Time Does What Time Does

It had been a long time.

Luxord looked at his English midterm—a paper passed back some two months ago, unearthed from the stacks upon stacks of shit that now demanded sorting.

"VERY PROMISING," his teacher had written in all caps, because that was how she wrote, like a shout in the dark, but on paper. "I LOOK FORWARD TO WHAT YOUR FINAL EXAM HOLDS IF THIS IS WHAT YOU COME UP WITH MIDYEAR!"

The midterm paper had been a close examination of Arthurian literature, with Luxord's thesis being that it was neither Lancelot nor Guinevere responsible for the decay of Camelot and the world's most righteous and chivalrous kingdom—no, not them responsible, but King Arthur himself.

Beneath this glowing essay, this heavy, wordy, thoughtful demonstration of all he knew, all things British and all things literature, there was the final paper Luxord had buried away—now wishing he'd properly thrown away instead. He wasn't even sure it was justifiably a paper at all, unless the only defining quality of a paper was that it be printed on paper, which this was.

"King Arthur," he'd written, "is a dense fucking idiot who let everything he'd worked so fucking hard for fall to utter shit because he was in love with his best friend who was too busy being jealous of Arthur (and doing his wife) to love him back properly. Let's hope this 'once and future king' stuff is just bull, because if that motherfucker rises from the grave to rule again then we are all royally fucked."

At the very bottom of this paper—and it was just ONE paper, his final paper—just ONE torrent of curse and loathing as you just read it out to be—at the bottom of this paper his teacher had shouted out to him in plainest English:

"LUXORD, WHAT HAPPENED?"

-to which Luxord had never responded.

Just as he had never responded when Tifa asked him. Just as he had never responded when Larxene had asked him—which, technically, she hadn't. What she had asked him, very pointedly, was, "What's wrong with your face?" when she'd caught him crying one day—a question so utterly stupid and horrible that Luxord hadn't even been able to summon some half-witted comeback. He was an ugly crier. What more could be said?

"How on Earth can you want to marry her?" Luxord had fumed shortly after that, directing this rage at Marluxia all those months ago. "How can you want anything to do with her?"

The two of them had been outside on the front drive, Marluxia tenderly detailing his vehicle with all the patience of a very suave-looking saint. As Luxord had rung out the rag in his hands and chucked it into the bucket of suds between them, Marluxia had watched the boy dig his fingers into his scalp, close his eyes, and hate his life.

"We all misbehave in the face of grief," Marluxia said idly, polishing away at a hubcap.

"They hell's that supposed to mean?"

Marluxia had sighed—rocked back on his heels to look up at the boy now haloed by the sun. "What it means," he'd said, "is that Larxene is doing the best she can. I'm not saying it's very good. And I'm certainly not saying it's healthy. But she's doing the best she can by you. Even when it doesn't seem like it at all. For every ounce you blame yourself for where you're at right now—for your mother—she blames herself more."

At this, Luxord had laughed. "That's rich," he'd gone. "Real rich."

"Meditate on it," Marluxia had told him. "Take a walk in the woods then. See what you can't find there. Only by removing yourself from society and its people can you reflect on them with any kind of clarity."

"…Are you smoking pot again?"

"No. I'm not."

"Is that stoner code for, 'Yes, I am,' because—"

"Take a walk, Luxord. The trees will listen to you bitch until you're blue in the face. But my part is done."

And that was how it had all started, with Luxord throwing himself moodily onto his motorcycle, pointing his bike west, and going.

And going.

And going.

Going until he hit a substantial enough tree line, until he threw his bike down on the side of the road, until he threw his helmet right alongside it. Until he stormed off into the woods hollering at the top of his lungs because nobody was around for miles anyway and why the hell not? He had screamed every curse word he knew three times over and when that was done he'd even made some up. He'd kicked trees, trampled saplings, ripped and shredded and torn through the underbrush like a certifiable madman. And when that, too, was done he'd plopped down on the dirt and found—to his own shock and relief—that he wasn't crying. He couldn't cry. He couldn't do it anymore. And in the silence that followed, he watched the trampled plants limply try to right themselves, the shredded leaves sigh and sway in the breeze and the sun and the perfect tranquil summer of it all… and he actually thought Marluxia had made a sort of sense after all. There was peace here, believe it or not. And beauty, too. Damn, but it only there was some way of hanging onto a thing like this. Forever, Luxord had thought.

It wasn't until later that night, having discovered three ticks that needed removal not to mention arms burning with poison ivy… It wasn't until that evening, as Larxene was doubled over laughing at his swollen, bitten self, that Luxord realized the obvious.

You could hang onto moments like that. Those kinds of things could be captured.

"Larx," he'd said, scratching at both arms at the same time. "Do you have a camera?"

And it had changed everything.

