Pause
A Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

Standard Copyright Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz, it's characters, indices, and the like quite obviously do not belong to me because in that case I would not be writing fanfiction about them. They remain the property of Kyoko Tsuchiya, Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss and Movic. I do this for fun not profit. I do not intend to show any disrespect to any of the fine individuals and companies responsible for this fine show in authoring this work: I aim merely to share the love. Onward!

Author's Notes: This story was influenced by a Gundam Wing fanfiction I read God knows how many years ago, which was about two friends sharing time together. No romantic complications or manufactured conflict - just a study of friendship. This fic is my attempt to do the same thing, but I prefer Weiss Kreuz and don't just want to do a carbon copy of the story that inspired me. The fic is set just after Ouka's death at the end of episode 12. And yes, the title is German. It means 'break' or 'interlude' but it's pronounced more like pahw-zeh, so it sounds slightly different to the English word.

---

"Come on, Omi. Out."

Omi flinched, half-turning at the sound of Ken's voice and nearly knocking the half-full mug of long since cold tea by his elbow to the floor. Surprise briefly registered on his open, boyish features, to be replaced by a somewhat uncharacteristic look of mild frustration. He knew what this was about. He knew what his friend wanted and he wished the guy would drop it. He also knew that Ken wasn't going to drop it; he wouldn't let anything go that easily.

Stubborn Ken. Always stubborn. Or determined. Ken preferred that.

"I'm busy." Omi said, forcing an irritated note into his voice. It took quite an effort.
"No you're not." Ken said simply. He was lounging in the doorway, hands behind his head. He looked quite at ease, as if he had been waiting there for hours. As if it were perfectly natural that he should be at the door of Omi's room, open to get the air, at this time on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Ken had an undeniable knack for blending, for looking as if he belonged. It already seemed, sometimes, as if he had been born a florist. As if he had never wanted anything from life other than what he had got. "I've been stood here watching you for almost ten minutes and you haven't done a thing."

Ten minutes? How could Ken, ordinarily hardly the quietest of souls, have been stood watching him for ten minutes and he not have picked up on it? For a moment, Omi felt rather anxious.

"I was reading." He said finally, lamely.
Ken blinked. "Most people occasionally turn the pages when they read, Omi." He pointed out. He craned his neck to look at the book in Omi's lap and couldn't quite forbear to smile. "It kind of helps to open the book, too. Either you've got X-ray vision or you're sitting there doing nothing. In which case I'm not interrupting anything and you're coming outside."
Omi looked away. "I was thinking, then."
"Nice try, Omi." Ken said. "Now come on. Shift. Get your shoes on."

Omi capitulated. What else was there to do? As Ken had said, his research paper wouldn't mind he went outside for half an hour or so whereas Ken himself was likely to get a little chagrined if he didn't. The older boy had been right, too, in assuming that he hadn't been working on it. Hadn't, in fact, managed to write a word all day.

Ken had been at him to come outside all day, too. It was, he thought, far too nice a day to be stuck in front of a computer. Something else it was hard not to notice about Ken was his marked affinity for the outdoors; that was something he really did seem to have been born with. Omi wondered how many times he'd been out already. Wondered if Ken was only going out now because he wanted to make sure that he did. Probably not. He wouldn't want to spend a day like this indoors unless there was really no way around it.

It truly was a beautiful afternoon, though. Ken hadn't just been saying as much in an attempt to charm him out of his room. As he stepped away from the shop, adjusting the collar of his lightweight jacket, Omi gazed up at the sky and couldn't quite hold back a small, sad sigh. It was one of those clear days where the sky seemed to stretch on forever, when just to look up into it was to be gifted a brief glimpse of infinity. Sometimes a clear daytime sky could look broader and more depthless than those of the night it preceded. It was often the case in the city. Pleasantly cool outside and a faint breeze in the air. Ken hadn't bothered with a jacket at all. The wind tugged gently at Omi's hair, blowing it into his eyes. He scooped it back with one hand. His hair looked lighter in the bright sun, you could see threads of gold and auburn and red in it, all the shades which, when combined, added up to Omi.

"When the wind blows right," Ken said, "you can smell the sea. I told you it was a nice day."
"Where are we going?" Omi asked. He shivered slightly, drawing his jacket more tightly around himself.
Ken shrugged. "Anywhere." He said, then immediately changed his mind. "The park. Any park, I don't mind a journey if you don't." He added, catching the look in Omi's eyes. "Well, it's a shame to always be surrounded by buildings and things and you can't be planning to avoid parks for the rest of your life and I didn't spend all this time coaxing you out your bedroom because I wanted to go buy groceries with you."

