Proximity
A Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

Standard Copyright Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz, it's characters, indices, and everything related to it are quite obviously nothing to do with me save for the fact that I get a lot of enjoyment out of temporarily appropriating them. They remain the property of Kyoko Tsuchiya, Koyasu Takehito, Project Weiss and Movic in spite of what I might wish. I mean no disrespect to any of these individuals or groups and would like to assure them that I am not seeking any kind of profit from writing this thing, unless warm fangirl fuzzies can be counted as capital.

Author's notes: Okay, now I'm just in reaction. Much more heavy angst and I might scream. Time for something rather more pleasant, I think. Hence this piece of cute, only mildly angsty Yoken fluff (if you don't like this pairing you probably shouldn't read my work because even when my Weiss fics don't go in that direction they want to). This story is intended to be read as a stand-alone work, but I've got a feeling it may well inspire a sequel or two. I was going to name this in German, but the closest translation for 'Proximity' is 'Nahe' – literally: near – and that doesn't have quite the same nuance to it. I know I'm not normally a one for putting song quotes at the start of fics, but in this particular case the couplet in question – from a Dir en grey song – was the inspiration, however indirectly, for the entire piece. I admit it, the lines in question are actually sung in English.

Without thinking, I put my hand on your neck.
You say nothing and you do nothing.
From 'Kr cube'; Dir en grey

He called Ken's name in a way that suggested he'd been doing it for a while – exasperation and relief commingling almost indistinguishably in a solitary thread of sound – a single syllable, Ken, a word which by itself meant nothing very much and yet had come to stand for an entire person. As if the boy whose name he called were an errant cat he had been sent to track down by an exasperated mother. As if, now that he had found him, Youji Kudou wanted nothing more than to grab him by the scruff of the neck and wordlessly carry him back indoors. The last bit at least was accurate. Indoors sounded like a great idea to Youji right about now. Ken, by the looks of things, did not share that opinion.

The boy looked round at him, eyes full of a vague surprise. Surprised to see him there.

"Oh, it's you."

But not unpleasantly so, in spite of the flat greeting. Not at all.

"You could at least sound pleased to see me."

It was, Youji sometimes noted, strange how a guy could be both glad to see that someone was unharmed and aggrieved that they hadn't at least had the decency to have gotten themselves in trouble at the same time. Very strange. Given that this was Ken they were talking about here, almost surprising that he wasn't in trouble, or some minor variant of the same. Odd that someone so unexceptional could be so damn good at drawing attention to himself.

But this was Ken, and drawing attention to himself was something he was worryingly good at. Nothing to do with his looks; it could be firmly blamed on the attitude.

"All right, I'm pleased to see you." Ken said. Mildly suspicious. He stood; a sudden, graceful movement. Brushed the dust from his faded jeans, picking off a stray fallen leaf, refugee from a different season. Straightened, meeting Youji's eyes again. He frowned in a way that Youji was coming to recognize implied thought, not aggravation. "What are you doing here?"

Finding you, Ken.

Ken's tendency to trip over his own feet meant Youji tended not to notice the agility to him if it wasn't actually being pointed out to him. He'd had to admit to a certain surprise when he'd discovered that Ken, who had seemed on first acquaintance to be a living embodiment of the word clumsy, had played soccer professionally. In goal, no less. Go figure Ken Hidaka. Youji couldn't. Sometimes he suspected Ken couldn't either; he spent half his life at sixes and sevens with himself. It was no wonder the boy seemed so mystified half the time. Youji thought that being Ken would be enough to mystify anybody, never mind Ken himself.

It had taken him a long time to notice that, when it mattered, Ken kept his distance.

"I could ask you the same question, Kenken." Youji said teasingly – the silly, familiar nickname which Ken sometimes tolerated, sometimes just plain despised, was only an attempt to goad the boy into a reaction. "There are better places to go pout than this."

