Lunch with Ichijouji Ken
~ Vain 10.03 & 12.13.2002
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For the curious, this is a nice, accurate look inside my head and at how I see Ken and why I write him the way I do.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I own neither Ichijouji Ken nor most likely anything that begins with word "digi" in this fic.
The concept and plot—such as they are—are mine. M. I. N. E. So don't take them.
If you flame me for this, you are a fucking moron.
This was written as a stupid little cheek-in-tongue story that snowballed into something that I personally find more than a little bit disturbing. But what the hell; I liked it.
This is NOT a self-insertion story (nope, hell hasn't frozen over yet), nor should this be perceived as anything more than the unsuccessful exorcism of some demons. Exactly whose demons remains to be seen.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"It happened eight years ago; but I can't say she died.
She only effaced herself a trifle more than usual,
And when I looked round she was no longer there."
– Albert Camus
The Plague
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"You're quite insane you realize." And I smile, an expression that I'd like to imagine is winning, but which probably only comes off as sadistic. "Quite."
Ken looks up at me from his tea (because I always imagine him drinking tea—something I'd prefer like English Breakfast) and lifts an eyebrow. "I beg your pardon?"
Ichijouji Ken is always polite and proper. He speaks softly and his movements have a calculated refinement to them that I could never possess. I have found it to be one of the many reasons I'm fascinated by him. The rest I chalk up to my own rather subtle insanity—and I do believe that I'm just a bit insane.
"Mmmmm . . . " my filler noise. I settle back into the plush chair that my imagination has conveniently furnished for me—it's made of a soft velvety material (because leather squeaks too much)—and I try to gather my thoughts. I prefer large chairs because they make me look smaller in comparison.
Ken mimics the motion across from me. After the silence lasts for several moments he lifts his mug to his lips. "I trust you were actually going somewhere with this, Vain."
He omits the "-chan" I usually attach; he doesn't see the need for it. Despite the fact that I am at least 7 years his senior, he is always more mature than me in many ways.
I look away from his eyes. I don't look at people when I talk unless I want something from them—the intimacy of it makes me uncomfortable. "I was talking to Guardian about it Tuesday night in MGC," I respond.
His lips twitch towards a smile. "Glad to see I'm so fascinating . . ."
I laugh, a self-deprecating sound. "No, I'm just a loser."
He knows that I'm serious and he says nothing. This is, after all, my mind and I'll be damned if I feel the need to dissemble here. He knows everything already, but I'm bored and anxious and if I don't put some sort of order to my thoughts I feel like I'll start screaming.
"We were also talking about astrophysics," I say as though it has any merit on the conversation.
"How so?"
I blink. "We decided that the Universe isn't three dimensional."
He lifts an eyebrow and I hate the expression for an instant because it's one that I can't replicate. I know that that's merely a genetic trait, but it bothers me nonetheless.
"How does this lead to me being insane?"
"Mmmmm . . . Actually, the whole thing started with Utilitarianism. I was ranting about the inadequacies of John Stuart Mill again." Mill was a familiar soapbox for me to stand on—I'm a devote follower of Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. "You came in after that."
He waits and I imagine my own cup of tea, but then decide that I'm hot and change it to a bottle of Vanilla Coke. I take a moment to revel in my temporary omnipotence as I sip my Coke. Gulping is terribly inelegant.
"Guardian thinks that you and the Kaiser are separate beings."
"Ahhh." It's a neutral sound and I know that he's humoring me. Like me, he both hates to have people prying about his business and is madly curious to see what they're saying. "And what did you decide?"
"It wasn't about making a decision," I say over the lip of my Coke bottle. "I simply disagreed with that point of view, that's all."
"You two disagree about everything." He sounds bored and I smile slightly because it's true.
"I know. Sempai says that we were married in a past life." My plain brown eyes twinkle with a strange kind of glee—the look I get right before I lay into someone with a very good insult and I'm burning with my own cleverness. I know the expression is on my face and for a moment I don't care. It suits me, I think. Anyway, I'm young and angry and I can afford to be stupid. "I think she's full of shit."
Let it never be said that I'm not blunt and straightforward.
He chuckles faintly. Ichijouji Ken does not laugh. "So why am I insane?" he resumes after a sip of tea.
I take a swig of Coke, momentarily forgetting my continual, faltering attempts at elegance. I am not, nor ever will be, an elegant woman.