Now, at summer's August end, Luxord surveyed his bedroom once more. It was plastered with photos—some grainy, some washed out, a few overexposed and bleached nearly invisible, but some (and their numbers were growing by the day) just stunning, and simply so. Tifa, who had taken an Into to Basic Photography class during her freshman year before losing interest, had shown him the bare bones of how to work a dark room, and had left the rest to Luxord, his curiosity, and the many (and often failed) experiments that resulted.

He was pleased by how far he'd come. He was amazed that such a simple thing could interest him for as long as it did, for hours on end. He'd never liked art. He'd never been good at art. He didn't even really consider this art. He'd been good, he realized, at creating moments for people, and this was just an extension of that.

Luxord was constantly pushed to learn more, to do more. He had read somewhere, in his first days in Larxene's old hand-me-down draped around his neck—that the first ever camera was not a camera at all, but rather an entire room. And when the smallest amount of light—the tiniest beam of light—was allowed to enter this room, it carried an image with it. An upside-down image, granted, but that was just the start of it all and wasn't it just amazing?

Since then, Luxord had made his own cameras, and in doing so he'd discovered that anything—nearly any old junk at all—could be turned into a device used to capture those moments that Luxord now felt this overwhelming need to capture. He'd regularly ransacked his finds from all those afternoons spent with Xigbar rummaging through discarded what-have-yous and he'd built several scrap cameras to the day.

An old Altoid's tin? You could turn it into a camera, he found.

A used matchbox? Challenging, but this, too, could build a camera.

Standing now and admiring his own work, Luxord hefted the pile of papers in his arms. On top of the stack, the one question still screamed off his failed final paper, still left unanswered.

"LUXORD, WHAT HAPPENED?"

He carted the whole lot down to the recycling bin, where he unceremoniously dumped it. He didn't even think twice.

X

"Is there anyone alive out there? Can anyone hear me?"

"Xigbar?" His mother's footsteps followed her voice down the basement stairs, one-two, one-two.

"Can anyone hear me?"

"Oh… Xiggy, sweetheart." Making her way over stacks of plates and cups, empty root beer bottles and randomly scattered pillows, Xigbar's mother finally made it to his side where she prodded him gently with her foot. "Xiggy. Xiggy, wake up."

One half of his face was caked in drool and his own hair. The other side was crookedly crowned by his eye patch, which had slipped down over his cheekbone. He jolted upright, mushed his eye patch back on properly, and looked up into the worried face of his poor, poor mother.

You see, while Luxord had been emotionally racketeering himself to kingdom come and back again, Xigbar had been doing what he did best—namely: nothing. In fact, he hadn't seven been able to bring himself to open the DVD player lately, he was so consumed in laziness, and so was consequently on his twelfth run-through of Titanic.

"Jack! Jack! There's a boat, Jack!"

"Sweetie. Maybe it's time we talk."

"Nah, nah. This is the good part."

"The part where Jack dies?" she asks him. She was met with silence. "Xiggy."

"Mom. Come on."

"Xigbar, Kurt has told me that if he has to listen to Celine Dion one more time, he's going to board up the basement door and cut off your supply of food and water. Now, I don't think he would actually do such a thing—you know he loves you very much—but let's not run the risk. I think it's time we talk."

"Damnit, Kurt." The pause button was pressed. Rose remained frozen in hysterics on the screen.

"Well, school's going to start back up again soon. Have you given any thought to textbooks? Maybe we could get you a—I don't know. A school sweatshirt? What do you think? Would you like that? We could go today. Maybe—I don't know—check out the campus. Have a look around."

"Mom. It's a community college. Nobody reads the textbook. And nobody—friggin' nobody—wears a school sweatshirt."

"Well, be that as it may, mister—" she faltered here, and had to swallow hard. "I'm… I'm worried about you. All I've seen you eat lately is peanut butter out of the jar. I never see your friends anymore. I don't even remember the last time I saw you in a different pair of pants."

"Mom."

"I'm just saying! I understand that the time after high school is a very, very confusing one and I support you no matter what—you know that. It's just that, well, I don't know! I—I feel like—okay, look. I saw Axel at the supermarket the other day. Did you know he wants to study chemical engineering? I mean—and Demyx, he has his band going for him and everything. Axel told me he's even been looking into music production. Music production! Go figure! And I just thought. Well. I."

"You just thought, 'Why'd I have to get the dud?' am I right?"

"Xigbar!"

"Look. Axel probably just wants to study chemicals so he can make shit blow up better. And with more colors. Demyx has a hot girlfriend now, who will probably be breaking up the band all Yoko Ono style any day now."

"Kurt tells me Roxas is in an accelerated program? That he might even be in some of your class with you this fall for-?"

"Advanced. Academic. Studies. I know, Mom." Xigbar closed his eyes and rested his skull against his fingertips. "Can I just finish my movie now?"

