Tainted But Beautiful
Epilogue
Light
Pairings: AkuZeku, Zemyx, AkuRoku, AxDem, minor onesided VexZex, XemSaix, Marxene, Cleon
Rated: M
Warnings: Vampires, vampires, vampires...uh, yaoi, AU-ish-ness, abuse, noncon, rape, graphic scenes, character death, overall weirdness, scads of violence
Summary: Axel is a powerful vampire slayer who's captured Zexion, a vampire, as his pet. What Axel doesn't bargain on is Demyx, his former student, developing a strong attraction to Zexion...
Notes: And so this is the end. For good.
I was originally going to thank some of my more regular reviewers with a list of names...but I decided against it. Because every single one of you who has read, and reviewed, and contributed to the audience for this story in some way, has my unending gratitude. I'm still overwhelmed by the response to this story - this is easily my most popular story on this site, and the only one I can thank is all of you. For favoriting it, for putting it on your alerts, and above all, for leaving more than 400 wonderful reviews. Thank you all, I love you all, and I could not have done it without you. I'm not going to pretend that I was writing this solely for me - if I'd gotten no responses at all, I would not have stuck it out for thirty chapters and almost two years (yes, almost two years, you are right to be shocked...but the dates don't lie. I began this in November of 2008 and now it's June of 2010).
It's been a long journey, sometimes frustrating. Some people may not have appreciated the fact that I have a life, which prevented me from updating for stretches that ranged up to four months. I won't apologize for that, because I have made it clear from the beginning that I don't view fanfiction nearly as important as my real life and my serious writing. For that, I have to thank the ones who did choose to have faith in me and stay with me even when this fic ran the danger of dying. This story I do not view as the best representative of my writing - the early portions of the story are almost unreadably bad in my eyes. Back in 2008, it seems I was under the impression that I was writing for a comic book, given the number of words I italicized and the liberal usage of apostrophes and dashes. I think my prose has shown some improvement, however small. At least I'm not afraid to use full stops anymore.
And though these characters are not mine, I have grown attached to my interpretations of them and to the world that I have created. If anything, this story cemented my desire to create worlds of m own, because it is so damned fun. In fact, I've mentioned that I'd like to appropriate this world for use in an actual, original novel - you can see where this plotting would have led me if you look at my livejournal (the link is my homepage).
I've rambled enough here, so I'm going to allow to enjoy this epilogue.
Even twenty years after that disastrous day - the strike on the Coven of Thirteen - Axel still visited his two students' graves religiously. He didn't get to visit often, it was true; his job as a section chief in the Slayer Society meant that he was often away from the city, and when he wasn't away he was buried under mountains of paperwork.
All the same, he managed to drop by the cemetery at least once each year. He timed most of these visits so that they occurred relatively close to that day in January when Xemnas had fallen - the day that Roxas and Demyx had died. Roxas, literally, and Demyx...on that day, Demyx had ceased being Demyx any longer. He had technically died a few weeks later than that, but Axel preferred not to think about those nightmarish weeks...
He never brought his wife and children, because he didn't believe it was anything they needed to see. The past. They were aware - his wife especially - that he had suffered more than most vampire slayers, but never had he shared with them the extent of his suffering. He didn't want to, didn't need to. It wasn't fair to them - they were his family, his future. They didn't have anything to do with the sins of his past.
Those days he spent alone, crouching in front of the two graves, his hands on his knees and thinking, always thinking, of what happened and what could have been...
He allowed himself the thoughts that never dared cross his mind the rest of the year.
Always, Axel came during the middle of the day, at the sunniest hour, when the graveyard was awash in light and looked almost fake...unnatural, somehow. More like a movie set of a graveyard than an actual cemetery in which corpses were buried. Cemeteries were supposed to lit only by the full moon on a dark and stormy night...but it was better that he visited during the day, because it felt more real. Less like a dream.
And, on a more pragmatic note...
He wasn't the only one who visited.
Every time he came to the gravestones, he brought twin bouquets of flowers - the arrangement was different each year, reflecting nothing except which flowers he could buy for cheap this time of the year - but the grave to the left was already festooned with flowers. Flowers with long green stems and fan-like purple-and-white blossoms: irises. A carpet of irises so thick that he had to brush them aside to even read the name and dates, let alone the poem.
