reikah
in
inmyvortex
Fic: Flying upwards over the mountain [2/?], R.
Title: Flying upwards over the mountain [2/?]
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: reikah
Rating: PG-13 currently, will rise to R.
Word count: 6959 (12,667 total)
Notes: AU. Returning wounded from a mission to a neighboring country, Kurogane is rescued by a mysterious mute hermit with a curious pet eagle. There is more to both man and bird than meets the eye, however, and fairy tales meet Kurogane pretty much head on.
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For the most part Kurogane spent the following fortnight asleep. It wasn't like there was anything else to do; no point in practicing katas when his muscles were too weak to lift Ginryuu's weight, no exercise to do when he felt dizzy and nauseous just from the effort of standing up. Eagle himself was busy as usual, but to Kurogane's surprise as his strength returned the man took to staying indoors for a few hours at a time to keep him company. It might even have been appreciated if he wasn't an annoying idiot.
He hadn't thought anyone could piss him off this much without the use of their voice. He was turning out to be wrong; the blond had an astonishing ability to convey everything from sarcasm to sly teasing through nothing but body language, and he mocked Kurogane mercilessly, during the daylight hours when he was most active. At night he seemed calmer, more passive, although this didn't really help Kurogane because somehow he had trained the damn bird to bother him instead during the dark.
It was a brighter creature than he had thought, brighter than any of the birds the falconers back home trained. By day it seemed content to just watch its master acting the fool, but at night he had somehow taught it to badger Kurogane, stealing his eating utensils from his fingers while he was trying to use them, or dropping rocks on him from the hut rafters. If it wasn't one of them winding him up, it was the other, and no matter how many times Kurogane threatened a brutal beatdown when he was all healed up, both of them seemed to find it a great game to taunt him.
His injuries still bothered him, but as the days passed and the weather worsened they began to knit together as Kurogane's strength returned. Stubbornly he used the time Eagle was out doing whatever it was he did to do some basic stretches of his own, just trying to keep himself in some semblance of shape. He still couldn't do too much without tearing the wounds open afresh, but he did what he could as the days drew shorter and winter closed in around the hut.
The colder weather drove Eagle inside a little more, to Kurogane's annoyance. It was a small hut to start with, and even though it was the blond's to begin with, after a few days it began to feel very cramped indeed. Eagle seemed unable to stay still, as restless as Kurogane as he performed dozens of small chores around his hut - filling in cracks in the walls to keep out drafts, cleaning and sharpening his tools, mending his clothing while cramped in the corner - and Kurogane sympathized.
He was beginning to feel more than a little cabin feverish, and Eagle's inability to speak didn't help there. The hermit seemed unused to having company, for he seldom initiated his mimes, just responded to Kurogane's questions or comments, unless they centered around his past in which case the blond pretended Kurogane wasn't there.
There was something naggingly familiar about him, although Kurogane couldn't put his finger on what it was; something about the angle of his cheekbones, the line of his mouth. Kurogane found himself studying the man, trying to find that point of recognition in his features; Eagle caught him at it a few times and made a great show of leering at him, his eyebrows dancing and his mouth turning up in a smile that was teasing and sly and somehow off, like it was a pale copy of a real smile. Kurogane always was the one to break eye contact, usually with a tch.
The snow stopped after a few days, but Eagle managed to convey, via a series of complicated hand gestures mixed with more dog-related pantomiming that made Kurogane want to throw things at him, that this would be just a temporary break. He was in the process of collecting together their dishes when Kurogane woke up, evidently meaning to go wash them, and Kurogane abruptly decided that he'd had enough of staying indoors.
"I'll help," he said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in the the only set of clothes he had, the set that had been in his horse's saddlebags when he fled. The ones Eagle had found him with had been torn beyond repair.
Eagle flipped his head in disdain, eyeing him up and down, and conveyed with quick, jerky hand gestures that Kurogane was not to leave the hut.
"I'm not saying I'll go hunting wild fucking boar," Kurogane growled. "I just need to get outside before I go crazy cooped up in here."
Eagle shifted the dishes in their wooden tub to his other side and made a face, disbelieving, and Kurogane scowled at him. The blond tilted his head to one side, considering, and then reached out to the small table he used as a makeshift desk and picked up his carving knives, wrapped in a leather sheath; he put these in his tub atop the dishes, grabbed a whetstone, and a bar of tallow soap, and gestured for Kurogane to follow him. Before Kurogane had fully climbed to his feet he'd located a traveler's cloak that was a far too short for Kurogane, but made of some thick, coarse wool, with fur at the edges of the hood and the hem. It looked Valerian in make.
It was cold outside, a thin residue of ice still over the ground making it slippery as hell. Eagle took him across the clearing the hut was housed in to the rocky banks of the small stream not too far away, where he bent down and began to unload the dishes over the pale rocks. Kurogane awkwardly went to his knees next to him, surprised at how breathless he was just covering the short distance from the hut to the bank, and Eagle studied him cautiously before handing him the bar of soap and pointing out the dishes. His breath fogged in the air, and Kurogane tugged the cloak tighter around himself.
Eagle made a curious face, and Kurogane scowled at him, insulted. "Of course I know what to do," he said, scornfully, and Eagle grinned at him. He pointed at the dishes, then at the hunting knives, and then at the icy path stamped down out front of the hut; it took him a bit longer to convey the other chores he wanted done, but Kurogane watched him thoughtfully as he explained in his own mute way and then nodded.
After the blond had gone - into the woods with a quiver of hunting arrows and a bow, his bird gliding above his head silently from tree to tree - Kurogane breathed out slowly and settled to his task. He already knew how to do routine domestic tasks; he often spent days in the wilderness on missions, by himself or with only a few other ninja for company, and camp chores were split fairly evenly amongst them.
He did the dishes as fast as he could, the stream water numbing to his hands, and then tried them carefully off and pulled his gloves back on. They were only thin leather riding gloves, and stained where he had touched his bloody wounds with them, but they were warmer than nothing.
Kurogane didn't know how long he worked. It had been late afternoon, he thought, when he left the hut; it was twilight when Eagle returned with his bird on his shoulder, carrying a brace of thin, rather bedraggled rabbits by their ears. He had sharpened Eagle's knives - all of them, from the thin filleting knife to the curved skinning knife - taking the opportunity to examine their origin; they looked like his own country's, and he wondered how Eagle had acquired them. They weren't very good blades, although he figured they could butcher a rabbit quick enough for the stew. He wouldn't try wolf with them, let alone boar or caribou.
After that he'd ashed down the icy trail Eagle had stamped into his surroundings, all those mysterious comings and goings leading into the forest itself. It wasn't hard work, but by the time he was done - or at least, out of ash - he had to sit down and catch his breath. His wounds had stayed closed, which was at least a small mercy.
He was enjoying the outside air, cold as it was, leaning with his back to the exterior of the woodshed propped against the building when Eagle approached; the man's leather boots had thick soles, of a make foreign to Nihon and Valeria, and seemed held together with metal hobnails. It made them sound very distinctive on the ice and rocks.
Eagle came to a stop in the middle of the clearing and looked around, as if assessing Kurogane's work; he lowered the rabbits and touched his free hand first to his shoulder, then his ribs, raising his eyebrows. "I'm fine," Kurogane said in answer. "No bleeding."
This seemed to please Eagle, who beamed at him and ground his boot against the ashed rock he stood on, as if testing for friction. He was wearing furs and hunting leathers; his quiver, slung casually over one shoulder, wasn't notably emptier than it had been when he left. He looked about the clearing again, and then turned back to Kurogane, grinned at him, and let his tongue hang out, pink and panting.
"Oh, shut up," Kurogane groaned, and Eagle grinned and held up his catch in one hand; he pointed at the rabbits, then at the hut, and Kurogane pushed himself off the wall and came to take them. "We ought to store them outside," he said. "Let them last longer in the cold."
Eagle shook his head and raised both hands to mime doggy ears, but instead of panting he mimed tipping his head and howling at the sky. Kurogane grunted; he'd heard the forest wolves, but he didn't think they'd be bold enough this early in the winter to steal frozen carcasses from outside a human dwelling. Still, the hermit had been living here for longer than he had.
