Rating: PG-13
Disclaimers: Standard disclaimers apply. I don't own any part of Weiß Kreuz – in any shape, form or incarnation. Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiß, Kyoko Tsuchiya and whomever else do. Original characters belong to me.
~*~
Brother, son, friend. Team-mate, assassin, murderer. He was all of these and yet none at the same time.
He lived each day, switching from one role to the other like quicksilver, never remaining one long enough for its reality to sink in. Almost as if by flitting here and there, he could deny all.
~*~
How long could he go on being so many people and not crack at some point? Pretending to live a normal life by day, but in the hidden darkness of night, playing at a game far riskier than what daylight revealed. Trying to separate one reality, one life from the other, denying the fact that it is an impossible feat, for all lives ultimately coalesce in a single person; become an integrated whole.
Realities exist as one; to try and separate them would be like trying to tear the very fabric of life itself.
~*~
Still he tried. It wasn't as if he didn't. God, he'd tried. He had struggled for years, and the years changed him.
~*~
He had been young and impetuous. He assumed he was invincible, as all young people invariably do. Nothing can harm me, he thought. My world is safe, he proclaimed. It was beyond everything for him to even conceive that his future would not turn out, as he believed it would.
And then he had nothing left to lose. He rejected his worth, and gave his all. He traded his life in an act of what the young perceive as pure altruism – for something far darker and far deeper.
I am helping people, he justified. I am convicting those who cannot be touched by the law, but who deserve to be punished, to die, for what they have done. I am helping others because no one helped me. I am right.
He was little more than a child, and saw the world illuminated with a child's understanding.
There is black, and then there is white.
~*~
But the world proved him wrong, again and again and again, until he had no cause to ever believe – in anything.
For lines blur, and then there is grey.
Yet, if he did not believe, then there was no meaning, no sense, and all that he had experienced, all that he had done, was for naught. And he could not live that way; he would not live that way.
So he found belief where he could. It was a twisted belief, for deep down, he did not truly believe that death justifies death. But deep-rooted in his heart was Revenge and closely intertwined with that was Love. They could not be parted, and they spurred each other on.
~*~
He met others like him. Others with pasts just as bleak, and whose futures each had willingly forfeited. Others, who hurt just as much, sometimes even more. Others who were willing to share the burden, to carry the load, to make things bearable.
Enough time had passed though, for him to comprehend exactly, how impossible separation is. Silence and solitude was the answer. Hold yourself apart; never be involved, and the roles become easier to control.
Thus he kept himself isolated. Always different, always aloof.
So close, yet absolute understanding lay just outside his reach.
Every role is you. The parts form the whole.
~*~
He laboured thus, at times losing his way, at times finding a reason. But it was enough to sustain him. His Love never failed, and Revenge bore him when he felt he could not go on.
~*~
Then, all he had bided his time for came to fruition.
He waited for the sense of accomplishment, of satisfaction to wash over him and cleanse him of his guilt and sin. But when the blood rush faded, when he prepared himself for the rest of his life, he found only emptiness and loss.
Hurt magnified, because the abscess had been lanced, and the overpowering drive of Revenge was no longer there to mask the raw presence of a wound left unhealed for too long.
Revenge earned him nothing. It could not bring back what he had lost, nor could he build any sort of future on its flimsy foundations.
It was a lesson bitterly learned.
~*~
Now, only Love remained – but it caused him pain. It was distorted and misshapen; for once it had been inseparable from Revenge, and this Love – without Revenge – was not whole. This misshapen Love of his could not understand the world it saw without the eyes of Revenge.
Yet Love in itself is inherently pure. It is what humans do and perceive that causes it to warp.
His love for his sister was pure, and from this – underneath the cracks and ugliness – his Love began to mend.
~*~
He set about to atone – he needed to atone – for what he had done. It was not so much an act for others, but rather an act for him. To some extent, he even now felt unworthy, believed himself past redemption, that he did not deserve what he had gained.
But do we truly deserve any of what we have? No one genuinely deserves anything.
The beauty of redemption lies in the fact that it is a freely given gift, made all the more precious because it cannot be earned.
Yet, a large part of redemption, he knew, lay in forgiving himself. He had once read that man is his own worst enemy, never taking the path to forgiveness when he could punish harshly and bear the pain for his perceived transgressions.
And so, although his mind warred with his heart, the days passed as he slowly rebuilt himself.
~*~
Little by little, he learned.
He learned that Love bore him much more and with greater ease than Revenge ever did, and that he found his sister's laughter to be the most wonderful sound he had ever heard.
He watched the seasons change, and smelled the newness in the air. He noticed that relationships did not always cause pain, and that sharing his burdens with his friends was not a cowardly thing to do. He learned that he could not always control every facet of his life, and that lacking control was not the same as being out of control.
He found that it was no longer necessary to live so many lives, to play so many roles, and though he struggled to reconcile what he had done with what he had learned, he discovered things were easier to handle when you accepted that you were not alone.
He listened to what his friends had to say, and learned to empathise. He did not find it easy, for he was and will be a man who did not need the company of others. But he tried, and he learned.
And each small step took him nearer to where he felt he should be.
~*~
Nevertheless, the future is unpredictable and fluid, and Life blindsided him.
~*~
It had been many years since his friends (he no longer considered them merely team-mates) and him hunted together. They rarely kept in touch, except to know perhaps, that the others were still alive. They each had their own life to lead and love to pursue, and some memories had become too painful and haunted, and staying together only meant building new lives on a foundation of hurt.
Even so, some bonds forged the way theirs were, can never be truly forgotten or broken.
But each realised a truth: that to forge a new life – to move forward – the past must be left behind.
So he was alone again. And though a man accustomed to solitude, he had somehow grown comfortable around others, and gradually became aware that with only him (his sister long married with a family of her own), his house had become too quiet.
~*~
Then he met him.
~*~
The old fears still strong, and his mind on occasion still warred with his heart – he was hesitant, because it meant another role. A role he deemed himself unprepared to see through, unworthy to be blessed with.
All the same, sheer pigheaded persistence wore him down and won, eventually.
~*~
He looks over at the man sleeping cuddled to his side, watches the gentle, even breathing of one at peace with the world, if only for a few hours. His eye traces the lines of his lover's face – relaxed and vulnerable in sleep – and envies the ability to fall into slumber with such ease. For him, the stillness, the blankness of the night always brought introspection to the surface.
He feels the body beside him stir - breaking him out of his musing - and an arm snake over his waist to pull him closer; an unconscious, sleepy gesture that somehow makes him feel cherished.
A small smile teases the corner of his mouth as he looks at the man lying next to him. He considers, with sleepy fascination the shadows cast by the glare of the streetlight opposite, playing against the ceiling of his room, now and then changing shapes, shifting.
He pulls the covers over the both of them, takes a deep breath, and smells the scent of sleep, love and commitment. He closes his eyes, and draws his lover just a tiny bit closer, and drifts to sleep.
He wonders at the strange contentment stealing into him as he lies there, and thought, that of all probable futures, this was the least likely.
Yet, here he is.
~*~
He was, in spite of everything, at peace.
He had found himself, as himself.
His life would always be tinged with an edge of sadness, for things once seen, cannot be forgotten, and actions once followed through, cannot be undone.
He realised though, in that brief moment between wake and oblivion, that he was not defined by the individual and separate roles he played; he was defined by who he had become through the roles, good and bad.
And it was, he understood – enough.
~* end *~