DEMYX LA MONTE
July 14 1989 - January 17 2009
The first time that he'd visited the grave, he had, in a fit of immature vidinctiveness, thrown aside all three of the irises lying atop the stone and stomped on them until he'd crushed them into a purplish pulp. He was rewarded for his spite the next year, when the stone was covered with a veritable mountain of irises, so thick that he'd spent a good twenty minutes clearing them out.
Since then, he and Zexion had through trial and error reached an unspoken compromise. Zexion could cover the stone with a single layer of irises, and in exchange Axel would be allowed to place his own bouquet atop the stone as well. The thought filled Axel with a sense of sad irony - even after his death, the two of them were still fighting over Demyx - but slowly, he'd learned to accept it. Even enjoy it. Somehow, for a reason he couldn't name, his throat always tightened whenever he approached Demyx's grave and saw it carpeted with purple, white, and green.
A symbol that he had been loved and was still being loved.
After he'd rearranged the irises over Demyx's grave so that the boy's name was readable - he deserved at least that - and positioned his bouquet, he spared no more attention on Demyx. Demyx had already been mourned that night, after all, and much better than Axel could. Instead, he turned his attention on Roxas' grave. Leaned his bouquet against the weathered stone and sat back in the grass and thought and thought and thought. So many things. So many regrets.
Such a short time he'd spent with Roxas. As a teacher, and later as a lover. It had all passed by so quickly - it always amazed Axel to think that it had been less than four months, in all - yet he refused to forget a single day. Engraved it in his soul, so that the memories could come flooding forth whenever he visited the graves, as clear as the day they'd happened.
Roxas' death, Demyx's death, his last conversation with Zexion...
Everything.
He knew he should move on, but just one day of reliving those events - couldn't he have at least that?
"And you're a hypocrite, too," he said to the irises, slowly wilting under the winter sun. "Look at you. You just can't let go, can you?"
He didn't mind, though. To know that one other person had not forgotten...it comforted him more than he could say. More than he would ever tell Zexion, if he could.
Axel decided that he hated no one more than fat German tourists at this instant. Well, he thought they were German. He couldn't tell. All he could tell was that there was a mob of them, all in identical T-shirts, and they weren't speaking English, and they were all overweight, and they were currently occupying all of the streetcar's seats.
"Honestly, you'd think that just by using some fucking logic, they'd have figured out that it'd be better if they stood and let everyone else have the seats. It'd be more efficient; more people would be able to fit in the seats than those Jabbas. It ain't rocket science, got it memorized?" Axel groused as he clung to the pole.
"Axel, please," his wife said. "I keep telling you, if you're going to swear, don't do it in front of the kids."
"Aww, they can't hear me," Axel said with an airy wave. His two ten-year-old daughters - the ones his wife was really worried about, since their son had ended up taking after Axel in every respect - were currently staring out of the open window, jabbering excitedly to each other and not seeming to care about their cramped quarters. They gave no sign at all that they'd heard their father's lecture.
"Geez, Pop, what's wrong with a little standing? I mean, you're a vampire slayer," said his son, a tall, stringy sixteen-year-old who Axel had named after his father. His facial markings - the signs of his phoenix blood - were red and narrow, much less obtrusive than Axel's.
"Yeah, well, I'm a vampire slayer who's been tromping up and down San Francisco all day, so you can forgive me for wanting to sit my ass down for just one second," said Axel, glaring daggers at the babbling tourists.
"You have no stamina at all, yo," said his son with a laugh. He wasn't clinging to the pole yet, because the streetcar had yet to start - the conductor was intent on getting it full, though Axel felt it was already swelled beyond its capacity by the chubby tourists. He leaned against the window, grinning languidly and looking utterly at peace with himself. Axel wondered if he'd been that annoying at sixteen.
"When you yourself have just turned forty-two, you can talk, Reno," Axel snapped.
"Papa." A tug on his shirt; Axel looked down at his daughter Demi. She was a quiet, serious girl; whereas Reno was as tall and red-haired as Axel, Demi and her twin Roxanne were blonde, blue-eyed, and petite, like their mother.
Neither of them had been infused with vampiric blood - it had been Axel's decision. After suffering through what this life did to people, he'd decided that he would at least offer his daughters a chance for a normal life. The daughters he'd named for the two who had suffered the most, although it seemed he had named them incorrectly - Demi was the quiet, introspective one, while Roxanne was loud and good-natured and loved music.