This; the rooftop. To watch the gathering dusk over the eaves of the low-rise stores and apartment blocks that characterized the area around the flower shop, to gaze toward the clusters of glistening skyscrapers which, like strange flora, sprouted in huddled clusters here and there about the city, seemingly set down almost at random. Such was the nature of urban landscapes, urban beauty. The city slowed as night crept upon it, slowed but never quite reached stasis. Still was the one thing Tokyo nights could never be.

How long, Youji wondered, had Ken been sitting up here before his absence had been remarked upon?

"I am not pouting!" Ken retorted. "Aya's getting me down." A brief access of anger and then a quiet, almost discomfited explanation. Very much Ken.
"Aya gets everyone down." Youji replied smoothly. "That's what he's for… but I thought you guys were pretty much getting the hang of one another."
"Getting the hang of one another?" Ken echoed incredulously. "Sure we are. That'd be why he acts like it causes him actual physical pain to talk to me, right? I've had quite enough of him for one day, thanks very much."

All true, Youji knew. Aya and Ken did rub one another up the wrong way and they did so simply by being themselves. On their first meeting Aya had tried to kill Ken; on their second Ken had retaliated by punching him in the face and from there, to Youji's mind at least, it had been downhill all the way. Aya, going by the way he acted, thought Ken was loud, rash, volatile and rather simplistic. Ken – as he had said or shouted or murmured on any number of occasions – thought Aya had either a stick or, more occasionally, his head up his ass. The two halves of a diptych, everything they did together only served to further stress the differences between them.

True that Aya and Ken aggravated one another. But not the whole truth. Not why Ken had retreated to the roof.

They slipped back into silence as Ken turned away, crossing over to the railing and leaning on it, gazing out at nothing at all. Youji watched him as he watched over nothing, watched the way the wind agitated his always-rebellious hair, the way it tugged at the loose tee-shirt he wore. Youji hadn't but been able to notice Ken's dress sense, or more precisely his lack of one; the clothes he chose to wear only emphasized his unknowing personification of the archetypical boy next door. Ken was plainly no child, but he was nonetheless boyish. Probably he would be for a long time to come.

Something about Ken had Youji regard him naturally and unthinkingly as a boy, even though he wasn't. There was still an element of the boy about him, something Youji himself had long outgrown by the time he'd reached the age Ken was now. Nineteen had seemed older, when Youji had hit nineteen. It had seemed awfully old to him, but it wasn't. Watching Ken, it made him think that it was nothing at all. A nothing age, that – a year spent in limbo, caught between adolescence and adulthood. A bit of both and not enough of either— no wonder Ken was confused. Easy to forget that, with everything else that was going on, he was still trying to finish growing up.

Certainly Ken was innocent and far more so than Youji had been— but he wasn't that either. He'd seen both much less and far more than Youji had done, at that age…

All Youji could say about him for sure was that he was Ken Hidaka.

It was perhaps unsurprising that Ken could only admit to needing time alone when it came as a form of escape. Aya, of course, had a gift for solitude, for finding calm. Aya could stand in the center of a crowded room and still he would be obviously, unsympathetically solitary. Omi had that too, to an extent, though in his case privacy meant losing himself in the computer and his headphones. Not Ken. That wasn't his style. To look at him was to be reminded of the essentially social nature of humans; where Aya was the exception, Ken was the rule.

If the boy truly wanted solitude Youji knew that he should have backed off and left him to it – but Ken didn't have the knack for seclusion the others did. What was perfectly normal behavior from Aya was worrying when manifesting itself in Ken. If he was isolating himself it meant there was something preying on his mind. Meant he was, for whatever reason, far from happy.

Youji was beginning to wonder if maybe Ken used loneliness as a penance.

For Weiss all had things they did when they wanted to forget. Forget who and what they were, leave behind the role that life had cast them in and in which they were all, for their various reasons, fundamentally unhappy. But, equally, they all had things they did when what they wanted was to remember…

… maybe, in Ken's case, isolating himself was one of those things.

