Bountiful Autumn
By Kay
Disclaimer: I don't own Weiss Kreuz. Obviously.
Author's Notes: Shounen ai dwells here, if you haven't already guessed. Of the YoKen variety, no less.
i.
Ken dreams, not every night but when restless, of every faction of his life crashing together into a train wreck.
The light hits the glass at an odd angle, breaking into colored flashes that sparkle across the tiled floor and gentle green curves of the leaves. The shop is open. It is always open. The people come in through the door with its tiny, jangling bell and laugh soundlessly as they pass Ken's still form, frozen before the windows, staring out past the black letters painted on the pane and the reflections that further mar them. The teenage girls whirl about in their pressed uniforms, the mothers cluck softly at the blossoms, and he can feel it all compress together into a tiny ball of light that fills the entire room and the empty concave of his stomach.
The blood drips onto the floor from his claws. It's the only thing Ken can hear. Plip. Plip. Plip.
Across the street, Kase is waving at him.
Ken wants to wave back. He wants to join him, feel the sun warm on his back and the grass squeak under his sneakers. That is living. But he's stuck here like a fly on paper, drowning in his own inefficiency, breath caught perpetually as he tries not to inhale the cloying scent of marigolds and columbines, sickly sweet like death, and the metallic edge to the blood drenching his apron.
He can feel it soaked through to his belly. The blood. Sticky, like grape jam or natto, burning straight into the gut like a tangible reminder.
Omi is saying something to him, but Ken cannot hear. Instead, he finds himself closing his eyes and falling, falling, falling.
ii.
"You're going to piss Aya off," Youji says, arching an eyebrow in inquiry that Ken can't make himself answer politely.
"Shut up." He scowls. It isn't his fault. "I told him the kids had a game today. I told him two weeks ago."
"He doesn't think so."
"It's on the calendar," Ken insists, resisting the urge to run and point it out. Because he's not sure if it is, actually, and the clock is surging forward in a slow but unmistakable gesture. To make it now, he'll have to take his bike. He'll have to cram all his equipment into a backpack that smells too much like old soda and salt from a crumpled bag of chips.
"It's going to rain, anyway," Youji muses idly, tucking a stray slip of blonde behind his ear and into the frame of his sunglasses. Ken resists the urge to point out the stupidity of wearing sunglasses indoors. It's not like Youji will listen.
"You could work for me."
"Like hell." Youji laughs at him.
But Ken is already out the door, slamming it shut on the heated protests that follow. He doesn't feel bad about it because it's not his fault. Outside, the air is clear with the upcoming edge of fall, crisp and light on the head.
iii.
August follows the trail of July like a clinging sibling, and business trickles down as the cold seeps into the city. Winter will bring the sales back up, but until then Aya scowls at the register and bookwork, and steps out more often to visit Aya's room as if checking to see that the bad luck has not affected all other areas of his life.
Ken likes fall. When he plays soccer in the park, the dead leaves crunch and get caught on his cleats. His leather jacket is easier to wear during missions, more of a help than a smothering weight-- he's always liked the bulky solidarity of it. It feels like a shield in its own way. Or maybe it's just comforting, all smooth and familiar and smelling like his room when he's prowling the dark corners of the underworld.
The bugs start to leave and he feels relieved about giving up insect repellent. He hates the sharp, acidic sting to it against his mouth.
"It's so red out," Omi says one day, pointing at the trees with a smile, and Ken peers up beneath a mop of brown and laughs. The color is not the black of a man's intestines, but the defined brightness of the fire truck he'd played with as a child, and with whom he saved eighteen people from a tree that seemed the deadliest threat to conquer.
iv.
The cleaning is always the rough part.
It's easy to forget about it in the moment. Ken tends to blank things from his mind until it's necessary to confront them, though like a lingering sense of food poisoning they disturb him until he can no longer take it. So when he's digging his fist into another man's gut and smothering the mouth with the other to silence the choked cry of shock-- why is this happening to me, it can't end like this, what happens now, it's a lie, not the end not the end not the end-- it's not like he stops to think about what the action means.
No, it's later in the bathroom when he's washing the crusts of maroon out of his hair. When the red swirls down the faucet. When, on particularly gory jobs, he scrapes the remains of an organ off of his blades with revolution that it occurs to Ken that this is what he does: rips people apart.
