And This Is Where Life Goes On
Author: Jusrecht
Character/Pairing(s): Barnaby, Kaede (no pairing)
Warnings: SPOILERS up to episode 17. Character death in the beginning. Some angst.
Summary: Barnaby and Kaede, in the aftermath of Kotetsu's death.
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1.
The first time Barnaby met Kaede, she was a young girl of nine who stood under a rain of crumbling stones and steel skeletons. He did not know who she was, not until weeks and weeks later, when a chance glance at the unholy clutter that was his partner's desk provoked a dreamy smile and an hour of chattering and bragging from the proud father. The story ended, to Barnaby's amused relief, with a petulant note that the beautiful, incomparable daughter was apparently a fervent admirer of a hero who was, unfortunately, not her father.
For the longest time, he knew her only as the girl smiling on Kotetsu's desk. She wore her hair tied with a pink ribbon, a small, painfully adult smile softening her sun-browned face. It was nothing like her father's, a dazzling grin bursting with warmth past transparent glass and green plastic frame. Barnaby remembered thinking that she must have looked like her mother, and was content with the detachedness, the opaqueness of that conclusion.
Until the day he must face the girl in person.
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2.
The second time Kaede met Barnaby, she was a girl of twelve. He stood at the front door of her house, an incongruous spectacle with his leather jacket and stylish boots against the background of her humble little town. She gaped, and forgot to move.
"Hello," he began, and that was when her world ended.
—
3.
His words flowed quietly, meticulously, a stream of coherence and heartfelt regret as he gently pushed the knife deeper.
Or so Barnaby had dreamed. In reality, he stood tongue-tied before her anxious, waiting gaze, for the only words he could string together were 'your father died protecting me'.
Then he gave them voice.
—
4.
And Kaede learned that grief was absence—the absence of happiness, warmth, hope. Of everything.
Then understanding surged and filled the absence. Truth was a cold, heavy thing, but it made sense, and the fact that it did only made her feel angry and betrayed. She leapt at him with a fist that could break teeth and bones, with a speed that could shame bullets, only to meet her match in his, stride for stride.
The blueness which ringed his eyes was a mirror of her own. Her father. His partner. Her father. His partner.
Screaming, she threw herself again at him. Hatred was easier to handle than grief.
—
5.
"She would understand, with time," the grave old woman told him, polite if aloof. Barnaby could not help but see a swarm of accusations behind her sad, solemn eyes. This was her son's death, spoken by the ignorant lips of indifferent newscasters, trumpeted on large, colourful billboards with flashing letters. A hero who died a heroic death was the pinnacle of heroism. It was a celebration, and the world was too busy wallowing in grief to notice that it was nothing more than morbid excitement.
She did not offer him tea. He knew a rebuff when he saw one, and took his leave with a defeated bow.
—
6.
Kaede might have a Japanese name, but there were not more than five Japanese words on her tongue. The old language was dying in their modern world, but sometimes she had heard his father, the quiet syllables and plosives echoing down the stairs as he spoke to her mother's picture.
Now the dead words clung like dust to her shoes.
She stared at the coffin, deathly silent as fistfuls of earth rained upon its polished surface—and felt utterly alone.
—
7.
"Listen, Barnaby, one of the suspects has stolen a boat and is heading toward you. Sky High and Dragon Kid are handling the other one, so focus on him. Remember, he can manipulate water."
"Understood."
From the centre of the bridge, Barnaby cast his eyes toward the dark spread of the bay. A single, blinking light shone brightly white against the rippling blackness.
He took a deep breath.
"Let's go Kotetsu-sa–"
His breath hitched, strangling the word. There was an empty space beside him now where only wind whispered; once, there had been a laugh and a pat on the back, warmth as opposed to this cold emptiness.
Gritting his teeth, he plunged into the darkness.
—
8.
After three years, Kaede was still determined not to forgive.
Time moved on, and with it her life moved on, and with it her body moved on, growing, changing, growing, and wouldn't stop changing; all the while, she was leaving his father behind in his grave. Somewhere, in the confusion of her fifteen-year-old mind, she came to one decision: if everything else moved on, then at least her hatred should stay. And so she preserved it, a tiny glittering black diamond inside a glass jar, weeping softly, bleeding silently, deep inside her heart.
After three years, she graduated and moved into a boarding school in Sternbild through a scholarship; it was an achievement, but–
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9.
After three years, Barnaby was still determined not to give up.
It was guilt, fuelled by desperation and so much helplessness he could not help it. He returned and returned and returned, the road by now a familiar one, smooth asphalt to gravel and mud, blinding glass towers to green-crested mountains. Once a month—the entire thing turned into a pilgrimage soon enough, but after his timid offer of financial help had been declined, it was all he could do.
And so he tried and he tried and he tried, but–
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10.
"Nothing will ever bring you back, will it?" she asked the mute photograph of her grinning father.
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11.
"Nothing will ever bring you back, will it?" he asked the grey, silent headstone that was the only thing left of his partner.
