Disclaimer: Only the grammar errors belong to me.

Note: I wrote this for a lovely lovely woman who is a marluxia/namine fan, and while it's not really a pairing fic, the taste of it is still there. I'm fairly certain you can read it no matter who you ship without being overtly offended, but, you know, thought I'd throw out the warning. :D

Breadcrumbs

There's a story somewhere in the back of his mind, not hidden far, but enough so that he doesn't care to actively remember it. It has two children, and a careless father, and a witch of some sort. All the good stories have witches in them, he recalls. That story also has breadcrumbs. A trail of them.

A trail of breadcrumbs needn't be literal. He's fairly certain it is in that story, but his trails of breadcrumbs aren't. Not bread, but magic. A wired trail of magic for nobodies to follow their way home.

Still, breadcrumbs are what come to mind when he tries to explain where he is going. Why he's bothering leaving cracks in the worlds they destroy, why he creates thin beacons that lead from there to here. And why every morning he walks the black desert, the dead woods and the long dark beach seeing if anything decided to nibble.

He's found dozens and dozens of lesser nobodies this way. Stray dusks and snipers and assassins, lost and unsure and just clinging to the fragile pathways that he makes. He's captured countless that follow the tantalizing breadcrumbs from their world of decay to his. Slowly creating an army with his traps that lure and catch.

And then. And then there is today. On the dark beach where the Superior is so fond of lurking about, a couple worlds over from where Oblivion stands, he finds a new catch.

Caught and tangled in a web, he watches at the odd creature squirms and thrashes its limbs in the threads of magic and dark. He's laughing a little, in his mind, as he sets about cutting each strand. A small wail breaks just as the last string does, as the body tumbles and drops to the ground in a sprawl.

It's a child, he recognizes, despite the tangle of awkward limbs and the wet hair that covers its face. Wet? Drenched, more like. Soaked through with that bitter salty smell of wide oceans. He tries to think quickly of any non-landlocked towns they've been to recently. Any cities by the shore. Any group of islands. Anywhere where a nobody could have been born and then pulled here. And then the child coughs and sputters and wretches. Body heaving and shaking.

He crouches down next to it, head turned, curiously trying to peer at the face shrouded beneath long blonde hair. The face that tilts up at his seems to be composed only of eyes. Two eyes that bring the only colour to a body of white and maybe death and just skin stretched over bones.

"Hello, you," he says. A quiet whine is his only verbal answer, and then the child is in his arms, across his lap, brittle fingers wound deeply into the coat along his arms. She's lunged into him and he doesn't quite fall back in surprise, but he recognizes how near of a thing it is. He pauses for a moment, feeling the press of a cold, wet, barely formed chest against his own.

And, ah.

Ah, he thinks, glancing over at the shredded mess that had lured the child here. At what's left of this particular breadcrumb. Ah, indeed, almost smiling. He's found himself a Gretel.

"Tch tch," he murmurs into her ear, and it's delightful the way her body twists for a moment in a shiver that isn't temperature driven. "Look what I've caught in my net. A little sea urchin."

He pries her hands from his sleeves and grips her shoulders to have her at arms length. Her throat lets a whine escape again, a quiet mewl, but he's quick to place a wide palm across her lips.

"Hush now, or you shan't come with me." The threat shadows her gaze, curling darkly in her mind, and he's fascinated to watch the pull and tug his words produce across her expression. She doesn't know him. If he walked away now she probably wouldn't even be able to recall what he looked like. Yet... such a clingy, desperate thing she is. So she quiets, presses her lips together, and drops her hands and eyes.

"You'd like to come with me then?"

"Yes." She speaks! Whispered, broken, delicious. His curving of lip is sharp and cruel but she's not looking anyway. His hand cups her chin and he's oh so conscious that if he presses just a little stronger she'd wear finger bruises across her jaw to match the blue shadows under her eyes.

He can feel her frozen skin seeping heat from him he'd never claim to have. That her teeth don't clatter is some strange sort of miracle.

"As soon as I mend what you've destroyed," he murmurs, making sure her eyes follow his to the broken trap beside them.

"Oh," she says, sounding surprised, as if she had completely forgotten the snare that had pulled her from her shores to his. "I will fix it," she says. She stumbles to the shreds of his trap, and his hand is out to stop her, but she's grabbing the treads nimbly and quickly and tying faster than he can watch.

And she's no Gretel. Maybe she's that sleeping princess who weaved and sewed and one day spindled too much. Or she's the youngest daughter who tied nettle shirts for her cursed brothers while her fingers bled open and red and raw. She's the stubborn peasant girl trying to make straw become gold but he won't offer her his hidden name.

"You can't fix it with knots," he says, coming close to exasperation. Except now she's blinking at him, eyebrows folding, and when she looks down at her work his own gaze follows. There are no knots. No clumsy ties, or mismatched chord, or break in the magic that makes the thread more than just thread. It's perfect. It's new.

"See?" And she's smiling paper thin but with light and brilliance and a sort of pleasure nobodies aren't permitted to have.

And well, well, well. She's none of those girls, from stories, that are carefully affected by magic. She is magic herself.

When he reaches his gloved hand down as an invitation, he means it.

"I have a castle. Come be my princess." And some smiles can tear faces because hers certainly threatens to. Larxene will pitch a knife-throwing fit, he muses, but some things can't be helped. The weight of her tiny hand is where he can feel her shivers and her breath and what is almost a pulse... and that can't be helped either. Because he knows a good chess piece when he sees one. And this girl? She'll make checkmate.

And besides, he almost smiles, he needs to have her. Because all the good stories have witches in them.