May 24, 1986

a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

Standard Copyright Disclaimer: Not mine, make no profit and mean no offense. Weiss Kreuz remains the property of Takehito Koyasu, Kyoko Tsuchiya, Project Weiss and TV Tokyo.

Author's Notes: Ken Hidaka's past, like his eye color, isn't so much a matter of solid canon fact but picking what you like and sticking with it. His life before he joined the J-league is only mentioned in passing, and half of what's mentioned contradicts the other half. What we do know: he was brought up Roman Catholic, spent a period of time in a Church orphanage, and his father was probably what we in the West refer to as a Deadbeat Dad. Beyond this point things get a little fuzzier, but I tend to stick with canon as established in the Holy Children Drama CD – specifically that his mother died when he was still very young and Ken utterly failed to deal with it. That would be the genesis of this fanfic, which started life as an RP post and got completely out of hand.

Warnings: A small child being profoundly miserable.

It starts small.

It starts with the clinic and a lazy late summer afternoon trapped just outside the windows, and Ken home from kindergarten with a clay pot in his bag and his mother by his side and the admonition to be good for the doctor still fresh in his mind.

The doctor is rolling up his sleeve, wiping alcohol on his upper arm. Ken, sitting on the edge of the examining couch, curls his fists in the front of his shirt and bites down hard on his lip. He isn't going to cry. The last time they'd done this to him he'd cried but that was for babies, not for big kids of five and a half who started school in the spring—He manages only to gasp when the needle bites into his arm: a sudden stinging pain, like the sting of a giant insect. He didn't cry, though. Babies cried.

"That's a brave boy you've got there," the doctor says. "You must be very proud of him."

Ken grins up at the man through a film of tears. His mother gives him a fond smile and ruffles his hair; there is something in her eyes he cannot begin to understand.

"He is," she says. "I am. Doctor? Can I speak with you a minute?"

After that, it's never quite the same.

-o-

He's not quite sure how much longer it takes to sink in that something is the matter with Mama. Perhaps the third, maybe the fourth time in as many weeks they take the bus down to the clinic and sit there and wait on uncomfortable waiting-room chairs, with Ken swinging his legs and yawning in boredom and Mama looking more and more anxious by the visit, and nobody even thinking to ask him to take his shirt off and sit blinking on the couch while a stethoscope is pressed to his chest. The third, maybe the fourth time, he realizes that if he's not sick then Mama must be: he has a book about people who work and that's what doctors do, isn't it? They make sick people better.

He wonders how that can be when she isn't coughing and isn't staying in bed. Mama doesn't look ill. Just sleepy, and she doesn't seem to want to play with him very much lately...

She seems to be hugging him more.

-o-

The doctors want Mama to see a consultant. A consultant, Mama tells him, is a special kind of doctor who only cures one kind of illness. The doctors at the clinic, she says, know a little about lots of kinds of sickness, but a consultant knows a lot about a little. Ken thinks that must make them much less clever but Mama tells him they're just as clever as the normal doctors, but in a different way. She says consultants work at a special kind of clinic called a hospital, with lots of other doctors and nurses. She'll be going there for a while, instead of the local clinic. Did he understand?

Ken nods and smiles; he sits at the table and draws boats until dinner because he's going to be a boat driver when he grows up. A sailor, Mama says, and he nods: yes, a sailor. He'll go to sea and find treasure and give it to her. He can't find his yellow crayon so he draws the sun in orange but Mama says they're the best boats anyway, so it's all okay.

She kisses him on the head. She asks him to clear his crayons away so she can lay the table.

There's another set of waiting-rooms, another doctor. This one is bigger and, where the clinic doctor is a nice man like Papa, the new one is almost as old as Grandpa, about a hundred and Ken thinks that he must be a very clever doctor because although he's so old he isn't dead yet. There are ladies in white dresses who smile at him and tell him that Mama won't be long, and wonder over his head what he's doing there at all.

Papa comes home: he can hear him talking to Mama as he lies in bed. His parents' voices are low, their conversation full of long and difficult words Ken doesn't understand – what are they talking about, he asks Tiger, but Tiger doesn't know either. They're strange, those words: he can't even remember them properly and still they bring him dreams. All he understands is that the words are strange and ugly-sounding and they make the grown-ups sound scared, like the names of witches and monsters. He didn't used to think that Papas were scared of anything…

Sometimes, he thinks he can hear Mama crying. He gets up and asks for a glass of water, dragging Tiger by the tail.

