Title: Tunnel Flights (p3)

Author: Smoke

Rating: PG-13, language.

A/N: This was written twenty-four hours too late for my contest deadline. ):

There was nobody around the safety door when Kurogane rode up to it. This was just as well, seeing as anyone who saw him trying to go up Above would doubtless assume he was suicidal and try to stop him, or something stupid like that. He didn't have time for that, not now, so he wrenched the rusted handle to the right and pulled the door open. It moved slowly on disused, creaking hinges. Flakes of rust fell off the handle where he touched it.

Sunlight flooded the tunnel.

Kurogane was not often impressed, or at least he seldom deigned to show it when he was. But this... His jaw dropped. It was brighter than anything he'd ever seen, like Fai's welding torch multiplied a thousand times. It illuminated a wasteland, a massive desert that stretched past the horizon. He could see the wreckage of buildings off in the distance, but nothing real, nothing that showed what the earth had once been. Just... rubble. Cinderblocks, broken glass. Nothing alive.

He'd always sort of thought it would be green. Not this ugly mess of white-yellow-grey-brown.

Still, he got used to it fairly fast, and got ready to rev up his bike and start searching. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of looking up. Above him was an empty blue. For someone who'd spent their whole life having to duck to get anywhere, it was vaguely eerie.

"Fuck," he muttered, looking at the ground and then up again. "Where are you, Fluorite? This place is huge."

Well, there was no point in letting some big blue empty scare him. As long as the motorcycle worked - And it'd work, because Fai had made it - he could search. Fai couldn't be far from the tunnel systems, because whoever had dumped him out here (Kurogane had a pretty good idea who it was, too) wouldn't have wanted to risk getting sick. He'd heard that you got sick in the Above - really sick, that is, not throwing up but braindead or worse - after three hours. Fai had been gone for two.

An hour to find him and get back. Hour and a half at the outside. Well, a mechanic without higher brain functions wasn't going to be helping anybody. Time to get going. Kurogane grinned and pulled down his goggles. Just for now, he didn't have to think about the fact that Fai might be dying or that he was in grave danger. This was just another race.

-this is a pagebreak -

It quickly became clear that he wasn't going to find much of anything just searching randomly. Kurogane needed a vantage point, a way to see a lot of this apparently endless desert without actually going over it. He sped towards the tower that dominated the landscape. Miraculously, the orange-and-white tower was still standing, despite apparently being the tallest building around. It was possibly the biggest thing Kurogane had ever seen. He left the bike tipped on its side next to the outdoor steps and started up the stairs.

Halfway up the staircase, he realized that getting to the top of the stairs was significantly less important than getting high enough to look around. Which, about 300 steps into the tower, he was. He looked out – This place seemed endless, a desolate wasteland devoid of any life or color. It was hardly even sand, the desert. It was more like grey dust or rubble. There was nothing nice about it. It looked threatening in its emptiness.

Light glinting off of something orange caught his eye. It was something far-off, small, and plastic.

Team Tsubasa's goggles were orange plastic. Fai's goggles were orange plastic.

The stairs seemed twice as long on the way down, even though he was sure he was running much faster.

-this is a pagebreak -

Kurogane slowed to a stop as he got closer to the place where he'd seen the plastic. It was hard to navigate without any real landmarks to go by, but the sun was high and bright in the sky, and the plastic glinted bright orange in the sand. It was as bright as the taillights on a cycle, and that was no problem to follow.

The plastic turned out to be an oblong, hexagonal piece of orange-tinted plexiglass. One of the lenses from the goggles, definitely. He pocketed it and looked around. Fai couldn't be too far off, could he? He'd been out here almost half an hour already. Stupid mechanic with all the white on his uniform – He'd be practically invisible against this sand.

Sound carried well up Above -- Kurogane heard someone cough.

Still carrying the goggle lens, he stepped cautiously around the sand dune. That was where he found Fai, groggy and covered in dusty sand, but alive. Definitely alive.

"Ah," Fai said, squinting at him. "It's Kuro-tan."

"What the hell are you doing out here, you idiot?" Kurogane said, speaking gruffly to hide the overpowering sense of relief he felt.

"I'm not sure," Fai said apologetically. "I just woke up. I might be tied up, I can't tell."

