They arrived in a world where people's souls roamed outside their bodies in the shape of spirit animals, free for anybody to harm. Their hostess was a young female scholar with an academic institution who had been shocked when they had appeared without warning on the roof upon which she took her lunch, and she was kind enough to provide Syaoran with a key to the library.

"Thank you, Miss," Syaoran said, bowing deeply. Her soul animal, a pine marten with fur of the brightest red, was twined around her neck watching him. "We won't be here long. We can't stay in any one world forever."

"I know," she said, and her smile was sad and wistful.

Kurogane found the concept of an external soul a worrying one; he would side-eye the people they passed in the street, the animals trotting after them or flying above them or carried, concealed, in their clothing. The people here for their part seemed to find the travelers frightening.

"Sir, sir, where's your daemon?" said one child, tugging on Fai's sleeve as the wizard bent over a selection of fine, glittering wristwatches, silver and embossed with gold, displayed upon a velvet cloth in the marketplace.

Fai turned to her in surprise. A small group of children behind her were clustered close to the wall, watching them with wary, worried expressions; she was clearly their spokesperson.

"Kid," Kurogane rumbled. Fai shushed him with a hand on his wrist.

"Only you can't be witches, cos you're men," said the girl, determined. "So we was wondering where your daemons was."

Fai smiled at her; a gentle, warm smile that was still all too rare. Kurogane tensed; this was beginning to remind him of the time they'd landed in the world where everyone had no shadow, and they'd had to flee early when the locals turned nasty.

"Who says I'm not a witch, hmmm?" Fai said, teasingly. The girl's eyes grew even wider.

"Billy says men can't be witches because... because witches kill the men," she said.

"And yet, here I am," said Fai, and Kurogane rolled his eyes. "As a matter of fact, my... daemon is right here."

"Really," the girl said, sounding suspicious. Kurogane shot the wizard a narrow-eyed glare, which Fai ignored with typical aplomb.

"Yes," he said, and he undid the top button on the long dun trench coat he wore in these kind of worlds, and before Kurogane could ask him what the hell he was playing at he'd plunged a hand inside and pulled something - something furry and wriggling from an inside pocket.

Kurogane sputtered.

"See?" Fai said, ignoring him. The creature twisted in his palm; it resembled a cat but with a long body and short tail. Its tiny ears were triangular.

"That's just a ferret," said the girl dismissively.

"Ouch," said the ferret.

"She's so mean to us~" Fai agreed in a sing-song voice, while Kurogane did a double-take so fast he thought he might wrench his own neck.

The ferret wriggled its nose and sighed. "You'd think people would know a real witch when they saw one, too."

"Witch familiars are birds," the girl said scornfully. Her own daemon, which had been sitting on her shoulder in the form of a mouse, turned to a pigeon as if to illustrate this.

"Mmm," Fai hummed agreement. "But maybe male witches are different, yes?"

"Very different," the ferret agreed solemnly. Fai lifted it to his shoulder, where it tangled itself around his neck.

"What the fuck," Kurogane said.

Fai pouted. "Kuro-chan is a witch too," he said to the little girl, as if confiding something secret. "He doesn't want to be, so he's very grumpy about it."

"What? Idiot, I'm not-"

"Ve~ry gru~umpy," the ferret said in a singsong voice that was higher in pitch than Fai's, and the little girl giggled.

"What's his daemon?" she asked, eagerly, and Fai put a finger to his lips, folding his arms in mock-thought.

"Well," he said. "He's a big, grumpy dog -"

"Wizard!"

"- but really, he's very loyal and more bark than bite -"

"Wizard!"

"- and he takes good care of his master," Fai finished, cheerfully, and Kurogane grabbed him by the arm.

"We're going," he growled.

"Bye!" said the girl, already skipping back to her friends, no doubt full of stories about the strange men.

"Bye!" said the ferret, as Kurogane towed them back towards the "university".

They had been assigned a small room often used by traveling scholars; it had two, small beds on the opposite ends of the room, two cramped desks with lights over them, and side tables separating the beds as if keeping lovers apart. They'd pushed the beds together as soon as they were assigned the rooms. Syaoran slept opposite; the light was on under his door, and Fai knocked on it lightly.