"Xiggy, you've watched it so many times…"

"Yeah," he said. "Almost one time for every Oscar it raked it, it's true."

"Too much of a good thing doesn't always make a great thing."

"Mom. My god. Can I please finish my movie?"

Xigbar's mother sighed, stood up, and seemed to relent. Right before she pulled the plug to the TV. Rose and the frozen sea vanished. "Xigbar," she said. "Take a shower, Get some clean clothes on. Empty your cat's litter. And go buy your textbooks. It isn't—it isn't up for debate." She was practically glowing with pride as she ascended the stairs, Xigbar still stunned and speechless in the dark behind her.

X

Now when Xigbar's mother claimed that she "never" saw Xigbar's friends anymore, she was shamelessly exaggerating. What she'd really meant was that she never saw Luxord anymore, which was true, but the rest of Xigbar's friends had remained stubbornly (and thankfully) more persistent.

The girlfriend Demyx had acquired was a blonder, sweeter version of herself that Kairi had set him up with, and Demyx's ability to attract a girl like her—not to mention hold on to a girl like her—was surprising to all. Kairi had stuck to her own ban on dating and was starting to get into some spoken poetry thing Xigbar neither knew nor cared much about. And Axel and Roxas, after much heated squabbling and several weeks of Cold War silence, had finally become one of the few token gay couples a their high school. Axel's acceptance—on scholarship, no less—to a state school was even more shocking than Demyx's newly acquired luck with women, but Axel had assured people, in his own way, that he and Roxas were rock-solid—would remain rock-solid no matter the soon-to-be distance of several hundred miles.

"I'll be damned if I've sweat and worked and played my square ass off just to lose that stupid kid now," he'd told Xigbar over video games and pizza one night. "I will straight up be damned. Nah, man. We'll make it work."

"You—love him?" Xigbar had asked. The crack in his voice hadn't gone unnoticed, but Axel said nothing of it all the same.

"Yeah," he'd said. "Yeah, I definitely do. Definitely."

That night, Xigbar had pulled a much-folded and dirt-stained paper from the very back of his desk drawer. It had been read time and time again, and on more than one occasion Xigbar had nearly brought himself to ripping the thing to a thousand little pieces. What the paper said was this:

"If I could write a love poem for you, boy, I would. And I'll tell you right now, it would be the love poem to trump all love poems—it would bethatimpressive. It would be justthatamazing. But the way things are and the way I happen to be, I'm not a poet. You probably know this by now. So here's an I.O.U. of sorts.I.O.U. the world's greatest love poem—the world's greatest love poem that will make Shakespeare's bones twitter and shift and hang in shame. I hope you're expecting somethingmagnificentby now, because you're going to get it. Meet me next week—the usual. Don't be late. Yours, X."

The lengths Luxord had gone to in order to try and reach out to him—to Xigbar, of all people! "When he could have anyone," Xigbar had mumbled to himself more times than he liked to think about. His mind had this annoying habit now of racing back to Luxord's basement, the couch there, the heat that followed, and the scene would replay far more than the Titanic could ever, ever hope to and each and every time Xigbar's stomach had clenched, his palm broke out in a sweat.

"Hey—" Axel had looked at him, a pointed green gaze hovering over a slice of pepperoni pizza. The look said he already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask. His eyes tended to betray everything like that. But he asked anyway. "What happened, Xig?"

"Huh?"

"What happened? Somebody die?"

Yeah, he thought. Multiple people in multiple ways, if you wanna get all philosophical on my ass.

"Nothing," Xigbar had said with a snort. "Nothing happened."

X

Watching Roxas in a college bookstore almost depressed Xigbar as much as being in the college itself. The whole place was beige and brick and decidedly lacking in sufficient window-age, in his opinion. From wherever you were in the building, there was a 90% chance you had no idea what the outside world even looked like at that moment. There was simply no way to know. A hurricane or Hungarian invasion could've been bearing down on them and everyone in the VCC would've carried on, operating as usual. It was dreadful, and Xigbar took it as a clear sign of things to come.

But Roxas. He was elated. He went up and down the aisles of sloppily shelved textbooks, picking up ones he wasn't even supposed to be buying, for Pete's sake, just so he could look inside them. Out of sheer curiosity. It left Xigbar completely baffled.

"Am I a giant nerd because the phrase 'Special Topics In—' is a huge turn on to me?"

"Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty friggin' sick if you ask me. You sick, twisted loser. Do you have what you need yet?"

"Hang on, I'm getting there," Roxas said, right at the same moment his phone went off. It was Axel, and it was no surprise. Xigbar, who had already bought his books (though he'd stood firm on refusing a damn ugly hoodie with VCC emblazoned on the front of it) made to head out the door, shaking his head as he went.