"You and the Kaiser are the one and the same."
He shifts slightly and I suddenly marvel at how small he actually is. He's tall for his age, tall for anyone Japanese at his age, and his presence makes him seem larger than is, but when compared to me, he's a small bird-like thing. I wonder that he hasn't burnt himself out.
"What do you mean?" he asks me. He doesn't sound nervous—he is, after all, who he is—but he's wary. Frustrated perhaps. I sympathize.
"It's really quite obvious," I reply. I sound more disgusted than I actually am, but I rarely tend to come across exactly as I mean to anyway. "You knew exactly what you were doing as the Kaiser in both the Real World and the Digital World, and you went to great extremes to conceal this behavior from others." I point at him for emphasis, ignoring the incivility of the gesture. "Your parents, your teachers, your peers, the Digidestined . . . towards all of them you exhibited Kaiserish behavior. The only thing that stopped you from going psycho on them was social constraints. If you could have gotten away with it, you would have beaten the shit out of Daisuke after that soccer game. But you knew then and still know now that you can't do things like that and get away with it. There is no place in the real world for the Kaiser." I pause for effect. "Or for you for that matter."
To his credit he remains expressionless. My flaw perhaps is that I forget that he's only a twelve-year-old boy. He doesn't look or act twelve years old and I'm lacking for not integrating that discrepancy into my writing more. Perhaps it is a product of his life.
"I thought it was all a game . . ." he says after a moment. His sorrow is genuine.
"I know. But surely you realize that there's something seriously cracked about doing that for fun. The first time I saw you, I was walking through the living room and my brother was watching TV. I looked up at the screen and saw you—a child—dressed in spandex and a cape and beating something small and cute with a whip. A whip, Ken. And I said to myself, 'My five year old brother is watching this?' I was both enthralled and appalled by your behavior and, maybe it's just the psych student in me, but all I could think was 'why?'"
Here he flinches.
"So I continued watching. I had seen the first season and I liked Takeru and Angemon and Yama, but it was you, Ichijouji Ken, that I latched onto. It was you who made me a fan. What on earth could posses you do to do such a thing—even in jest?"
His eyes harden at the challenge I just realize I've issued and he sneers. "I don't know, Vain. What could posses you to write about the things you do? Rape? Murder? Possession? Betrayal? Torture? Self-mutilation? Suicide? Are you really that monstrous because of what you do to pass the time?"
I stiffen and feel anger building in my joints. My anger is always a physical thing and my temper is something that frightens me. "Some people would say yes."
"Don't turn this into a censorship thing—"
I slice my hand through the air to silence him. "Fuck that! It has nothing to do with censorship and everything to do with social values. If it didn't you'd have ripped Dai's head clean off his shoulders after that game or you'd have told that teacher who wanted the Donkey Madness tips exactly what you thought about him. If it didn't, you'd have never stood on your roof and raged against the world in general and you'd have never fled—yes, FLED—to the Digital World because your precious, fragile control was slipping. The difference between me and you is that I am a liar and a coward, Ichijouji. You are an honest coward of a completely different breed. You're a Hannibal that constantly needs to be validated by society. A Mr. Hyde who knows what he's capable of and is terrified of losing control because you will get caught. And then they'd lock you away and you couldn't handle that."
He throws the mug at me, but it never had a chance of hitting me and we both know it. "I am not a coward!"
"Liar! Then why run to another world just to be yourself? You advance from kicking puppies to kicking people by then? Why not say what you think instead of what people expect of you? You ARE a coward Ken-chan. Just like me. Just like everyone."
He glares at me for a moment, violet eyes blazing, and I feel a twinge when I realize how gorgeous he is like that. He runs a delicate hand back through his hair. A sigh leaves barely parted lips and he slumps back into his chair. The sudden change in body language is unnerving, but looking into his eyes, I can tell that he's still pissed. Closed mouthed, anal little bastard. "Is that all you wanted to say?"
I frown and push a heavy lock of brown hair from my face. My Coke vanishes. "I don't really know." I pause, thinking. "You would have kept going, wouldn't you?"
He lifts that eyebrow again. Damn him.
"If you hadn't gotten caught, I mean. If the others hadn't defeated you?"
The boy's eyes take on a hooded, serpentine look. "And what would you have done?" He smirks faintly. "If you were a god, would you step down one the basis of an inferior creature's whim?"
