Chapter Text
Kei is the worst Ken in Barbieland.
It’s unfortunate. But it also can’t be helped. He’s thought about it before of course — disappearing into the Outlands in the night. Lord knows it would be easy enough to escape from the Ken dormitories; he doesn’t think any of the Barbies actually even know where the Kens retire to every evening, and only Barbies have jobs anyway, so there would be absolutely no immigration officers, guards, policewomen, or any other form of security that required a drawn salary to facilitate.
He’s a creature of comfort, though.
He likes his room facing the beach. He has a nice shelf that Koutarou and Tetsurou managed to help him build out of the driftwood they collected in the downtime between their surfing hours. It’s stocked with books that the Librarian Barbies are happy to help him with. He has dinosaur paraphernalia from a couple Archaelogy Barbies who’ve taken a liking to him, happy to indulge a Ken with his own silly little hobby. He likes his Barbie well enough — Hitoka isn’t as exuberant as some of the others, and fortunately isn’t any of the variety whose job or habit it is to throw parties. So most of the time, Kei is off the hook. It’s only once in a while, when Hitoka goes for things that specifically require her to bring her Ken, that Kei even really has to head out to stand around for a bit of the day.
Overall, things aren’t bad, but they aren’t good, either. So it’s a constant fifty-fifty on his tab; stay, go, stay, go into the Outlands.
Well…
The one thing that keeps pushing the tally in favour of staying. He’s standing on the beach right now. Kei had watched, earlier, as Tadashi applied sunscreen on his Barbie’s back and then promptly forgot about himself. Later, when he returns to their building, it’ll be with a nasty burn on his shoulders and a smattering of new freckles on their way to the tops of his cheeks.
Tadashi is a good Ken. He’s not the best, but he’s earnest about it and seems to find genuine pleasure in doing things for his Barbie. He’s likeable, and nice, and he likes Sunday Town Halls and Friday Night Discos and sitting in the passenger seat of the Barbie convertible, smiling pleasantly. Kei, by comparison, and in general, is a really bad Ken. He doesn’t like to do any of these things, but he does, because he has to. And because after all of these things, when the Barbies say goodnight and head into their dreamhouses, leaving their Kens in the streets, Tadashi deflates, the little top-piece wefted into his hair drooping comically, and Kei can never take it.
It’s happening again today, like clockwork. He watches as Tadashi waits for his Barbie to disappear into her dreamhouse, waits for the telltale slump of his shoulders. Before Tadashi has even turned heel, Kei is already weaving through the other homebound Kens straight to him. He’s still in his beach shorts, the orange palm tree print ridiculous in the nighttime, and a big blue donut floatie strapped around his arm.
“Movie night?”
Kei slips carefully up to Tadashi’s side, his tone bored. Still, his presence makes Tadashi perk right back up. When he tilts his chin up to look at Kei, the bridge of his nose is smattered with more spots than usual. He blinks wide eyes.
“Oh!” he chirps, tone accommodating. The slightly pleased lilt to his voice is a good turnover from the sad droopiness of just a moment prior. He barely has to think about it, and that’s a nice thought. “Okay! Yours or mine?”
Kei smirks, pleased to have elicited the uptick in Tadashi’s mood. “Depends. Do you have aloe vera back at your room?”
“Do I have—? Oh!” Tadashi gasps, glancing down at himself in surprise. He’s sporting a sunburn all the way down his chest, his tan skin reddened over his neck and stomach. An embarrassed blush flares over his face and it makes him look like a strawberry, dappled under his freckles. He’s the only Ken with freckles, and Kei likes them so much. “Uh…” he says dumbly, pushing the side pieces of his hair away from his face in an involuntary movement of embarrassment. They flop right back down over his cheeks immediately. His eyes flicker hopefully back up to Kei as he asks sheepishly, “I don’t think I do, do you…?”
“Of course I do,” Kei answers shortly, remembering to scoff towards the end of his sentence in a bid to hide the quickness with which he’d answered. Like the last two, or three, or twenty times, Kei had aloe vera in his room. It had been there ever since the first time he’d seen Tadashi get sunburned, waiting to be useful in his Ken Vanity above his Ken Sink.
The convenience of this fact seems to go over Tadashi’s head, if the way that his shoulders sag in relief and his face lights up with a thankful smile is any indication. “Yours, then!” he decides cheerily for them, as if there was ever going to be any real contention. He beams at Kei as they walk, says, “You have such cool movies, Kei!”
Kei knows that he only has such cool movies because the Filmography Barbies take pity on him, like any of the other Barbies who’ve contributed to his trove of odds and ends. Tadashi isn’t privy to this information, but it sort of only adds to the bitter feeling in Kei’s stomach — that there’s such a sour underside to what Tadashi would exuberantly believe as something positive to match the rest of his Ken-tinted world. But when Tadashi trails behind him, padding quietly down the hallway to their rooms, sunburnt and happily compliant to Kei’s company and altogether endearing. When Kei looks at the contented half-smile on his easygoing face, the way his skin is faintly red even in the nighttime moonlight, it’s hard to critically of Barbieland.
Kei is door number 11.
“Here we are,” Tadashi announces thoughtlessly for the both of them, even as Kei opens his door and steps in first. “Thank you for having me,” he adds soon after, automatic, even though he’s in here every other day. He wrangles his floatie off his arm, the plastic-on-plastic squeaking comically, and deposits it by the door. Kei privately thinks that he likes how it looks, lying innocuously next to all of his other trinkets. The evidence of Tadashi existing in his space. Kei murmurs a soft affirmative and he follows Tadashi in, clicking the door closed behind him.
Tadashi makes a beeline straight for Kei’s couch. It’s a beat-up old thing, but Tadashi doesn’t have one of his own. It’s a novelty.
