Kurogane decided as much as he hated oppressive heat, he hated the cold just as much. It froze his muscles so much he could not stop moving for very long or else they would freeze and it would take hours for them to warm back up to full capacity. During the day it forced him and the kids to wear as many layers of clothes as the damn mage. Even the white manjuu was sporting a new fluffy blue coat, yet it still remained hidden under Kurogane's clothes most of the day.

The locals had told them the temperature had not reached above freezing in five years. They had a legend about a noble mage whose heart had frozen at the loss of his sister. He had vowed to make his land suffer as he had. He made the temperature drop so that the inhabitants would freeze as he had. Kurogane liked to watch people when stories were being exchanged. The man who told it to them seemed as if he really believed the story, and his eyes kept darting around as if he was afraid someone was going to punish him for telling the story to strangers. Sakura looked as if she pitted the poor soul who had lost his sister. Syaoran got his usual look of grim determination whenever he suspected a feather was involved and it would take a good deal of effort to regain it. As for the mage, Kurogane was sure he had never seen his face so pale or his eyes so hollow.

After a fruitless day of searching for the feather on the cold, snowy mountainside which involved a lot of shivering and stamping of feet, Fai defying all laws of physics by walking on top of the snow, and a near death experience when Kurogane had to push Fai out of the way of a giant, falling icicle, they returned frozen, covered in snow, and sore to the house that had offered them shelter. Sakura and Mokona would be spending the night with the host's youngest daughter, and Syaoran would be staying with their eldest son. Kurogane and Fai would be sharing a room with a single bed to share body heat. His mind tried to grasp at something when it heard the words "body heat," memories of another heated world where body heat with the mage was the last thing he had wanted, but the thought remained elusive, slipping through his mind like sugar through his fingers. Fai gave him a strange sort of smile as Kurogane stiffly followed him into the room.

The blonde sat down by the ample fire, watching it crackle and burn, the red flames reflecting eerily in his eyes. Kurogane decided he didn't like the way it cast shadows across the man's otherwise flawless face. He set about changing out of his wet clothes and into the pajamas the hostess had left out for them on the bed. He had wanted to get changed quickly because Fai always made him feel uncomfortable if he was doing nothing while Kurogane was trying to get changed. Unfortunately, his muscles failed to cooperate, still stiff from the cold that seemed to settle in his bones, turning his marrow to ice. Despite the fire, the cold air nipped at his skin when he pulled the last shirt over his head, causing him to involuntarily gasp and shiver. He had never been to a country before where it got this cold after the sun was down. The little heat that came during the day was not trapped by anything and afraid of the dark, running away with the sun that had given it life. His noise must have caught the blonde's attention because he was staring at him in that lazy way that made him wonder what was going on back there if anything. "Something wrong, Kuro-rin?" There was no cheerfulness, no teasing, in the way he asked the question, and, even though the blue eyes were fixated on him, Kurogane felt as if the man was not looking at him. Another shiver ran down his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. He sneezed; the blonde seemed to come back to himself at the sound, and he fixed a slightly worried gaze on the ninja. "Kuro-chan, you should be taking better care of yourself." Kurogane hastened to put a new shirt on before the mage decided to make some comment on his state of half-undress.

Once he was fully changed into dry clothes, he crawled underneath the several furry blankets. He felt a little bit better, but his mind remembered vague glimpses of shared body heat, and for reasons he couldn't explain, he suddenly wanted the mage in the bed next to him. "Don't stay up too late," he instructed as he buried his face in the pillow away from the cold. He never heard if the blonde made a reply or not.

A couple of hours later, he woke up feeling cold still, and it didn't take him long to realize the mage had yet to join him in the bed. He viewed Fai's current behavior as erratic, well erratic for Fai since the man usually made the most, or at least tried to, of every opportunity he got to spend in bed with Kurogane, tormenting him until he fell asleep. Feeling slightly concerned, he propped himself up on his elbows and peered about the now dim room. It was snowing outside, large fluffy flakes staining the otherwise flawless dark of the night.

The mage was sitting in the window, changed into the nightclothes of this world, face turned away from Kurogane, one hand pressed against the glass. Of all the strange things Kurogane had seen Fai done, the way the blonde was currently watching the snow with that blank look in his eyes was the most unsettling. A hidden part of his mind tried to yell something at him about scars and healing and a hot, sweaty day, but the rest of his brain argued it was all a hallucination.

He pushed the blankets off and shivered at how much colder the night had become. He wondered how Fai could possibly still be comfortable, but he seemed to recall the man insinuating he came from a very cold country a few worlds back. He slipped out of the bed, promising himself he would be back quickly with another source of heat in tow. He slid soundlessly across the hardwood floor and stood behind him, finding it a bit odd that the man had yet to notice his presence. He looked over his head for a moment, trying to find what was so entrancing out there in the white bleakness. Visibility was low; he could see a lone, dead tree wrapped in glistening ice, endless amounts of snow on the ground and falling from the black sky, and their faint reflections in the glass.

"Hey," he said, placing his hand on the blonde's shoulder. He doubled over as he got elbowed rather roughly in the stomach for this trouble.

"Oh, it's only you, Kuro-sama." The man had plastered a big, goofy grin on his face which only infuriated Kurogane further since he knew it had not been there a moment before. "You really shouldn't sneak up on people like that," he chided. The man didn't even have the common decency to apologize for knocking the wind out of him.

Kurogane straightened himself, convinced he was breaking through tiny ice crystals in the air. The room still seemed frozen even with another source of heat less than a foot away from him. "What are you still doing up?" he asked, glad to see at least the man was no longer grinning like an idiot.