"What are you thinking, Ken?" Youji heard himself ask.
Ken started, regarding him over one shoulder. "You're still here?" The surprise in his voice was completely genuine.
"Of course." Youji said airily, placing his hands in his pockets. Though he stood alone and upright, well away from the door to the stairwell, the playboy still managed to give the impression of lounging, of slumping into a languid, contented semi-sprawl. Cool, casual Youji Kudou, every inch of him laid-back; always indolent, always essentially unruffled. If you were looking for a Japanese James Bond, Ken thought you could have done a lot worse than Youji. He himself – Ken couldn't even have aspired to poise like that. "What are you thinking?"
How relaxed you look. How different we are. How it doesn't bother me in the same way my being different to Aya does. Why I'm not telling you to fuck off and leave me alone. "I'm thinking if you want to stay up here you'll shut up asking me stupid questions for five minutes."

(That I want you to stay, Youji. But I can't tell you that.)

"You don't want to talk?" Youji asked in mock surprise adding, with mock wit, "Has Hell frozen over?"
Ken bridled. "Two options, Kudou. Shut the fuck up or get thrown over the edge. Your call."

Youji grinned and stepped back, raising his hands pacifically. The rehearsed, yet casual flourish with which he lit his cigarette told Ken he wasn't going to be going anywhere in a hurry. The boy sighed and wondered why that thought didn't bother him as much as he'd imagined it would, even as he went back to gazing out at the night. He ignored Youji almost completely, but in a weird kind of way Ken took comfort from his teammate's presence.

The oddest thing about Youji was this. He knew when not to push an issue. He knew when drawing back was the only sensible thing to do; understood that, at times, silence was really all it was that was needed. He didn't use silence like a weapon like Aya did, he didn't sit there stonily and unnerve you into talking about anything and everything just for the sake of filling in his side of the conversation, because to do so was to know that something was being said even if that something was sheer, unadulterated crap. Around Youji, Ken found it surprisingly easy to keep his own counsel.

What are you thinking, Ken?

I'm thinking that I can't tell you what I'm thinking, Youji. I'm thinking I can't tell anyone, but especially not you. You wouldn't get it anyway.

Because he had been thinking about Kase.

It seemed a curious path for his thoughts to have taken. He had lost Kase, then Yuriko, within weeks of one another – both gone for good and yet Ken found that he didn't miss Yuriko anywhere near as much as he had imagined he would. As much as he felt he ought to, even. He wasn't even sure if it was her he missed, or just her company. Mostly he was happy for her, glad that she was realizing her dreams, so much so it rather outweighed any feelings that he would rather she had stayed with him (because if she stayed she would have been miserable, stuck going nowhere in a job she despised…).

It was as if she had been a close friend who had left. Or, perhaps, a sister, older or younger. He didn't think he missed her in the way a lover should. He was still too caught up with missing Kase. He told himself it was because she was only dead to him, whereas he had died for real. Of course a death would weigh heavier on his mind than a departure, even if that death hadn't come at his own hands… It sounded plausible enough.

Ken told himself lies.

(It was remembering the little things that hurt the most. The look of martyred dignity on Kase's face when he'd tripped for the nth time whilst running to class, and his smile when he'd helped him find his feet. The way Kase had stood in front of the mirror brushing hair damp from showering back from his forehead whilst he'd assured him it looked fine and could they go now, please. The ease with which he had made him laugh. The way he'd been able to talk to him about anything at all without feeling brazen or embarrassed or just plain stupid, or worrying what Kase would think of him for it…)

The memory of Kase hurt Ken like Hell. Hurt so badly it was almost tangible, almost an actual physical pain. It wasn't the manner of his death that hurt, or even the knowledge of his own betrayal at the hands of a man he'd trusted implicitly. It was just because he'd lost him and lost him for good. Unproductive thoughts. Unprofitable. Leading Ken nowhere but further down the path of reminiscence and regret. Kase was dead and he had been the one to kill him. End of story – or it should have been, at any rate. Why wasn't it?

