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: 'Proximity' bugged me. It bugged me a lot. Precisely, it bugged me to write a sequel (there wasn't enough shounen-ai in it or somesuch… well, to be fair there wasn't), and in the end I capitulated, partly because I like Youji x Ken and I think there aren't enough fics out there focusing on this pairing, but mainly because I wouldn't have had five minutes' peace from my plot bunnies if I hadn't. Being the obsessive fangirl that I am, I couldn't let this state of affairs go on unchallenged. Though this work makes some reference to the events in 'Proximity' I like to believe that it works as a stand-alone piece as well.
I know I have no choice
Is it right, taking a life?
From 'Prayer'; Hyde
Ken sometimes wished that it was possible to bottle time. To pack up his unwanted minutes, store them somewhere safe and hang onto them until he actually required them, waiting for a moment where they could put themselves to use. When they could actually make a difference rather than simply slipping past unnoticed. He could think of any number of occasions when he could have really used a few minutes more. Not now, though. So why not pack time up and store it, he thought? Why not keep it for when he really needed it?
Then he wondered where the thought had come from. That was easy – it came from having time in excess. Give a guy too much of that commodity and his mind ran wild on him, or at least Ken's would. Did. Had. After a while he'd started to sound crazy even to himself. Maybe he was crazy. It would have explained a lot.
Killing time, they called this.
Yet time died hard. It would have to, he thought. It made a bizarre kind of sense.
He thought about stories. Books, and manga, and movies. TV shows. About the way that stories moved, how they dealt with the superfluous hours. Narrative slipped happily through time without so much as a by your leave, pruning dead hours, rolling up whole swathes of their protagonists' lives for the sake of the plot because to do otherwise was boring. Wouldn't catch a guy in a movie doing what he was doing now. Wouldn't see, say, James Bond lying face-down on a hotel bed waiting for his leg to heal so he could go out and kick some serious bad-guy ass.
(… and wasn't it funny how it was almost as hard to think of Youji flat out on a hotel bed trying to ignore how crappy he felt than it was to think of Bond doing it, and where in Hell had that idea come from?)
No. Bond got injured and was brave about it. He'd grit his teeth through it, like getting his leg torn open was no more difficult to deal with than a sprained ankle would be, then he'd get up and carry on – so much so that three or four scenes later it'd be almost like he'd never been hurt in the first place. Or, maybe, he'd retreat to some ridiculously swish hotel to rest up a while, where the impossibly gorgeous blue-eyed blonde he'd rescued from the villain would dress his wounds for him just prior to the two of them getting it on, and the next time the audience saw him he'd be doing something macho like driving down a narrow mountain road in a white sports car looking tanned and healthy whilst the blonde fluttered by his side.
So much for James Bond. Lucky fictional bastard.
Ken Hidaka got injured and that was the way he stayed: injured. Holed up in a hotel bedroom with a badly wounded leg which his body dealt with only in its own sweet time. He had to heal the long way and without a script. Sometimes he thought his life could stand a little judicious editing. Or a hell of a lot of it, even. The closest thing Ken had to an impossibly gorgeous blue-eyed blonde to help dress his wounds was Omi and the kid wasn't in much better shape than he was.
To his mind it seemed faintly ironic to be spending all this time recovering only for the sake of getting themselves killed. A pretty bleak thought for a sunny afternoon. Such an afternoon practically demanded he be out in it and he couldn't have done so even had he been in any condition to. Sometimes life could really suck.
Aya – uninjured, impatient Aya – was still all for tearing off after Takatori and it had been all the three of them could do to persuade him maybe he'd be better off waiting until the rest of them could back him up. Aya. Probably lurking in the lobby or sulking in his own room. Petulant bloody Aya, dead set on his revenge, never mind that his revenge had nearly gotten all four of them killed. God damn, Ken thought wearily, and then he turns round and calls me reckless!
Aya, he knew, resented him. He wanted him to hurry up and heal so he could go find Takatori. Like he'd fucked his leg up for the fun of it, or something. It wasn't anything personal, though – right now Aya resented Youji and Omi too.
Last night he'd heard Aya arguing with Youji, cloistered in the room next door, about chasing down Takatori – paper-thin walls this bloody place had. More precisely he'd been woken up by it. Who taught Aya patience, and couldn't they have tried a little harder? Aya hadn't wanted to stay. Youji hadn't wanted to go. Are you out of your goddamn mind? Youji had demanded. For Christ's sakes, Fujimiya, it's only been three days! You want to get yourself killed? Youji Kudou, Resident Voice of Sanity. In spite of his irritation at being woken up, Ken hadn't quite managed to fight back his smile.