“I still can’t believe how cool your room is,” Tadashi muses, sinking into the velvet cushion. Kei’s room is cobbled together out of spare Dreamhouse furniture, then strung up with items of interest. He has some dinosaur figurines as makeshift bookends and strings of seashells hang from the ceiling in a cluster above his window, clinking and tinkling merrily and soft with the wind.
Tadashi sighs, picking up one of the plush pillows and fluffing it absently in his hands, running his fingers in vague patterns against the grain of the shiny velour. “Do you think all the furniture in the Dreamhouses is like this?”
Kei shrugs vaguely, not looking over his shoulders to see if Tadashi had caught the action as he chooses to go over the titles in his DVD collection rather than the way Tadashi’s tanned legs look sprawled out over the couch. “I wouldn’t know.” He whips his head around and frowns at the resulting surprised sound that this answer gets him. “What?”
Tadashi gapes like a fish out of water for the second before he snaps his jaw shut. “Nothing!” he blurts. “I just thought, you’re so cool. You must have been to your Barbie’s Dreamhouse already.”
Kei feels the way his mouth twists into a sour pucker involuntarily at this idea. “No.” Then he jolts a little in late recognition. Cool?
“Ah.” He inevitably has to look at Tadashi at some point. The furtive glance back reveals that he’s chewing his lip, face screwed up in thought. It’s odd behaviour from him to not innocently pursue a line of questioning. Kei decides to bite.
“Why are you surprised? None of us stay in the Dreamhouses.”
“Ah, yeah. I know.” Tadashi winces, his button doll nose scrunching. “I just have it in my head that maybe if you’re a good enough Ken, you’ll get to.”
“Weird.”
Kei doesn’t mean to mutter that, but it slips out. Tadashi immediately shrinks and huffs a nervous giggle, slouching backwards into the couch. Hot embarrassment flares across Kei’s neck and he whirls back around stiffly, pretending to return to the task of picking a movie… Jurassic Park. His entire shelf is Jurassic Park; not the series, just the very first one, over and over and over. And only on the second shelf. The rest of it is just stickers printed with the same image of a row of DVD spines.
In Kei’s defense, it is a weird thought. Dreamhouses are for Barbies, and the Kens stay in the dormitory. Still, he takes the only functional Jurassic Park DVD off of his shelf and kneels to slide it into the player, and as he does so, he says, evenly and without turning, “I don’t think you’re weird. I just think living in a Dreamhouse would be.” The backtracking is as close to an apology as he can let himself get.
It’s good enough for Tadashi, it seems. Because when Kei turns around, all appears forgiven as Tadashi’s round eyes are alive with the colours that are beginning to splash across the projected images. Kei tries to ignore the bitter thought that a lot of things seem to be good enough, for Tadashi.
He squeezes himself onto his couch. It’s slightly small because it was made for a Barbie and her Ken, but if he folds his knees inwards and minds his elbows, it’s a decent fit. On the other hand, Tadashi has never been conscious of his body the way Kei is; he’s easy and sprawling in the loose way he lets his long limbs tumble, and it’s only a matter of time before his arm pushes against Kei’s, their knees knock, their shoulders touch.
Kei watches the way the light flickers over Tadashi’s face; the colours swimming across the bridge of his nose, cheekbones. The way his mouth parts around his expression of small wonder. He doesn’t look mass-produced to Kei. He looks like something special. He looks like— like this, when they’re sitting pressed arm to arm— he looks like Kei could believe that he was made just for him.
Things start getting weird immediately, when Kei’s Kenphone blips on a Tuesday, at ten in the morning. Tuesdays are usually work days for Hitoka, but —
Brunch at eleven!!
Kei stares frownily down at the unorthodox message blinking up at him.
His Barbie has never asked him to deviate from their schedule before, so that she would now is definitely odd. It’s rare that all that anyone in Barbieland has to deviate from any sort of thing at all, with roles and jobs so clearly delineated. Still, it’s possible that Hitoka just knows something that he doesn’t — it wouldn’t be the first, second, or even third time, after all. At the end of the day, there’s only one very simple rule for them: be with your Barbie.
Heaving a long-suffering sigh, Kei drags himself out of his bed and over to his Ken Closet. Suspended within the tall glass display, laying out starchily flat and stiff, is a tight pair of leather pants and a spiked choker, boots and a singular pen of eyeliner. Kei scowls. Leather Punk Ken ensemble again. He’s been ardently refusing to put it on for weeks, so it just keeps refreshing in his lineup.
The last few attempts have taught him that the mechanism will not assign him the next outfit until he physically puts the present outfit onto his body, though. The hinges of the plastic wardrobe don’t actually swing open — Kei has to spin on his heel — and sort of wiggle — his hips — wave his arms like so; and the clothing weaves itself to his body in a flurry of doll magic. Unfortunately, Wattel didn’t seem to have thought past the point of getting them into the clothes, so he does still have to shimmy out of the difficult leather of the pants.
Only then does a more serviceable shirt and jeans appear — Casual Date Ken. Kei magicks it on with a grumbling sway of his hips and makes his way into town to the Ken Pick-up Point. It’s a ten minute walk out from the dormitories, where the roads just start to become pink and the beginning rows of the Dreamhouses begin to peek out from over the tops of immaculately identical trees.
Beep!
Hitoka never ever hits her horn more than once. It matches her personality: sweet, unassuming, helpful. Her cute pastel convertible pulls up to the curb, perfectly piloted, and her window rolls down. She leans out, her usual smile nervous at its edges. She waits.
Kei bites back on his sigh — his reluctance is hardly her fault. “Hi, Barbie,” he manages to sound out.
Her face splits into relief. “Hi, Ken!” she chirps in response. The door to the passenger seat pops open and Kei clambers in. It’s a graceless process, his too long limbs knocking as he folds himself into the space next to his Barbie, who’s polite enough to pretend she doesn’t notice any of his awkwardness. When he’s settled, she catches his eye and shoots him another one of those smiles before turning back to the steering wheel, heaving a deep breath and squaring her shoulders before stepping on it.
