Title: Post-War Goals
Character: Kaito||Romance: N/A
Word Count: 500||Chapter Count: 1/1
Genre: Angst||Rated: G
Challenges: Diversity Writing, Arc-V, A79, K rated; Include the Word Boot Camp, #16, account; Arc-V Flash Bingo, #46, Kaito; Mini-Fic Masterclass Challenge, #1, Canon Goodness
Summary: Hoping only blinds one to reality. When one is carded, it can't be reversed. And if he ever knows this for certain, Kaito has a plan ready.
The sound of a card tearing shouldn't have been a horrifying one. It hadn't been more than an annoyance in years before. An annoyance, to be certain: cards shouldn't be carelessly discarded or disposed of. He'd heard plenty of stories about spirits in the cards as well. That should be taken into account.
But since the invasion, the sound of a tearing card meant someone died. Carding itself wasn't reversible, at least not so far as they knew. Kaito encouraged people to think it wasn't himself. He refused to cling to false hopes and until they could win their world back, they had no time for daydreams regardless. They had to be cruel. They had to be vicious. They had to not care.
He didn't care. It was easy not to. He'd never been carded. But since he saw his father and his brother fall as little pieces of paper - both of them without any chance to defend themselves - he hadn't cared about anything other than ending each and every soldier of Fusion.
Once in a while some of them tried to pretend to defect, to claim they hadn't known what was going on. He knew better. Sometimes he pretended to listen, just to learn more from them. He didn't trust everything he heard, not until he could test it out somehow, but they could be useful on occasion.
And once they had nothing else to tell him…
He'd acquired the means to card people from the first one who'd tried that. She'd offered it as a sign of good faith - what did Fusion scum know about good faith? - and he'd learned a great deal from it, especially how to use it.
Carding Fusion scum worked just as well as it did on XYZ civilians.
He hadn't yet torn up any of those he'd carded. He kept them instead; he'd found an old card folder and tucked each of them in there. Sometimes he stared at them, the captive members of the army that ruined his world. He had so many but there were always so many more arriving. He didn't think he'd made a dent in their numbers.
One day he would, he promised himself, trade these all for something far greater: the knowledge of if carding could be reversed. And if it could be - he still tried to believe down to the core of his soul it couldn't be - then he would have his father and brother back again.
And if it really couldn't be, if they were gone forever, then he would save some of these cards and merrily warm himself by the fire on a cold winter's night, imagining screams that should be.
The End
Notes: Ah, Kaito. I wouldn't make any long-term plans for that fire…