reikah
in
inmyvortex
Fic: Not Quite Paradise [9/?], R,
Title: Not Quite Paradise [9/?; ongoing]
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: Co-write between mikkeneko & reikah
Rating: R
Word count: 7,908 this chapter (60,999 so far. for srs?)
Notes: "In a future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery. AU, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai."
Part One - Earth: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Part Two - Mars: [8] [9] [10] [11]
← back to chapter eight
Part two: Mars
searching for the future
"Things are kind of tense between Earth and Mars right now," Syaoran said as they walked back from the shopping district. They had a new round of pastries, as well as a few bags of baking supplies; Syaoran's repeated assurance that they would face no more harassment seemed to have been true enough.
"I thought things were always tense between Earth and Mars," Yuui commented.
Syaoran laughed a little. "Well, that's true," he admitted. "But especially now. You were in the academy right? So you must know about the psychics - that so many more of them are born in space than on Earth."
"Yes," Yuui said, "although given how many more people Earth has, there are still plenty to choose from. I'm from Earth, after all."
"Yes, but people like you are incredibly rare," Syaoran said. "The percentage of potential espers goes up exponentially in any of the space-born populations compared to the terrestrial ones. And since Mars has more people than any other extraterrestrial colony, we are still the primary source for new psychic talent."
"Which means?" Yuui said warily.
Syaoran shrugged. "Mars is a lot friendlier than Earth to psychics in general. Of course, it helps that we don't have a large peacekeeping force to supply or too many contacts with deep-space colonies to maintain… but the fact is that Earth needs psychics, and they don't have enough. So they want ours."
"Oh." Yuui's mind went back to Sakura's chilling tale of kidnapping - he'd heard rumors that such things happened, of course, but nobody ever had any proof; it was just something that happened to a friend of a cousin of a friend. "So they steal them?"
Syaoran's pleasant face was unusually flat and grim. "The raids have really picked up in the past few years," he said. "But before that, they tried to be a little more subtle about it. They'd scope out a psychic they wanted, then come up with a bunch of false criminal charges and demand that Mars extradite them to Earth for trial. After they lost a couple dozen of espers to Earth that way - none of them ever seen again - the Martian government caught on. And now they simply refuse to extradite any psychics to Earth, for any reason."
"Oh," Yuui said, reviewing the past hour in this new light. "But - but I'm not Martian."
Syaoran shook his head. "That doesn't matter," he said. "I said Mars was friendlier to psychics than Earth - and right now they're so mad that they don't want to hand any espers over to Earth, no matter where they're from. But at the same time they can't officially withhold Earth citizens from Earth justice - so they just quietly look the other way.
"Whenever someone comes in hot from Earth - like you did - and the Feds are demanding that Mars instigate a local search, the government just… sends out a few people, very discreetly, to find out if that person is a psychic on the run. And if they are, then they just pretend they never saw them."
"But doesn't that run the risk of letting real criminals run loose?" Yuui asked, guiltily aware that psychic or no, Earth's accusations of his 'terrorist' crimes had quite a lot of basis.
"Maybe," Syaoran said seriously. "But it's like this - if they commit crimes in Mars space, the police will come down on them like the hammer of God. And if they really did commit crimes on Earth but none here, then it's not our job to do Earth's police work for them!
"Besides, the number of 'real criminals' who escape from Earth to Mars is much smaller than the number of innocent Martians they've kidnapped over the years - like Sakura." Syaoran's normally open, easy-going face hardened into a mask of hatred. "They'd still be looking for her, if they didn't think she was dead. They put her face in the newsfaxes next to murderers, arsonists and rapists - and she never harmed a soul!"
"I see," Yuui murmured, hunching his shoulders and clasping his hands in front of him. "I had no idea that the Federal government was so - so ruthless."
And he should have known, just given their treatment of himself and his twin. But the truth was that up until they had taken Fai away from him, the Academy had given them more than they'd ever had in their lives - warm housing, steady food, comfortable clothes. An education. A purpose, a chance to become more than a pair of worthless street rats. For all that they'd used and exploited Fai - and himself - a deep-down part of Yuui couldn't help but believe that they didn't deserve any better, and that they should be no more than grateful for the time and expense that Earth had spent on them.
But he did know better now - now that he'd had a chance to get outside the system, see and hear about its abuses and excesses from other people's ears. And while it should have reassured him to know that running away had been the right move, it didn't make him feel any better to think of Earth's enraged fury at losing them.
"Don't worry about it," Syaoran reassured him, and Yuui realized that his usual pleasant expression must have slipped, revealing some of his worry. The boy patted his arm, anxiously trying to cheer him up. "That's on Earth. This is Mars now! You're far away from them, and they can't touch you any more."
Yuui gave him a small smile. "I suppose you're right," he said. "Come on, let's get back to the ship. The others will be waiting."
When the shuttle pulled in both Kurogane and Sakura were waiting on the other side of the airlock; Sakura had her arms folded over her chest and her back to the wall, her expression a little shadowed, and Kurogane paced back and forth before the small door as the Mokona closed the shuttle bay doors and then pumped air back into the room.
