OHAI FIC: ohai fic

Pairing: KUROFAI OBVIOUSLY like I ever write anything else ahahahahaha (help)

Notes: So, there is no plot to this. No, like, there is actually no plot to this, except to answer the, 'What if there was a Nihon!Fye who never met Nihon!Kurogane, or a Celes!Kurogane (or even a Valeria!Kurogane) who never met met Celes!Fye?' question. I think it's going to be the first part of my, "OH LOOK HERE ARE A BUNCH OF DUMB SLICE-OF-LIFE ONESHOTS ABOUT THE GANG'S EXTENDED POST-SERIES JOURNEYS, LALALALALA," 'verse, but yeah, this is pretty much three thousand words of absolutely nothing happening. Um. Oh, and I always thought Kurogane's thing for reading manga in the earlier chapters of Tsubasa was really cute, so I brought it back. Yeah. 'kay. Cool.

Other notes: Also, my grandmother gave me her Tarot deck.

Seven of Cups

There had been snow the night before, and although it had been light enough to melt before midday, the sky was still white with cloud, and the wind where it gnawed at the back of Kurogane's neck was cold. He sneezed and nearly walked into a streetlamp, which set him grumbling: he wiped his nose and glared at the small cat watching him from a window and stalked away down the street with what he liked to think was superb nonchalance. His breath fell from his lips in irritable puffs. He had forgotten his gloves and the tips of his fingers were turning red, and his nose wouldn't stop running, so he was very probably getting a cold, but mostly, Fye was late.

The bell of the bookshop shone loud in the dimness as he clattered inside, wiping his feet on the mat with bad grace following a glare from the woman at the counter. Trestle tables spanned the shop in a mazy sprawl, each one heaped high with dust and books alike, and the walls were mortared with scrolls. Skinny, temperamental ladders gambolled from shelf to shelf on little enchanted legs so as to make the higher volumes more accessible: over on the other side of the shop, Kurogane could see a father scrambling after a small boy who had climbed to the very topmost rung of one of the more agreeable ladders and was having a marvellous time directing it from shelf to shelf at high speed.

Still grumbling, he mooched away through the maze of tables and ducked into the older bookshelves right at the back, which he had abandoned a good hour ago in favour of finding food. He turned down a narrow alleyway between two dark shelves and was met with a blinding burst of light: for there was a window set into the wall just there, and the pale light fell through the dust to glance silver-bright off the white tiles. There, standing still and strange as a white stone statue, was Fye, his hair blazing in the light, his fingers hovering just above the pages of the book in his hand.

Kurogane had once stood alone between the white walls of a deserted house heaped high with sand to the windows: and in the half-dark after the heat of the day, with thunderclouds massing in the hills far away and a little cold wind beginning to walk in over the moors, he had suddenly been overcome by the powerful notion that someone he could not see had only just walked out of the door and would return any minute. He had turned, neck prickling, to catch a flash of white in the doorway and the barest sense of a sound like a breath: and he had wondered if that had been how everyone they had left behind had felt on seeing them leave, afterimages still bright behind their eyes long after the form had faded.

Looking at Fye now, he felt once again a loud and insistent sense of loss, as though something in him, something living and present and urgent, had fallen away barely seconds ago. Profoundly unsettled, his touch to Fai's wrist was rather rougher than it could have been. Fye startled badly, glanced up in confusion: smiled, softly and with sadness. Kurogane relaxed somewhat, but kept his hold on Fye's hand.

'Find anything good yet?' he asked, loud and brash. 'Thought I saw some manga up front, but it was just crappy girls' stuff.'

Fye said, 'This is a bookshop,' and, 'Shhhh,' and then, moving a little closer to whisper wickedly into Kurogane's ear, 'You read Ouran religiously. I've seen you.'

'I do not,' Kurogane grumped, but kept his voice down, if only to keep Fye near. He tugged at his wrist a little, brought him closer still, until their knees bumped and their shoulders brushed. He slipped his hands under Fye's own and took the weight of the book into his palms. 'You're late and the kid's on an architecture kick again.'

'I found a story,' Fye explained, quiet and breathless. The wintry light in his hair was nearly blinding, and the bones of his wrists under Kurogane's were fragile. 'Your hands are cold. Did you forget your gloves again, you big silly?'

The light in his eyes was soft and so lovely. Kurogane still had to look away sometimes: Fye could cut him like glass even now. 'Seriously, he wouldn't shut up about arches,' he insisted, swallowing hard. 'I left him at the café with that Aoki guy. Figured they could talk history at each other for a bit. C'mon. We're leaving.'

