Kingdom Hearts Fan Fiction ❯ Alkalinity ❯ Magnesium ( Chapter 2 )

A/N: I usually wait at least a week to update my pathetically-short chapters, but it hasn't even been an hour since I posted the last. XD This is one helluva plot bunny. Since I haven't had a chance to get reviewer feedback on the English vs Japanese name issue, I'll continue with the English names until I know how everyone feels about it.

 

 

As always with stories, I was sucked in kicking and screaming. I'm lazy. When I end up writing a story, it's always because I've found a fandom that I like, but not the particular story that I want to read. There are amazing AkuRoku fics, but the only cohesive stories I've found so far run closer to fluffy and relatively clean - and I need my gritty romances with lots of pain and sharp edges. I'm seeing definite sadism-masochism-bondage-domination-submission in this fic's future, ne?

 

* I'll use asterisks if there's a key term of word that may not be understood - if anyone needs clarification, the explanations are in the footnotes.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

He felt the blood spurt over his hands, thick and hot. It grew cold all too quickly in the night air, reminding him of fluids cooling on lovers' skin after passion.

 

 

The woman beneath him twitched, and he tightened the garrote* efficiently. He had torn through the flesh all around, and could clearly see the gleam of bone. In better light it would have been a dull yellow, but the moon leeched it of color.

 

 

He still sat over her chest. He felt her heart stop.

 

 

Boredom had never become him, and he felt it creeping in now. With a sigh he bent to remove her eyes. He cut off her nose, and knocked her teeth in with the hilt of a knife for good measure. It served a double purpose: the body would be more difficult to recognize, and the bizarre state of the corpse would have the constable scrambling to find a suspect among the serial killers currently walking free.

 

 

Thirdly, he had hated her. They were harder to kill when he could see the cracks; he found himself sympathizing with them and loving their flaws.

 

 

She hadn't been beautiful, but she was perfect. She had smiled softly, and laughed easily. Gentle, kind, and loving.

 

 

From the moment he saw her he hated her. Hated feeling inferior, dark, craven - broken. He wanted to destroy her for the same reason he wanted to destroy all perfect, beautiful things. The same reason he burnt paintings and broke glass.

 

 

He wasn't perfect or pure.

 

 

And so he wanted everything else to be as broken and sullied as he was.

 

 

Though he knew they were the only ones in this obscure corner of the public gardens at this hour, he gave their surroundings a cursory glance. Then he dragged the body (it wasn't her anymore, just a cooling sac of meat) through a gap in the hedges and rolled it down the bank and into the river.

 

 

The current picked it up and carried it swiftly until it disappeared from his sight.

 

 

He absently checked the inner pocket of his coat, which was heavy with coin. He didn't know why exactly the client had wanted her dead, but she was certainly dead now.

 

 

It took him less than an hour to reach his lodging - not a home, but it would have to do. It was a neighborhood of brothels and disreputable taverns, and no one batted an eye at a boy barely old enough to be called a man striding down the middle of the road hours before dawn covered in blood.

 

 

He was tired when he reached his room, but sleep was not a priority.

 

 

His priorities began with the hot, long-fingered hands that manacled his wrists, and continued into the tongue scraping the dried blood from his skin, the teeth bruising the skin, the nails cutting into him, the hips grinding him down into a thin mattress.

 

 

Roxas's priorities ended with the familiar gesture of a long leg hooking over his hips, and watching glass green eyes slide shut.

 

 

And finally, sleep.

 

 

Because Axel was so shattered he was powdered glass, and so completely dark as to be pure again. Because only Axel made him feel like he was being corrupted - and that meant there had to be some purity in him, didn't it? There had to be something to corrupt.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

Roxas woke sharply at the insistence of his alarm clock, which he slapped back into silence. The arm that he had extended from beneath the thick duvet reacted to the chill air and snapped back to his side.

 

 

The cold was not acceptable. Even under the duvet he began to shiver, and so he reached instinctively for the lanky body that was so adept at warming him up.

 

 

And then he registered this, and sat bolt upright.

 

 

More disturbing than the instinct was the dream that had prompted it. He seldom dreamed, and even then it was in snippets. Now he had vivid scenes slamming into him, as precise as a frame of film.

 

 

To his horror, he felt a stirring between his legs, and knew he was growing hard.

 

 

He didn't know if it was the murder or the sex. Because as much as the memory of blood on his hands and a heart stopping beneath him made him shake, he was aware enough to admit that the sex might bother him more.