Kurogane knelt down beside his mechanic and untied first his wrists and then his ankles. He'd probably gone numb while he was asleep. "You're okay?"

"Ehh. I feel sick."

"Are you gonna throw up?"

"Not sick like that. I mean like sick-sick," Fai said, flexing his fingers and putting a hand to his head.

Kurogane nodded, looked at him, sighed a little too theatrically, and picked him up. "Okay. Let's go."

"I wasn't scared," Fai said in his ear. "I knew Kuro-rin wouldn't just let me die."

-this is a pagebreak -

Syaoran paced up and down in his bedroom. There wasn't much time until the race. If he left now, by himself, he might make it in time, but there was no way Kurogane-san would.

There was nothing else for it. He got on his bike, which was a trainer, but a trainer made by Fai. The agreed-upon racetrack was over at Team Shop's home track. He'd just have to explain the situation and try to postpone the race.

-this is a pagebreak -

There was, at the outside, an entire hour to get back underground. Kurogane was a little worried, but not unduly so. There was still time, and the safety doors were painted red specifically to make them easy to find from the outside.

The wind picked up. Fai's hands, holding tightly to the back of Kurogane's jacket, trembled slightly. "Doing okay?" the racer asked.

"Yeah," Fai said. " 'm just… stiff. Achy."

"We'll be there soon," Kurogane said, no room for questions in his tone.

-this is a pagebreak -

The Wave racer was getting impatient by the time Syaoran got to the track. "Ah, excuse me," the boy said hesitantly, "There's been some trouble. I don't think Kurogane-san can come…"

"The ditched?" the Wave racer said incredulously, and laughed. "What, was he scared?"

"There was some trouble with Fai-san," Syaoran said quietly.

"So you forfeit," the racer said. "We win."

"I was hoping you could, um, wait."

The Wave racer shook his head. "No way. We chose a time and place, and they aren't here. Rules say it's a forfeit, unless there's someone taking his place."

There was already a crowd gathering. Someone yelled, "We came out here for nothing?"

"Umm," Syaoran said, "Umm –"

A sensible, friendly sort of voice spoke from directly behind him. "Well, I've heard this boy is quite a passable racer. He could race in Team Tsubasa's place, couldn't he?"

"What?" said the Wave racer.

"What?" said Syaoran. He turned around. There was a tall man behind him – he looked to be seventeen or thereabouts. He wore team colors Syaoran hadn't seen before, black and navy blue with tiny pink accents.

"Do you think you can do it?" the man asked him. He had short grey hair and looked… trustworthy, in a hard-to-explain way.

"… Maybe," Syaoran said. "Who're you?"

"I'm Yue," the mechanic told him. "It's nice to meet you."

-this is a pagebreak -

The wind was quickly becoming a sandstorm. Fai tied his scarf around his nose and mouth, and then a hankerchief across Kurogane's. He put the lens back in his goggles with an audible click, and wrapped his arms tight around Kurogane's waist.

They drove fast, searching for the bright red of the security door. "Kuro-chan," Fai said, his voice hard to hear over the howling wind, "Would this be a bad time to say I like you?"

For a second, Kurogane couldn't think. Then his mind started racing so fast he couldn't string together a sentence. "Like... how?"

Fai said, "I'm not really sure if I know what I'm saying. I'm... tired."

I hope you do, Kurogane thought fervently, and realized he'd said it out loud when the mechanic laughed.

"I was a little worried Kuro-tan would hate me."

"Stupid. I wouldn't hate you," Kurogane said. "And it's like you said. A lot of teams do it."

"I'm in love with Kuro-zoom," Fai said almost to himself, as if he was trying it out. The sand was getting thicker in the air, and it stung where it touched bare skin.

"Don't say it like we're dying," Kurogane told him.

"I will still be in love with Kuro-zoom when we get home," Fai amended. Kurogane felt the mechanic's grip on his waist slackening.

"Hey. Don't fall asleep. I keep thinking - "

"I'm not going to go into a coma, Kuro-rin," Fai said sleepily. "There are things I want to do first. People I care about. And I have to fix Kuro-bun's headlights."

"The door!" Kurogane yelled. There was something red visible through the driving sand. The safety door.

- this is a pagebreak -

"Good race - What's your name?" Yue asked.

"I'm Syaoran. And it really wasn't," Syaoran said miserably.

