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

+ in the end, there is only sadness

Once upon a time there were two little boys, but Ken's too old for fairy tales and he doesn't want to believe in Kase anyway because if it hadn't been for belief he wouldn't be in this mess.

It almost sounds like a fairy tale when he looks back on it. A sad, straightforward story of ambition and trust and betrayal told in the simplest of terms; there's something mythic about it, something softly unbelievable. Ken sets it in the Heian and calls Kase a vengeful ghost. Himself, an unwary young man only too eager to be taken in. All it needs is kimonos and katanas and ridiculous hairstyles in the place of the gangsters and guns…

Put it that way and he barely believes in it himself any more. Some days he can almost pretend he made Kase up.

Ken can't remember what it was to have faith. Loss in the abstract; he misses it like he would a long-dead parent, something that vanished so long ago he can't recall what it was to hold it in the first place. He can't recapture the flavor of it, can't remember what made it feel so right, so safe— it's vanished like his mother's lost embraces and the forgotten taste of childhood candy, so bland and bittersweet on an adult's lips. To so much as try to recapture it is to be rudely reminded that the moment has passed: the past is ash and loss is forever. He can't go back and pick it up again.

Ken doesn't believe. Maybe now he'll be saved.

But Ken believes in Hell, though he doesn't have to. No, Kase. We don't have to wait.

Ken barely needs the Devil when the Hell men can make all by themselves is quite bad enough. Ken has seen things, already, that make his skin creep just to think about. He's seen things in private houses in respectable neighborhoods and in gleaming, sanitary office towers that have made him feel stained for days, he's stumbled, blood-spattered and vague-eyed with horror and too shaken and strung out on sheer exhaustion to think, into the forgiving darkness and crossed himself and realized only belatedly that he isn't alone. Divine Plan, Father Michael? What's divine about this? Man makes Satan look unambitious, worse, unimaginative and if you don't fear the Devil then what's the point of God? Look, Ken wants to say. Take a look at what a mess You made. Look what we've done to Your creation, all by ourselves. We don't need You two any more.

But even to think it embarrasses him. It seems a silly idea when Ken's Hell still has cool autumn evenings and comfortable cats sleeping in shafts of sunlight, and the glazed streets and sidewalks when the air is heavy with the smell after rain, and Youji's laugh.

So Ken carries on because he has to do something and he doesn't know what else to do. The store, the house, deny these dark beasts and Manx in the basement snapping on the lights, who's with me. Perhaps he'd understand what Youji saw in her if she were to smile sometimes – it's becoming routine, a habit Ken can't seem to break. He kills because they tell him he must; survives because he's good at surviving, and there's nothing else for him to do but kill and keep on living. It beats the alternatives, that's all.

(Adaptable, the bearded man said in approved surprise, placing an unremarkable buff file down on the desk in front of him, and Erika smiled like a proud parent, and Ken got the feeling of himself as a pet project, as someone's good work, their bonus payment. You'll do, Erika's smile is saying; why does it relieve him?)

Ken tries to believe that the past is dead and can't hurt him any more and he can't even convince himself.

He misses Kase and it feels like presumption. Ken has mourned him once already and will mourn him again and what right does he have to do that, to grieve the death of a man he killed? Grief. What a sick, fucked up reaction. Murderers have no right to miss their victims, surely? But Ken does miss him – the boy who was his friend, who had kissed him when nobody was looking and promised him that wherever they went they would go together, not the man he killed. That, he tells himself, wasn't really Kase. It wasn't Kase because it wasn't anybody, just another dark beast, just another torn, bleeding body slowly cooling on the pavement. That makes it bearable somehow, makes it both better and worse at the same time.

It can't all have been a lie, but standing in the back room – smell of damp earth, of pollen and leaf mold – an uncompleted order slip on the counter next to him and idly pockmarking a dry block of oasis with bare fingers and savoring its peculiar crisp feel, the indentations the pressure of his fingertips leave behind, Ken wonders where the faultline lies. He wonders when Kase decided to let him fall and what he did to make him, if he did anything, if he was anything but merely convenient. He wonders why he didn't notice the change (was there one?), and why he didn't try and stop it (could he have?) and if, if.

And he realizes Kase has become another if only I hadn't, and he shivers.

When did Kase get that good at acting? When, for that matter, did Ken? Even now he can't stop smiling.

Ken lives like a contradiction in terms and he thinks of his past in the either-or terms of before and after and every fresh loss requires a redefinition, shifting of the boundaries. Before the nuns, before the fire, before death and betrayal in that order, before Kase… sometimes he catches himself wondering what's going to go next, and it frightens him how little there is left to choose from. His team, his mind, himself; they're all he has now, and he doesn't know what he'll do if they go too.

Of course, he's thought that before.

Of course, if he loses his mind, he won't be able to miss it. And if he dies, he's just dead.

He misses Kase, though, and even that feels awkward and wrong because the man he killed was Kase too and it's his fault that man is dead.

(Though he probably deserves it, Ken doesn't want to die. He lies still and silent and secretly breathing, gazing at the blackness at the back of his eyes and wanting, quite desperately, to scream. The breath's been knocked out of him, he feels sick and scared and horribly alone and he can't comprehend what he's just survived, the why of it hasn't really sunk in yet. In freefall, Ken prays that Kase is as arrogantly self-assured as he remembers him being and will just walk away. Absurdly, he is wondering where Kase got that stupid suit and why he wants to run a goddamn company so bad he'd kill for it, and the concrete feels cool beneath his back. There's not enough blood and Ken hopes like Hell Kase doesn't know enough to realize it. Our Father Who Art in Heaven, I don't want to die…)

Sometimes Ken imagines he must have killed Kase simply for failing to live up to his expectations, for daring to be something other than the boy he grew up with. He knows it's not true, but sometimes he can't help but think it might be. Ken's got his revenge, so why isn't he happy? Why does he continue to kill though he's lost his only excuse for it? He went very wrong somewhere down the line. So did Kase.

(Finally, finally Kase moves and Ken – the shop, smell of damp earth and lily pollen staining the fingertips, arguing with Youji over you've been smoking in the stockroom or you could have told me you'd moved the coffee filters or any damn thing at all, Momoe's cat walking onto Aya's newspaper and curling up to sleep, the kids in the park at dusk and I'm terribly sorry, Mrs. Sato, we lost track of time – Ken has already decided. No, Kase. I'm having it my way this time. The boundaries shift and Ken isn't going to die convenient and once again it's just a job and this isn't Kase, isn't anyone, it's just another target fighting for his life because it's easier that way, because someone's got to die here and it's not going to be Ken—Hunter of light, deny this dark beast his tomorrow.)

He must have thought it a price worth paying, at the time…

So Ken moves on alone because he has already made his choice. He chose to live. He killed Kase. Those were the terms and he accepted. All he can do now is live with the consequences: Kase is dead and whatever Ken chooses to make him. He is little more than another regret, a missed opportunity, something else Ken destroyed only by clinging to it too tightly and he can't even seem to hate Kase for it…

It's a joke cracked by a God with a mean sense of humor, but the joke isn't that Kase had to die. It's only that the man who killed him had to be a man who loved him. But that's just the way things are in storybooks.

And Ken looks back on his childhood and it feels like a fairy tale, something mythic and softly unbelievable. This is how he got here and some days even he can barely bring himself to believe it. This is Ken's life, a story about resurrection without the redemptive aspect, about a young man immolated like a firebird, who burned to death and stepped from the ashes and found nothing worth surviving for. This is the tale of two little boys, who tore one another apart.

Nobody said the phoenix had to like it.

-ende-