(…the time Kase had rested his hand on his shoulder, just briefly, simply because he had felt like it. It had chilled him, that touch, left him startled and confused and thrown. Awakened in him the uneasy awareness that something between them had shifted but with no idea what to do about it, how to progress…)

If Kase was dead, why wouldn't he let him go?

Twilight crept up on the city and slowly, even tenderly overpowered and subdued it, transforming it into a study in blues and violets, in grays and blacks. Providing a suitably muted backdrop for the patchwork of glimmering lights studding the outlines of the stores and homes nearby, artificial stars casually scattered amongst the night-dark sea of buildings spreading out around the flower shop and outdoing the real things, a handful of which smoldered wanly and defiantly in the bare, burnished, polluted skies. Further off, the office towers of the financial districts glowed garishly, picked out by concealed spotlights. By night, the city glittered like a cyberpunk take on Fairyland.

In the end, Ken betrayed himself. Shattered the heavy but companionable silence that had gathered between himself and Youji, and did so completely unknowingly. He sighed.

"Ken?"

Youji's voice. He had retreated back toward the stairway, to lounge against the wall. Stood still and silent and watchful as befitted a man in his profession, the blonde was half-lost to the shadows; Ken would have had to search for him if it hadn't been for the tiny beacon that was the glowing end of his cigarette, a telltale sign of his continued presence. A light in the darkness; a tiny betrayal in its own right.

"What?" He turned to face the man, leaning against the railings. "What do you want?"
"Are you feeling all right?" Youji asked. His tones suggested that a yes would not have been considered at all an appropriate answer. Or a convincing one, for that matter.
"I was… just thinking." Ken said awkwardly. He smiled, and that looked awkward too. "Aren't you bored?"
Youji ignored the question, stepping – much to Ken's relief – back into the light. Youji didn't belong in the shadows any more than he himself did. "What about?" Because it doesn't sound like your thoughts are making you happy.
"Not much." Ken said noncommittally. A subtle mendacity. "Things."
"What things?" Youji asked. Probing gently for information, like a doctor palpating a sore, as if he were preparing to excise, with surgical delicacy, Ken's grief – and, like a doctor, prepared to draw back with a smile of apology at any minute. Does it hurt when I press here? How about now? For he knew that, if he handled Ken the wrong way, all he would get from him was an angry demand that he, in almost as many words, mind his own fucking business.
Ken shrugged. "Just… things, really. Things that happened lately."

The elaboration was from Youji's point of view a surprisingly positive sign, a suggestion that Ken was at least willing to countenance a continued discussion, but the studied obliqueness of the boy's remark was mildly unsettling. If this had been a woman he was talking to Youji would have judged the remark capricious, almost teasing, suggesting at a desire to be drawn out rather than to open up freely. Veteran of a thousand casual flirtations, an old hand at conversational games, he had no problem detecting that…

But this was Ken.

This was Ken, who fell into conversation with the opposite sex only accidentally. Ken, who spoke to women in exactly the same casual, unthinking way he spoke to men. Whose appreciation for the finer nuances of conversation was more or less nonexistent. The closest Ken got to flirty was, intriguingly enough, during their frequent bouts of verbal sparring, essentially good-natured things that they both enjoyed rather too much to define as genuine disagreements. He'd long been acquainted with Ken's tendency to open his mouth before engaging his brain. The day Ken started playing fast and loose with words, Hell really would freeze over. How he'd managed to get anywhere at all with that auburn-haired girl he'd wanted to run off with—

"Is this about that girl of yours?"

Not really.

"Yuriko? Well. Kind of… I miss her."