"Xigbar—"

"It's cool, man. Don't sweat it. Take your time, I'll just chill outside."

Outside was in the thick of the sweltering summer they were all trying to ride out. Waves of heat rippled above the vast parking lot the community college had to offer. There was barely a breeze out there and everyone Xigbar could see looked sweat-soaked and miserable.

And soon I'll be joining your godawful ranks, he thought. If his mother's goal in sending him out into the world in search of textbooks and ridiculous sweatshirts was to shake him out of his stupor, she was terribly confused. All this made him want to do was crawl back in the basement and never resurface. Ever.

The only people who were not miserable out here, Xigbar noticed, were the kids, of which there were surprisingly many. All of them wore the same lime green camp t-shirt, all of them glowing with sun and sugar and summer. They were taking turns, most of them, using the spray of water from a hose for their own refreshing version of water limbo, which sent boys and girls alike into squealing hysterics.

It should be said that Xigbar couldn't help but notice the two boys off to the side, talking amongst just themselves a mile a minute, laughing uproariously at whatever it was the other had just said, pushing kidding, grinning bright and huge enough to nearly split their little face in two. They couldn't have been more than nine, Xigbar figured. The same age Luxord claimed to have fallen in love with him.

"Huh."

"Excuse me, but can I help you?" came a pinched, bossy voice from behind him. He turned to find a girl who looked to be carrying her own bodyweight in juice boxes. Xigbar could barely make out a mop of brown hair and a flash of blue—green—blue-green?—eyes before everything became a tumbling cascade of magenta Juicee Juice, and somewhere in all that the bossy voice because immensely less bossy and considerably more exhausted.

"Oh no," the girl went. "No, no, no."

"Eurrr…" Xigbar knew her name. He knew he knew her name. He just didn't—couldn't quite—Shit, what the hell is her name?

Whoever she was, she apparently remembered him if her double-take was any clear indicator. She flipped her hair out of her eyes, laughed and went, "Xigbar! What are you doing here?"

Xigbar held his bag of textbooks aloft. His explanation seemed to make a whole lot more sense than hers at any rate, as she was now bombarded by small children clamoring for juice and looked more like some freakish humanoid school bus than a—

A barista! A coffee chick! Yeah! That was where he knew her from, he was sure of it. Slowly but surely, memory after memory congealed in a little pool in the center of Xigbar's brain. His mind was waking up from weeks of Titanic brainwashing and things were slow, but getting there.

"Yuna, right?" he went.

"Yeah! Sorry if I came off as rude. I didn't mean to! They told us we can't be too cautious—you know, on a campus as big as this one and everything. And I guess I'm still terrified they're right! Ask nicely, Clara." This last part was directed at a tiny thing of a girl in braids and bruised knees, who had been on the verge of snatching up her second juice in one sitting, having already sent half of the first one down the entire front of her shirt. Yuna shook her head, but obliged the kid anyway.

"Looks like a pretty viscious job. Dam—dang, I mean. Dang. That's a whoooole lotta kids." The girl with the juice regarded him indifferently as Yuna smiled.

"I know. They're a total handful. But it's fun. This is my fourth summer being a counselor for them. I still work over at Starbucks, you know. Or at least, I do for a little while longer, anyway."

"Yeah? College-ahoy, huh?"

"Mmhmm. Randolph Macon."

"Huh. Where's that at?"

"A ways away. But you're staying local? I'm jealous."

Clearly put-off by being so ignored, another kid came bumbling over to Yuna then, pulling insistently at her elbow. "Miss Yuna," he whispered in a way that was probably closer to yelling than whispering, but the intent was clear. "Miss Yuna. Why is your friend a pirate?"

Yuna's face, already pink from the sun, now turned a full shade darker. "Hey now," she went, "he's not a—"

"The name's Gold-Beard, kid," Xigbar said. Gap-Toothed Gold-Bear the Fierce, to you. And I'mma pirate 'cause I like to pillage and steal from the rich." He even added in a hearty ARRR! for good measure, but had to clear his throat by the end of it from the sheer effort of trying to sound like an asthmatic bandit with every accent imaginable. Xigbar hacked drily into his hand. The kid in question seemed to be two parts disturbed and one part curious, and so—the disturbed winning out—he took off back to the safety of his small, shrieking pack of fellow kids. Yuna had the look of someone trying very, very hard not to judge.

After an awkward moment, she laughed, congratulated him on his fine act of piracy, and then trailed off into an even deeper silence than the one before. Xigbar was trying desperately to think up some excuse, some need to be off somewhere and leave, but his mind was still too slow, still just crawling along somewhere in the north Atlantic.

Wake. Up. Wake. The fuck. Up.

"The Gap-Toothed Gold-Beard the Fierce, huh?" Yuna asked. "That's your name?"