It wouldn't be the first time Ken had gone to the park today, either.

Parks were parks were parks. The grass, luxuriantly green from an overnight rainfall, was, as always, a patchwork of empty spaces and the colorful, almost riotous confusion of urban life. An elderly woman walked her dog along the path, next to her on the grass a young family; mother and father and a baby barely old enough to toddle and a bubbly little bundle of a girl still too young for school, all pigtails and dungarees and infectious three-year-old giggle. A demure young woman sat knees together back straight on a bench reading a paperback, watched by two men a few years her senior. Young adolescents grouped together, talking and laughing and doing it all too intensely, everything very significant, overburdened with meaning. The older ones, by and large, had already split into smaller groups, into couples. The occasional solitary soul enjoying the sun or sat in the shade under the verdant, glossy-leaved trees.

Ken, every inch of him faultlessly boy-next-door, spotted a couple of teenage girls, by their outfits refugees from the Sunday-afternoon Harajuku crowds. Perhaps headed home, perhaps dragooned into a family outing. He raised one eyebrow in a silent comment. Their clothes screamed look at me, both of them like drowning swimmers desperate for attention. Look at me. He looked and wondered. Ken Hidaka, not designed by nature to attract a second glance. Dark brown hair, dark brown eyes, eminently forgettable in a t-shirt and faded jeans. It didn't bother him. He'd settle for invisibility.

It was no surprise to see the park crowded. Life goes on, Omi thought, feeling a familiar tug of fierce regret. It was hard for him to believe that it could do, but no. Life went on - and wasn't that the whole point of it, them, the four of them? That was what it was for. It didn't make it any easier. Ken walked purposefully, hands in his pockets. Omi wondered where he was headed. He wondered what Ken was thinking about. Perhaps he was thinking of nothing at all. He didn't look at all discontented; it wasn't often he did and even then it was seldom for long. He tried to imagine what his own face might look like. He doubted he appeared anywhere near as quietly contented as his companion. What, Omi wondered, was it like to be Ken?

Ken's normality in the face of circumstance, Omi sometimes thought, was little short of amazing.

"What's on your mind, Omi?"
Omi blushed. "Nothing. Can we sit down?"
"Sure, if you want to."

They settled near one of the mature trees, Omi in the shade, Ken lying on his back in a patch of sunshine, one arm raised to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun, sailing high in the limitless sky. Far too nice a day to spend indoors. He could just about ignore the traffic, the sound of footsteps and the quiet burble and murmur of conversation. Tokyo noise. Leftover noise. The sound of the city, the sounds we barely hear. Such was the nature of urban tranquility and as natural a part of city life as birdsong and the rustle of leaves were as part of a rural existence. Birds sang in the city, too.

"She wouldn't deny you the sunlight, Omi." Ken said after a time he never counted had passed, turning onto his side, one hand resting beneath his head, to survey Omi critically. The boy looked distant, his eyes full of a vague regret. He would be thinking of all the things he should have said and done but didn't, things he would never be able to say. A wrong there was no way to right. Ken knew the feeling all too well. He could easily guess why Omi had hesitated at the suggestion they went to a park.
Omi blinked. His eyes focused. "What do you mean, Ken-kun?"
Ken paused, collecting his thoughts. "You've not been yourself lately." He said finally. Not that he was expecting Omi would be. After everything that had happened to the kid lately, no wonder he was feeling down. When it comes it all comes at once. No wonder he spent half the time staring into space and it took the best part of a day to sweet-talk him into taking a short walk. Ken sighed. He wished there was something he could do to change things. He knew there wasn't; more, that it was pointless wishing that things were otherwise.
"Should I be?" Omi asked.

He glanced over at Ken, slightly confused by the earnest look in his expressive brown eyes. As if he were waiting for something but would understand if it didn't arrive. Ken was trying, however tentatively, to reach out to him, make a connection. To draw him back from the place he had been lost in for - how long was it since she had died, since the night he had lost Ouka? Long enough for Ken. Omi didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to not talk about it. Denial didn't help. For Omi to deny his grief would, he felt, to be to deny her. Ouka, his friend, the sister he'd never suspected he had. Deny that by her presence in his life she had made a difference, that she had touched him in a thousand and one little ways. Deny that he missed her, now that she was gone. Where would the comfort be in that?

