Fic: This Cold Country (1)
Title: This Cold Country
Rating: T
A/N: For the kuroxfai late summer contest. Based upon my take of what might have happened had not both Kurogane and Fai’s mothers died in canon, and just what exactly would happen with the twins’ great magic.
Much thanks to Crys for the Kuro-quack nickname. X3
Warning - this isn’t happy.
Now I say again: two remain
But, of course, they’re part of you now.
- Koushun Takami
The puppets clatter and dance on their strings to the beat of children’s laughter, porcelain-white faces with curving lips and bright eyes, clapping gloved hands that bare not an inch of young skin to the cold. Around the square their mothers and nannies shop and linger, baskets on arms and boxes borne in servants’ grasps, crisp commands echoing over the frosty ground, gossip and happenstance traded almost on par with the silver coins spilling from heavy purses, glittering gems.
‘Did you hear-? Did you know-? You’ll never guess-!’
Kurogane breathes out dragonsmoke into the falling snow, gloved fingertips pulling his hood further up over his face to ward off the chill and the snow, feeling the pervading cold snake its way through his bones even as the little children before him keep laughing, entranced by the puppets of the show in the square’s centre and unbothered by the weather. This is their world, their home, and they’d been brought up in it, but still it stings a little that such children can float on by, unaffected, whilst Kurogane himself huddles further into his borrowed furs and tries to hide the most of his shivering.
“Kurogane-san,” a familiar voice gives warning of the approach of a familiar figure - even though she is dressed in the long, decorative robes this strange country seems to favour, sweeping lines that have a different elegance to the Nihon style Kurogane has known all his life.
“Souma,” it is good to see the other shinobi, an excuse for him to stamp his feet and express all the gruff impatience he’d felt whilst waiting for her for a good hour, snow frosting his lashes and fussing children grating on his ears as they were dragged away from the puppet show too early for their liking. “Did you find -?”
The woman shakes her head at him as soon as she is close enough, her own low hood only letting him glimpse the thin line of her mouth, displeasure at her own failure to retrieve the information they sought. “This whole country is founded on magic, Kurogane-san. It’s a much more common trait than in Nihon - everyone possesses it, from the royalty on down to the lowliest-born babe.” Souma radiates an impatience Kurogane can only echo - when Tomoyo had presented the mission to them the day before it had sounded a simple task to track down the two magicians she’d dreamed of, but half a day in and a whole world away her two shinobi keep drawing up blanks. Even with the gift of charmed anklets to translate for them the task seems impossible; they’re looking for two people amongst thousands, hundreds of thousands.
“Mister, mister,” a tiny hand pulls at the edge of Kurogane’s cloak, the man looking down to see one of the children has wandered over from the show, a girl by the sound of her voice, the ringlets of her hair. Kurogane fights off the urge to forcibly detach the child; he has nothing against children in general, but the shifting masks everyone in this country wears - white, snow-white, with a single bead of colour in the centre of the brow - remind him too much of the old tales of youkai and yuurei, pale wraiths without identity or purpose. “Mister,” the girl’s voice is piping, drawing the attention of some of her little friends, “are you a ghost?”
Kurogane stares at the child. “What?”
The girl points up, straight up, to the narrow band of skin visible under Kurogane’s hood, his face. “Mother says only dead people don’t wear masks.”
Souma flinches as one of the girl’s friends screams at the mention of ghosts, heads all around the square swivelling around to stare at the two cloaked figures surrounded by children, young accusing fingers pointing as the shrill noise is taken up by the whole group -
“Ghost! Ghost!”
The adults stare, the children scream, the guards with shining helmets and weapons glittering like the frost appear, almost shimmering into existence - perhaps, they had come that way; they are hard to focus on, even though their white faces are flat and cold. Kurogane puts his hand to his sword beneath his cloak, Souma to her moon-blades, but there are children in the way and their consciences ringing in their ears, and more and more guards surrounding them every second they stand there.
