A/N: Since I was super busy in the lead-up to Fakiru Week last year, these were written on the bus to and from uni. And I still didn't manage to do all of the prompts.

Spring

There were roses and tulips and daffodils nestled against each other in the bouquet Fakir was carrying. The twittering of birdsong filled the air and warm sunlight stroked the freshly trimmed grass in the field. A little yellow duck trotted after the boy, flapping her wings to keep up with his long strides.

Freya's garden had been in full bloom when they stopped there to pick out flowers, a paradise bursting with life and colour.

Fakir crouched before two weatherworn slabs of grey stone and carefully placed the bouquet at their base. The wrapping paper crinkled with the movement. Duck watched him, uncertain. Fakir had not looked back at her once during the walk, as if he had forgotten she was there. Or wanted to pretend she wasn't.

Maybe she should leave him alone and unwind at the lake for a while. Maybe. But maybe wasn't good enough.

There was a rustling in the grass and a grey cat slunk into view, circling them, yellow eyes glinting. Fakir smiled a little sadly, wisps of the past clouding his gaze momentarily. "Hey, Mr Cat."

Duck took to the air and landed on Fakir's shoulder, where she lightly nudged his cheek. He turned his face toward her, his expression clearing as he blinked the memories away. "Sorry. For running off like that."

Mr Cat gave an insistent meow, eyes flicking from one of them to the other. He seemed to be sweating in a frenzy of passion. Though it might just be Duck's imagination.

Fakir reached out and petted him. "You know, a lot of birds are getting married by the lake. You should go see them."

Mr Cat jumped into the air like he'd been shocked. He took one last look at the two of them, purred plaintively and scampered off.

Fakir remained where he was, sitting cross-legged on the grass. A pair of pale blue butterflies flitted about, sometimes chasing each other, sometimes balancing themselves on swaying green blades.

Duck stayed with him. She would stay as long as he wished. Forever and ever. He had made her a promise that day, and the promise was mutual.

Books

Uzura loved stories. Fakir read to her every night, fairytales with happily-ever-afters and epic tales of knights and dragons and scary stories that made her laugh. Duck disapproved of the last kind, fearing it would give the girl nightmares, but Uzura was fearless. Fakir often said she had inherited the best of her mother. Whenever he did, Duck made a face and said she had inherited the best of her father.

Uzura loved writing too. How could it have been otherwise, when she had the blood of ancient magic running through her veins? Fakir watched her, watched as her chubby little fingers gripped a pencil too large for them, turning childish images in her head into big messy words on a page. Frequently she was so absorbed in the activity that he had to reach over and gently pull a clump of wayward hair out of her mouth. Jet black hair, just like his, but sticking up all over the place like Duck's.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened in the first few years. Uzura grew taller and the letters on the pages she laboured upon became more careful, less unruly. Her blue eyes shone with laughter.

But then one day they were wide and filled with fear.

"Papa," she said. "Papa, the kitty and the puppy over there are dancing together. Just like I wrote in my story. Papa, stories aren't supposed to come true. They're just stories."

Uzura had always been fearless. While other children were afraid of monsters that snuck into their houses under the cover of darkness and ghosts wailing in cemeteries, she dismissed such ludicrousness with the pragmatism of someone much older. But now her courage was falling to pieces, and all because of the curse he had inflicted upon her. He ruffled her hair. "And you're right. They don't. Not usually. But sometimes extraordinary things happen."

When he had put her to bed that night, he pulled Duck aside. "Uzura's story came true."

"Did it?"

"I don't know if I should be happy or concerned."

They were silent for a while, remembering the horrors of so many years ago, of a town full of ravenous crows and tainted blood, of phantom oak trees and poisoned jewels. But amidst all that there had been light and white feathers floating in the wind and pages covered in wet ink fluttering around a thicket of bushes. Where a princess doomed to vanish and a useless knight embraced and lit up the night with a power they had not known lay within them.

"It'll be okay," said Duck.

"Yeah." Their hands met and squeezed for a moment, Fakir's warm and strong and Duck's small but wiry. "After all, all sorts of stories come true."

Duck laughed, and for a second she was the clumsy, awkward girl Fakir had first met. "We can't afford to be picky, can we?"

Whatever happened, they would just have to find a way to deal with it. Like they always did. And what was there to be worried about? When it came to dealing with the weird, the wacky and the wonderful, they were practised veterans.

Burning

He was engulfed in a raging firestorm. The air seared his lungs on the way in and made him lightheaded on the way out, as if he was running long and hard. He grunted through the bursts of pain in his right hand as it flew across the page. Red droplets peppered the black letters in its wake, and red smears decorated the sheets like scorch marks. He could barely see past the hot wetness scalding his eyes.