Omi found it hard to believe that she was gone, sometimes. He had known Ouka for a very short time, a far too brief stretch of time and yet she had become a fixture, someone he expected and positively needed to see, a girl he had thought would always be there. He still half-expected her, some day, to walk blithely into the shop the way she always had done, talking cheerfully about this and that, and then browbeat him into some assignation. Ouka had always been so vital. So utterly alive. How could she be dead?

He sighed, gazing down at his trainers. One of the laces was coming undone. It didn't matter, not while they were sitting down. "It's… hard. I… I can't explain."
"To find something you'd lost then lose it again? For good?" Ken asked, absently twisting a few blades of grass through his fingers and tugging on them, frowning as they broke with a faint but audible snap. "Yeah, that is hard. I wish I could say it got easier. You get so sick of if only." He let the grass fall from his fingers, scattering it in front of him. "It's not your fault."

Omi wrapped his arms around his bare knees, gazing into the middle distance. A small spot of yellow and black against the endless blue was a pair of young boys flying a stunt kite. Omi watched the kite as it dipped and weaved, pulling against the ropes that constrained it, finally making one daredevil dive too many and falling to earth. Omi watched impatiently, waiting for that drop of harsh color - yellow and black, nature's warning: danger, poison - to reappear against the endless blue sky with its peculiar clarity, which it did a minute or so later, one of the boys giving an enthusiastic cry as the kite took to the air again. A thread of sound. The yellow and black speck diving and swaying and looping.

"It's easy for you to say that." Omi said bitterly. "She shouldn't have got involved. I…"
"No." Ken said surprisingly firmly. "Don't go down that road. It's pointless." He'd been there. He knew how pointless it was. "What happened, happened and nothing's going to change that. Listen to me, Omi. What happened to Ouka is not your fault. You didn't kill her."

He tugged at another handful of grass, this time hoping to make it break. Therapy of action. Having something to do with the hands helped. Wasn't that why lunatics made baskets or something? Ken wasn't thinking of Ouka. Wasn't thinking about Omi's problems. Wished he could have been, but he wasn't. He was thinking of another night, another name, another loss. Blood on his hands.

(Go to Hell. Can't. Already there. Sorry.)

Omi shook his head. "I… don't see how you can say that. She'd never have gotten mixed up in…" Caution had him drawing back. Out in the open, in the light of day, he simply couldn't call things by name. "all of this if it weren't for me. I'm the constant, Ken-kun."
"But Ouka didn't blame you." Ken said softly, watching Omi cautiously through his untidy fringe. "So don't blame yourself. I'm sure she wouldn't have wanted you to. It's… really not your fault, Omi."
Eye contact. "Then why does it feel like my fault?" Doubt. Plain in Omi's voice.
"Because you're a good person." Ken said with a small, rueful grin. He said it well; it sounded plausible from Ken in the way it wouldn't have from, for example, wry, knowing Youji. Sincerity became him. "That's why. Because if you weren't you wouldn't even think about it. But it's not, okay? How many times are you going to make me say this? Jesus, I feel like a stuck record."

He laughed briefly, scattering another handful of torn-off blades of grass, and was gratified to see Omi smile, though Ken didn't know if it was at the poor joke, at him or both. He didn't care either. It was a small, vague thing as smiles went, here and gone in a matter of seconds, but it was a smile: it was real, it was there. It was a step in the right direction, a start. What now? Build on it or let it go? They'd already come further than he'd anticipated.

His arm, where it was supporting his head, was going numb. His fingers felt like he had borrowed them from someone else. Ken debated whether or not he could be bothered to move for a moment or two, finally capitulating to the ache in his arm and turning onto his front, resting his chin in the palms of his hands. For a long moment Ken did nothing but watch Omi watching the kite. The boy was tugging absently at his untied shoelace, twisting it between his fingers. The kite arced and dived against the blinding sky.

