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Erlösung	By : quietladybirman Category: Weiß Kreuz > General Views: 1943 -:- 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.

Chapter List
- 1
- 2
Erlösung

a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila
Standard Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz, its characters, storyline, indices and all the rest of it is not and never shall be mine, which makes me cry bitter emo tears of woe and the rest of the fandom throw a party in grateful thanks. It belongs instead to Takehito Koyasu, Kyoko Tsuchiya, Project Weiss and Movic (and no doubt several more companies whose names elude me), which is fortunate given the kind of thing I choose to write about. So: not mine; fan work; not for profit; no money being made by anybody and certainly not by me; move along, please.
Author’s notes: An attempt at an AT fic, set toward the end of Strafe – the point at which I deviate (and quite wildly) from the canon timeline should be obvious from the start. Familiarity with the events of the Verbrechen and Strafe OAVs and the characters who can be found therein would definitely be helpful as I have a sneaking suspicion the opening won’t necessarily make an awful lot of sense without it, but if anyone out there who hadn’t seen the OAVs wanted to read the fic anyway I’d be delighted so what do I know? Incidentally, this fic is not destined to be particularly pleasant either. If you’re looking for a nice story written by a nice person, you’d be well advised to go and read something else (which didn’t have General Powell in).
Warnings: This story is suitable for mature readers only. Major character deaths, spoilers for Verbrechen and Strafe, strong language from the start: dark adult content from Chapter Two. Fic is not a floatation device.

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one: friendly fire
Because this is the way they punish the deserter. This is the worst of it, worse than the sentence, than knowing you are doomed to die: when they come for you (and they always come, in the end) they send your friends to do the job. That way it gets done quick and clean and, above all else, it gets done right.
Who would want to see a friend suffer?
It’s finished. All of a sudden it’s over and he doesn’t want to have won, he doesn’t want to have won at all; here’s Ken on his knees in the snow with the claws of his bugnuks thrust up beneath Aya’s ribcage. He smells copper and sweat and Aya’s terror and, how weird, the faintest hint of cigarettes and he never, absolutely never figured Aya for a smoker, he can feel the quickening of Aya’s heartbeat through the blades and the sudden surge of something over his hands. Even through the worn leather of the gloves it makes his hands feel warm and sticky. Ken doesn’t think he’s ever felt more like a murderer.
If he looks up – penance begins here: he forces himself to, he has to see – there’s Aya’s face, lips parted, eyes wide and shocked. Nothing else, not yet. He’s seen that look a thousand times before, but never on Aya. Ken can tell the pain hasn’t hit yet. He knows Aya hasn’t really understood that he is going to die and Ken would give anything to be there instead…
He isn’t. It’s Aya who slips backward, muscles turning to water; it’s Aya who falls. Lands heavily in settling snow already scuffed by footprints, stained with rosettes of blood. Aya. It’s Aya who is dying; Ken lives on. All Ken can do is drag himself slowly and painfully back to his feet (shivering and suddenly acutely aware of the biting cold, the pain that wracks his body when he tries to stand, his own overwhelming exhaustion) and watch.
It’s only unthinking instinct that’s carried him this far.
But it’s over and already his panic feels distant and dreamlike. Already he hardly remembers fighting and he can’t think why he should have fought so hard. Ken doesn’t want life at any cost.
He waits for a curse, for something about the sister, a message to carry or something hideously banal about safe-deposit boxes or trust funds— they don‘t come. Aya only smiles and his smile is like the Madonna’s, he smiles at nothing and it chills Ken's blood. Aya is saying, I didn’t think you’d be the one to beat me, and there’s something like respect in eyes already grown dulled and distant. Now, only now does Aya see him as an equal and not a junior partner; an irritation at best, at worst a liability. Ken almost laughs. He wants to punch Aya. Aya, you stupid shit, do you really think it works like that? It’s not a game. You don’t get to try it again…
Youji – and good God! it was fitting; why else would your best friend be your executioner? – languid Youji, always last up, always late home, cool and unhurried in everything he does, has surrendered with uncharacteristic haste to his own end. He, lying still and silent and face-down in a slowly spreading pool of his own cooling blood, must have slipped away while Ken struggled with Aya for his life. Flakes of snow have already settled in the folds of his coat, in his tumbled hair. Omi, held upright by the cocoon of wire Youji ensnared him with, is dying: Akira, of course, was dead before any of this began. Now Aya, the smile guttering and fading, lets his eyes fall closed.