"I'll skin these," he said, opening the hut door and dumping the rabbits on the desk, and then grabbed the wood hatchet, turned around, and said, grinning, "catch."
Eagle did, with no problems at all. His reflexes were fast. He was grinning in a sly way Kurogane didn't like, though, and he narrowed his eyes at the blond and said, "What?"
Eagle pointed at him, the rabbits and the hut door in that order, and then mimed pulling his hair into a ponytail. He repeated the gesture when Kurogane blinked at him in confusion, and then held up his left hand and circled the fingers of his right around his index finger, and -
"Did you just call me a housewife?" Kurogane said, slowly, and Eagle grinned and nodded, and oh, that was it, that little bastard was going to get it, injuries or no.
He had to give up chasing the blond after maybe five minutes, kitten-weak and breathless, but he did manage to send Eagle sprawling face-first on the ground by throwing a branch at his legs to trip him up, so for now he contented himself that the insult had been repaid.
Kurogane got his first clue to the blond's identity not two fortnights after his rescue, after a few days with no snowfall. His wounds were healing nicely by then, although there would definitely be huge scars left behind, and he was well enough to help with a few more strenuous chores, such as hunting; Eagle was a dead shot with a bow and good with a hunting knife, but with two of them instead of one he needed to take down bigger game to provide food, and dragging deer back to the hut was a difficult task for just one person. Kurogane was happy enough to help, but his feeble reserves of stamina were quickly drained by such work, and he tended to sleep for longer stretches of time.
He was awoken one evening from just such a sleep, filled with warm, lazy dreams (involving his sword and the blond idiot, and strangely, a jar of honey) by something small and hard thwacking into his face. He grunted and turned his head to one side, but a sudden draft woke him all the way up, and he opened his eyes to see the eagle standing on the bed next to his pillow. It held a small polished stone in its beak, and as he watched it fluttered back up to perch on the headboard, at which point it dropped the stone on him again.
"Fuck off," Kurogane said, grumpy with exhaustion. The eagle just flared its wings and beat them, blowing his hair away from his face, and with a low growl he pushed aside the heavy sleeping furs and sat slowly - so slowly, his ribs were still a solid mass of pain - upright. Ginryuu was within reach and he eyed her, wondering if he could skewer the goddamn bird without tearing open the wound in his side.
He discarded the notion as unfitting for a sword of Ginryuu's proud heritage, not to mention difficult. The eagle flew to land on the perch installed near the door and made its irritating chirping noise. It was watching him and somehow Kurogane had the feeling that if he tried to go back to sleep the fucking flying rodent would go back to pelting him in the face with stones.
"I don't know how he trained you," he told the bird, "But he probably could have saved time by punching himself in the face."
The eagle just shifted its grip on the wooden bar and croaked at him. It spread its wings and kept them spread. The fire was dying down, dying out, and in the embers the bird's feathers looked more coppery than brown.
Kurogane belted his robe closed more out of tradition than anything else; he certainly didn't care if the goddamn blond lunatic saw him naked again, not at all, and paused only to stamp on his boots and pull Eagle's thick fur coat off the back of the door before following it, stumblingly, out into the moonlight clearing. The coat was too small for him - there was no way he could button it up over his chest - but his own clothing was either too badly damaged for wear or not suitable to the chill in the air, and Eagle's coat was at least lined with fur.
By the twilight the stream was almost invisible, a thin trickle of black only discernible by its gurgling and the pale rock that surrounded it. The forest didn't feel so evil in the dusky evening light; the night insects filled it, and he could faintly hear the calling of owls, the howl of wolves. Natural sounds, normal sounds.
The eagle flew straight from the open door of the hut to the gnarled oak tree that its master had showed him yesterday, its bark carved and notched with heavy slashes of a knife. It roosted in one of the branches, and for a moment Kurogane was at a loss as to why the creature had brought him here (unless it was sheer bloody-minded torture, in which case like owner like goddamn bird) until he saw the darker shape lying folded on the pale rocks beneath it.
"Idiot," he said, bending over Eagle and touching his forehead with his fingers; the moron felt cold to the touch. He'd brought some furs out but not enough; the air was cold enough Kurogane's breath steamed, and it smelled like the respite from the snow would be over soon.
He shook the man gently, and when that failed shook him again harder. The eagle croaked at them both from the oak tree. "Wake up, moron," Kurogane said, shortly, and grabbed the man's tunic, jerking him with a considered lack of tenderness; that worked when nothing else did, and Eagle's eyelashes fluttered open even as he moaned in disapproval.
"You were freezing," Kurogane snapped, when the man went to push him away, and those blue eyes flashed in surprise before turning away, a thoughtful expression on his face. Kurogane sighed. "Look, I get that you don't want to... To scare me, or whatever, or you think I'll kill you in your sleep or whatever. But it was your bed first, and we can share. Especially if you're going to do something stupid like this."
Eagle pursed his lips and Kurogane wanted to shake him again. He wasn't any happier about sharing the bed than this moron, no doubt, but if the blond died of the freezing shakes then Kurogane knew well enough to know his chances of survival dropped sharply.
The blond wouldn't look at him, but Kurogane could feel the gentle shivers rolling through him, and with a growl he took one of the furs the moron brought with him and threw it over the man's shoulders. His shivers slowed abruptly, but Kurogane wasn't done yet; using the folds of the furs to trap the stranger's arms, he clamped his arms around the fool's chest and threw him over one shoulder.
The man writhed and hissed, almost instinctively, and Kurogane's shoulder and ribs weren't gonna be thanking him for this anytime soon, but he couldn't free his arms and thus Kurogane toted him across the clearing and into the hut without fighting him to do so. The eagle swept along into the hut after them and Kurogane waited for the bird to be indoors before kicking the door shut and bolting it.
He dumped Eagle rather unceremoniously on the bed and sat down on the edge of it himself, trying to get his breath back and his head to stop spinning. He'd lost a lot of strength with the fever, but the blond was so light, so frighteningly light that he didn't hurt as much as he should. The wound over his ribs had opened a little, he could feel the wetness of the blood against the bandage, but it wasn't serious.
The eagle hopped into the headboard, and Kurogane turned as much as his ribs would let him to watch it; it made a light chirruping noise, and the blond idiot sighed and leaned over, nuzzling against its wicked beak. He looked for all the world like he was comforting the bird. Maybe he was.
"Fire's going out," he said, standing up again. He found the bucket Eagle kept his firewood in and fed it slowly to the flames, watching as the wood kindled and the fire jumped higher. The chill was starting to fade from the air.
When he turned around the blond was buried under the furs and the blankets, wedged against the far wall. He'd pulled them up over his nose, and in the firelight his eyes were golden. The eagle remained perched on the headboard over his head; with a grunt Kurogane picked up Ginryuu and staggered a little, finding the sword's weight had increased since he had last held her. "Here," he said, gruffly, and lay her, sheathed, in the centre of the bed.
The blond's gaze flicked between the sword and Kurogane, and then he sighed and turned deliberately so his back was to the ninja, facing the wall. It surprised Kurogane a little; with how goddamn flirtatious Eagle was during daylight hours Kurogane had thought he'd have to pry the man off him at night. The silver locket he always wore had gotten twisted around his neck, and so as Kurogane lowered his aching, sore body to the bed he could see the crest stamped on it.
Interesting, he thought, as he pulled the covers over himself and turned away from Eagle, whose back felt cool against his but who was gradually heating up. That was the royal seal of Valeria.
Making a mental note to confront the moron later, Kurogane closed his eyes.
He was right in the end. It began snowing the next day, and it didn't let up for what seemed like years. Eagle hadn't been lazy about preparing for the weather; the carcasses hanging to dry from the rafters shared their space with dried vegetables, entire baskets of things like potatoes and onions stored in boxes under the bed. The hut felt darker and closer as the snow piled up outside, but the strange thing was that this didn't stop Eagle from going outside with his bird twice a day, at dawn and at dusk. Kurogane didn't try to follow him; now didn't seem like the time. He hadn't pushed the man on his Valerian locket, either.
