Through a Glass Darkly
a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

Part Two

& rebehold the stars

And the world flooded back, and it damn near drowned him.

For a single horrible moment there was chaos. Chaos and, with it, his own terrible confusion and maybe, just maybe this was what it was to go insane. For a time he never counted Ken had lain in darkness, with nothing more to anchor him than the sound of an air pump and the voices in his head: one moment there was nothing at all, the next he was caught in the epicenter of an explosion of color and noise and sensation, and scalding brightness. There were voices and they said his name. There was light, and Ken knew the light was real because the light hurt his eyes: his eyes could gain no purchase on it, and he recoiled. He might have screamed, if only he had possessed the strength to.

He stared into light overwhelming and unbroken as the darkness before it, but there were patterns in the light: planes, lines, shapes. There were forms and they were the forms of angels, but they had the faces of his friends. Maybe that was what they did when they came to you. Maybe they pulled a figure from your mind, and worked from there…

And then there was just the moon, wound about in skeins of cloud and imprisoned behind the bare boughs of autumn-naked trees, and the wind ghosting against his bare skin, raising goose-pimples on his arms and making him shiver, and, sudden and startling as a stolen kiss, there was rain on his cheeks. He was cold, and it felt good.

Ken had died; now he had been reborn. Reborn to what?

He struggled to sit and found he could barely move; he fought to talk, and could barely even whisper. When God had come up with the idea of bodily resurrection, clearly He hadn't thought through exactly what that would involve. Maybe the downsides just hadn't occurred to Him. Perhaps it was different when your body was perfect and ineffable, not some sluggish lump of dust and clay, when you didn't have to deal with limbs that seized up through nothing but inaction, and dizziness and nausea and thirst. There were bony little fingers clawing at his legs, heavy hands clasping his shoulders tight enough to bruise as they struggled to lift, and they hurt; it was all he could do not to shy away, try to struggle free. Surely this wasn't how it was meant to work?

Angels shouldn't have needed to do all this.

The strangest part of all was that when they spoke to one another, they used the names of his friends.

No, it wasn't meant to be like this. The nuns had told him about Judgment Day, but they'd never had been good with details: they'd never told Ken he'd spend it shivering and wanting to puke, if only he'd had anything to throw up on…

There were arms about him, warm and strong, tightening about his body as an unseen figure pulled him up and out of the hole. There was – did everyone get this? – there was a wood, skeletal trees with branches like the bars crowding about them, and light so bright it burned streaming out from between them, seemingly from nowhere at all. There was the heavy, cloying reek of turned earth and a tapestry of green and brown scents from the forest, and rain on his skin.

There was a smear of mud up the length of one of his numb lower legs, showing obscenely dark against cold, pallid flesh. Ken shivered and closed his eyes and pretended he was alone.

"Azrael," he whispered to the creature that held him. As good a name as any for his personal angel of death.

He wished he knew what had happened to the others.

absent friends

It wanted to be called Youji.

Certainly it looked like Youji, for all that was the easy part. Though, with the light blazing agonizingly from behind it like that, Ken couldn't really see the figure's face, it was the right size and shape, and its long damp hair hung heavy about its face like Youji's did after a shower. It even smelled faintly of cigarettes like Youji did, though otherwise its scent was altogether wrong. It was, at least, a good enough attempt. Good enough that when the creature said, it's me, Ken struggled to force a smile to his own lips and pretended he believed it. It looked like Youji, and its hands were warm and it tried to touch him gently. What more could he have hoped for?

"It's me, Ken," the creature said; it placed him down on the ground, and even that it tried to do gently. It was a good liar, as good as Youji had been. "It's Youji. It's okay, Ken. It's over…"

Its words were as meaningless as the drumming of the rain, but Ken spoke to it anyway. Maybe he was tired of being alone, with nothing to see but the darkness and nothing to speak to save the voices in his own head. This wasn't Youji, but it wasn't his mind either. He remembered Youji far better than this.

So he called it by it's name, or the name it had chosen. He said, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry…"

It was, he supposed, as close as he would get to apologizing to Youji.

For a moment he fancied the Youji-thing looked almost pained. Then it turned, straightening, gazing up at something, or someone, caught just out of Ken's line of sight. He could see the creature's face now; the light, as it turned from him, fell across its cheeks, and the figure squinted into it. Their face was Youji's, too, though the eyes were hard and cold and narrowed with anger. Ken couldn't remember the last time he'd seen that look on Youji's face – it would have been long ago, he was sure. Long ago, and something to do with a girl…

It said something that Ken didn't catch and a voice he didn't recognize, though he recognized its panic well enough, answered: it raised one hand, to gesture to whatever luckless soul stood behind it, and when it spoke it spoke with the voice of a judge pronouncing sentence. Azrael, Ken thought again. Azrael called Youji… When next it bent to him, its hands were full of dark, damp cloth. A shroud?

We sell flowers, Ken told it. I'm a florist—

The Youji-shaped thing didn't seem to care. It simply smiled at him – the smile, that was something else they couldn't get right: this was a mere upward quirk of the lips that had nothing to do with anything that was going on behind the creature's eyes – and, gentle as a father trying to help his sleeping child into their nightwear, carefully helped him to dress. Though he was chilled to the bone, though he was wracked with uncontrollable shivering, it hadn't occurred to Ken to worry about that before. Wasn't that how things were supposed to happen?

This wasn't something the angels did: not before the judgment, anyway, and Ken was certain he couldn't have been judged yet, because he hadn't been condemned. You'd remember something like that, he was sure – unless it had already happened, and so quietly he had barely been aware of it.

It could have been that, of course. Maybe the part with the coffin and the screaming and the voices in his mind had been how they did it in Purgatory for a man who had sent so many others to premature graves of their own. There was, after all, a twisted and terrible kind of poetry to it, just as there was to all divine justice. It was the kind of punishment a just God might choose to mete out to a man who had murdered simply because he had been told to; a merciful God, perhaps, would show His mercy at the last simply by allowing the punishment to come to an end. It could always have been that.

I don't know anything any more, Ken realized. I don't even remember how I died…

How strange that only now he was mostly clothed did it occur to Ken that he really should have been embarrassed by being found naked.

lethe

This was what salvation looked like, for clearly Ken had been saved. These creatures who looked like his friends had found him and clothed him, they had draped a damp and heavy coat about his shoulders like a blanket, and now the one that looked like Youji, one arm braced about his shoulders to help him sit, offered Ken water. The thing that wasn't quite his friend held a bottle to his dry, bitten lips; a trickle of water, cool and sweet, flowed into his mouth and down his dry, abraded throat. It wasn't enough. Ken snatched for the bottle and gulped greedily at the water until the bottle was drained nearly dry, and he felt quite sick with it.

His captors, the target and his dreamy, twisted protégé, had offered him blankets and water too, before they murdered him. He hadn't been grateful then.

Maybe he still shouldn't have been. Ken wondered if the angels shaped like his friends were going to kill him as well…

But for now he had been saved, and it was enough. Context was all

His stomach rebelled and he vomited: the nuns hadn't thought to mention that bit, either. When Ken raised his head to look at the angel with Youji's face, he was smiling, or at least his chapped lips had twisted upward. He was gasping, shaking so badly he could barely manage to raise one bloodied and aching hand to wipe at his lips: he very nearly asked if he could have another drink.

