Title: Bleeding Hearts
Rating: K+
Pairings, if any: Marluxia/Aerith
Summary: The world was nothing but a memory, a fabricated lie for their gain and Marluxia is disconcerted to find that he has far too much in common with the flower-girl.
Word Count: 2000
Warnings: Spoilers for CoM
CoM
A/N: For the contest on KHhet, the prompt was 'life and death' with a pairing you haven't tried before. …This pretty much counts as never tried before from me. Please tell me what you think, haha.

Edit: Gingko is a type of herb/flower that was used in ancientish times, because a few people were confused. :)

--

He'd come to the world out of sheer boredom. It would be quite some time, he estimated, before he had to give the world card to the boy and he had nothing else to do, so with a flick of his wrist, he activated the portal and stepped through the doorway.

-

Traverse Town, the card had read. He remembered glancing over the card and distantly wondering when the child had been there. From what he had heard from the others, the place was desolate and rundown, the inhabitants barely surviving after their world had been destroyed. Still curiosity fueled him as he made his way down the alleyway, down past homes with dimly glowing lights inside, past alleyways with crates and barrels, everything seeming the same after a while. The older members were right; there was nothing left in this world save for ruin. He couldn't even feel anything other than the barest hint of –

…wildlife?

Pausing for a moment, Marluxia glanced around and felt the tendrils of warmth and growth coming from somewhere to his left. Puzzled slightly, he moved in that direction; perhaps there was a chance that some of the wildlife had survived through the destruction. Lichens and mosses were prone to such things, but if they were what he felt then they were the oddest ones he had encountered.

The familiar tingle of his scythe at his fingertips, he wandered through rubble and dust, ignoring the occasional hiss of a cat or the growl of a stray dog as he passed by their spots. The feeling grew the closer he got until he could make out a patchwork-like mass of warmth and life coupled with the sight of dim lighting and a mass of flowers spanning at least thirty feet all the way around. In the middle of the mess of buds and leaves was a single kneeling person, their long brown hair pulled back, wearing a long pink dress and what looked like soft suede boots.

"You needn't lurk," the person, a woman, he realized, said quietly. "I know you're there."

Raising an eyebrow, he stepped into the light, careful to avoid the plants that shifted as he moved closer. "And how would you know I was there?"

The woman laughed softly, withdrawing her hands from soft dirt and turning her head a little to regard him with bright green eyes- nearly matching Axel's own, he thought. "Does it matter? It's not often that our world gets visitors and even less frequently is it someone drawn to the garden."

"Mm, well," Marluxia drawled, walking around the edge of the garden, a little surprised when she made no move to protect her back. If he wanted to, he could strike her down in an instant. Was she foolish or did she not care? "It's quite a garden that you have."

The chime-like laughter again, followed by the woman getting to her feet and dusting her hands off on her dress. "It takes a while but it's worth it." She leaned over and picked up a half-empty watering bucket and started weaving her way out of the garden to presumably fill it up. "You're not from this world. If you were, we'd have seen you before."

Internally scoffing at her audacity, he ignored the baiting comment. "Your roses," he remarked, his tone slightly acidic as if insulted that she addressed him in such a familiar manner. Glancing over the garden, he paused half-way through, doing a double take when he saw the mix of flowers she had, "They need more-"

"Sunlight, I know. They're being rather stubborn, though, thinking that I'm giving too much attention to the trillium and the azaleas." She picked up her staff along the way to where he stood, examining him with glass-green eyes.

"You talk about the flowers as if they're alive," Marluxia said succinctly, watching her reaction.

"You say that like you think they aren't." She offered out a hand, the warmth and earthy smell around her oh-so-familiar. "Aerith. You're a long way from home."

He eyed her hand then turned his attention back to the garden. "You're out long after you should be. Don't you know that the worlds are more dangerous at night?" The subtle threat was there, open and waiting and he was curious to see if she would take the bait.

To his surprise, she didn't seem offended or even hurt by his blatant brush-off of her introduction; she simply drew her hand back and surveyed the garden with him. "I can take care of myself. All of us can. We have to," another sideways look. "I can't imagine the hood is comfortable."

A vague smile thinly curling his lips, he responded, voice frosty. "I can't imagine that it's any of your business."

Bells and laughter again, dimples flashing as she smiled at him. Who was this girl? From all the worlds he'd been to, none of them had been so forward or so foolish as the case might be. Part of him was irritated. All it would take was one flash of his scythe, one simple move of his wrist and her pretty little head would be gone; but his mission wasn't to kill anyone that he came into contact with and technically he wasn't supposed to be here. Besides, she was nothing but a memory, a fabricated lie for the Keyblade master to fall into for their plans.