Sometimes he wondered if Reno resented him for having to follow in his footsteps while his sisters didn't have to, but it seemed Axel's fears were unfounded: Reno didn't seem to care about anything except vampire slaying. He was even better than Axel had been at his age, something Axel couldn't decide if he should be proud of or disturbed by.
"What is it?" Axel asked Demi.
"Forty-two is the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, isn't it?" she said, her eyes huge and unblinking and focused on his. Axel sighed and patted her on the head.
"Why do you ask?"
"Because I heard you say it," Demi said. "In the books I'm reading, they say that forty-two is the Answer - "
"Yeah, well, it is," Axel said, "and it's also how old your poor father is. If only I could sit down..."
"Hey, Pop," Reno called - he'd somehow maneuvered himself towards the far end of the streetcar, even though that required passing through a thick tourist blockage. "Can I stand on the outside?"
Axel thought about the people he'd glimpsed clinging to bars on the sides of the streetcars rocketing through the city, and immediately said, "Absolutely not, got it memorized? Come back here!"
"Why not, yo?" Reno complained.
"Because it's dangerous." A vein was twitching in Axel's temple. He'd thought that compared to taking out an entire coven, raising children could not possibly be difficult, but oh, how he had thought wrong. If a day passed in which he suffered only a regular headache instead of a migraine, he considered it a job well done. Every morning when he woke up he was surprised that he, his wife, and his children were still alive. Truly, it was a miracle.
"Oh, c'mon, I helped you kill that African vampire just last week, you're a hypocrite if you say this is dangerous - "
"I allow you to kill vampires," Axel growled, "because you've trained to do that since you were four. I will not allow you to hang off the side of a streetcar - by a single pole - while passing through heavy traffic."
"You're such a sourpuss, Pop, hard to believe you're a section chief," said Reno. "Why can't you be a cool section chief, like Cloud - "
"Can you talk about anything besides vampire slaying?" Axel said. "I'm not a vampire slayer during this entire week, got it memorized? I'm your father and this is a fun family vacation that we're all gonna enjoy, got it fucking memorized?"
"Sure thing, yo," said Reno, though his grin clearly said he hadn't got it memorized. He sauntered back towards Axel, not caring when he bumped into a particularly obese German tourist - the tourist hurled a torrent of indignant nonsense towards him, which Reno rightly ignored.
"You don't seem to be enjoying yourself so far," noted Axel's wife, smiling slightly.
"Got a fucking headache," Axel grumbled, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. The air in the streetcar was hot and stuffy and he wondered why the damn thing hadn't started moving yet.
"Hey, Papa!" It was Roxanne this time, a source of almost as many headaches as Reno. If only all of his children could be more like Demi...although, he could do without the apropros-of-nothing questions about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was a little too much asking for his children to be normal, though, when you were the vampire slayer Axel La Monte of all people.
"Yep, what's going on?" he said with a sigh. The German tourists were jabbering and pointing at him and Reno. He wondered what they were saying and decided he didn't particularly care.
"Druella - " Xigbar's daughter, figured, why couldn't his kids play with better-behaved children? " - told me that vampires these days, they can disguise themselves as human and go out during the daytime, is that true?"
"Druella's full of lies, yo," said Reno airily.
"But she's thirteen," said Roxanne as if that settled everything.
"And your bro's sixteen, yeah? And he's actually killed vampires, not like Drooly - "
"Her name," said Axel's wife," is Druella. Don't be so disrespectful to your friends."
"Drooly is nobody's friend! You just make us play with her because she's the kid of Papa's friend," said Roxanne, surprisingly insightful.
"So what if I do," Axel snapped. "Nobody deserves to be lonely, you hear? Nobody. Especially not those who other people don't understand and treat like shit because of that - "
He broke off, unable to continue, realizing that he wasn't speaking to his children but to himself. To his young, stupid self who had seen nothing wrong with treating Zexion the way he had...
"Axel," said his wife, very quietly. She placed her hand on the crook of his elbow, keeping her touch light; Axel forced himself to breathe.
"Yeah, sorry..." he said to his kids, who were staring at him in wide-eyed confusion - they had sensed that there was more to his anger than just righteous indignation over a bullied child. "Listen, don't talk about vampires or Druella or Xiggy or anything like that during this week, all right? We're here to have fun, nothing else..."