Ken used to get sick a lot after missions. After a while, it just becomes salt to a wound. And after that, dull grinding into his stomach, like a wind-up toy that has been overly twisted and can't find the right gear to play music.
v.
Ken thinks that Youji should look sad sometimes when he smokes. Like, by leaning his forehead against the window and trapping his hair there to hide his eyes, and letting the smoke curl up around his face to further shield his expression, it should be because Youji is like them-- in pain, wanting, falling.
Most of the time, Youji is smiling when he lifts his head. Ken isn't surprised by that. What makes him startle, even for a moment, is that it seems to be a genuine smile and that either means Youji is not sad or Youji always, always lies.
Ken isn't sure which possibility scares him more. He doesn't like to think about it, but again it lingers, uneasy and drifting under the skin.
vi.
He doesn't think about Kase, either. Ken just doesn't do a lot of thinking at all-- he never has. It winds him up and brings him down, and the world seems several shades less than what it should be when he thinks about things.
But on the first anniversary-- not of Kase's death, though Ken never begins the anniversaries until after it occurs, but of when he met him, before dousing himself in the darkness-- he takes the day off and just walks.
Not to anywhere special. Certainly not anywhere that Kase had ever gone with him. But maybe to parks or tourist attractions, things he would have asked Kase to go to, things they would have both loved or hated, had it all been different. He buys two tickets to a theme park the first time, though not after that-- Ken can't afford it on the meager pay of an assassin disguised as a florist.
He feels like he owes Kase this. Of course, Ken doesn't owe Kase anything. It should be the other way around. But perhaps that's how it is. Yes. Ken feels like Kase owes him this.
vii.
A drunk Youji is a very unpredictable Youji in that he completely contradicts everything he does the moment before-- sometimes Ken thinks it's like spinning a wheel that's rigged to show a different score each time. Except, just when you believe you've won, it stops in the same place every single time afterwards.
"You don' have to do this, Kenken," Youji mumbles into his ear. It annoys Ken so much that he scrunches his shoulder up in displeasure and tries to rub the feeling away from it. As if sensing this, Youji laughs at him.
"Shut up. We're almost upstairs and if you trip now, I'll kill you."
"So cruel," Youji sighs, but takes extra care in his footwork as they ascend another step. Upstairs, Ken can hear Omi's keyboard clicking away in the night even though school is tomorrow. Of course, though, he can't sleep before the team is home. Ken wishes he could just drop Youji down the flight and leave him there to nurse his hangover until morning.
As if hearing him again, Youji wheedles, "Don't drop me, Kenken."
He doesn't. Youji's arm is warm slung around his shoulder. It feels oddly good in a way-- Ken has forgotten how good another body can feel under his hands when it's not on the verge of dying.
viii.
Sometimes Ken has the feeling that he's dropping from a great height, but just as he reaches the bottom he jerks into awareness. Looking wildly around in bed, he wonders if, just a second before, he had been floating above the mattress or if it is the strange contortion of the human brain.
The blinds break into long, stretching shadows across the sheets. Ken flings them back and pads barefoot to the bathroom, rubbing at the dampness of his pajamas unhappily. Down the hall, he can just barely hear the low hum of Omi's radio and, if he presses his hear to Aya's door, the scattered remains of deep breathing.
Youji is always silent. Sometimes Ken wonders if he's there at all, staring at the door with unfocused eyes until the shadows shift. Sometimes Ken wonders if he's there at all.
ix.
The only reason Ken survives being clumsy sometimes is the fact that years of soccer practice have turned his toes into steel.
"Another flowerpot bites the dust," Youji observes, watching Ken reassemble everything slowly and blink down at the mess. As soon as the comment sinks in, the boy scowls heavily and heatedly scoops up the cracked terracotta from the tiles.
"Shut up. I don't see you doing anything to help, you lazy ass." He grimaces towards the corner where Youji and, regrettably, his flock of female admirers have set up. They're still beaming at him like he's turned on the sun. Ken wonders how Youji can even stand it, being under their gazes like a specimen under a microscope, and flexes his toes in his shoes to make sure the bump into the counter really didn't damage anything.