But Fakir didn't stop writing, no matter how his head pounded and the muscles in his arm clenched up and screamed in unbearable agony. The pain ripping through his being mingled with a new kind. Duck. Duck. Duck. He said her name, over and over until he couldn't tell if it was echoing in his head or if he was choking it out in a beseeching chant. She was in every part of him, her cries reverberating in his ears as the crows closed in on her. He felt the physical impact of her body hitting the ground when she fell, the straining in her tiny wings when she picked herself up, again and again. When the crows sent her tumbling through the air with sharp, ruthless blows, it was like whiplashes cutting into his flesh.

Still he wrote on, and she danced, and danced, and danced, and the whole world was ablaze in roaring, howling turmoil. They fought for one breath after another even as the heavy smoke descended upon them, threatening to snuff out everything they knew and loved, even though to fight was to commit themselves to excruciating suffering.

Flames were consuming them, but now they were pouring out of Fakir's quill and Duck's entire being, eclipsing the tame fire that had come before. Its power overwhelmed them, stretching out and rearing its head, yearning to be free. In a great explosion it broke away from its chains and the town glowed blindingly bright.

It was agonising. It was like looking directly at the sun, except that the sun was inside him too, a great hot star exploding in his chest. He wanted to screw up his eyes, wanted to flinch away from the magnificence and grandeur of Duck's hope, a force so great, so full of nobility and sacrifice he couldn't bear it. It hurt. It really, really hurt.

But he mustered his strength and leapt out of his chair and ran for her, because his pain was her pain, and in the face of what she had endured, what did his matter?

After the prince and the princess sailed into the sky in their golden chariot, Fakir took Duck home and sat holding her for a long time. The fire had ravaged the town, trapping its victims inside its angry, churning mass of destruction. But the town had risen from the ashes like a phoenix, and had risen to be stronger and more beautiful than ever before. It had risen to be free.

And no one was freer than the duck who had not given up until the very end and the boy who had changed reality with the strength of his will. They had fought fire with fire, and they had won.

Illusion

It was quiet. There was none of the lively chatter that characterised a typical day at Gold Crown Academy, no whispers of gossip or pounding of footsteps along curving paths. Only the water in the fountain played its trickling music to an empty space. On its edge sat Fakir's solitary figure, head bent in pensive silence.

Duck dragged her feet on the concrete, tired from dancing and staying back to clean the floors. Mr Cat was more relentless than ever with his punishments nowadays, though who could blame him? There was no way she could tell him that her abysmal progress in class was caused by her having to save the day all the time as a magical prima ballerina. How ironic indeed.

Looking up and seeing Fakir, she went over and joined him, plopping down by his side. Neither of them felt much inclined to talk, Duck too burnt out from dashing around continuously for the better part of the day and Fakir being his usual surly self. After a while Duck broke the silence. "Fakir . . . I wonder if we're real."

"Hm? What are you talking about?"

"I mean, according to Mr Drosselmeyer, we're nothing but characters in a story. I wonder if that's all there is to our lives. Are we just puppets with no existence or purpose beyond the story?"

Fakir didn't answer for a long time. "Who knows?"

It wasn't reassuring. It was empty and fraught with uncertainty, question marks lingering in the chilly air. Fakir wouldn't comfort her with hollow words. That much she knew. Sometimes she even liked his frankness, the way it made her face her fears head-on even when she was a shaking mess, even when it seemed impossible to take another step. Even if she was being marched to a guillotine, she had a feeling she wouldn't flinch as long as he was there.

"I think I'm real," she went on. She didn't know why she was pressing the subject when it was a cloud of gloom hanging over them, a cloud she was continuing to feed until it became too heavy, too bogged down with water to keep at bay. "I feel like I am. But it's all a bit confusing. I'm a duck and a girl and Princess Tutu, but I'm really only a duck. I –" She forced herself to stop. "Sorry, Fakir. I don't know what I'm talking about."

Fakir looked sideways at her. "And what's wrong with that? True, our eyes and minds might be deceiving us every day. We might die in a split second, at any time, because Drosselmeyer wishes it." Duck flinched. He seemed to notice, and his voice lost a bit of its edge. "But we think we're real. We want to believe what we have is our own. It may be beyond foolish, it may be the stupidest thing we can ever do, but we do it anyway." He spoke reluctantly, every syllable sharp and clipped, desperation to voice what was on his mind locked in battle with unwillingness and resistance. The words seemed to be pulled from him with some effort, and once they were on his tongue he bit them off as though they tasted unpleasant.