Syaoran was the first out, wearing his EVA suit but no helmet, clutching a couple of bags; Yuui followed in his civilian clothes, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes at the blond's overconfidence. It was wildly irresponsible not to take your suit on an orbit-to-surface shuttle flight, but just like an Earther to forget his suit in his cabin. Stupid, Kurogane thought.
"Syaoran," Sakura said with some relief when the two of them opened the doors. "Are you alright?"
"I - I'm fine, Princess," Syaoran said, looking a little flushed at her regard, and Kurogane snorted. "Did we hear from the triads? When is the meeting?"
"Three days," Kurogane said, scowling. "They want us to sit on our thumbs and sweat."
"Is that normal?" Yuui wanted to know. He had several bags too, and he shifted uncertainly in the corridor behind Syaoran.
"Depends," Kurogane said. "Normal business practice, no. But if you mean 'is it something to worry about,' also no. It's just bullshit power games."
"So we just hang in orbit until they're ready to meet with us?" Syaoran asked, and Kurogane nodded. "The Security Services know we're here, Captain... is that really okay?" His eyes flicked to Yuui, who bit his lower lip, and Kurogane let out a long sigh.
"Should be," he said. "They won't sell you out to Earth, and the triads won't either. For all their faults," he said bitterly, "they're Martian to the bone."
"If you're sure," Yuui said, but he looked doubtful. "What are we supposed to do for three days?"
"What we did for the last ten," Kurogane said. "Wait. There's a lot of waiting in space travel; you'll get used to it. Don't recommend you go shopping again, though."
"Oh!" This seemed to trigger Syaoran's memory, and he fumbled, one-handed, in the bags he had hooked over his wrist for a small white cardboard box; he held this out to Sakura, blushing furiously. "Th - that's for you. I hope you like it."
"What is it?" Sakura asked, her brow furrowing even as she opened it, and Kurogane was startled to feel Yuui nudge him.
"We bought some new stuff," the blond said. "I'm going to put it in the galley - you should come too, Captain Third Wheel."
"Huh?" Kurogane asked, and Yuui sighed and put on a long-suffering look.
"Let's leave your young crewmembers together, yes?" he said, and Kurogane jerked, coloring as he realized what Yuui was after; Syaoran gave them a slightly pleading look. Yuui took some of the bags from him with a grin and turned on his heel, and he was walking down the corridor as Sakura finished opening in the box and squealed in delight. Kurogane rather hastily followed him.
He opted to follow Yuui into the galley - Sakura's voice raised in excitement behind him until the door hissed shut after them - and stood for a moment inside the doorway, uncertain. Normally he'd use the opportunity to use the machines or practice sword play, but he didn't feel up to that with Yuui present, and he didn't think it would be fair to toss the blond out. Yuui seemed at home in the kitchenette, unloading strange and arcane items from the bags and putting them in cupboards.
Kurogane tilted his head to one side as his passenger went back to unloading more bags, including white boxes not unlike the one Syaoran had presented Sakura with. "You're in a good mood today," he said, keeping his voice level, and didn't say what he was thinking: what happened that you forgot yourself?
"Well," said Yuui. "We had a run in with Martian security and I am, as yet, unarrested. I'm a little relieved by that, you could say. I made my twin a promise concerning capture."
"Oh?"
"It's none of your business, Captain Nosey," Yuui said lightly, and Kurogane scowled as he poked through the bags.
"What the hell is this stuff?" Kurogane asked, confused, lifting a small plastic... thing. It looked like a hydraulic pump, but much too small and fragile.
"If it's got a nozzle, it's an icing piper," said Yuui, bent down to rummage through the cupboards. "Please don't move it, I'm planning on experimenting with cakes later."
"We don't have room for all this," Kurogane complained.
"Don't underestimate my packing abilities, Captain Nitpick," Yuui countered. He finished emptying the bags and rummaged in a drawer for a fork, opening one of the boxes on the countertop to reveal a slice of chocolate cake, decorated with whipped cream and glazed cherries, and Kurogane recoiled away from it instinctively. Yuui's eyes lit up, however, and it transformed his face.
"How can you eat that stuff?" Kurogane demanded.
"With a fork, usually," Yuui replied. "A spoon is also a good idea. I could use my fingers, but that just gets messy."
"Tch," Kurogane growled, and Yuui scooped himself a slice of chocolate cake, putting it into his mouth; his whole face softened in obvious pleasure at the taste, and he slid the fork back out slowly, obviously cleaning every last shred of the cake from its tines with his tongue as he did so. Kurogane didn't think he was trying to be seductive, the gesture was unconscious and filled with a kind of quiet satisfaction rather than overt flirting like the times Yuui had tried to offer himself up, but it was damn arresting anyway.
Yuui looked up to meet his eyes, and Kurogane realized he'd been staring. Yuui grinned. "Jealous?" he asked with a sly wink.
"Hell, no," Kurogane said, turning sharply away and trying to calm the suddenly-kindled heat in his body. "Sweet shit like that makes my teeth ache just looking at it. Don't tell me you're going to fill up my galley with that junk."