“Ghost,” says the little girl who had started the mess, young voice taking on an edge of awe-laced fear, right before her friends pull her back and away from Kurogane, the puppets stopping their show.
The snow whirls down, faster and faster, blurring sight and putting Kurogane and Souma more on edge. There are threads of magic in the wind that drives the snow on, foreign symbols they have little to no defence against. It yanks down their hoods, exposing their unmasked faces - such a blasphemy in this strange world - and coating their hair in tiny flakes of frozen white.
‘Put down your weapons.’ The voice comes with the snow, frosted and flat and something heard not with the ears, but the mind. Magic, issued from one who expects to be obeyed.
“Like hell,” Kurogane snarls back, feeling the cold touch his high cheeks, his lips, his nose. He tightens his grip on his sword - Ginryuu -; beside him, Souma does the same with her own blades. Their message is clear - they refused to be disarmed.
‘Put down your weapons,’ the voice repeats once more. ‘We will not warn you again.’
It was really, Kurogane reflects, quite unfair for magicians to make that sort of demand when their opponents couldn’t even see them anymore. A good, visible target for retaliation would be nice, something he could point his sword at and slaughter.
“We refuse,” says Souma clearly, dark eyes looking all around her for the hidden foe through the lines of blurring white falling from the sky.
‘Then,’ speaks the voice, ‘we place you formally under arrest for the bearing of arms and of being without a mask. You will be escorted to the dungeons, there to await trial.’
Kurogane scoffs - magic or not, one blow from his sword will send all the guards tumbling, falling to the ground like finely-dressed dominoes. “You and whose army?”
‘We won’t need an army,’ the voice assures him, and then pain clamps down tight around Kurogane’s mind, bright and bold and blazing, arctic fire that rips across his thoughts and instinctively has his hands falling from his weapon, clutching at his head to try and relieve the agony. Blearily, Kurogane can see Souma suffering as well beside him, the thunk as her blades hit the snow-covered ground, the world whirling and dizzying as both of them fall to their knees -
Unconsciousness, when it comes, is a relief.
#
Kurogane can remember clearly the look on his mother’s face when he’d told her he was going to be going to another world, the widening of her eyes, hands loose and lax in her lap. She’d recovered well - she is a lady, after all -, lips curved and knowing in a way that seemed akin to all mikos.
“The Tsukoyomi favours you, son.”
“You mean,” Kurogane had retorted, grumbling a little as he sipped at his green tea, “she likes using me as her errand boy.”
His mother had laughed, a lovely sound. “Some things will never change.”
Kurogane wakes to cold again, to hard stone and dimness and the echo as his boots scrape the floor he’s lying on, cheek pressed to the rock beneath him. His head still aches, throbbing from the magical assault it had undergone an undeterminable amount of time earlier - the room Kurogane has been placed in has no window, the space lit by strange glowing globes on the walls; the shinobi has no idea how long he had been knocked out. He has no idea where Souma is either - pushing himself up to his feet and glancing around himself he can see is quite alone in the empty room, Ginryuu removed from his waist.
“So you’re awake?” A lilting voice draws Kurogane from his analysis of the room, the man whirling around to glare at what had been a featureless wall behind him - it is marked with an open doorway now, a single androgynous figure dressed in robes of white and gold just beyond the threshold on the other side.
The figure’s face - like all the other’s of the country - is covered with a white mask, a magical construct that moulds to the wearer’s skin and moves with it, completely concealing the identity - and in this case the sex - of the one behind it. The person’s words had been soft as well, an even pitch that could work for either gender. All Kurogane had been able to draw from was that the stranger is young - younger than him, probably.
“Where am I?” The shinobi demands without preamble, blunt. “Where is my companion?”