Gently, the thing that might have been Youji whispered, his voice as soft as the wind sighing through the trees. Gently.

shadow that comes in sight

And, sudden and unexpected as a slap to the cheek, Kase was leaning casually against the jutting branch of a tree.

Ken blinked at him, and Kase raised one hand as if in salute. His brow was resting lightly against his folded forearms, a warm, genuine smile tugged at the corners of his lips. There was blood on his torn suit, showing almost black in the half-light, seeping slowly into the pale fabric and dripping slowly down to pool about his feet.

"Well, I said I'd be back."
"Where've you been, you bastard?" Ken demanded. "I missed you!"
Kase laughed, briefly and without humor. "Knew you couldn't live without me. Couldn't die without me either, huh? You always were the needy one, Ken."
"Everyone leaves," Ken whispered. He shivered, pulling the damp, oversized coat Youji had draped over his shoulders more tightly about himself. "Even you left me. Don't you get it? I'm tired of being alone."

Kase smiled; blood wept from his wound; his wind-tousled hair was tugged as if by invisible fingers and, as his friend shifted his weight, Ken saw not firm young skin or Kase's shining eyes and smiling lips but, behind them, delicate phalanges and the smooth curve of the ribs, a single sunken, empty eye socket, the skull's fixed grin. Kase flickered before him like old and overexposed film stock, skin and bone layered one on the other as in a demented slide show.

"Not my business," Kase said with a shrug. "You're the denominator, Ken. It's you. Doesn't that tell you something?"
"Tell me something?"
"Quit playing dumb, Ken. You play dumb far too often. Can't you see the pattern? For God's sake," Kase said, and he sounded frustrated as he had explaining, as Ken fretted and scowled over a science textbook, the intricacies of the carbon cycle, "you're the one everyone ditches. Stop bitching about how miserable you are and try to work out why we all get so sick of you and your fucked-up, needy shit, okay? "
Ken laughed at him. "Oh fuck off, Kase! You don't think that. I do. You're me, you asshole. You're me."

There was a small rock lying on the pathway he sat on, and Ken snatched it up. For a second, maybe two, he tested the weight of it as it rested in his palm – then, a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in his throat, he flung it at the bleeding specter that had been his oldest friend. It hurt to close his hand about it, his aim was wild, but it made him feel better.

Ken grinned, and his grin was wild and raw. Kase simply spared him an offended glance and vanished, slowly melting back into the shadows as if he had never been there at all.

Don't think this is over, Kase told him.

Ken just smiled. He said, "I never did."

in the wood of the suicides

Someone was screaming, and it wasn't him.

The voice was a man's – Ken could tell it was a man, for all his screams were high and thin and agonized, and barely human at all. He'd heard too many men scream like that to believe otherwise.

It could have been worse, he supposed. At least the voice wasn't a woman's or, worse, a child's and hadn't there been something about kids? Dead boys, that was what this had been about – that was why he was here, and what he had died for. There'd been children dying like art, buried alone where nobody would ever find them, or even think to look. Even now Ken couldn't believe that he could have suffered more than they had, not when they had so much more to live for and he had gone into this eyes open. Shivering, Ken drew his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms about them and even that sent bolts of pain up his aching limbs, left him biting back a cry.

Someone was screaming, and his screams were terrible. Terrible as the cries of a man trapped alone in the darkness and waiting only to die, calling out to anyone at all to find him, save him, please. More than anything Ken wanted to get up and go after him and make whoever was hurting him stop, but his limbs ached and his hands and feet were torn and bleeding and he couldn't move, dammit! He just couldn't move…

Stop it, he thought: it felt like a prayer, every bit as desperate and frantic as twenty-three had done. Stop hurting him. If this man has to be killed, kill him quickly. Just stop hurting him.

Please stop.

clarity

"Verse five," Ken said: he couldn't stay silent for fear of the noise, he spoke only to himself. He flinched slightly when he heard the words echoed in a voice that was only painfully familiar – he hadn't expected to even be overheard, still less to be replied to.
Youji asked, "Verse five?"
Of course. Youji was here now, wasn't he? Or at least something that looked very like him was, something enough like his friend to be a comfort to him, whatever happened next. Looking up at the Youji-shaped creature by his side, Ken nodded, grave as a child. "I remember now."

(The Lord is my shepherd. Maybe now he would be saved, maybe they would all be, if only it wasn't too late—)

Yes. Yes, I remember. Ken swallowed. He recited, his voice hoarse, stumbling slightly over the words, "You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil... My cup overflows." He hardly knew what he expected Youji to say to that and yet Ken was gazing up at him, eyes expectant, as if he were waiting for his friend's reaction.
"That's … great, Ken," Youji said.

And Ken knew he would never have imagined that look of bewilderment, or the confusion in his friend's voice – not on Youji. He never would have dreamed of languid, elegant Youji like this: nobody would have brought Youji's face and voice here only to have him bone-weary and slumped in the driver's side of Aya's car, his suit and shoes and even his too pallid skin spattered with mud, curls hanging limp and heavy with rainwater and the dark smudges of exhaustion showing plain beneath tired green eyes. This Youji smelled of earth and sweat and stale fear, he smelled like a man Ken had never met.

No, he could never have dreamed this. Azrael could have done better than Aya's stupid Porsche.

He realized for the first time that just maybe this Youji was real: not an angel with the face of a friend, or a restless wraith or a half-remembered phantom of the mind, but truly alive. Youji's hand, resting on his shoulder, felt warm and heavy and reassuringly solid: I'm here, Kenken. It's okay. I'm here…

Ken's hands were bandaged with his friends' discarded neckties, the clothes he wore were slightly too large and still smelled of alcohol and tobacco smoke, and of a stranger's expensive cologne, and Youji sat in the driver's seat of Aya's car listening to the jazz station, a bottle of French mineral water with a blood-smeared label held loosely in one hand. Just details, but details he would never have thought to dream.

This was real. Oh, God, this was real… If he thought about it too hard, he thought he might start to weep. And so Ken gave his friend a wan, clumsy, painfully genuine smile, because he didn't know what else he should do.

"You don't have a clue what I'm talking about," he said, "do you?"

sv x hr = co

On his knees, in the mud, Ken vomited: there was dirt beneath his aching palms, dirt and drifts of fallen leaves, damp and smeared with grime but still gaudy and strangely beautiful.

The screaming had stopped. Omi had come back, and smiled at him so kindly and gently Ken knew he had to look like crap. The kid had said, shall we go? and Ken had given him a weak grin of his own in return, and tried to stand. Bad idea. The worst. Pain had left him dazed, dizziness and nausea caught him by the throat and shook him, and let him drop; crying out more in surprise than in agony or in fear, he had stumbled and fallen, and when Omi crouched by his side Ken had waved the teenager away, and been suddenly and violently sick.

Afterwards – head bowed, shoulders shaking as he fought to catch his breath – he simply sat and waited for the pain in his feet to subside and his vision to clear. Omi's slim, clever fingers groped insinuatingly beneath his chin as the teenager searched for his pulse; from the hard, insistent pressure of the boy's fingers against the flesh of his throat and the sound of Omi's indrawn breath, Ken could tell whatever it was that his friend had felt there it was all wrong.