He thought that perhaps Youji was right. Perhaps Aya really did want to get himself killed. Why else would he be so set on chasing after Takatori now? Aya would get his shot at his revenge regardless and it wasn't exactly like Takatori was trying to hide or was in any imminent danger of dropping dead all by himself. The man was the Prime Minister, would still be Prime Minister when he himself could walk without his leg giving way…
(What the Hell good is it going to do your sister, Youji had said, if you wind up dead now? Aya had gone quiet. Maybe he'd said something, maybe not – the only things Ken had heard after that was a door slamming, footsteps in the corridor, Youji's weary sigh. Touchy bastard, Aya Fujimiya…)
The hotel room could have stood to be a lot more impressive, too.
They hadn't even been able to go home, or back to the place they laughably described as such, and heal. The place had been trashed, they had been forced into hiding. Ken had been surprised to realize that he was rather more worried about Momoe's cat than he was about any of his things. He'd never let on to any of the others but secretly he rather liked that cat. He'd pet it when he was sure nobody was looking.
Leaving them here, where here was nowhere Ken had ever wanted to be. Here was a second-rate hotel in a second-rate district on the edge of the city, a place where the staff didn't ask too many questions and didn't care that much if they couldn't get in to clean the rooms, rooms which didn't pretend to be anything more than a place to come and sleep. Simply, even starkly furnished rooms with an afterthought of a bathroom tucked discreetly away behind a white-painted door. Anonymity was more important than comfort now they were on the run: it sounded like something from a movie and, like most things, it sounded far more impressive there than it did in real life.
On the run, like they'd ended up in a Japanese remake of Bonnie and Clyde. Wanted terrorists. The word called to mind something impossibly sinister in a balaclava. Not him, a florist of all of nineteen, fond of soccer and kids. Not any of them. At least the movies had got the dilapidated hotel bit right.
Seemed like he was doomed to spend his entire life on the receiving end of unfounded suspicions.
He labeled the thought unproductive and let it go, let it drift away from him like an autumn leaf caught on the currents of a fast-flowing, slate-gray stream. Heard it before; what's done is done. It wasn't worth trying to hate Kase when it got him nowhere, changed nothing… he didn't even feel angry any more, just sad.
There was nothing on the television. Too early. Just the soul-destroying wilderness that was daytime programming. Kids' programs, lifestyle shit, old movies, wide shows, reruns of dramas that hadn't been that good the first time round, he wasn't going to resort to that. The world caught and framed by his window looked bright and flat, artificial as a movie set. A slight breeze fidgeted idly with his curtains. Ken yawned.
He was tired; no point in denying it. Tired and bored. His leg hurt. The rest of his body didn't feel much better, but it was his leg which was really getting to him. Why his leg of all things? If there was one thing Ken hated to be it was idle. Why couldn't Youji have gotten the leg injury? He wouldn't have minded an excuse to lie round doing nothing at all. He didn't need an excuse to do that.
(Youji. He frowned slightly.)
The cigarette rested on the nightstand. It had been abused by its stay in his jacket pocket, its neat paper tube distorted; now it gently bled flakes of tobacco. He didn't know why he'd kept it. He didn't smoke, wasn't likely to start any time soon. It was only… somehow, it had felt like the right thing to do. Sometimes, all there was to go by was instinct.
(Did he miss him?)
Ken drifted – not to sleep, but close enough to it to touch. To dormancy, a dazed, half-wakeful state characterized by heavy-limbed inertia, his eyes closed only because to open them was too much of an effort: a feeling too many sleepless nights had made all too familiar. If being dead felt like anything at all, Ken bet it felt like this. He must have looked like he was sleeping. He didn't reply to the knock on the door, didn't lift his head when it was pushed open, though he sighed inwardly. What was it about being injured that meant the world and its dog felt they had a divine right to walk into his room and bother him when all he really wanted was a bit of sleep—
"Ha… I'll come back, then."
And laughter in his voice.
"I'm awake, Kudou." Ken said a little irritably, opening his eyes. "You can come in."
Youji didn't come in immediately. Simply hovered in the half-open doorway for a moment as if waiting for something. He held himself like a man denying pain, an oddly misplaced, strained little ghost of a smile playing across his lips. Tired, yet speculative eyes, as if he had been watching him for a while. Maybe he had – who knew with Youji? Ken wouldn't have put it entirely past the guy to have loitered by the door, propped up by the edge of the frame like a character in an unusually knowing manga, and only have knocked when he fancied making his attendance plain. They all had a way of finding silence and calm, of subtly erasing their various presences. Blending into the background. Odd to think Youji might bother to do so simply for the sake of watching him lying still and silent and, to all intents and purposes, utterly unaware.
"How long have you been there, anyway?"
"Not long." Youji said noncommittally. "Wanted to see if you'd wake up."
Ken frowned, bewildered. "Youji, I was never asleep."