"Ken," Papa asks him, "why are you still awake?"
He says, "I don't know."

-o-

"Where are you going?"

The first time she vanishes, she's gone for a long time. They don't tell him where at first, just that Mama's not well and needs to go away for a while so that she can get better. She looks pale and tired and, he thinks, not so big as she once did as she puts her hand on his shoulder and tells him, as his father carries her bags to a taxi, to be brave. He would have to be brave and try not to trouble his grandparents, because things were going to be a little difficult for them right now as well.

"Mama? When will you be back?"
She doesn't reply. She simply pulls him into an embrace, she kisses his brow. She says, "Be good."

-o-

The first time she vanishes, they send him to stay with Granny and Grandpa. He's done that millions of times, of course. He's even been there by himself a few times now he's getting bigger, but it feels different this time, and he doesn't understand why.

Ken has been there about a week when Granny asks him if she can help him make Mama a card. He draws boats, of course, and a dog. Granny sticks his picture to the front of a piece of stiff yellow card, and prints some big characters above it. That, she tells him, says 'Get Well Soon'. He wants to put glitter on it, but she says no. They keep things very clean, where your Mama is. They won't even let Granny bring her flowers, which seems funny. Ken has a new book now, all about going to hospital, and all the sick people have flowers in that.

So instead Grandpa shows him how to fold a paper crane. For luck, he says. He gives him some paper, brightly colored and patterned, like present paper only thick and stiff, and shows him where to fold. It's hard. Ken's first shaky attempt looks more like a sick seagull next to Grandpa's but Grandpa says he'll get better, if he only keeps trying. You can't expect, he says, to be perfect right away. Just keep trying your best.

They're kind to him, but he misses his room and his toys and Mama, he misses Mama most of all. He wishes he was at home and doesn't know why he isn't: Granny, when can I go home?

Be good, Mama said: Ken wonders what he did that was so wrong.

He wonders, if he does everything the grown-ups tell him to – if he takes his baths and eats everything on his plate (even the mushrooms, even though they're horrible) and doesn't get cross at the shops and goes to bed when Granny says it's time – if he does all that and doesn't complain, will she come back?

-o-

Something is the matter with Mama. She's different when she comes home. Thinner. She wakes late. They'd told him she was going away to get well: now here she is back again and, for the first time, Ken can tell that she really is sick.

He had hoped, when she came home, things would go back to normal but they're not, just strange and scary and sad. Mama no longer takes him to the park, or to kindergarten: she hands the job off to Auntie Yamada. Auntie isn't really his auntie, of course, she just lives upstairs and has a little girl who goes to the same kindergarten he does, but Sumire is three and she has stupid pigtails and she thinks Ken is mean. Ken hates Sumire because she's whiny and refuses to talk to her all the way there, and while Auntie is nice to him she's not Mama, so Ken can't help disliking her a bit too.

Mama scolds him for it when he gets home and Ken is almost too angry with her to care because she should be there and she isn't and they won't tell him why. Why won't she get better? Wasn't that why she went away?

She's supposed to be getting better now she's home, the book says so, but Mama isn't getting well. She's tired all the time now. It's all she can do to drag herself through the day; some mornings even getting out of bed is enough to exhaust her. Dinner comes from the freezer or from boxes; Papa goes to work with his shirts inexpertly pressed; Ken can't remember the last time they went to Mass as a family and even there he can't escape it. His father has started lingering after the service, started talking in a low voice to Father Kitano: though he feels guilty for even thinking it, Ken doesn't want to go home. Maybe Papa doesn't want to, either.

Advent Sunday and Hinarin's talking to him and he wishes she'd leave him alone.

"Is your mom gonna die?"
"No. Go away."
"But daddy says she's got cancer."
"No she hasn't!"

The denial is reflexive. He only realizes after he's said it that he doesn't know what cancer is.

The girl purses her lips into a frown; she says something else, but he's no longer listening. Ken gets up and walks away, out the church doors and out into the postage-stamp-sized churchyard. It's cold outside, and he watches the breath curling from his lips as he kicks the leaves out of their neatly-raked piles until the sexton yells at him to stop.