“You are an esteemed guest in the dungeons of the royal palace of Valeria.” There is a smile in the words of the stranger, something touching on lazy that irks even as the person leans against the lintel of the door, nonchalant to the space between their ‘guest’ and them. “Your companion is in another cell, perfectly safe, but she’s still out-cold. Do all people from your world have such low magical resistance?” Kurogane narrows his gaze and wonders how the stranger knows he is not from this world, and the stranger laughs, still lilting. Kurogane thinks the stranger might be a boy, wispy as the blond hair that is combed back away from the other’s face. “Don’t scowl so~! You look so handsome when you’re not scowling.”
…Although, with that sort of comment, the stranger can just as easily be female.
“Does the scary ninja have a name?”
Kurogane glares (this person knows too much) and steps forward, standing on the other side of the door’s threshold opposite the stranger, his captor or jailor, he wasn’t sure which. He’s easily a head taller than the assumed boy, broad-shouldered where the other is slender. Looking down he can see the other really is blond - Kurogane’s mother had told him stories about pale demons once with pale skin and fair hair. The shinobi would wager this foreign creature before him would fit the description perfectly, but that is unverifiable due to this country’s - Valeria’s - strange fashions, the stranger covered from throat to foot, masked, robed, gloved.
This is not a country of individuals.
The stranger tilts his head up to meet Kurogane’s gaze, and his eyes are wonderful, terrible, blue. There is power in that gaze, a power belied by the languid leaning the Valerian is still doing against the lintel, uncaring of the fact his captive could reach out and throttle him in less than a heartbeat. Kurogane has never seen eyes like that, not on all the mikos in Nihon.
Could…this boy…?
Kurogane still glares, working things through in his mind. “This isn’t a social call.”
The shinobi can hear the pout in the other’s voice. “How rude~!! Sir Blacky needs to learn some manners.”
“’Blacky’?!” Kurogane is reaching up to choke the other before he’s even had time to properly think about it, rage-fuelled instinct lashing out and being helplessly denied when his hands, instead of wrapping around a slim neck, smacked into an invisible barrier, a kekkai dividing him from the now-laughing stranger.
“What else am I to call you~?” The stranger straightens up, his eyes aglow and his lips curving through the mask, laughter still bubbling from him, airy, light. “Mysterious Sir Blacky refused to give me his name!”
Kurogane has never wanted to slaughter someone so much as now.
“…Kurogane.” He eventually growls out his name, if only to shut the stranger up. “Kurogane-tono.”
“So Sir Blacky is a lord…” the statement is breathed out, and then the stranger claps his hands. “My most noble ninja~!”
The urge to kill is still strong.
“Saaaa, Kuro-gon is scowling again!! Shame, shame!”
“My name is Kurogane.” The man from Nihon enunciates his syllables slowly and clearly, convinced he’s speaking to an idiot.
“Kuro-ga-neg?”
A twitch. “Kuroga-ne.” Is this really his ‘trial’? The idiot before him is certainly trying enough.
“Kuro-gag-nu?”
“Kurogane.”
There’s a pause. “…Kuro-puu,” the stranger says eventually, ignoring Kurogane’s instinctive baulk. “Don’t you think that’s cuter?”
Kurogane slams one hand against the barrier between them, ignoring the tingling feeling it sends shooting up his arm. “I don’t care if it’s ‘cuter’!! My name is Kurogane!!” The moment he got out of this cell -
“Kuro-pon is so grouchy…”
Kurogane still wants to shriek, but something else springs to mind, pulling him away from his need to yell. “How is it that you know of my job and my origins, but not my name or status?”
The stranger seems almost disappointed, losing his sport. “…My brother is a dreamseer. He saw your deportation from your world and your arrival in this one, but not much else.”
Dreamseers…Kurogane can understand, as both his mother and Tomoyo shared the streak alongside their miko abilities. Sometimes their visions possessed a startling clarity, other times what they saw was clouded, confusing flashes that were endlessly vague.
“…You’re too early, Kuro-pya, for what my brother saw.” The quiet words draw Kurogane from his musings, attention focusing on the stranger again. “A whole year too early, in your time.”
“You know what I’m here for.” It isn’t a question.
