Landscape With Figures
a Weiss Kreuz ficlet by laila.

Legalese: Weiss Kreuz, it's characters, indices and everything else belong to Takehito Koyasu, Kyoko Tsuchiya and Project Weiss, not to mention a list of companies both in Japan and the Us which is no doubt as long as my arm, including TV Tokyo, Movic and whoever it was dubbed the series in the US and should be goddamned ashamed for enforcing the line 'Who pissed in his Cheerios' on one Youji Kudou. I don't have any right to this series at all. Ficlet written simply for the fun of it, as I doubt anyone would want to buy even should I try to sell.

Author's Notes: Written some time ago for the fic challenge group I produced 'TMI' for then subsequently dropped out of after a falling-out with the community leader, I kind of forgot I had written this simple little vignette, which involves Youji, Ken and a rainy afternoon out and owes its existence to the prompt 'Street Scene', for an amazing ho-hum length of time. On rediscovering it, I decided to post it partly because I haven't posted anything in months and felt the need to prove that I ate'nt dead and am planning on dragging myself back to the land of the fanficcing by my fingers if necessary, but also because I happen to like it. I hope you, my invisible and hopefully not nonexistent audience, like it too.

It's raining, but the city streets seems as crowded as ever. It'd be too much to expect that they wouldn't be. Tokyo refuses to ease off, ever. Though the rain renders it damp and gloomy as the setting for a post-modern nightmare the city isn't one to let a little thing like bad weather cramp its style. Cities never are; it's outside their nature.

Ken forgot his coat. More accurately, he left it behind. Blaming the lapse on simple forgetfulness could never convey the deliberate intent that had underscored his actions. Ken didn't take his coat because he didn't think he'd need it. It didn't seem like it was going to turn out so bad, early this afternoon – who cared if rain had been forecast?

Stupid move, he knows, but it's too late to do anything about that now. Left to himself he'd head on home regardless – who cares if he gets wet? Ken doesn't care. He's more interested in getting back: there are other things he would rather be doing with his afternoon, things he still wants from the day. He wishes he'd decided to come out alone after all, that he hadn't managed to nag Youji into going with him though at the time it had been an achievement. He could have been back by now. Ken doesn't want to be here. Inside he's angry. He's fed up with Youji. He hides it, though. The rain is nobody's fault.

It's raining and Youji is worried about his hair, his shirt, his shoes, about the shopping bag he carries which holds some other absurdly expensive article of clothing. Youji, Ken thinks, needs to get a sense of proportion. The young man is pretending he isn't really bothered, pretending that they've sought shelter under the awning of a gaudy department store for no reason at all, but Ken knows him well enough to be able to tell when his jokes are no joke at all.

Ken is bored.

Ken thinks it's Youji's fault for wearing such expensive clothes; deep down, Youji doesn't understand how Ken can care so little about his appearance. Sometimes it occurs to the both of them that the only things they really have in common are things they can never admit to and which nobody in their right mind would wish to share. By rights they should never have met. Yet they're friends, or friendly enough, and somehow that seems wrong. That they can take pleasure in one another's company at least some of the time is, almost, a gesture of defiance in the face of fate.

The streets look experimental, cluttered and chaotic as bad art. The world, Youji thinks, becomes smeared when it rains. The colors run, everything seems muted and somehow indistinct. The clouds and the darkness render the shadows overemphatic and exaggerated. When it rains, or so Youji often fancies, the city is abruptly transformed into a clumsy watercolor painted by a well-intentioned but ham-fisted amateur artist – someone possessing a clear vision but without the talent to see that vision through.

Youji looks at the streets, at their shape and color, and is struck all over again by how undifferentiated everything seems, how the faces of the crowd seem to merge into one. He scans the passers-by for a pretty face, yet he can't see one. The city pasteurizes people, makes it impossible to pick out their individual shapes and forms; the crowd has extinguished them, bleached the life and individuality from them. They're nothing. Ciphers. Bit-part players in the drama of his own life, possessing a single dimension between them. The world splits into two; himself and Ken on the one hand, everything else on the other.

(He knows Ken is real.)

Youji watches a young woman, stood across the street and gazing into the window of a boutique, shaking the droplets of rain from her umbrella. He supposes she's about his age, or maybe a little older. Something about her seems impeccably bourgeois but her prettiness is strictly standard; she looks good, but she doesn't look anything other than ordinary. Youji runs into girls with that standardized kind of attractiveness over and over again in the course of a single day; for all her advantages she remains bland as rice porridge. He can tell she's from a good family just by looking at her; can tell that, if he went over and introduced himself, she would blush and giggle and be slightly alarmed. She's what they still call a nice girl.

He stays where he is. She disappears inside the store. Her hair slithers, sinuously, across her shoulders as she walks; her boots are stained with rainwater and dirt.