There's a heat on the back of his neck like a sunburn, and Youji's eyes follow him all the way to the back of the shop.
x.
The lines of the sky trace themselves in Ken's mind and he follows them with the blunt curve of his fingernail, mouthing the constellations to himself. The crinkle of the headset next to his ear is dim-- he reminds himself to ask Omi whether or not it should be fixed or adjusted or anything. It's not like Ken knows. He can't even fix a fucking microwave problem without blowing something up.
The mission feels far away tonight. Maybe it's the cold of the air. Frost will be dotting the crumbled brown leaves and dried grass in the morning. 'Cancer,' Ken thinks quietly, gazing up at the stars. 'Hercules crushed the crab. It had never been a threat in the first place, and he crushed it. It was only following the orders of Hera.'
It's a bit like their target, actually. But Ken isn't paid to make judgments on whether or not the police can handle their assignments better than they can. He's lost his sense of redemption, perhaps too deeply involved in wanting his own.
Ken is a Capricorn. Not that it matters. He vaguely remembers his mother telling him this as a child, sitting him on the futon and tucking the soccer-patterned comforter around his face with gentle hands. 'You rest in the heavenly sea in the sky, Ken, and beyond your constellation is the heavenly gate where dead souls pass. The Double Ship, Southern Gate of the Sun, my darling.'
His father had called it nonsense, but sometimes Ken would stay awake on nights like this and stare the sky as if he could see the pathway all would someday take. It seemed so very, very far away.
The headset bursts into static. "Siberian," Omi says. "It's time."
xi.
Ken doesn't always know what to think about Youji. (And so, most of the time like in all other things, he doesn't think at all.) Most of it attributes to the strange contradictions of Youji's personality.
A playboy tortured over past love. A joker imbibed with the serious understanding of reality. A flippant friend who can worry more than Omi and Ken combined if given the incentive. A sense of justice tempered by compassion.
Ken doesn't think about any of that.
Rather, he watches the ways in which Youji arranges flowers, muttering low curses when the thorns prick him and refusing the suck the blood away that swells into droplets on the pale ridges of his hands. He would ask why Youji doesn't wear gloves, but then again, neither does Ken on the dark days.
xii.
"Fuck this! Fuck it!" Ken kicks the counter hard enough to bruise even his own hardened feet, cursing again after the impact.
Youji does not look up from the newspaper. "The coffee filters spill again?"
"I don't see why we always stack them so high. It's stupid, and I can't even reach the third shelf." In hindsight, Ken thinks suddenly as his cheeks burn, he should never have said that. It's embarrassing. Both Aya and Yohji have inches on him that he's always secretly, grudgingly longed for, but his build would never allow it. Rather, Ken is compact and lithe, angles to his elbows and hip bones, and his fingers barely graze the second shelf when leaning over the jutting edge of the kitchen counter. "Because of this goddamn counter," he mutters in addition, hoping to blame it. It's too late. Youji is grinning.
"What's the matter, Kenken? Feeling a little… underdeveloped?"
The burning cheeks flare. "Fuck off, you pervert. I'll just have juice." And he does, stubbornly refusing to look at the likely smug smirk on his teammates face.
The next morning, the coffee filters have been moved next to the microwave. Ken passes them by for the refrigerator, oddly light-headed and furious and tentatively happy, confused as to why he feels any of it.
xiii.
Out of everyone on the team, Ken probably gets along best with Omi.
He's sweet and kind, and if Ken can ignore the dark glint to his eyes that speaks of strength only found in the most dire of situations, he can pretend they're two normal boys just laughing at each other. It's different for Aya; there's no pretending with the ice statue. All the truths Ken would rather avoid are reflected right back at him, clear as crystal, black as tar.
Youji is… Youji. He's something entirely separate. Ken can't pretend it's going to be okay with Youji around because Youji wouldn't lie to him like that-- he's bluntly honest, cruel and merciful in that exact manner. He'd told Ken about Yuriko. He'd told Ken about who he is, something Ken is still figuring out.
He'd told Ken, on a night when liquor still lingered on his breath and the moon was caught up against the window like a beacon, that Ken was amazing.
xiv.