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12.
Try as she might, Kaede could not escape the spread of his winged fame. Beneath Sternbild's gilded dome, Barnaby's name was on everybody's lips. Everywhere she glanced, there was his face, his picture, his existence—all her reminders.
Until one summer night, a choking madness seized the brazen city, and her unwilling eyes watched as he plunged into a blazing, towering inferno.
—
13.
Barnaby did not pause. He would have, once, but he had been another man back then, and Kotetsu a living, breathing presence at his side—annoyingly constant, inerasably there. And that good, selfless man had taught him, among many other things, to jump into danger's arms for the sake of a life, not some paltry two-hundred points.
And so Barnaby did not pause.
—
14.
She stared furiously at his prostrate form, at the crisscross of sickly white bandages covering nearly half the plane of his body. The sight stung her eyes. She did not think that her father's murderer deserved to look like that.
Like a hero.
But when his glazed, unfocused eyes rested on her, the illusion shattered. Recognition frightened him, and there was a flash of sharp, malicious pleasure in her chest to know that her mere presence could frighten him when the ruthlessness of fire could not.
"You could have died," she declared bluntly, tearing their silence to shreds.
Surprise filtered through the screen of wariness, perhaps from the raw sound of her voice, or the bluntness stitched to her words. He lowered his eyes, fingers curled slightly inward against a bandaged palm.
"I could have," he admitted, and then met her gaze once more, steadier.
"But?"
"But it wouldn't matter."
At that moment, Kaede understood her father better than she ever had. There was a reason why he had thrown his life away for this man, and she knew this was it.
"You can play the hero all you want," the words flooded out, riding on reckless, angry waves, and she was powerless to stop them, "but I will never, never forgive you if you waste the life my father had saved."
Then she turned away, out of that colourless room and down the hospital's cold, pristine corridor, before she would let her tears fall.
I understand, I understand… but oh, Papa.
—
15.
Her daily visit confused him as much as her fluctuating moods, but Barnaby had long learned to live with the unknown.
The first week was long and awkward, as she took her place by the window, glaring down his feeble attempts at conversation into whimpering silence. The second half of the week brought books, and one time flowers, small and white with a faint, tingling fragrance that dispelled nightmares from his dreamscape.
The next saw her sitting by his bedside, bent over Calculus and Physics. It took him a few days and a series of cold snubs for her to bite her lips, mutter, and challenge him with the most complicated derivational equation she could find in her textbook.
Luckily, he had always been a star student in his time.
—
16.
The day he was released from the hospital, she stood in the midst of the waiting crowd, embroiled in their passionate whispers and undulating hum. When he appeared, she alone remained silent in the chorus of claps and excited cries. He did not see her, but she saw him, Barnaby the hero and Barnaby the man, one perfect while the other not.
It wasn't his fault, you know, her father would have said, and Kaede silently agreed.
—
17.
"I'm sorry."
A long, strained silence followed. Then she nodded, and he breathed once more.
—
18.
"This is the kind of food you eat every day, isn't it?" she demanded, surrounded by a smell she had known once so well.
His spoon paused in mid-air, and he met her gaze through a thin curl of white vapour, apprehensive. "I thought you would like it. Your father taught me how to cook this dish."
"My father," she said, exasperated, "had no idea how to take care of himself."
A hint of a smile bloomed in his eyes. "And yet he was always fussing over other people."
"That sounds like him all right," Kaede huffed, and took a tentative mouthful.
It was better than she remembered.
Something must have shown on her face, for his lips surrendered to that smile. She saw the softness of its edges—and to her surprise, found that she liked it.
—
19.
Six months later, when Barnaby won the MVP for the first time since his partner's death, Kaede returned his smile with her widest and most brilliant.
It was, he thought, the most beautiful gift he had ever received in years.
—
20.
Barnaby was a mentor to help align her powers and a friend to help ease her troubles; but for all his roles in her life there was one she would never allow him to touch.
"You're not my father," she told him, eighteen and angry and in love. He looked surprised, hurt, and she stormed out of the café, basking in the bitter satisfaction of knowing that she had yet to lose her power to hurt.
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21.
Three days later, she returned, contrite, a mumbled apology hovering about her lips. He was too relieved not to forgive her anything, and they spent the rest of the day ridding his fridge of ice cream.
And when she finally introduced her boyfriend, it was before Barnaby that he trembled.
—
22.
The resemblance had always been there, but one day she told him with eyes shining and voice trembling with the uncertainty of certainty: "I'm going to be a hero," and he saw that there really was his partner in her.
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23.
He was everything her father was not, but one day he declared before a stunned crowd and legions of cameras: "I'm a human first and a hero second," and she realised that there really was her father in him.
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24.
When he finally destroyed Ouroboros, once and for all, it was Kaede who stood holding his hand before his parents' grave.
—
25.
When she finally walked down the aisle, resplendent in white lace and milky pearls, it was Barnaby who gave her away.
End
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