"What happened?" Youji said from somewhere above his head. "Ken, are you all… is he okay?"
"He fell," Aya said, as if it were obvious.
"Fell?" Youji echoed. "What the Hell was he doing trying to stand by himself?"
Omi raised his head, clearing his throat slightly. "Youji-kun, Aya-kun, can you be quiet for a second? I've got to—"

It wasn't a surprise to Ken that his teammates talked over his head, as they might have done for an ill and frightened child. They discussed him as if he wasn't there at all, or couldn't understand them: it hardly seemed to matter very much. Sitting back on his heels, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of the coat they had dressed him in, he gazed at an unremarkable spot between the boughs of the trees and waited, like a child, for them to finish talking and decide what to do. For whatever happened next to happen…

What were a few minutes more when he'd waited so long already? When it was quite enough for Ken that they had come back for him at all?

"He's in shock," Omi said.
He heard Youji laugh, brief and bitter. "Of course he is."
"No, Youji-kun. I mean…"

Omi meant medically. He meant the kind that killed.

You're not dead, Ken. You're only dying.

No wonder he felt like shit. The strangest thing was that Ken wasn't frightened – not at all. Maybe he'd simply forgotten how to be. Why worry about the fate of a dead man? (But this was real. Remember that.) Omi's words didn't move him; the tension that crept into the teenager's voice and the naked panic he thought he could see in Youji's weary green eyes didn't seem to have anything very much to do with him.

There was a blanket, thick and heavy, draped about Ken's shoulders; there was a hand on his brow, gently brushing his damp, tangled bangs out of his eyes. There were hands on his arms, helping him to find his feet, and he wished that his friends wouldn't make such a fuss over him.

"I'm all right," Ken murmured. "I'm fine…"
"Christ, Kenken," Youji said gently, "and you call me a bullshitter."

four quarters

From the inside of Aya's Porsche, the world didn't look that different from how it did at the end of any other mission with a fucked-up 'A' plan. Yeah, things were a mess: yeah, we're still breathing. That was what mattered, right? Game cleared, roll the credits. It was time to go home.

They'd sat Ken in Youji's seat in the front of the car though, and he wasn't sure if this annoyed him or not. God knew he didn't like knowing his team were making an exception for him because they thought he wouldn't be able to handle the darker, closer confines of the back seat; God knew he was grateful they hadn't left him to plead with them not to be made to sit there. When he fumbled for the safety belt Omi had helped him and, as Omi draped a dry blanket he had clearly taken from someone's bed about him, he told him to sit tight. We'll have you out of here soon, Ken-kun.

I know, Ken had told him. And, thank you.

"I'll drive," Youji said.

Youji had unfolded himself gracefully from the driver's seat, flipped it forward; now he leaned on the roof of the car, waiting patient as a Sunday father for his teenage son to slouch his way into his family saloon. Ken gazed up at the others through the open door, and the look on Aya's dour face had him fighting back laughter. This, he thought, should be good—the thought was comfortable and easy, warm as the blanket about him. For the first time in Christ knew how long Ken's mind felt like his own again, all his own, and the world about him shifted into a more familiar shape.

"This is my car," Aya pointed out.
"Yeah, man," Youji said, "I know it's your car, that's the problem. If you wanted something with a back seat—"
"At least it has a back seat," Aya retorted. "And a roof."
Youji shook his head. "It has a shelf, Aya, and at least the Seven knows what it's doing. If you'd bought yourself a vaguely sensible car rather than this mid-life crisis on wheels…"
"Everyone, please." Omi interrupted the familiar argument before it could really get started, which Ken thought a bit of a pity. "Aya-kun, Youji-kun is right. He's not going to fit in the back, his legs are too long. Can we please get going? We don't have time for this now."

He pushed gently past Youji, slipping neatly into the back of the car without waiting to see if Aya was following: Youji raised a brow in silent statement as the redhead clambered awkwardly in after Omi, scowling as if Youji had grown so tall simply to spite him.

"What happened to the target?" Ken asked, as Youji was reversing out of the clearing. "The French guy?"
"He died," Aya said: nothing more.

Smiling, Ken closed his eyes. Home felt so much closer, hearing that.

route 254

Youji was driving too fast. How fast Ken didn't know; all he had was the draft from the open window that tangled his hair, rain on his cheeks and the awareness that they shouldn't have been moving this quickly, not even down roads as empty as this one.

There was nothing to see. Just shuttered storefronts and rain-washed streets, the weaving headlights of the handful of other cars that were out this late and, here and there, a pedestrian made reckless by the lateness of the hour and the emptiness of the streets hovering suicidally on the curbside or darting, ready-or-not, across the road and to Hell with the traffic. Rain hammered tireless and tedious on the windows of the Porsche and, on the radio, Ayumi Hamasaki was singing Boys and Girls. It was kind of her, Ken thought, since he'd heard it about five hundred times already and all he wanted from the world right now was that it be exactly the same as it had always been.

He said, "I'm gonna throw up again—"

Ken just about managed to lean forward. If this had happened to any of the others while they were all riding in Aya's pretty little car, he thought he might have found it funny.

"Sorry," he said through a gasp, wiping at his mouth. It tasted bitter. "Jesus. Oh, Jesus Christ. Sorry, Aya…"
A grumpy voice from the back seat said, "You're paying the cleaning bill, Hidaka."
"No he's not," Youji said. "Shut up, Fujimiya, it's just water and it's not his fault you bought a fucking stupid car."

Ken wanted to laugh at them, so he did.

triage (priority i)

He knew he was going to hospital because they told him he was, and rightly or wrongly Ken trusted his friends. Now, as Youji and Aya helped him from the car and to his feet (it hurt, good Christ it hurt! and, for a moment, Ken wondered if he were about to pass out), Ken knew they had arrived simply because as he parked up Youji had said, we're here.

The streets were wet, shadow-haunted, sunk in incomplete silence: they felt no more real than a stage set. Funny, Ken had never been on stage before, not unless Nativity plays counted – third shepherd, age seven: a single line, then let us to Bethlehem, and he hadn't even got that right…

There was a building there somewhere, but Ken barely saw it. All he could see, as Youji and Omi led him toward what must have been the emergency department, was light. Light, scaldingly bright, pouring from the windows and glass-fronted doors of a gaudy Christmas tree of a construction Omi assured him was Japan University Hospital, but could have been the headquarters of Mizuho Bank or Mitsukoshi department store for all he knew or cared about it. The light flooded over him, pulling him under. He drowned in it.

"Ow," Ken muttered. "Fuck."
"Ken?"

Youji turned to look at him, glancing back over one shoulder in sudden concern, concern that was quickly chased away by open alarm, and Ken could hardly understand why that should have been so. Instinctively Youji caught him by the upper arms, as if he feared that Ken would fall; Ken cursed under his breath, tried to pull away, but Youji only gripped him the tighter. The look in the young man's eyes said this was the first time since Ken, in another country and another life, had left the Koneko that he had actually seen him. It said that he didn't like what he saw.