Roxanne was right to a degree - though the vampire population had been greatly diminished after the fall of the Coven of Thirteen, individual vampires had only grown more dangerous. Some genius magician had invented charms that many vampires wore as earrings, which allowed them to go about in broad daylight; the skilled illusionists among them were able to impersonate humans. Just a few years ago there'd been some highly publicized attacks in a high school, when it turned out that one of the students was really a vampire who'd hidden himself among the student body to better access victims.
This, Axel thought, was an ironic echo of the silly vampire books that had been popular around the time that he'd met Zexion.
But San Francisco had a vampire slaying force of its own (its section chief was actually one of the prime organizers of the Pride Parade...), so Axel decided that he needn't worry excessively about a vampire attack. If one happened, he and Reno could easily handle themselves. All the same, he glanced surreptitiously around the streetcar, looking for anyone specific - somebody with too-large, too-prominent, earrings, or someone who was trying to keep to the shadows...
Everything was normal, of course. Just fat chattering tourists everywhere he looked, and a conductor yelling for more people to fill up the damned car. Axel sighed. At this rate, they were never going to move.
"Papa?" Roxanne said, querulously. "Listen...umm...I'm sorry for saying those things about, um, Druella..."
"Aww, Rox," Axel said, his heart - never completely whole - breaking into a hundred tiny pieces. He knelt down and placed his hands on her shoulders, so that he was staring in her eyes. Bright blue eyes that reminded him all too much of theirs...
"It's all right. I know you meant nothing wrong. You've got a big heart, you and your sister both; hell, even your brother, you all...I think I did you right in the end, all of you..."
"Papa," Roxanne said, looking faintly embarrassed.
"Sorry," Axel said, making to stand up.
Of course, at that instant, the conductor finally decided to start the streetcar.
The best thing Axel could say about that incident was that Roxanne hadn't ended up harmed that badly; she'd crashed straight into her mother and that had cushioned her somewhat. Axel was not so lucky. He spent the rest of the day walking around with cotton stuffed up his nose, since it had started bleeded copiously after he'd gotten a faceful of the pole.
The rest of the afternoon proceeded without incident, thankfully enough. The La Monte family spent most of the afternoon visiting Chinatown, where they loaded up on snacks and boba teas from the little bakeries, crowded together in the tiny factory that apparently manufactured a good percentage of all the country's fortune cookies, and had dinner at a dim sum restaurant. By the end of the day, Axel had removed the blood-soaked balls of cotton from his nostrils, and was happily exhausted, along with the rest of his family. Maybe he ought to take vacations more often...
But even on vacation, he couldn't entirely shut down his slayer's instincts. Throughout the day, he'd felt a constant prickling at the edge of his senses...a prickling he couldn't explain, except that he was aware - on some level - that someone was following him. He didn't voice any of his suspicions to his family, and whenever he turned around to see if there was anything suspicious behind him, his eyes caught nothing but the usual crowd. Nothing that looked like it could be a vampire...
The next two days flew by as well: they spent an inordinate amount of time in Union Square, shopping at the fancy boutiques because of Roxanne and Axel's wife; Reno got his revenge by taking them for a harrowing walk through the Tenderloin afterwards. They visited the Castro as well, hunting for the hidden slides that Demi was sure existed, but that trip was cut short when Axel ran into the section chief pride organizer, who tried to take him aside to regale him with endless gossip about the Slayer Society. Axel had excused himself as quickly as possible, since the whole point of this trip was that he did nothing slaying related. Then they went to the Hard Rock Cafe on the pier, per Roxanne's insistence, and Axel remained silent for much of that dinner even though the rest of his family was laughing and marveling at the live acts, because he was suddenly struck by the thought that Demyx would have enjoyed this trip had he been alive to...
Demyx would be thirty-nine this year. Would he have a family of his own? Or would he still be with Zexion?
It was too painful to think about, so Axel tried not to think at all.
Throughout it all, though he was enjoying himself - the La Monte family, simply by virtue of being the La Monte family, rarely got to spent time together like this - he couldn't help but nurse the nasty suspicion that somebody was following him. The suspicion grew and grew and only solidified as the days passed, though he never voiced it to anyone, not even Reno. If it was a rogue vampire, Axel could take it out easily, especially since the vampire seemed to be following the family around during the daytime. Vampires could go out in the daytime now, but the charms sapped much of their strength.
But Axel began to suspect that the vampire was not a random rogue. In fact, he was quite sure as to the vampire's identity.
I am not the only one who has yet to let go of the past.
