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Die Fürsprache (bait and switch)	By : quietladybirman Category: Weiß Kreuz > General Views: 2425 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Weiß Kreuz, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Die Fürsprache

(bait and switch)

a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila

________

+ sanctuary

It is qualitatively different to close your eyes against light than to do it in darkness. Shifting patterns against the retinas, a certain burnished quality to the blackness behind the eyelids, betrays the presence of light on the face.

He has known nothing for – it hardly matters how long. Time is an irrelevance when it passes entirely unheeded. Now, vaguely aware of the light and the sudden return, however tentatively, of sensation, he tries to open his eyes but he can’t. Can’t seem to make himself move. Can’t seem to make himself do anything save breathe, aware only of brightness and cold and sudden unrelieved pain, and wait. Wait. What is he waiting for, for fuck’s sake? What else is there left to give? Sick of waiting. He hopes, hopelessly, that they will at least have the grace to kill him quickly. Remembers—

Someone is carrying him, holding him to their chest: has to be a man, who is this why are they touching him? The contact terrifies him. He wants to protest. Wants to twist in their unbearable grasp and struggle free, demand they get off, let go, don’t touch me, Goddammit! but he can’t make the words come any more than he can push the marauding hands away. He is conscious of a sudden insane need to start screaming and not stop. Don’t, oh God, don’t…

Then voices; simple, unrevealing conversation. Two voices and both familiar but he feels far too hurt and frightened and exhausted to care quite why. Can’t even remember if they belong to friends or enemies.

“No, not on his back, you’ll hurt him!”

“I know. Stand back, please.”

“Hang on, you’ll need the sheet turned down…”

And it is just sound. As the man holding him places him gently on his side and steps, thank God! away from him (so they’re probably not enemies), the voices seem to recede, becoming little more than a vague murmuring, like a forgotten radio playing in the room next door when drifting off to sleep. Now he notices the cold again though he understands, however vaguely, that he isn’t quite so cold now as he was before he found himself here, wherever here is. Someone he can’t see draws a heavy blanket up and over him (almost has to be among friends) and, though it hurts where it brushes against his ravaged back, that pain seems a small price to pay for warmth and comfort when he thought he’d never have either again.

He doesn’t so much want to cry as feel he should be crying, but he doesn’t. He simply lies still and luxuriates in warmth, listening to the voices without ever once hearing them and, offhandedly, lets reality slip from his grasp again.

Are you going back to the hospital, Aya-kun?

Yes. You’ll be okay here?

Mm. We’ll be fine. Oh, can you call me, when you get there? I – I’ll need to know Youji-kun’s condition for the re—

You don’t need to rationalize concern, Omi.

… Aya-kun?

It hurts to move. Further analysis is impossible. The why is ever-present, little more than half-hidden beneath the simple fact of injury and he doesn’t want to think about it. It won’t go away if he pretends, for now, that the pain means nothing.

Still cold, still horribly aware that he wants to cry and denying it because there is nothing to do but deny it while he still has his pride, or what remains of it, Ken lies on his front under stifling sheets and searches grimly for sleep. He is exhausted and feverish and harried by his own thoughts; his head and arms and chest and back hurt and coughing is an ordeal, he is torn apart inside, he wants to scream. He never has liked the way illness walks hand in hand with injury.

Aya, a pair of narrow-framed glasses balanced schoolmarm-style on the end of his nose, watches him over the banked pages of a paperback book as if waiting for something and Ken wishes he would go away. He appreciates the sentiment but feels stifled by the demonstration of his teammates’ anxiety. He doesn’t feel he deserves their concern, moreover he wants only peace. The ticking of the clock, the faint rasp of turning pages as Aya loses patience and his attention drifts back to his novel, are the only sounds. Ken wants to turn the radio on, wants something real and concrete and focused in the now to cling to like a drowning man to driftwood and so keep himself from thinking, but a swell of dizziness and the sudden pain lancing through his body when he tries to sit traps him where he lies. Ken turns away to hide the tears in his eyes. He tells himself it is only because he hurts.