"It's—" Ken broke off, coughing. Swallowed hard. "Just bright in here. I'm fine."
"Fuck, Ken," Youji blurted out – Mother of God, Ken thought, he's only three years older than I am. "You look like shit."
Ken slumped slightly, resting his brow against the curve of Youji's shoulder. Closed his eyes, just for a second. He said, "That good, huh? Sorry. I…"

Even as he spoke he wondered what he was apologizing for – but Youji had told him to watch himself, hadn't he? Now here Ken was in an ER lobby and his eyes were hurting so badly he could hardly bear to keep them open, and when he walked it was as if, like the girl in the fairytale, with every step he stepped on knives. Be careful…

"I fucked up."
Youji sighed. "No you didn't."
"But I—"
"You didn't." Impatiently, Youji cut him off. "It wasn't you, this would've been one long fuck-up no matter what. They sent us after JohnClark, Ken, he'd have made any of us."

John Clark? But the target was – had been – French.

John Clark. Ken blinked, feeling himself starting to frown. He tried to think and it seemed far harder than it should have been; his mind was sluggish and unresponsive, and it grumbled at him like an old man woken from an afternoon doze for the sake of some small chore. Who was John Clark? Another dark beast, maybe. Some old gaijin like the target, some scary hard bastard Persia had sent them after unprepared and barely warned, who'd nearly dragged the four of them to the grave with him. Maybe that was it – but surely he'd have remembered the guy, if he'd been that difficult to bring down?

"What?" Ken said. And, "Who's John Clark?"
"What's a cultural attaché do?" Youji asked him. Then, when Ken still looked blank, he smiled. He might even have laughed. He said, "I'll explain later. Will you come on? You look fit to drop."

triage (priority ii)

Prophetic, as it turned out.

The room was too bright and too noisy, and crowded with strangers. There was a short queue at the reception desk already, headed by a compact, sturdy-looking young man in stained chef's whites with one hand wrapped in a gore-spattered tea towel: behind him a brace of girls waited to be seen, the taller of the pair leaning heavily on her friend's shoulder, glossy black hair cascading over her pale face as she whimpered drunkenly about her ankle. Wait here, Omi told him, and Ken smiled and said, okay.

He sat where Youji led him, watching vague-eyed and barely interested as Omi smiled sweet and genuine at the desk clerk and spun her some convenient lie. The smile had fallen as soon as Omi turned away, and the teenager sighed deeply as he walked over to them, raking one hand through his damp blond bangs as he murmured something about wait times and Friday-night drunks. It was a shock to realize that the weekend was just beginning: caught somewhere outside the hospital doors, it was an ordinary Saturday morning.

"How long?" Aya asked.
Omi simply smiled helplessly. "At least he'll be a priority once he's been through triage," he said, "right?"

It really should have felt more personal.

Should have felt more real, but it didn't. It was only a hospital because Omi had told him it was, and Omi was a liar but Ken believed in him, utterly. The waiting-room, caught behind the veil of Ken's own exhaustion, looked every inch as movie-set fraudulent as it felt, the people who drifted about it vague and insubstantial as specters.

The strangest thing about them was that most of them hardly seemed ill at all; they might have been actors, feigning it for the cameras. A young woman was giving Youji a bleary smile which his friend, gazing down at his clasped hands and mud-spattered shoes, barely seemed to notice; the bedraggled-looking older man sat opposite, evidently whole, might have been there only to get out of the rain. A nurse, pallid and ghostlike in crisp, clinical white, slipped quietly into the waiting area and called for Katsumi Ando, but nobody seemed to pay her any heed and she padded away again as noiselessly as she had arrived.

"I feel sick," Ken said. He sounded surprised.
Omi raised his head, and there was concern in his eyes. "Do you want me to ask for a kidney bowl, Ken-kun?"
"No," Ken said. Then again, more decisively: "No. Where's the bathroom?"

Omi just looked dubiously at him; he didn't look as if he was going to help. Okay, Ken thought, fuck it, he'd do it the hard way then just like he always did. He blinked once, twice, as if hoping to clear his vision; he squinted into the too-bright haze about himself in search of a likely-looking door. Finally, after an embarrassingly long search, he found it set neatly into the wall behind him. Now all he needed was for it to be a real bathroom, not a sound stage or a costume cupboard or another playland forgery in wood and pasteboard and painted gauze…

Turning to Omi, Ken gave the boy a wide, reassuring smile and clambered ungracefully to his feet, but the ground seemed to lurch sickeningly beneath him, yawing like a ship in a storm. His vision blurred: a cheap fade to gray and then back to the same two seconds later, and by then Ken was already falling.

There was no time to cry out. There was barely time to raise his arms to protect his head. Ken simply fell, catching the side of his head a painful blow on something as he pitched forward, landing in a dazed and crumpled heap between two aisles of chairs. Then he merely lay still, eyes wide, staring in naked confusion at the sweep of the linoleum floor and the dozing tramp's scuffed and battered shoes, dizzy and breathless as a child at the end of a footrace. I'm okay, he wanted to say, but he couldn't find the breath to do it with. Really, I'm fine…

A girl shrieked, thin and pointless; Omi cried his name. The desk clerk, more practically, reached for the call bell.

"Is there a problem, Nanase-san?"
"A patient's fallen."

And footsteps hurrying over to where he lay, and hands on his shoulders; a bespectacled woman, plain-faced and harried-looking, was trying to turn him onto his back. Ken wanted to reach up and push her glasses back up her nose before they fell off altogether, and as if that wasn't bad enough he still felt like he was going to throw up… he closed his eyes, letting the world slip sideways and fall away from him.

A heartbeat later and Ken opened his eyes again to the sensation of weightlessness, to arms about his body as he was lifted, carried. He wanted to protest – Jesus Christ, how many times? I'm fine – but he couldn't seem to find his voice, could barely even force himself to open his eyes.

"Sir," a woman was saying, "I said we're fetching a hoist, if you'd just wait a moment—!"
"Get a doctor." Aya cut her off. "He's waited long enough."

Gentle as a man carrying a sleeping child to bed, Youji placed Ken down on – he couldn't quite tell. Something soft, which yielded slightly beneath him. A gurney, he guessed; the target (Holy Mary mother of God) smiled at him from behind Aya's banked shoulder. Ken didn't want to lie there but Omi's hands were resting on his arms, gently pinning him down and Omi wouldn't let anything bad happen to him, Ken was sure of it. Omi knew what to do, he always did: please lie still, Ken-kun, and it had to be the right thing to do, if Omi was the one telling him to do it.

If Omi was here he might still be okay. Ken had been given a pillow this time and a young woman, rendered utterly unremarkable by her prim white apron and nurse's cap, was covering him with a blanket, and he was far too dizzy and tired to fight, he hurt too much.

"Well," Youji was saying, one hand resting heavy and paternal on his shoulder, "well, Kenken, that's one way to jump a queue…"

Ken tilted his head back to find his friend's face, and smiled at him, and passed out.

bones

"How old would you say? I thought maybe sixteen…"
"Try twenty. He's an adult."
"Really? My Lord, this country. What's wrong with you people, don't you age?"

Even with his eyes closed, the light had stung them.