"Inferior?" My brow contracts slightly and I can feel a deep line of tension settle in the center of my forehead. "Howso inferior?"
His delicate shoulders raise and then drop in a jerky parody of a shrug. "By default, I suppose. After all, you would be a god."
I momentarily envision myself as being omnipotent. It seemed rather . . . dull. I told him so and he made a faint snorting noise behind his hand that would have sounded odd coming from anyone else.
"You're a masochist," he responds with a cool dismissive wave.
"And you're not?" I wish I could lift an eyebrow. Instead I settle for contracted brows again . . . It's damned annoying.
He smiles humorlessly. Ken is rather rigid and dry sometimes—acidic. I find it droll.
"Yes, but a masochist with power."
He gives me a moment to mull that over.
"There's something deeply oxymoronic about that." I close my eyes and lean back in my chair. I wish I had a real chair like this.
Across from me, a fresh mug of tea materializes in Ken's hands again. He takes a slow sip and sighs. "No. I wouldn't have stopped." His pale, thin lips turn down into a slight scowl of displeasure and he shifted a bit in his seat. "I had no reason to stop. It felt good—made me feel good—to hold the power of life and death in my hands."
"Mmmmm . . ." I bring the mouth of the re-materialized Coke bottle to my lips, but don't take a sip yet. "Well, more power to you: it's not at all my bag."
"You just don't want the responsibility."
"You're damn skippy," I retort sharply, lowering the Coke again. I lift my head and open my eyes. "Because you obviously handled it oh-so very well, neh? All the wonderful precedents you set, neh?"
He waves a hand in front of him to ward off my words. It looks as though he's brushing cobwebs out of the air. "And I'm your role model now?" His eyes are glittering now, stunning and malicious. "Pathetic."
Acidic. Ichijouji Ken is pure acid when he needs to be. It bleeds into his voice and I stiffen at the sound.
"Hardly." Flat, cold and stiff—that's me. Not acid, not fire, just flat.
He takes a sip of tea. "Oh, I forgot . . . You are of course the Queen of Vicariousness, right? At least I never hid from my life."
"You're lying again, Ken-chan. You ran from your life. You ran an entire world away and would have stayed there, horrid little thing that you are, and played "God" as you call it if the others hadn't come and kicked you off your self-made throne."
For an instant it looks as though he's going to hurl his mug at me again, but then he simply lowers it onto a small round table with what I am assuming is a tea cozy on it. He folds his slim, bird-like hands in his lap and closes his eye tiredly. "So you're saying you wouldn't?"
I know what he means, but I feign confusion and avert my eyes. I don't understand how I've lost control over this tiny simple thing . . . over my own mind. Hmph. How monstrously unfair.
He presses onward, the little prick, recognizing my act for what it is. "If you could run away from all this shit," he gestures at the formless place I've created for us, "and return to Eden, would you?"
"I can't, though."
"But would you?"
". . ."
And I silently hate him. But he's only a construct of me, so I can only hate myself.
I look back up at him and lift my eyebrows ever so slightly. "None of this is real, you know." I wave a hand. "Just my imagination at play, the whole lot of it. My own omnipotence." I can feel the dull edges of a sad smirk on my mouth. Where did I put my damn Coke?
He picks up his mug again. "I thought that you didn't want to be omnipotent—dull, I believe you said it was?"
I ignore him and he smiles. It's small and cold, well-suited to his moon-pale face and small tense mouth. I've always thought he looked odd when he was happy.
"So that all begs the question, am I really insane?"
". . . Shut up, Ichijouji."
He chuckles then and my hands ache to inflict damage one something. "Something else for you and Guardian to hash over, I suppose."
For a moment I consider willing him away to leave me in peace, but I hesitate when he says no more. I stare blankly at the Coke bottle in my hand. Vanilla Coke—hell of a lunch . . . I can almost feel my stomach lining wearing away.
"Hey, Ken . . ."
Those sharp violet eyes look over at me critically and I bite the right corner of the inside of my mouth.
"Nothing. Nothing at all, really."
He sneers at me and I look back at the Coke, reflecting on its imaginary form in my own Eden and wondering why I don't just will Ken away and stop staring into space. There's something profoundly not normal about this—having conversations with yourself, with someone else, in your head. But I know that neither Ken nor I will be going anywhere: in the end, he's absolutely right. The smug little bastard.
Besides, even by myself, I don't want to be alone.
~ Fin
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~