"Kinda," Xigbar lied. The untold truth was that it was Luxord's pirate name that Xigbar had given him back in their own crazed childhoods of pirates and neighborhood shenanigans. Xigbar knew he had had his very own pirate alias as well, but it completely escaped him at the moment.

"Have you talked to him recently?" Yuna asked. Untold truth or not, apparently Yuna knew everything anyway. Xigbar wondered why he even bothered sometimes. All times. Any times. It was seeming more and more like a good time to go back to liquefying his brain with James Cameron and Company.

"Nnnnot in a while, I guess," Xigbar said. "I dunno, I figure he—got busy or something."

"Oh." Behind Yuna some ways over her shoulder, Xigbar could now make out Roxas, toting not only two bags' worth of books, but a decidedly depressing VCC t-shirt slung over one arm. Xigbar already pitied him, but Yuna was still talking even as Roxas began calling him over. Xigbar stood rooted to the spot. He was either too conflicted or still too functionally slow to even know what to do. Yuna said—she was saying—she was speaking to him—

"He wasn't, you know. Busy. I think you know that, Xigbar."

Some minutes later, walking back to the car with Roxas in tow, Xigbar was quiet. For Roxas, quiet wasn't bad—not by any stretch. Hell, quiet was a break from the crowd he usually hung around with, and given that his head was buzzing with so many seemingly magical-skippy opportunities that lay before him now that he qualified for classes high enough to take him out of high school and into somewhere new, well, he was lost in his own thoughts, too. But after Xigbar had started the car and moved them through two stoplights without even so much as breathing a word, Roxas grew concerned. Most anyone would have.

"Hey, so who was that girl?" he asked.

"Who?"

"That girl you were talking to?"

"Oh. Nobody. I just know her from—she like, works at Starbucks."

"Oh. Huh." From the corner of his eye, Xigbar watched the smartass kid raise an eyebrow and mouth something that vaguely looked like, "Staaaaarbucks. Right."

"No, seriously, dude. She works at Starbucks."

"No, no. I believe you."

"There's nothing there."

"Nah, no. Nothing."

"Roxas."

"What?"

"Look, either start talking or shut the hell up, because this weird limbo back and forth between the two is weirding me out. You wanna talk about—what was it—special topics in anything?"

"There's a Special Topics course they offer in—"

"Yeah, you know what, I was kidding. Limbo-silence Roxas is better. Let's stick with that guy."

"Screw you, man."

It was only after safely dropping Roxas off that Xigbar allowed his thoughts to return to Yuna and what she'd told him. Or at least, what he'd picked up of it. Nobody liked running reconnaissance missions in the Game of War. The art of spying, of sleuthing, of gathering intel or developing anything remotely resembling strategy was totally lost on most children. Xigbar and Luxord both had been no different. They were much more inclined to charge senselessly into the imaginary fray, guns and swords blazing, than to stealthily acquire information behind the scenes.

Or at least, Xigbar had always assumed this about the both of them. He was starting to wonder if maybe it was only him like this now, only him stubbornly hanging onto—what, exactly? What was there left to hang on to?

Where nearly nine months ago there had been the burnt down remnants of a mattress shop, there was now the foundation laid for a new store, one still yet unnamed and unknown. Whatever it was Xigbar had assumed, he'd been wrong. Luxord clearly knew how to plan. He clearly knew how to strategize. And somehow, by some magic means well beyond Xigbar's sleepy capacity to understand, Luxord clearly knew a whole hell of a lot more about Xigbar than Xigbar even knew about himself.

So he quit idling his car creepily by the construction site for the new store. He turned his vehicle right on around and he headed off home.

X

"Xigbar, can I talk to you a sec?" Kurt was seated in the family room, though it had never really held much of a family in it before. It was a glorified storage space for odds and ends no one used much—a fireplace long since abandoned, several short, squat bookshelves housing old books nobody read. And so for Kurt to be waiting for him here in this utterly pointless space… well, Xigbar might have been feeling slow that day, but he knew enough to know something was wrong.

"Xigbar. Your mom and I—we've been worried about you. I mean, you know that, right?" Kurt was leaning forward, resting the bulk of his weight on his knees, his index and thumb fingers from each hand all steepled together. It was a look of deep thought—or so it was supposed to seem. In Xigbar's head, the whole thing sounded vaguely rehearsed.

"Right." Xigbar perched himself awkwardly on the stiff-backed sofa across the room from Kurt. The fact that the floorlamp beside the man was casting a harsh interrogation style light on him couldn't just be in Xig's mind, could it?

"We know that the surgery we'd scheduled—a while back, you know. We know it fell through. And maybe we sprung that on you too quickly, I don't know. But we just want to let you know… Xigbar… that the option is still open if you want it. We—your mom and me—we want you to have the, the best options out there, and you do. You do have them. If you want them."

