[Kingdom Hearts] Marluxia, Larxene, "Becoming"
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Title: Becoming
Summary: Nobodies need something to fill in the spaces of who they are, but how do they find that something? [Set pre-KH2, pre-COM]
Characters: Marluxia and Larxene
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: I did not create and do not own these characters or anything relating to the Kingdom Hearts franchise. This fanfiction is written for non-profit enjoyment, and is not intended to harm the rights of owners and creators.
Notes: Curse you, last-minute editing impulses! I was this close to submitting this on time. The story is as close to fluffy and friendshippy as you get when focusing on psychopaths who aren't technically supposed to have emotions.
It opened its eyes and wondered why it couldn't see. The light had been immense and consuming only a moment before. There had been ... violence, pain...
Now nothing, as if its eyes had been removed.
It was kneeling on something hard - too smooth to be ground - everything was quiet, and it was almost cold. The sensation was dim, as if it were somehow too far away to get at properly. Then it was strange that its extremities were trembling. My hands, it thought, flexing its fingers. Yes, they were fingers, just that shape, numbed at the tips... It touched iself hurriedly, looking for injuries, and also showing itself that it was the right form.
Hair, shoulder-length. Two wobbly-lobed ears, a neck, breasts... No clothes. But the body was there, unhurt and unchanged. It didn't know why it had expected change, but it seemed a blessing that its body was the shape it felt that it should be. The lack of injuries seemed strange, though.
Wait. There was something else about body shape. I'm a woman.
Should have known that...
Then she strained to see, desperate for it in the same way that she had needed to check her shape. Was the world still there? What was she sitting on?
Sightlessness turned into darkness, and the darkness shifted.
Then it turned grey-white, swift and strange, and leapt at her. She rolled before it hit, then scrambled to her feet, spinning around to keep her eyes on the creature. Something whirled over her head, and she whipped around again.
Two men stood near her - and then there was a scream behind her. The alien-looking creature that had attacked her had a spiked metal wheel embedded in it. It's strange, sharply-pointed arms scrabbled helplessly at the air, and then its chest cracked, caved in, and it vanished, along with the weapon that had killed it. She stared at the spot ... and took a small, decisive step back.
"Another Nobody has manifested. As I predicted." It was a man with long blond hair and the slightest smugness in his voice. He lifted his chin, seeming to look down his nose at her, and wrote something on a clipboard.
"Would you like me to clap?" said the red-haired boy beside him. Then he turned to her. "Hey there." He raised his eyebrows, curling up a corner of his mouth. "Would you like some clothes?"
She wondered why she wasn't embarrassed as she took the package of clothes - but dressed without knowing the answer. Underwear, trousers, boots, shirt, long black coat, gloves. She looked up as she dressed, taking in the sight of twilit woods. The ground seemed too lumpy for the place where she had been kneeling, and there were no twigs or leaves embedded in her palms, which there should have been. She felt as if she had been somewhere else ... close to here, but almost too far away.
The shivering in her fingers began again, and she looked away from the scenery to study the men. They seemed to be wearing the same clothes as hers. Was it a uniform?
"Now would you like to come with us?" The redhead hitched a thumb over his shoulder. "There are more of those beasties around here, you know. The woods are swarming in them this time of year."
She had received something from them, but she didn't know them. She wasn't sure that she needed to go with them, so planted her feet apart as if standing against the boy's easy command. "Didn't we skip the introductions? Who are you?"
"Ohh, feeling sure of yourself, huh? How about you tell us your name first?" He grinned.
She stared at him, then away, as if she were looking for clues to answer his question.
"I think you got us a dud, Vexen," the boy said, turning to the blonde man. "Won't the Superior be pleased we stopped all our other duties to find this?" He hitched his thumb at her in the same nonchalant way.
The other man - Vexen - sneered at both her and the boy. "Give it time. It is no surprise that there is some uncertainty of self, considering the kind of trauma needed to create a Nobody."
The boy seemed to be paying him no attention, watching her piercingly for a reaction. "That's you, by the by. Nobody." His green eyes narrowed, cat-like, with pleasure, though she didn't think she'd reacted. "And if you're wondering why you don't get surprises or mad 'cause I said that - well, that's why you're a Nobody."
She followed them, because even 'Nobody' was a kind of answer. It seemed to fit.
. . . . .
The Superior watched her in almost the same way as the boy she learned was called Axel, though he wasn't as obvious or as pleased about it. She was allowed to keep the uniform.
She couldn't help thinking that the uniform and the number that went with it were the best things she had going for her.
She watched them pass her by. Demyx, dancing and dripping his way through the castle, and on occasion flat-out running as someone else chased him, flailing sodden paperwork. Luxord, flicking coins and smiling as if the outcome was always amusing. Axel, smirking around in the corners - and so on, all of them with something to do, missions to complete. Shooting, fighting, building, researching, playing, growing, planning, experimenting, policing...
She sat in an alcove in one of the hallways, watching. She told herself that she was waiting in anticipation of the power that would come to her. It seemed a natural conclusion that something belonged to her, in the way that it did with the others. It was completely beyond her imagination what it would be.
Some of the other members of the Organisation looked impassively on her as they saw her sitting in her alcove; others sneered. It was probably the worst sign that she had never seen the Superior since being introduced to him.
After a few days, low-order, nameless Nobodies began to swarm around her, as if in some kind of solidarity, or as if trying to scavenge what solidity she might have.
