Roses in Rain
a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila
Standard Copyright Disclaimer For Dummies: Guys, I don't own Weiss Kreuz or anything so no matter how much I pray Aya and the rest of the guys don't belong to me. They belong to Kyoko Tsuchiya, Takehito Koyasu and Project Weiss. Please do not sue me, I mean why would you want to? I'm poor! But I do own one character Rain aka Calico, don't take her or feel the wrath of Aya-san's katana!
Suethor's Notes: Hi! I started a new Weiss ficcie! dies I haven't had any inspiration for a while because my WK muse chibibirman hasn't given me any so this is a shocker but a good shocker because I wasn't expecting to get some nice inspiration so suddenly! This fic has NO YOAI! The main pairing is AyaRanxOc (girl), don't like don't read! There will be mentions of child abuse, blood and DEATH! And some other disturbing things so please don't read if you are easily upset. Now here is the damn fanfic for you all to enjoy hopefully! waves Please review it is greatly appreciated but NO FLAMES!
… Really, this fic doesn't have yoai. We have yaoi instead. And this is not your typical 'new-girl-joins-Weiss' tale.
Prologue – Beautiful Stranger
That was how it began.
Imagine Tuesday, revealing itself in all its business-as-usual glory. Imagine a boringly normal evening and the store, as ever, crowded with all the usual bit-part players: schoolgirls in their, for the most part, unidentifiable uniforms; young mothers; the occasional older woman braving the barbarian hoard that is a load of Tokyo high-schoolers playing cute. Picture Youji – or not; there's no need to picture this bit – sprawled in his usual chair in his usual spot surrounded by the usual crowd of girls, languidly flirting with the more appealing of them. Picture a girl grabbing Omi's arm and him smiling anxiously at her and wishing he could tell her to leave him alone, and Aya watering the roses, an action which seemed somehow horribly deliberate, and trying to ignore it all, and looking like he was flirting with a headache.
Finally there was Ken, trying and trying desperately not to draw attention to himself. Ken was stood at the table, kind-of-but-not-really working on an arrangement and thanking the God he couldn't quite work up the conviction to believe in that he had not only an excuse to ignore the girls but also that he only seemed to attract the shy ones anyway and they didn't usually go much further than staring.
Ken knew it shouldn't have been ordinary, but it was ordinary all the same. Routine, and nothing about it that stuck in the mind as anything out of the usual, anything but just another Tuesday evening in a flower shop that really shouldn't have existed but did and nothing for any of its incongruous staff to do about it but stand there and take it and keep on smiling.
… Though, now Ken allowed himself to think about it, he guessed some of them (naming no names, mind) needed a little more practice in that direction.
Normal busy Tuesday and no custom at all and Ken stared out the window and twisted the stem of a tiger lily he knew he should probably stop messing with before it ended up fatally battered between his fingers, and tried to guess how long it would be before Aya decided to give in to impulse and started yelling at the customers again. Youji, he could tell, was wondering the exact same thing. In fact Youji was wishing (though Ken hadn't quite picked up on this bit) that he had managed to end up a little closer to Ken so they could, perhaps, put a bet on it, when the shop door opened with an irritating little cling of bells and she stepped in.
Her. Not, of course, that Youji or Ken or anybody present cared about her, or even really noticed her at first – why should they have done? She was just another girl walking into a shop full of them and the shop bell only rang, to Youji's mind, just about all the goddamned time…
No. Nobody noticed; Ken certainly didn't. The first thing he noticed was the noise dropping off. Right off, like life was TV and someone had hit Mute. Ken hadn't noticed the noise when it was there, not really, but now it had gone it seemed, to his mind, weird. It was weird. The shop never went silent unless Aya had started shooing the girls out and Ken hadn't heard Aya raise his voice, or even say a word. Shouldn't he have heard Aya shouting? Impossible for him not to look up, his eyes already suspicious. He didn't know what was going on and he never liked that, that feeling at a loss…
He didn't like it at all. He had seldom, if ever, seen an entire roomful of very noisy people go totally quiet all at once and could think of no way to describe it but freaky. Really, really goddamned freaky. For a moment he could hear nothing but the noise filtering from the street. Cars. Voices. Life going on regardless, even as the tiny world caught inside the store stopped short, held its breath.
She smiled.
She ducked her head and looked apologetic and smiled through a furious blush and Ken stared and wasn't alone. Absolutely everyone was staring at her and she knew it. She had to know it, didn't she?
Omi, who had one hand raised almost defensively and by the looks of things had been hoping to catch the girl, looked stunned; Youji, on his feet, was the perfect picture of shocked concern. He had already been reaching out to help her up, when he had caught sight of Aya and frozen, one hand still half outstretched, just as everyone stood frozen. The girls, almost to an individual, looked horrified – their eyes wide, their mouths agape, a few of them holding shocked hands to frightened faces, their surprise almost parodic.
Nobody looked good when they'd just fallen over, nobody at all, but somehow she did.
She sat on the floor like a girl in a manga, all disheveled hair and skewed limbs and her school uniform skirt swirled gracefully out around her, showing her thighs in a way Ken refused to believe could have been accidental though he couldn't imagine what else it could possibly be. Her bag had skittered off somewhere to rest by one of the shelves, spilling open and scattering pens and textbooks and notepaper across the floor and Ken didn't believe she was true. Girls fell over cute as that in the stupid true-love manga his older sisters used to like and probably still did, and on TV shows, and absolutely nowhere else. They definitely didn't do it in the middle of Tokyo flower shops on a Tuesday afternoon.
And then (Jesus Christ, Ken caught himself thinking, someone's gonna get killed), then there was Aya and that, to his mind, had to be the absolute worst of it. Aya was sprawled on the floor in front of her, that girl, blinking and looking just about as un-coolly-disdainful as any of his companions thought they had ever seen him…
"Oh shit," Ken heard someone say, and realized it was him.
That was how it began.