Consigned to Fire
(five easy pieces)
a Weiss Kreuz fanfiction by laila
Author's Notes: It's a one-shot with chapters in!This was originally going to be an actual proper fic with a plot and stuff, but something happened and it turned into a series of five (well, five and a bit) loosely-connected and somewhat experimental vignettes of varying lengths set at various points in the Weiss Kreuz timeline – which points precisely I'm hoping will be quite obvious – focusing on Ken and his somewhat complicated relationship with Kase. Naturally enough, this led to the fic taking about fifty times as long to complete as it would if I'd actually been writing a continuous story, to the extent that I didn't expect I'd ever finish it and actually came close to deleting it a couple of times… Note that the opening vignette is meant to be in the second person, but I've rewritten it so as not to contravene the ban on second-person fics. No major content warnings save a little non-explicit slash (don't tell me you've never thought it), a moderate amount of cursing and a metric tonne of angst.
The first lie they tell him is that he's survived.
At first there is nothing but gray and an unbearable heaviness of being and a feeling of disconnection and, somewhere a million miles away, a voice talking comforting nonsense. The voice is a woman's and it tells him he's still living and he's been badly burnt and it's over, he's safe. He's alive. Not that there's anything to prove it when even breathing's no longer an issue, when all he has to do is be. Survival hardly seems worth it.
For a while he's convinced it's a joke: he remembers, though his memories are scalding and smoke-choked and painful to the touch, just enough to know there's no way he could have lived, never mind have come out the other end relatively intact.
He's no phoenix. But it easy to know what he's not.
It takes a while for it to really register with him, as reality slips in around the edges of that intense nothingness and the shifting colors and patterns of the world come creeping slowly back, that the voice is a nurse's, and the nothing drug-induced, and he's only in hospital after all. Which is when he starts to believe them, and he makes the first mistake.
Which is when, as life renews its claim on him and he starts, tentatively at first, to come to terms with his own survival, it kind-of sinks in that he's not supposed to be doing anything of the sort. He's meant to be dead. Someone wanted him dead. He's supposed to be out of the picture and he catches himself wondering if they've found out that he's not, and so he permits himself to start to worry again. Permits himself to be something other than grateful, and hopelessly, pathetically so, to be anything at all. It would be easier for everyone if he were dead. He's supposed to be dead. But he's not dead. He's alive. What happens now? What is he meant to do?
He doesn't know it's not even an issue.
He doesn't know he was right first time.
Later, when he's recovered a little and he's no longer seeing the world through a mist of pharmaceuticals, and he knows he's getting better because he's feeling so much worse, they ask if he remembers what happened to him and if he knows where he was injured. Somehow it's a strange kind of relief to know it's his back that's the issue and even that's being sorted and, though he knows it won't ever look that pretty, he catches himself thinking well, it could be worse. It's not like he'll really have to see the worst of the damage. It's not like anyone else will if he keeps his top on.
Oh, when it comes to the details they're honest enough, once he's worked out the codes, but what else could they be when veracity's only a glance in the mirror away? And he doesn't think to question the first lie.
In time, they tell him the truth.
He's already dead.