There’s a smile again, but it’s more twisted, dry, the mask showing the curve but lessening its magnitude. “It isn’t hard to guess, when a princess of another country sends two of her best assassins on an errand. She’s not the first to try and take responsibility for saving all the worlds. Hopefully, she’ll be the last.”
“Then you know where the magicians are.”
The blue, blue eyes shine again, pools for drowning men, and the stranger’s voice is low, soft as a snowflake. “Kuro-myu is cleverer than that.”
“You.” Kurogane’s earlier suspicion comes back to the forefront of his mind. “You’re -”
“It’s time to say bye-bye for now, don’t you think?” The smile is back, sweetly insincere, and Kurogane growls when he sees the stranger write glowing symbols into the air, the Valerian script. These pass through the barrier and encircle Kurogane, the shinobi struggling, not knowing what the other was doing.
“Wait -”
“Bye-bye,” breathes the stranger, and then the magic in the writing flows in, over and under and around Kurogane, pulling him down until he’s suddenly smacking into the ground again, breathing in grass and cherry blossoms and -
And he’s sitting in the Imperial gardens at Shirasagi, at home in Nihon, with a groaning Souma coming to beside him. And it hits him -
The masked idiot hasn’t given him back his sword.
#
A lot of powerful magicians and mikos were dreamseers, though it wasn’t a requirement. The visions could come when called or at random, flashes and sequences depending on the strength of the dreamseer, the certainty of the present or future that they saw. Dreamseers often dreamed of people they didn’t know, important twists in fate, occasionally coming around to their own loved ones. Dreamseers dreamed of other dreamseers, connected across the many worlds by their common bond of magic, bright sparks that called out to each other. It wasn’t uncommon for a dreamseer to predict the birth of a great miko or magician, to send out blessings and warmth to the unborn child still cradled in its mother’s womb, another potential addition to the community. Those with magic but without the ability to dreamsee could still feel their brethren across the worlds, although they could not predict the time of their coming. Everyone was connected.
No-one knew when it was exactly people started dreaming of the Twins or who exactly it was that had had the first dream of them, but suddenly dreamseers across the worlds were united in strong images of two blond boys, perfectly identical, stupidly powerful, as yet unborn. Magicians across worlds woke up crying, torn between happiness and a vague despair, feeling the power building as the Twins were conceived and began to grow, and their power grew and swelled with them. When they were finally born, they were strong, ridiculously strong, and as they grew they kept getting stronger, flourishing into their magical prowess, easily outstripping their elder counterparts.
The dreamseers kept dreaming, and dreamed of the Twins, elder, adult, blond, blue-eyed and beautiful, and saw magic so strong it ripped apart the worlds, completely without the consent of the two who wielded it. Together, united, they would be too strong for their own good; their own strength would drive them insane, kill them and kill everyone with it. For the safety of everyone -
Across the worlds, those who could dreamsee sent their assassins, alone, in pairs, in flocks, from the moment the Twins were born. All of the assassins failed, driven away by the strength of the children, the Twins fiercely protective of each other, holding onto each other as they grew up, as they grew stronger, as they followed a fate that should not have been, but was.
Tomoyo was a dreamseer, and she saw the Twins. She saw everything ending for their sake, and her heart tore a little for them - but there was nothing she could do. There were too many lives at stake -
She sent Kurogane and Souma to Valeria, to do as they could.
#
“Kuro-paa!” A warm body hits Kurogane’s the moment he arrives back in Valeria, having waited out the year a certain idiot had told him of even though he’d grouched and grumbled and complained all the while, much to the amusement of both his mother and Tomoyo. (The latter case he can understand - Tomoyo has Always Been Like That -, but the former was as incomprehensible as always. He’d lost Ginryuu. Ginryuu, the family sword, his late father’s sword. Why didn’t his mother care more..?
“Don’t worry,” she’d said, and smiled, kissing his brow.)
“You.” Kurogane is not in the mood for niceties, pulling at the lanky frame that’s wound itself laughingly around his neck and pushing back with his grip on the other’s hips - he can’t tell by his sight alone because the stranger is still masked, but the voice is the same, the hair is the same, the stupid nicknames are the same.