Xigbar blinked. Kurt regarded him expectantly. And… Xigbar honestly had no idea what it was this man expected of him. But there was clearly something, and while he sluggishly began to piece things together, Kurt sat waiting. Waiting, and waiting—for something he felt certain would happen. Xigbar could sense it.

"Let me get this straight. You're—worried about me?" Xigbar asked.

"Of course we're worried, Xiggy."

"So you think that… a new, what, a new face is going to fix me?"

"No. No!" Kurt snorted a snort of dismissal, but maybe it was surprise? Xigbar couldn't tell. "That's—it's only out there as an option, Xigbar. We're not making you do anything. We just want you to know that we are fine, we are fine and supportive with whatever it is you need. You know that, right?"

"Yeah. I get that. Feel the love and all, but—what if what I want is for you not to feel like you have to offer me that shit?"

"I don't understand, Xigbar. I thought—"

"It's friggin' Horner's, Kurt, it's not a third leg growing out of my forehead."

"I know that, Xigbar."

Suddenly, it occurred to Xigbar that—had he told his mother and Kurt what all had happened at the hospital in the first place—none of this might be going on right then. At all. The only reason he'd even considered the surgery in the first place was to—what, to level the playing field somehow between him and Luxord. But Luxord, of all of them, seemed to be the only one capable of looking Xigbar in the one visible eye and—

Suddenly, and quite awkwardly, Xigbar's brain had made the drastic jump back to Luxord's basement sofa again. It was impossible to fake an attraction like that. Luxord, for whatever ungodly reason, clearly thought that Xigbar was something worth looking at. Something—and he had no idea why he had to gulp like he did when he thought this—but something worth getting excited over. Something worth investing huge amounts of time and energy and—

And suddenly, none of this lined up right and Xigbar was just about ready to throw his hands up at everybody and return to the ship and sink with the goddamn thing once and for all and be done.

"Do you even know what I look like?" he snapped. Kurt's eyes widened, his fingers unsteepling themselves, his hands hiding at his sides. "Like, why the hell would you ever, ever suggest to your kid—to anyone—that he change what he looks like because, gee, maybe it'll make him feel better about himself as a person. Because everybody who's having a shitty time oughtta just run out and get a facelift because that really fixes everything."

"Xigbar. Hang on."

"No!" Xigbar laughed, or tried to, but it cracked out of his throat like a squawk. "No, Kurt. This is the dumbest pile of shit anybody's ever tried to sell me on. Hell, even the guys snorting lines in the bathroom could have a thing or two to teach you about salesmanship, man. Jesus Christ." Standing, wiping his hands on the thighs of his jeans because he was sweating bullets he'd been oblivious to, Xigbar heaved one huge sigh and followed it up with a shrug. "Look," he said. "I'm not mad. I'm annoyed as hell. Because I'm surrounded by pretty cool people who know me well enough to ask me what's wrong, not to suggest that I go and get a new pair of ears or a better, more normal looking face so I'll be a happier goddamn person, Kurt. That's just—it's seriously just such a load of shit I can't even begin to explain it to you. And I'm not going to bother."

His hands came up in front of him to ward off whatever other asinine thing Kurt may have bubbling out of his mouth. "I'm done," Xigbar told him. "Really. Okay? I'm done. My face stays this way."

He hadn't meant to make Kurt feel bad. And he knew, Xigbar did, that by making Kurt feel bad he would in turn wind up making his own mother feel bad—and that was certainly not what he wanted because once she started feeling bad she just wouldn't stop talking about feeling bad for three weeks. But cross fire was cross fire, he figured, and if someone was going to get hurt in all this, at least it wasn't him. He didn't think he could handle another well-meaning attempt of Luxord's to free him from the confines of pre-op. Not that such an attempt seemed at all likely at this point.

Xigbar closed, but was careful not to slam the door to his room. He was surprised to find laundry—fresh and clean and folded neatly on his bed. His mother had been in here—must have taken advantage of his holding up in the basement to do some much needed cleaning. His closet had been purged of all the clothes he'd once strewn across the entire room in an effort to find something decent to wear. It now looked tidy and almost, dare he think it, like the closet of a college kid. A young man. The thought was enough to make his stomach kick itself into somersaults.

Moving the laundry on top of his desk, Xigbar then fished out the old, familiar paper from back of it. "If I could write a love poem for you, boy, I would. And I'll tell you right now, it would be the love poem to trump all love poems—it would bethatimpressive. It would be justthatamazing. But the way things are and the way I happen to be, I'm not a poet…"

He read through it, though he more than knew its contents by now, and when that was done he folded it up and returned it to its designated little spot. Xigbar then proceeded to throw himself face down on his bed and will himself to sleep forever. When that didn't work, he called himself twelve kinds of idiot, buffoon, loser, and moron, before rolling onto his back and fishing his phone out of his pocket. Something had to give. He couldn't retreat to the basement after all, it seemed.

