The first night was beautiful.

"This is your room," Vexen had said, opening the door into a pastel painted, square room with French windows and a balcony overlooking the garden and the rest of the city. On the left was the bed, on the right a chest of drawers, a wardrobe and a frankly gigantic bean bag chair. The carpet was soft underneath his feet and he pulled the older man in to collapse onto the blissfully soft mattress, laughing as deeply as the kisses he generously gave to Vexen.
"Can't I stay with you?" He'd asked in the evening at bedtime, tugging impertinently at his sleeves, thrusting out his bottom lip in a manner most people considered to be adorable. For a serial murderer, he was good at adorable.
"I'm sorry," Vexen had apologised as he'd tucked him up in bed. "I'm legally obliged to have you locked in at night."
He'd shrugged.
"Fair enough."

But the lock was delightfully easy to pick, the creaky floorboards simple to avoid, Vexen's door handle as silent as the night itself and it was with the utmost care that he pressed their bodies together under the duvet, digging under Vexen's pale, slender body to pull him close.
"Marluxia?"
"Mm-hm."
"What are you doing here?"
"I was lonely."
He heard Vexen sigh in the darkness and squeezed him tighter, nipping gently at the bare skin of his shoulder blade.
"Oh, stop that."
He petulantly swept his tongue up to the base of Vexen's neck, burying himself in soft, blonde hair. He'd have stopped there, but then there was such a delicious looking ear right by his mouth and he couldn't resist the temptation to envelope his lips around it, tugging ever-so-slightly. He liked being gentle with Vexen. Anybody could break shit, he'd come to realise - but it took real skill to teeter on the edge, to push the limits of what you could and couldn't do without ever quite crossing the line.
Vexen let out a whisper of a sigh, reaching up to pull him over his shoulder to face him.
"Kiss me where I can kiss back, at least,"
Gently, so gently, he gripped Vexen's shoulders and guided his body over him, craning his neck to find those thin, delectable lips, to flash the barest hint of a tongue, to wrap his arms around Vexen's neck and draw him in closer still. Nothing with any great force. Gentle.
He wasn't sure if Vexen realised, or understood, but to be careful with him was proof of how much he'd changed. He'd come to realise that everything was a compromise - and more importantly, come to enjoy the challenge of bending - but not quite breaking - the rules.
"I suppose I'll let this slide, just this once," Vexen murmured sardonically against his lips and suddenly Marluxia smiled, suddenly Marluxia felt his heart swell so much that it hurt, and suddenly Marluxia couldn't believe that he'd ever even doubted that he was helplessly, hopelessly, drunkenly and wonderfully in love with Vexen.

The first night was bliss.

---

The first morning was cold.

Even with Vexen shielding him Marluxia wasn't safe from the nightmares, and fire and blood engulfed his sleep and once he was done screaming he was soaked in cold sweat, eyes streaming with tears, glued to Vexen's body and shaking helplessly. Vexen had an arm around his shoulders, fingers of the other gently running through his hair, murmuring comforting words in his ear. He felt cold, so cold.
Eventually he managed to prise his stiff fingers from Vexen's back, gawk, horrified, at the welts he'd left there in his nightmare world, and be carried into the bathroom, sat on a stool as warm water poured from the taps, and then stripped and lowered into the bubbles.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd had the luxury of enjoying a bath and he took nothing for granted, not the heat rising from the water, soothing his mind, not the gentle hands tangling shampoo in his hair, not the soft kiss that made him melt, completely.

The first morning was also warm.

---

The first day was new, and old.

Marluxia had followed Vexen around his daily routine for two, perhaps three months, acclimatising to the life of a normal young man. He learned to cook - badly. He learned the washing machine, and the sink and the dish brush, he learned the vacuum cleaner. He learned good manners in shops as he took items to the check out, and he learned being quiet in the library as Vexen picked out all manner of books for each other to read.
He even learned the wonderful feeling of achievement as one day Vexen arrived home with a brown envelope and he opened it up to discover a good, solid C in black and white on the page inside. Vexen had told him that the national average grade was a C, and suddenly he realised that he wasn't the worst of the worst at everything any more. In one respect, at least, he was as good as everybody else. He was slowly becoming normal.
He learned to like normal. Normal was a bit of a thrill, a bit of a privilege, and Marluxia made very sure to learn it well.

Finally there was only one thing left to learn, and that was school. Marluxia never admitted it to Vexen but, deep down inside, the prospect - Vexen first brought it up one night at the dinner table - scared him. School was where it had all gone wrong the first time. School was memories of manipulation, bullying and sadism.
But there wasn't very much where Marluxia could go with one GCSE in Botany, so further education was the only place for him. Vexen was supporting him, even taking him down to the local college to see him off on the first day, a month or so after that.
When Marluxia finally found the right room - the bleached walls and long corridors reminded him too much of prison, but thank God the classroom was brightly coloured with work patched all over the walls - he felt like an outsider. Everybody stared disinterestedly at him and he took a place at the back, alone. For all the things that he'd learned he still didn't know interaction with other people his age. The only person he ever talked to for more than a few minutes was Vexen. But he held tight and quietly obeyed the teacher's instructions until he had produced a whole page of child-scrawl notes that even he couldn't read. That day he made a mental note to learn good handwriting, as well.

The first day was alien.

---

The first friend was a real cornerstone.

He'd decided to learn packed lunches over school dinners because it gave him an excuse to throw food at Vexen in the morning, and as the days lightened into summer he found himself outside more often than not on his lunch breaks. He'd always been alone and that didn't really trouble him because, waiting back at home, he had Vexen.
Her name was Larxene and she was a bit of a tomboy, studying electronics and engineering a few flights of stairs below him, and she didn't really have any friends either.
"Hey. Can I sit here?"
Marluxia, having learned politeness well, dutifully stood up, even if there was a whole field of grass in which the girl could have chosen a place to sit instead of his.
"Sure."
He made as to leave as she sat down in the grass, and she giggled at him.
"By here I meant next to you."
"Oh."
And he sat down again.
"New?"
"What is?"
"You. Are you new around here?"
"Oh. Yeah. I started about a couple of months ago. I do botany and business studies."
She nodded approvingly.
"I'm in engineering, and electronics. I think my mum would have preferred that I did something girly like textiles, but you know."
"I do?" Marluxia asked, a little confused. He didn't even understand half of what she was saying, but he didn't want to call her up on it in case she thought he was stupid.
"Figure of speech."
Marluxia didn't really know what that was, either, but he nodded.
"Right."
"So what's your name?"
"Me? I'm Marluxia."
"That's cute. Kinda suits you. Are you gay?"
Marluxia, who had only ever heard the term as an insult, frowned and shook his head.
"Got a lot of guts to go around with pink hair, then," The girl commented. "But don't get any ideas, okay? I'm a lesbian."
Marluxia didn't know what that was either, but he pegged it in his mind to ask Vexen later. He felt a little bad. He was completely and utterly lost in the conversation. He hardly knew anything.
"So what's your name?"
"Larxene."
"That sounds kind of... sparky." He replied thoughtfully. Larxene laughed.
"I like that. Shoots and sparks."
"Shoots?"
"Yeah. Your name sounds like a flower."
Marluxia had laughed too then.
"I like flowers."

The first friend was really, really special.