Work Text:
Milquetoast
He stared at the sky, the hay cart swaying gently beneath him. He was lucky he'd found a ride, giving his tired feet a rest. The drawback to the ride was that it gave him too much freedom to think.
Kanan thought the school had sent him to review new textbooks in another town. He'd lied to her about that. He'd taken this trip to meet a man who said he knew Gonou's father, a priest named Tae recently returned from overseas. Gonou had fabricated the lie to visit Father Tae without Kanan.
He'd had his reasons for speaking with Father Tae in secret, reasons that no longer mattered now that all doubt was erased. Kanan was his sister. He didn't care, and honestly, he would've been surprised to learn otherwise, but he thought Kanan might want to know for certain. He was wrong about that. She was not who she said she was.
Their accidental meeting at the university hadn't been a happy coincidence. She'd always known they were siblings. In fact, she'd been hunting for him, determined to find him from early on. Her search was intense, and when she'd found Gonou ...
He'd expected to learn she was his sister. But he hadn't expected to learn she was a suspected serial killer and arsonist and, most disturbing of all, that she was supposed to be dead.
According to Father Tae, the authorities were convinced she'd gone on a killing spree, responsible for six deaths, making all of them look like accidents—and she'd done it all before the age of fifteen. When suspicion fell on her, she'd tried to run. But through a series of bizarre incidents, she'd burned to death in a building.
She wasn't dead, of course, but no one could prove otherwise. When he'd traced Kanan's path to him, from beyond the orphanage to the university, graves were all he found. Kanan had effectively erased her past, ensuring the world would never know who she was.
Except Father Tae had known. Though, as it turned out, Father Tae wouldn't be telling anyone anything again, the poor old man. In Gonou's last conversation with him, the aging priest's heart had simply quit. It was sad, but hardly a surprise. He'd said he wasn't very healthy, after all.
Even so, it wasn't as if anything had changed for Gonou. Kanan was still his sister and his wife, even if she was a serial killer. But he supposed they should discuss the killings.
Because now he knew how the woman at the restaurant had gotten locked in the freezer when she'd been alone—the same woman who'd fired Kanan. There was also the professor who'd given her a poor grade—he'd fallen down a flight of stairs in the library. Both incidents were reported as explainable but suspicious accidents. If deaths continued to add up, life might become inconvenient.
The hay wagon stopped and he got out, glad to see his home. At the front door he paused: maybe the serial killer talk could wait. At the moment, he was looking forward to sleeping in their bed, wrapped in Kanan's embrace. One more night wouldn't change anything.
He stepped inside, finding the house—his sanctuary—destroyed. A great battle had been fought, and Kanan was missing.
He panicked, cold fear coursing through his body. He raced to his neighbors' house to find out what they knew. After a handful of conversations with various people, he knew the bitter truth, and more layers of his happy life began to peel away. They'd traded his only family to save their own.
He was so polite, they thought he'd understand. He was so kind, they thought he'd see reason in their plight. He was such a milquetoast, they thought him incapable of doing anything about it.
Then he went home to his little house and calmly retrieved a kitchen knife.