Scrolling through the contacts in his phone, Xigbar thought about who to call, thought out any number and all which-ways the ensuing conversation would go. Roxas was an obvious choice, because the boy had a clarity beyond his years and wasn't likely to make fun of Xigbar or hold his own stupidity against him. Demyx was likely to overreact and ultimately come up with a hopelessly romantic gesture that would probably leave Xigbar wanting to gag and die. Axel—simply wouldn't do, unless Xigbar's idea of solving the problem was cursing and drinking and rinsing and repeating until things fixed themselves. Even Kairi—poor Kairi, who, in her defense, was the name Xigbar's thumb hovered over the longest—even Kairi was unlikely to be of any help. She had jokingly walked him through his awkward first-and-only date with Luxord, and more to her credit she had kept her mouth shut about it. If anyone knew the situation at hand, it was (oddly enough) her. They weren't on the same page, though. Not nearly. And while washing her hands of love may have worked for her, Xigbar had a sick-to-his-gut sensation that this wasn't the fix for him either.

I don't want a stupid heart-to-heart, he thought. I don't want any of that bullshit. I don't even know what I want, but what difference does it make?

And so Xigbar called the only person he wanted to talk to.

…The number you have dialed is not available. Please hang up, or try your call again.

"The fuck?" So Xigbar hung up and tried his call again.

…The number you have dialed is not available. Please hang up, or try your call again.

"Ohhh… Oh no you didn't, you little bitch."

…The number you have dialed—

"SERIOUSLY?"

…The number you have dialed—

X

This was how the home phone rang. It's not often that a home phone goes off anymore. For whatever reason, we prefer to skip this process and in part maybe we lose something. Those awkward moments before we're handed off to the person we really want to speak to, for instance. The learned ability to talk to somebody's parents… somebody's bizarre and eccentric sibling… somebody's brother-in-law-to-be, even.

"Marluxia?"

"Who is this?"

From what Marluxia could hear, there was just silence, and for a second he even held the phone away from his ear to check and see that whoever it was calling hadn't hung up. "It's—Xigbar," said the phone.

"Oh."

"Is Luxord there?"

"Sort of."

"Huh?"

Marluxia was watching something interesting take place. He'd been watching all day, in fact, and the day before and the day before that. He was watching Luxord grow up—rather suddenly and rather violently, almost, into a half sensible person. He'd been worried right along with Larxene for the longest time, but unlike his fiancé, he had actually made some semblance of an effort to reach out to the kid. As a result, he'd discovered cameras—something for which Larxene was still giving him shit—"Why couldn't you have gotten him into, hell, I dunno, rocket scientry or whatever? Gem-cutting? I don't give a shit, but—pictures, seriously?" Marluxia was happy for him, to a point. But on this particular evening he was watching as Larxene shouted all kinds of obscenities at her brother who was well in the process of packing as many things as he could into a large black rucksack.

"He's on his way out, actually," Marluxia said into the phone. He made an effort, then, to walk to the other side of the house where Larxene couldn't be heard calling Luxord a pansy artsy-fartsy idealist with his head so far up his ass it might as well have been kissing the moon.

"Oh. Oh. Well, hey, don't worry about it, man. Listen. Can you, ah," Xigbar rambled on and sighed and stuttered for a minute longer. "Can you just tell him I called? I, uh. I tried his cell, but I think maybe he changed the number?"

"Yes. …About that, Xigbar. Luxord is, literally, I mean, Luxord is literally on his way out the door."

"No, really, it's okay I'll call back later, don't worry."

"It might—be a while, you know. Before he gets back."

"That's fine. It's fine! Seriously. It's aaaaall cool. No worries."

"What I'm trying to say, Xigbar is—is nothing."

"Nothing?"

"No. Not—not nothing. I can't say I know for sure when exactly Luxord will be back."

There was a long silence here, but Marluxia didn't bother to check and see if Xigbar had hung up this time. He knew he'd do no such thing.

"Oh."

"As in… I don't know. When. If."

"Oh."

"I'm sorry."

"No! Nooo. Don't be sorry. Don't be…"

"Goodbye, Xigbar."

Marluxia had planned it like that, of course. Marluxia tried to plan most things, when he wasn't obsessing over his car, his job, or the front yard, all of which took up a considerable amount of time and energy, it was true. But Marluxia had planned this to the best of his ability, right from calling Xigbar's parents to express a private concern for their son's mental health, right to using Luxord's phone to call Yuna and tell her where to find Xigbar and how to go about it—right, in fact, down to suggesting that Luxord cancel his phone plan if he was traveling and instead just do a pay-as-you-go sort of thing. "Cheaper in the long run," he'd said. "And you'll be needing the money."