Youji was lying. He was lying and Ken knew he was, and yet he couldn't work out how to let him know that he knew. It would have been too weird…
… and far too difficult for Youji to admit he had been watching him. He had been aware even as he did so, stood hushed and attentive as a new father amazed by parenthood by the half-open door of his child's room, that he shouldn't have been there at all. Shouldn't have been stood there in the hall watching, fascinated, as a wounded teammate gently capitulated to exhaustion. He had known himself an interloper – almost a voyeur – but he had pretended it didn't bother him… Quiescent, Ken had looked peaceful. What was he when awake? Youji had never noticed the marks of tension on the boy's face before but, if he only looked truly relaxed when half-asleep, they must have been there all along…
There was something softly, insidiously dangerous about watching another sleep and for all Ken had been awake after all, the danger had been there.
That Youji was seemingly fully clothed made Ken horribly aware of his own state of undress, which felt worryingly precarious in the face of Youji's pointed, patented chic. He hadn't bothered changing out of the sleeveless t-shirt and brief shorts he had been sleeping in; why bother when the healing wound on his leg was uncomfortable enough beneath its bandages, never mind pajama pants or denim? Now however, suddenly self-conscious, he really wished he'd changed.
"Could have fooled me, Kenken." The young man said lazily. "You certainly looked asleep."
"Don't bloody call me that and I'm really goddamn bored." Deliberately offhand. "You?"
"Much the same." Youji admitted with a soft chuckle. "Never thought I'd miss that damned flower shop."
Ken turned onto his side, resting his chin in the cupped palm of one hand, watching Youji slightly suspiciously. "Miss the shop? Who are you trying to kid, Youji? You miss your little fan club… hey, are you coming in or what?"
He came in. Closed the door behind him and crossed over to the bed, sitting down on the edge without waiting for an invitation. Sat down heavily, sighing. A weary sound. Even to walk from his hired room to the room next door and it had taken it out of him. Sad that it should be so and that Ken could envy him that small amount of mobility. At least Youji could walk without needing someone else's arm around him – still, with any luck this would be the last of it. At least the end was in sight, right? Right? Why did even to think that feel so strange?
Yet it felt strange to see Youji again, as well. Youji's presence, his own slight discomfort in sharing it, stressed the fact that things were coming to an end. Weiss' purpose was, Ken knew, nearly fulfilled; even should they live they would, with Takatori's death, split off from one another. They would slip back into the patterns of an everyday existence, which meant losing what little solace they had grown used to taking in each other's company. Deep down Ken understood he was going to have to start to disengage. To pull away from his teammates. Prepare to step forward into – what?
(If they lived they'd be set free, so why wasn't he happy?)
What was there? The others at least had some kind of a purpose. Aya still had his sister; he would live for her and through her no matter what. Youji would start over, probably – he could always go back to work. Omi would have classes and friends and his own vague hopes for an ordinary adulthood. But him? What was he meant to do with his life after all this? Ken couldn't go back to soccer no matter how much he wanted to. Coaching full-time? Private security? Another bloody flower shop? A slow drift into criminality, to becoming one of the dark simply because that was where his only real skills lay? About the only thing he could do which events hadn't cut him off from was kill people for a living…
(Ken Hidaka was dead: what did he have to go to?)
It suddenly struck Ken that to lose Weiss would be to lose everything, again. He had lost his purpose and Kritiker had given him a new one. What was he meant to do when that was gone too? Weiss was the one thing that gave any shape to his posthumous existence and God, that was pathetic…
He wondered what Youji was thinking. What it was he thought about when he wasn't thinking of anything in particular. Sex? Women? No. Definitely not. Much too simplistic. There was a lot more to Youji than that even if the guy pretended otherwise.
Youji sat there in silence, eyes unfocused, smiling at a private conjecture or simply because he wanted to. Contented, casual Youji, languid and graceful even when sat upright. Quite at ease with himself and with the world, carrying with him an effortless air of serenity. Whatever he was thinking about Ken bet it wasn't bothering him. He looked so utterly comfortable, as if there were nowhere in the world he would rather be than a second-rate hotel on the edge of the city, and nothing he would rather be doing with a sunny afternoon than spending it indoors. Flattering, in a weird kind of way. Ken wondered what the guy was here for. Company, perhaps?
How in the Hell could he find Youji such relaxing company? Why was it that, out of all his teammates, Youji was the one who could make him feel contented— there was something about being with Youji which made him happy, even when he wasn't. Times like now. The thought of losing that with Weiss hurt.
He envied Youji his nonchalance, his unthinking grace, his entire attitude, carefully cultivated to suggest that here was a man whom very little could truly unsettle. Cool, calm, collected Youji, never without a careless smile or a ready quip no matter what his situation… one of life's unpaid actors, the kind of man you really had to watch.
Wanted to watch. Youji always had been exasperatingly easy on the eye. If Ken hadn't liked the guy so much he would have had to hate him.
"Hey," Ken heard himself say after a time he never counted had slipped past, "do you ever find that when you're by yourself you start thinking really weird stuff?"
