Author's Note: Another crazy Ken drabble. This started out as two completely seperate drabbles, than evolved into two connected ones, and then four connected ones, and then six, and then five. Which is where it is now. Five loosely connected, abstract and fragmented pieces of Ken. With major Youji/Ken hints. More than hints, really. Series-wise, this is placed somewhere right near the beginning of Gluhen. Theoretically.
Disclaimer: I wish I owned Weiss. While I'm dreaming, I wish I owned a pony. But Weiss is owned by Koyasu Takehito, Kyoko Tsuchiya, and whoever else actually has legal rights to it.

795
I.
If there was a God. If the things the nuns teach in Sunday school were true. If there was divine intervention. If there was belief.

Ken doesn't believe. It's fallen away from him like the sun sets, leaving only a pretense and an ache, a wish that it would come back and everything would be.

Normal.

What's worse, really? No God or a God who abandons his believers to a betrayal of a life where they run steel claws through the chests of jaded businessmen because there is nothing else that they can do?

Perhaps God tried his hardest. Perhaps, in the end, God just had to let Ken go. Because God was overworked, or too busy, or just forgot. And so he let Ken go.

That was fine. Ken understands. Ken can't imagine how hard it must be to look after six billion people. He has enough trouble just looking after himself.

That was fine, too.

So he had let God go. Fair is fair and all. If God didn't believe in Ken, Ken didn't believe in God.

II.
It is amazing how hard it is to wash blood out of leather.

This is what Ken thinks as he scalds himself one more time with the hot water running out of the faucet.

You're not supposed to wash leather with hot water in the sink, Kenken, Youji would scold him if he was here. But he's not and Ken is and in retrospect he would simply pretend he doesn't know any better. But he does and cold water won't get out the blood.

Denim's so much easier. Get the blood on the denim. Pour some hydrogen peroxide on the blood. Scrub a little, throw the whole thing in the wash.

Scrub until your hands are raw and you still can see the blood.

Ken's not sure if he can use hydrogen peroxide on leather. So he won't. The blood might not come out with just water and scrubbing but the coat is black so who will notice a spot here or there?

Ken notices. And he wears denim.

III.
Ken was always alone, truly. There was Kase, just for fleeting moments, there and together and whole, but he was gone long before Ken presumed him dead. Gone but still physically there, and there was nothing Ken could do since it was Ken's fault.

There was Weiss, but Weiss was a group of strangers as much as it was a team. They were as close as they could be to each other. They killed together, lived together, worked together, would die together, but they were as far apart as they could be with their hidden pasts and morbid secrets.

Like working with familiar strangers. Ken would think he knew them until they did something completely unexpected, and he realized he knew nothing.

But situations changed and the world became complicated. Skeletons were revealed and bodies dug up, things spiraling out of control until he felt his life was naked to the whole universe.

Look at me, it screamed. I have been betrayed. I have nothing to live for. Everyone I've ever cared for is dead, and it's eternally my fault.

IV.
But humans are incapable of living without affection, without human contact. Ken is no exception. He craved it, wanting to bask in it as a cat would a beam of sunlight warming the carpet.

It didn't go unnoticed.

And at first it was nothing. A word, a murmur. Fingertips tracing against cold walls. A look, a sigh. Comforting arm slung low across shoulders.

Ken saw and felt and knew and said nothing. Did nothing. Merely apathetic. Let things change, and shift, and differ. Let things grow worringly heated.

Arguments. No emotion, brilliant catharsis. No thought, fully loaded. Every word weighted, chained down to the floor with ribbons. Testing, pressuring, pressing, moving. Nerves strung high.

Developing. Escalating. Tension that built and simmered until it was visible, the mirage of summer heat hovering over asphalt. The glare of the sun in his eyes. Agitating and unresolved.

And then, like all things, there was a solution.

V.
Blood on their clothes, strung across the floor, discarded without a second thought. Blood on his hands.

And his arms, and his neck. Small clumps in his hair, almost dried and stuck together.

It didn't matter.

Comfort in mutually assured destruction. Something more. Glass poetry. Falling together, entwined, fingers on clean black leather stained with blood.

Fragmented passion.

The blinding white stripe of electricity in the lightbulb floating beyond Youji's shoulder. Touch and get burned. Sex with the lights on.

The smell of a businessman's blood rising high in the room. Their latest victim. Their latest dark beast. Reassurance that they are alive.

For now. And afterwards there are no words, no pretenses, no lies. Just that they, for the moment, are there. For each other.

Then Ken wonders if he has it inside him to look after someone else again. To put trust in another human. To worry after someone else, to let someone be important to him.

And Ken wonders if eventually they won't be surrounded by the smell of the dead. If eventually they will be clean, and if then they will need each other like they do now.

But then Ken remembers that he isn't supposed to hope. Because hope is for the living.

And Ken long since quit that game.