Chapter Text
1. Breakfast, those memories, waking up from a long night and coming into the morning. Ienzo had no appetite but he was provided with heavy food. Fluffy scrambled eggs, toast and jam, orange juice and milk over granola, suitable for a young boy expected to grow.
He still wasn't speaking, through those breakfasts. Ienzo by then had perfected the art of isolating himself with one agile twist of his mind. He could be alone in a crowd of people, on the edge of all of them, watching.
Just, what he remembers: a bed too big for him, where he knocked around like a dried pea in a tin. Stretching his feet out under the smooth sheets, the comforter and fabric sliding against his skin, undemanding.
(Zexion rarely sleeps, although he maintains a penchant for food. There's nothing quite like that feeling of safe harbor to put someone else at ease, which he's called upon to do, now and again. He remembers someone comforting him, and he improves on that.
No one listens like him. He really understands. He's been through it all, after all).
2. Shooting marbles, with the other children, between being chased by them. Even kept him close, tied to the apron strings so to speak, for the most part, but Ienzo was already becoming slippery, with an exploratory bent. An observer, he was hungry to observe: but not even a level stare could always protect him from the bigger children. Sometimes, he just had to cut and run.
But sometimes, he'd smirch his pressed pants with courtyard dust, crouching down on the cobblestones with other older boys and a few girls jostling at his elbows, fighting for marbles.
He picked up a lost one for his first, and went on winning more with that. It was all angles, calculation, with just a bare element of gamble, and social status as well as the marble to lose. He hated that moment of having to let fly, but Ienzo clambered to the top of the heap, the diminutive marble king.
He could win when it came to thinking, at least. He was the master of the calculated gamble.
(Zexion later would remember that, and his favorite, the clear cat's eye with a twist of green running through the glass - people not anything more or less than that, some more appealing than others, to be collected, calculated, used, and put away for later.)
3. Sitting with Even, eating sea salt ice cream, both of them leaning forward with their elbows on their knees and nearly being equal, like that. Even then Ienzo hungered for independence and control and he liked that, those moments, when Even would shuffle his ubiquitous stacks of papers aside and they'd go sit on the lab stairs in the tawny afternoon sun, both of them licking trickling ice cream off the sides of their hands.
Until he can say everything he wants to say perfectly, Ienzo would rather not say anything at all.
His eyes are nothing more than camera lenses. His brain is complicated biological apparatus to turn a reel of film, committing all of this to the deepest memory he can. This man who's in charge of him, these boundaries that delineate his world.
(Zexion can be loquacious, an orator when it's required of him. A schemer must scheme smoothly. A manipulator must wind people round his fingers.
He'd rather take than give, and what he takes most people throw away, unthinking, more fool they. They were all fools. He remembers).