Consigned to Fire
(five easy pieces)
a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

+ diminishing returns

The first time they kissed it was almost an accident.

Sat in Kase's bedroom on a wet autumn afternoon with practice cancelled and nothing for it but to kill time and neither of them very good at being indoors. It was easy to waste time with a whole world to do it in but with four white walls, a desk, a bed, time dragged. The windows were closed. The door was closed. Being in that cool, cuboid room felt like being packed away and stored but it wasn't like there was anywhere better to be, or anything better to do.

Ken studied his friend's unremarkable life with the careful air of a tourist. Just as anything was better than nothing, anything beat going back.

He stayed out too often. Small wonder when he constantly seemed to find trouble. For breaking curfew, for talking back, for yawning during prayers or cursing or running in the corridors or any damned thing at all. He was restless. Bored. Tired of petty regulations, institutional food, religion as a reflex and God held up as the answer to everything. He missed his parents in a vague, halfhearted kind of way, though that was a reflex too. It didn't really mean anything any more. He couldn't remember what family had been like anyway… Ken didn't see how any of it was relevant though, tenacious by nature, he at least kept trying. He still couldn't believe the Virgin Mary gave a shit if his room was untidy. Surely the Holy Mother had better things to worry about than Ken Hidaka's messy floor? She'd been a mother herself.

He'd always liked Kase's home. Always been nothing but happy to be invited there. Small, crowded, comfortable, it seemed to Ken the essence of what a home should be. Kase's mother, a woman who seemed as much a part of the furniture as the couch and the stove, was tall and slim and fadedly pretty and to Ken's mind, imprecisely attuned as it was to his own elusive memories and more potent cliché, she hardly looked like a mother at all though at least she smelt of baking. Whatever time Kase brought him round there always seemed to be something on the stove and, when he tried to remember her later on, Ken found he couldn't picture her without her apron, or the spotted headscarf she pulled back her short and fading hair with.

It had been an accident, almost; the kiss felt accidental. Clumsy. They both knew it wasn't meant to happen, that it shouldn't have happened and yet it felt only inevitable, like it was something they'd planned long ago.

And a dog was barking outside, an isolated string of sound. The rain pattered idly on the windowpanes as if it, too, had nowhere better to be. Smiling, Kase draw back and Ken blushed and pushed him backward and, though he didn't do it hard, it was quite hard enough to tell his friend he had meant it and they'd tried to argue over whose fault it was but it had all been far too embarrassing to think about, never mind to apportion blame for, and they'd decided to pretend it hadn't happened.

Ken was twelve.

He hadn't really liked it much.

The second time they kissed it was during an argument.

He'd been angry about – same old thing as always. They'd been arguing a lot lately. Kase had inherited a girlfriend, kind of, from Christ alone knew where. Ken didn't like her. Seeing the pair of them together left him feeling irritated and resentful and weirdly twisted up inside. He didn't get it, couldn't see the attraction. The girl was, he supposed, cute enough, with some stupidly common name Ken, whether by accident or ill-will, had never quite managed to get straight, but she really shouldn't have been Kase's type and it bewildered Ken that nonetheless she was. They'd been arguing about her, about Kase's new, unsettling habit of folding himself away with her – just the two of them. Ken resented it and resented her, the intruder, and something in him said he didn't really want to know why.

He was skipping practice and Ken was sick of covering for him. Ken was as pissed as their coach was.

Ken hadn't given girlfriends a second thought. There were better things to think about. If he were to be entirely honest with himself, Ken couldn't really see the point of girls. Kase needed to get his goddamn act together. If he wasn't going to take it seriously, why bother turning up at all?

Privately, Ken gave it another six weeks. He shouldn't have made that thought public. Shouldn't have told Kase. Kase had grabbed him by the shoulders, grasping them hard enough to bruise and Ken, strong for fourteen but deceptively slender, still obstinately erring on the short side of average and resenting his classmates' growth spurts, had thought his friend was going to hit him. He was already primed to return the compliment when Kase kissed him.