"You're real quiet, Omi." He said after a while.
"Do you mind?" Omi asked, startled by the interruption. He'd slipped into a daze, watching the patterns the kite formed as it threaded across the sky. He'd almost forgotten Ken was there. "You're not bored, are you?"
"I've had worse good times."
Omi blinked. He hadn't expected Ken to take that angle on it. "You'd call this a good time?"
Ken tried to shrug and gave it up. "Sure. Why wouldn't I? It's a nice afternoon and I like it here. You?"
"I'm all right."
Which again was better than Ken had expected. "Yeah, well. You hold that thought."
"Ken-kun? You know you said something about finding things, then losing them again?" The boy tore his gaze away from the kite, looking over at his companion curiously. Ken had tried to make a connection. Perhaps, Omi thought, he had been doing that because he wanted him to know that they shared common ground? "Were you talking about your friend?"
Ken blinked. He might even have started. "Kase?" He asked, taken aback by the question. God, it felt so strange to say that name aloud again. He'd never thought that would happen. "Well, yeah… I didn't think you guys remembered him."
Omi looked awkward. "I'd pretty much forgotten what he was called," he admitted. "But I remember him."

Kase. Their target. Ken's friend. What did it feel like, Omi wondered, to look at an intel photo and see a familiar face, the face of a close friend? He remembered the man and the mission mainly because of Ken and the way he had reacted. Omi doubted he would have behaved any differently had he been shown a picture of a friend and then been told this man has to die. It was no wonder Ken had fought against the dawning realization he had no idea who Kase had become, and fought hard.

Ken hadn't wanted anything like what he'd got out of his life, though he'd settled to it with the same easy aptitude he did to most things (if ever this was over, if the four of them were ever released from the ties that bound them together by anything other than death, Omi had no doubt that Ken at least would find it easy to slip back into the patterns of an everyday life). He'd heard of Ken before he'd met him - he had a past to hide from. A kind of notoriety. A name that was never cleared. Omi hadn't paid attention to the scandal which had cost Ken his career but he'd known about it, in a vague kind of way, as yesterday's half-remembered news. Ken had more reasons than most to be obviously dissatisfied with the bad hand life head dealt him, but he wasn't. He hoped for the best. He trusted readily, perhaps rather too readily. He looked, perhaps more than any of them, to the future.

He was Ken and he was a contradiction. He was strange in that he was entirely too ordinary.

"Oh." Ken said simply. Just that, oh.
"You don't mention him." Omi said. "Do you just not want to?"
"I don't know that there's a reason, particularly." Ken said uncertainly. He'd never really wanted to talk about it, but - oh, what the hell. How could he expect Omi to talk to him about Ouka if was going to clam up the minute the kid tried to return the favor?
"Do you miss him?"
An obvious question and far too easy to answer. Ken shifted a little uncomfortably before speaking, one hand resting on the grass in front of him. "I feel… I don't really know. Regret, mainly. And sometimes I wonder why he did what he did. Maybe I was convenient, or maybe he was trying to get back at me for something… but I don't know and I won't ever and that's hard. I didn't know him like I thought I did. But yeah, I miss him." He looked up, meeting Omi's grave blue eyes. "Do you think that's weird?"
"That you miss him?" Omi asked. When Ken nodded he smiled at him, sympathetically. "No. I think that's normal."
"Yeah sure, but look what I went and did to him." Ken countered. I killed him… but he was unwilling to call it by name. It wasn't an evasion but natural caution. They were, after all, in public. This was no conversation to be having in a public park, but Ken didn't want to draw back. Not now. "We betrayed each other." We destroyed each other. "What right do I have to miss him after that?"
Omi blinked, again surprised by Ken's take on the subject. "It's got nothing to do with what right you have." He said rationally, gaze once again back on the expansive sky and the swooping kite. It was relaxing to follow its movements, like watching the flight of birds or the dreamlike motions of fish in a tank. "You miss him because you wouldn't be human if you didn't. If I'm a good person, Ken-kun, so are you. Don't give up on yourself."
Ken said nothing for a moment, frowning as if he were thinking it over. "You know something, Omi? Even after everything that's happened, I'm still glad I knew him." It can't all have been a lie.

(I'm glad I met you. Me too, Ouka. Me too.)

"Yeah." Omi said dreamily. "I'm glad I knew Ouka, too."
"What a stupid world." Ken said, but he said it thoughtfully. As if he were prepared to be swayed on the matter.

He wondered how they'd got onto the subject of his problems when Omi was so caught up with his own and rightly so, but perhaps it should have come as no surprise. Typical Omi. Always considerate. Holding things together. He was an extraordinary kid, really: even familiarity couldn't dull that. Omi had gone through a hell of a lot and yet he hadn't let it embitter him. A mind like a razor blade but never superior. Hadn't let his intellect define him. Omi didn't have that I'm smarter than you and you know it air some of the intelligent kids Ken had known at school had. They'd talked down to him if they'd talked to him at all, as if to be sporty somehow rendered him brain-dead.