“I was thinking we’d go to the cafe for brunch, and then, well,” she jumps into rambling as they roll down the singular road into town, “I’d like to go shopping!”
”Sure,” Kei replies flatly.
He can see the way Hitoka’s hands tighten on the wheel, though she keeps her eyes determinedly ahead of her, steadfastly not looking at Kei.
“Let’s go then!” she announces, chipper tone injected with marked force into every single syllable.
The car races off. On a normal day, Hitoka already buzzes with a thrum of nervous energy — a caffeine high from being a caricature of a hard-working, deadline-pressed creative Barbie, combined with a sweetly nervous personality. But even Kei can tell that it’s amped up way more than usual today. Her grip on the wheel is white-knuckled tight, and the car keeps turning jerkily.
Kei has questions, but he doesn’t ask. It would only stress Hitoka out further and it doesn’t really matter if he has reservations on any occasion anyway. They soon pull into the circus of shopping mall complexes that are crowded into a huge plot of land nested below the slope of the hill bearing the huge white BARBIEWOOD letters.
“Shopping?” Just to be sure. Now that they’re circling the carpark beneath the behemoth buildings of shining glass windows and massive stacks of stores, it’s really hitting Kei how odd it is for Hitoka to be bringing him all the way out here. Aside from at Barbie and Ken compulsory events, they’ve so far lead very separate day to day lives.
“Yes!” Hitoka exclaims, putting the car into park. Kei holds back on a shrug, instead nodding stiffly and looking out the window on his side as they come to a stop.
Kei clambers out and he has to strain his neck to see up and up and up the tall glass fortress of a shopping complex that towers over them.
“Exciting, right?” squeaks Hitoka. She’s propped her sunglasses up on her bangs, and in the lenses, the twofold reflection of the mall winks at Kei.
Kei wrinkles his nose. Up here, Hitoka won’t see it.
”Exciting,” he echoes drily. A wry joke for only himself. This is a score towards the Outlands option, he decides privately.
Hitoka barely suppresses a nervous sound, and then she leads him into the shopping mall.
It’s clear that she’s immediately overwhelmed by the sheer — everything. She wanders aimlessly for a while, then finds a directory and reads over it three times, looping back to walk the same circle. But it’s simply not his job to tell Hitoka what to do, or where to go, or how to go about any of it. Finally, some sort of determination flashes across her face. Kei watches as she squares her shoulders and turns grimly in the direction of the closest clothing store, and marches them decisively right into it like they’re soldiers without a battle plan.
“Hi Barbie!” an unfamiliar voice calls from further down the racks of clothes. Turning in that direction reveals a tall, athletic Barbie with a neat bob and a jersey number splashed across her chest.
“Hi Barbie!” Hitoka chirps back.
”I don’t usually see you around here,” the other Barbie grins at Hitoka, tilting her head in question. “What’s the occasion?”
This, for some reason, makes Hitoka’s eyes go a little wide. “N-no reason, really!” she stammers out. “I just felt like shopping today!”
Volleyball Barbie laughs. “A Barbie should feel like shopping everyday!” she quips, beaming her stunningly too-white smile at Hitoka. It’s moot, of course, since their outfits manifest for them in their rooms every morning automatically. Anything they buy will go right into their Dreamhouse Wardrobes and disappear, back on the shelves to be shopped again whenever a Barbie acts on the feeling of shopping.
Hitoka makes a nervous little noise and Kei is unsure if he should be doing anything to assuage it. “I have no idea what I’m doing!” she blurts. She spins towards Kei, pretty doll-head on a swivel, blonde ponytail bobbing desperately. Her eyes are wide, pleading for support. Kei’s mouth falls open, spurred on by duty, but no words come out. He’s not sure what to say.
“Oh!” Volleyball Barbie steps in smoothly. “Well, a gorgeous Barbie like you can’t be left helpless in a mall now! Here, maybe my Ken can help!” she offers helpfully, smiling sunnily at Hitoka. “He’s really good at this, he helps me out all the time — here he is now!”
Hitoka blushes to the roots of her hair in the face of Volleyball Barbie’s sympathetic cooing. Her Ken comes stumbling over in the general direction of her voice, his chest and face obscured by a tall pile of clothes, with hangers with more dresses hanging on his arms. When Volleyball Barbie helpfully takes some of the hoard from him, Tadashi’s sheepish grin and freckled face smiles back at them. Kei’s stomach swoops, tumbles, and lands like a rock.
“Hi, Barbie!” he chirps at Hitoka, then, eyes shining with surprise and excitement as he turns to Kei, “Hi, Ken!”
“Hi, Ken,” Kei echoes dutifully. He can feel some of the tension easing from his shoulders as he looks at Tadashi’s big, excited smile, the stack of clothes quivering in his hands and the hangers clinging messily onto his arms.
Volleyball Barbie places a gentle guiding hand against Hitoka’s back, which makes her yip in surprise as she’s steered in the direction of going deeper into the store. “I’ll take you around, and our Kens can help out,” Volleyball Barbie offers kindly. She’s quite a lot taller than Hitoka, and they make a pair, drifting through the rows and rows of clothes.
“Yeah, we will! I love shopping,” Tadashi enthuses as he falls into step beside Kei. Kei finds that he cannot agree with that statement — lacking both enthusiasm and experience — and settles for a vague noise of assent, which no one hears anyway.
“So, which Barbie are you?” Volleyball Barbie asks.
“I— I’m Graphic Design Barbie, so I usually spend weekdays working! Making p-posters and doing things on my laptop…”
Their chatter fades into the swallow of the rest of the colourful clothing store, Volleyball Barbie’s hand on Hitoka all the while. Kei can tell that it has a reassuring effect on his Barbie, she looks less tense, less lost, and it fills him with a sense of relief too.
“Isn’t this great?” Tadashi begins to babble from beside him. He’s bright-eyed and keen.