Yue's racer passed Syaoran a canned soda. "You almost won. You're, like, eleven. He's eighteen. You totally showed him up."

"I lost," Syaoran said, not pointing out that he hadn't been eleven for several years.

"Doesn't matter," the racer said. "You've got spirit, brat."

"There's this girl," Syaoran admitted.

"Oh yeah? What's she look like? You're impressing her, huh."

"She's got brown hair and green eyes and she's really, really pretty," Syaoran said. "But she's in a coma. I want to pay her medical bills."

"Whoa. Heavy. What's her name?"

Syaoran pointed to the emblem on Yue's uniform. "Sakura. Like your tea-"

The racer spat his drink across the floor. "What the FUCK did you do to my sister?"

The safety doors not two yards away from them clanged open, letting in a burst of sand-filled air, a motorcycle, and two men.

"Kurogane-san?" Syaoran asked.

"He needs a doctor," Kurogane said, gesturing towards Fai as he went about reclosing the doors. "Radiation poisoning."

"I want to know what the hell happened to my little sister!"

"Touya, please," Yue said. "I'm sure it isn't Syaoran-kun's fault."

"How did she get into a coma? She's supposed to be with mom and dad!"

"Um," said Syaoran.

"I said I need a doctor!" Kurogane's voice carried over everything else.

"Yuki can fix him," Touya said.

Yue was already looking Fai over. "Symptoms?"

"I'm really fine," Fai said. "Just a headache. I ache a little. Nothing serious."

"Tilt your head back and look to the left, please," Yue's voice had taken on a professional, clinical tone. Fai obliged. "No discoloring. How many fingers..."

"How does a mechanic know that?" Syaoran whispered.

"Yukito wants to be a doctor," Touya said in a hurried undertone. "But he needs money, and nobody wants a mechanic to take care of them. So he uses another name. That's beside the point, though. Where is Sakura?"

"Oh! She mentioned you in her letter!" Fai told Yukito. "Except she used your full name, so we couldn't find you."

"You got out just in time," Yukito informed Fai. "I'll write you a slip for some pills that will get anything bad out of your system, okay? Just so you don't glow in the dark."

"I just want to sleep," Fai moaned.

"How odd. That's not a regular symptom."

"Someone drugged him," Kurogane supplied.

"I don't remember who," Fai added.

"It was Wave," Kurogane said.

"You can't know that for sure."

"It's gotta be Wave. Who else would it be? I'm going to kill that sonuvvabitch racer."

"Oh, his mechanic did give me a cup of coffee," Fai said suddenly.

"That sounds fairly suspicious," Yukito decided.

"Yuki, let's go see my sister," Touya said.

When Yukito found out that Sakura hadn't gotten any better or worse in the time since Syaoran had found her, he said that it was stunningly good luck and they might be able to wake her up at the hospital. Syaoran looked so excited that Fai wondered if the boy was going to faint.

- this is a pagebreak -

Two weeks later, Syaoran walked self-consciously into the hospital, holding a bunch of heatlamp flowers. The felt out of place in his uniform, and looked at the floor the whole way up to Sakura's room.

She was finishing lunch when he got there. She looked up at him and smiled brightly, and it made him think that maybe this was what a heart attack felt like. He held out the flowers. "H-here."

"You're Syaoran-kun, right?" she said. "You took care of me that whole time?"

"Y-yes," he said. "It wasn't any trouble! I'm really- I'm glad you're okay."

Touya, who was sitting by the wall, spoke up. "If you lay one finger on my little sister-"

"Touya! Stop being mean," Sakura said, turning slightly pink. "He took care of me for a long time, he's a good person."

Syaoran thought her voice sounded just like he'd imagined.

"Whatever," Touya said, but let him stay.

- this is a pagebreak -

"Did you take those pills?" Kurogane asked.

Fai rattled the bottle. "Tada! Last one." He swallowed it and tossed the bottle in the trash. "I am now officially not a mutant."

Kurogane laughed. "What the hell, you screwball."

"Kiss me, now that I'm human," Fai demanded.

Kurogane obliged, pulling the mechanic close and lifting his goggles out of the way.

"I smell like engine grease," Fai laughed.

Kurogane didn't let go. "So what?" he said, palms pressed against Fai's hips. "I love this smell."