Ken smiled reluctantly. He knew he'd said it well, with just the right degree of hesitation. Again, it sounded plausible. Yuriko – he glanced away, back across at the city, wondering what direction her apartment would have been in. He'd never been able to work it out. Yes, he missed her, but not really. Much less than he'd thought he would do. He was glad she was happy. He wished he didn't have to use her name like this, to take her memory in vain, for Kase's sake…

The problem was that owning up to missing Yuriko was acceptable in a way that admitting that it was Kase he was thinking about – a man who had betrayed him, a man he had killed – would never have been. Not in Youji's eyes. He could hear Youji asking, what was so special about that guy? Hear him ask how in Hell he could still be hung up over a target. A man who had tried to kill him even if he had been a friend, once. That's not the action of a friend, Ken. What'd he have on you? And Ken wouldn't have been able to answer. Not honestly.

Youji had no idea how close they'd been. No idea at all. Ken wasn't about to enlighten him, either.

(I miss Kase. And he wasn't always like that, Youji. I swear, he wasn't always like that.)

"You know, there's something I've been meaning to ask." Youji said finally, quietly. He took a drag on his cigarette, lifted it from his lips, held it between thumb and forefinger and looked thoughtfully down at it. Ken watched him, grave-eyed, silent, vigilant. "Why did you want to run off with her? I know you do things on hot flashes sometimes, Ken, but that… that was a whole different level."
"Huh?" Hot flashes? "What do you mean?"
Youji raised his head, met the boy's eyes. Serious as stone. "You emigrate with your wife. You emigrate with a girl you've lived with for years. You do not— normal people don't decide to emigrate with someone they've known for a few weeks, Ken, cute or no. What were you thinking? Jesus, you barely knew the woman and you were going to throw away—"
"What?" Ken asked sharply. Cutting him off. "Throw away what? All this? Yeah, how could I possibly want to lose this. Give me a break, Youji!"
"Okay." Youji said wearily. "Forget that much of it. Why choose her?" He hadn't realized, even before he asked, that he desperately wanted – more, needed – to know the answer. He couldn't act too eager, though. Eagerness was not even remotely his style. Youji Kudou never pushed the issue.
"Well, I… shit, this is gonna sound lame." Ken turned away, tugging nervously at his fringe. "… I wanted to make her happy."

And Youji sighed, as if he couldn't believe his ears. Ken had wanted to make Yuriko happy. He had seriously considered upping and leaving everything he'd ever known, everyone who cared for him, just because he'd hoped that in so doing he would make someone else, a girl he liked but in truth barely even knew, smile. Youji couldn't think of any way to describe it other than to say it was typical of Ken. Stupid, rash, unreasonable – a hopelessly selfless gesture, coming from a boy who hoped only for the best. But what about you, Ken? Did you even think about that?

He had wanted to make her happy. As if his own thoughts on the matter, his own happiness even, had been merely an incidental thing. Christ, Youji thought, sometimes Ken could be such a kid that it was frightening. He wanted to make her happy.

Ken Hidaka, you are an idiot.

"Ken." Youji said finally. A single syllable. A word which by itself meant nothing and yet conveying so much.
"What?"
"Would she have made you happy?"
Ken frowned, surprised by the question. He couldn't say he'd looked at it from that angle before. "I don't know," he admitted, after an awkward silence, "but I would've kind of liked the chance to find out."

In all honesty he had no idea what the answer was. Could Yuriko have made him happy? Did it matter either way? Yuriko had loved him – she had told him so – nevertheless even now he wasn't sure he could have said if he'd returned her feelings. Ken knew he had liked her. He was absolutely convinced of that. But loved her? Not a clue. Not a single goddamn clue. Maybe the only way to find out would have been through experience… as it was he had no idea. Even if he had loved her, he probably hadn't loved her enough, or something else as stupid and corny as that.