He couldn't move. There'd been agony and then there'd been darkness, and he had opened his eyes to find himself here: stripped bare and tied down, surrounded by familiar strangers with closed-off faces and the cold eyes of the casually cruel and if only, oh God if only he hadn't known quite what sins these men were guilty of. There had been questions – who are you? Why did you follow me, who do you work for? – then pain again, worse than before because it was so much more deliberate, and he hadn't even trusted himself to scream. Your name, boy. Tell me your name.

All about them there were things, shapeless and ugly and glistening, unpleasant as organs shining moistly in the hollow of a pried-open chest, cradled by the bare ribs. Ken closed his eyes and concentrated on the pain. Don't speak, Hidaka. Don't say a word… Shadows on the retina: the artist bent to him, ran one heavy hand slowly along the length of his leg and Christ! if only it had been carnal. It would have been so much easier to bear if it had only been carnal.

Ken thought, I'm going to be sick. Thought, I'm scared. Oh, God, I'm scared…

(What's going to happen to me?)

"No good?" The target sounded disappointed.
The artist shook his head. "Useless. He's an athlete, Gabriel! Remember the last one you dragged home? His bones were a wreck, and this one's got at least five years on him… see, look here."

He ran one finger down Ken's shin, tracing the faint, broken white line of an old operation scar. Ken flinched, and dreamed he was able to kick. He had too many scars already to remember where they all came from, but he recalled that one well enough. It had been a bike accident: he remembered a stifling seven-year-old afternoon, and burning asphalt and dust beneath skinned palms, insinuating itself into his cuts and making them smart. Remembered looking down at his aching leg to see blood and something white protruding through the skin, something he'd stared at in sickened fascination. He had said, I think I hurt my leg—

"He had this set. Nasty break, by the looks of it. And the other's no better, see? Right here, he's broken… Oh, I hate it when they're this active. No, it's useless, it won't work. Gabriel…" The artist stepped back. He turned away, gaze fixed on something Ken couldn't see. "I know you want him to talk but Gabriel, you can't seriously be suggesting we operate now? Don't you think the whole process is unpleasant enough as it is? No. No, it's just… just too distasteful, and to go through all that for something I couldn't even use… there's just no point. Find another way."

triage (priority iii)

Except Ken had been there once before and managed to survive, and what was dead couldn't hurt him any more.

There was light on his face, there were voices speaking low and murmurous and as he opened his eyes, gazing blearily up at his thousandth unfamiliar ceiling, Ken wondered how long he'd lost this time. Only a second had passed really, and yet he awoke lying on a clutter of pillows, propped up in a high, hard bed. The room he had opened his eyes on was bright and crisp and clean, the day caught beyond the single window showed gray and unremarkable and utterly, utterly beautiful. His thoughts were slow as Sunday afternoon, they had the vague, sluggish quality he had come to associate with the after-effects of anesthetic. He didn't hurt any more.

Hospital, then. Omi was there, by his side with one delicate hand resting atop Ken's own. Youji was there, stood by the door conferring with a doctor, tall and stern and movie-handsome. It must have been his voice Ken had heard.

He said, "Omi." He said, "Sorry. I… you were right. I'm not that good. Sorry."

It still hurt to talk, and Omi simply frowned at him as if he didn't understand. The look in his eyes said he had no idea what Ken was talking about and had decided, as Omi all too often did when confronted with something his mechanical mind couldn't rationalize away, to keep smiling and hope it wasn't important. Ken-kun, he said, how are you feeling?

"Fine." The lie was as instinctive as it was obvious. "I'm okay."
"Oh, Ken-kun." Omi smiled, but the smile was weary, fraying about the edges; Ken caught himself wondering when the kid had last slept and, for a moment, he wished Omi weren't there. Stop worrying about me, he wanted to say. You've gotta rest, Omi. It's no good us both feeling like shit… "You don't always have to be… I mean, you know it's okay to not be okay sometimes too, right?"
"I'm fine," Ken whispered, "honest," but there was a catch in his voice and he couldn't seem to meet his friend's eyes. He couldn't even lie to himself.

And why did it matter, anyway? Omi was going to kill him, if not today then soon. He'd promised, after all—

"Would you like some water, Ken-kun?" Omi said sudden and awkward, and perhaps he had spoken only to fill the heavy silence. Ken flinched at the sound of his voice. Hospital, then: he had, he realized, been listening for the sigh of the pump. "They said," the teenager added, as if by way of an explanation, "you needed to start drinking again."

He didn't wait for a reply, just reached for a pitcher of water and bowed his head to fill a scratched, cloudy plastic tumbler. What, Ken wondered, is wrong with this picture?

Omi had looked so much better before. He had been far more himself when, lost in darkness, he'd gazed at Ken as if he were a curiosity and promised he would help him find death. This Omi was pale and bone-weary, his liar's eyes full of concern and that same horrifyingly impersonal compassion he might show to a tearful teenage girl who was nothing to him save as an innocent and a victim, compassion that was all the more terrible for being wholly unfeigned. Omi had promised to kill him and yet here he was sat by Ken's bedside holding out a plastic cup full of chalky, tepid water, because it was all he could think of to give.

"Here," Omi said. "Don't worry, they said you shouldn't be sick again."

Of course, his hands didn't work right. It hurt even to lift them, and his fingers wouldn't move properly. His left wrist was in plaster, the fingers of his right hand clumsily splinted, his nails split and broken to the quick. Wincing, Ken reached for the cup all the same, caught it clumsily between both hands. Even then he might still have been okay if it hadn't been for the grime beneath what remained of his nails. The breath caught in his throat, and he gagged. If his stomach hadn't been empty Ken thought he might have thrown up.

Some nightmares didn't have the grace to end just because you'd woken up. Only that, only dirt from a forest floor trapped beneath his nails – and it was real and hideous and utterly insupportable. Lost in stifling darkness, with nothing to cling to but the wheeze of an air pump and broken-record phrases from half-forgotten prayers, Ken lay still and silent and thought about fear. You're going to talk, the target said, and all he could do was agree…

He dropped the glass.

"Ken-kun?" Omi started forward, quick and anxious."Ken-kun, are you all—!"

Omi's hand was on his arm, and Ken hid his face in the crook of his friend's shoulder and clung to him like a child, and he wept. The cup clattered to the floor.

a smile without a cat

"I thought I told you to fuck off."

Some things never leave you, no matter how much you wish they would. A bad penny to the end, there was Kase, showing up predictable as Sapporo snow. Ken, gazing out of the window at an unremarkable Tokyo Saturday, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips, knew it without having to so much as glance around: wherever he went there was Kase, a shadow caught on the edge of sight, forever.

"I told you I can't." His friend's voice was little more than a whisper. Soft as a sigh, as a spring breeze tousling the long grass. "I'm you. I'll always be here, you know that."
Ken closed his eyes for a moment; he heard himself laugh, a short, unpleasant chuckle that felt strange on his lips and bitter to the taste. "Yeah, I know. You said that before. You and dad and Saint Joseph and all the rest of them. You'll go away when I'm dead, and I'm not that. Not me, Kase. Not me."
"Hah. Keep telling yourself that. You've got to die someday, and when you do—"
"Sure. Everything dies sooner or later. We'll meet again, Kase."