Nihon's border with Valeria was limited to a small spot in a mountain pass, with this forest standing between their countries, the cursed forest neither country wanted to claim. Kendappa hadn't cared about the tiny northern country for years, considering it neither a threat nor worth courting. At least, not until a man in Valerian-style wizard's robes arrived at her court seeking asylum.
He had been the former chief wizard of Valeria, he told them, kneeling before the raised dais with perfect Nihon manners despite his foreign face. He had served the King faithfully, but when Ceres invaded, there had been nothing he could do: his master's castle had been invaded, the man himself tried and executed in the Ceresian style before his own people. His body had been displayed outside the castle with that of his wife and closest advisors, while his wizard had been lucky to escape with his life. His name was Kyle, and he had begged Kendappa for sanctuary, and she had granted it in exchange for information regarding Ceres.
Kurogane trusted Kyle about as far as he could throw the weasel little man; in his opinion he should have stayed and died beside his master, for that was the point of service. Still, the peasants of Valeria had mostly confirmed this story when Kurogane questioned them, although they hadn't had many kind words for either their dead king or their deposed court wizard. They welcomed their Ceresian invaders, who had brought discipline and law and prosperity, cleansing the country of the taint of its former royal family: the mad King who was rumored to have indulged in all sorts of depravities. The common folk were rife with unconstructive rumors about just what depravities those consisted of, but all generally agreed they had been terrible. Why else would the gods have sent the plagues, the droughts, the flash-freezes and avalanches for all those years of his rule?
King Ashura had also executed the Queen, who had refused to leave her husband's side, and the young prince and the only heir to the throne. There was some confusion over Prince Fai's fate; Kurogane and his squad had infiltrated many different parts of Valeria's capital city, talking to hundreds of people, and it seemed nobody had their stories straight when it came to the young prince. He had been executed with his parents, his body nailed up beside theirs, or he hadn't; Ashura had killed him personally and buried him with honors, or had him killed away from the eyes of the court and buried him in an unmarked grave, or let him live. There were actually two princes. There was just one prince and a 'seeming' brother, which Kurogane took to mean some kind of illegitimacy.
Some said the 'seeming' brother had been killed instead of the prince, and the prince himself was under Ashura's control, learning statecraft at the King's hand. Some said both the prince and his bastard sibling were demons who had driven Valeria down to its knees, and when Ashura broke into the castle they were supposed to have turned into terrible bat-like creatures with twisted men's faces and fled justice through an open window.
Kurogane kind of doubted that last one.
It didn't help that the takeover had happened years ago. Kyle had turned up on Kendappa's doorstep almost seven years past, and though Kurogane trusted his Princess with everything he had, he wasn't sure what Tomoyo had been looking for when she'd sent him to sniff around a six-year-old mystery. By the time he'd arrived most people had forgotten the events of that night; the King and Queen and, if he had been there, the Prince's bodies had been pulled down from the gallows and burned, their bones interred in a plain patch of earth in the castle's courtyard. Tomatoes grew out of it now.
The only thing he had been able to find of the former royals was an old picture, left to weather and crack and stuck up inside the inn; it had evidently once had pride of place inside the castle, but Ashura had thrown it out after he had taken over and the enterprising innkeeper had brought it back down to the village. It was an expensive painting of the former King and his wife in their robes of state, near as Kurogane could tell; the innkeeper had let his patrons throw knives at the canvas for a fee for years, and the painting was spectacularly defaced. The King had no head left, and some genius had drawn cat ears, a mustache and spectacles on the Queen. All Kurogane could tell from the painting was that the King had been tall and the Queen had perhaps had blonde hair, under years of graffiti.
Eagle could perhaps have told him more, if the man wasn't mute. He was obviously Valerian; his pale coloring gave that away, as did his blond hair and blue eyes, as well as his host of little mannerisms: his use of pot-metal knife and fork instead of chopsticks, his clothing and winter survival skills, even the way he cooked. While some of his tools were clearly Nihonjin in origin, Kurogane suspected he had traded for them, a suspicion that was confirmed when he was cleaning up inside the hut during one of the blond's dawn trips outside and found a basket under the desk that contained cakes of dye, rough, unrefined stuff in waxpaper that would nevertheless get him basic things like tools at any of the northern Nihon villages.
Kyle hadn't mentioned the prince of Valeria at all, but the peasants had known exactly how old the dead royal was supposed to be. They claimed his father had lost his sanity at the prince's birth. He'd be in his early twenties by now, like Eagle, and he'd have no reason to stay in a country that loathed him. He wouldn't go to Ceres, obviously, and perhaps he wouldn't go to Nihon, for fear of the reception he might receive there.
It seemed to Kurogane that Eagle was a lot more than a silent man in the woods. He just didn't know how to discuss his connection with the dead deposed royals of a whole country with a man who wouldn't, or couldn't, speak, and who had been hiding out in solitary for years.
He'd have to have a closer look at the locket, he decided, before he pushed the confrontation.
Kurogane got his chance during one particularly cold week, too cold to leave the hut for any length of time. Eagle had retrieved some firewood and suspended a pot of snow over the cauldron of soup to melt, and had managed to convey, with his by-now customary hand gestures, that they were to use the water to bathe when the snow had finished melting. He also helpfully suggested Kurogane go first, since he smelled worse, and after telling him to shut the hell up Kurogane tried to subtlety sniff his own armpits when Eagle wasn't looking. He was unfortunately forced to agree with him. Sickness and a long period of confinement weren't doing him any favors in that regard, and he missed the bathhouses back home rather fervently.
He stripped to the waist and washed himself with a sense of relief once the snow had melted, making sure to get the area behind his ears and around the back of his neck. Eagle sat on the end of the bed while he did this, pretending to toy with something but eyeing Kurogane out of the corner of his eye and being incredibly obvious about it; the man had the same sense of stealth as Kurogane's dead horse.
While he was washing he peeled his latest set of bandages off and checked out the wounds; they had healed up enough that even the scabs were receding, although the arrow-wound left a puckered web of scar tissue that pulled on his muscle when he moved his shoulder and was likely gonna guarantee arthritis when he got older. If he did get older.
The slash mark to his ribs had healed up neater, but it still left a long shiny ribbon of pink scar, curving all the way around his side from his navel to just under his right armpit. It was still a little red around the edges, but it wasn't the fever-hot of infection, and he cleaned it out gingerly, careful not to soak the scab too much. He wasn't going to be winning any beauty awards anytime soon, which was just fine with him.
"Your turn," he told Eagle, and was surprised at how scratchy his voice sounded. He didn't talk much to the blond or his bird; he had gotten into the habit of communicating like he did, with hand gestures and mimes. Eagle looked up from the item in his hand - one of his more battered broadheaded hunting arrows, the fletching at the base half-fixed - and pretended to be surprised; Kurogane shrugged his robe back on and scowled at him. "Get on with it," he said. "You're not exactly fresh smelling yourself."
The eagle squawked as if agreeing with him, and Eagle pulled a face at his pet and slid the arrow back into the basket he kept them in. He climbed to his feet and edged carefully around Kurogane to the cauldron, undoing his robe as he did so; he hesitated with his fingers caught on the hem and glared at Kurogane, twirling his finger to indicate Kurogane should look away.
"Why?" Kurogane asked, sitting back on the bed and running both hands through his damp hair. "Hiding something?"
Eagle rolled his eyes and folded his arms across his chest, and Kurogane snorted in disdain and turned away to give the damn idiot his privacy. It wasn't like the man had anything Kurogane hadn't seen before, and vice versa.
Still, he kept the pale man in his peripheral vision as he fished around in the man's basket of arrows, setting himself to repairing the fletching as Eagle divested himself of his clothing, striping off robe and tunic and leggings until he stood in nothing but his underwear, standing shivering slightly before the fire. It wasn't that chilly in the hut - whatever substance he used to draft-proof the walls worked wonders - but it was still cold, especially on skin freshly revealed under all that fur and leather. Eagle folded his clothes and put them on the bed; the silver locket stuck out against the pale skin, on a long chain that wound around his neck. The locket itself hung down his chest, and Eagle carefully hooked his thumbs in it and put it to one side, atop his clothing.