"Syaoran-kun," he called. "Could you come into our room? There's something we have to talk about."

Without waiting for a response he turned and walked away, stepping past Kurogane standing glowering in the hall and opening their door.

Syaoran emerged a few minutes later, his hair ruffled and the black smudges under his eyes indicating that he had stayed up late. There was ink smeared across his fingers, but he looked happy. "I was talking to the scholar who took us in," he said, when he entered. "She has a fascinating device called an Aleth - um, Fai-san?"

"Mmm?" Fai said. The ferret was curled up in his lap; her eyes gleamed brightly in the lamplight.

"Where did you get that?" Syaoran asked, sounding impressed.

"The idiot summoned her," Kurogane said, grumpily.

"It's easy!" Fai said happily. "You just have to close one eye and look for the edges where your daemon should be."

"Yeah," said Kurogane. "No."

Fai pouted. "The people here are already scared enough of Kuro-tan," he said lightly. "People without daemons are terrifying monsters to the population of this world."

"The... edges?" Syaoran said, dubiously.

"Yes," Fai said. "You can see them if you squint."

Looking a little wary, Syaoran put a hand over his eye and stared into the middle distance with an intense expression on his face; Kurogane felt sorry for the poor kid. "Don't listen to the wizard," he said. "There's nothing there."

"No," Fai agreed, surprising him, then ruined it with - "Your daemon is sitting on the chair, Syaoran."

Syaoran looked over in surprise, and Fai grinned, a flash of sharp teeth. "It might take a few tries to see her," he said.

"Her?" Kurogane noted.

Fai nodded. "Most people here seem to have different gendered daemons. Maybe it represents the duality of their natures." He stroked one hand gently down the ferret's back, and she rolled over and wrapped her limbs around his hand, nipping his finger.

Kurogane snorted. "Sure," he said. "For someone who calls himself mommy and wears women's clothing in -"

"No more!" Syaoran said, hastily. "Please, no more!"

"You heard our son, Kuro-overshare," Fai said, and he wasn't grinning so much as leering. "There's only so much any poor boy can be expected to hear, mmm?"

"Oh, shut up," Kurogane said, with a sigh. Syaoran was still staring at the back of the chair with a thoughtful expression on his face; the ninja crossed the room to stand next to Fai, who had his head angled down, studying the writhing thing in his lap.

"Why did you choose a ferret," he asked, looking down at the creature. He'd've thought a cat would've been more Fai's thing.

"I didn't," Fai said. "She chose herself." He scratched behind her ear with a forefinger; she unfolded herself and shimmied up his arm to perch on his shoulder.

"We chose me," she said, proudly, and Fai grinned.

"You got a name?" Kurogane asked her, warily, and poked at her with his little finger. She seemed so scrawny, but her fur was soft and sleek (like a certain idiot's hair, his treacherous brain thought).

Fai sucked in a breath, and his whole body tensed.

"What is it?" Kurogane asked, freezing. He was worried he had hurt her somehow and that the wizard had felt it, but Fai ducked his head so his long bangs covered his face, his neck, bare beneath the ponytail, turning pink. "Wizard?"

"Syaoran-kun," Fai said very quietly, "Could you leave mommy and daddy alone for a while?"

"What - oh," Syaoran said, and chewed his lip. "Oh. Yes. Um. Yeah," and he was leaving the room faster than Kurogane liked.

"What was that about?" Kurogane said, staring after him as he closed the door behind him. "You've never- "

And Fai surged up and kissed him, roughly and wetly, teeth nipping.

Kurogane mmmfed in surprise, but Fai swallowed the sound and deepened the kiss; his shoulders were rigid under Kurogane's hands. He fisted his hands in Kurogane's shirt and pulled Kurogane heavily toward him, sending them tumbling onto the bed. Kurogane tried to get his hands out to brace their fall, and Fai hooked one leg over the back of his knee and ran a hand through his hair, kissing him the whole time.

