[KHR] Baptism by Fire
Title: Baptism by Fire
Characters/Pairing: Byakuran
Rating: T
Warnings: Violence, gratuitous backstory, Byakuran himself.
Word Count: 2,139
I swear I will stop spamming with KHR fics like, tomorrow. Promise. -.-;;
Written for khr_fest
//life itself is wrong, and must be destroyed//
The end of his fourth winter. The rescue party finally pierces the last of the ice sealing the cabin door shut.
They find his father first, slumped against the kitchen cupboards. In death's repose he is strangely unsympathetic. Limp and frozen, he invites only wincing discomfort, his failure a bright red badge. At his left temple, the signature of one final success--a grisly little hole.
They approach his mother, lying in bed. Over her corpse the sheets have frozen solid, beneath it, the bones show through her skin at odd intervals, like stones immersed in cold wax.
Of the child, there is no sign.
At the end of the summer, a fragment of mystery: he returns, somehow even more bizarre than he was before, his hair shocked into the shade of swan's down, and there's a mark beneath one of his eyes, like tiny claws or an upturned crown.
The smile, however, is the same.
The doctor remembers their meeting vividly: the child smiling blithely, feet swinging gaily from his stool, telling him all about the different world he slid into once his father had pulled the trigger, where his parents didn't have to hide from vengeful mob bosses and end up killing themselves in the process.
(This was all he would say. Afterwards, when he was questioned about his parents more thoroughly, he seemed to take no notice. Only said, "They didn't really do anything to help themselves, did they? Didn't really try. If they had, they probably wouldn't have died."
It was his tone that was curious, as if he was asking a mock-rhetorical question. To the doctor, he almost sounded scornful.)
In the world where he went, his parents were quite ordinary people, not at all caught up in mafia politics and massive debt. They stayed in one place: a quiet, peaceful neighborhood, and kept to themselves, and his mother cooked dinner every night and his father didn't wake him up screaming. It was an okay world, he supposed, but it got boring after a while, so he decided to come back.
A delusion, of course. An elaborate fantasy brought on by extreme trauma--unfortunate at such a young age. When he got older, he probably require copious in order to recover fully.
Mentally, he meant. Physically, the child was in perfect health. He was well-nourished, without a single scratch on him. It was as if the whole terrible incident had never happened, as if nothing had changed.
//and//
He endures the trials and taunts of middle school. His adolescent years are his greatest pitfall, his days fluid and spilling into sleep white and thick with nightmares. He harbors only cold, highborn loathing for his classmates, narrows his brittle eyes at their weakness and stupidity. He is expelled in his last year for nearly strangling a girl in his class--fragile, glassy-eyed, leggy and foolish like a newborn fawn, constantly falling into the same trap of tryst and heartbreak again and again and again and again. There she was, again, wailing in homeroom, piteously bemoaning her plight, and it somehow got into Byakuran's head to make her stop crying.
Stupid. Completely, utterly stupid.
People like that shouldn't be allowed to live.
(Or maybe it was people shouldn't be allowed to live at all.)
//unmaking procreation//
His first semester at university is not disappointing, simply because Byakuran has learned to live without expectations. He spends his classes reading--science, mainly, and history--or daydreaming. Occasionally he glances down at his fellow students in semi-circular lecture hall. In the past their antics would have made bile rise mercurially in his throat, but they are nothing to him now, as close to him as clouds, or flower petals in a breeze: part of a blurred and formless background. A few of these people, no more human to Byakuran than cardboard cutouts, call him 'friend', but he himself has no one. His days are spent casually in idle amusement, watching, wondering. Waiting.
He meets Irie Shouichi's little brother one day, even more clumsy and flustered than his older sibling. True to form, he thinks nothing of it. There are no strange occurrences in this world. Indeed, in this entire universe. Things live and things and die. Boring.
Two weeks later, after he slides through dimensions like a knife through water, after he (impossibly) meets the boy again, after the facets of his life click into place: the moans of his mother starving to death, the strange sound of his feet in a house he used to know, the feel of his hand around a young girl's throat, the flowers, the snow, and the small, frightened boy--all of it clicks into place. A switch turned on. The crown wheels in his mind begin to turn.
The universe is a far more interesting place than he thought.
//and//
Something switches in the air between them, enough entrance for a familiar, a ghost in the machine. Irie Shouichi feels the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention.