Kurogane meant to go for the locket, but paused, the corner of his eye on Eagle; his shaggy hair had grown out even further since Kurogane had arrived, bound away from his face with a thin leather cord, and he was skinny enough his spine was visible, each bump a faint dent against the skin. Kurogane was sure if the man turned around his ribs would be evident too, and for a second he felt guilty, abruptly, that he was depriving this man of food. That wasn't what had drawn his attention away from the tantalizing glint of the locket, shining at him from Eagle's dark bundle of clothing.
It was the scars criss-crossing the skin of his back.
They were numerous, and there was no apparent pattern to them; they striped his skin like whipmarks, cutting in every direction at once: vertical, horizontal, diagonal. They had the faded, faint appearance of childhood wounds, scars that have been outgrown, but they had evidently been deep at the time. Kurogane flexed his left hand slowly, the old scar covering his palm seeming tighter now than it had ever had. Eagle rolled his shoulders lazily, cricking his neck to side to side, and then his bird chirped at him; he started and peered back over his shoulder to see Kurogane staring, and his face broke into a slow grin.
"Oh, shut up," Kurogane said. "Get on with it."
Eagle smirked at him and slid a hand around his side, his thumb rubbing at his back, and poked his tongue out between his lips; he waggled his eyebrows flirtatiously. Kurogane snorted and turned away.
"Not if you were the last idiot in the forest," he said, going back to the arrows, and saw the way Eagle's mouth curved in a smug grin out of the very corner of his eye.
He pretended to busy himself with the arrow until he was quite sure both the blond and the bird weren't watching him before snitching the locket, and turned to angle his shoulder against him and its owner. It was real silver, with a small silversmith's mark stamped onto the back; the seal was a work of art itself, intricately depicting the Valerian royal family's coat of arms: a phoenix rising from a bonfire, wings spread and crest sticking upright, long tail feathers snaking in a vague s shape.
The clasp was tricky, and he had to wedge his thumbnail into the gap and lever quite hard to force it open. Once it was the hinges were quite stiff, which went to figure; the crown prince wore it every day and although he might take it off before bathing, Kurogane had never seen the blond pay much attention to it in the form of maintenance.
There were two miniature portraits, one tucked into each wing of the locket, but someone had taken a knife to the one on the left and slashed it rather ruthlessly out of its frame. The tiny fragment of picture left indicated it had once contained an image of a man.
The one on the right, however, showed the former Queen, without the years of hatred and knife-throwing and graffiti her image in the Valerian inn had accumulated. It had been an expensive miniature, for the pigments were still strong. She smiled prettily out of the locket, her blue eyes as bright as Eagle's. Her son, Fai - not his illegitimate brother, Valeria had been a patriarchy and there was no way a Queen's bastard would have been recognized as such - shared her jawline and cheekbones, her narrow aristocrat's nose, her pale gold hair.
Kurogane snapped the locket closed and pinched at the bridge of his nose, sighing.
"So," he said, turning back around, because he wasn't going to sit here clutching the blond's secrets in silence. "I take it you weren't fond of your old man?"
Eagle - Prince Fai - froze in the act of undoing his ponytail; his hands fell slowly away from his hair, the cord caught in his grip and his ash blond hair spilling loosely over his shoulders. His blue eyes were fixed on the locket, open in Kurogane's palm, the chain tangled around his fingers.
"A word of advice: hermits don't usually have lockets stamped with the royal family's coat of arms," he said, untangling the chain and holding the locket out. Fai took it, moving stiffly and woodenly, still looking somewhat dazed; his eyes flicked down to the locket back in his hand and then to Kurogane before a scowl flicked over his face like a thunderhead.
You have no right, he mimed, with furious and jerky hand gestures, adding a suggestion for Kurogane to self-pleasure himself with something sharp. Kurogane wondered briefly when he had gotten so good at interpreting the blond's vague mimes, and guessed it was familiarity.
"Yeah," he said, not apologizing because apologizing would put him on the defensive. "Probably. I heard about you when I was in Valeria. You never asked me what I was doing there, did you?"
Fai shook his head, and then conveyed with a swipe of his palm and his fierce scowl that he didn't care. His jaw was set, his eyes hard, but Kurogane thought he saw a glint of something worse than rage hiding in them: fear.
"My princess sent me," he said. "Princess Tomoyo of Nihon. She had a dream, you see, that something was happening up here, but she didn't know where or what. I came up here with nine other ninja, to find out what I could. They're all dead now, the others. The Ceres guards got them."
Something flashed over Fai's features, and his adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. His mask fell for a moment, and for less than a heartbeat Kurogane saw in his face neither rage nor the teasing idiot he'd been, but a boy, the scared boy who had gotten whipped.
I heard the prince had a seeming brother.
I heard the old king liked torturing kids.
I heard he had a son, but the son was what bought evil on us, so he had the kid dealt with. If you know what I mean.
"What happened to your brother?" Kurogane asked, on a hunch, and Fai gasped like he'd been slugged in the gut, physically recoiling from him, the locket spilling from his nerveless hands to fall silently into the fur rug on the hut floor. The eagle hissed, taking off from its perch and flying at its master, and even in the grip of his reaction Fai held out his arm so it could land; its powerful claws tore wet red strips out of his forearm.
It was pretty much the answer Kurogane had expected. Of course the bastard brother wouldn't be allowed to live, if the real prince had had to run away to keep himself alive. Still, he averted his eyes as the eagle flipped its wings to its back, crooning softly to its master, who held it close as his shoulders shook. Kurogane had never seen any of the birds in the mews at home do anything like that. It didn't surprise him; he had decided before now that it wasn't an ordinary bird, and knowing now that its master was the son of the magically inclined tyrant king of Valeria just cemented his suspicions: it was most likely his familiar.
"How did you end up here? Did you run away? Or..." He paused, trying to think of some alternative. He couldn't think of a scenario in which a prince, however mistreated and magically inclined he might be, would learn the woodsman skills necessary to survive, alone, in a forest like this one, let alone thrive here.
Fai shook his head, but refused to elaborate or meet Kurogane's eyes. His bird was glaring at him, although with all raptors it was hard to tell when they were giving the evil-eye or simply looking. Kurogane sighed and bent down despite the way it stretched the scar tissue over his ribs, picking the locket up from the carpet again, and put it on top of Fai's clothing.
"I'm not here to... to hurt you, or anything," he said. "You saved my life. My princess only gave me orders to scout, and, well, I've scouted Valeria and I didn't find anything. I'm not going to lie to you, 'cause I hate liars: when I go home I will tell my princess I found you, but..." he sighed, scratching roughly at the back of the neck. Gods, he was a miserable failure when it came to these kinds of talks. He much preferred body language, but as Fai attested some things couldn't or shouldn't be conveyed with anything but speech. "Look... Nothing's going to happen to you. Okay? My princess will leave you alone if that's what you want. And I've got better things to do than harass you."
Fai made a soft snorting sound of disbelief at this, but he was watching Kurogane again, not ducking eye contact, which was a plus. His eagle blinked at Kurogane distrustfully and flexed its claws, making its master flinch slightly. Fai's hair was still messy and loose around his face, and the blood the bird had drawn with its talons dripped messily to the floor, and Kurogane sighed deeply and stood up.
"I'm going outside," he said, sliding his boots on. Fai watched him in silence, not that the blond had much of a choice. "Finish up with the water. I..." he trailed off, swallowed, then decided to hell with it. "I won't ask you anything more for now. But... if you want to tell me, and you can work out a way around the whole... no talking thing, I'll listen. And how many people can you say that about?"
He turned away from the blond then, embarrassed at having exposed himself like that, and spotted Ginryuu lying still in the center of the bed, marking the line between his half and Fai's. With a sense of relief he scooped her up. Some sword katas felt about right for now.
He pulled a cloak off the back of the door and paused before opening it, one hand on the latch and his blade resting heavy and familiar over his shoulder. He wasn't sure if Fai would let him back in if he left, and then he'd die of exposure, and he really didn't want those to be his last words.