"Weird, like how?" Youji didn't sound surprised at the way silence had splintered.
"I dunno." Ken said uneasily. "Maybe it's not weird as such. Maybe it's more not the kind of thing you think when you've got more important things to do. Like your brain gets bored and starts… acting up. Do you ever get that?"
Youji paused, simply watching Ken for a beat before committing himself to a reply. "I think everyone gets that from time to time." He said finally, quietly. "Why? Is something bothering you?"
"No." Ken said automatically. Amending it, after a few moments' thought, to "Kind of… but it's kinda stupid."
Youji blinked. He might even have frowned. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"It's nothing like that!" Ken laughed and did so awkwardly, nervously rubbing at the nape of his neck with his free hand; he had been embarrassed by Youji's concern. "It's… really pretty dumb. Forget it…"
— Ken was superstitious enough to believe it was bad karma to talk of the future, even his fears for it, before a dangerous mission; blame it on one too many bad movies. You never talk of the future, someone always gets killed that way—
Youji looked at him thoughtfully for a moment or two, the speculative look creeping back into his sleepy green eyes. Watching him. Watching him again, he corrected himself. Ken hadn't noticed the way, when business slacked off in the shop, or when they sat together in the darkened basement, he occasionally permitted himself to look at him for no reason other than he wanted to look – but Ken, Youji knew, was nowhere near as naïve as he was usually taken for, so he doubted this was because he had failed to notice altogether. He would have told himself it meant nothing, or maybe he simply hadn't wanted to think about it and had filed the awareness of it away for future consideration.
Sometimes Youji suspected Ken of deliberately playing up to the image of himself as cute, clumsy idiot. Which would have been a surprisingly savvy, self-aware move on his part, had he been doing so…
"Hm. You're still keeping your distance."
"Everybody does that, too." Ken replied simply. "I'm trying, you know… but it's not easy to be open. Who's open? You don't tell me everything." A perfectly reasonable point made in a perfectly reasonable manner.
"Damn straight I don't." Youji said. Playing at gravity. "You talk far too much for me to be sure of you, Kenken."
Ken looked skeptically at Youji for a moment. "Thanks," he said, with heavy irony. "Look, Youji, if you're not going to try to be open with me why shouldn't I be distant and stop calling me Kenken, for fuck's sake. Why do you call me that anyway, I'm not six years old and even if I was it'd still be a goddamn stupid name."
Youji ignored the obvious riposte. Ignored humor: something in him was telling him, for some reason, to treat the question as perfectly serious. "Because it suits you." He said as if it should have been self-evident, smiling at the blank look that crept across Ken's face. "It's cute."
Ken looked at him incredulously for an uncomfortable moment. "You're losing it, Kudou." He said definitely.
"You think I'm crazy for thinking you're cute?" Youji asked. Provocative. Teasing. He smirked at the discomfited look on his companion's face, the way he flushed slightly, fidgeting a little uncomfortably under his regard.
"Did you hit your head on that last mission? You… no, forget it. I'm not talking about this with you. It's too weird for words."
(Because they'd come so far and no further.)
Bad luck or not, Ken couldn't help wishing that maybe he had decided to confide in Youji about his fears for the future after all. It beat sitting with Youji on a hotel bed, having the guy call him by a pet name more suited to a pre-schooler than it was to an assassin of almost twenty and then having Youji tell him he'd given him a stupid nickname because he thought he was cute. Either Youji's teases were getting even dumber with acquaintance or, even more freakily, he actually meant it and that – Ken didn't want to think about that.
– You never noticed you were beautiful, did you, Ken?
– … Kase?
And he'd asked, what are you talking about? – Ken couldn't not think about that. He had to confront it sometime…
Almost without meaning to, Ken looked over at Youji. Discovered the blonde was looking at him. Not smiling, not doing anything, just watching as if there were something enthralling about him. He fidgeted, once again conscious of his state of undress, shifting position anxiously as he looked quickly away and blushed, again. Ken wished that he hadn't.
Ken concentrated on the bedsheets, reassuringly plain, disheveled from his uneasy attempts to find a comfortable position to lie in. He didn't notice the way Youji smiled at him, the contemplative look in his eyes. Ken didn't seem aware of his own physicality; the unknowing edge to the boy was one of the things Youji found so appealing about him, something exciting and novel – almost. Nearly all the women he had known flaunted their own beauty. They wore their bodies with the same air of knowing pride they would a pair of diamond earrings or an expensive new dress. Asuka hadn't done that. She had been the exception. Asuka hadn't known she was attractive. Hadn't even guessed at it—
Ken didn't have that either. His body was something he unthinkingly used simply because he had it. He didn't take any pride in it for its own sake. Probably it hadn't even crossed his mind to consider it anything other than strictly functional. If I told him how attractive he was, Youji thought, he'd be convinced that I was joking. A proud, beautiful girl would thank me and tell me I was sweet to say it; Asuka would have laughed and said my pick-up lines needed work. Ken would tell me I was crazy.