He doesn't want to go home.

-o-

It has a name now, the thing that is wrong with Mama. Ken hoards the knowledge guiltily, well aware that the grown-ups think he doesn't understand. They don't discuss it in front of him. He's not supposed to know.

After Christmas he asks Hinarin what cancer is, but she doesn't know either.

-o-

Spring comes and Mama's hair falls out. She wraps her head in brightly-colored scarves and it doesn't help. Her skin's gone a funny color and the paintbox shades of her headscarves just leave her looking iller. Ken takes to tugging at his own hair in secret, but it stays stuck to his head as firmly as ever. He doesn't get it. He caught Sumire's cold just from walking to kindergarten with her but he still hasn't got the cancer from Mama. He wonders if maybe she ate something funny, or if she sat next to a bad person who was out without a cold mask. He wonders why God has spared him and Papa, but let her get sick. He crawls onto her bed after kindergarten, shoes still thoughtlessly on, and she holds him in her arms and murmurs soft things to him.

She goes away again, then again, and every time she comes back looking more and more ill. Papa's barely home and when he is he's preoccupied, dazed. He talks in whispers on the telephone and his conversation is choked with new bad-sounding words, words like terminal and palliative. Ken wants to know what the words mean but he doesn't know who to ask. None of his friends know, and Papa won't tell him.

(Aren't doctors supposed to help people? All his books say they make sick people get well again. Why won't they make Mama well?)

He's starting to feel scared. Really scared, all the time. What's happening to Mama? Why won't it stop?

And yet every morning he still half-expects to wake up and find her better. It doesn't happen the day he starts school, either, and it's disappointing all over again. Ken, a new rucksack slung over his narrow shoulders, stands by the side of Mama's bed as she fusses with the collar of his shirt and struggles to smooth his hair, and he wants to tell her it's okay not to because it seems so hard for her, but the last time he did she'd held him too tight and cried and cried until he was crying, too. Ken doesn't want her to cry again so he gives her a clumsy grin and says he'll be fine by himself and she's not to feel bad, and as tears stand out in the corner of his mother's eyes he wonders why it didn't work. She strokes his hair, pulls him into an awkward hug. She tells him to be good.

All the other kids have someone with them. A couple have their fathers, but most of them have their moms. He alone is separate and they stare at him, children and their parents both.

"Where's your mother?" The boy sitting next to him asks.
"She's tired," Ken says. Then, "Go away."

-o-

A kid called Hiro gets walked right into the classroom by his mother, every day for the first two weeks, and every time she leaves him he cries. Hiro is a baby.

Ken pushes him over in the yard and he's scolded and sent to stand in the hall. He decides he doesn't like school.

-o-

Mama isn't going to die. She can't die, can she? Old people die, and Mama isn't old. Not really old, not like Granny and Grandpa and the consultant…

But he'd come home one afternoon (walking, as always, alone) and she'd just gone: Papa's bag was in the hall, but there was no sign of his parents. Mama's bed was unmade, there were plates in the sink still with the food on them, and he'd wanted a drink but he'd dropped the glass and it had broken and there was juice everywhere, and Auntie Yamada must have heard because she had come and taken him back to her apartment, and Ken had thought she was going to scold him for making a mess, but she didn't. All she did was make him some food, and look at him so sadly it made him cross.

"Why are you here?" Sumire asks, when Auntie Yamada's not listening. "This isn't your house."
Ken scowls at her. "It's not like I want to be!"

He gets out his book because he can read and she can't, and he sits on the floor and stares at the pictures until she leaves him alone.

He had hoped that Mama would come back later, but when the door opens it's only Granny. Ken goes back home with her, he waits in the living room as she rinses and stacks the dirty dishes and tidies Mama's bed, and cleans the juice and broken glass from the floor. There's a cartoon on with robots and fighting, and it's a bit scary and he can tell it's really for bigger kids but Granny doesn't tell him to stop watching. He watches it all and half of the next one before she comes back, carrying Mama's big shoulder bag, and turns off the television.

"You'll be staying with Grandpa and me for a while," is all she says.
Ken sighs. He gets to his feet. "Oh-kay."