"Thanks for saving my life, idiot," he said, still avoiding eye contact, and then pushed open the door and stepped out into the bone white world beyond.
next chapter →
-tbc
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: reikah
Rating: PG-13 currently, will rise to R.
Word count: 6959 (12,667 total)
Notes: AU. Returning wounded from a mission to a neighboring country, Kurogane is rescued by a mysterious mute hermit with a curious pet eagle. There is more to both man and bird than meets the eye, however, and fairy tales meet Kurogane pretty much head on.
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For the most part Kurogane spent the following fortnight asleep. It wasn't like there was anything else to do; no point in practicing katas when his muscles were too weak to lift Ginryuu's weight, no exercise to do when he felt dizzy and nauseous just from the effort of standing up. Eagle himself was busy as usual, but to Kurogane's surprise as his strength returned the man took to staying indoors for a few hours at a time to keep him company. It might even have been appreciated if he wasn't an annoying idiot.
He hadn't thought anyone could piss him off this much without the use of their voice. He was turning out to be wrong; the blond had an astonishing ability to convey everything from sarcasm to sly teasing through nothing but body language, and he mocked Kurogane mercilessly, during the daylight hours when he was most active. At night he seemed calmer, more passive, although this didn't really help Kurogane because somehow he had trained the damn bird to bother him instead during the dark.
It was a brighter creature than he had thought, brighter than any of the birds the falconers back home trained. By day it seemed content to just watch its master acting the fool, but at night he had somehow taught it to badger Kurogane, stealing his eating utensils from his fingers while he was trying to use them, or dropping rocks on him from the hut rafters. If it wasn't one of them winding him up, it was the other, and no matter how many times Kurogane threatened a brutal beatdown when he was all healed up, both of them seemed to find it a great game to taunt him.
His injuries still bothered him, but as the days passed and the weather worsened they began to knit together as Kurogane's strength returned. Stubbornly he used the time Eagle was out doing whatever it was he did to do some basic stretches of his own, just trying to keep himself in some semblance of shape. He still couldn't do too much without tearing the wounds open afresh, but he did what he could as the days drew shorter and winter closed in around the hut.
The colder weather drove Eagle inside a little more, to Kurogane's annoyance. It was a small hut to start with, and even though it was the blond's to begin with, after a few days it began to feel very cramped indeed. Eagle seemed unable to stay still, as restless as Kurogane as he performed dozens of small chores around his hut - filling in cracks in the walls to keep out drafts, cleaning and sharpening his tools, mending his clothing while cramped in the corner - and Kurogane sympathized.
He was beginning to feel more than a little cabin feverish, and Eagle's inability to speak didn't help there. The hermit seemed unused to having company, for he seldom initiated his mimes, just responded to Kurogane's questions or comments, unless they centered around his past in which case the blond pretended Kurogane wasn't there.
There was something naggingly familiar about him, although Kurogane couldn't put his finger on what it was; something about the angle of his cheekbones, the line of his mouth. Kurogane found himself studying the man, trying to find that point of recognition in his features; Eagle caught him at it a few times and made a great show of leering at him, his eyebrows dancing and his mouth turning up in a smile that was teasing and sly and somehow off, like it was a pale copy of a real smile. Kurogane always was the one to break eye contact, usually with a tch.
The snow stopped after a few days, but Eagle managed to convey, via a series of complicated hand gestures mixed with more dog-related pantomiming that made Kurogane want to throw things at him, that this would be just a temporary break. He was in the process of collecting together their dishes when Kurogane woke up, evidently meaning to go wash them, and Kurogane abruptly decided that he'd had enough of staying indoors.
"I'll help," he said. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, dressed in the the only set of clothes he had, the set that had been in his horse's saddlebags when he fled. The ones Eagle had found him with had been torn beyond repair.
Eagle flipped his head in disdain, eyeing him up and down, and conveyed with quick, jerky hand gestures that Kurogane was not to leave the hut.
"I'm not saying I'll go hunting wild fucking boar," Kurogane growled. "I just need to get outside before I go crazy cooped up in here."
Eagle shifted the dishes in their wooden tub to his other side and made a face, disbelieving, and Kurogane scowled at him. The blond tilted his head to one side, considering, and then reached out to the small table he used as a makeshift desk and picked up his carving knives, wrapped in a leather sheath; he put these in his tub atop the dishes, grabbed a whetstone, and a bar of tallow soap, and gestured for Kurogane to follow him. Before Kurogane had fully climbed to his feet he'd located a traveler's cloak that was a far too short for Kurogane, but made of some thick, coarse wool, with fur at the edges of the hood and the hem. It looked Valerian in make.
It was cold outside, a thin residue of ice still over the ground making it slippery as hell. Eagle took him across the clearing the hut was housed in to the rocky banks of the small stream not too far away, where he bent down and began to unload the dishes over the pale rocks. Kurogane awkwardly went to his knees next to him, surprised at how breathless he was just covering the short distance from the hut to the bank, and Eagle studied him cautiously before handing him the bar of soap and pointing out the dishes. His breath fogged in the air, and Kurogane tugged the cloak tighter around himself.
Eagle made a curious face, and Kurogane scowled at him, insulted. "Of course I know what to do," he said, scornfully, and Eagle grinned at him. He pointed at the dishes, then at the hunting knives, and then at the icy path stamped down out front of the hut; it took him a bit longer to convey the other chores he wanted done, but Kurogane watched him thoughtfully as he explained in his own mute way and then nodded.
After the blond had gone - into the woods with a quiver of hunting arrows and a bow, his bird gliding above his head silently from tree to tree - Kurogane breathed out slowly and settled to his task. He already knew how to do routine domestic tasks; he often spent days in the wilderness on missions, by himself or with only a few other ninja for company, and camp chores were split fairly evenly amongst them.
He did the dishes as fast as he could, the stream water numbing to his hands, and then tried them carefully off and pulled his gloves back on. They were only thin leather riding gloves, and stained where he had touched his bloody wounds with them, but they were warmer than nothing.
Kurogane didn't know how long he worked. It had been late afternoon, he thought, when he left the hut; it was twilight when Eagle returned with his bird on his shoulder, carrying a brace of thin, rather bedraggled rabbits by their ears. He had sharpened Eagle's knives - all of them, from the thin filleting knife to the curved skinning knife - taking the opportunity to examine their origin; they looked like his own country's, and he wondered how Eagle had acquired them. They weren't very good blades, although he figured they could butcher a rabbit quick enough for the stew. He wouldn't try wolf with them, let alone boar or caribou.
After that he'd ashed down the icy trail Eagle had stamped into his surroundings, all those mysterious comings and goings leading into the forest itself. It wasn't hard work, but by the time he was done - or at least, out of ash - he had to sit down and catch his breath. His wounds had stayed closed, which was at least a small mercy.
He was enjoying the outside air, cold as it was, leaning with his back to the exterior of the woodshed propped against the building when Eagle approached; the man's leather boots had thick soles, of a make foreign to Nihon and Valeria, and seemed held together with metal hobnails. It made them sound very distinctive on the ice and rocks.
Eagle came to a stop in the middle of the clearing and looked around, as if assessing Kurogane's work; he lowered the rabbits and touched his free hand first to his shoulder, then his ribs, raising his eyebrows. "I'm fine," Kurogane said in answer. "No bleeding."
This seemed to please Eagle, who beamed at him and ground his boot against the ashed rock he stood on, as if testing for friction. He was wearing furs and hunting leathers; his quiver, slung casually over one shoulder, wasn't notably emptier than it had been when he left. He looked about the clearing again, and then turned back to Kurogane, grinned at him, and let his tongue hang out, pink and panting.
"Oh, shut up," Kurogane groaned, and Eagle grinned and held up his catch in one hand; he pointed at the rabbits, then at the hut, and Kurogane pushed himself off the wall and came to take them. "We ought to store them outside," he said. "Let them last longer in the cold."
Eagle shook his head and raised both hands to mime doggy ears, but instead of panting he mimed tipping his head and howling at the sky. Kurogane grunted; he'd heard the forest wolves, but he didn't think they'd be bold enough this early in the winter to steal frozen carcasses from outside a human dwelling. Still, the hermit had been living here for longer than he had.