But which of them would be right?
Ken looked up, watching him circumspectly from beneath his untidy fringe. Obviously pensive. Thoughtful eyes, thoughtful frown, a slightly quizzical tilt of the head. Waiting to speak.
"What?"
"Youji?" Ken said quietly, suddenly serious, "Remember that night you asked me what I was thinking about, and I told you I was thinking about Yuriko?"
Cautiously, Youji nodded. From Ken's question, he could guess what the boy was about to tell him. "Yeah?"
"Well…" Why am I considering telling you this? "I wasn't. Thinking about her, I mean." He sounded awkward. Looked awkward. He bit his lip, briefly glancing back at the disordered sheets as if hoping they would give him some clue as to what to say next. Youji didn't speak, just looked at him inquisitively. His gaze said, go on. "It… you said it started before and you were right. It wasn't ever about Yuriko, Youji. Not really."
"Then who was it about?" Drawing him out. Sensing that, left to himself, Ken would have been content to skirt around the issue in the hope he'd guess for himself. Ask the question – get it over with. It wouldn't be so bad once he'd got it out in the open, would it?
"I didn't say it was about anyone…" Ken said uncertainly, knowing it wasn't convincing. Youji wouldn't be fooled by that for a moment. Who would have been? He closed his eyes, took a breath and held it. Braced himself as if preparing to dive into a pool he already knew would be far too cold. "Kase." Taking the plunge.
"Kase?"
There was no recognition in Youji's voice at all. It hurt. It made Ken want to stop the conversation in its tracks. He wanted to get up and leave but he couldn't. There was nowhere to go and his body wouldn't have stood for it anyway.
"Forget it, Youji. Just… forget I mentioned it. You don't know who I'm talking about anyway."
Ken sounded upset. The marks of anger briefly scored themselves across his face only to vanish before Youji had really registered their presence; the boy turned away, gazing intently out of the window at the flat day. The name, Youji understood, had been issued as a test, a test he had failed. Kase. The name sounded familiar, but why? They heard so many names in their profession. Names of customers and co-workers, the clumsy yet subtly revealing pseudonyms Kritiker had assigned them, the names of their targets—
Targets. The spark of recognition flared bright as a match-flame in a darkened room.
"You loved him?"
… not that he needed Ken to respond to know the answer to that one. The boy could deny it all he wanted but his anger at Youji's failure to recognize Kase's name made his feelings sharp and clear as a mountain stream even without the all-too-obvious grief, suddenly made explicable, he had felt after the young man's death. Kase. Ken had loved him and he had killed him. Nobody should have to do that, to tear the life from someone they had cared for so deeply. Ken certainly shouldn't have had to. What the Hell had he ever done to deserve that? Jesus, it was no wonder the kid had been in a slump. He'd guessed it was something like that, but to have Ken confirm it – well, it startled him.
Ken didn't reply straight away. He looked at Youji in surprise for a beat, then he closed his eyes briefly and sighed. Softly, deeply, jadedly. It was a reply in itself, that sigh. For a moment he considered clinging to the mendacious comfort of denial but why bother? What good would it do to deny the obvious?
"Yeah." He spoke just as softly as he had sighed.
"Shit." Youji's voice was almost a whisper. "I'm sorry." Even as he said it he wondered why: what exactly he was apologizing for. The situation? Maybe.
"There's no point being sorry." Ken said. Weary, he sounded so weary. "It happened. Nothing's going to change that."
"Oh, Ken… you know it shouldn't have happened at all."
"It did, though." Ken said steadily, then added, almost as an afterthought, "Why does Weiss have to screw everything up for us? It ruins everything. Look at what happened to Ouka, for Christ's sake… why can't we reach out?" Angry now.
"Reach out?" Youji asked, quietly intrigued by Ken's sudden impersonal anger; he could tell that it hadn't been directed at him. "What do you mean?" Wanting Ken to explain himself.
"We're so fucking insular. It's like there's a line with us four stuck on one side and the rest of the goddamn world on the other and every time we try and make a connection with anyone out there—" on the other side of the line "—that's it! We've doomed them. Everything falls apart! It's the kiss of fucking death to talk to someone outside Weiss… we can't get close to anyone without worrying they'll end up dead by association and I'm sick of it, Youji!"
He wasn't angry. That was despair, externalized the only way Ken could manage.
It had been only instinct which made Youji gently, cautiously place his hand on Ken's bare shoulder, driven by the need to impart some small measure of comfort. Ken shivered slightly at the touch of his fingers, gazing curiously up at him. His lips were slightly parted, his expression flatly quizzical. His skin felt cool to the touch. Ken didn't understand but he didn't pull away; it wasn't anything new.