“It’s okay,” Kei tells him honestly. There’s an obvious grumbling note to it that he could’ve hidden better, but Tadashi bursts into giggles at the disdain in his tone, as if Kei has made a truly funny joke. There’s something helplessly flattering about it.
He doesn’t quite understand it. Tadashi is the very picture of a Ken who likes being a Ken, the perfect product of Barbieland. Kei doesn’t like Barbieland. But he knows with certainty that he likes Tadashi. A sudden dislike unfurls in his chest with this thought — he watches Tadashi trail a few paces behind his Barbie, arms stacked high with clothes; loyal, helpful, kind. She doesn’t pay him any mind, chatting away with Hitoka. Surely if there’s one Ken who deserves affection, it’s Tadashi—
Tadashi, who turns on his heel, looking over his shoulder at Kei and losing his footing as he does so.
Kei dives.
Hangers fall to the ground with a disparate smattering of plastic clatter, soft clothes making a pile on the floor. Tadashi is in his arms, bent far backwards with only his heels still on the ground at an impossible pivot. Wide, brown eyes stare up at him in shock. Kei’s gaze snaps to Tadashi’s mouth.
“Wow, you’ve got a cool Ken!” Volleyball Barbie calls out, rushing to their side. She reaches concerned hands out to Tadashi, and just like that, his focus switches away from Kei as he grasps her hand and lets himself be pulled firmly upright. “Thanks so much,” she grins at Kei.
Bitterness floods his mouth.
“It’s fine,” he mutters.
“Oh my god, are you okay?” Hitoka asks, flying to his side, fretting. He nods, acknowledging her concern. It doesn’t assuage her anxiety though, and she rambles on guiltily, “I shouldn’t have gone shopping! I didn’t realise it would be so dangerous!”
Kei bites down on his deep inhale. “It’s really fine.” He moves to turn away, but makes the mistake of glancing down at Hitoka. She looks genuinely distraught, eyes roving worriedly over Tadashi and flickering to the clothes on the floor, half of which had been intended for her. Maybe it’s this; the sincere concern spared for Tadashi, or a soft spot Kei might have unconsciously let develop, but he sighs for real then, and stiffly reaches out to place a placating hand on Hitoka’s shoulder.
She jumps a little, and he slides his hand off immediately. But now they’re looking at each other. Softer, Kei says, “It’s okay. It’s no big deal, Barbie.”
The rest of the day goes a little smoother after that. Hitoka calms down, and Tadashi carries a more reasonable number of items. Kei helps. It’s almost companionable enough to be comfortable. In the end, Kei is thinking that it’s worth something for Hitoka to have made a new friend in another Barbie. It sweetens the deal in this case that that Barbie comes with Kei’s preferred Ken of choice. In the end, they leave with a reasonable number of paper bags that Hitoka piles in the shotgun seat, so Kei has to fold himself into the back. It’s the same with Tadashi, and their Barbies whizz away from the shopping malls, perfectly parallel on the pink road.
Standard Barbie and Ken rules still apply, even if it’s Barbie and Ken and Barbie and Ken. Hitoka’s baby blue car comes to a stop in front of the central station and Kei is booted out unceremoniously.
“Bye, Ken!” she calls out.
Kei answers dutifully, “Bye, Barbie.”
“Bye Ken!” Volleyball Barbie yells.
“Bye, Barbie,” Tadashi waves, his top-piece of hair drooping adorably glumly as behind Hitoka’s car, as he’s kicked from his Barbie’s automobile as well.
“Movie night?” Kei murmurs gently.
Unlike on any other day before this, Tadashi purses his mouth, and it compresses into a miserably wriggly line. He kicks into the dirt, dragging his feet. A tiny plastic pebble skitters lamely across the pink pathway.
“I dunno,” he mumbles quietly, nose tipped downwards and voice defeated.
The chest pangs come back tenfold. Before he can think about what he’s doing, Kei is taking Tadashi’s arm and leading him all the way back to the dormitory. Down the winding, well-trodden path that all the Kens take dutifully daily, Kei doesn’t look back for fear of what he’ll see on Tadashi’s face. Apprehension or rejection or sadness. The thought that he might be useless for this, caring for Tadashi, swells in his mind and in his throat like a horrible bloat. But for what it’s worth, Tadashi goes quietly, without protest, and lets Kei lead him by the wrist all the while. All the way to door number 11, and neither of them say a word about door number 12’s presence just a step more down the line.
They don’t have to sleep, but Tadashi likes to do it. Kei likes when he does it, too. When he falls asleep, Tadashi looks like the baby deer drawn on the inside of one of the books Zoology Barbie let Kei have, and it’s always a marvel. His limbs are folded fawnlike and gentle to curl him along the side of Kei’s sofa, the top of his head pressed uncomfortably against the armrest. He dozes fitfully, mouth parted around soft snores. This is what he looks like when he’s not being Barbie’s Ken. Possessiveness flutters in Kei’s chest, a soft and dangerous creature with wings, threatening to one day fill his ribcage and expand till he bursts. But tonight is not that day, and so Kei gently cradles Tadashi’s sleeping head to his chest for the second it takes to nestle a pillow under his neck and watches his soft hair fan out over the fabric with a tenderness so raw it aches down to bones Kei doesn’t have.
The moon casts gentle light over Kei’s room. It illuminates Tadashi in beautiful silver, brushes over the ridge of his nose and his cheekbone, kisses over the top of his mouth before the rest of it and his chin is swallowed back up by shadow. It’s a restful, perfect picture. Everything is still but for the quiet, steady pulse of Kei’s heartbeat.
Oh, Kei realises, for the first time. A heartbeat.
When Kei first got to Barbieland, Akiteru told him a secret: Kei was always meant to be real.