"I'll skin these," he said, opening the hut door and dumping the rabbits on the desk, and then grabbed the wood hatchet, turned around, and said, grinning, "catch."
Eagle did, with no problems at all. His reflexes were fast. He was grinning in a sly way Kurogane didn't like, though, and he narrowed his eyes at the blond and said, "What?"
Eagle pointed at him, the rabbits and the hut door in that order, and then mimed pulling his hair into a ponytail. He repeated the gesture when Kurogane blinked at him in confusion, and then held up his left hand and circled the fingers of his right around his index finger, and -
"Did you just call me a housewife?" Kurogane said, slowly, and Eagle grinned and nodded, and oh, that was it, that little bastard was going to get it, injuries or no.
He had to give up chasing the blond after maybe five minutes, kitten-weak and breathless, but he did manage to send Eagle sprawling face-first on the ground by throwing a branch at his legs to trip him up, so for now he contented himself that the insult had been repaid.
Kurogane got his first clue to the blond's identity not two fortnights after his rescue, after a few days with no snowfall. His wounds were healing nicely by then, although there would definitely be huge scars left behind, and he was well enough to help with a few more strenuous chores, such as hunting; Eagle was a dead shot with a bow and good with a hunting knife, but with two of them instead of one he needed to take down bigger game to provide food, and dragging deer back to the hut was a difficult task for just one person. Kurogane was happy enough to help, but his feeble reserves of stamina were quickly drained by such work, and he tended to sleep for longer stretches of time.
He was awoken one evening from just such a sleep, filled with warm, lazy dreams (involving his sword and the blond idiot, and strangely, a jar of honey) by something small and hard thwacking into his face. He grunted and turned his head to one side, but a sudden draft woke him all the way up, and he opened his eyes to see the eagle standing on the bed next to his pillow. It held a small polished stone in its beak, and as he watched it fluttered back up to perch on the headboard, at which point it dropped the stone on him again.
"Fuck off," Kurogane said, grumpy with exhaustion. The eagle just flared its wings and beat them, blowing his hair away from his face, and with a low growl he pushed aside the heavy sleeping furs and sat slowly - so slowly, his ribs were still a solid mass of pain - upright. Ginryuu was within reach and he eyed her, wondering if he could skewer the goddamn bird without tearing open the wound in his side.
He discarded the notion as unfitting for a sword of Ginryuu's proud heritage, not to mention difficult. The eagle flew to land on the perch installed near the door and made its irritating chirping noise. It was watching him and somehow Kurogane had the feeling that if he tried to go back to sleep the fucking flying rodent would go back to pelting him in the face with stones.
"I don't know how he trained you," he told the bird, "But he probably could have saved time by punching himself in the face."
The eagle just shifted its grip on the wooden bar and croaked at him. It spread its wings and kept them spread. The fire was dying down, dying out, and in the embers the bird's feathers looked more coppery than brown.
Kurogane belted his robe closed more out of tradition than anything else; he certainly didn't care if the goddamn blond lunatic saw him naked again, not at all, and paused only to stamp on his boots and pull Eagle's thick fur coat off the back of the door before following it, stumblingly, out into the moonlight clearing. The coat was too small for him - there was no way he could button it up over his chest - but his own clothing was either too badly damaged for wear or not suitable to the chill in the air, and Eagle's coat was at least lined with fur.
By the twilight the stream was almost invisible, a thin trickle of black only discernible by its gurgling and the pale rock that surrounded it. The forest didn't feel so evil in the dusky evening light; the night insects filled it, and he could faintly hear the calling of owls, the howl of wolves. Natural sounds, normal sounds.
The eagle flew straight from the open door of the hut to the gnarled oak tree that its master had showed him yesterday, its bark carved and notched with heavy slashes of a knife. It roosted in one of the branches, and for a moment Kurogane was at a loss as to why the creature had brought him here (unless it was sheer bloody-minded torture, in which case like owner like goddamn bird) until he saw the darker shape lying folded on the pale rocks beneath it.
"Idiot," he said, bending over Eagle and touching his forehead with his fingers; the moron felt cold to the touch. He'd brought some furs out but not enough; the air was cold enough Kurogane's breath steamed, and it smelled like the respite from the snow would be over soon.
He shook the man gently, and when that failed shook him again harder. The eagle croaked at them both from the oak tree. "Wake up, moron," Kurogane said, shortly, and grabbed the man's tunic, jerking him with a considered lack of tenderness; that worked when nothing else did, and Eagle's eyelashes fluttered open even as he moaned in disapproval.
"You were freezing," Kurogane snapped, when the man went to push him away, and those blue eyes flashed in surprise before turning away, a thoughtful expression on his face. Kurogane sighed. "Look, I get that you don't want to... To scare me, or whatever, or you think I'll kill you in your sleep or whatever. But it was your bed first, and we can share. Especially if you're going to do something stupid like this."
Eagle pursed his lips and Kurogane wanted to shake him again. He wasn't any happier about sharing the bed than this moron, no doubt, but if the blond died of the freezing shakes then Kurogane knew well enough to know his chances of survival dropped sharply.
The blond wouldn't look at him, but Kurogane could feel the gentle shivers rolling through him, and with a growl he took one of the furs the moron brought with him and threw it over the man's shoulders. His shivers slowed abruptly, but Kurogane wasn't done yet; using the folds of the furs to trap the stranger's arms, he clamped his arms around the fool's chest and threw him over one shoulder.
The man writhed and hissed, almost instinctively, and Kurogane's shoulder and ribs weren't gonna be thanking him for this anytime soon, but he couldn't free his arms and thus Kurogane toted him across the clearing and into the hut without fighting him to do so. The eagle swept along into the hut after them and Kurogane waited for the bird to be indoors before kicking the door shut and bolting it.
He dumped Eagle rather unceremoniously on the bed and sat down on the edge of it himself, trying to get his breath back and his head to stop spinning. He'd lost a lot of strength with the fever, but the blond was so light, so frighteningly light that he didn't hurt as much as he should. The wound over his ribs had opened a little, he could feel the wetness of the blood against the bandage, but it wasn't serious.
The eagle hopped into the headboard, and Kurogane turned as much as his ribs would let him to watch it; it made a light chirruping noise, and the blond idiot sighed and leaned over, nuzzling against its wicked beak. He looked for all the world like he was comforting the bird. Maybe he was.
"Fire's going out," he said, standing up again. He found the bucket Eagle kept his firewood in and fed it slowly to the flames, watching as the wood kindled and the fire jumped higher. The chill was starting to fade from the air.
When he turned around the blond was buried under the furs and the blankets, wedged against the far wall. He'd pulled them up over his nose, and in the firelight his eyes were golden. The eagle remained perched on the headboard over his head; with a grunt Kurogane picked up Ginryuu and staggered a little, finding the sword's weight had increased since he had last held her. "Here," he said, gruffly, and lay her, sheathed, in the centre of the bed.
The blond's gaze flicked between the sword and Kurogane, and then he sighed and turned deliberately so his back was to the ninja, facing the wall. It surprised Kurogane a little; with how goddamn flirtatious Eagle was during daylight hours Kurogane had thought he'd have to pry the man off him at night. The silver locket he always wore had gotten twisted around his neck, and so as Kurogane lowered his aching, sore body to the bed he could see the crest stamped on it.
Interesting, he thought, as he pulled the covers over himself and turned away from Eagle, whose back felt cool against his but who was gradually heating up. That was the royal seal of Valeria.
Making a mental note to confront the moron later, Kurogane closed his eyes.
He was right in the end. It began snowing the next day, and it didn't let up for what seemed like years. Eagle hadn't been lazy about preparing for the weather; the carcasses hanging to dry from the rafters shared their space with dried vegetables, entire baskets of things like potatoes and onions stored in boxes under the bed. The hut felt darker and closer as the snow piled up outside, but the strange thing was that this didn't stop Eagle from going outside with his bird twice a day, at dawn and at dusk. Kurogane didn't try to follow him; now didn't seem like the time. He hadn't pushed the man on his Valerian locket, either.
