Fic: Illusion (G)

[daegaer.livejournal.com]

Title: Illusion
Author: daegaer
Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Challenge: Feudal Japan
Pairing: none
Rating: G
Warnings: none
Word count: 400 (four drabbles)
Summary: A ronin bent on revenge, Ran plans what he will do after he has killed Takatori.



When his revenge is achieved, Ran thinks, he will finally have the peace to join his family in death. He imagines the relief of cutting down Takatori and what a relief it will be to make atonement for even that death amidst all the others he has caused when he cuts himself open thereafter. Perhaps one of the others will stand as his second, he thinks, and frowns. Neither Yohji nor Ken is confident with a sword, his decapitation could be inelegant. It will have to be Omi.

Another Takatori, he thinks. Perhaps Omi will see that too as revenge.


*


At the end of it all Ran finds only heavy weariness. It should be joy to face his family' enemy openly, but Takatori - for all his skill with a blade - is an aging man facing his doom in a burning house. There is no pleasure in the fight at all, just a grim necessity as the flames roar up the shoji, the delicate paper gone in a flash.

Standing over Takatori's body, Ran half-decides just to stay and burn with the house, but Ken calls him and he stumbles out to clean air.

He will die a proper, gentleman's death.


*


When he visits his sister a last time the nun who opens the gate greets him by name. It takes a moment before he sees past the shaved head and recognizes Takatori Shuuichi's mistress.

"I have no use for the illusions of the world," she says, seeing his surprise. "Someone else you know is here too -" She points; Ran recognizes Sakura, whom Takatori's minions made a plaything. "She too has forsaken illusion."

Though he promised Sakura nothing, Ran feels shame. Then his shame melts into shock, as his sister walks towards him, whole and healed.

Such divine compassion terrifies him.


*


He should turn his back on the world, live a solitary life of prayer, Ran thinks. Was not his planned death illusion, showing he cares more for the niceties of his rank than for the state of his soul? This new path is a better response to the compassion he has received. He laughs bitterly - it would be perfectly respectable. It would not disgrace his family's memory.

But it is hard, harder than anything he has done so far. He cannot lay aside his sword and his past. He does not understand forgiveness.

The world has him in its grip.