(The first touch of hands, remarkable only for it's deliberateness, had bred a legacy of casual contact conducted strictly in private. An easy physicality which nonetheless obeyed strict boundaries – it went only so far and no further, just because…)
Ken rested one hand on top of Youji's, as if he were trying to make sure the blonde didn't pull away. God, he'd needed that touch, the silent reassurance that he wasn't alone. Youji understood. It was, he thought, weird that sometimes he wouldn't realize how much he'd needed something until it was handed to him. He was a physical person and yet all too often he resigned himself to living in isolation – he would grow used to it, so much so that he would be surprised by how right simple contact felt. The touch of Youji's hand had possessed all the force of a revelation.
"But he would have had to die anyway." Ken said finally. "Kase, I mean. It's not like he was innocent or anything. If it hadn't been me it would have been one of you guys. I… it's weird, but I think it's better that it wasn't one of you."
Which Youji thought was an odd angle to take on the subject. "What do you mean?"
"I'd rather hate myself." Ken's tone was so level, so perfectly ordinary, that it took Youji aback. Something of the sort must have shown in his face, because he blinked at him. Blinked twice, then stifled a giggle. "What?"
"You," Youji said skeptically, "would rather hate yourself?" What are you talking about? Do you know how strange you sound? Ken, how can you say that so normally?
"I'm glad I was the one who killed him." The boy spoke simply, dark eyes grave and utterly honest. "Because if one of you had, I'd have hated you for it."
(Because killing him didn't stop you loving him. Right, Ken?)
Again, Youji didn't need to ask to know what the answer would have been, had Ken managed to find his voice. He met Ken's eyes, gave him a small, genuine smile; Ken's attempt to return it was only tentative, as if he were trying to remember how to smile, what the point of it was. His smile was a tight, clumsy thing – raw, vaguely childish and nothing like his usual good-natured grin. It didn't serve to make him look any less wistful. He looked drained; felt it too. He couldn't go on keeping his distance, living for a memory…
He wasn't always like that – but it was getting harder and harder for Ken to remember what Kase had been like. At some point, though what point he couldn't be sure, Ken realized he had begun thinking about Kase in terms of simple descriptors, reducing his personality to nothing more than a list of characteristics, his face gradually becoming indistinctive as a photo-fit. Dooming a man who had once meant everything to him to a slow slide into anonymity. Kase didn't seem quite real to him any more. He was moving away from him without even meaning to, simply because Kase was dead and he was still alive.
Some days Ken could almost imagine he'd made Kase up, that he had never been anything more than a dream gone bad…
"What about now?" Youji heard himself ask. Quietly. Caught off-guard by his own urgency. "Do you still—"
"Love him?" Ken finished the sentence for him. Why was Youji asking? "No, I don't think so. No. Not any more. I'm pretty sure I used to, but – oh, God, it's all so pointless. I can't remember what it was like any more anyway."
Because it had all been fucked up by the way it ended. Ken's memories had been tainted, torn in two and stained in arterial red. It hadn't just been Kase he had murdered; he'd killed Ken Hidaka too. The last few, fragile threads tenuously linking the man he was turning into with the boy he had once been had been severed the night that Kase died: he couldn't step back now. Might as well try to breathe life back into a corpse…
"… but why do you care?"
Youji shrugged. "I worry about you, kid." He said. True, but not the whole truth.
"Oh." Ken didn't seem to know how to respond. He settled on uneasy silence.
He let himself succumb to the parenthetical tangle of his own thoughts, which drifted through his mind haphazard as wind-blown autumn leaves. Distracted, Ken shifted position slightly, letting his head drop forward as if he had tired of keeping it raised, letting his eyes slip closed for a few brief moments; a fall of his dark hair spilled its soft, ticklish way across the skin of Youji's wrist. He drew a little closer, abruptly recalling Youji to his debility even while breaching a line, all unknowingly—
— leaving Youji at a loss, sensing danger. Instinct told him to draw back, find safety in solitude, but God knew how Ken would have interpreted it. The boy was weary, troubled, hurting: atypically vulnerable. Wrong to take advantage of it. Wrong, too, to take away what little comfort he was deriving from his touch. All he could do was look away. Youji turned back toward the door, his gaze falling on the nightstand. His attention snared on incongruity.
"I didn't know you'd started smoking, Ken."
Ken raised his head, blinking in confusion. "Huh? … I haven't."
"Well, it sure looks like you have." Youji said, and smiled at Ken's incomprehension. Leaning over, he picked up the battered cigarette, holding it to the light and turning it between forefinger and thumb. "If you don't smoke, where'd you get—" He broke off, realizing he knew the answer, thrown by the unexpected shape and complexity of it, and he turned to the boy in sudden surprise, one eyebrow quizzically quirked. "You kept it?"
"You noticed?" Ken clapped one hand over his mouth, a sudden flush creeping across his cheeks. "Oh, God, you weren't supposed to notice!"