'I found a story about us,' Fye said. He pushed the book against Kurogane's chest, leant close. 'Listen. Listen. And striving still the Twiceborn stood against the poison-bearing beast and struck out its eyes, and from its talons snatched his sword-brother, who lay swooning upon the grass. Thereupon the Twiceborn gave unto him the philtre he had bought from the queen with his own heart's blood, and the Dark Warrior awoke and clasped him in his arms and cried passionately –'

'The hell,' Kurogane said, choking. 'Give me that.'

Fye did, although he smirked rather unfairly. Kurogane glared down at the pages. 'It's the same damn chickenscratch they've got everywhere around here,' he complained of the text, but there were illustrations, and rather beautiful watercolour ones at that. They involved a dragon, and a daring rescue mission, and a beautiful bright-haired man holding a very familiar crystal staff – 'Alright, alright, so there's a blond guy in a dress and – the hell am I naked for?'

'So you agree it's you!' Fye crowed in delight, then remembered that they were in a bookshop and clapped one hand over his mouth. His eyes had creased up at the corners. 'I told you!' he added in a stage whisper. 'We're famous in this world! We were historical figures! Alright, yes, it's technically a myth, but the introduction said that there is strong historical evidence to suggest it was based on real people who lived about eight hundred years ago. Look, look, read what it says on the back – with all three volumes collected in one volume for the first time, this stirring new translation of the greatest love story ever told will delight your –'

'This,' Kurogane said, sharply, 'is fiction.'

Fye chuckled under his breath. 'You were called Melanodamas,' he said. 'The introduction says that means black steel. You made your sword out of the tooth of the North Wind, which, by the way, takes the shape of a silver dragon.'

'You are making this up.'

Fye only grinned.

'But this is fascinating!' Syaoran said, when, against Kurogane's better judgement, Fye showed him the book. 'Oh, it's – oh, I can't read it. Aoki-san, do you know anything about this book?'

The attic room above Aoki's house was small, but the guest room had been even smaller: and so Syaoran had taken the latter, while Fye had cheerfully dragged Kurogane up into the former. It was certainly very cosy as they all clustered around the little heater that Aoki had brought up, along with some good strong tea and a plate of little almond biscuits. He had owed the Dimension Witch a favour once, it had transpired: but quite apart from that, he was a gentle, scatterbrained old man who despite his kindliness was very lonely, and so he had seemed glad of guests.

'Oh, yes, the Melanodamas and Pheidas,' he remarked, slipping on his reading glasses and peering down at the cover. 'We had to read it in school. Some of the boys found it a little embarrassing, I must say! All the girls loved it, for some reason. Rather a pretty story, I always thought – very good poetry, I'm told by those more knowledgeable in such matters. It's the national epic of the neighbouring country, you know.' He chuckled. 'But I'm just an old weather-mage, eh – what do I know about poetry?'

'I'm sure you know a great deal!' Syaoran protested. 'You know all about architecture!'

Fye, who had draped himself over Kurogane's shoulders and gotten himself quite enjoyably tangled up in a woolly blanket while doing so, flicked Kurogane's elbow before he could roll his eyes.

'I will tell you this – after I met our dear friend Yuuko-san – gods rest her soul if what you say is true, terrible loss, terrible – ah – what was I – oh, yes, after I met her, I did start to wonder whether or not, well, you know, the story didn't concern,' here Aoki lowered his voice, 'goings-on, you know. Between the worlds, I mean. I've been round and about the dimensions myself, of course, but that kind of magic isn't common knowledge in this world, not at all – the odd charm here and there is the most we can manage. But there's this one part – I remember, there's a part of the story where Pheidas falls out of the sky in a burst of light and magic, you see, and I always wondered if perhaps he hadn't been a traveller like ourselves –'

This time, Kurogane had to flick Fye's elbow, because he had gone utterly still.

Later that night, tangled up on the narrow mattress Aoki had managed to find space for amid the boxes, Kurogane said, 'Thought you liked the idea,' because Fye was still not really talking.

'Can you imagine,' Fye said, still and chilly in the dark, 'can you imagine having to go back and – because he goes back at the end. The very last passage – I didn't understand what it meant, but now – a door opens in the sky, you see, and he leaves, and Melanodamas spends the rest of his life searching for him and never finds him. And that – that happened. That happened to us.'

A little piqued, Kurogane said, 'I keep telling you you're coming back to Nihon with me.'

'I know.'

'Then stop sulking,' Kurogane suggested.

Fye got up and went away and sat on top of the orange crates. Kurogane sighed heavily and fumbled for the little charmed lamp that Aoki had loaned them, but Fye, hearing him, said, 'Don't turn it on – just – go to sleep. I'm feeling – I'm sorry. I'll be better tomorrow.'