Youji had been right, hard though it was to admit it. Yuriko deserved better than what he could offer. He could never have been fully open with Yuriko, never have admitted who he was. Had she known why he had tried to push her away, she would have been horrified. He could never have told Yuriko about Weiss. About himself – but ignorance wouldn't have kept her safe. The only way for Yuriko to stay safe was for her to stay well away from him. He couldn't reach out. To do so would be not only to put himself at risk but to drag an innocent down with him, it would be to involve them, however unwittingly, in a dangerous game. It would be asking for trouble.

How could he claim to truly love someone if by the very act of loving them he put them in danger, put their life at risk? He was the assassin Siberian and, even had he deserved it, Siberian couldn't aspire to anything so conventional as love.

All of which was just too bad for Ken Hidaka.

But even ignoring the obvious – the danger, the lies, the blood on his hands – he hadn't been right for her. Yuriko deserved someone who could give himself wholeheartedly to her. She didn't need a guy who'd been ensnared by his own past. Yuriko shouldn't have been expected to have to fight against memories to hold her lover's attention…

(…whilst Kase still had him, how could he feel for someone else?)

He waited to see what Youji would say, half-expecting a flip, cynical rejoinder, but the blonde said nothing. He just smiled pensively and crossed over to the balustrade, leaning on it and looking out across the eaves. Ken followed his gaze, but there was nothing much to see. Just the ink-stained sky, the rooftops, lighted windows, a pair of passers-by hurrying down a largely empty street. A deft, rangy cat – perhaps a stray – stalking silent but deadly along the tightrope that was the top of a wall, head forward, tail erect and full of grim intention. Maybe the cat thing made rather more sense than Ken had given it credit for, but he still thought Siberian was a bit of a bitch to pronounce.

(Even so, there was nothing stopping him trying. Ken studied Youji's profile, and wondered what he was thinking.)

Now he watched Youji over one shoulder, watched as the young man lounged against the railing, the soft veil that was his honey-blonde hair falling in its usual contrived confusion into his face. The struggling cigarette burned unregarded between his fore– and middle fingers. Hard now for Ken to ignore the breadth to his shoulders, the well-proportioned chest, when posture drew attention to it; easy to disregard such things when normally all one noticed about Youji was his height, his willowy grace. How did he get so tall anyway? Ridiculous even to think that way but the guy's height had seemed rather pointed to Ken at first. No two ways about it, he really could have done with growing taller… he'd always kind of hoped he would but he guessed he was stuck with it now.

Words unspoken made the sudden silence, incompletely filled with the distant, recycled clamor of the city, hang heavy and pointed between them. It wasn't comfortable this time. The conversation wasn't over; it merely bided its time, waiting for one or the other of them to pick up the loose, hanging threads of it. To carry on from where they had left off.

"Are you all right?" Ken asked, after what seemed like an age but was probably no more than five minutes. Patience, he would have freely admitted, had never exactly been one of his strong suits.
"I sometimes think it's like you don't want us to reach you, Ken." Youji said quietly. Talking to the night, to the gentle breeze and the slight but insidious evening chill. "You only ever give us the surface."

Who are you, Ken?

It seemed a silly thing to want to ask someone who seemed so resolutely unenigmatic. Ken was open, friendly, accessible, so totally there that most people seldom wondered about the things he didn't say, or just plain failed to notice that he didn't say them. Never said them. His family, his early childhood – Ken simply didn't mention things like that. Youji had noticed. He'd noticed how Ken kept his distance. He had to admit to being intrigued.