"Ken..." Youji began. He had to fight back his smile.
"I don't smoke, Youji," Ken countered, "what else was I supposed to do with it?"
No, it wasn't possible to keep back the smile, in the face of something like that. "You didn't have to keep it, kid." Blasé, at least on the outside. Shit, the poor boy looked mortified. Why, oh why was it that the only truly accurate word Youji could think of to describe an embarrassed Ken was cute?
"I was going to throw it out!" Oh for God's sake, Hidaka! When you've dug yourself into a hole, stop fucking digging.
Shit, of all the things to happen! Ken had just known he should have thrown that thing away, when he found it in his jacket pocket just after they arrived in the hotel instead of hanging onto it only because it had felt like the right thing to do. What was wrong with him, anyway? Maybe then others were correct when they said he never thought anything through. He needed to bloody well start before he did something really stupid.
Ken was convinced Youji would be thinking he was working with some kind of weirdo. Hanging onto a cigarette he was never going to smoke for the sake of the man who'd given it to him like, oh God, just like one of those stupid love-struck schoolgirls who'd fluttered round the four of them in the Koneko. The kind of girls Youji had barely even glanced at, instead pushing them in Omi's direction or failing that his own – they were too young and giddy, nowhere near sophisticated enough for the blonde's tastes. Christ, he'd never be able to live this down! Even if he'd tried, Youji would never let him forget it.
He'd told him he'd loved Kase. He'd hung onto the cigarette Youji had given him the night they nearly died, just because. From there it wouldn't be a huge logical leap for Youji to conclude— how the fuck was he supposed to get out of this one?
"You know I believe you, Kenken." Youji said teasingly, playfully ruffling the boy's hair. He pretended the touch meant nothing at all. "Thousands wouldn't, but I do. You had no ulterior motive at all. It's pure accident you've still got this…"
Ken scowled at him, batting his hand away. "Shut up, Kudou."
"What's wrong, Ken?" Youji asked, and laughed – not maliciously, only with sheer relief. He wished Ken's actions, all-too-explicable to any halfway competent student of the human heart, hadn't left him feeling so perversely gratified. Wished they had bothered him more. But they hadn't – he could at least speculate as to why not, though he would perhaps have denied it as strenuously as Ken was doing. "You don't need to get so worked up. You know, I'm actually pretty flattered. I had no idea you felt so strongly about me…" A joke which was no joke at all.
"Youji! You egotistical fucking asshole, would you shut up?" Ken cut him off, struggling vainly to hide discomfiture behind defensive anger. "Do you think the whole world's after getting in your pants or something? All I did was put that thing in my pocket, it doesn't mean I've got a crush on you! It doesn't mean anything at all!"
(A crush? Had Ken meant to use such a high-school phrase? Jesus, Youji thought, he's still so naïve…)
Youji tried to look stung. "Are you trying to suggest you don't like me?"
"Not like that, no!" Ken said heatedly.
Though he had spoken far too quickly for his words to hold any real conviction Ken, Youji realized, was taking this deadly seriously. His eyes were furious but averted and he turned quickly away, staring intently at an utterly unremarkable spot on the bedspread only because it beat looking at Youji. He knew he had to be blushing; it only irritated him further. Ken flinched slightly when he felt Youji's fingers brush the line of his jaw, shying away more from instinct than impulse as Youji gently grasped his chin and tilted his head back, guiding his gaze back toward him. Once again, he had no idea what to say.
"Ken." Youji's voice was soft and contemplative; the teasing gleam slipped cautiously from his sleepy green eyes. "Would you like to have another go at saying that whilst actually looking at me?"
"… what are you implying?" Ken said finally, forcing himself to look away. His expression told a tale of nervous expectancy, betraying himself more plainly than his words could ever have done. He had caught himself in a contradiction: Ken knew he was lying and yet he couldn't, wouldn't allow himself to own up to it even to himself.
"Oh, not much." Ken recognized Youji's manner as exaggeratedly offhand. The blonde was a little too unequivocally blasé for his attitude to convince; it left Ken in equal parts intrigued and alarmed. What was Youji planning? Did he want to know? – he could have pushed him away, but he didn't. He was too curious, too caught up in the situation. The moment. "But I'm getting the feeling you wouldn't mind if I did this."
This? Ken was about to ask Youji what he thought he was talking about only for the question to be answered for him before he had a chance to speak.
Youji kissed him.
He kissed him and Ken froze. Youji's kiss was a shocking, frightening thing, full of a gentle demand. Mandating acquiescence and a willed passivity Ken was normally a stranger to. How to explain, then, why he submitted? In the movies they close their eyes. Ken didn't. He couldn't collude with a deception compounded by celluloid. It didn't cross his mind; so complete a surrender was beyond him. His eyes widened when Youji kissed him; he could do nothing but stare.
