Title: Poetic Imposter Syndrome
Rating: General Audiences
Summary: Kallen reflects on her childhood and her relationship with her brother, Naoto, in the light of Britannia's colonial policies.
Author: Oceanic Eternity
Kallen—the red terror of Britannia—stood with Zero—a man that was to Britannia what a serial killer is to the child under whose bed he hides—in the shell of an apartment building. Behind them, ruined pink wallpaper peelings clung on to life. Below them, Shinjuku ghetto was bathed in the grim twilight of the end of another poverty laced day, which, like the poverty laced decade beforehand, shrieked of decay. Ugly decay. Decay that stole goodwill. Sapped strength. Vindicated vice.
But beauty is as resilient as the human emotions of hatred and love, desperation and comfort. Beauty refused to say die. It survived in the sky, in the raw unchained wind, and in Kallen's quiet voice reciting poetry:
"I walk with steps of midnight hue,
"To the grey and white dawn dew,
"And hope and hope forevermore,
"That death triumphs for you no more."
"I did not know that you memorised poetry," said Zero. He raised a pair of field glasses to his eyes. "It is hard to imagine the red terror of Britannia having a classical education."
Kallen sighed and looked at the sky. Sunset pink, and warning red. The sun's beautiful bountiful rays scattered through the clouds and bathed Tokyo Settlement in a golden light, while Shinjuku was plunged into shadow. What Zero was looking for was a mystery—if he could even spot it in the shadows. "Being an heir has its advantages. Such as being able to say exactly the right things to sound intelligent."
"Does not the study of the arts," Zero said before taking the field glasses from his mask and turning to her, "make one intelligent by default?"
Kallen picked up a piece of rebar a little longer than her forearm that had broken free of it's brethren and threw it through where the exterior wall should have been. It spun in the sunlight for a moment.
"No. Not really. In any case, one does not memorise poetry to become intelligent." The rebar dropped out of sight, into the grim shadow of Shinjaku.
Zero put the field glasses back to his eye, and pointed them at the Tokyo Settlement. "Harsh taskmasters?"
"Not a task master; my brother. He loved poetry, and wanted me to memorise it. 'Make a proper lady out of you,' he'd say. I hated everything about poetry, except for the way his eyes glowed when I was able to recite my lines." Kallen stood and took a step away from Zero.
Zero may well have been part of the building. Not a person, just a breathing sculpture hung against the sky. It was likely any emotion Kallen assigned him was less an observation of his personal state and more a reflection of her own. "I was a child; I had a child's sense of ability: I was not aware of the concept of realistic expectations. I attempted to memorise the entire works of Longfellow. I tried and tried, and got about halfway through. Then—" Kallen paused. She didn't need to tell Zero, a man with a soul that resembled a brick wall, anything.
She turned to face him, and he'd begun packing away his field glasses. "Then he died, and I stopped."
"Memorising poetry?" Zero didn't look up.
"Yes. Poetry—Britannian poetry—is beautiful, but it's only use is sounding useful to Britannians. As a child I wanted to do my brother proud. As I grew older, I realised that he had already given up on Japan, that he had seen which way the winds were blowing so he could send me sailing clear of the rocks of damnation; and when Britannia invaded, that he was fighting because it was all he knew how to do, but he had tried and succeeded in turning me into a Britannian.
"I can write Britannian poetry. I can breathe Britannian poetry. I know Wordsworth and Shakespeare and Tennyson—but I don't know anything worth a damn about Japanese poetry. I have the soul of a Britannian, because when I was a child, my brother was a realist.
"I never noticed this when I was small, but Naoto memorised Japanese poetry. He composed Japanese poetry. But he did not teach me a thing about either." Kallen let bitterness into her voice, allowing it to coagulate into a low growl that hung in the back of her throat as she spoke.
"At least your brother loved you." Zero's sympathy was bitter comfort. Naoto her brother, Naoto the visionary, Naoto the poet, was dead, cold, and buried, but Zero the implacable stood in his place.
Whoever the man behind the mask was, he stood for something. Something that wasn't Britannia, and that was all Kallen needed.
END
Notes:
The poem at the start I rescued from my "Dead Works" folder, because I read it and thought: "what if Kallen were a poet?"
The parts in Excalibur where it mentioned the cultural colonisation of Britannia I thought were really interesting, and poetry cannot be anything but cultural.