Kurogane put his head back under the blanket and scowled at nothing in particular. After a very long and disagreeable while, he said, 'Your princess's brother. Him and his boy. They were always – in every world we ever met either one of them, the other was always there. Swear I even saw them as characters on a television thing once. And it's not just them, either. That dumb loudmouthed guy and the quiet girl we keep running into. The fair-haired kid and the doctor. Hell, whenever we meet a new Fuuma, he always has some version of that whiny vampire guy hanging around. All of them, they're always – so I wondered if maybe one day we'd meet ourselves. Only.' Again he paused. This was already quite a speech by his standards, and he seemed to be struggling with it. 'A lot of the people we meet don't end up happy,' he managed, finally, 'or one of them dies, or one of them kills the other one, or – you know. Doesn't always turn out well. So I wasn't sure if we – so it's good – we ended up good for a while, at least here.'

'Did you ever think –' Fye began, and here it was, the thing that was really bothering him, '– did you ever think that – because we left our worlds, the other ones – what happened to them?'

'I always thought maybe there was someone like you in my world,' Kurogane admitted. 'Thought maybe I'd just – missed him, the whole time.'

And Fye said, flatly, 'If there was ever anyone like you in my worlds, in either Valeria or Celes, he died before I found him.'

In the morning Fye left Kurogane alone with Syaoran and drifted away into the crowds without looking back. Kurogane resigned himself to another day in the fascinating world of architecture, but in the end was more than willing to let the kid drag him around from bakery to bakery – 'There's just so much material for the chapter on food preparation practices across the dimensions!' Syaoran explained, cheerfully, because oh, right, he'd been writing a book for the past couple of worlds now, and all the putative chapters had names exactly like that one and thinking about it made Kurogane's head hurt – 'Also, cake!' Mokona supplied, with great excitement.

But the bakeries were warm, and then Kurogane found a basket of complementary breadsticks he was quite partial to, and it was always good to see the kid smiling, anyway, even if he did talk about buttresses and pediments a lot. He parked himself in the corner of a particularly frilly sort of cupcake shop and gnawed idly at his breadsticks, listening half to the very long and enthusiastic conversation the kid was having with the bemused girl behind the counter, and half to the noise of the rain on the window – for there was rain that day, and it clattered down all around and sluiced through the gutters at great speeds, sparkling here and there with oddments of the low-grade magic that permeated that world.

He had not slept well the night before, even after Fye had reluctantly wriggled back into bed, because he had been thinking quite hard about things he never usually bothered to think about at all. He disliked uncertainty with a passion. He lived his life from week to week, never touching his head to the same pillow more than five nights in a row, and in all that vivid flux he could depend only upon himself, upon the brittle, powerful, beautiful man who slept beside him, and upon the steadfast good cheer of the boy who was their son. He would give all ground but that: he would yield all else to chaos, but never them. He glanced tiredly at Syaoran, who would be seventeen quite soon, and smiled a little, comforted. He was proud of very little else as he was of that boy.

The violently pink door swung open with a clamour of tiny bells, and Fye waltzed into the shop clutching a basket of blue roses in one hand and a small white kitten in the other. On his head there appeared to be a very large, very purple hat that sported something like seventeen too many feathers. Cheeks flushed from the cold, he looked about, gave Syaoran a great, beaming smile of encouragement, and plopped himself down in the chair next to Kurogane's. Kurogane remembered a lot of things in that moment, including the fact that he had once paid in bone to keep this man alive. His chest ached a little.

'Hello, Kuro-sama!' Fye sang.

'You look like a damn peacock,' Kurogane told him, because honesty was important.

'Don't I?' Fye agreed happily. 'I got it on sale, too. Spectacular, don't you think?' He preened for a moment, then settled the kitten down on the table. It wobbled determinedly across to the edge, lumbered down into Kurogane's lap, and went to sleep.

'You planned that,' Kurogane accused him. 'Get this thing off me.'

'Yes, dear, we'll deal with the kitten later,' Fye said, waving a hand. Kurogane watch him closely. This was not his old false happiness: he knew genuine delight in Fye's face when he found it, and was always deeply pleased by it: but just then, he could not assign it a cause, and that confused him. 'I bought her for Aoki-san as a thank-you present. Anyway, I have some very important news! I read it again!'

'Read what?'