But Ken lives on.
Don’t go, Ken wants to say. Don’t, oh God don’t leave me here, don’t leave me alone. And, I'm sorry. I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted any of this… words. They get stuck in his throat. He can’t find the words, he’s never been good with them and what good are words when his teammates lie dead at his feet?
Soon Ken will weep for them, but not now. Now he simply screams.
He doesn’t remember falling to his knees. He doesn’t feel the tears as they spill, unchecked, down his cheeks. He doesn’t know how long he kneels in the stained and bloodied snow, his eyes wide, staring into nothing. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing. He doesn’t know what to do. There must be something. He must have known. He wouldn’t have fought for nothing; there would have been a plan. There must have been something he – there would have been some meaning, surely – surely there would have been something worth dying for. Worth killing for. He must have had some idea of where to go from here: he… no. The long term he would have left, as he always did, to Omi and Omi—
Omi is dead. It seems impossible. Unthinkable, but he forces himself to think it. Omi is dead. Omi Tsukiyono, his friend, his oldest companion, a boy who was hope and life, God dammit, life: that boy is dead.
Omi. And Youji, and Aya too and he never thought of Aya as someone who could ever die still less as someone he would outlive, whose life he could ever have taken; they’re all dead. Words, words, empty and meaningless – Ken can’t understand them, can’t even begin to comprehend what the words might mean; realization is an iceberg. It’s too vast to see, too slippery to grasp, he founders on it.
Ken feels, once again, hysteria creeping up on him and he has to bite back the scream. He raises one hand to his mouth to keep himself together, and the stench of his friends’ blood on his gauntlets makes him gag. Suddenly repelled, he strips the bugnuks from his hands and hurls them away from him, he never wants to see them again, he no longer cares if they lead the authorities right back to him. I’ll fight anyone for the sake of the people I believe in, he’d said, and at the time he’d meant it; does he ever say things he doesn’t mean? But he never meant for this to happen.
I’ve changed my mind, he thinks. I never meant this.
Ken is lost.
And they come. A ghost army stealing from the snow and shadows where they have waited, still and silent and patient, only for an ending. Distracted, Ken hears nothing. Sees nothing until, finally, even he can ignore them no longer.
Ah, stupid, he thinks dispassionately when finally he feels the weight of the strangers’ presence, and raises his head, and freezes, trapped by the weight of their eyes. Stupid to miss what was so obvious, to fail to realize they would have stayed. Stupid not to search them out, before all this began…. In Ken's business mistakes always get paid for, one way or another.
Weiss couldn’t have gone on beating the odds.
He lashes out when they come for him, instinctively swiping with one bare hand at the man who snatches for his upper arm, but the blow is a feeble one and doesn’t connect. He struggles and momentarily manages to break free when they yank him bodily to his feet but, ensnared by agony, numbed by the piercing cold and his own bitter despair, he is only utterly vulnerable. Ken doubles over when one of them punches him in the solar plexus, the breath knocked out of him as pain recalls him to pain. He’s still after that, his head hanging forward, slumping in the arms of the men who hold him upright. He lets them twist his arms painfully behind him and cuff his hands behind his back, lets them drag him away. He’s off his guard, overwhelmed, desperately outnumbered: worst of all he doesn’t care. Not about what happens to him. Not any more.
Ken doesn’t want to fight, to kill; he can’t see the point. There’s nobody left to save but himself, and Ken long since stopped worrying about him.