Nihon's border with Valeria was limited to a small spot in a mountain pass, with this forest standing between their countries, the cursed forest neither country wanted to claim. Kendappa hadn't cared about the tiny northern country for years, considering it neither a threat nor worth courting. At least, not until a man in Valerian-style wizard's robes arrived at her court seeking asylum.
He had been the former chief wizard of Valeria, he told them, kneeling before the raised dais with perfect Nihon manners despite his foreign face. He had served the King faithfully, but when Ceres invaded, there had been nothing he could do: his master's castle had been invaded, the man himself tried and executed in the Ceresian style before his own people. His body had been displayed outside the castle with that of his wife and closest advisors, while his wizard had been lucky to escape with his life. His name was Kyle, and he had begged Kendappa for sanctuary, and she had granted it in exchange for information regarding Ceres.
Kurogane trusted Kyle about as far as he could throw the weasel little man; in his opinion he should have stayed and died beside his master, for that was the point of service. Still, the peasants of Valeria had mostly confirmed this story when Kurogane questioned them, although they hadn't had many kind words for either their dead king or their deposed court wizard. They welcomed their Ceresian invaders, who had brought discipline and law and prosperity, cleansing the country of the taint of its former royal family: the mad King who was rumored to have indulged in all sorts of depravities. The common folk were rife with unconstructive rumors about just what depravities those consisted of, but all generally agreed they had been terrible. Why else would the gods have sent the plagues, the droughts, the flash-freezes and avalanches for all those years of his rule?
King Ashura had also executed the Queen, who had refused to leave her husband's side, and the young prince and the only heir to the throne. There was some confusion over Prince Fai's fate; Kurogane and his squad had infiltrated many different parts of Valeria's capital city, talking to hundreds of people, and it seemed nobody had their stories straight when it came to the young prince. He had been executed with his parents, his body nailed up beside theirs, or he hadn't; Ashura had killed him personally and buried him with honors, or had him killed away from the eyes of the court and buried him in an unmarked grave, or let him live. There were actually two princes. There was just one prince and a 'seeming' brother, which Kurogane took to mean some kind of illegitimacy.
Some said the 'seeming' brother had been killed instead of the prince, and the prince himself was under Ashura's control, learning statecraft at the King's hand. Some said both the prince and his bastard sibling were demons who had driven Valeria down to its knees, and when Ashura broke into the castle they were supposed to have turned into terrible bat-like creatures with twisted men's faces and fled justice through an open window.
Kurogane kind of doubted that last one.
It didn't help that the takeover had happened years ago. Kyle had turned up on Kendappa's doorstep almost seven years past, and though Kurogane trusted his Princess with everything he had, he wasn't sure what Tomoyo had been looking for when she'd sent him to sniff around a six-year-old mystery. By the time he'd arrived most people had forgotten the events of that night; the King and Queen and, if he had been there, the Prince's bodies had been pulled down from the gallows and burned, their bones interred in a plain patch of earth in the castle's courtyard. Tomatoes grew out of it now.
The only thing he had been able to find of the former royals was an old picture, left to weather and crack and stuck up inside the inn; it had evidently once had pride of place inside the castle, but Ashura had thrown it out after he had taken over and the enterprising innkeeper had brought it back down to the village. It was an expensive painting of the former King and his wife in their robes of state, near as Kurogane could tell; the innkeeper had let his patrons throw knives at the canvas for a fee for years, and the painting was spectacularly defaced. The King had no head left, and some genius had drawn cat ears, a mustache and spectacles on the Queen. All Kurogane could tell from the painting was that the King had been tall and the Queen had perhaps had blonde hair, under years of graffiti.
Eagle could perhaps have told him more, if the man wasn't mute. He was obviously Valerian; his pale coloring gave that away, as did his blond hair and blue eyes, as well as his host of little mannerisms: his use of pot-metal knife and fork instead of chopsticks, his clothing and winter survival skills, even the way he cooked. While some of his tools were clearly Nihonjin in origin, Kurogane suspected he had traded for them, a suspicion that was confirmed when he was cleaning up inside the hut during one of the blond's dawn trips outside and found a basket under the desk that contained cakes of dye, rough, unrefined stuff in waxpaper that would nevertheless get him basic things like tools at any of the northern Nihon villages.
Kyle hadn't mentioned the prince of Valeria at all, but the peasants had known exactly how old the dead royal was supposed to be. They claimed his father had lost his sanity at the prince's birth. He'd be in his early twenties by now, like Eagle, and he'd have no reason to stay in a country that loathed him. He wouldn't go to Ceres, obviously, and perhaps he wouldn't go to Nihon, for fear of the reception he might receive there.
It seemed to Kurogane that Eagle was a lot more than a silent man in the woods. He just didn't know how to discuss his connection with the dead deposed royals of a whole country with a man who wouldn't, or couldn't, speak, and who had been hiding out in solitary for years.
He'd have to have a closer look at the locket, he decided, before he pushed the confrontation.
Kurogane got his chance during one particularly cold week, too cold to leave the hut for any length of time. Eagle had retrieved some firewood and suspended a pot of snow over the cauldron of soup to melt, and had managed to convey, with his by-now customary hand gestures, that they were to use the water to bathe when the snow had finished melting. He also helpfully suggested Kurogane go first, since he smelled worse, and after telling him to shut the hell up Kurogane tried to subtlety sniff his own armpits when Eagle wasn't looking. He was unfortunately forced to agree with him. Sickness and a long period of confinement weren't doing him any favors in that regard, and he missed the bathhouses back home rather fervently.
He stripped to the waist and washed himself with a sense of relief once the snow had melted, making sure to get the area behind his ears and around the back of his neck. Eagle sat on the end of the bed while he did this, pretending to toy with something but eyeing Kurogane out of the corner of his eye and being incredibly obvious about it; the man had the same sense of stealth as Kurogane's dead horse.
While he was washing he peeled his latest set of bandages off and checked out the wounds; they had healed up enough that even the scabs were receding, although the arrow-wound left a puckered web of scar tissue that pulled on his muscle when he moved his shoulder and was likely gonna guarantee arthritis when he got older. If he did get older.
The slash mark to his ribs had healed up neater, but it still left a long shiny ribbon of pink scar, curving all the way around his side from his navel to just under his right armpit. It was still a little red around the edges, but it wasn't the fever-hot of infection, and he cleaned it out gingerly, careful not to soak the scab too much. He wasn't going to be winning any beauty awards anytime soon, which was just fine with him.
"Your turn," he told Eagle, and was surprised at how scratchy his voice sounded. He didn't talk much to the blond or his bird; he had gotten into the habit of communicating like he did, with hand gestures and mimes. Eagle looked up from the item in his hand - one of his more battered broadheaded hunting arrows, the fletching at the base half-fixed - and pretended to be surprised; Kurogane shrugged his robe back on and scowled at him. "Get on with it," he said. "You're not exactly fresh smelling yourself."
The eagle squawked as if agreeing with him, and Eagle pulled a face at his pet and slid the arrow back into the basket he kept them in. He climbed to his feet and edged carefully around Kurogane to the cauldron, undoing his robe as he did so; he hesitated with his fingers caught on the hem and glared at Kurogane, twirling his finger to indicate Kurogane should look away.
"Why?" Kurogane asked, sitting back on the bed and running both hands through his damp hair. "Hiding something?"
Eagle rolled his eyes and folded his arms across his chest, and Kurogane snorted in disdain and turned away to give the damn idiot his privacy. It wasn't like the man had anything Kurogane hadn't seen before, and vice versa.
Still, he kept the pale man in his peripheral vision as he fished around in the man's basket of arrows, setting himself to repairing the fletching as Eagle divested himself of his clothing, striping off robe and tunic and leggings until he stood in nothing but his underwear, standing shivering slightly before the fire. It wasn't that chilly in the hut - whatever substance he used to draft-proof the walls worked wonders - but it was still cold, especially on skin freshly revealed under all that fur and leather. Eagle folded his clothes and put them on the bed; the silver locket stuck out against the pale skin, on a long chain that wound around his neck. The locket itself hung down his chest, and Eagle carefully hooked his thumbs in it and put it to one side, atop his clothing.
