Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ Horatio Is Silent ❯ One-Shot

Rating: PG

Warnings: Shounen-ai

Pairings: Implied Aya + Ken

Archive: My website and FF.Net, White Illusion, WKYaoi. Others, please ask first.

Disclaimer: Weiss Kreuz characters do not belong to me. "Hey Jude" was sung by the Beatles. The title was inspired by "Hamlet", written by William Shakespeare, which I have also quoted. I have no intention of infringing on copyrights with this non-profit work.

Notes: This story is an alternate ending to the WK anime, set a few years later, discounting the last few minutes of the second season and the OVAs. It contains spoilers for pretty much the entire series. I also recommend that you listen to "Charlie No. 3" by the Whitlams (an Australian band), which was a great aural aid to writing this story.

There were times when he thought his secret would bleed out of him, seeping out between his ribs, staining his crisp white shirt.

His secret would be blood-warm, he imagined. Thick, black with sin, running down his chest and blossoming on his suit jacket like a rose. It would go unnoticed for a few seconds, but sooner or later one of his colleagues would choose alarm over discretion and point, and everyone would know.

In turn he would look down, touch the stain with his fingertips. He might even gasp, a quiet exhalation of breath drowned by the shrill screams of one of the more excitable typists. There would be cries of alarms, commands for someone to call the ambulance. His past would not touch his work -- he would be quick to stand up and away from his desk. He would take off his wire-rimmed spectacles, murmur a quiet "Excuse me" and leave, never to be seen again.

Sometimes he wondered if he really was as pathetic as his morbid imagination suggested. He smiled then, a little, and went back to work. A mind used to plotting the unnatural but timely demise of select members of society now cut mercilessly through words, efficiently discarding extraneous characters a garrulous writer had feverishly slaved over. He did not know any of the writers he edited for, and did not bother to.

At precisely 5pm on weekdays, he shut down his computer and grabbed a stack of print-outs and diskettes. These he filed carefully in his briefcase, along with his Palm Pilot, to be perused later that evening. Half an hour later he would be on a train to Kanda, back to the small, cold apartment he rented. He could easily have a bigger place in a more luxurious neighbourhood -- Kritiker had been generous with his "severance package" -- but what was the point?

He rarely deviated from his routine. He had no one he could surprise with an early homecoming or (not flowers) small gifts. There was nothing in the apartment that broke the monotony of non-thinking on the train and made him smile, giving the whispering schoolgirls something to stare at besides his crimson hair. He ignored them, as well the surreptious glances of trendy young men speculating whether the expensively-dressed salaryman was related to a yakuza family.

His hair darkened with the evening, from the red gold of sunsets to the rust of dried blood in moonrise. He ate dinner at a small yakitori restaurant near his stop, jostling for elbow space with noisy students too self- centered to notice that his eyes held not violet glass but tempered steel. He usually ordered two servings, three if he had skipped lunch -- alone, speaking only if spoken to. He never stayed longer than forty-five minutes.

There were times, as he turned the key in his doorknob, when he pretended that the smell of grilled chicken clinging to his clothes came from his apartment. That there would be someone in his kitchen doing a bad rendition of "Hey Jude", greeting him with chocolate-sweet eyes and an embarassed laugh. He would drop his briefcase and wrap his arms around warm flesh, his hands clutching at faded cotton, burying his face in hair the colour of cinnamon.

Then the door opened and chill air tickled his lips, sweeping away memories of kisses. Sometimes he merely shook off his ridiculous daydreams and got down to his nightly rituals, sometimes pain lacerated his throat and prickled at his eyes and he had to sit down before he broke beyond repair. On nights like these he could not bear the impersonal sparseness of his apartment and he would haunt east Shinjuku, using the enthusiastic music of amateur bands to overwhelm the cries of phantoms lingering over his shoulders.

More often than not, though, he would change into a pair of old jeans and a navy blue sweater, and spread out the contents of his briefcase neatly on his desk. He would work on them diligently for two hours, stopping briefly now and again to refresh his mug of tea. He did not own a television, and the small stereo on a low table was a grudging concession to the few CDs he owned.

His telephone usually rang only on Friday nights; Manx, giving her weekly reports on his sister's well-being. The last favour he asked of Kritiker before he abandoned his family name forever. Aya-chan would be safe as long as she believed he was dead, and so dead he stayed, buried under human voices and computer screens and neatly-pressed shirts in an air-conditioned office.

On weekends he trained in a nearby kendo dojo, tasting dull relief in the back of his throat at using a sword that did not kill. His men cut did not end in a spray of brain matter and bone shards, nor did the sweep of his shinai against his opponent's torso spill wet, hot intestines onto the floor. He cared little for tournaments and competitions, despite Sugimoto-sensei's increasingly firm urging. "Hidaka-kun" was content with anonymity, and asked for nothing more than to be allowed to train.

He spent Saturday afternoons browsing the bookstores in Jimbocho, carefully selecting a book or two -- and, without fail, the latest issue of Shonen Jump. The former he read over the weekend, the latter he arranged in a neat stack next to a bookcase. On the way home he would stop to watch a game of soccer, his eyes gravely following a scruffy ball kicked around a patch of grass by equally scruffy children.

On Sunday mornings he went out early, returning with a newspaper and a spray of cattleya orchids. Before reading the paper he would remove last week's orchids from their white porcelain vase, replacing them with the fresh flowers. He did not eat breakfast on Sundays.

Sometimes after kendo training he dropped off his gear at his apartment and did not return until late, spending his Sunday in the cafes and galleries of Aoyama. Sometimes he stayed in, sprawled comfortably on the floor to read, and for hours the only sounds in the apartment were his breathing and the rustling of paper. Whatever he chose to do, though, the setting sun and the rising moon would inevitably find him at Shiokaze-koen park, inhaling the salt-sprayed air of Tokyo Bay.

He thought he could hear voices in the breeze.

There were times when he wondered what kept him from succumbing to the pull of the tides, and sink into bronze- skinned arms in the depths of the ocean. His loneliness clawed at his ribcage like a cat, tearing his flesh into ragged strips salted with swallowed tears. There was no one left who remembered the fiery rage in Ken's eyes when he took down an opponent, or the way Omi obsessively checked his weapons before a mission, or Yohji's habit of caressing the flowers in the shop before they left for a kill. Not even Manx had known them so well. Aya did not know him, or them, at all.

No one left but him.

In the darkness of sleepless nights, he doubted whether it was enough just to remember. Surely he owed it to them to tell their story, so they were not remembered as terrorists or criminals. Then his mind would summon the image of a young girl in Tokyo, mourning her niisan, and he felt a surge of something he would never acknowledge as resentment.

Days, one after another, stretched before him in increments of train tickets and coffee breaks. There were times when he thought it was penance enough.

-owari-

O God! Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me,
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
-- "Hamlet", Act V Scene II

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