It was some sort of administrative mix-up — Kei was meant for the real world, but the Wattel Headquarters over there had made a miscalculation and he had ended up in Barbieland instead. It was a bit of a headache; he explained, trying to keep track of the ratio of Kens to Allens and Barbies, a bit complicated when you had to shuffle around the numbers every time someone left for the real world, or the Outlands, or a Barbie got too weird.
“That’s why you haven’t got an exact designation,” he explained cheerfully, “But don’t worry! Being a Ken is easy!”
On his first day, Kei got a tour of all of Barbieland. Akiteru introduced him to everyone, all pleasantries and occupations, but Kei got the feeling that he was also being tested — seeing if he would be a good fit for any of these Barbies.
Akiteru was sheepishly apologetic about this, and Kei was largely ambivalent to everything Barbieland had to offer him. The most excitement he had shown was with the Barbies who had nature books — he took a particular liking to Marine Biologist Barbie and Archaelogy Barbie, who had bookshelves lining the walls of their offices, and whom were nice enough to let him leaf around while they chatted with Akiteru about President Barbie’s latest policies. Unfortunately, both of them already had Kens.
So Akiteru switched tactics. Maybe they were overlooking what was obvious. Kei was unusually tall and unusually blond — Akiteru was tall and blond too, a very nice-looking classic Ken, a fine and nice young man. But he wasn’t as tall as Kei, and his blond was paler. “You’re just missing the tan — but that can be fixed on the job easily,” Akiteru had assured him when he sent him straightaway to Koutarou and Tetsurou to see if he’d be a good Beach Ken.
“Hey, hey, hey!” Koutarou had crowed loudly, striding down the beach in his bare feet. That couldn’t have been comfortable — hot sand on plastic. They were the two most immediately obnoxious Kens Kei had ever met, and at that point, he had only met three Kens. Their hairstyles were gelled all the way up, spiked and tall, and Kei immediately reached consciously for his own head.
“Rule number one,” Tetsurou wagged his finger at him. “Never get in water.”
“What?” Kei asked. “Then how do you surf?”
Koutarou and Tetsurou looked at each other, then they threw their heads back in tandem and burst into uproarious laughter. Their hands on their hips, their faces towards the sun, they glistened ridiculously, gold and sun-kissed and muscles rippling.
“What?” Kei demanded.
Koutarou — or maybe Tetsurou— broke away from shining gloriously to wag a finger at Kei chidingly, still snorting on his chuckles all the while.
“Who said anything about surfing?” he chortled. The other— Tetsurou or maybe Koutarou— barked a laugh in agreement.
Kei barely suppressed the loud tch that ached to click against his tongue. “Aren’t you two Surfing Kens?” he gritted out instead.
To his rapidly mounting chagrin, this only served to intensify the laughter that rose in droves to meet with his ire.
“Okay, okay, we’re pissing him off,” grinned Tetsurou. He strode forward easily to drape his arm over Kei’s neck, yanking him into his broad chest. He spun them both towards the ocean and gestured grandly with a wide sweep of his arm. “See all that?”
“The sea?”
“The beach,” he emphasised, as if that should mean something.
“The beach!” Koutarou crowed, swooping up beside Kei on bent knees, as he, too, gestured, palm outwards, arm following in a curve upwards. “We’re Beach Kens!”
That didn’t answer any questions.
“That’s what I said,” Kei said impatiently.
“No, no, no,” Koutarou wagged his finger empathetically. “You called us Surfing Kens. We don’t Surf. We Beach.”
“Like whales?”
“Like what?” Tetsurou frowned.
“Wh-ales,” Kei sounded out, patronisingly slow. “The sea animal, like the ones in Marine Biologist Barbie’s books.”
“Sea animal,” they chorused together, looking at each other as if their amplified voices would give way to clarity. As if on cue, two dolphins leapt out of the sparkling sea water to the sound of a conch shell blaring; with a musical tinkle, a giant seashell breached the surface of the blue sea, spraying creamy foam and glinting bubbles of air. The gorgeous mermaids nestled within the shell waved merrily at the trio of them on the beach, before just as suddenly and magically as they arrived, they plunged once more below the waves.
“The only things that come out of the sea are the dolphins and the mermaids, this time everyday!” Tetsurou chortled as he clapped Kei on the back.
It didn’t make any sort of sense. But around them, Barbies and Kens and Allens milled about amiably, in bright swimsuits and swim trunks, holding ice creams that didn’t melt and laying under big pink-and-white umbrellas and on striped towels in the sand. Tetsurou and Koutarou smiled at Kei with their flashy white teeth and held their surfboards — that they apparently didn’t use, and also where had those come from? — at their hips.
“It’s time to Beach!” they announced loudly, and Koutarou held his surfboard out and offered it to Kei, waiting with a patient and wide grin. He’d rather die than admit it, but Kei felt the twinge of not wanting to disappoint them. They gleamed so shiny and muscular under the Barbieland sun, earnest in their crowing.
So Kei took the surfboard from him. Immediately, he frowned, weighing it in his hands. The surfboard was light and hollow. “This is hollow,” he said.
“Sure,” Tetsurou agreed easily.
“It is!” Koutarou confirmed.
”So then how do you surf,” Kei asked.
“We don’t!” they chorused. Then Tetsurou had the nerve to kiss his teeth a little bit as he tacked on, “We already told you.”
Stand on the beach. Hold the surfboard. Grin, smoulder, glisten, flex, tan beautifully golden. It turned out that that was more or less the scope of a Beach Ken’s duty, with minor variations and adjacent responsibilities such as run slowly and sexily but otherwise sexlessly in the sand while silhouetted against the setting sun. Kei lasted all of half an hour before he scoffed and threw in the towel; though not without convincing Koutarou and Tetsurou to get in the sand from neck-down with the promise that he would make sand mermen out of them, and leaving them there subsequently. Maybe it was against some law, but neither Policy Maker Barbies nor Law Enforcement Barbies were likely to be bothered with Kens.
It was instead Akiteru, who had been poorly-concealed behind a deck chair the entire time, who came rushing towards Kei on the beach.
