticent in barren adolescence, and there is nothing of himself to give.