Untitled - A Weiss Kreuz story
By Tien Riu
Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz and characters used are property of the original creators.
Author's note: "Untitled" is a short story, originally posted on my lifejournal over a year ago (or so).
Much has changed since the last time I wrote or posted for the Weiss Kreuz fandom. "Untitled" has been rewritten slightly but has not changed significantly.
Posting it is my way of making a concrete promise to myself that I will finally pick up and finish "Lust" rather than allowing it remain as it is.
This has not been beta'd, as I have lost contact with my incredible, generous Weiss Kreuz beta reader, Briar Rose (through my own fault). Thus, although mistakes have always been completely my fault, there will probably be more evident this time round.
Years passed; they had a habit of doing that.
Some days he would wake up, get dressed and walk down to the local store for a newspaper, a cup of coffee and a bun. Watching the man behind the counter lift the lid and pull a fresh white bun out, hand wreathed in steam, the past seemed like a dream.
It was easiest in the summer. Some days he would sit in the kitchen look out into the garden. The birds always sang here.
He'd bought the house one day years ago and spent a year paying a fortune to plumbers, builders, carpenters and interior decorators. It had once been a dojo - and before that, a temple. The owners had moved to Shanghai after the war - the Vietnam War that is; it had been abandoned since then. In his less sane moments, he liked to think that it had been waiting for him.
Strangely enough, the past came in spring when the leaves started growing again. He would stare out at the trees - pink and heavy with blossoms - and the memories would come back unbidden. Some mornings it felt as if his life - this life - was the dream and that he had never left the flower shop.
Perhaps he never had.
He was packing his bags on the last day of winter, as pale sunshine streamed through the bedroom windows. He had intended to make a quick trip to Singapore - there was aparticularly fine casket of wine, part of a shipment from France that he was thinking of buying. The thought coalesced then: five years had passed and he would turn thirty-four that year - the prime of his life were he normal, ancient for what he had been. It was no more than a single moment of clarity - not words as a sensation of curiosity that he could only articulate as a question: What became of them?
Five years ago he had told them he had to leave and that no amount of blood spilled would bring Asuka back to life. They never questioned his reason for leaving.
He wondered now if they had ever wondered; they knew he had willingly drowned in blood - sacrificed everything in the name of vengeance - for her. Perhaps they had never asked because doing so would have stopped him from escaping the life they had all created together.
Blood and death, cloaked in the cloying scent of hot house blooms and the high pitched laughter of children. The sense-memory came, clutching at his throat, strangling his breath as it had the first time he had realised he could no longer remember Asuka's face. That the anger that had burned through him - that had helped him kill time and time again (in her name, in her memory, in revenge for her sacrifice) had died and all that was left was something cold and dead.
He had left a week later, walking from the Koneko and Weiss and searched for - something. He had never been able to articulate what he had searched for and in five years, had never found it. He had wrapped himself, instead, in all that it might represent - holding it close till, to some outsider who didn't know better, it must have seemed as if he were real.
Watching the pink petals drifting from the branches in the garden, he remembered the dead flowers and foliage he had arranged day after day in that flower shop. Of creating a pretence of life - and the girls who had flocked to the counters, willing to believe the lie in exchange for a fleeting, fragile beauty.
They say that healing comes like the wind - gently as a zephyr or wildly as a gale. And when it first comes, it pulls the dirt and the grime and all that lies close to the surface away and hides that which lies beneath. And when it comes a second time, it takes all that is left.
And sometimes, what it takes with it is you.
That day, Youji Kudou boarded a plane and flew back to Tokyo.