“Ah— Kei,” he greeted sheepishly, eyes flitting with mild alarm to the twin mounds of sand-Ken in the beach behind Kei. “I take it you don’t feel like a Beach Ken…”
Model Ken was tall and silver-blond with the most striking green eyes Kei had seen in his presumably short existence. He was also the fourth Ken that Kei had ever met, and Kei was starting to see a pattern.
“You just gotta get used to it — practice poses in the mirror till it feels natural!” grinned Model Ken, throwing his arm good-naturedly around Kei’s shoulders and giving him a big squeeze.
Kei asked sardonically, “Is that what you did?”
Model Ken laughed. “No! I was made for this, and I can do it all the time, easily!”
Kei could almost physically feel a headache pounding against his temples, which shouldn’t have been possible, because he was a doll. He didn’t think that he could spend another hour doing this. The cameras flashed, and Model Ken threw up a peace sign and hit three distinct poses in quick succession. Kei winced in the light and someone yelled at him to relax his jaw.
Kei scowled. Model Ken looked down at him and gasped in horror. He reached up and pushed the corners of Kei’s mouth back, and smoothed out the furrow in his brow. “You’ll get wrinkles!” he stage-whispered.
“I’m plastic,” Kei answered stonily.
”And you gotta be like water,” stage-whispered Model Ken, and he threw his shirt open. It fluttered beautifully behind him and he flung his head at a precise angle that fanned his hair out angelically as he tilted his face into the light. “Smooth.” He hit another pose, the flowy material of his gossamer shirt billowing about him romantically. “Liquid.”
The worst part was that his images popping up on the monitor were flawless. He looked fantastic.
”I can’t do this anymore,” Kei muttered as he slinked out of the harsh studio lighting.
“Hey Kei,” singsonged Akiteru as he took off his sunglasses and hat from where he was standing over in the corner with the Makeup Artist Barbies. He approached like someone would a wild beast, like what Kei had watched on one of the nature documentary DVDs.
Kei stonewalled Akiteru when he immediately tried to start reasoning with him all the way back to Akiteru’s apartment in the Pink House.
“You just need to find something that fits!” Akiteru cajoled, still in his poor disguise from earlier.
Kei scowled, and was secretly pleased at the slight grimace that this elicited in Akiteru. “Because that worked out so well today,” he snarked.
Akiteru wrung his hands. He wiped his sweat off on his trousers, even though there was no sweat to be wiped. At the door of his apartment, he chewed on his lip and let Kei sidestep him to enter first, and then he didn’t follow. Kei raised an eyebrow. “Not coming in?”
Akiteru shook his head. “I have to go do something,” he explained, “It’s— just stay here.”
Kei didn’t stay. He waited until Akiteru was out of sight, and then he crept along in the direction that he had seen him disappear into. In the moment, Kei hadn’t been motivated by any sense that something was deeply wrong. But he’d felt a need to know; maybe it was an inherent calling to figure out where he fit in, and what his purpose was. Whatever the urge was, it took him through the hallways of the Pink House. The signs were not hard to follow, succinct and clear, and they led him to the office of President Barbie.
The echo of Akiteru’s voice was unmistakable.
“President Barbie— I,” Akiteru took a deep breath. “I’m doing everything I can to—“
”Everything you Ken! Hah!”
”Yes, you’re very funny, of course,” Akiteru rushed to promise earnestly. “I’m doing everything I can to find Kei’s designation. But he just doesn’t seem to be a fit for anything I’ve tried him for.”
“Hmm—mm.” There’s the sound of plastic thunking hollowly against wood, rhythmic. Kei took a deep, steadying breath, and gingerly peeked around the corner of the office, getting himself at an angle where he could just see into the President’s office.
President Barbie sat on her own desk, swinging her feet. The tall backs of her stiletto heels hit against the wooden desk with each movement. She had a blonde, sharp bob, and a leopard print blouse. Akiteru was out of sight, but she wasn’t looking at him either, swishing a furry-tailed keychain between her fingers distractedly instead.
“Well, we can’t let him know,” she said with a sigh, pursing her red lips in thought.
“Kei’s a smart Ken,” Akiteru protested, “He’ll figure it out.”
Kei’s heart sank like a stone.
In the room, President Barbie sighed. The incessant swishing of the keychain between her fingers stopped as she set it carefully down on her desk instead.
“I know you mean well,” she addressed Akiteru. “But we really can’t help that he’s an anomaly. He wasn’t supposed to be here. There’s no natural way he can belong.”
President Barbie was just speaking plainly. Doing her job. Kei knew that. Kei knew that, but it still stung when Akiteru didn’t deny any of it, didn’t protest.
And he had lied.
“I’ll send a missive out to the Barbies,” President Barbie was deciding in the meantime, her tone barring any room for discussion. “I’ll speak to Hitoka.”
“…Okay,” Akiteru’s voice sounded lacklustre, and Kei didn’t even want to imagine what he looked like. Didn’t want to think of him at all.
Count one for the Outlands. And it might have been the one and only, if Akiteru hadn’t caught him on the steps of the Pink House. One look at Kei’s face, blank and reproachful all at once, must have told him everything he needed to know because his complexion paled as recognition and horror swept openly across his face.
“Please,” Akiteru pleaded. “Kei, you have to understand—“
“Don’t ever speak to me again,” Kei instructed flatly. “I never want to see you.”
The pain and panic that flashed in Akiteru’s eyes was palpable; Kei let his anger crash over him and then ebb into the dull wash of disappointment. The feeling of cold uncaring sealed over in his chest, like setting concrete, deadeningly hard and heavy.
That was count two for the Outlands. And the tally might have stopped there, right at the first ring of trees that demarcated the borders, if not for the faint sound of splashing that reached Kei’s ears alone in the quiet night.
