Disclaimer: I don't own Weiss Kreuz, and I think we all
know that, ne? This fic is just my own
little idea of what Yoji's life was like before he joined Kritiker and
Weiss. So far as I can tell, nothing is
ever said about what his childhood was like. No spoilers in this chapter. Please review and let me know if you like/dislike it, if I make any
mistakes, etc. In the meantime, on with
the show!
I suppose one could say that my whole life with Weiss started with
my mom. No, I don't mean that in some
weird, fucked-up, psychotherapist kind of way. I've never had any problem with Oedipal complexes, thank God. No, what I meant, was simply that, along
with my green eyes and light brown hair, my mom also bequeathed to me her
incredible love of mystery stories. Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, you name
it; she had it. Other kids learned to
read out of primers or Mother Goose storybooks. I cut my literary teeth on Poe and Wilkie Collins. Betcha never knew I was so well read,
huh? But my favorites were the
hardboiled ones. Sam Spade, the
Continental Op, Dashiell Hammet, and Phillip Marlowe. I searched for the Maltese Falcon and prowled more filthy
back-end alleyways than a down-on- his-luck tomcat. And I loved it. I wanted
to be like these people; hell, I wanted to be these people. If "down these mean streets every man
must walk alone," then I would find those streets and walk them.
Alone. I would become a PI, a private
dick, the kind of man who wore a trenchcoat and fedora, smoked countless packs
away just because it made him look cool, kept a bottle of bourbon in his bottom
desk drawer, right next to his revolver, had a pert secretary and a world-weary
attitude towards every client that walked in the door. Not to mention, of course, all the
beautiful, dangerous women in his life. Hey, I've always been a born flirt. It's just my personality. Besides, I learned young the effect that compliments have on a
woman. Normally, upon seeing my mom, you would probably just say, "She
looks nice" and overlook her, but when she smiled--she became the most
beautiful woman on the planet. But I
digress....
So my mom taught me to love all of
her books with the same love she felt for them. And I grew up wanting to emulate Humphrey Bogart. Probably sounds pretty childish, doesn't it? I suppose I might even have grown out of it,
decided to grow up and become a good little corporate banker like everybody
else. Hmph, yeah right, Youji Kudou,
corporate banker just doesn't have quite the same ring, does it? But then my comfy little life
shattered. My father had basically
never been around for any of my life--the occasional phone call, usually from
jail, hardly counted. Mom and I
preferred it that way. I'd picked up,
from the way she talked, that theirs was not the most harmonious of
relationships and that he had a bad habit of ending fights with violence. He was content most of the time to simply
ignore our presence. And we felt the
same way about him. I mean, I got a
last name from him, what more did I need? So imagine my shock when one day, when I was about thirteen or so,
coming home from school to find a strange vehicle car parked in our driveway,
and to hear angry shouts emanating from the kitchen. I ran in to find my mom screaming at this grimy-looking stranger
to get out of her house. I just sort of
froze in the doorway, wondering what in the hell was going on and if I should
call the cops. Like they'd be able to
do anything by the time it took to get out to our little home in this backwoods
town. He saw me and stopped yelling
obscenities to stare intently. I hated
that stare; it felt like he was leaving trails of greasy muck down my mind with
his eyes. His stare seemed to judge,
and find lacking, everything about me. It made me want to pound his face in. And then he spoke.
"So that's th' boy. Hmmph. Not much like me, is he? Eh, I
don't s'pose you'd give your old man here some money, would you boy?" He leered at me in what I presume was
supposed to be a pleading smile and swayed drunkenly, and I realized suddenly
three things. First, this was my
father, the very man who'd helped to produce me. Second, he was rip-roaringly drunk in the middle of the day, and
third, I didn't like him one bit. See?
I've always been a quick thinker.
As I was sorting out these
blindingly obvious deductions, my mother found her voice again. This time, although not loud, her voice held
the sort of strength and determination that I'd quickly found it was best to
immediately obey. Kind of like Aya when
he's in one of 'those' moods. Hmm...I
wonder if Aya would kill me for comparing him to my mom? Save that thought for later. Anyway, she told him to get out of her house
now and to never bother us again. All I
can say is, if it'd been me that she was telling that to, I would've had my
bags packed and been in another country before she finished the sentence. I can recognize an implied "or
else" command when I hear one. Apparently, however, that is not a skill I inherited from my late
un-lamented father.