When the wizard finally let him go, both of them were breathless and there was colour riding high along Fai's cheekbones. Kurogane raised an eyebrow.

"You touched me," Fai said, sounding embarrassed.

"You kissed me, moron," Kurogane said, although he didn't have the normal bite in his tone; couldn't, with Fai so warm underneath him.

"No. My - my daemon, you touched her and it felt - it felt like - fuck, Kuro-chan," and Fai let his head loll back.

"You kissed me because I touched your daemon?" Kurogane said, mystified.

"You touched our soul," the daemon itself clarified quietly. It had scuttled free of Fai's shoulder when Fai pulled them down to the bed, and was watching them from the pillow, its sleek white fur contrasting with the boring brown of the pillowslip.

Kurogane looked back down at Fai, who was watching him with half-lidded eyes. He tried to imagine what that would be like, to have a stranger's hands upon your bare naked soul, especially for Fai who spent so long hiding and concealing; it didn't come to him. "Sorry," he said, uncertainly.

"Kuro-tan," Fai said, and leaned up to nibble at his throat; Kurogane rolled his head back to allow the mage's clever mouth easier access. "Do it again," and Kurogane groaned.

He woke up the next morning with Fai asleep across his chest, face buried in his clavicle. He would never, ever understand how the wizard could accomplish that, and yet Fai did it near every night, without fail.

The ferret was curled up on the night table, asleep like Fai was. He wondered if it were possible for one to be awake without the other.

"Wizard," he said, his voice still thick with sleep. He wanted to piss and to shower and he could do neither with Fai doing his level best to crush him under his weight; scrawny as Fai was, even his weight started to tell after several hours.

The bare skin of Fai's back gleamed still with sweat, and he smelled gross; sex and sweat and his own musk. His breath against Kurogane's nose could only be described as "nasty". He didn't so much as twitch when Kurogane called him by his title again, nor when he shook the idiot, and neither did his daemon. Kurogane suppressed a groan and began the laborious task of manhandling the mage off him.

He swung his legs over the side of his bed and stretched, yawning. Fai made a displeased sound behind him and rolled over, burying his face in Kurogane's pillow, and Kurogane let himself grin now that he was confident the moron couldn't see him do so.

He took two steps toward the door, snatching up a towel from the foot of the bed, and fell over something solid on the carpet that hadn't been there when they'd gone to bed.

"Ouch," said a cranky male voice that was somehow familiar and foreign simultaneously.

"You're fucking with me," Kurogane said, sitting up.

"I wish," said the wolf, glaring back at him.

Kurogane scowled at the wolf, which scowled back at him. It-he was big, and muscled, and black, with dark red markings like a dog that Kurogane was pretty sure didn't occur naturally. His eyes were gold to Kurogane's red, but just as annoyed.

"Mmm... Kuro-tan," Fai said, sleepily, from above them on the bed.

"I didn't even do that... squinty thing," Kurogane hissed.

"You didn't have to," his wolf hissed back.

"Kuro-chan? What are you -" Fai's head emerged over the end of the bed, and Kurogane groaned as his lips curved upward, into a very pointed smile. "Hello," he said, happily. "You must be Kuro-woof!"

The wolf growled, putting his ears back, and Fai burst into peals of laughter. He reached out, slowly, and carded his fingers through the wolf's shaggy fur, and Kurogane had to grit his teeth against a wave of something; it felt grossly intimate. The wolf merely closed his eyes and tilted his head into the mage's questing fingers.

"I can't wait to get out of here," Kurogane said, setting his jaw, and Fai gave him a look.

"Kuro-wolf is so grouchy," he said, sweetly. His fingers found the underside of the wolf's jaw, and with a growl Kurogane leaned forward and kissed him to distract him.

He still hated the idea of something so valuable just wandering around, but... it had its benefits.

Notes: Fai's daemon is a ferret, as mentioned explicitly in the text. Kurogane's is a gray wolf, for reasons that are fairly obvious. Syaoran's, which I never got round to putting in, is a peregrine falcon: they mate for life and always return to their nesting sites.