 

 

Killing someone he had never seen in a dream was one thing. Dreaming of a person he had met only a day before…

 

 

The strength of everything made him want to hide somewhere small, dark, and safe. He knew anger, and sadness, and even happiness, but these suddenly seemed pale, washed-out facsimiles of emotion compared to the raw passion of the dream.

 

 

The killing and the fucking weren't real, but they made mockeries of everything he had ever felt or done. There had been ecstasy, hunger, and lust in both acts, so that the blood and pain seemed to bleed together into something exquisitely real.

 

 

More real than the world he was waking up to.

 

 

More alive.

 

 

He wondered if he had always felt this hollow, and was only now noticing.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

Namine was the only person who knew him well enough to notice the aberrations in his behavior, but she also knew him well enough to recognize what was fair game and what was do-not-discuss. After a pointed glance, she let it go.

 

 

Before breakfast they examined the uniforms that an overtly perky maid brought them.

 

 

It was a shame that they were uniforms, as Roxas would have been willing to wear them of his own volition. They were a requirement, however, and the siblings had a particular dislike of requirements.

 

 

The girls' brocade jacket was laced in so many places that Roxas was able to widen it in the shoulders and tighten it severely over his narrow hips. He opted to wear just the black tie beneath (in early autumn two layers seemed rather excessive) and forgo a shirt. Namine was pleased with the way his suit jacket fell to her fingertips in the sleeves.

 

 

Eyeliner was applied by both, and Roxas pretended to polish his piercings while waiting for Namine to finish ripping a pair of fishnets. He felt slightly unbalanced with so much silver in his brows, ears, and navel and no ink in his skin, but a tattoo had remained harder to arrange than dates with a piercing gun.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

After a breakfast that was as opulent as everything else about Reiketsukan Academy, they received their schedules from Xemnas.

 

 

“I'm really quite lazy, so I had planned on writing up the same schedule for both of you, but the majority of incidences on your records seem to involve the two of you working in tandem. And I would personally prefer to avoid having our microscopes used in `modern art installations' involving steamrollers. Which was actually quite inspired. But only because it didn't happen here.

 

 

“So you two will not have any classes together for the first semester. I'll award you with more shared classes in future semesters if you can keep your asses in line. Clear? Good. Leave now.”

 

 

There were three two-hour classes per day, with six classes total. It seemed that they alternated between niger and cruentus days. Roxas would have just called them black and red, but the one passerby he had mentioned this to had hissed at him and insisted that they were the school colors, and the school colors were to be referred to in Latin, thank you very much.

 

 

Roxas had marveled at how uptight people could be even in a madhouse like this one, and happily flipped the snarky passerby the bird.

 

 

On a more pleasant note, however, he found that the boring normalcy was helping to chase away the imprint of the dream. The heat and passion didn't fit the doldrums of school, schedules, and uniforms. He could even laugh a little now, over how disproportionate his reaction this morning had been. The last time he had been so shaken by a dream, he mused, he had been six and terrified of a fire that he saw consuming everything around him.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

His first class was Latin, in which he was fluent enough to take a two hour nap. At the end of class he scribbled down the assignments inside the cover of the thick, musty textbook he was given. Then there was morning tea with Namine, during which he was relieved to find Axel missing from the staff table.

 

 

The gods, as always, were perverse bastards.

 

 

Because he walked into his chemistry class to find the students watching calmly, as if this were a regular occurrence, while the teacher had a little too much fun with the Bunsen burner at his desk.

 

 

He saw Axel, and for a moment there was nothing. Then his synapses flared to life, sending remembered heat crashing through his veins while the sensations of his dream slammed into him with the force of a car into a brick wall.

 

 

It wasn't until a hand caught his shoulder that he found the eyes of everyone in the room trained on him, and he realized he had frozen in mid-step. His eyes were so wide they hurt, and his breath was coming in short, shallow bursts.

 

 

And he didn't have to look up to know whose hand was on his shoulder. The heat seeping through the fabric and into his skin was enough.

 

 

He recognized the pale, tapered fingers, and was aware of phantom sensations. He could feel those fingers holding him, caressing him, scratching him, bruising him, stretching him -

 

 

With a choked gasp he broke away, staring blindly at a point over Axel's shoulder. He couldn't meet his eyes, for fear of what they would summon.

 

 

Roxas then did something he though only other people did, in movies and books and soap operas.

 

 

He fainted.

 

 

x(X)x

 

 

Leijhana tu'sai to all readers and reviewers!

 

*garrote - an implement (as a wire with a handle at each end) for strangulation