He stayed there, standing in the
middle of our kitchen, alternating curses at her hard-heartedness with pleas
for more money. I wonder now why she
didn't just give in, give him a handful of yen and tell him to hit the
road. Damned stubborn streak she had, I
guess. Another thing I inherited from
her, I suppose. The less I get from my
father the better. They continued like
that, yelling at each other. I was
worried that he might hit her or try to steal something, so I tried to push him
out of the house, but it was like trying to shift a brick wall. I was a really skinny kid back then; hadn't
hit my growth spurt either, all hands and feet and big eyes. Hard to believe someone like me could ever
have looked as innocent as Omi, eh? Suffice to say, my pitiful attempts to push him out of the house didn't
cause anything more than to irritate him further. I wish now I'd had the sense to realize that that was the only
thing my efforts could have done and had stayed over in the doorway, or phoned
the police, or something, anything else. I wish I'd had the size and strength then that I do now. I wish I'd had a weapon, any weapon. Hell, I wish a lot, don't I? But wishing doesn't do any good, especially
at changing the past.
I was kicking and lashing out at him, only connecting half the
time and not causing any damage, but as I said before, he was a man to whom physical
action, usually violent, was the answer for every problem. His solution,
therefore, to the current situation, was to backhand me hard across the face,
snapping my head and sending me sprawling across the kitchen floor and into a
corner of the room.
My head throbbed, both front where
he hit me, and back where I hit the wooden floor; one of my eyes was starting
to quickly swell shut, and my nose was bleeding slightly, but I saw what
happened next clearly enough to have nightmares about it for years to
come. I'm sure you've heard that old
saw about "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?" Well, let me tell you, that doesn't even
begin to come close to the fury of a mother protecting her child. If he'd been any less drunk, I'm sure my old
man would've realized that and hightailed it out of there. But "if" is a mighty big word to
hang a future on...
My
mom--she went...berserk is the only word for it. Suddenly he wasn't her no-good absentee husband, or even just a
money-desperate bum. He was an ENEMY. And he was hurting her CHILD. She lashed out at him with a force I never
would have dreamed her capable of. No
weapon, just her hands and nails and feet encased in pointy-toed shoes. She was like a wildcat, hissing and yowling
her anger. And I could only watch,
frozen in shock and pain, as the inevitable occurred.
Her nails raked across his
face. He bellowed in an inarticulate
combination of rage and fear and pain. She screamed and kicked at him over and over again, blindly desperate in
her fury. He clutched her arms so tightly that the skin went white all around
his fingers. She jerked wildly in his
grasp and spat into his eyes. Losing
what little control he'd had, he hit her. Her body went flying backwards, and her head connected with the corner
of the wall. Hard. Sickeningly hard, with a sharp crunching
noise like celery stalks being broken. She slumped down as if her legs had turned to strings, and pitched onto
her side. Her eyes stared out at me
vacantly as if shocked to find herself on the floor. I stayed in my corner and prayed that he wouldn't start hitting
her again. That she'd get up soon and
make him leave us alone. That someone,
anyone, would come along and stop this fight. What can I say? I was young and
naive and not nearly as well-acquainted with death as I am now.
He knew, though. Somehow he knew. I don't know if it was from a lifetime spent in and out of every
bar and prison around or if it's just some kind of sixth sense that you develop
as an adult. The ability to tell the
instant that someone is gone; the ability to know the moment that what was once
a human being is now just another discarded pile of flesh. Perhaps it's because, as children, we cannot
conceive of our own mortality, and so are unable to share in this strange
empathy that allows us to catch a glimpse of our own eventual fate in
another's. He just collapsed there,
on the floor, beside her. I was
shocked. He was ...crying; moaning and
wailing, begging for forgiveness from someone who could answer him no
more. I think I knew then, but I hugged
my denial like a warm blanket, refusing to accept that awful knowledge. I just sat there, blankly, watching my
father tremble as he cried, and watching the slowly spreading trickle of
crimson shine under the fluorescent lights.
One of the neighbors must have
called the police when the shouting started, because they eventually
showed. Who knows how long we would
have stayed like that, otherwise. Frozen. Like a movie set to 'Pause.' I suppose shock is the technical term for
it. I just felt...numb.
After that, I went to live with my grandmother--my mom's mother, not my dad's. If he had any family left, they stayed far away during the ensuing trial. Bad publicity, ya know? I suppose she loved my mom and even, to a certain extent, me, but she didn't believe in expressing emotions very much. Very polite, very formal, very strict. Of course I rebelled. She didn't approve of my mom's marriage, and had basically severed all ties with her. Hell, I didn't even know I had a grandmother living in Japan until she rescued me from the neighbors I was staying with during the trial. That first night under her roof she set out quite an impressively long list of rules and regulations for me to live by. Foremost among them was to never mention my mother in her presence. Maybe she just didn't want to deal with the emotions her name would bring up, but to me it was just more evidence that she was one cold-hearted bitch. (See, I don't love all women, just the pretty, nice ones. Or at least the pretty ones.) In the end, the only things of my mother that I was allowed to keep were her books. Not all of them. Grandmother said there were too many to pack, and "besides, they are just wasteful literature, with nothing of value or artistic merit." So naturally I smuggled in as many as I could and took to reading them, both openly and in secret as much as possible. Obedience has never been my strong suit.