The grown-ups are waiting for something. He doesn't know what, just that they're waiting, and it's not a happy kind of waiting – not like the way he waits for the holidays, or his birthday. This time, they don't seem to want to answer when he asks where Mama's gone. She's somewhere she can be looked after, is all Grandpa will say. Will they make her better, Ken asks him, but Grandpa doesn't seem to have heard. Grandpa, he says again, will they make her better there? He asks Granny if they should make another card, and she smiles in a wrong sort of way and says maybe and then they don't.

He still can't make his cranes look right.

-o-

Mama's hospital isn't as big as the one in his books so it must not be as good and it worries him. They've gone to see her together – Granny and Grandpa, and Papa, and him. Mama is in bed when they get there, all slumped to one side like she's falling over; her eyes are closed and she won't open them, not even when Papa sits by her bed and holds her hand, and talks to her quietly. Ken hangs back, he clutches Grandpa's hand. He doesn't like it here.

"It smells bad," he says. "Granny, you said Mama couldn't have flowers…"
Granny looks upset. She looks at Grandpa, and it's him who answers. "It's different now, Ken."
"Oh," Ken says. Then, "Is she getting better?"

Granny says nothing, but she cries all the way home. She thinks Ken doesn't hear.

He never sees Mama again.

-o-

The sixth time she vanishes they tell Ken that she'll never be coming back and he doesn't understand, he doesn't understand a word. She always came back before, didn't she? Why should this time be so different?

It is late May and already uncomfortably hot: less than a year since he sat on the examination couch clenching his fists in the hem of his shirt and telling himself he wouldn't cry. Mama is gone. He's a few inches taller, longer-limbed; he can count to a hundred and write his own name; his eyes are grave. The rest of the first grade think he's weird and that stupid baby Hiro tells everyone he's mean, but Ken doesn't care if they all hate him just as long as they leave him alone. It already feels like he's been at school for years and years; already he wishes he could stop going.

She goes away forever and he is shamefully, guiltily grateful: there will be, at least, no more school for a while…

Mama had told him to be good, and he hadn't been. Maybe that was why she wouldn't come back.

They've been to Mass; they're dressed in black. The scent of incense is still heavy in Ken's hair, even now they're walking home. Church was interesting today and pretty with all the flowers, and afterward there'd been food and everyone was so nice to them. But he was almost the only kid there and Mama's church friends had all looked at him strangely, like he'd done something strange when he was sure he hadn't, and when he'd smiled at them one of them had started to cry in that funny crumpled-up way grown-ups do. After that Ken had been shy, and stuck close to Papa and was careful not to smile at anybody else until he forgot.

It's funny, but Mama still hasn't come back. Everyone else was there and they all talked about her all day, even Father Kitano had done, but she was nowhere to be seen no matter how hard Ken looked. She still isn't.

"Where's mama?" Ken asks.

He's been asking it a lot and he'd stop, really he would, if only someone would give him a proper answer. For a moment he thinks he is in trouble, and is going to be shouted at. Instead – after a long, giddy moment of near-fear – he is pulled to his father's chest, held so tightly it squeezes the breath from him: Papa, that hurts—

When he's finally freed from the snare of his father's arms, the collar of his shirt is damp.

-o-

Mama is dead: Ken knows this. He just wishes he understood what dead meant, apart from sleeping for ever.

It is autumn. The leaves are turning brown again; the air grows cool and crisp; Ken is back at school and, now that it's far too late for it to matter, they have taught him how to write the words for what he has lost. He clumsily traces the characters over and over, resenting every single awkward stroke, and Miyazawa-sensei tells him he's still not holding his pencil correctly and shows him, again, how his fingers should grip it.

Now they tell him to draw his family, and for the longest time Ken simply sits there and stares at the paper they gave him. Shinya in the next seat has a mother and a father and a big sister on the swim team, and a new baby brother and a cat and a goldfish and Ken hates him for it. Ken starts to draw a boat then scribbles all over it; he chews on his pencil, he gazes out of the window, he watches the falling leaves and wonders what he did wrong that Shinya didn't.

"Ken-kun," Miyazawa-sensei scolds him, "Why aren't you drawing your family?"
And Ken says, "I don't want to."

-ende-