"It's not a question of right and wrong, Shou-chan." It seems to Irie that Byakuran is choosing his words very carefully, the same way he picks the fried tofu out of his kitsune udon, long-fingered hands maneuvering his chopsticks crosswise, like a mired crane. "It's a question of advancement. Everything we do is for the good of the people.
"Since when do you care about people?"
The words are out before Irie can stop them. They do not move, but the space between them grows wider. He digs his palms into the edge of the counter. Byakuran stands in the middle of the kitchenette, like a thousand times before. In the silence, Irie imagines he can hear his heart pounding. Is this it? The confrontation he has been contemplating since they finished Choice, and Byakuran began to speak of flowers and strange people in places Shou-chan could never believe. It's absurd. This is absurd. But then why does he feel like he's doing the right thing?
"So cold, Shou-chan!" Byakuran cries suddenly, and Irie tries his best not to flinch. "But suppose you're right? Suppose I don't care about people. What then?"
He's faking it. He's faking all of it. For how long?
"Civilization advances far more more quickly than you think, Shou-chan," Byakuran continues, and his voice is suddenly cold, "and faster still when I am pulling the strings."
And in between the crawling fear and overwhelming anger a ray of triumph appears like a light in Shouichi's eyes. Gotcha.
"We," Byakuran amends, and Irie is savagely pleased at how poorly Byakuran is able to cover his tracks. "When we are pulling the strings."
"What are you doing, then?" Irie demands. There's no use pretending anymore.
"What are we doing, Shouichi?" Byakuran snaps, and this time Irie does flinch. "We are venturing further into the unknown than anyone ever has in this dimension or another. We are introducing modes of technology never even dreamed of on this time plane.Weare unraveling the mysteries of time, space, the universe, laying them down at our feet--"
"At what cost?"
Byakuran stops. His voice has been gaining uncharacteristic color and noise, a screen of white noise tuned into picture. But at Irie's quiet words, he stops, and the fervor slides off his face like a mask, or back into one. Instead, his eyes open, that brilliant, impossibly clear color, too bright and too strange. He could be an alien, with those eyes and his white hair, but his expression is far too human. Only humans could look that dangerous.
"At any cost, Shou-chan," Byakuran says in his most quietly contemptuous voice. "I thought you understood that."
//some kind of savior//
Bluebell is running in the hospital courtyard, legs flashing between gaps in the carefully pruned hedge, white feet trampling the flowerbeds. She spins once, and pounces--the rhododendron bush trembles, then goes still. Byakuran can just make out a tiny erratic bellows, working fast to match the furious pace of a heart hammering so strenuously he can practically see it, a bird trapped beneath her hospital gown.
He watches, turning the ring over and over again between his fingers, feeling the grooves of both unfurled wings, the smooth face of a pale blue stone.
~
"I suppose I should be thanking you?"
Kikyou straightens his blood-splattered tie. His fingers are still clenched around the gun.
"A simple 'thanks' is not exactly what I had in mind, Kikyou-kun."
Kikyou doesn't reply. He turns back to the body.
Byakuran places the ring on the former boss's desk, turns, and walks away.
~
"Join you? Why would I join you?"
His voice sounds like gravel, like a man in want of sleep and drink. Zakuro grumbles to himself for a while, not meeting his eyes, merely keeps shoveling. The grave is still not deep enough.
"After all this time, you still don't trust me," Byakuran laments, sighing in a way that sounds decidedly practiced. Zakuro leans on his spade, giving him a look. Byakuran leans forward into empty space, his white fingers steepled like a diplomat.
"Very well then. Consider this. You have exacted revenge for your one and only love--"
Zakuro grunts approvingly.
"--and it still has not brought her back."
For a moment, it seems as if Zakuro is going to hit him with the shovel. It certainly looks like it. But Byakuran does not back down. If anything, he leans in closer.
"What else are you going to do?"
~
She looks up from the viridian-eyed ring clenched tightly in her grasp.
"Byakuran-san?" Her voice is feeble and tentative, an enormous departure from her scarred and hollowed face. "What is that I have to do?"
Her eyes are unusually glassy and protuberant. They would not look out of place on the end of eye-stalks. She doesn't blink.
"Only this," Byakuran says soothingly, "Become a part of my family, always."