Why was something squeaking out in the forest? Kei carefully padded his way towards the sound, where the trees broke into a clearing. Silver light spilled out over a glittering pond, and a Ken knelt, bent, over the still surface of the water.
As Kei watched, he rubbed desperately against his face, rough and unforgiving. He made a small, distressed noise — he pushed his palms against his cheeks, his fingers splayed to frame the sides of his face almost delicately. He looked fragile. Kei realised with a start that he was trying to erase his freckles, which poured across his face and his arms, spotting them with constellations.
Maybe it was the effect of the moonlight, or maybe it was Kei’s emotional turmoil, but in that moment, he had the urgent thought that they looked like stars.
“What are you doing?”
The other Ken reacted with his entire body, jumping with fright as he whirled around wildly, eyes huge in his face. His mouth wobbled, fingers still pressed to his face, too stunned to try to fake anything else.
“Are you seriously—?” Kei cut himself off sharply, crossing over in a matter of a few strides and planting himself firmly in front of the Ken, reaching out without thinking and taking his wrists in his hands. The Ken’s eyes widened, his hands going limp in Kei’s hold.
Kei took a slight breath. “That’s lame,” he said. The Ken’s eyes flickered with hurt.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “I know. I just— you wouldn’t get it.”
That made Kei laugh, harsh and mean. He was having the first — and worst — day of his life. The other Ken flinched. Kei stared down at him, eyes alight with malice.
“What wouldn’t I get?”
The way the Ken’s mouth settled was almost angry, his eyes scanning over Kei’s face like he was looking for something he knew he wouldn’t find. He exhaled a brittle little laugh, self-deprecating, and held up fingers as he began to count.
“You’re tall and you’re blond and you’re perfect,” he listed, waver in his voice as he meted out each trait. “Like a Ken should be. Like I’m not.”
It was the most bullshit thing Kei had ever heard. But it was honest.
“Kei.”
The other Ken looked back at him in apprehension and disbelief. This, too, made Kei want to laugh. He felt on the edge of a rancid sort of delirium.
“Tadashi,” the other Ken replied, tentative and with a reluctance that felt appropriate; it felt neutral, neither the overblown promise of Barbieland or the ominous unknown of the Outlands. It felt grounded.
Kei nodded. He could have been nodding to acknowledge Tadashi’s reply, but mostly, he had made up his mind.
“You should go back,” Kei said to him, curtly.
Tadashi breathed out, quick and soft. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry,” he said shortly. “Listen— can we just pretend this didn’t happen? I shouldn’t have been doing this here.”
Kei raised his eyebrows. “Or anywhere.”
“Yeah. Right,” Tadashi snorted. “Don’t make fun of me.”
He hadn’t been making fun of Tadashi. Either way, that had been the first count towards staying. Tadashi was proof that not everything in Barbieland was so perfectly ordained after all. Tadashi had felt real, more real than anything Kei had known in that moment. Maybe it was weakness then, the way it was weakness now.
”Where do you stay?” Kei asked.
Tadashi looked confused. “The dormitory?” he answered, with a puzzled lilt to his voice. “Where all the Kens stay?”
And so, Kei moved in to room number 11.
“It’s Beach Day!”
“Get out of my room,” Kei grits out with a groan, rolling over and pulling his pillow over his face.
“It’s Beach Day, Beach Day!” Tetsurou chants again, at the same time that the pillow is ripped off of Kei’s face. Koutarou’s grinning mug swallows his entire view, and Kei groans, turning onto his side pointedly, only to be physically picked up and rotated so that he’s back to staring Koutarou in the eye again. His stupid athletic Beach Ken strength.
“Is Kei coming?” Shouyou bounds into the room. “It’s Beach Day!! We’re going to be late, hurry up!”
Kei hisses. “It’s nine in the morning, Beach Day starts at three.”
While Beach Day does in fact start at three, it turns out that Kei is helpless to it beginning earlier when at least four other Kens decide that it should begin earlier. There is little he can do to resist being carried out of bed and directly to the beach, save for cursing the absence of locks in the dormitory the whole way through.
As soon as the group of them step onto the beach, Kei’s pajamas ripple with sparkling pink light and give way to a pair of orange surf shorts instead. Beach attire, Barbieland dictates for him. For a Ken on the beach.
”Y’know,” Tetsurou says thoughtfully, “He’s so pale, I don’t know how we ever thought he might be a Beach Ken.”
Kei rolls his eyes from where he’s been deposited in the sand without fanfare. But Shouyou’s mouth is trembling, his eyes comically wide.
”What is it?” Kei asks sharply, running low on patience. He’d stands up and dusts himself off. “Well?”
“V… V… V…” Shouyou begins to stammer, mouth falling open into a stupid expression, as he points a wobbly finger at Kei. “VAMPIRE KEN?” he shouts questioningly.
It’s the stupidest thing Kei has ever heard. Tetsurou bursts out laughing and Kotarou’s eyes go huge, like Shouyou has just revealed the most shocking proof in existence. Everyone knows that Vampire Kens are limited edition and stay on the high ridges of castles on tall hills with their Countess Barbies, not in main Barbieland. If Kei was a Vampire Ken, it would be well known and accounted for.
“What if he sucks my blood!” Shouyou yells.
“We don’t have blood, stupid!” Tobio fires back.
“I wish I could suck your blood,” Kei hisses vindictively. “I’d drain you and dump your bodies in the Outlands.”
”WAAAH.” Shouyou wails at the same time Tobio fumes, “Not if I drained you first, asshole!”
Kei kisses his teeth loudly, leaning forward with full intention to vindictively convey that neither one of these idiots are able to drain each other of a fluid that they simply do not possess. Tadashi’s laughter is like a point-blank shot to his chest. It bubbles up from beside him, quiet and deliberately muted, but in the moment it is the most sudden and musical thing in the world.
He grins sheepishly when Kei turns his eyes on him.
“Hi, Ken,” he greets.
“You’re here,” Kei says.