Ken makes the mistake of running in the freezing August rainfall. The downpour drenches his jogging gear through to the bone, skin only a thin slip of cloth under the rest of it.
He sneezes for the rest of the week. Aya banishes him and his germs from the store. Ken takes the time to hole up in his room, watching games and eating pretzels that are strong on salt.
It's a pleasant thing to sleep the day through in the sunlight.
xv.
Ken comes back from the mission with Aya alone. He doesn't know where Aya is. He doesn't care, either. He's cranky and upset and tired, aching and angry and sick from the black burns that have ruined one of his favorite shirts.
He should probably be thinking about the people he's killed tonight, but it hurts right now. Too much to hurt even more. The rush of bile is trapped against the back of his throat, acidic and ugly.
Youji meets him in the kitchen. They don't speak. Youji doesn't ask where Aya is, or how the mission went, or even if Ken's wounded anywhere. It can be taken care of tomorrow. Tomorrow, and when Youji's gently takes hold of Ken's arm and takes him close-like, leading him up the stairs, Ken realizes how exhausted he is by the shaking of his fingers and the hazy blackness that makes up the end of the hallway beyond.
"Time for bed, Kenken," Youji says quietly.
Ken isn't proud of it, but he would have cried like a baby had he the energy.
xvi.
It becomes refreshing to jog in the chilled air, breath steaming out in white puffs for Ken to run through. Omi makes worried sounds but doesn't stop him, and Youji makes wiseass cracks about how he's not even idiot enough to go outside in such skimpy clothing, hot date or not. Ken tells him to freeze to death in a gutter, slowly and painfully, so he and said hot date can laugh at him.
"You look like a Popsicle," Youji remarks when Ken opens the door, shivering and sweeping the hair plastered to his forehead aside. "We could make you an ice sculpture exhibit in an art museum. Better than swans, anyway."
Ken is too busy rubbing his gloves together to acknowledge it, but he makes sure to aim a particularly heavy kick at the chair as he passes.
xvii.
No one is ready to face the inevitable realization that they will die. People run out of time. Things that are there could disappear any moment. There isn't a warning, a sign or omen that will clue you in on the future. People who pretend they are ready for death are fooling themselves, and in the final hour will cry for all the time they have thrown away by the handful.
For Ken, he's always known he will die. It's hard living so close to the edge every other night and not realizing it. He takes a weekend in the beginning to come to grips with it (but has he?) and tries to push it out of mind.
None of them are immortal.
What Ken hates is that, even knowing tonight could be his last, he does not learn from his mistakes. Words he wants to say remain unsaid, and even seeing the end does not take away the regret when he lets chances slip away like water tracks. Things like Yumiko, and the ice cream he refused, and the sunrise he slept through.
xviii.
"You can't put an aconite in a Lover's Arrangement," Youji protests behind him, and Ken resists the urge to turn around with his shears and stab them at the man.
"Why the hell not? It looks good."
"Aconites," Youji recites, deftly plucking it from the blossoms with a heavy, melodramatic sigh, "mean to beware of approaching foes."
Ken thinks and then realizes it's true. "Oh. Yeah."
Youji studies the arrangement a bit longer, pursing his lips. "Sweet William for grant me one smile… that's a nice touch. So is the white heather. Protection?"
Ken shrugs. Youji continues, mumbling every so often a sweet sentiment that sounds almost alien when spoken in front of Ken, pushing aside blossoms and adding or subtracting to the arrangement. When he next looks up, there is an fiercely intent expression shadowing his jaded eyes and face.
"Let's take a chance on happiness, Ken."
Time stops. Ken is aware on a level he can't touch right now that Youji is smiling at him. A thousand thoughts cross his mind at once, but they move too fast to capture. All he can manage is a soft sound of protest and, embarrassed further by it, "What?"
Youji makes an amused sound. He reaches behind Ken nimbly and pulls out a sprig of white flowers on a twig from a bin. "White violets," he says, and tilts his head with that disturbingly tender and hesitant look. "How does it look now?"
Ken doesn't look at the arrangement. "Terrible," he chokes and leaves the room before the pounding of his heart drowns out everything.
xvix.
Ken learns to play jacks this fall. He plays with the kids on the sidewalks in the park, and takes to coming home with chalk slathered across the palms of his hands.