In the distance, caught and carried by the chill night wind, he thinks he can hear the sound of sirens.

____
It’s over by the time the first cars reach the scene, in a cacophony of banshee sirens and squealing tires and the sudden report of slamming doors. The newcomers can feel it in the air, in the heavy silence; they can tell they have arrived too late. Nothing moves. Just wind and drifting flakes of snow, a shattered door swinging loose on its hinges, the quiet rustle and snap of fabric fluttering in the breeze.
It’s over: or nearly so.
There is nothing to see: or nearly nothing. Just the fairground, baroque and banal. The rides, strangely insubstantial behind their veil of snow. And the scars of bullets, and the blood spattered obscenely across once-garish paintwork, now time-muted and sadly peeling.
A pair of scuffed, bloodied leather gauntlets with shattered steel claws and no apparent owner; Exhibit A. A katana with a worn, blood-smeared blade. A crossbow. A palmtop computer tucked away in a ruined pavilion, playing and playing a single sound clip; a woman’s soft, frightened voice, rendered tinny and distorted by the machine’s speakers, repeating a name and a one-word plea: Help, Omi-kun. Help, Omi-kun. Help… repeating, and repeating, and repeating until all the sense is bled from her words and they become as nothing, a thin thread of meaningless sound, a plea from someone who could be anyone addressed to somebody who has become nobody.
A boy, a puppet hanging limp in his own tangled strings.
A young man, his once-vital body twisted and broken and shattered, torn with bullets.
The redhead, pale lips twisted into the ghost of a smile: perversely serene.
Over: or nearly so. He lies silent, still, on his front in a slowly spreading pool of his own cooling blood; his tumbled, blood-brushed hair, damp with snow, clings to the contours of his cheeks. His breath is as nothing, the faintest whisper of warmer air against the exposed wrist of the man who bends to him, checking for life he hardly expects to find. His pulse, beneath the strong, competent fingers that grope for it, struggles thin and weak and frantic – fading, fading and fighting against it. One two one two one two—
And the crackle of a radio, the nod of a bowed head, hurrying footsteps. Sometimes, even the best of friends will get it wrong.
Nothing to see, the policemen say, again and again and again. It’s over. Move along there. Move along.

____
The soldiers push him forward simply because they can. Because Ken (his vision swimming, on his feet only because they hold him there) can’t keep up with them and has to so he stumbles, and pulls back on the arms that grasp his own, and nearly falls, and they force him onward with rough blows to the back and calves with fists and boots and rifle butts that send him staggering again, and taunt him in a language he only half understands, though he understands only too well that they are taunting him. Not knowing what they are saying to him makes it worse, somehow.
He can’t think why he’s still alive and almost wishes he wasn’t. If they (whoever they are) are sparing him, it’s only because they want something from him; he can’t even begin to imagine what, now that there’s nothing left. Ken knows that should frighten him.
He knows they’re behind the fence. That should frighten him, too.
Ken stumbles again as they try to lead him up a shallow staircase, losing his footing, and the soldier holding him under the right arm spits a curse in his ear and pulls him forward anyway; if he doesn’t walk they’ll drag him and some last spark of pride and defiance says, they can’t do that. Good Christ, if the others saw him like this, if Aya— he can’t finish the thought, he cringes from it, but Weiss don’t give up and that’s enough, that’s enough to have him grit his teeth and raise his head and stumble onward. Ken is all there is now, and if he gives up then they have truly failed.
It’s such a stupid thing to take pride in. Such a stupid thing to do, to cling to a name. His team is dead. It can’t matter what Ken does, now – but what else is he supposed to do?
He keeps his head up as they walk into a long, shadow-veiled room, all dormant monitors and banks of softly humming computers and the shadows of men, still and blank-faced as statues. He doesn’t glance about himself; he won’t give them the satisfaction of knowing he’s curious. Ken hopes he looks angry.
“Siberian,” she says quietly.
