Title: Scarlet Ribbons
Fandom: Weiss Kreuz
Pairing: Schuldig/Aya-chan (I know!); implied Ran/Ken
Categories: romance, amnesia, angst
Length: Long [~18,000 words]
Warnings: n/a


Author on LJ: n/a
Website: Sulatkamay Stories

Review:  "Princes, you realize, are terribly inconvenient creatures."  A romance within dreams.

If you're not familiar with Weiss Kreuz, it would take several posts to explain. Instead, for an in-depth summary I will defer you to Viridian5's excellent distillation of the zany-ness. I myself will only say this: it is a show about four florist assassins, who are the "good guys", and the psychic assassin team who opposes them and wishes  to take over the world  to be independent of their Evil Overlords. Schuldig is one of the psychic assassins, being a telepath and actual psycho, and Aya-chan is the younger sister of one of the florist assassins, who spends the majority of the first series in a coma.

Poor Aya-chan gets hardly any screen-time, and certainly not enough to develop her character. This story outdoes the canon on that point. Since canon would collapse if she were awake, the romance occurs when an injured Schuldig meets Aya-chan in her dreamworld. You can believe that this girl is real, much more so than the saintly archetype that appears in the anime and manga. She argues with Schuldig as he baffles her with metaphors and fairy tales, and as she grows up (she is in a coma for years, after all) she slowly makes him change his point of view. By the end, you want her to reunite with him - you can believe that they're good for one another. It's a very unusual story for a fandom that is aggressively slash/yaoi oriented.

The story set-up is clever, too; it's actually told after she's awoken and tried to readjust to life, having forgotten about her companion in dreams, but still suffering this nagging feeling that she misses something - or someone. I won't spoil the resolution, but I'll tell you now that it is very unlikely that I would rec a story with an unhappy ending. Hint, hint. 

Scarlet Ribbons