He believes that living is a surreal thing. It feels like a tangible dream until you wake up, and then it is over.
xx.
Ken has no illusions about where he will go should Weiss ever disband. In that unlikely event, he knows exactly where each one of them will be.
Omi will go to college and do something insanely gifted with computers (which Ken will never, ever begin to understand). He'll be the only thing that keeps them together, and will probably send obnoxious but heartfelt Christmas cards if he can't manage to make them get together.
Aya will take care of his sister and work to make ends meet, most likely continuing as a florist until a better opportunity opens up. It's hard to imagine Aya without a sword and blood streaked down his boots, but sometimes if Ken glances over in the shop, when the light is right, he can see a part of the man that folds under the petals and refuses to wake up.
Youji will do whatever his lazy, overly sexed attitude wants him to, and while he may not find peace, he'll at least single-handedly support the cigarette industry. For some reason, when Ken thinks about a future without the underworld, he pictures Youji lounging around art galleries to impress women and attending parties where he is the lifeline of the enjoyment. He will slowly learn to smile, and Ken will figure out whether or not he has been lying to him for years under the pretense of that gesture.
Ken is the simplest of all.
He will play soccer, drink apple cider under the summer sky and hum of cicada, and give coins to the scruffy man who sings Moon on the Water at the corner behind the bookstore.
xxi.
"Don't look at me like that," Youji says flatly, blowing a stream of gray smoke into the air with the grace of a professional. "It's not even serious."
"It looks serious," Ken says quietly.
He know he shouldn't push. The air is like electricity, vibrant and in the momentary, clinging to the baggy lengths of his jeans and the soft cotton of his sweater. He wants Youji to look at him. He wants things to make sense again. He wants to know when the hell they stepped onto the ride, and where the hell he can get off again.
Ken wants so much sometimes.
Youji says nothing, not about them and not about the trickles of red visible down the sleeve of his mission uniform. Ken doesn't say anything, either; two can play the same game. Except he's not even sure what the game is anymore, if it's a game at all, if he can afford the stakes or has any chance of getting ahead. He feels like he's falling farther and farther behind, lagging at the start line, desperately speeding ahead and getting nowhere with himself.
"Goddamn it," Youji suddenly snarls, and his hand is around Ken's, gripped hard with milky-white knuckles, and he yanks Ken beside him at the window like he can rip the bones out of his wrist.
Ken keeps looking down, sick and frustrated and just a little more than very hopeless. "I'm sorry…"
Youji is silent. Then, "It's a beautiful night."
Ken nods tentatively, swallowing the lump of doubt in his throat, and looks up.
xxii.
Sometimes it's okay not to understand. Ken wants to say that it's wrong, however, because they don't have all the time in the world. They could be dead tomorrow. They could be dead tonight. They don't have the luxury or agony of the unknowing, the courage to plunge headfirst into what they have already seen as an impossibility.
But Ken holds Youji's hand that night. He's so nerve wrecked that he's almost trembling, so afraid that he could throw up.
The world leaves too much space for regrets.
xxiii.
Ken is dreaming again.
The shop is silent but busy, full of people and yet leaving Ken completely alone. The blood drips. The marigolds smother him. Across from his face, Kase is tapping at the glass and grinning at him with eroded teeth full of black, scurrying insects, crawling between his gums and the dead muscle of his tongue and the bitten corners of his mouth. Ken feels like he should be telling him not to tap on the glass.
A hand slips into his own in that moment.
Ken's breath lets out in a painful rush, but he barely notices. It all goes away. The dripping, the flowers reaching towards him, the gaping smile of rot, everything, and it's Youji's fingers squeezing his own, Ken's more certain than anything else and he doesn't have to think about it. These are Youji's nicotine-stained fingernails and thick scars from years of handling his wire. This is Youji's lifeline and his heartbeat, straight up into Ken's chest as if forcing him to keep his own pumping. This must be Youji's smile dancing on the edge of his vision like a taunt he longs to return.
And Ken discovers, turning his head to say something, to kiss him, to touch his face, that what comes next after this doesn't really matter at all. They are falling, falling, falling, but they hit the bottom together.
the end