Ken blinked. He glanced curiously at Youji's profile, searching for any sign that the man was joking. Nothing. His green eyes were curiously grave, his expression almost wistful. "What in Hell are you talking about?" He asked finally. "Youji… man, I hate to say this but you are just making no fucking sense at all." Youji didn't even need to look at Ken to know he had his hands on his hips. Quirk of his, noticeable as that thoughtful frown.
"What's on your mind, Ken?" Youji asked again. "It's not just Yuriko, is it?"
Ken started. Surprised that Youji of all people could have hit so close to home. Surprised that he – languid, sensual Youji, a man who cultivated the impression of being utterly self-absorbed most of the time – could have been so perspicacious. The young man noticed more than he let on. Relic of his past life; a souvenir of normality. "What?"
"You don't want to talk about it." Youji said equably. Statement of fact, even of the obvious. The boy nodded almost in spite of himself. "Fine. All right, I understand. But this started before you even met Yuriko. Or am I wrong?"
Ken turned away, head bowed. "Yeah." A quiet admission. "You're right, on both counts."
"That's all I wanted to know." Youji said simply. Then he added, almost without meaning to, "You've been so distant lately, Ken. It's just not right."
"Distant?" Ken echoed.
Youji smiled at the darkness. He smiled at Ken, though he knew he couldn't really see him. "Yeah. Distant, Ken."

Youji knew when to push, and when to let things lie. For now, he let it lie. Ken would open up when he felt like it, when the time was right. Until that time came – and it would come; Ken wouldn't be capable of keeping whatever-it-was quiet forever, that simply wasn't his way – there was no point in forcing the issue, in pushing for the answers which, for whatever reason, Ken wasn't yet prepared to give. What could that be but strictly counterproductive? He'd do it when he was ready. That was Ken for you; it was just the kind of person he was.

Sometimes, all words do is complicate matters.

They stood close, but not quite touching. A comfortable, companionable distance between them and yet Youji still imagined he could sense the warmth bleeding from Ken's body. Though he never once glanced in Ken's direction, he was all too aware of his presence. Of the shadow-camouflaged form of him. Of how near he was, so near he fancied he could feel him for all their bodies hadn't actually touched. The sleeve of Ken's loose top, caught by the wind, brushed lightly against the fabric of Youji's shirt. Youji glanced over at the boy. His head was tilted slightly back, his eyes strangely thoughtful.

(Distant? Ken frowned slightly, fleetingly, brows furrowing. Him? That just seemed wrong…)

Ken. A study in soft tans and deep browns, autumn colors. Something about him gave the impression of warmth, always. He would be cold now; his arms, recklessly bare against the chill of the evening, would be goose-pimpled. He would be cold, but still he was warm. Ken. Foil to the cool, disdainful Aya, but so much more than that.

And him smiling.

At a wistful private joke. At a conjecture. At a possible future born from a notion which began with the phrase what if I. At a strange, indefinable kind of hope, vague but nonetheless there for the taking. Ken looked at Youji thoughtfully for a few brief moments and came, with characteristic impetuousness, to a decision. Distant? We'll see about that.

It was a hesitant thing, that first touch. Three fingers brushing ever so lightly against the chilled skin on the back of Youji's hand, exerting only the gentlest of pressures. A tentative enquiry as to whether or not their presence would be welcomed. Perhaps it was only to have been expected from Ken, a tactile person, a firm believer in the power of actions rather than words. It was a nothing of a gesture but it signaled something singular, something new and alarming and strange, but something which was not without its own peculiar allure. Ken had of course touched him before, but never so deliberately. Never with such intent. How strange that, out of the pair of them, Ken should prove the more daring.

Ken touched Youji's hand only because he wanted to.

To say that the boy's actions had caught Youji off-guard would be an understatement. He gazed down at his hand, resting on the balcony, and at the fingers of Ken's hand as it rested on top of his own, in something akin to shock. But he didn't pull away. It didn't even occur to him to do so. It occurred to him, instead, that he had wanted to do something of the sort himself.

… and, however uneasily, they both realized that something between them had shifted.

"Well?" Ken asked quietly. "How about now?" Tentative. Anxious. Even curiously shy.
"Ken…" Youji met his eyes. Surprised. "What are you… what do you mean?"
"Am I still that distant?"
And Youji smiled. A lazy and practiced, but genuine and curiously gentle smile. "You're getting closer."

-ende-