prologue

Black and White and Hard and Cold,
A Halo of damp blonde hair,
Snow like perfect unwrinkled sheets, stretched out as far as the eye could see.

His black boots sank to the ankles in the snow. The leather coat barely kept the chill away. It was still snowing, a light drizzle of white flakes. Winter here had been complete. Everywhere he looked, it was white and clean, perfect folds of mountain and shallow, grey sky. The only spot of colour he could make out was the black figure sprawled on the ground like a blot of ink on clean parchment.

There were no footsteps leading up to where he lay. Perhaps, the snow had covered them, like it did everything else. Perhaps, the sky had simply spat him out.

The snow made walking awkward, and in the silence, the sound it made as he crunched it under his feet was loud and gruesome. Still, the figure did not stir.

Green eyes stared up at him unseeing, lashes crusted with ice, unshod feet half buried in the snow. A cadaver; perfectly preserved.

He knelt down next to the body, fascinated, reverent. He pressed the back of a cold foot to his cheeks, bit at the skin behind the ankles, pulled the gloves from frozen hands, and sucked at frost bitten fingers. Blue lips parted, and a breath rose like a cloud; smoke from a chimney.

Alive still.

He pulled off his own gloves with his teeth, and placed both hands around the man’s neck. A pulse beat against his palms, faint and slow. He watched as the blonde struggled for consciousness, the feeble flutter of his eyelid;, the dimmed green of his eyes. A losing battle.

For the longest time, he merely watched, lulled by the pulsation against his palms.

He thought of leaving.

He considered staying.

Stay and watch the corpse crystallize…or maybe fade; wisps of darkness like ugly black tears against the perfect snow. After all, he had never witnessed ‘nothing’ die before.

The thought brought a smile to his lips.

In the end, he leaned down and caught the greying lips in his own, parted them and breathed warm breath into the cold cavity of his mouth. Emptied his lungs, and when his chest began to burn, he sucked from him the cold dead air, warmed it inside him, and fed it back.

Eyelashes brushed against his cheeks like butterfly wings.

Marluxia was gone long before Vexen awoke.