(Never mind that he is besieged by memory. He remembers the damp only too clearly, remembers breathing in air that felt clammy and the hideous chill of the uneven cement floor against bare skin; he hadn’t wanted to lie there. Remembers shock, humiliation, desperate fury. The memories hurt too, will go on hurting long after his injuries have, superficially at least, healed. I didn’t want to, I didn’t want him to do it…)

He wants Schuldig dead so badly it is palpable. He can imagine with desperate clarity the soft snick of his bugnuk claws slipping into place, the feel of it as they tear through tissue, catching slightly on bone or cartilage only to be wrenched free with a single sickening twist. He sees glazing eyes and slowing pulses, can almost sense the sudden hot spray of blood pattering soft as spring rain across face and neck and smeared over hands and forearms, cliché of a murderer. Even in extremis Schuldig, Ken thinks, will smile still, as if to die at all were just another grim joke. Ken can imagine every single detail, every last lingering second of the man’s murder and knows that, perhaps uniquely, he would feel no guilt for it. And it would make no difference, none at all.

Revenge is senseless. Empty. That was the secret Kase murmured the night he died.

Might as well say he can do nothing. Ken is devastated, he is furious, he hates Schuldig but despises himself. He misses his mother. He wishes it was last week forever, wishes he didn’t feel himself bereaved…

He cries silently into his pillow and prays Aya hasn’t noticed. He can’t stand the annihilation that is his friends’ sympathy.

You remember those briefings Manx gave us?

Well… yes, but—

They’re crap. Totally goddamn useless.

They tell the girls in the shop that his father has died.

Omi came up with the cover story on the first night, bickering briefly with Aya over the details. They reject heart attacks as too vague, finally settling on a stroke. When Omi tells him about it later, an awkward expression on his face (well, we had to say something, Ken-kun), Ken only nods and smiles vaguely and says, all right.

As an excuse it seems perfectly serviceable, his brief absence justified by the claim he was out of the city, his pallor and uncharacteristic silence and air of discontented distraction explained away as grief so raw it bleeds. A fortuitous cold snap and the fallacy of memory keeps anyone from questioning the fact he has taken to wearing long-sleeved tops. With lowered heads, with sidelong glances through falls of glossy hair, the girls whisper behind their hands; the braver ones offer clumsy condolences and vague reminiscences of relatives of their own. Two of them mention pets – they can’t help their innocence. Ken attempts a smile and says he’d rather not talk about it and they pretend to understand.

Ken misses Youji and can’t work up the nerve to go and see him (he hasn’t ventured outside once yet; the world seems all at once to be a big and crowded and frightening place and he is alone, he is all alone). He wonders if Youji hates him, and if he should take up Omi’s single tentative offer of – he doesn’t know what to call it, support perhaps? Do you want to talk about it? He couldn’t even answer.

Aside from that they haven’t mentioned the rape. Ken wishes they would. He suspects they’re waiting for him to do it and he doesn’t know if he can. He can’t find the words for what he’s feeling. He longs for his friends to dare to be indiscreet.

He withdraws. Ken talks to no one if he doesn't have to, keeps his head lowered, seems to draw defensively in on himself when he sits; it's nothing but a betrayal but he can't make himself stop. He carelessly pushes up one sleeve exposing an arm bandaged to the elbow and hastily tugs it back down the moment he realizes what he has done. Both his teammates notice he has stopped answering the phone. Manx arrives, as ever without warning, but for once she arrives empty-handed and tells them only that Kritiker is temporarily standing them down from duty before she leaves, frustrated by the way her agents have closed ranks against her.

Aya broods about it all evening, causing Omi no end of relief when he sullenly slips off to the hospital, but Ken can’t work out if Persia means the move to be seen as a punishment or a favor.

What exactly happened between you and Schwarz?

Nothing. Nothing happened.

Oh, Siberian. You never were a very convincing liar—

Leave me alone, Manx.

Ken never dreams. More precisely he never remembers his dreams through anything other than the discreet traces they leave behind. He is thankful for it; he is at least dimly aware that a lot of his dreams are extremely unpleasant and have been for a while. Often, sometimes as often as two or three times in the course of a single week, he rises with the lingering awareness that he has slept extremely poorly. It’s one of the reasons Ken goes running. It wakes him up; it helps to tire him out. He usually sleeps better when he’s exhausted. But he can’t bring himself to leave the shop, he is still too sick to run. It bothers him. He misses the hush of the muted predawn streets, the way the city holds it breath as it waits for the day to begin. His sleep is suffering. He is dreaming nightly now and he knows that they distress him.