“I’m here,” Tadashi agrees. He cocks his head innocently and pokes his finger at his cheek. “You missed a spot,” he informs Kei, before a grin splits across his face.
Kei’s hand flies to his face to rub at the side of it. No sand comes off; it’s perfectly fine. Tadashi sticks his tongue out at him cheekily and Kei’s own lolls uselessly in his mouth. Then Tadashi closes the paces between them and leans up. Kei flinches back on instinct. Tadashi narrows his eyes in concentration and dusts off Kei’s cheekbone with his fingers. This time, Kei feels the telltale grit of sand streaking off of his skin.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Kei tells him sarcastically. He had meant to say thank you.
Tadashi doesn’t seem to mind, just hums and answers cheerily, “You’re welcome, Kei!” But his eyes are already elsewhere, drifting unanchored out towards the sea. It makes Kei uneasy, seeing where Tadashi has splintered off from a whole into these smaller pieces edged with melancholy.
He tries not to think about it. Instead, he busies himself with what he usually does on the beach to keep far away from anyone else. He trawls the sand for interesting shells for his collection, carefully excavating any colours or textures that catch his eye.
“Kei!”
The sharp shout of Tadashi’s voice catches his attention, the apparent uptick in tone a pleasant surprise.
“Look what I found,” he instructs, wind-swept and a little out of breath from running on the beach. He presses a round and rough shape into Kei’s hand.
“A sand dollar,” Kei informs him without thinking too much about it.
Tadashi thinks on this answer before he asks. “What can I buy?”
Kei exhales a huff of a laugh. “What do you want to buy?”
A sly look snakes across Tadashi’s face.
“Can you make me one of those seashell necklaces?” he asks, pointing over towards the part of the sea where the Mermaid Barbies rise from. He’s making reference to the shells they wear around their necks. He definitely knows that Kei has some means of doing it, because he’s seen the trinkets in his room.
Kei wants to humour him. If it’ll keep him here with him, smiling and freckling at a rapid rate under the sun instead of pining after his Barbie, he’ll make as many necklaces as Tadashi wants.
Tadashi picks an array of shells and they carry them in their pockets back to Kei’s room. This counts as a Beach Day activity, Ken reasons to himself, and certainly doesn’t bother justifying it to Koutarou/Tetsurou/Tobio/Shouyou, who are all too busy smacking a beach ball around boisterously when Kei and Tadashi make their stealthy getaway.
“Wow,” Tadashi comments idly, leaning to peer at the working of Kei’s hands. He drapes himself over Kei’s back, slumping into him, and hooks his chin over Kei’s shoulder so that he can see the work bench better.
Kei’s heart pounds in his chest, the dizzying thumping a completely new sensation to him. He swallows, parting his lips to inhale a long, quiet, steadying breath as he wills his hands not to shake or stall in their task. Tadashi’s hair tickles against his cheek, his weight pressing down on Kei. It feels — Kei is already scared of what it will feel like when he eventually moves away. He wants to melt into Tadashi, stay pressed to him forever.
”Don’t move,” he scolds instead when he finally finds his voice. “I’m going to use a drill now.”
“Okay,” Tadashi promises, marvelling.
Tadashi keeps to his word. He doesn’t move. He keeps his face tucked against Kei’s neck, arm braced across Kei’s back to watch the careful process of drilling and sanding and polishing the shell. Kei barely remembers to breathe the entire time, dead focused on his task in a desperate bid to ignore the clawing feeling of need crawling over every bit of his skin.
When the shell is finished, lying shiny and clean in the centre of a pile of dust, Kei picks it up and runs his thumb over it carefully. It’s a white shell with a mottled brown pattern that almost looks like a thin crescent on its smooth interior. “Here,” he exhales in a rush, jerking in his chair to turn to Tadashi. Tadashi jolts back in surprise, lifting his weight off of Kei as he does so, and Kei immediately mourns the lightness. He swallows, looking into the other Ken’s expectant face.
“Can you pass me that string?” he asks, mouth like sandpaper. He points to a spool sitting on a smaller side table. Tadashi nods, his cowlick bobbing with excitement as he scrambles clumsily to reach across the room for it. The momentary pause gives Kei time to process the remaining phantom pressure of Tadashi all across his back, and he squeezes his eyes shut and centres himself.
“Thanks,” he says when Tadashi drops the spool onto his work bench. He picks up a pair of scissors and slices a length of string from the spool, looping it through the hole he’s drilled into the shell and deftly tying it off into a knot. Page 37 of the copy of A Hundred Knots for Adventuring Barbies! he had found rattling in the drawer of a cupboard that had been donated from Girl Scout Barbie.
“An adjustable sliding knot,” Kei recites from memory, demonstrating the necklace in his hands as he holds it out for Tadashi’s inspection.
“Wow,” Tadashi breathes, his eyes glimmering. It’s worth it — to be a piecemeal Ken with piecemeal skills — if he can put that excitement back in Tadashi’s face even for just a second. “You’re so cool, Kei.”
And… it’s nice to hear, but Kei wishes that Tadashi would believe it about himself. He wishes he could tell Tadashi that he had seen the way he’d helped his Barbie, and Hitoka too, all the way through their shopping day, that he’d noticed him colour-coding the clothes before packing them into bags. He turns the thoughts over and over in his head, but ultimately finds that he doesn’t know how to put them into the correct words.
“You’re plenty cool,” Kei says gently instead, meaning it as he reaches down to pluck the sand dollar out of Tadashi’s hand.
“Not as cool as you,” Tadashi protests, reaching out grabby hands for the pendant that he’d paid Kei for. Kei presses the seashell and string into his palm, and Tadashi admires it openly, turning it over in his hands with glee before clasping it to his chest in an excited motion. “Never as cool as you!” he enthuses.
“You’re killing me,” Kei answers as drily as possible. Inside, his heart thumps against his chest, jackrabbiting. You’re killing me, killing me, killing me.