A bed of irises, surrounding a name and nineteen too-short years.
On the evening of the third day, the family climbed up Lombard Street - billed as the crookedest street in the world - to reach their hotel as they did every night. There were some grumblings from Demi and Roxanne, who were not used to so much physical exertion, and everyone was exhausted after a long day of traversing San Francisco. Axel remained silent, deep in thought. Certain that this couldn't last. He would never enjoy himself so long as a pair of midnight blue eyes kept following him fthroughout the city.
He slept, beside his wife. It took him a long time to fall asleep; he kept his eyes on the ceiling, idly seeking patterns in the plaster, and his mind turned. It was summer, far removed from that icy day in January in which he always visited the graveyard to pay his penance, but once again the unwelcome thoughts were infiltrating his mind, creeping in like silent snakes. Choking him. He placed his hand on his wife's shoulder and felt the rise and fall of her chest, and listened to the gentle snoring of his three children piled up on the next bed. His heart ached and he realized that he loved them - all of them - almost as much as he had loved Roxas during that brief and wonderful month.
He was the crummiest husband and father in the world, still stuck on a half-vampiric boy who had not breathed in twenty years.
It was still dark when he opened his eyes again. Almost five in the morning. Predawn. Axel sat up, silent and graceful with the instincts that had been honed into him over three decades of vampire slaying. None of his family moved. They remained peaceful, asleep, untroubled. He wouldn't have it any other way.
He opened the door soundlessly, stepped out onto the sidewalk, shivered in the chill of the early morning, which he felt too acutely through his T-shirt. The sky was still dark blue, but the edges were tinged with red, the dull fire of the coming dawn.
Zexion leaned against a nearby wall, his arms folded, his eyes as piercing as Axel remembered.
The breath caught in Axel's throat. He'd known, intellectually, that this moment was coming, ever since he'd realized who had been following him and his family. But nothing could have prepared him for it. The memories. They came flooding back at him in a single deluge, senseless and shapeless -
The words that Zexion had whispered at him that horrid first night, the night when everything had changed...
"You cannot save anyone, can you? Poor weak fool. At least you have me..."
What a cruel irony those words had turned out to be.
Staring at Zexion now, Axel was astonished by how little the incubus had changed over twenty years. Why should he have? He was an immortal vampire, by nature unchanging. Even now, he was still as pale and slim as Axel remembered, with the same slate-colored hair covering one eye (though it seemed somewhat shorter in the back than it had before), and penetrating, deep blue eyes with a dull fire burning inside them...a dull accusation. Always an accusation. Or perhaps Axel had always imagined that accusing light, because he thought it should be there...that someone had to blame him for everything that had gone wrong in his life, and nobody seemed better fit for that task than Zexion.
Or maybe Zexion really did blame him. That thought made him shudder.
In a way, the lack of change in the incubus' appearance only reinforced the few differences. He now wore earrings, large, frosted-glass globes in each ear - the charms that enabled a vampire to survive sunlight. His face seemed thinner, his cheekbones sharper, and his eyes...they were hooded and the skin around them was lined, incongruously so for someone who appeared so young. He looked like a shell-shocked soldier, still haunted by demons from a battlefield years ago.
Axel understood, because he saw that same look on his own face every time he glanced in the mirror.
Despite the elderly quality of his eyes, the rest of him seemed somewhat...younger. Or maybe it was because Axel had grown older. Back then, Zexion had physically been around the same age as him, just a little bit younger, so he'd found it easier to think of Zexion as a viable threat. Now, he saw nothing but a too-skinny teenager, only a little older than his own son, and he was amazed that he had ever feared Zexion. If anything, looking at Zexion made his heart hurt - from sympathy. This child, said the part of Axel that was all parent, has been through so much. He deserves some measure of love and comfort.
But of course Zexion wasn't a child. He was even older than Axel, had suffered far more than Axel.
They faced each other, twenty years separating them, both equally afraid.
At length, Zexion spoke. His voice flat and measured, he said, "Good morning."
His voice was so soft... Axel found it hard to believe that Zexion had been so easily able to manipulate using it. He heard Zexion's voice whispering taunts and damnations upon him, but it was a mere echo down a tunnel twenty years long.
"It's you," Axel said. His voice felt overly loud, too hollow and slow. "I knew it was you."
"I knew you knew," Zexion said. "I thought for a little while that you did not, but you would have known...because you are still a vampire slayer."