This one has him wake screaming. And still he can’t remember a thing.

It isn’t any kind of comfort any more. Now he finds he wants, more, he needs to know. He needs to know what’s lurking in his subconscious because not to know frightens him far more than he will ever admit. He can’t destroy something he doesn’t understand. It isn’t fair, Ken thinks furiously. This isn’t fair, why me, haven’t I lost enough?

(Why do some people’s lives run so graceful and smooth all the way from birth to dispiritingly easy death when here he is, nineteen years old – just – and already utterly out of options, presiding over a train wreck?)

Ken has been murdered and left alive.

Half three in the morning and Ken stares wide-eyed at the ceiling, and feels stained, and wonders if he should take another shower. Another shower: he’d need to get Omi to re-dress the wounds on his back again. It wouldn’t be so bad if Omi didn’t always agree so readily, why does the kid have to understand? Is he is more concerned by the tainted feeling that clings to his skin, or the pain that standing and walking will cause him? Who showers at half three in the morning, and just what is he trying to wash away? Perhaps he is losing his mind. Somewhere in the back of his mind Schuldig smiles at him and he’s too tired to deal with it, too tired to much care if he’s going crazy, or rather more so, or not. He isn’t sure if Schuldig is an improvement on Kase but at least Schuldig only hates him.

To Ken's mind everything gets worse when tainted with exhaustion. He turns onto his front and closes his eyes and feels like the only person in the world who’s still awake and who cares if it’s noon in America? The worst thing is that this isn’t even new; it’s the same old problem showing off a brand new coat. Oh, go away. Just go away.

Sometime this week Youji will be discharged.

He already knows it’s hardly worth trying to get back to sleep.

Where’s Ken?

… You mean he isn’t in his room?

And though Ken has always been good at running, even he can’t run forever.

He knows he has to confront it sometime and better that he does it now, on his own terms, than that he is forced into it on someone else’s. The decision, like so many of his decisions, is an impetuous one and he slips away from Aya and Omi without a goodbye, hesitating on the shop’s doorstep only momentarily before slipping unheeded into the evening-crowded streets. He doesn’t want the others trying to talk him out of resolution because he knows they’d manage. Doesn’t want Omi, citing his continued debility, pointing out the painfully obvious – that he’s in no state to go walking. Ken knows he isn’t and he doesn’t care, or not enough; he feels cooped up and frustrated. He needs to do – anything, as long as it’s not sit home and think. Ken is tired of thinking.

Tired of hiding, too, of letting Schuldig win by default. He always has been competitive.

He doesn’t want them to know where he’s going. Not when it would probably lead to the offer of company, a lift down, someone, metaphorically, to shelter behind even if it is Omi and Omi is smaller than him – little things, all well-meant, all of which would make what he has to do impossible. Some things have to be done alone.

The city seems noisier than he remembers it being, the sky trapped between oversized buildings; he is caught off-guard by the scale of things. He finds himself wondering why they, whoever they are, build everything so tall. The city is so big and the individual so small, so easily lost in the noise and the clamor. He wonders, is this deliberate? It is cold outside, and Ken is thankful for his jacket. Thankful, too, for his own comparative anonymity. For now he still fits in, at least on the surface.

He is surprised by how quickly he reaches the hospital. Ken seems to remember the journey as taking longer than that. He is sure, too, that he has walked more slowly than usual. For a moment he does little more than linger on the paving outside, gazing up at the bruised and menacing skies and ignoring the ebb and flow of people about the entrance; a pair of housemen smoking snatched cigarettes, an anxious salaryman with new father written all over him half-hidden behind an expensive bouquet (should he have brought flowers? How stupid to arrive empty-handed and him a florist), a weary young mother struggling with a fractious infant in an overburdened pushchair. The child casts a soft toy to the floor in a fit of pique and Ken instinctively retrieves it, brushing off the woman’s slightly distracted thank you. It’s nothing, he says, and means it. After that it seems silly to stay by the doors.

Ken realizes he is frightened, but he can’t handle the uncertainty any longer. At least if he knows what Youji thinks of him he won’t have to worry about it any more. There isn’t much he can do about his situation, but he needs the therapy of action. He needs to at least be able to pretend he is something other than helpless.
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Die Fürsprache (bait and switch)