Around him, the flowers shifted and he could feel their discomfort. Were they really that protective of the girl?

"They're very perceptive," Aerith said quietly, and without looking at her he knew that she was aware of what he had been thinking about earlier. "And it's not." Drawing up her dress, she made her way through a patch of daffodils, picking up some of her tools that she had left around earlier in the day. "I don't suppose you would be willing to give me the bucket off to the right? I need to put the gardening supplies back so someone doesn't trip or I forget them."

"I don't suppose I would." Marluxia drawled quietly, examining one of the blood-red roses and then cursed as the vine slid up smoothly and thorns poked into his skin- a warning. Traitors. Face carefully blank he unwound the vines and made his way over to the small black bucket that was sitting on top of a rickety old bench that didn't look stable enough to sit on. "Your flowers are oddly protective."

Aerith took the bucket and started arranging the various small shovels and items in there, brushing off damp dirt. "They're special." Bright eyes fixed on him again. "Tell me, does the hood hide a disfigurement or something similar?"

A smirk curled his lips and he allowed himself to push the hood back quickly, brushing his bangs out of his eyes with a smooth movement. "That was rather rude to ask," he said softly and she shrugged smoothly. "I could kill you at any moment."

There was no fear on her face, only a simple, warm smile that made part of him angry because she had no right to humor him; the other part of him grew more intrigued by the moment. He still wanted to know why the flowers reacted to a simple human girl of all things. "I could die at any moment. I'm no fool. The Darkness surrounds all worlds." Stepping carefully out of the azaleas, she turned her back to him and headed for a worn stone wall where a small hook rested for the bucket of supplies. "Will I remember this? There's something that's going on around here, and in our memories. I don't know what it is, but there's a boy…and his past and our future. All of it's chained together but I don't know what it means. And there's something in me that knows that you're-"

"You do not want to finish that," Marluxia said smoothly, frigidly, and she simply nodded. He supposed that he could tell her that she was a memory, a shadow, a reflection in the mirror- any kind of thing- and she would have no choice but to believe it, but at the same time, why would it matter? She wouldn't remember anyway, not with Naminé rearranging Sora's memories- which included the girl's as well. Pulling himself away from his thoughts, he silently glanced over the patches of flowers that shouldn't have been growing together so well, yet were. Even more surprising was that he could feel no complaints from the flowers, nor were any of them fighting for sunlight (fighting for the attention of their caregiver, maybe). Glancing down, he found a climbing rose winding around his leg and sliding up to his wrist, the light, fragile weight comforting as it was in his garden.

"It's getting late," Aerith said quietly, drawing his attention away from the flowers for a moment as she started going through her expansive garden and picking out certain things with careful, slender fingers. "You'll be going back to your home?"

Marluxia said nothing and simply worked on unwinding the rose from him, letting it twine around one of the small trees that were growing close. When he turned around he found the brunette girl holding out a mixed handful of flowers.

"For the road."

Thumbing through them, he ran through their names: trilliums, dangerously sharp wild roses, valerians, tulip, azalea, snapdragons, and with a slight smirk he noted the small batch of delicate bleeding hearts, his glove-clad fingers brushing over ginkgo and-

"Come on!" Blue-green eyes flashed in the sunlight, short brown hair bouncing up and down as the girl spun in a circle, her sundress whirling out around her and she was summer and spring and all things warm in the world-

Marluxia very nearly crushed the flowers in his grip as he jerked back from her, trying to ignore the memory because they weren't supposed to have them He couldn't even remember his old name, anymore.

The brunette was giving him a strange look, her lips pursed with concern as she stepped a little bit closer, only to pause as cold metal was pressed to her throat, the scythe just waiting to bite into her pale, pretty throat. Life and death did not matter to him anymore (maybe when he had a heart it did), but now he simply existed and that was good enough. The green-eyed girl, however, he could feel the life in her; he could feel her heart and yet knew that it was not fully real- maybe just as real as the rest of the Nobodies.

He still can't get the image of the girl from his Somebody's memories out of his thoughts and briefly, he debates on teleporting to Naminé's pretty white room, wrapping his fingers around her delicate ones and pushing the crayons into the drawing that would ripteareliminate these memories from his head. Aerith was still standing there, her face calm, her bright green eyes fixed on his own and with a growl he jerked away and pushed himself through the gate he summoned with a claw of his fingers across open air.

Days later, a boy came to Traverse Town, spiky brown hair and child-like blue (too bright because she can remember midnight blue eyes from someone) eyes taking in everything around him and Aerith struggled to remember why every time she came to her garden the scent of roses was the strongest over all and the flowers reached out for someone. Or maybe it was for nobody.

--

Yeeee.

C&C please?