Kissing Youji wasn't like being kissed by Kase. It had even less in common with the almost accidental kisses he had shared with Yuriko – they had been clumsy and chaste and strangely meaningless. This was lingering, languid, sensual: it tore the breath from him. He didn't understand. He didn't think he was meant to. The blonde smiled as he drew back, leaving him flushed and unsettled, trying to find his breath, compose his thoughts, think of something to say.
"Youji?" He sounded too startled for anger. "… what did you do that for?"
"What else am I supposed to do with you?" The question bred only another question. Youji's voice was cold and solemn as midwinter for all he realized Ken would recognize the calm as affected; though he smiled, he did so with perfect gravity. Sometimes, Youji knew, there was no option but to take life seriously. "Just because, Ken."
"Because?" Ken echoed.
"It was the right thing to do." Youji relented, giving in. Blame the company I'm keeping. You of all people, Ken, should know about that. Because what do we have to lose, now? "Did you mind?"
Ken looked at his hands for a heartbeat. "Not as such." He admitted, uncertainly meeting his eyes. Stressing the peculiar circumspection to him. "I mean… I've had worse kisses."
Something odd Youji had noted about Ken; he was an assertive, even aggressive kid, the kind of boy who liked to give the impression of self-confidence and yet from time to time it would become painfully obvious that he had so little idea what was expected of him in a certain situation that he didn't even know how to bluff his way through – he'd been like that with that girl, Yuriko. He genuinely hadn't had a clue how to handle himself around her; she had been in control. Shyness was not a quality Youji associated with Ken and yet sometimes shy was only what he was. Youji blamed inexperience.
Jesus, he knew so little. It made Youji want to (and he suppressed another smile) help him. Inexperience was easily enough cured – nevertheless, they were running out of time. How much time did they have left? Who knew when Aya— just to think of the redhead was to be recalled to unpleasant reality. Aya was the sharp shock of cold water on sleep-warmed skin.
"Me too." Youji said with a lopsided smile. "Plenty of them… are you all right?"
Ken was yawning, incompletely stifling it behind one hand. "Yeah… well, not exactly." He amended. "My leg hurts like Hell." He rubbed at the bridge of his nose with the balls of three fingers. Suggestive of a gathering headache. Suggesting he needed to be left alone.
"And that's why you're yawning?" Youji asked wryly. "You need sleep, kid. You're not going to get any better like that."
"I'd be asleep already if you hadn't come barging your way in here," Ken pointed out. His words were irritated, but there was no real animosity in them.
"But you're still glad I came, though."
"Shut up. I can't believe your goddamn ego." Ken gave Youji a playful cuff to the head as he settled back down on the bed, wincing slightly as an incautious movement jarred his wounded leg. For all his apparent good spirits, he still looked tired.
Youji grinned. "And you wouldn't want me any other way, Kenken." He was gratified when Ken returned the smile.
"Sure, Youji. Whatever."
Ken closed his eyes; the conversation, Youji knew, was at an end. Better let the poor kid rest. Sighing softly, he got to his feet, draw the tangled sheets up over Ken and headed for the door. Probably it wouldn't be a bad idea to go lie down himself. Seemed a shame, seemed a waste to nip such a promising situation in the proverbial bud, but what could he do? Ken always had possessed a crazy kind of flair for accumulating injuries, seemed to take a positive thrill in outdoing the rest of Weiss in the amount of damage he could sustain over the course of a single mission. The inevitable corollary of close-range fighting. The boy was still hurt – first, he needed to recover, and maybe then…
No. Ken's recovery would only mean it was time for the endgame.
He was running out of time: Youji knew Weiss' end was close enough to touch for all he had no idea what kind of an ending they were in line to face. So he'd seized the moment because what else was there to do? Better that than doing nothing, pretending Ken really had hung onto that cigarette through simple happenstance. Maybe it was bad karma to reveal his hand so completely just before the four of them stepped knowingly into jeopardy but to say nothing at all would be, in its own way, to goad fate just as gravely. He couldn't live for tomorrow when tomorrow – or soon, at any rate – they would all be dead or parted. No wonder he chose to exist solely in the here and now.
Youji had kissed Ken because it had been the right thing to do and he didn't regret it for a moment.
He paused on the threshold as he reached the door, turning and regarding Ken over his shoulder for a single stolen moment. His teammate was curled up on his side, his eyes closed and limbs relaxed, clearly already drifting into sleep. Never one for hanging about, Ken; he even set to relaxation with almost frenetic purpose.
"Sleep well, kid," he said to Ken. To the empty air.
He knew Ken couldn't hear him but it hardly seemed to matter. Smiling contentedly to himself, Youji slipped from the room, treading for all his corporeality quiet as a phantom and circumspectly pulling the door closed behind him. The latch slid back into place with a soft yet definite click. The sound cleaved time in two.
-ende-