Pale and furious and incongruously immaculate; her features, for all the flawless makeup, tight and pinched. Manx. Manx, her hands cuffed before her, a rifle to her back. She’s as plainly a prisoner as Ken is, but of who? How long has she been here? Has she been here – the thought is too frightening to contemplate. Ken simply stares at her as if he’s never seen her before. What on Earth is Manx doing here, trapped behind the wire?
The sickest thing about it is that he’s pleased to see her.
“Manx, what—?”

Manx looks away from him. She can’t meet Ken’s eyes. She says only, “They were fakes.”
Ken closes his eyes to hide the tears. The breath seems to stick in his throat. Fakes— then Weiss died for nothing.
“How touching,” says General Powell.
Ken starts, his dark eyes snapping open again as he stares into nothing at all. At first, he sees nothing. The stranger is biding his time, visible only as a slight thickening of the shadows at the far end of the room. When, finally, he condescends to slip into view, stepping into the inadequate light cast by the flickering screens that surround him, Ken can tell he does it only because he has tired of the game. There is no reason why Ken shouldn’t see him now. Powell is smiling.
He isn’t at all what Ken was expecting. He doesn’t know what he was expecting; he never does, he merely knows that they’re always a disappointment when you see them in the flesh, the – and Persia’s stupid storybook phrases never seem right either, when they stand there in front of you, cringing or blustering or furious or smugly denying that they could owe the same debt to mortality as their victims – the dark beasts. They’re just people then, ordinary people: ordinary feels all wrong though, too, in the context of this specimen. This man (tall even by Caucasian standards, slick, case-hardened yet still handsome, his chiseled features softened by a boyish, rebellious forelock), is anything but ordinary. He smiles, and his smile is dangerous. Predatory.
Ken feels the man’s eyes, eyes that shine bright and moist in the half-light, heavy upon him: it was this man, he understands, who wanted him taken alive. Powell’s gaze, as it sweeps across him, is assessing. Calculating. There’s something sick about it, something speculative. His eyes make Ken feel unclean.
“Hm,” Powell says after an uncomfortable moment has passed. “Ken Hidaka, isn’t it? I must say you’ve surprised me. I was rather expecting the redhead, or the little boy with the crossbow, perhaps… Omi, I believe his name was.” Again, there’s speculation in his voice; it’s as if he sees in Ken's surprising endurance a pet project unaccountably derailed.

Ken can’t explain why, but the knowledge this man expected him to die convenient leaves him feeling – he can’t define it; what is he feeling? Angry, insulted for his team and for himself, perversely almost proud. “Sorry for surviving, then,” he says tersely, feigning a defiance he’s a long way from feeling, and bridles in the face of Powell’s amused, indulgent smile. No, Dark Beast is about right for this one.

“Stubborn. Yes, I think I see why I ended up with you.” Powell smiles without humor and glances briefly and disinterestedly across at Manx. He says, and he sounds like a benevolent father bestowing a great favor on a sullen, uncooperative daughter who has done nothing to deserve such grace (see, how magnanimous I can be when the mood strikes!), “Your pet, Miss Manx, gets a reprieve.”
Manx doesn’t speak, but she starts, her chin lifting and her eyes widening – slightly, just slightly, but enough: a subtle betrayal of her own horror. She knows far better than to hope Powell might fail, somehow, to notice. That he would have had Ken, or anyone, dragged here in manacles with a gun to his back simply for the sake of proving that hope was dead, so he could kill him in front of her, leaves her disgusted.
(And she is not a sentimental woman but, momentarily, she thinks of a cheerfully crowded little corner store and the heavy smell of pollen and a young man declaring proudly that all a girl’s character can be read through her ankles – her ankles, for heaven’s sake…)
But that he’s changed his mind… what might that mean for Ken? For the both of them?
“Oh,” Ken says, in a small, flat voice Manx hasn’t heard him use in years, “don’t put yourself out for my sake.”
