Behind Closed Doors
Sometimes when Daisuke tries to hold him, Ken fights back. A whirlwind of teeth and perfectly manicured nails, he's more like a wildcat than a human being, and Daisuke is always bleeding before he can get Ken to calm down enough to realise he's safe.
Afterwards, Ken won't talk to him, and instead goes silently to their shared bedroom. When Daisuke follows, he finds Ken sitting on the bed with tears streaming down his face and hands buried in indigo strands, muttering feverishly even as he tries to rip out his own hair by the roots.
It takes Daisuke the rest of the night to get Ken to go to sleep.
Sometimes when Daisuke gets home from work he finds Ken in the sitting room, staring blankly at the white painted wall and surrounded by cut out pictures of himself. They're all from magazines and newspapers, and Daisuke always takes his time neatly cutting them out.
By the time he returns from work Ken will have found them, and Daisuke comes home to a room full of mutilated photos. Ken doesn't seem to like his famously gentle eyes; every photo of him has them burned out with matches or scratched out by Ken's old blunted penknife.
Occasionally Ken draws on his photographed wrists in dark red ink that looks just like blood.
Sometimes when Daisuke's at work, he'll get a bad feeling, and he excuses himself from work to rush home. He's found Ken in the bathroom quite a few times now, watching the blood gush out of his newly slashed wrists with morbid fascination and delight.
Once he comes home to find Ken standing on the rail of their apartment balcony, staring down at the 10 storey drop even as he teeters in the wind. Daisuke is nearly sick then, and he is too terrified to even make real sense as he begs Ken to come down.
In the end, Ken only gets down when Daisuke grabs his wrist and drags him.
His family has told him that Ken's a lost cause, that he should give up on him. Even his friends are sure that it's hopeless, and Miyako's been ringing every night to make sure that Ken hasn't seriously hurt him in a fit of madness.
But when Ken's eyes clear and he cups his cheek with that gentle hand, Daisuke doesn't care. And when Ken kisses him and tells him he loves him, nothing else matters. The hours of pain and grief are worth it, because he knows Ken's still there somewhere, and that he cares.
It doesn't matter that Ken's broken. Daisuke loves him, and will wait forever to fix him.
Author's Note
I've always thought that when people write this couple they forget one important thing - Ken's been through a lot, and it was clear that even after the final episode of 02 he still had a lot of issues to work through. I decided to take the idea that Ken finally just tipped over the edge, because I felt that the pairing Daiken shouldn't be so easy. It was actually a lot more work than it looks - each section follows the pattern of 45 words, 51 words and 15 words.
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