Fye heaved a great sigh. 'The book,' he explained, as though it were obvious. 'I went to a professor up at the university, the sweetest woman, terribly clever, anyway, I asked her to help me read the hard parts, because the language is a bit different to my own, you see, and she told me all about the history of it and showed me the earliest texts and other versions of it and – '

'Will you shut up about that damn book?' Kurogane hissed at him, quite viciously. The kitten woke up and wriggled out of his lap in fright. 'I don't care about what happened to us in other worlds, alright? No point thinking about – about who we were a thousand years ago in some other place, or about what might have happened if I hadn't left Nihon, or if you hadn't been – there's no point, got it? There's much of it, too many of us. We'll probably meet a thousand times in a thousand different worlds, fine, and maybe some of those times we'll get screwed over and you'll leave, or I'll die, or maybe sometimes we won't meet at all, sure, but I don't care about those. You, here, you right in front of me, you are not leaving me. Not now, not ever. We'll be the ones who make it through together. Nothing else matters.'

The rumble of the ovens and the chatter of the patrons all around went on undisturbed. The kitten gave a series of piercing mews and began to claw its way up the leg of Kurogane's trousers. He scooped it up and set it back on the table, breathing hard. His living hand was shaking only slightly: his inhuman hand was still: the kitten bit his thumb, and he swore. Fye picked it up and began to stroke it. It purred.

'It bit me,' Kurogane added, a little jealously. 'Don't see why you're being nice to it.'

'Did the big scary Kuro-wan give you a fright, precious?' Fye enquired of the kitten, which promptly fell asleep again. He drew in a very deep breath, swallowed. 'Do you know, dear, that sometimes I very nearly think I hate you?'

'Feeling's pretty damn mutual,' Kurogane grumbled, although it wasn't at all – and, of course, Fye only looked at him, long and steady, which meant that he knew it wasn't. Kurogane looked away. There was a strange weightlessness in his chest: he rather felt that he had stepped off the edge of a cliff without looking, and was only just beginning to realise how far he had still to fall. He was not normally one for confessions.

'You really will do anything I ask you, won't you?' Fye said, laughing, but not unkindly, and not even sadly, only with a great and painful tenderness. 'Anyway, as I was saying – there's a sort of lost prologue that gets left out of most of the modern texts, apparently, because it's very heavily disputed. It tells the story of Melanodamas' discovery. He fell out of the sky, too, you know, when he was a young child, and was adopted, and grew up to be a great hero of the kingdom: and the name he bore as a child was Kaitamoino.'

'And?'

Fye shrugged. 'It means black steel in Old Valerian,' he said. 'So you see – in my world, you didn't die after all. You just – walked through a door in the sky, somehow, and came here, and found me all the same: and I did the same, somehow: and so it was alright, at least for a bit.'

Over at the counter, Syaoran said something excited about, 'Oh, but look at these beautiful pots!' and the poor waitress burst out laughing. Mokona, who had been engaged in a dental wrestling match with a caramel apple for the past few minutes, finally managed to unstick its mouth, and set up a victory chant. An oven chimed, and the smell of fresh croissants wafted over. A line of sunlight had struck straight through the mist and down onto Fye's hair, and Kurogane was never going to be able to look away from him, not once for all the rest of his life: which would always be this, no matter what happened, always this: his son laughing in the background and warmth all around, and there, opposite him, thin wrists red with the touch of cold and eyes hazy in the light, his hair living gold, every angle sweet and sharp enough to rend Kurogane in pieces, that man.

'Like I said,' Kurogane said, softly. 'Don't care. Doesn't matter.'

Fye got up, hips moving with an exaggerated grace that turned Kurogane's mouth dry: sat down next to him on the little bench in the corner and hugged Kurogane's cold unfeeling arm, which was always how he said sorry. 'Well, then,' he said, and put his head on Kurogane's shoulder, 'that sorts things out quite nicely. Have you been terribly bored without me?'

'We need to get the kid out of here before they have him arrested for showing indecent enthusiasm in muffin trays,' Kurogane grumbled. He put his face into Fye's hair and breathed in deeply, which always steadied him. 'Not healthy in a boy his age. I think he's trying to buy that apron.'

Fye stole a quick glance at the counter, where Syaoran was, indeed, haggling cheerfully over something frilly and pink that was apparently, 'A rare artefact that could provide invaluable insight into the culinary customs of your culture, ma'am!' Fye laughed. 'You'd look very fetching in it, dear,' he told Kurogane. 'Stop complaining. Play with the kitten.'

'That thing is a monster and it hates me,' Kurogane protested, but he let it sleep in his lap anyway.

Note: So, yeah, this is probably going to be a collection of oneshots, some rambly and plotless like this one, others with some vague sense of structure. I'm sort of writing these in the library during breaks from work, so – slow-going, but fairly regular, mmkay?

Tune in Next Time For: Angsty!Fye talking to angsty!Subaru, because Twin Problems, and so.