"And you?"
Zexion jerked his thin shoulder in a shrug. "I do not know...even now."
They fell silent again. Axel continued gazing at Zexion, his mind buzzing with questions, but he didn't know where to begin.
Once again, Zexion was the one who broke the silence. "You have done well for yourself, haven't you? Marrying...her, of all people...and your children."
"The boy is Reno," Axel said. "The girls are Demi and Roxanne."
Zexion made a little noise that might have been a snort or cough or nothing at all. "My, my. You've changed a lot. I never thought that you would cut your hair..."
"That's the difference between twenty and forty," Axel said in a deadpan, running a hand through his hair that he now kept swept back from his forehead and done in a short ponytail. Then, more seriously, he added, "You haven't changed much, yourself."
Zexion exhaled. "That is the difference between a human and a vampire."
"I know," Axel said, with the dim sense that this was all wrong, but he didn't know how to fix it. To steer this conversation back into safer waters - but since when had there been such a thing as "safe waters" for the two of them? They had never conversed as equals, never would, because the memories were too painful, too tangled, between them.
There was a string binding them, but it was so hopelessly gnarled and knotted that they didn't know where it began or where it ended - and it felt less like destiny than a noose.
"What were you doing, anyway? Following me and my family around the city...you haven't been stalking me, have you?"
"Hardly." The noise Zexion made was definitely a scoff. "I was simply visiting the city for a little bit...and then I happened to glimpse you in the crowd. You'd changed a lot, but I could tell. You walked the same way, and your eyes...and you'd be around this age anyhow. So when I saw that it was you, I decided to..." His voice trailed off.
"Stalk me," Axel said.
Zexion shrugged again. "I don't know what possessed me, but..."
"You wanted to talk to me," Axel said, "even though I expressly told you during our last conversation that I never wanted to see you again."
"Maybe..." Zexion said. "I don't know. I don't know what possessed me to do any of this...it's just...I get the feeling that you have not gotten over it, have you?"
Axel remained silent. Zexion took that as a cue to plunge on ahead, speaking quickly, as if he had to get the burden of his words off his chest.
"Otherwise you would not have named your daughters after them...and I've seen enough of you these three days, witnessed all of your outbursts and the times when you pause and fall into melancholy silence, and I see you when you're sleeping, how you whisper their names..."
Once upon a time, hearing Zexion say all this - expose his weaknesses like this - would have caused Axel to fly into a senseless rage. But time and trauma had dulled his edges, and he could now only stand there, letting Zexion's words hit him like a series of well-timed blows, because they were true. Strange, how Zexion struck at him the worst not when he was intentionally being manipulative, but when he was speaking in a confused jumble, speaking naturally...
Speaking as he'd done with few others besides Demyx.
"You haven't gotten over it, either, have you?" Axel said, quietly. "Why else did you decide to follow me around?"
"That's not..." Zexion began, but he fell silent. Because he knew it was true.
"And you visit their graves, and those irises..."
"Fine. Point taken," Zexion said, though he didn't sound offended. "I haven't forgotten. I can't bring myself to forget. You can't either, can you? Even though you told yourself that you would move on...even after your wife, your children..."
"Something like that," Axel said, "is something you have to commit to your memory."
He spoke with a conviction he didn't feel. He gazed into Zexion's dark eyes, wanting some sort of understanding - some sort of reprieve. Reprieve from the nightmares that had haunted him for so long. Every night, he saw them. Roxas white and bleeding beneath him; Demyx a mindless, growling monster, his last sight his mentor raising a gun against him...
The corners of Axel's eyes stung but he felt no wetness. He just stood there, shivering and weak, suddenly aware of how cold the early morning air was...
"I understand," Zexion said. "It's best not to forget, but..."
"I want to be free," Axel said.
"You can, you know," Zexion said. He was gazing at Axel with the most curious look in his eyes - a sort of pained sadness, yet kindness as well. Kindness? That wasn't right. Zexion hated Axel, didn't he...?
Axel wasn't so sure of that. He no longer hated Zexion, after all. Wasn't sure what he felt, but it wasn't hate. If he himself, the darker and more bitter one by far, could let go of his hatred, it made sense that Zexion could as well. Perhaps better.
"You can," Zexion said again, and it sounded as if each word was costing him tremendous effort. "You can, while I cannot. Do you understand? I am a creature of the night, the darkness...it is my fate to lie in the shadows. I cannot posssibly move forward, because that requires stepping into the light. Something that my nature will not allow me to do."