But Marluxia hadn't planned it out well enough—or at the very least, there were far too many factors he hadn't considered. For one, he hadn't considered the fact that Xigbar would need to put gas in his car. Xigbar hadn't considered this either, seeing as when he'd pulled into his driveway he was still tempted to retreat again to the isolation of his basement, so at nine at night when Xigbar's car squealed into the parking lot of 7-11, he was hurling more expletives than was even considered normal or appropriate for him.

Marluxia also hadn't considered the fact that Xigbar would hit every single red light on his drive over, which introduced Xigbar to new levels of road rage he'd never even imagined before.

Finally, Marluxia hadn't been planning on—when Xigbar's car finally did round the corner and come hauling ass down the lane—Luxord to already be swinging one leg over his motorcycle, cramming his helmet over his blonde head. Even Larxene in full-blown psycho mode as she was hadn't been able to slow him down long enough, and perhaps the only thing that slowed Luxord down at that moment was the flash of headlights in the side mirrors of his bike.

"Luxord!" Xigbar shouted. "Lux!" He was fumbling at the car door, throwing his weight against the thing and nearly knocking it clear off its hinges. His palms hit the pavement as his foot caught in the doorframe, but if it was a fall it must not have been much of one because Xigbar had somehow launched himself to his feet before any of it could register.

His brain had finally woken up and it was electric. Scary-electric.

"Luxord! I'm sorry. Please, just listen. I have been—I may still be—I may never… ever… change. I have been such an asshole to you. And, shit, man, I blamed you for everything and I-? I don't even know why." Stepping towards the motorcycle, a thing still foreign to him, a still that still made him cringe, still made him miss the safety of the Saab, Xigbar's hands curled into fists. Please hear me, he thought. Please hear me through that stupid, stupid helmet that will probably do a piss-poor job of keeping your stupid, stupid head safe. "Luxord?" he went. "I'm sorry, Lux. I'm… really, really sorry. I just want to talk to you again. And—I don't know. I don't know yet. But I'm trying and I'm here and—shit, I'm— yeah, I'm still sorry."

People never recover from their first heartbreak. They may move on, and in many cases they often find a love far greater and worthier than the one that broke them in the first place. But there is no cure—not even time—for a fractured heart. For Luxord, heartbreak had been a long time coming. When you put all your eggs in the basket of the person you've loved for a decade or so, you can't help but be asking for a world, maybe even worlds of trouble.

Xigbar didn't know this. He couldn't have known it, and so perhaps Luxord shouldn't have held it against him like he did. But you should be told, as it is only fair, that Luxord absolutely knew Xigbar was behind him. He heard what it was he said, he heard his name come from his mouth and he heard the plea in his voice. He even saw Xigbar's desperation, the look on his face—red-tinted from brake lights, one visible eye twisted with fear and apology— from the cracked side view mirror on his bike. But none of these were enough to turn him around.

"What the fuck… What the fuck?" Xigbar's arms fell useless to his sides and all the weight of his own melodrama suddenly came crashing down on him full-force, not to mention the sheer exhaustion of a crazy, psychotic, absolutely emotionally draining day following a string of very ordinary, very lazy ones. He realized, with total defeat, that he was completely out of shape for this thing called life.

I've sat on the couch so long that I have literally forgotten how to be a fucking person in the fucking world. How is this—I don't—how does this even happen?

A scuff of shoe on wet asphalt caught Xigbar's attention and he turned to look behind him, his breath hitching for a reason he couldn't name. It was only Larxene, though. Just her. He hadn't known she was there. But then—of course she was there. She was watching, too, as her little brother raced as far away from him, from her, from them as he could get. Her arms were crossed, her eyes tired, her expression one that Xigbar couldn't even name. She turned her gaze to him, then, and it was one that pinned the blame and soothed the hurt all in one.

"You shouldn't be surprised," Larxene said. "It had been a long time."

(x)

Sooooo. Having been bitten by this weird, crazy bug that made me totally… nostalgic(?) for things like this, I logged back into to see what was what. It's crazy to come back to your old writing after so long—to find so much wrong with it, but also so much of it better and more natural, I guess, than more recent stuff feels.

Long story short, I married an awesome chick who's a marine and a badass and I'm totally teaching and making kids into wonderful little writers and everything. I'm lucky in love, in life, in… about all the things you can be lucky in. I have a dog now who even gets along with my stupid cat. I feign cluelessness when I hear them talk about fandoms—most of which I'm clueless about anyway—and I even finished a femmeslash novel I've been working on for years. I'm doing things… and I guess I just thought of this story while doing things and I thought—I dunno. Maybe it'd be fun to finish. I don't even know who's still out there reading, I'm just that clueless. Cue Titanic. Is there anyone alive out there? Can anyone hear me?