Raising his head, Ken searched for his friend's face, but Kase was nowhere to be seen: it wasn't even a surprise. Kase was everywhere and he was nowhere, a phantom of the mind no amount of prayer or visits to priests would exorcise.

Kase was merely another guilt-born phantom, exactly like all the rest of them. Ken thought he could cope with that.

"We'll meet again," he said, "and that's a promise. But for now you'll have to wait."

under siege

"Ken," said Youji. "Kenken, look at me. No, at me, Ken. The doctor wants to talk to you. You okay with that?"
Ken blinked slowly; slowly, he nodded. He said, "Youji, who's John Clark?"
"You don't have to worry about him, Ken. He's just a guy in a movie. Will you be okay to talk to the doctor? They're kind of worried about your injuries."

Ken knew it for a warning.

This doctor looked like the target too, which was to say like nothing very much. He was an older man, in his early fifties if Ken had to put an age to him, neatly turned out in a smart pinstripe suit and a tie his wife had clearly chosen to match it. He could have been anyone or no one, just another blameless, business-suited nonentity, looking far more like an aging section chief than anyone's idea of a doctor.

"Good afternoon. I'm Doctor Saionji, I'm the consultant in charge of your case. Is it all right if I sit down?"

Of course it was all right by Ken. The doctor draw up a chair and sat down heavily, sighing as he took the weight off his feet, and Ken smiled at him, a polite shopkeeper's smile. He said, "Can I help you?" Falling back on rote.

(For what was this if not another interrogation?)

The doctor smiled. Yesterday – well last week, at any rate – Ken might have thought he looked kind. "Well, perhaps you can. The young men who brought you in – how do you know them?"
"I'm a florist," Ken said. "We sell flowers."
"So you all work together?"
"We sell flowers."
"Very well. Now, your… colleagues told us you all went drinking in Sayama, and that you had an accident. Now, I may be mistaken but from what I know of your condition when they brought you in—" He broke off. Looked away, talking to the sheaf of paperwork he held. "Well, I find it hard to believe that's true, son. In my experience your kind of injuries are very rarely found in accident victims… do you think you could tell me how you were hurt?"

No. No, he couldn't. There was nothing he could tell this man. Nothing except the truth, and how could Ken offer him that when the truth would damn them all?

So he said only, "What?"
"How did you come to be hurt?" The doctor asked again. Gently, he spoke so gently. "Please try not to worry. It's quite safe to speak freely here. We can see to it that nothing else happens to you."
"It wasn't them!" And he'd spoken too soon, the denial was too emphatic. "I got lost," he said, "I got lost in the woods and they found me and I thought they'd never come but they did, they found me. I was lost, it wasn't them, I swear to God it wasn't."
The doctor frowned slightly. He said, and he sounded as gentle as ever, "Son, I don't wish to accuse your friends of anything. They've clearly been very worried about you and no doubt they're glad you weren't worse hurt. I'm just concerned that their story doesn't add up."
"I was lost," Ken said again, his voice little more than a whisper. "I was lost."

their blood shall be upon them

The target was dead. Ken knew he was dead because Aya had told him and Aya didn't lie without good reason, but the target hadn't worked alone. Nobody had mentioned the other one, the artist, a skinny nonentity not much taller than Ken himself was. There'd been a man with them back in the forest – hadn't there? There had been a forest, right? The clothes they had given him, damp and oversized, smelling of alcohol and aftershave and someone else's stale terror, had to have come from somewhere.

Ken wondered what had happened to their owner. He wondered why it was nobody had told him that.

debrief

"I'd have talked," Ken heard himself saying. "I'd have told them anything they wanted, if they'd come back."
"But you didn't," Omi said, and it was almost as if he had never known the truth at all. You're not that good, none of us are… he had said it, hadn't he? "You didn't talk, Ken-kun. It's okay."
"But I would have done." Don't you get it? "I'd have told them everything!"

It seemed strange it should have hurt so much yet there it was: the worst thing of all. It hurt far more than remembering the indignities that had been forced upon him, more than the darkness and the cold and the all-consuming terror. They would have offered him an ending (now, child, is there anything you'd like to tell me?)and for all that Ken would have wept and hated himself for it, he knew that he would have taken it. He wouldn't even have had to think about it: worse, this time it had been different. Just this once, but once was all it needed and already it was far more than he deserved. His friends had saved his life, for no reason other than a replacement wouldn't cut it. They had wanted him back.

They had come for him when he thought nobody would, they brought him water and bandaged his wounds, they held him when he cried and Ken would have betrayed them all for nothing more than a quick death.

We sell flowers. I'll show you.

(Just don't put me back there.)

There was blood on the tile and somewhere he couldn't see a man was screaming, a man he had told himself he would endure anything to protect. They would have died, all of them, and it would have been all his fault…

Ken knew that he would have talked, and that the only thing that had kept him from it was sheer dumb luck – the one thing he had told himself was utterly out of the question, the million-to-one shot that was rescue. He'd prayed for death before that. Now Omi sat and gazed at him, his child's face grave and his eyes full of compassion, and told him that he had said nothing after all, and everything was all right. From Omi he believed it, but Omi was a liar.

closing time

The newcomer wasn't a doctor. She – a dark, slender, quietly good-looking specimen – had the narrow-framed smart-girl glasses, the messy bun and the slightly distracted expression, but there was something the matter with her eyes. The rest of her was note-perfect, but her eyes were too young to match. She wasn't a nurse, either: she wore no uniform, she didn't look careworn enough. She was a liar too, but Ken trusted her because Omi had told him he ought to and that she, whoever she was, would see he got out of here.

I want to go home, he had said.
Ken had expected to be told not to be so silly. Instead, Omi had smiled at him. He said, I'll figure something out.

She wasn't a doctor and she wasn't a nurse, but she had given Ken a tired but genuine smile and a glass of water and when she told him to drink it, obediently he had. Maybe, if he'd thought about it, he might have thought it tasted odd.

He drank it anyway. Doctor's orders. The woman smiled and took the glass and left him, slipping quietly out and into the corridor. Ken listened to the steady tick, tick of her heels against the linoleum as she hurried away and wondered what would happen when they stopped, and then why it mattered. He wondered where she was going and why she was there at all, playing at doctors. How good they all were at looking harmless.

In time, he realized he was tired. Something was insisting he wanted to close his eyes, so he did. Not long now, Omi said quietly. Just hang in there, Ken-kun…

But falling asleep would be so easy, and Ken was sick of fighting.

(This is a sedative—)

It should have frightened him – but, caught somewhere far beyond fear, Ken slept all the same. There didn't seem any point in struggling. Omi and the others would do their best; he could ask no more. He let himself drift, barely bothering to open his eyes when he felt himself being jostled, lifted from his bed – somewhere caught on the edge of hearing he could hear Omi querulously demanding… Ken didn't know what and, in truth, he hardly cared. He let himself slip back into dreamless, narcotized sleep, and didn't wake again until the slamming of a car door jolted him from it.

"Careful," Omi was saying, "careful, Youji-kun. Aya-kun, can you get an IV stand? Thanks."

Both orders, of course.