"But you have those..." Axel said, pointing to the spheres dangling from Zexion's ears.
A brief, weary smile flashed across Zexion's face. "Oh, these? You truly think that these can do anything? I can enter daylight, yes, but...I cannot stay in it for long. I still must cling to the shadows, because if I stay in the sun too long I become tired, and sick, too tired for my powers to work properly. I'm sorry, the light will never be my province. The way it is yours."
"Mine, huh?" Axel said, smiling as well, but it was as fake as Zexion's. It hurt his facial muscles. "You really think that?"
"It is more yours than mine, at any right," said Zexion. His eyes were dark, dark and so very serious. For one wild flash of an instant Axel saw how Demyx could have - genuinely - fallen in love with Zexion. "Even if you choose not to...you still can."
In a vague way, Axel was aware of the pale red light beginning to seep upwards from the horizon, like a stain of blood. But most of him was focused on Zexion in front of him, solemn and unhappy and fierce, speaking with more conviction than Axel had ever heard from him before. More than Axel had ever heard from anyone before. It stopped the breath in his throat and made his heart pound slow and deep, making him more aware than ever of his humanity. He might have the blood of a phoenix, but in the end he belonged more with those of mortal flesh and mortal blood than to the world that the cold, pale, pulseless Zexion represented.
And he understood Zexion's words. Finally. Understood what the other immortal had been trying to impress on him. There were less than six feet separating them, but it might have been a canyon. Neither could cross it. Could know the other's world.
Nor did he want to.
"Move ahead. Put it behind you. Face the future with a smile, instead of constantly thinking what could have been," Zexion exhorted, his voice soft, pleading. "Do it for the both of us, Axel."
He began stepping backwards, disappearing into the shadows cast by the building. Back and back, the glass globes dangling from his ears shining as they caught the growing light from the rising sun.
"Walk forward, Axel. Because I cannot. Walk forward into the light."
Axel gazed at him one last time, at the midnight-colored eyes gleaming in the shadows, and obeyed. He turned and faced the sun spilling bars of golden light across the winding street, and didn't look back.
Tainted But Beautiful - The End
15 July 2010
Biblical quotes for the win. That quote features prominently in the novel The Poisonwood Bible, and though I have no pretensions that this little vampirefic is even one tenth as good as that work of art, I thought it would be a nice little reference, and very fitting for Axel's ending.
You can interpret this epilogue however you wish, but I will point out that yes, I was influenced to an extent by the epilogue to Harry Potter. I must be one of the few Potterfen out there who actually likes the epilogue... Axel's wife may be either Larxene or Namine or a random blonde, blue-eyed OC. The Namine interpretation is hinted at in the final chapter, but it's nothing definitive, and you can ignore it if you don't like AkuNami (but I do). Reno is a younger version of Reno from FF7. I use the "younger" as justification for any OOC-ness. The epilogue was originally going to be set in Rome, but I changed it to San Fran because I've actually been to San Fran and I enjoyed it a lot (Axel's itinerary is based on mine).
As for the future...I will be putting up one more "chapter," so to speak - a soundtrack, listing 14 of the countless songs I listened to that helped shape this story, and my explanations for how they pertain (or at least, how I think they pertain). I probably will not post much more on my fanfiction account after this. I won't make a blanket promise like I did a few months ago, because who knows, some insane caprice might strike me. But fanfiction definitely holds less an appeal than original fiction does for me at this moment. I am much, much more active on my fictionpress than my fanfiction, so I invite you all to check it out. My username's Bickazer and I'd love if you took a look at, and commented on, my to-be-100-chapters serial Broken Memory. I have no illusions that it will acquire as vast a readership as this story, but c'mon...I'd like to have at least something of a reader base. SO GO CHECK IT OUT YAH?
A long time ago, back when was into the pairing, I crapped out some vague thoughts for a sequel featuring a Reno/Yazoo pairing, of all things. I'm slowly getting back into that pairing, but writing the sequel means that I have to do some research into FF7 (beyond watching Advent Children), and I don't feel like doing that, so the sequel will be a long time coming. Plus, everyone interesting is dead by this point. In the meantime, you can go read Broken Memory, yah?
Thank you all for a wonderful almost-two years. And please keep reviewing and supporting me.
Jander Panell