“Kuro-pon,” the hypocritical stranger from the cell smiled up at him, nameless, irritating, fake, “you came back.”
“My sword.”
The stranger - boy - man brings his hands together, as if to pray. “Did you miss me?”
“My sword.”
“I was so lonely without Kuro-pii~!! I told Fai all about the grouchy puppy in the dungeons and he was quite disappointed he never got to meet you so I said I’d take you to him as soon as you arrived -”
“Give me back my goddamned sword.”
The stranger wiggles out of his grip, slipping to the side and hanging off of the taller male’s arm. “Let’s go to dinner! You kept me waiting so long and I’m terribly hungry now - Kuro-tan is such a terrible person to keep his date waiting like that. I should scold you, I should, I should, but I shan’t because true love is blind and I shall just have to accept that Kuro-wan is just like that and -”
“Do you ever shut up?” Kurogane interrupts when there’s a pause between words, but his companion - his target - only laughs at him again, grating on the shinobi’s nerves, sharpening the blade of Kurogane’s temper in an impressive display of sparks.
“Here,” something pale and white is withdrawn from one of the stranger’s pockets, held up to Kurogane’s cheek. The shinobi can’t help but flinch as it moves onto him, spreading across his face, and he raises a hand to claw it off, sure his companion is trying to kill him - “It’s a mask; it won’t hurt you.”
Kurogane drops his hand automatically at the reassurance, and then he inwardly kicks himself, and tries to pry it off again. He does not know this man beside him, this man who knows what he’s here to destroy - why should he feel safe in what is technically his enemy’s company? There are no reassurances in this strange world, none -
“It’s done~!” His target chirps out the words, poking Kurogane’s - now masked, covered - cheek with one finger and causing the shinobi to smack it away. “Now let’s go eat! I want cake.”
…Alright, there was one reassurance. Some people could always be trusted to remain annoying.
Kurogane shakes his head - the mask is like a second skin, moving with his muscles. It feels strange. “I’m not going to dinner with you.”
His companion gasps. “Kuro-chii is standing me up?! I’m hurt; I’m wounded, I -”
Kurogane puts one hand over the idiot’s mouth, holding the words in even as the man - the magician - continues to try and mumble away. When the mumbling finally stops he removes his hand, meeting a pout with a glare of his own. “Get this damned mask off of me and give me back my sword.”
His companion is stubborn in his own way. “Not until you come to dinner with me.”
“I don’t know your name.” As if it really mattered.
“Yuui,” the name rolls out, foreign and strange, slipping off the tongue as easily as the blond plucks a pair of gloves from another pocket, offering them to Kurogane and hurrying on before the shinobi can offer protest again. “Kuro-chin should put these on, else he’ll be flung out of Court -” they’re at Court? “It’s not illegal, like not wearing a mask, but it’s terribly bad etiquette.”
Kurogane pulls on the gloves - reluctantly, but he needs Ginryuu and a pair of gloves (probably) won’t kill him - as Yuui links arms with him, the shinobi trying to shake his personal limpet off and away as they began walking, Kurogane semi-dragged out of the room he’d transported into and out into a grand hallway. “Why does everyone have to wear a mask?”
“The Queen Mother decreed it,” Yuui says lightly, “when she was Regent. Valeria was such a terribly superstitious place; everyone had to be unique, individual. Wearing a mask made sure no-one was individual, and so society lost its scapegoats.”
Distracted, some thread of the story nagging at him, Kurogane consents to being led down another corridor, this one a little busier, servants passing by in muted, understated furs to keep them warm in the cold country and yet still largely unnoticed. Kurogane glances at them, at their white masks, at the different coloured spots on their brow, the only thing differing from mask to mask. He reaches up to touch his own brow, not certain if he had a colour there at all - Yuui’s mask is totally blank. “What are the marks for?”