He glances across at Ken and wonders what he is seeing. The boy – and somehow it's hard to think of Ken as anything but a boy – is frowning as if his thoughts are troubling him, but it doesn't have to mean anything; thinking, he has often noted, appears to have a hard effect on Ken. Following his gaze, he can't begin to work out what it is that Ken is gazing so intently at. He realizes Ken's world will be very different from his though it won't have changed at all. He understands that, where it matters, he doesn't really know Ken at all. He thinks he would like to, though.

(Everyone needs to be close to someone.)

"What?" Ken says suddenly.
Somehow Ken has shattered a silence which, in truth, never existed – the leftover noise of the city, the rattle of raindrops on the awning above their head, has seen to that. Youji is surprised by the sound of Ken's voice, but he manages not to start. "What, what?"
"Didn't you notice? ...You're looking at me funny. What's the matter, aren't the girls holding your attention any more?" He smiles briefly. Ken's teasing. So far, Youji thinks, so normal.
"Are you suggesting you'd like that?" He smiles at Ken's attempt to look irked but he can tell he was expecting it. He can tell the boy's heart isn't really in the endeavor. "I was just thinking."
"Thinking?" Ken pretends surprise. "Well, there's a first time for everything."
"Thinking isn't a challenge for all of us, Kenken," Youji replies easily. "What are you looking at?"
Ken blinks. "If that's all you wanted to know," he says, and somehow he says it cautiously, "why didn't you just ask me that instead of staring at me like I've got something on my face?"
"That's not an answer," Youji says, and only realizes afterwards, from the way that Ken frowns at him as if he has said something bizarre, that he must have sounded far too serious. "Never mind, Ken. Forget I mentioned it."
"I wasn't looking at anything."
"So," Youji can't quite hold the question back, "what were you doing?"
"Nothing," Ken says quickly. "Had something on my mind."

Ken sounds defensive, as if he's hoping to discourage Youji from asking what he was thinking about. He folds his arms as if he is irritated. In truth he only feels cold. His tee-shirt clings damply to him, the material seems flimsy and far too thin for the sudden cold. He feels underdressed, wishing the rain would stop even as he understands it's not going to. The rain arrived unexpectedly, but it's perfectly content where it is. He isn't: he's bored. He wants to go home. Something about Youji and his unexpected seriousness and the look in his companion's eyes is making him feel profoundly uncomfortable. Ken shifts position slightly and sighs without really realizing it, running one hand along one of his bare arms.

"Bored?" Youji asks quietly.
He's almost right: Ken thinks he'd rather admit to boredom. "Very. Can we go home?" (Everyone has to belong somewhere.) He's not sure if he sounds plaintive or petulant and isn't sure if it matters one way or another. He wants to get out of here and doesn't much care how he accomplishes it. Another ten minutes and he thinks he'll be grabbing Youji by the wrist and dragging him out into the storm regardless of his protests. He could always do that. Youji's strong, but Ken reckons he's stronger.
"Now?" Youji's distaste for the idea shows in his voice. "It's still raining, Ken."
"Thanks, I can see that," Ken says impatiently. "It's not going to stop raining just because you want it to, you know."

Which remark Youji thinks could, said under the right circumstances by the right speaker, almost have sounded profound, in a catch-penny kind of way. Here however, and coming from Ken, it's only the literal truth. Ken has never been one for playing on the surface of things. Ken smiles slightly, as if to soften the quiet rebuke his words imply then, without waiting for his response, he steps out into the rain. Already he's standardizing himself, making a virtue out of fitting in. Ken fits in everywhere; it's a knack he has. His looks, his build, his utter normality all conspire to make him so eminently unexceptional that, ironically, he almost becomes remarkable.

Youji realizes that, in this blurred and undistinguished crowd, he could easily lose Ken forever. To his own surprise, he finds himself wondering what it is Ken thinks about when he's not thinking about anything very much—

"Hey, Youji," Ken calls over his shoulder, "are you coming or not?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming." Youji sighs, raising his eyes heavenwards in a parody of displeasure. He wonders, only half-jokingly, how to solve a problem like Ken. Turning up the collar of his shirt, he hurries into the streets, shivering at the feel of the rain on his face. His shoes are going to get ruined. How is it that Ken can care so little about his appearance? It seems willful, deliberate, utterly incomprehensible; as if Ken forced himself not to care simply to prove a strange kind of point.
"Good, because if you think I'm telling Aya you're not coming back because you can't stand to get a bit wet, you've got to be crazy."
"You think I'm crazy now?" Youji asks, pretending to be stung.
"I think you need a sense of proportion. Youji, man, they're only clothes."

— but the moment passes, lost to nothing but normality, and the thought drifts from him. Suddenly it doesn't seem relevant any more. The time is wrong, the place is wrong, it feels like a stupid question anyway – he can imagine Ken's reaction, imagine the way the kid would frown and say, before he even contemplated answering, why do you want to know? – and somehow he forgets to ask.

He always forgets to ask.

-ende-