And patient. Amazingly patient, Omi. Good thing one of them was.

Ken wondered about Omi sometimes. Couldn't help but wonder when he thought about that family of his, the family who had rejected him and Omi had gone on to reject and who could blame the kid? What would Omi - Mamoru, then, though it felt odd even trying to think of Omi as Mamoru - have been like if he'd stayed with his father? Would he still have been himself, still Omi even if he had never taken that name? Was there any way he could ever have grown to be such a remarkable young man if he'd been raised in the household of Reiji Takatori? No way to tell. Upbringing is all, or was it character? Even the scientists hadn't worked that one out. Ken certainly couldn't. He only knew that Omi Tsukiyono and Mamoru Takatori might as well have been two different people, strangers to one another.

Mamoru. That name wouldn't stick to Omi. Not when Omi had a perfectly good name already. Aya had been right, that wasn't who he was. Omi was Omi.

"Life's not stupid, Ken-kun."
Ken smiled. "I thought you'd say that." He sat up, an abrupt but strangely graceful movement, brushing the dirt from his top. "Oh, goddammit. I'm covered in grass."
Omi giggled almost guiltily. "What do you expect after ripping up half the field then lying down on it?"
"Yeah, yeah. Whatever." Ken laughed with him, little caring that the joke was on him. What else was there to do? Omi had a point, after all.

He had wanted to say something else. He had wanted to tell Omi that one of the hardest things to do with the dead is to realize that, one day, you've got to let them go. That after a while, you get to a point where you have to step back from your grief. Not so much to deny that you still miss them or to think that's it, I've hurt long enough and put them out of mind, but to step away from them. Say yes, I loved you. I needed you. I still love and need you and I'll always miss you. But I have to go on living all the same.

So much Yuriko had taught him, even if she hadn't known she was doing it; Ken was grateful to her for that and for everything she had shown him. He missed her too but it was a different kind of pain, a bittersweet one, mitigated by the knowledge that Yuriko was somewhere even if she wasn't with him and probably the happier for it. Safer, too. Letting go of love was an ambivalent triumph. But loss of Yuriko he might one day get over. Ken knew he would never get over losing Kase, but he was learning to live with it.

He had wanted to tell Omi, that will happen. Some day you'll realize you've started to move away from Ouka. You're going to have to let her go sometime, because although she is dead your life goes on just the same. Ouka would want Omi to carry on living and be happy - a comfort Ken himself hadn't been granted. But he didn't want to see Omi feeling ashamed because it was happening and he couldn't reconcile his own desire to resume his place in the world with guilt that he wanted a life which Ouka was no longer a part of, or worrying that his grief growing less keen meant he were somehow denying her. It's natural, Ken wanted to say. It's just the next step.

"I think we need to start heading back, Ken-kun."

But perhaps Omi knew that already.

"Sure." Ken got to his feet, shaking the rest of the loose grass off his t-shirt and looking down at Omi as the boy scrambled upright, dusting himself down and stretching slightly cramped limbs. "Your shoelace is still undone, Omi."
"Oh!" Omi stooped to retie it, blushing slightly. "I forgot about that!"
"Yeah, I kind of noticed."
Omi straightened. "Not fair, Ken-kun." He said, the look on his face halfway between a pout and a smile.
"What? 'Not fair' would have been not to mention it and let you fall on your ass." Ken replied perfectly seriously. "Anyway, come on. I'll buy you a coffee or something."
"For coming out?"
Ken shrugged, pushing his unruly fringe from his eyes and holding it there for a moment or two before letting it fall back into place again. "Well… no, not exactly. Because I want to."

Omi headed back off down the paths toward the park entrance, moving easily through the crowd. Ken followed a few paces behind, hands in the pockets of his jeans, losing Omi momentarily behind a cluster of gossiping high-schoolers, finding him again once they had passed the girls. Omi could have been anyone, a stranger. He looked perfectly ordinary. Perhaps, if a stranger had looked close enough at the boy, they would have considered him rather a wistful soul, but nothing remarkable. It was better than Ken had hoped for, a promise of happier days to come. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but some day. Some day, they'd manage it. They'd get there in the end.

In spite of everything, Ken felt at peace.

ende-