“Decoration - they change from day as the wearer wills it. ‘Crimson for health, green for the wealth, for the chaste there is yellow and brown. Rose for the looks, blue for the books, and white for the ones with the crown.’” Yuui recites the words smoothly, with the ease of something that has been learned by heart, at a young age, even as he stops at a set of great doors, guards on either side snapping to attention.
Kurogane’s gaze is drawn to the blond’s brow again. “So you -”
Yuui pushes open the door, and Kurogane’s following words are lost, drowned in the sudden rush of noise that hits them, a great hall at dinner, plates clattering, chairs scraping, trays being lifted and shifted by scuttling servants.
“Your Majesty.”
“King Yuui!”
People - courtiers - stop what they are doing and bow, Yuui waving a hand laconically for them to rise, to continue with what they’d been doing. This continues even as he’s still clutching at Kurogane, pulling the shinobi up the large hall to the far dais, the high table.
Kurogane is quietly furious - seething. “You’re the King.”
Yuui is oblivious to his anger, or pretends to be anyway. “No.” Kurogane is about to argue, angry the other could deny something so obvious, but they’ve stopped at the dais and someone is rising from their seat to greet them, gold-haired, white mask blank, fair and slim and - and - Yuui looks up at him again. “I’m one of them. This is my twin brother, Fai.”
#
Evening, dinner done, and the setting sun over the snow-capped mountains sets the horizon on fire, Yuui humming under his breath as he looks out of the window, his brother beside him, quieter, still. Kurogane sits in a chair close to the fire in the secluded room they’re in, and waits for the attention of the kings to be bestowed upon him again - he’d tried speaking before, moving, but he hadn’t received so much as a glance, the silence in itself a quelling feeling in the air.
The shinobi ponders as he waits, about the mission Tomoyo had first given him over a year before, the mission he’d resumed, insisting Souma would be unnecessary. He would be quick, efficient, separating the twin magicians his princess had dreamed of with the only true certainty that the many worlds could offer -
(“People die, Youou.” A hand on his cheek from the past, one of his father’s underlings, trying to comfort him, to stop his endless pleas for someone, anyone to bring back his dead parent. “All we can do is mourn, and know they are in a better place.”
“But chichue liked it here,” he’d insisted. “With us.”)
He comes back to himself to gloved fingers in his hair, pulling back his head as two sets of rather serious eyes study him.
“I want Ginryuu,” he says automatically, blurting out his demand like a young child, repetitive.
“Prisoners aren’t allowed pointy things.” It’s Yuui that speaks, recognisable by his voice, tone bordering on self-righteous amusement. It’s his brother that’s holding their ‘guest’.
Kurogane glares. “I’m a prisoner?”
“We can’t let an assassin be armed.” Fai’s voice is lower than Yuui’s, still soft, yet still firm. “We can’t let an assassin have free reign around the royal palace .”
‘We won’t make your task an easy one,’ Fai doesn’t say, but the words hang in the air regardless. He is the dreamseer, the one with the sight, the one who had seen, and clearly the vision must’ve been a one displeasing to him. To love your brother above all the worlds -
“I’ll babysit~!!” Yuui suddenly springs at Kurogane from the side, startling loose Fai’s hold as the more energetic twin leaps into the shinobi’s lap.
“Hell no.” Kurogane shoves him onto the floor, relishing the thud the blond makes upon impact.
“Mouuuuu,” Yuui whines from the ground, clutching at Kurogane’s trousers under his robes and attempting to sob dramatically into the shinobi’s knee, “Kuro-chuu is so terrible to meee! Fai, Fai, tell Kuro-tu he has to be kinder to me or you’ll turn him into a duck.”
Fai looks down at his brother, his tone mildly curious and far too calm for Kurogane’s liking. “Why a duck?”
Yuui looks up at him, teary-eyed and radiating melodrama. “I want a pet duck.”
“But I thought you wanted to babysit.”
“I can babysit a duck.” Yuui is perfectly earnest.