Kurogane meant to go for the locket, but paused, the corner of his eye on Eagle; his shaggy hair had grown out even further since Kurogane had arrived, bound away from his face with a thin leather cord, and he was skinny enough his spine was visible, each bump a faint dent against the skin. Kurogane was sure if the man turned around his ribs would be evident too, and for a second he felt guilty, abruptly, that he was depriving this man of food. That wasn't what had drawn his attention away from the tantalizing glint of the locket, shining at him from Eagle's dark bundle of clothing.
It was the scars criss-crossing the skin of his back.
They were numerous, and there was no apparent pattern to them; they striped his skin like whipmarks, cutting in every direction at once: vertical, horizontal, diagonal. They had the faded, faint appearance of childhood wounds, scars that have been outgrown, but they had evidently been deep at the time. Kurogane flexed his left hand slowly, the old scar covering his palm seeming tighter now than it had ever had. Eagle rolled his shoulders lazily, cricking his neck to side to side, and then his bird chirped at him; he started and peered back over his shoulder to see Kurogane staring, and his face broke into a slow grin.
"Oh, shut up," Kurogane said. "Get on with it."
Eagle smirked at him and slid a hand around his side, his thumb rubbing at his back, and poked his tongue out between his lips; he waggled his eyebrows flirtatiously. Kurogane snorted and turned away.
"Not if you were the last idiot in the forest," he said, going back to the arrows, and saw the way Eagle's mouth curved in a smug grin out of the very corner of his eye.
He pretended to busy himself with the arrow until he was quite sure both the blond and the bird weren't watching him before snitching the locket, and turned to angle his shoulder against him and its owner. It was real silver, with a small silversmith's mark stamped onto the back; the seal was a work of art itself, intricately depicting the Valerian royal family's coat of arms: a phoenix rising from a bonfire, wings spread and crest sticking upright, long tail feathers snaking in a vague s shape.
The clasp was tricky, and he had to wedge his thumbnail into the gap and lever quite hard to force it open. Once it was the hinges were quite stiff, which went to figure; the crown prince wore it every day and although he might take it off before bathing, Kurogane had never seen the blond pay much attention to it in the form of maintenance.
There were two miniature portraits, one tucked into each wing of the locket, but someone had taken a knife to the one on the left and slashed it rather ruthlessly out of its frame. The tiny fragment of picture left indicated it had once contained an image of a man.
The one on the right, however, showed the former Queen, without the years of hatred and knife-throwing and graffiti her image in the Valerian inn had accumulated. It had been an expensive miniature, for the pigments were still strong. She smiled prettily out of the locket, her blue eyes as bright as Eagle's. Her son, Fai - not his illegitimate brother, Valeria had been a patriarchy and there was no way a Queen's bastard would have been recognized as such - shared her jawline and cheekbones, her narrow aristocrat's nose, her pale gold hair.
Kurogane snapped the locket closed and pinched at the bridge of his nose, sighing.
"So," he said, turning back around, because he wasn't going to sit here clutching the blond's secrets in silence. "I take it you weren't fond of your old man?"
Eagle - Prince Fai - froze in the act of undoing his ponytail; his hands fell slowly away from his hair, the cord caught in his grip and his ash blond hair spilling loosely over his shoulders. His blue eyes were fixed on the locket, open in Kurogane's palm, the chain tangled around his fingers.
"A word of advice: hermits don't usually have lockets stamped with the royal family's coat of arms," he said, untangling the chain and holding the locket out. Fai took it, moving stiffly and woodenly, still looking somewhat dazed; his eyes flicked down to the locket back in his hand and then to Kurogane before a scowl flicked over his face like a thunderhead.
You have no right, he mimed, with furious and jerky hand gestures, adding a suggestion for Kurogane to self-pleasure himself with something sharp. Kurogane wondered briefly when he had gotten so good at interpreting the blond's vague mimes, and guessed it was familiarity.
"Yeah," he said, not apologizing because apologizing would put him on the defensive. "Probably. I heard about you when I was in Valeria. You never asked me what I was doing there, did you?"
Fai shook his head, and then conveyed with a swipe of his palm and his fierce scowl that he didn't care. His jaw was set, his eyes hard, but Kurogane thought he saw a glint of something worse than rage hiding in them: fear.
"My princess sent me," he said. "Princess Tomoyo of Nihon. She had a dream, you see, that something was happening up here, but she didn't know where or what. I came up here with nine other ninja, to find out what I could. They're all dead now, the others. The Ceres guards got them."
Something flashed over Fai's features, and his adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. His mask fell for a moment, and for less than a heartbeat Kurogane saw in his face neither rage nor the teasing idiot he'd been, but a boy, the scared boy who had gotten whipped.
I heard the prince had a seeming brother.
I heard the old king liked torturing kids.
I heard he had a son, but the son was what bought evil on us, so he had the kid dealt with. If you know what I mean.
"What happened to your brother?" Kurogane asked, on a hunch, and Fai gasped like he'd been slugged in the gut, physically recoiling from him, the locket spilling from his nerveless hands to fall silently into the fur rug on the hut floor. The eagle hissed, taking off from its perch and flying at its master, and even in the grip of his reaction Fai held out his arm so it could land; its powerful claws tore wet red strips out of his forearm.
It was pretty much the answer Kurogane had expected. Of course the bastard brother wouldn't be allowed to live, if the real prince had had to run away to keep himself alive. Still, he averted his eyes as the eagle flipped its wings to its back, crooning softly to its master, who held it close as his shoulders shook. Kurogane had never seen any of the birds in the mews at home do anything like that. It didn't surprise him; he had decided before now that it wasn't an ordinary bird, and knowing now that its master was the son of the magically inclined tyrant king of Valeria just cemented his suspicions: it was most likely his familiar.
"How did you end up here? Did you run away? Or..." He paused, trying to think of some alternative. He couldn't think of a scenario in which a prince, however mistreated and magically inclined he might be, would learn the woodsman skills necessary to survive, alone, in a forest like this one, let alone thrive here.
Fai shook his head, but refused to elaborate or meet Kurogane's eyes. His bird was glaring at him, although with all raptors it was hard to tell when they were giving the evil-eye or simply looking. Kurogane sighed and bent down despite the way it stretched the scar tissue over his ribs, picking the locket up from the carpet again, and put it on top of Fai's clothing.
"I'm not here to... to hurt you, or anything," he said. "You saved my life. My princess only gave me orders to scout, and, well, I've scouted Valeria and I didn't find anything. I'm not going to lie to you, 'cause I hate liars: when I go home I will tell my princess I found you, but..." he sighed, scratching roughly at the back of the neck. Gods, he was a miserable failure when it came to these kinds of talks. He much preferred body language, but as Fai attested some things couldn't or shouldn't be conveyed with anything but speech. "Look... Nothing's going to happen to you. Okay? My princess will leave you alone if that's what you want. And I've got better things to do than harass you."
Fai made a soft snorting sound of disbelief at this, but he was watching Kurogane again, not ducking eye contact, which was a plus. His eagle blinked at Kurogane distrustfully and flexed its claws, making its master flinch slightly. Fai's hair was still messy and loose around his face, and the blood the bird had drawn with its talons dripped messily to the floor, and Kurogane sighed deeply and stood up.
"I'm going outside," he said, sliding his boots on. Fai watched him in silence, not that the blond had much of a choice. "Finish up with the water. I..." he trailed off, swallowed, then decided to hell with it. "I won't ask you anything more for now. But... if you want to tell me, and you can work out a way around the whole... no talking thing, I'll listen. And how many people can you say that about?"
He turned away from the blond then, embarrassed at having exposed himself like that, and spotted Ginryuu lying still in the center of the bed, marking the line between his half and Fai's. With a sense of relief he scooped her up. Some sword katas felt about right for now.
He pulled a cloak off the back of the door and paused before opening it, one hand on the latch and his blade resting heavy and familiar over his shoulder. He wasn't sure if Fai would let him back in if he left, and then he'd die of exposure, and he really didn't want those to be his last words.
"Thanks for saving my life, idiot," he said, still avoiding eye contact, and then pushed open the door and stepped out into the bone white world beyond.
next chapter →
-tbc