He pulls a handful of daisies from thin air and presents them to her like an offering, sly and grandiose. She gasps, and snatches them away with a gasp. She clutches the flowers so hard they shake. She has eyes only for each yellow, white-fringed face. Her tattered bunny rabbit falls to the floor.
She's too busy to notice Byakuran pick it up, patting its ears fondly before he slips in inside his jacket. Only the mirror is a witness to his expression, and mirrors can only speak of things they have seen before--an open window (greed), and a new war medal (complete and utmost triumph).
//and//
Twinges of the heart, at best. Such is the nature of apostles in war time. They are valuable, but the only one he really loves is Ghost, perfect in meaning and perfect in execution, the thoughtless fingerprint of a God. Living. A carbon copy. The only lights are Ghost and his eyes.
So this is what it feels like to be a god.
//At the end//
He is not evil.
Powerful, and manipulative, and not quite human--a threshold he'd past long ago, a child trapped in the ice, an invisible web. Watching his parents succumb slowly to secluded worlds of suffering and pain--was that when he decided to disconnect himself from the world?
Or had he just been one of the lucky ones, a child born without a soul?
Other people. He cannot understand them. Watching them never moved him. This is why he cannot understand Uni, pure and gracious Uni, Uni with a smile, Uni with her bleeding heart. How ironic that the mafia princess herself abhors death. But no matter. His severance was deliberate and real. Him versus the rest of the world.
And the world deserved to lose. How tedious it was, except for when he played his little games, but small joys never lasted long.
When the women came, with their ring and their mystery, it was all so inevitable he just had to laugh. The time had come for a new game, on a grander scale, a time to topple men and worlds alike, a time to rule and to consume, to consume, to consume.
Because, in the end, wouldn't it be far worse to stay here and do nothing? Plot the pointless course of one little life and then die, fade into ashes and dust and then nothing. To become nothing, not even a memory, not even a thought. Living that way was not living at all, it was accepting death. Life. What life? It was a statue eroding and crumbling into a space on a plinth. It was a mountain made of sand. Existing for the sake of existing. Useless.
Everything was useless. Everything except him.
//and//
At the very last moment, Byakuran turns to embrace the flames.
Characters/Pairing: Byakuran
Rating: T
Warnings: Violence, gratuitous backstory, Byakuran himself.
Word Count: 2,139
I swear I will stop spamming with KHR fics like, tomorrow. Promise. -.-;;
Written for khr_fest
//life itself is wrong, and must be destroyed//
The end of his fourth winter. The rescue party finally pierces the last of the ice sealing the cabin door shut.
They find his father first, slumped against the kitchen cupboards. In death's repose he is strangely unsympathetic. Limp and frozen, he invites only wincing discomfort, his failure a bright red badge. At his left temple, the signature of one final success--a grisly little hole.
They approach his mother, lying in bed. Over her corpse the sheets have frozen solid, beneath it, the bones show through her skin at odd intervals, like stones immersed in cold wax.
Of the child, there is no sign.
At the end of the summer, a fragment of mystery: he returns, somehow even more bizarre than he was before, his hair shocked into the shade of swan's down, and there's a mark beneath one of his eyes, like tiny claws or an upturned crown.
The smile, however, is the same.
The doctor remembers their meeting vividly: the child smiling blithely, feet swinging gaily from his stool, telling him all about the different world he slid into once his father had pulled the trigger, where his parents didn't have to hide from vengeful mob bosses and end up killing themselves in the process.
(This was all he would say. Afterwards, when he was questioned about his parents more thoroughly, he seemed to take no notice. Only said, "They didn't really do anything to help themselves, did they? Didn't really try. If they had, they probably wouldn't have died."
It was his tone that was curious, as if he was asking a mock-rhetorical question. To the doctor, he almost sounded scornful.)
In the world where he went, his parents were quite ordinary people, not at all caught up in mafia politics and massive debt. They stayed in one place: a quiet, peaceful neighborhood, and kept to themselves, and his mother cooked dinner every night and his father didn't wake him up screaming. It was an okay world, he supposed, but it got boring after a while, so he decided to come back.
A delusion, of course. An elaborate fantasy brought on by extreme trauma--unfortunate at such a young age. When he got older, he probably require copious in order to recover fully.
