Title: Courage
Author: jordannamorgan
Fandom: Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress
Characters: Takumi and Ikoma.
Setting: Pre-canon.
Rating: Mild PG.
Length: 1,540 words.
Summary: Takumi’s closest friendship was rather ironic.



It was common knowledge among the steamsmiths of Aragane Station that Takumi was a coward.

Naturally, he was afraid of the Kabane: afraid of traveling on a train where they roamed beyond the walls, and terrified of the thought that they could ever break through those walls to overrun the town. He was afraid of the epidemics of disease that could sometimes flare up within a station’s limited confines. He was afraid of the bushi who enforced the rules meant to keep people safe, and of breaking those rules even when they were so plainly overzealous that most steamsmiths would cut corners without a second thought. He was afraid of snakes and spiders and lightning storms, of the stern looks and voices of the senior steamsmiths. Hell, sometimes he could even be scared by his own shadow.

All of which made his closest friendship rather ironic.

Because Ikoma was spooky—or that was the consensus among most of the other young steamsmiths, at least. With that hard, haunted look in his eyes, and the way he talked a little too freely about his desire to kill the Kabane, there was something about him that unnerved them. They bullied him on the excuse that he was an easily-distracted dreamer with silly delusions of heroism… but sometimes, Takumi thought it was because he reminded them just a bit too much of what could happen.

Of all the younger generation of steamsmiths in Aragane, Ikoma was the only refugee from a station that had fallen. Of course there were elders who lived in the days before the Kabane came, who remembered the terror and confusion of those monsters’ first rising up; but they did not willingly discuss their painful experiences so far in the past, and besides, they occupied a very different place in the hierarchy of the depot. It wasn’t common for them to talk casually with their younger subordinates. On the other hand, Ikoma was a peer, and his memories still burned as brightly as the day he’d lost everything—even if it was in part because he constantly, deliberately stoked them. And that meant they were also readily on his lips for anyone who would listen.

…Which was decidedly not the other steamsmiths.

They didn’t want to think of the possibilities. They avoided it by blithely convincing themselves it would never happen; that if Aragane’s walls had stood strong all this time, they always would in the future, or that the bushi would save them if the Kabane ever did come. Or they took the philosophically fatalistic view that if the station was overrun, everyone would just die, so there was no sense in dwelling on unhappy eventualities before they occurred.

Ikoma’s very presence made those eventualities harder to ignore—and that was what made his fellow steamsmiths so uneasy, Takumi was sure. That was why, when they weren’t mocking or harassing him, they kept a careful distance from the quiet, intent outsider in their ranks. They kept away to avoid hearing of what he’d experienced, and thinking of what it would be like if the same thing happened to them.

Yet for all his lack of nerve about so many other things, somehow the one who listened was Takumi.

He’d heard plenty of true-life horror stories before, told by train crews who witnessed the devastation of the Kabane from a distance… but he’d never actually heard a survivor of a fallen station talk about the close-up details. About seeing one’s familiar home become a hell of blood and fire and bodies that didn’t stay dead. About looking into the lifeless eyes of a loved one, and seeing only a monster awakening in their place.

It wasn’t as if he had really planned to know those private horrors so intimately. From the time the smaller boy arrived at Aragane, alone and broken and bitter, something about him had simply compelled the bigger boy to reach out to him with compassion no one else offered. After some initial sullen stubbornness, Ikoma finally talked just because Takumi did listen—and Takumi kept listening because Ikoma needed it so badly, even if he would never admit it. Even when the last thing Takumi wanted was to have his mind painting pictures of the nightmares Ikoma described. A vivid imagination was the curse of a coward, keeping him awake on many nights thereafter.

Ikoma once said that he liked Takumi’s imagination. He claimed it gave him inspiration.

How such a thing had come of their conversations was even more unexpected and confounding. Gradually Ikoma’s ventings of grief and rage had turned to his desire for revenge, his speculations of what he could possibly do to fight the Kabane… and somehow, Takumi himself gradually shifted from sympathetic listener to an active contributor on the subject. Although he didn’t like to dwell on thoughts of battle with Kabane any more than on thoughts of being their victim, something about Ikoma’s fervent zeal drew him in. Takumi was a very good steamsmith after all, and his mind couldn’t help grasping at the sound ideas in his friend’s uneven but clever ramblings. So he ended up offering suggestions, even when the sensible part of him knew these brainstorming sessions were a kind of madness.

That Ikoma progressed from contemplation of weapons to the biology of the creatures they were meant to kill was, Takumi supposed, frighteningly inevitable.

The first time that lunatic showed him a Kabane heart cage he’d pried out of a train wheel and squirreled away for study, with bits of flesh still intact on the inside, Takumi’s own heart nearly stopped. Simply talking about hurting the Kabane was one thing, but willfully exposing one’s self to pieces of them with their tainted blood was most definitely a very real insanity. He fiercely argued as much; but it was no surprise that Ikoma’s obsession overrode him, and a deluge of illicitly gathered Kabane organs followed.

Eventually, Takumi got used to it. He even came to be halfway interested in Ikoma’s forensic discoveries about the Kabane, in spite of himself. Of course he still protested, but it was mostly a token gesture.

He wasn’t sure exactly when they started pondering what would happen if the effects of a Kabane bite could be halted before reaching the brain. The only definite thing was that it was Ikoma’s idea to begin with. As far as Takumi had always viewed it, anyone bitten was already dead—so the thought of somehow saving them afterward would certainly never have occurred to him. In any case, they theorized back and forth for an afternoon or so, resulting in Ikoma’s hypothesis that temporarily cutting off blood flow at the neck was the most likely chance.

…And the next time Ikoma invited him to his house, Takumi was confronted by his most alarming madness yet.

The newly built iron rig loomed up tall at the back of the single small room, its steam pipes and pulleys taking up significant space. Its dangling centerpiece was a deceptively simple leather harness, the purpose clear from its size and shape alone.

What Ikoma had built inside his home was nothing less than a mechanical gallows—masquerading as the prototype for a machine meant to test his newest pet theory.

Of course, Takumi objected. He argued that such a contraption would be far more likely to break someone’s neck or simply rip their head off than save them from a Kabane bite. He pointed out that even if it worked, allowing someone to survive being bitten, they’d probably never escape an overrun station anyway.

Predictably, Ikoma ignored Takumi’s efforts at rallying some common sense from him. Instead he merely asked for help in calibrating the monstrous thing.

As Takumi feared, it nearly decapitated Ikoma in the first test. The mad genius was unfazed, and kept his reluctant collaborator working with him on delicate, nerve-wracking adjustments for hours.

Takumi hated it. Its very shadow filling half the room made him feel uneasy. He was sure that if Aragane ever fell to the Kabane, and Ikoma had reason to try to use that machine, it would only kill him—which might be a slightly less terrible fate than succumbing to the Kabane curse, but not by much.

Yet even so…

At work the next day, he watched the other steamsmiths laughing trivially at their tired old jokes, while Ikoma was bent gravely over the schematics in his notebook. And he felt something he hadn’t before.

Unlike their peers, at least Ikoma was willing to think about the dark possibilities of the future—because he had seen what they could be. His desire to spare others from the same experience was so great, he would pursue any chance he could, no matter how reckless or absurd. He would try to be prepared for every worst case, even if he could never possibly predict all of the variables, and he was left to grasp at nothing more than hazily-informed guesswork.

Crazy or not, surely that devotion and diligence in the face of overwhelming odds was courage… and Takumi was glad to have a friend who possessed it in such great measure.

It made him feel just a little less afraid himself.

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2023 Jordanna Morgan