Title: Cake
Summary: Kano is a cake and his lies are the frosting.
Rating: T
Angst and cake?
How great.
Colorful language?
That was a mistake.
They are walking along the street when Kano happens to glance over at one of the shop windows. It's filled with brightly decorated cakes and cookies, some topped with flaky, pink flowers, others with fancy scrawl spelling out words and phrases.
Kano can remember when he was younger, when he, Kido, and Seto decided to make a cake for Ayano's mother, or, as they called her 'Ayaka-san'.
Ayaka-san was warm and smelled nice. She never hesitated to wrap her arms around Kano, or the other two, and smooth down his unruly hair, humming sweet, sweet songs into his ear. She was gentle, and Kano hated her as much as he loved her. Ayaka-san was a mother, so of course she would provide a reminder of a gaping hole in Kano's shriveled heart, one that scratched at his skin, made him bleed, blood spilling from his chest and wrists.
His mother was dead, and that's what Kano should've been, six feet under the ground. His body was already rotting, so he fit the bill in one way. The lies Kano spoke to Ayaka-san cut into his own tongue, and the foul taste of blood was warm in his mouth.
They wanted to make a cake for her birthday, and the whole idea was Ayano's, like much of everything the children did.
Kido would mix it, Ayano would bake it, Seto would clean the dishes, and Kano would ice it.
When Kano had a look at the frosting he'd be using, and Ayano set the cooling, hot cake in front of him, the boy felt a thick, sticky feeling in his chest. It was hard to explain, but Kano realized the cake was a canvas just waiting to be painted and the icing was...
Like lies, Kano had thought. To others, icing was sweet and smooth. It created something beautiful, usually a clever design or crafty script, covering the normal, boring cake and keeping it moist. It gave off an illusion of something that really wasn't there.
When Kano lied, people didn't know they were lies. They simply smiled-perhaps grateful for the lie, because if they knew the truth, well, wouldn't that hurt them more?-and Kano always had to swallow the bile that rose to his throat, his heart bleeding out even more as the seconds ticked by with the victims of his lies blissfully ignorant.
(A weak voice had called out 'Monster!', accusing him, convicting him, but now that voice is gone, drowned out by the screams of others.)
Frosting a cake shouldn't have been too hard. But the churning in Kano's stomach, the nerves frazzling him, caused the boy to put one spread of white icing somewhere it shouldn't have been, and everything snowballed from there.
The more layers of icing he put on the cake, the more he slid the knife around, up and down, in circular motions, the uglier it became. He tried and tried to make it pretty, but his efforts were fruitless, a waste. Kano had put one layer of icing on(one mask), then another(two mask), and kept adding on to them(so many masks, every time he smiled, the edges of his mouth would crack like breaking glass).In the end, he couldn't find any proof to discern their creation had once been a cake. Kano had ruined it with his poor icing job, too much frosting, mixing the multi-colored sweet pastes together until they were a disgusting mess.
Like Kano.
Kano put on lies. Hundreds-no, thousands-of lies. He wrapped them around his body, strangled himself, spoke so many that the acidic residue dripped off his foul tongue. His falsehoods wore him down, tore away at his skin. Kano was a liar and overtime he had convinced himself that he was a pretty good one. It was the only thing he could do, after all. But Kano found he didn't even know the false words from the true ones anymore, and that every mask he wore fractured him. They'd mixed together, like the frosting, and turned into something else, something dark and empty. A brownish-red.
The cake was ruined.
Kano wanted to cry. He knew, though, that everyone would fuss over him if he did, and Kano didn't want to be the kid who spoiled everything, the one who wiped the happy smiles off their faces, replacing it with concern.
The others loved the cake. Ayaka-san's smile was dazzling, and she looked at the cake as if it were the best present she'd ever received. Kano felt shame curl in his belly, and the warmth of Ayaka-san's lips burned when she kissed him on his cheek. "Beautiful," she had murmured in his ear. "Thank you, Kano."
Ayaka-san thanked the others as well commenting on the rich taste, its moistness, and how clean the kitchen looked. Seto and Kido munched down their pieces enthusiastically enough, and Ayano praised them on how well it tasted, almost in a mock attempt to copy her mother, raising a bite to her lips.
Kano had looked at his own piece, untouched, and hated himself. The childish inquiry of Seto on whether it tasted good or not, crumbs flying out of his chipmunk cheeks, spurred Kano into taking a large bite and nodding.
The cake was delicious, but the frosting was bitter and felt like leather in his mouth.
They put one piece aside for Ayano's father and gobbled down the rest. No one noticed the black feelings emanating from Kano. That was because he wouldn't let them. Kano didn't want to ruin their cheerful mood, so he smiled as well(muscles stretching, tightening).
People never knew when he was lying. They couldn't pick out any truth from Kano's countless lies, see what lay beyond all those facades. And so Kano was always bleeding, until one day he couldn't bleed anymore, and the last healthy vessel in his heart finally shriveled.
Maybe it was the day he couldn't feel Ayaka-san's embrace anymore, or the day his big sister climbed to a high, high place, then fell crashing to the ground, like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, who reached for something he should never have tried to reach. Ayano was too kind, too loving, a replica of Ayaka-san, and so the cruel world crushed her as the wax holding her feathers together melted, burning her feet and breaking her fragile mortal body into pieces. She brought too many other people down with her, because when she jumped, their wax melted, and dozens of hearts were left fractured, maybe shattered.
"Kano!" Kido calls. The gang is a few feet in front of him, having stopped once they realized Kano was standing in front of the cake shop, staring at the window display.
He'd been lost with his thoughts, his memories, and Kano scolds himself silently. He can't let it happen again. Not anymore.
Kano thinks back on it very briefly and realizes it almost seems like the cake had been squashed, squashed by all the frosting. Kano is squished. He is Atlas, holding the sky on top of his shoulders as it weighs down upon him, crushing him. He can't drop the sky, can't even rest for one second. If he stops, if he quits lying, the world will collapse on top of not just him, but everyone he loves (or the people that someone as crooked as him can care for).
Kano will stand between his friends-his family-and destruction, even if he has to ruin some stupid cake.
"Just admiring the sweets," he laughs, edges of his mouth tearing as he smiles. "They look much better than the ones you'd ever make!"
Kido scowls, striding over to swat him in the back of the head, and the chuckles from the rest of his family help the blood in his veins flow more easily, help him go on.
Cake.
Ha.
It rhymes with fake.
A/N: i feel like this has been done before but whatevs.
i stayed up till midnight writing this so i hope you enjoy. oh and it hasn't been edited yet, so sorry