There was something shameful and wrong about being carried carefully back to his own bed by a man who was even more exhausted and bone-weary than he was. Youji must have known it, because he let Ken struggle and curse and demand he put him down now without a word. All the better to maintain the fiction he could have done it himself, if his overanxious friends had only let him try—

It felt strange to be back in his room again, though Ken knew full well there was no reason he should feel that way. It was just as he had left it: the closet door he hadn't quite closed on his way out swinging in the evening breeze, a forgotten sweater slung carelessly over the back of a chair, his bed – nobody gave a damn if Ken left his bedsheets in a tangled mess any more, but old habits died hard – inexpertly made and quite unslept-in. Youji placed him cautiously on the bed, and grinned when Ken aimed a clumsy blow at his face.

"You're a bastard, Kudou," Ken muttered. "A total bastard."
Youji just laughed. "Love you too."

It wasn't that Ken couldn't help himself, Youji was just an ass and wouldn't let him—that much established, Ken let his friend help him into his pajamas, draw back the sheets and settle him into bed. He could have done it easily any time, it was just quicker and simpler to let Youji fuss…

I'm fine, Ken told him. And, I can do it myself.

And Youji didn't believe him but that didn't matter a bit, because Ken hadn't bought it either.

looking glass world

A soul could get lost in Wonderland.

The woods were gone, and there were no more angels. There was only Ken, dressed in his pajamas, stranded in the shadows and too confused to think about fear. Darkness huddled close about him, thick as a shroud and heavy as the earth that covered him—and yet the shadows could not touch him, and he knew he would rise again. There was no sun and yet he stood in sunlight, the wind catching the flimsy cotton of his clothing and tugging gently at his tangled hair. His hands and his feet were bandaged – just bandaged, not taped and splinted, and immobilized in plaster.

You're not real, he thought.

Just for a moment, he wondered whose dream this was—

Ken knew what had happened to the artist now. He supposed in some way he had always known: the answer, elegant in its simplicity, had been there all along, a matter of scores settled and tables terrifyingly turned. Weiss wouldn't even have to worry about disposing the body…

The artist had been with them in the forest, but he had never left. His screams hadn't stopped, they simply faded away, choked by the weight of damp earth: then there had been Omi, soaked to the skin, dirt on his hands and blood on his shirt, and his face had all the terrible self-assured serenity as the face of an avenging angel. Never forgive. In Omi's eyes such a punishment might have seemed just, even almost poetic: now Ken, left to take his place, gazed down at an ordinary-looking young man, his frightened eyes wide open, lying alone and terribly hurt and knew that Omi had been wrong. It could never be that.

This wasn't justice. It was merely revenge. The artist could never have deserved what was done to him, no matter what his sins. No man should have to die like that, alone in the darkness, with nothing to hold onto but the memories of his sins and the silence in his own head, and nothing to wait for but death…

He knelt, resting his hands in his lap, and closed his eyes. The last thing he wanted was to have to watch, but not to see felt like shame. His friends had done this, and in his name. The least he could do was face up to it.

"I'm sorry," Ken said. And, "You didn't deserve this. It's my fault. I'm sorry."

And, leaning forward, he tried to reach out and touch him, then hesitated, the fingertips of one shaking hand barely brushing against the artist's arm, touching skin as chill and clammy as the skin of a corpse so gently that he could barely tell if he felt anything at all. He shouldn't have wanted to comfort this man, but some things nobody deserved to have to endure merely to be allowed to find death at the end of it. Who, oh who would think to look for the artist there?

"Why did you do it?" he asked. He let his hand fall. "They were children."

The artist shuddered and turned away, but the artist was Ken too and the why of it would change nothing.

"I would have stopped him," Ken told him. "If he'd told me. I wouldn't have let him do this, I—He didn't tell me."
All the artist asked was, "What's going to happen to me?" Already his voice sounded hoarse. He must have been screaming.
Ken looked away, down at his bandaged hands, fingers curling in the flimsy fabric of his pajama top. "I don't know," he admitted. "I… can't remember. There's voices, and… and I guess it's personal. I guess it's what you bring down with you. You'll probably see the kids. The first one, anyway. Don't expect him to understand."
"What did you see?"

Ken just shook his head: he couldn't answer that one either. Not to have it make sense, anyway. He'd seen his friends, he'd seen his father – and yet that hadn't been it at all. It was strange, but he felt himself starting to smile.

"You wouldn't get it," he said. "Even if I told you, it wouldn't—you'd be all, why is that so bad? I told you, it's personal, it's—" He broke off. Leaned forward slightly, as if he were confiding a secret. "It's you," he said. "Whatever you see, it's all you."
"That doesn't make sense," the artist whispered.
"It will." It wasn't a threat, merely an observation. "Look, it… well, whatever you see, it kinda comes out wrong. You can only be yourself, right? And if you're anywhere near as bad as I am, that's gonna be fucking horrible to watch."

The artist trembled, he closed his eyes. Something in his expression told Ken he understood him perfectly. "Can you kill me?"

"I'm sorry," Ken told him. "I would if I could."

Before he died, this man would be forced to endure a foretaste of Hell, a Hell that was far worse than anything the ancients could have dreamed up because it was so much more horribly personal. He would suffer in ways he couldn't even comprehend yet. It would get so much worse for him before God had the grace to offer him an exit and it would be wrong of Ken to walk away now, terribly so—but he was getting to his feet, he was turning away. Bad enough living it once. He couldn't go through it again, not even at second hand. He just couldn't.

The artist was looking at him. Even with his back turned, Ken could feel the weight of his gaze. "Will you be back?"
And Ken said, "No."

He opened his eyes and there was nothing.

it grows in darkness

One of Ken's biggest secrets was that had been scared of the dark until he was almost eleven. Nine years down the line, he gazed wide-eyed into unbroken shadow and heard himself bite back a scream.

It was too dark. Far too dark and far too quiet: there was nothing for him to hold onto. Just the darkness before his eyes and the sound of his own breathing, too fast and too shallow, and, so far off he hardly knew whether or not he should believe in it, a soft, grumbling purr that could have been a thousand and one different things and probably wasn't even there at all… He was alone. Ken was trapped in the dark and he was all alone.

We sell flowers, he was thinking, the phrase repeating like a snatch of a half-forgotten prayer. God in Heaven, we sell flowers. The Lord is my shepherd—

There were hands snatching at his shoulders, there was a body bending to his and gathering him to their chest: Ken felt his muscles tense; for a single desperate moment he forgot to breathe. He gasped, a curse caught and carried on his breath; he was fighting, frantic and desperate, to break free of the snare that was the stranger's arms, sending his attacker sprawling with a single violent shove that left his hands throbbing painfully and his arms aching. Stay away, God damn you. Oh Christ, oh Jesus just stay back!

"Ken," someone was shouting, a million miles distant. "Ken!"

Then light, as if it really were that simple.

wounds within

And it was only Youji after all. Youji, his hair tumbled as if he had been sleeping, half-kneeling on the edge of his bed with one hand resting on the switch of his bedside light. Youji who, by the look in his weary green eyes, was barely less shaken and afraid than he was – but he was solid and real and there, and Ken clung to him as if he were driftwood.

"Youji," Ken said. Then, "Mother of God, Youji."