Mentally, he meant. Physically, the child was in perfect health. He was well-nourished, without a single scratch on him. It was as if the whole terrible incident had never happened, as if nothing had changed.
//and//
He endures the trials and taunts of middle school. His adolescent years are his greatest pitfall, his days fluid and spilling into sleep white and thick with nightmares. He harbors only cold, highborn loathing for his classmates, narrows his brittle eyes at their weakness and stupidity. He is expelled in his last year for nearly strangling a girl in his class--fragile, glassy-eyed, leggy and foolish like a newborn fawn, constantly falling into the same trap of tryst and heartbreak again and again and again and again. There she was, again, wailing in homeroom, piteously bemoaning her plight, and it somehow got into Byakuran's head to make her stop crying.
Stupid. Completely, utterly stupid.
People like that shouldn't be allowed to live.
(Or maybe it was people shouldn't be allowed to live at all.)
//unmaking procreation//
His first semester at university is not disappointing, simply because Byakuran has learned to live without expectations. He spends his classes reading--science, mainly, and history--or daydreaming. Occasionally he glances down at his fellow students in semi-circular lecture hall. In the past their antics would have made bile rise mercurially in his throat, but they are nothing to him now, as close to him as clouds, or flower petals in a breeze: part of a blurred and formless background. A few of these people, no more human to Byakuran than cardboard cutouts, call him 'friend', but he himself has no one. His days are spent casually in idle amusement, watching, wondering. Waiting.
He meets Irie Shouichi's little brother one day, even more clumsy and flustered than his older sibling. True to form, he thinks nothing of it. There are no strange occurrences in this world. Indeed, in this entire universe. Things live and things and die. Boring.
Two weeks later, after he slides through dimensions like a knife through water, after he (impossibly) meets the boy again, after the facets of his life click into place: the moans of his mother starving to death, the strange sound of his feet in a house he used to know, the feel of his hand around a young girl's throat, the flowers, the snow, and the small, frightened boy--all of it clicks into place. A switch turned on. The crown wheels in his mind begin to turn.
The universe is a far more interesting place than he thought.
//and//
Something switches in the air between them, enough entrance for a familiar, a ghost in the machine. Irie Shouichi feels the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention.
"It's not a question of right and wrong, Shou-chan." It seems to Irie that Byakuran is choosing his words very carefully, the same way he picks the fried tofu out of his kitsune udon, long-fingered hands maneuvering his chopsticks crosswise, like a mired crane. "It's a question of advancement. Everything we do is for the good of the people.
"Since when do you care about people?"
The words are out before Irie can stop them. They do not move, but the space between them grows wider. He digs his palms into the edge of the counter. Byakuran stands in the middle of the kitchenette, like a thousand times before. In the silence, Irie imagines he can hear his heart pounding. Is this it? The confrontation he has been contemplating since they finished Choice, and Byakuran began to speak of flowers and strange people in places Shou-chan could never believe. It's absurd. This is absurd. But then why does he feel like he's doing the right thing?
"So cold, Shou-chan!" Byakuran cries suddenly, and Irie tries his best not to flinch. "But suppose you're right? Suppose I don't care about people. What then?"
He's faking it. He's faking all of it. For how long?
"Civilization advances far more more quickly than you think, Shou-chan," Byakuran continues, and his voice is suddenly cold, "and faster still when I am pulling the strings."
And in between the crawling fear and overwhelming anger a ray of triumph appears like a light in Shouichi's eyes. Gotcha.
"We," Byakuran amends, and Irie is savagely pleased at how poorly Byakuran is able to cover his tracks. "When we are pulling the strings."
"What are you doing, then?" Irie demands. There's no use pretending anymore.
"What are we doing, Shouichi?" Byakuran snaps, and this time Irie does flinch. "We are venturing further into the unknown than anyone ever has in this dimension or another. We are introducing modes of technology never even dreamed of on this time plane.Weare unraveling the mysteries of time, space, the universe, laying them down at our feet--"
"At what cost?"
Byakuran stops. His voice has been gaining uncharacteristic color and noise, a screen of white noise tuned into picture. But at Irie's quiet words, he stops, and the fervor slides off his face like a mask, or back into one. Instead, his eyes open, that brilliant, impossibly clear color, too bright and too strange. He could be an alien, with those eyes and his white hair, but his expression is far too human. Only humans could look that dangerous.