It seemed unusual that she kept waking up after she fell asleep. She knew that she didn't have much more fading to do before she wouldn't be there to wake up.
. . . . .
"Perfect," Marluxia, Number Eleven, announced as he stared at her.
She looked blankly back at him. Usually Axel was the flirty one, and then only in a sinister kind of way. Marluxia, for all his effortless pleasure in his own looks, never bothered much with using them.
"Help me get those to my quarters," he said, gesturing at the Dusks and Creepers around her. "You have a nice big supply."
It seemed easy enough to follow Marluxia's orders, and she thought that Perhaps she wouldn't fade entirely. Maybe she would become one of the high-ranking types of Nobody controlled by a member of the Organisation, at least.
"Would you happen to have a name yet, Number Twelve?" Marluxia asked.
"No, I don't."
"Strange. We tend to remember our previous lives a few hours, at most, after we form in Twilight Town. But you didn't end up there right away, did you?"
"How did you know?" She watched vaguely as a Dusk bounded out of the group of Nobodies she was herding after Marluxia, then looked ahead to find him frowning imperiously.
"Keep them together. I need many," he ordered, then answered her question. "Vexen wrote it in his report. He's probably going to come after you soon to study; we found another Nobody like you. She doesn't remember anything of her previous life either, and he's terribly eager to study and compare you two. Probably in one piece for the most part, so you're lucky."
A let-out breath escaped her. It was something like relief.
"This one does have a name, though, which is getting Vexen even antsier. This way," he added, gesturing through wide-open double doors. The light was sharp beyond it, and she thought for a moment that daybreak had come to the World that Never Was.
"My greenhouse," Marluxia said. "Get all those creatures in here. I need a lot of fertiliser."
She looked up at him with narrowed eyes. He smiled, shrugging one shoulder, and began to herd the low-order Nobodies into the room.
She helped him do that much, then sat down, cross-legged and leaning against the wall, and watched him get his fertiliser ready. It was more interesting than the view from her alcove.
"The problem is that they keep on disappearing that way," Marluxia said eventually, and sighed as he swung his scythe through a Dusk's middle. "It makes no difference where I cut, they just... Number Twelve? Are y-"
"Do this," she said, and dived forwards, not bothering to stand up, barely remembering to uncross her legs. "It's simple."
Simple. Put your hands on the joints, apply the right kind pressure - and the tension flowed forth from her in a great cracking power, released from what had built up when she had sat by the wall, straining as she watched Marluxia work his way through a mass of Nobodies.
It was infinitely satisfying, this squirming creature in her grip. She tore her standard-issue Organisation gloves off with her teeth, and it seemed like something surged up through her hands as her fingers twisted into the Dusk's approximation of living skin.
"It's still alive," Marluxia objected, though he sounded interested. She couldn't be bothered to look up and check. "If it keeps twitching like that, it will uproot my flowers."
"What does it matter?" she snarled - and flinched, remembering that he held his scythe. But Marluxia only looked down at her with raised eyebrows and a smile.
"They're part of my power, of course," he said.
"It's no trouble. Just do this," she said, snapping the Dusk's neck. The force was too much, though, and it vanished.
"No good," Marluxia pointed out, and she beamed at him, pure pleasure, before the expression settled into something a little more vicious.
"Half the fun is in finding out how far you can take it."
. . . . .
Vexen, looking disgruntled, stalked through the doors of the greenhouse a few hours later. 'Disgruntled' was a pretty default expression for him, but it seemed a little more honestly meant this time, especially when he saw the satisfied faces of Numbers Twelve and Eleven, looking out over the disturbed soil of the greenhouse.
"Isn't your garden just bursting with life today," he remarked snidely, and Marluxia laughed. It was that annoying kind of laugh that Marluxia tended to have, like he knew something you didn't. Vexen's expression of displeasure grew. Then he was surprised, because the normally wan, silent Number Twelve spoke.
"Oh, absolutely," she said, false innocence ringing in her voice. "Bursting. Trembling, even. I suppose I'll have to try and snap a few more limbs next time to get rid of the problem."
"As fascinating as this treatise on the treatment of Marluxia's cherry trees is-" and Vexen gritted his teeth as they burst into laughter "-I require you for an experiment. The Superior has given his permission already."
"I suppose I'd better go see him about that, then," Twelve said. "Why don't you fill in the preliminary report, so long? In the name of subject box, you can fill in - hmm, now where can that 'X' go - Larxene sounds pretty good, don't you think?"
"What? You - you remember!"
"Yep. Me," Larxene said. "Hey, Marluxia, want to come and provide witness to my dramatic recovery?"
"The least I could do, for your assistance here," he said graciously, and they left Vexen behind, sputtering indignantly.
Marluxia gave a quiet, satisfied laugh. "There's something enjoyable about getting Vexen to pull those faces. So, 'Larxene'," he said, as if testing the name, "you remember your life now?"
"Yep. It all came back in a flash." She stretched out her arms in front of her and admired her hands, remembering what she had got them to do, and the solid force of elemental power it had sent through her. "I guess I needed something familiar to trigger my memory."
"Familiar? Oh, how fascinating," said Marluxia. "Do remember to call me when you tell Demyx. I'm sure he would also start pulling the most fascinating faces."
She thought of what she had learned of Demyx over her only-partly-there days of observation, and she had to laugh aloud at the thought of what that odd little fool would do. She caught Marluxia's eye and they grinned together, and here, Larxene felt, was someone who she might enjoy sharing an understanding with.