He was trembling, his unsplinted fingers digging into his friend's shoulders so firmly Youji must have been able to tell that Ken was frightened that he would vanish completely if he were to let go, even if it were only for a second. For a moment he simply sat there, hands by his sides, and let Ken cling to him like a child woken from a nightmare, before tentatively wrapping his arms about his friend's body and pulling him close. Shivering, Ken pressed closer, holding Youji so tightly it must have hurt. Please be real, the boy's taut, desperate embrace was saying. Please, oh please, just tell me you're really there…

"I was so fucking scared, Youji!"
"It's okay," Youji said, because what else could he say to him? "You're at home. You're safe."
"I thought I was going to die," Ken said, and even his voice shook. "Oh Christ, I… I was so scared, I really thought I was going to die—"
"It's okay, Kenken," Youji whispered. "It's gonna be okay."

the mystery of faith

It ended where it had began: it ended with a woman, standing calm and dour in a shadow-haunted room. There'd been a mission and a target, smiling and unremarkable, and there'd been a simple mistake but missions, like stories, had to come to an end somehow. All things considered, Ken Hidaka thought it could have been a lot worse.

Ken was hurting and he was frightened, shaken to the core, but he was home and he was safe and they had come for him after all. Close the book here and it was almost a happy ending…

"I'm sorry," said Manx.

Something had changed since he had seen her last. For all the makeup and the neat little suit she looked somehow different. She looked older, worn and strangely diminished: she was, for now at least, only human after all. She wasn't Manx of Kritiker any more, only a woman who had been taxed – God knew why: Ken was sure it would have nothing to do with him, a missing agent who could be replaced at a snap of the fingers – almost to the limit of her endurance. Manx simply looked tired, and when she spoke her voice had been as weary as her gaze. I'm sorry, she said.

Here and now, he could almost believe that she meant it.

Propped up against his pillows, idly fidgeting with the IV tube that snaked across the sheets, Ken looked up at her and managed a small smile.

"Yeah, Manx," he said quietly. "Me too."

Manx frowned and glanced briefly over at Youji, stood slouched against the wall with his arms folded and a cigarette slow-burning its way to extinction between his lips, raising one elegant eyebrow in a silent query. The look on her face said she didn't understand a word of it, and she sighed slightly when Youji simply shrugged.

"No, Siberian," she said. Tired, she sounded so tired of it all. "There was an intelligence failure which Kritiker must take sole responsibility for and which I assure you—assure all of you will never happen again."
"But I'd have told him everything."
"So would any of us," she said simply, "under the right pressure. He was a spy, Ken."

John Clark, huh? The saddest thing about it was it wasn't even a surprise. Ken just sighed, turning away to gaze out of his window at another unremarkable Tokyo night – the lights of the cars prowling along rain-smeared streets, a damp cat darting into an alleyway, a young man at a bus stop eating soba noodles from the carton, a knot of stranded girls, one holding her handbag over her head, another wailing about the rainwater ruining her brand new boots. Saturday night declared business as usual and Manx stepped back from his bedside, the level, dispassionate look slipping back into eyes that could have been pretty, if only they hadn't been so cold.

"I owe you an apology as well, Manx," Youji said into the silence. "I shouldn't have shouted. I'm very sorry."
Manx dismissed it with a wave of the hand. "There's no need for that."
"Manx." Omi, waiting quietly in the doorway clutching a sheaf of paper and looking for all the world like a boy waiting to hand in an assignment to a teacher who had far more on her mind than marking, broke his silence. "About the report. I've been checking police records but I can't find anything about Morin or Nakajima. It doesn't look like either of them have been missed yet, so—"
"It can wait," Manx said. "I'll want it in by Wednesday afternoon. We'll need a copy of Siberian's medical records, let Birman know if you run into difficulties. Siberian…" She granted Ken a rare smile which had him flushing awkwardly and pretending a fascination he didn't feel with his bedsheets. "Get some rest. We're standing you down until you're fit for duty again."

And Manx picked up her bag and left, ushering Omi out before her and, careful as a night nurse slipping from the room of her sleeping patient, quietly closing the door behind them. Youji – and somehow it didn't feel strange at all – Youji stayed, flipping his cigarette through the open window behind Ken's couch, then settling back down into the chair he had dragged by the bed. There was a novel on the floor, and he bent to retrieve it. Here they were and Youji was reading about James fucking Bond, again. You couldn't make it up.

"It's too quiet in here," Ken said.
Youji put down his book. "I'll turn on the radio."

That was all there was, for a time. The lazy patter of rain on the window and the radio talking to itself in the corner, girl after interchangeable girl quietly singing pretty nonsense about love, and Youji sat in the chair by the bed gazing at Ken over the banked pages of a battered novel pretending to read about spies, as if they hadn't all heard quite enough from them to last a lifetime. Ken gave him a funny look and watched the raindrops crawling down the glass, and the steady pulse of the crowds on the streets.

"Youji," Ken asked, after a time he never counted had slipped past, "why are you still here?"
Youji just smiled. Said, "You've been alone long enough. It's not the same without you, kiddo, you know that?"
"Huh? What the Hell does that mean?"
"You're an idiot, Kenken," Youji said with a chuckle. "Get some sleep, okay?"

Okay. With Youji's arm braced about his shoulders, Ken sat forward to let his friend sort out his pillows and, when Youji tugged the bedsheets down to stop them from tangling about his legs as he lay down, he shivered in the breeze from the open windows. It would be cold outside, as cold as the grave – he caught clumsily at the blanket as it was drawn back over him, pulling it more closely about himself. Fighting against pain and his own stiff limbs, Ken winced as Youji's fingers brushed against his bruises. Even with the painkillers, it hurt to move.

Youji didn't ask about the light, or about the radio. He just sat back down, the book held loosely in his hand, smiling as if there were nowhere else in the world that he would rather be – not the arms of a woman, not even his own bed. Ken had been alone long enough, and all Youji wanted was to see that he wasn't any more.

"You should go," Ken said. He said, though he knew it wasn't true and wouldn't be true for a long time to come, "I'll be fine by myself."
Youji didn't move. He said, "I know, but right now I'd rather you didn't have to be."
"Honest, I'm okay. You gotta sleep too, I—"
"Ken." Youji cut him off. "Please. Just humor me, okay?"

(It had been hard on Youji too, and on them all. Ken knew he'd never understand how hard it must have been.)

It was silly and it was childish to refuse to admit he might need this: Ken knew it but he didn't care. All that mattered was that now it was Youji's idea, and now it felt all right that he should stay.

Ken fought to free one hand from the bedsheets, and reached out to rest it upon Youji's bare wrist. It hurt when Youji's warm, callused fingers closed gently about his own, it left him flinching and catching his breath, but what was pain in the face of the knowledge that he was no longer alone? His friends had come for him because they cared, and he was safe and he was warm and he was going to get better—Ken was hurting, he was frightened and shaken to the core, and he couldn't remember ever feeling more alive. He was going to live, and he was going to be okay.

"Thank you," Ken whispered.

And, when he was recovered, he would ask Youji to drive him out of the city and they would find an empty field, the wind whispering in the long grass, and he would lie on his back, and close his eyes, and feel the sun on his face.

-ende-