"At any cost, Shou-chan," Byakuran says in his most quietly contemptuous voice. "I thought you understood that."
//some kind of savior//
Bluebell is running in the hospital courtyard, legs flashing between gaps in the carefully pruned hedge, white feet trampling the flowerbeds. She spins once, and pounces--the rhododendron bush trembles, then goes still. Byakuran can just make out a tiny erratic bellows, working fast to match the furious pace of a heart hammering so strenuously he can practically see it, a bird trapped beneath her hospital gown.
He watches, turning the ring over and over again between his fingers, feeling the grooves of both unfurled wings, the smooth face of a pale blue stone.
~
"I suppose I should be thanking you?"
Kikyou straightens his blood-splattered tie. His fingers are still clenched around the gun.
"A simple 'thanks' is not exactly what I had in mind, Kikyou-kun."
Kikyou doesn't reply. He turns back to the body.
Byakuran places the ring on the former boss's desk, turns, and walks away.
~
"Join you? Why would I join you?"
His voice sounds like gravel, like a man in want of sleep and drink. Zakuro grumbles to himself for a while, not meeting his eyes, merely keeps shoveling. The grave is still not deep enough.
"After all this time, you still don't trust me," Byakuran laments, sighing in a way that sounds decidedly practiced. Zakuro leans on his spade, giving him a look. Byakuran leans forward into empty space, his white fingers steepled like a diplomat.
"Very well then. Consider this. You have exacted revenge for your one and only love--"
Zakuro grunts approvingly.
"--and it still has not brought her back."
For a moment, it seems as if Zakuro is going to hit him with the shovel. It certainly looks like it. But Byakuran does not back down. If anything, he leans in closer.
"What else are you going to do?"
~
She looks up from the viridian-eyed ring clenched tightly in her grasp.
"Byakuran-san?" Her voice is feeble and tentative, an enormous departure from her scarred and hollowed face. "What is that I have to do?"
Her eyes are unusually glassy and protuberant. They would not look out of place on the end of eye-stalks. She doesn't blink.
"Only this," Byakuran says soothingly, "Become a part of my family, always."
He pulls a handful of daisies from thin air and presents them to her like an offering, sly and grandiose. She gasps, and snatches them away with a gasp. She clutches the flowers so hard they shake. She has eyes only for each yellow, white-fringed face. Her tattered bunny rabbit falls to the floor.
She's too busy to notice Byakuran pick it up, patting its ears fondly before he slips in inside his jacket. Only the mirror is a witness to his expression, and mirrors can only speak of things they have seen before--an open window (greed), and a new war medal (complete and utmost triumph).
//and//
Twinges of the heart, at best. Such is the nature of apostles in war time. They are valuable, but the only one he really loves is Ghost, perfect in meaning and perfect in execution, the thoughtless fingerprint of a God. Living. A carbon copy. The only lights are Ghost and his eyes.
So this is what it feels like to be a god.
//At the end//
He is not evil.
Powerful, and manipulative, and not quite human--a threshold he'd past long ago, a child trapped in the ice, an invisible web. Watching his parents succumb slowly to secluded worlds of suffering and pain--was that when he decided to disconnect himself from the world?
Or had he just been one of the lucky ones, a child born without a soul?
Other people. He cannot understand them. Watching them never moved him. This is why he cannot understand Uni, pure and gracious Uni, Uni with a smile, Uni with her bleeding heart. How ironic that the mafia princess herself abhors death. But no matter. His severance was deliberate and real. Him versus the rest of the world.
And the world deserved to lose. How tedious it was, except for when he played his little games, but small joys never lasted long.
When the women came, with their ring and their mystery, it was all so inevitable he just had to laugh. The time had come for a new game, on a grander scale, a time to topple men and worlds alike, a time to rule and to consume, to consume, to consume.
Because, in the end, wouldn't it be far worse to stay here and do nothing? Plot the pointless course of one little life and then die, fade into ashes and dust and then nothing. To become nothing, not even a memory, not even a thought. Living that way was not living at all, it was accepting death. Life. What life? It was a statue eroding and crumbling into a space on a plinth. It was a mountain made of sand. Existing for the sake of existing. Useless.
Everything was useless. Everything except him.
//and//
At the very last moment, Byakuran turns to embrace the flames.