Hard to tell who is the most surprised by Ken’s words: oh, God, Siberian, not you too! Though the look on his face, half guilt, half frank dismay at his own unthinking imprudence, says he didn’t mean to speak at all, still less to say something so recklessly self-annihilating, Manx can tell he must have been hoping to sound defiant, as if he is throwing down a challenge: go on, do your worst, I don’t care any more… He doesn’t. Ken – okay, I’ll do it – Ken just sounds familiar: young and scared and miserable and hopelessly out of his depth. What’s my other choice?
Thank God, Powell just looks at him in surprise, and laughs in his face. Laughs and shakes his head as if at the antics of an exasperating but much-loved child, still every inch the indulgent father, and then gestures to someone still half-hidden in the shadows, beckoning them forward.
In truth, the last few minutes has seen Manx forgetting her almost entirely. For Ken, her presence is merely another unpleasant surprise in a night which has held so many unpleasant surprises that they’re becoming a matter of course; further confirmation, as if such confirmation could be anything other than utterly gratuitous, of how completely Weiss have been outmaneuvered. Ken can barely bring himself to look at her – a slender girl in yellow pajamas and a dead boy’s jacket, her eyes beyond fear, towered over by a pair of soldiers who seem easily twice her size. She is not restrained; they must know there is no need. What did any of this have to do with her? Oh, she knew better than poor Reina and the other girls she’d duped, she was well aware this was no game, but she’d had no idea just how serious things were…
Kaori is little more than an emblem of their failure.
—he can’t, Manx thinks uselessly, and she knows how pointless it is even to think it. He can’t do that!
But of course he can, and he will. They’re not in Japan any more. She sees it all. Understanding shears through her thoughts clear and sharp and painful to the touch as a shard of broken glass – the minute Kaori is led into the light Manx realizes that Powell is going to kill her. Kaori, for Powell, was little more than a lure, the bait in the trap; she was taken only to serve as an added incentive for Weiss to turn on one another, something for Omi to fight for over and above mere survival. A failsafe, just in case life alone wasn’t enough – and it worked. It worked only too well.
Now? There is nothing left to fight for. Weiss is finished: Aya, Youji and Omi lie dead; Ken, bloodied and used up and barely holding together, is a prisoner. And Kaori Hibana has outlived her use.
Manx sees it all; what does Kaori see? The girl stands mute, trembling and ashen between her solemn, blank-faced guards, her delicate features frozen so as to resemble a clumsily-carved mask, caught in a snarl of desperate confusion and fear so overwhelming it seems almost parodic. Only her eyes, huge and dark and shadowed, still move, darting mayfly-frantic from face to face as if she were searching for something and finding no hope, no comfort, no way out. Nothing at all. The soldiers, to a man, look through her; the woman’s eyes are full of a terrible, hopeless compassion; Ken is a study in guilt.
“I’m sorry,” he says, when he feels Kaori’s eyes upon him.
Kaori flinches at the sound of his voice, and quickly looks away. Don’t apologize, she wants to say. Don’t make me believe this is real – she can’t speak; her mouth is too dry, she can’t seem to make her lips move. The words get caught in her throat. If a man like Ken has been forced to admit to defeat, and she can’t think what else his apology might portend, there truly is no hope for any of them… so Kaori looks away, because to be forced to see Ken like this (slumped, exhausted, between the two soldiers who hold him on his feet, his clothing torn and blood-spattered, eyes dull with pain and dragging grief) strikes her as somehow obscene.
And meets Powell’s gaze only by accident, and gasps, and tries to tear her eyes away and can’t. Kaori is prey, a shy night creature trapped in the sudden glare of headlights, unable to move, to think, to do anything but stare hopelessly into the light and wait for the end. The gun in his hand is almost an afterthought.
The General simply raises his hand, and smiles: his smile is not for Kaori, but for Ken. “How remarkably sentimental of you, Siberian.”
(You weren’t my first choice, but I think you’ll do.)
Then the shot.
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