Fai took his hand and started running his fingers lightly along the scar on his palm. "You never told me where you got this scar." Strange how something like that should have ignited the air between them did nothing; any heat the man was causing killed by the cold before it ever reached either of them. He watched with some morbid fascination as the man pulled his hand and splayed it against his scrawny chest. "And you still haven't turned my wounds into scars." He had vague recollections of a similar situation involving far less clothes.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he growled, snatching his hand away from the man's chest. It was too cold for the man's mind games, and he most certainly did not want to see the pout that crossed the man's face. Everything his mind was trying to remember was just a bad hallucination brought about by the trying heat of that day.

"I thought it was a hallucination as well." The last thing he needed was the man to be reading his mind. "But it couldn't have been a hallucination if we're both remembering it." He still couldn't find any heat, even when the man stood up and took a step closer.

"I told you, I don't know what you're talking about," feeling a bit uncomfortable with the man so close, the mist from their breath mingling in the air between him. "Can't you do something about this cold?"

Fai gave him one of those sad smiles, and Kurogane turned to crawl back into the bed. He closed his eyes and felt the man crawl into the bed next to him. A cold hand slid under his shirt and glided across his stomach. His eyes drifted slowly open. "What do you think you're doing?"

Fai gave one of his short, little laughs that always sounded more sad than amused to Kurogane's ears. "Kuro-chan said he wanted me to do something about the cold." Sharing body heat was one way to combat subzero temperatures, but this wasn't what he had in mind.

His frozen brain could not, however, formulate any arguments as to why Fai should no be so close to him. He did not even try. Instead, "Your hands are cold," he said, looking at the man as long, deft fingers massaged his chest.

"Then we'll just have to warm each other up." The mage seemed to think that settled whatever argument Kurogane had the vague suspicion they were having, because he leaned over and began to nibble on Kurogane's neck. The hand that had been exploring his chest traveled slowly back down his body and into his pants. Kurogane gasped and arched his back when the cold hand came in contact with his arousal because when his hands were that cold, Kurogane didn't see how anybody could view it as something other than torture.

Giving into the urge for body heat, or fate, or his body, or just to get the man's cold hand out of his pants, Kurogane rolled over and pinned the blonde beneath him, ravishing his neck with his teeth and tongue. Somehow he got the impression that the current scene had played itself out exactly the same way before, but he passed it off as a delusion of his body desperately trying to remember heat.

Feeling the clothes were very much getting in the way, despite the fact he was still cold, he started tugging upwards on Fai's shirt. The waif stopped him, hands grabbing onto his wrists. "It's too cold for that," he panted. Kurogane confusedly obliged when the man pushed him slightly away, and he sat back to watch. "Like this," Fai said, rolling over so he was on all fours, rear raised in the air just so.

"No," Kurogane growled, and for a brief moment he registered surprise on Fai's face. Besides, the other way seemed much warmer for him.

The blonde reached behind him and pulled his pants down just enough to fully expose his ass, and it took all of Kurogane's will power not to just take what was so willingly offered to him. "It's okay," he barely heard the man whisper, "I'm used to it this way."

"No," he growled with a bit more force this time, punctuating it by rolling the man onto his back. "I prefer it this way," he told him, pulling off the blonde's pants before settling himself between the pale thighs.

"Kuro-myu, I…" he gasped as Kurogane's fingers stretched him, "don't think this is such a good idea."

"Then keep your legs under the blankets." Kurogane entered him swiftly and without warning, causing the blonde to gasp and wrap his long limbs around Kurogane, pulling him closer and clinging to him in a tight embrace. Though the man's hands scrambling at the back of his neck were still cold, causing him to shiver, the man's body was warm, and he buried his face into the crook of the blonde's neck. His skin was still warm there, and for a while all he wanted to do was they there and breath in the musky scent of the man's skin.

"You would be warmer if you moved," he heard the blonde whisper in his ear, and he felt him shifting his thighs higher around his waist.

He granted the man's request and soon learned he was correct in pegging the man as a noise-maker. He whimpered, moaned, gasped, and panted, whispering things in Kurogane's ear as he clung tightly to his shoulders. He shifted his position and thrust harder, hoping to rid the man of coherent speech and thought. All the sounds they made were crystallized in the cold air, so he could hear everything perfectly. There were some things Kurogane decided he definitely never had wanted to hear. After one particular instance, Kurogane bit down on the man's ear in an effort to shut him up. Thankfully, Fai also found other things to occupy his mouth. At one point he had brought Kurogane's free hand to his mouth and pulled the ninja's cold fingers into the warm depths.

Fai's kisses to his neck and jaw were familiarly desperate. Unnerving as those thoughts were, Fai's firm kisses to his mouth were even more disturbing. He kissed him without any hesitancy as if he knew he would not be pushed away. However, some of the desperation began to slide into the man's movements even then.

The blonde tightened his grip on Kurogane as he came, mewling some bastardization of his name, pulling him deeper into his warmth. Kurogane soon followed, burying his face in the man's soft hair. Eventually he pushed himself out of the man's warmth, instantly regretting it. The night air felt ten times colder on his sweaty skin. As soon as he moved, Fai grabbed for his pants. "It doesn't mean anything," he said once the man was again fully dressed and safely snuggled under the blankets. Settling himself down on his side facing the window, he tried to pretend he imagined the hurt look that crossed the man's face. "It was just body heat."

"I know." After a few moments, he felt something warm hesitantly press against his back. He stayed perfectly still, and the blonde seemed to take that as compliance, snuggling more firmly up against him. "And the other time is still just a hallucination."