Consigned to Fire
(five easy pieces)
a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila
+ slight return
But it doesn't really register until the next morning.
Ken has been awake all night but the longest shower in the world and an artificially bright smile keep it from showing. He notes Omi's surprise when he's there to open up but Ken can't quite think why it should be there when Omi knows he's scheduled to work today. He's conscious of the looks on his teammates' faces and he feels fine and can hardly understand why they're staring, and so it goes until the middle of his shift. Custom slows, Youji stands, stretching luxuriously as a sleepy cat and announces his intention to slip off for a cigarette and Ken smiles at him wearily and says, just don't do it near the flowers, and that's when he realizes he has murdered Kase.
It is a mistake, a typo: Ken is used to deferring. Used to stepping back and letting Kase go first. Maybe that was only what he was doing as he stood and watched his oldest friend bleed his life out on the paving at his feet. Even in dying Kase just had to go first…
But Ken knows that isn't it at all and he can't help thinking that he is betraying Kase. Ken isn't meant to be better than him. Kase is older, taller, cleverer: he is an exemplar. A standard Ken desperately needs to live up to which is always just out of reach, and that's simply the way it works. Ken isn't supposed to be able to beat him, ever. He isn't supposed to get in Kase's way, want what Kase can't have.
Ken isn't supposed to be here at all but, Lazarus in Kevlar, he is. So this is resurrection.
The night before, seen through a haze of exhaustion and sudden stifling horror that clouds his mind, makes his chest feel tight and leaves a copper taint in the back of his mouth, seems surreal. It's a movie he couldn't quite follow, a story heard secondhand, something sad and frightening that happened to someone else, a friend of a friend. The ache in his ribs has nothing to do with anything, nothing to connect to. How the Hell did this happen? It had felt, how weird, it had felt like they were playing. A child's game turned lethal; Ken can't comprehend it. Bang, bang, you're dead…
It means nothing. Kase is a memory, no more real than a figure in a dream gone bad. Kase's idiosyncratic smile, the tone of his voice, the touch of his hands, the gently oppressive weight of his arm as it rests across Ken's shoulders—
Gone. Just gone.
And he thinks of Kase's mother, tall and fadedly feminine in her apron and spotted kerchief, for the first time in years.
Ken doesn't understand. He doesn't know why it has to hurt so much when he's got what he thought he wanted (and – and isn't this always the way? – now that he's got it in his hands, he really isn't sure he wants it at all). All he's done, really, is to tidy Kase away again, put everything back the way he'd always thought it went in the first place. Why is this a problem?
"Ken?" Youji says in sudden consternation. "Ken? Are you all right?"
Ken smiles stupidly at the floor tiles, at loose earth, scattered petals and the shattered lacquerware pot he can't remember picking up still less dropping, and the fatally battered corpse of the gardenia he dearly hopes he won't have to pay for, and he remembers an autumn evening when the world was cast in gentle gold and Kase losing his schoolbag and hears himself saying, "I'm fine."
And the world skews and slips sideways and there is nothing else.