The beginnings of a smile prodded at Duck's lips. Ever since their journey through the underground lake, she had experienced a peculiar sensation that surged and ebbed erratically inside her whenever she thought of Fakir. Though they had developed a relatively comfortable partnership, it wasn't only warmth and security she felt. If anything, the sensation was somewhat uncomfortable. It often made her smile, but even when she did her mind was full of Fakir stifling sobs in his throat and Fakir screaming in terror as he was set upon by bloodthirsty crows, and the deep blue water of the lake dyed crimson with his blood. Of the burdens and anxious secrets they carried and shared. She didn't understand it, but the keenness with which the feeling asserted itself cemented her earlier convictions. "And that means something, doesn't it?"

They looked at each other, gazes clear and direct, hiding nothing, renewed determination reflected in their faces. She didn't understand it, not at all. But it was enough.

Wedding

"Okay, let me get this straight," said Duck for the fifth time. "Fakir did what?"

She and Charon sat opposite each other at the rickety worktable, the redheaded young woman sprawled across the wooden surface with her chin on her folded arms and the blacksmith leaning back in his chair, a glass bottle half-filled with liquid dangling from his fingers. The smithy was a mess. Axes with dull blades coated in rust lay scattered across the floor and all manner of swords and daggers hung in untidy clusters on the walls. A great clashing and clanging could be heard from a corner of the room, where a dark-haired young man was sorting through, cleaning and reorganising the junk, armed with a wet rag and a large slab of stone.

Charon raised his bottle with an unsteady hand. "I told you, he –"

The noise from the corner reached a screeching, banging climax. Fakir yelled over the din, not for the first time, "I don't need to hear it! Say it one more time and I swear I'll leave and you can clean this mess up yourselves."

But since he had made this proclamation without acting on it multiple times, it drew as much attention as would have the boy who cried wolf. Duck and Charon barely spared him a glance.

"So like I said," Charon went on blithely, "Fakir got married to a duck."

"I did not!" Fakir protested, finally giving up on grumpy tolerance and slipping straight into denial. "It's not like it was official or anything, Mytho was fooling around and –"

"Wait, Mytho's involved in this too?" said Duck, sitting bolt upright at the revelation. She lunged at an unopened bottle, yanked out the cork and tipped a liberal amount down her throat. Too liberal an amount, because she came up spluttering and coughing, her cheeks glowing as red as her hair. "What happened? What's the story?"

In the corner, Fakir was furiously achieving a personal best in his one-man axe-sharpening marathon. Unfortunately, the hair-raising clashing of metal wasn't quite loud enough to mask Charon's next words.

"Well, it all started when a young lassie in the town got married, shortly after we took Mytho in. The boy had no idea what a wedding was, and Fakir took about two hours trying to explain it to him – which didn't go well because Mytho . . . was Mytho, y'know? But I think your didactic intent was admirable, Fakir," he said kindly, looking over at his adopted son through a drunken haze. Fakir scowled. "So then Mytho wanted to do a demonstration of a marriage ceremony, with him as the priest, and," he paused to take a swig from his bottle, "Fakir's toy duckie was the closest thing lying around."

There was a loud crash as Fakir fumbled with a pile of knives, which cascaded to the floor. He leapt out of the way, flushing a deep crimson despite being the only sober one in the room. A brief silence ensued.

Then Duck giggled. It was a surprised sort of giggle, the way you giggled when what you heard hadn't quite sunk in, but made you giggle anyway. "That's . . . really kind of adorable," she said softly. "But weird. Definitely weird. Really extremely weird. Just . . . weird."

Fakir goggled at her, opening his mouth, indignant – and closed it again. And went back to scrubbing at grime.

Eventually Charon's snores replaced the clinking of bottles and gurgling of liquid, and Duck let out a long, indulgent sigh, looking as if she too was seconds away from falling asleep. Fakir wiped his hands and joined them at the table. His eyes met Duck's, and his face twisted into a scowl again.

"Fakir," Duck murmured placidly, "thanks for staying."

Fakir's expression lost some of its hardness, but he sure as hell wouldn't forgive her for teasing him just yet. At least, he wouldn't allow her the luxury of knowing she was forgiven. "Hmph. No one with even the tiniest iota of common sense would leave you two alone in the presence of alcohol."

Duck smiled. Fakir had seen her smile in so many different ways – big goofy grins, sheepish, self-deprecating chuckles, smiles of pure joy and delight – but this was his favourite. Call him selfish, but it was always something special when she looked at him with complete openness and trust.

She twisted her mouth to the side. "A duck, huh . . ."

"Whatever you're thinking, stop thinking it. As I said, it was a stupid idea of Mytho's. It's not like I have a – a thing for –"

Duck jerked up off the table and stared at him, wide-eyed.

Fakir's hand strayed to a little velvet-covered box in his pocket. "I'm not saying anything to you until you sober up."

In the last one, Charon remembers Mytho because . . . I said so. Yep.

Thanks for reading!