“But you’d probably lose a duck,” Fai points out reasonably, “and then the cooks would catch it and kill it and you’d be inconsolable for days.”
“I’m not an ‘it’.” Kurogane growls, interrupting the two brothers.
“You’re not a duck right now either,” says Yuui from the floor -
“But it can be arranged,” Fai finishes, and Kurogane glowers but takes the implied advice and shuts up, though not before hurling out one last complaint.
“He’s not old enough to watch me.” He refuses to call it ‘babysitting’.
Yuui puts a hand on his knee. “I’m older than Kuro-duck.” The shinobi looks disbelieving. “It’s true! Kuro-quack is so distrustful -”
“-With good reason -” thieving magicians taking his sword -
“- And so cruel!”
Kurogane eyes him. “Then how old are you?”
Yuui flaps a hand at him. “That’s a rude question to ask.”
“You’re not a woman.”
Yuui ponders for a moment more before pushing himself up, leaning across Kurogane to whisper his reply into the shinobi’s ear, the only real feature of the face the mask didn’t cover. His answer done, the blond king perches himself rather smugly on the edge of Kurogane’s seat, expressing a certain glee at the blank look flickering in red eyes.
“He’s not lying,” Fai chimes in before Kurogane can raise the query.
Kurogane is silent, stunned, trying to work out just what to say.
Yuui takes his hand, triumphant, and holds it up in the air. “I’m babysitting~!” He declares again, and Kurogane lets him, too shocked to protest.
#
“They don’t like twins in this world,” Fai tells Kurogane the following day off-hand, when they’re sitting at breakfast in the Kings’ private quarters and the shinobi is pulling at the mask on his face again, still trying to adapt to the sensation of wearing it. Yuui has not joined them yet - apparently the younger sibling likes his sleep. “But because we were royalty they decided not to kill us at birth, as is the practice for others. I think they were waiting until we were a little older to decide which of us would be the better heir, and then they would’ve killed the spare.”
Kurogane looks up at the blond beside him, Fai delicately cutting what looks like a peach into tiny segments, removing the stone and setting it to the side of his plate. Kurogane wants to know why the Valerian royals are entertaining him instead of killing him, but he doesn’t want to prompt them into action until Ginryuu is once more in its sheath. “…Your parents approved?”
“Father died of sickness a month or so after we were born.” Fai could be talking about the weather. “Mother poisoned the late king, our Uncle, and assumed Regency. No-one can prove that she did it, of course. Mother is…” a delicate pause. “Mother can be a little strange.”
“And she’s the one who decreed everyone should wear a mask?”
“From birth until death,” Fai agrees. “Everyone is identical, and so the social stigma of identical children is removed. Only the dead are without masks.”
“That’s why everyone thought Kuro-chama was a ghost the first time he came here,” arms wrap themselves around Kurogane’s neck from behind, damp hair touching the thin sliver of skin between chin and throat, a familiar head of gold propping its chin on the shinobi’s shoulder. Yuui has arrived at last, still warm from a bath. (He makes a dreadful babysitter.) “Kuro-toto, the grouchy poltergeist.”
“It’s Kurogane.” Kurogane tries to shake Yuui off of him but the king clutches on, playfully ruffling the shinobi’s short spiky hair and ducking effortlessly the fist aimed at his face.
“But that’s not cute at all,” Yuui is a demon, raised in an icy hell, stealing the food from Kurogane’s plate with no heed to the indignant squawks that follow his action.
“It’s not supposed to be ‘cute’!!”
“But tall, dark and brooding Kuro-myu needs a cute nickname, or everyone shall think he’s far too growly to play with~!” Yuui laughs at the other’s temper, darting out of reach when Kurogane grabs for him, the Nihon man’s chair screeching on the floor as he makes a sudden dive for the gleeful king.
Kurogane ends up chasing Yuui around the table for the rest of breakfast, swearing and going through a range of curses as the blond constantly eludes him.
Fai, calmly, remains in his seat, and finishes eating his peach.
#
The second part is here.