(Bless me Father for I have sinned…)

And it wasn't like the first one at all.

The first time they kissed it had been nothing at all; a hesitant thing, a mere brush of lips, the kind of thing a parent might do to a child. This time the kiss was forceful, demanding and easily hard enough to bruise. This time Kase commanded him to surrender and didn't care if Ken was in no mood to offer him that. Ken felt it like a theft from himself. Felt his eyes go wide and his muscles tense as if bracing against a blow. It tore the breath from him, it left him with nothing to do but glare at Kase in furious silence, left him bewildered and gasping and slightly frightened and surely that couldn't be right? He'd hated Kase way back when, back when it all began. Hated him. Absolutely despised the guy—

Freed, Ken had wiped his mouth as if hoping to drive away the feel of him, the taste of him and he backed up a pace or two, his posture defensive and his eyes dark with fury. He'd rather the guy had decked him, or tried to (fights he could handle, but this?). What was he trying to prove? What the fuck was that for, Kase?

You don't have to be jealous, Ken, Kase had said with a small, strange smile Ken didn't think he remembered seeing on his lips before, and Ken had punched him. He didn't know what the big deal was over kisses.

He'd walked back alone, slowly, hands deep in his pockets. Seething.

The third time – after a match, alone in the locker room and Ken searching for a misplaced glove, a glove which Kase later revealed to have hidden himself – it only felt natural.

After that, it was just something they did.

The significance of it didn't really sink in until later.

Thinking about it afterward, thinking about them if of course there was a them to think about, Ken (lying on his front in a bed which could never be his, chin resting on his crossed wrists as he gazed into nothing at all) felt only confused and abandoned and desperately miserable and wondered where Kase was, and just when they'd first slipped tentatively over the line, and why even now it was hard to think of Kase as anything other than – it's a friendship, Ken. You understand that, don't you? Well, didn't he? Ken wasn't sure he did, wasn't sure he understood anything though he'd nodded and smiled and said, at the time, of course.

(Sure. It's friendship. It's whatever you want it to be, Kase, as long as it's not nothing at all…)

But he thought, and he could hardly help but to do so, what kind of a friendship could ever have admitted to this and why did it have to feel like second best? How could Kase take so much from him, taking so much of it for granted, and give him nothing in return?

And him shamed and frightened and horribly alone, presumed guilty never mind his innocence, knowing in his heart it was already over and pointless to hope otherwise. It almost made him wish he had done it after all since it didn't matter any that he hadn't. All protesting his innocence had done was convince them he was beyond salvation, clinging to lies even when caught in deception… Ken had never had much; now all he had was Kase. He wasn't even sure he had him.

Damned for sure. Their blood shall be upon them.

They'll believe you. They've got to. You're telling the truth.
No, no they won't, they've already made their minds up, they don't care who did it, they just want someone to blame!
Ken, you… shit, listen to yourself! You're crazy!
I'm not fucking crazy! Oh God, oh God what am I going to do?

It wasn't – the thought came upon him treacherous but undeniable – no, it really wasn't worth it. Not for… what? Twenty minutes of lunacy, trapped with one another and something searing and demanding, something born of fury and despair and frank terror and the loss of control, loss of everything (it wasn't me, I swear it wasn't me, why won't anyone listen!); the line crossed and forgotten (Will you just, will you – fuck it, Ken, get a grip on yourself!), and a sharp stinging pain across one cheek and Kase's hands seizing his wrists and trying to pull away and failing, and falling to land on something that yielded softly beneath him and this isn't right, Kase… pleading for Christ alone knew what, crying out in consenting pain…

And nothing, now, to show for it. Nothing but guilt and a dull ache inside and it's a friendship, Ken. You understand that, don't you… but Ken didn't. He didn't understand at all. He wasn't like that, Kase wasn't like that either, Ken had nearly cried all the same—

—or maybe not even then.

Maybe the first time he really allowed himself to think about Kase, the first time Ken actually wondered where it all began, was after it all had ended.