Yuui laughed. "Don't worry, Captain Sourtooth," he said. "Not all desserts have to be sweet. I saw that you drink coffee - at least I hope you aren't letting the kids drink it, that would stunt their growth! - so I got the ingredients to make tiramisu. I thought you'd like that."
Kurogane grunted noncommittally, not wanting to admit that the idea actually sounded pretty good. Then he frowned and turned to the table again, looking Yuui square in the eye. "All right," he said. "What's this supposed to be?"
Yuui blinked several times, appearing at a loss. "What is what supposed to be?" he asked. "The… chocolate and coffee, and a shortbread…"
"Not the cake," Kurogane interrupted. "Look. This is a small ship, there's not really room for misunderstandings. So I'm just asking straight. The kid brings back a special cake for the girl because he wants to show her he cares, now you're talking about making some weird pastry that you think I'd like. What I want to know is, what message are you trying to send here?"
Yuui looked lost, stuttering as he answered. "I wasn't… trying to do anything like before," he said, and flushed. "I'm not trying to bribe you for favors or anything, I promise. I…"
"I didn't say you were," Kurogane said. "I just want to know if you're coming on to me or not."
"I… no," Yuui said, although the flush in his cheeks as he stared down at the table suggested that wasn't entirely truthful. "I just - you've been very kind to us, to me and Fai. I wanted to do something nice for you. That's all."
"You don't have to," Kurogane said sharply, just to dispel any notions of bribery or payment owed. But when Yuui only looked more hurt and annoyed, he added, "But if you still feel like making that tiramisu, I might have a bite. Just to see if it's any good."
He set himself down rather heavily upon the couch, flicking the television on with the buttons attached to its arm. The couch had been a recent purchase; the one before it had been too small to let him stretch out, and this one was bigger by it by a good four decimeters.
Normally he preferred to watch movies in his room; he had a stack of older video formats and outdated films he wanted to see. Now he took the opportunity to flick through the Martian channels - mostly reality television and chat shows; he settled on a film he liked and had seen a few times before - a dramatic retelling of the construction of the first great deep space station.
"I wouldn't have thought you'd be into older films," Yuui said, from across the room, and Kurogane snorted.
"My dad took me to see this one," he said. "We ordered it in from Mars special. You seen it?"
"No." Yuui paused, and Kurogane could hear the hesitation in his voice. "We didn't see many films. I didn't... we couldn't until we left home."
For some reason that we nagged at Kurogane like it did most of the time Yuui used it, like he was only half a person. He would have dismissed it as a twin thing - he had never had any siblings himself, but he could see how it might be to grow up with one - but Syaoran rarely used we, defaulting to Kimihiro and I or me and my twin.
"It's near the end," he said. "Too bad, you should watch it."
"Isn't that what I'm doing now?" Yuui retorted, but Kurogane heard the whisper of cloth as he got to his feet and came over, fork in one hand and box in the other, and settled himself on the arm of the sofa furthest away from Kurogane.
He stayed quiet while watching the movie, at least, and Kurogane took a small amount of pride in the fascinated excitement in his eyes during the climactic scene. Just when an outbound colony ship seemed like it would hit the bare-bones space station, it was saved by the movie's heroine - a young Japanese kinetic, stretching her gift past the breaking point and suffering an aneurysm after the ship was diverted. It was based on a true story; his father had once shown him the memorial plaque with her name on it on the space station walls.
"She must have been very strong," Yuui said softly as the credits rolled.
"Yeah," said Kurogane. "She was a hero."
"'Was'?" Yuui turned to him, tilting his head, and Kurogane turned away and shrugged.
"The station she saved is gone anyway," he said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. Figures that an Earthie wouldn't even know basic near-space history. "It was destroyed decades ago."
"Oh." Yuui paused, digesting this. "That's sad, but at least the people she saved got a few more years. It wasn't for nothing, was it?"
"She was prime material for Earth's propaganda machine," Kurogane said, ignoring this. "When they started up their Kinetic army. It was all 'join now and save lives like she did'. I guess they've moved beyond that if you don't know who she is."
"No." Yuui hesitated. "We didn't go to school, Captain, I... They didn't have to inspire me to join them by appealing to my need to be a hero or anything. For me it was 'join now and get three meals a day,' but for others we heard it was... it was 'join now or be lobotomized.'"
"What the hell?" Kurogane asked, sitting up straight. He hadn't heard that one, and his palms prickled. On the screen the credits were finishing to a stop, and he muted the television set absently as commercials for the next program started up. "I've never heard that."
"It's not like they said it outright. But yeah, if you didn't sign up then you had to be really careful, because the first time you did something wrong you'd get a laser burning out your frontal lobe." He twisted his fingers by his temples, mimicking smoke pouring out of his ears. "Unregistered, unaffliated espers were dangerous, they said."
"Fuck," said Kurogane, thinking of Sakura. He'd never asked why Syaoran and she had run; he'd thought they just hadn't wanted to lose their autonomy, and supported them fully. Now, though, he thought he understood a little more.
"Fai made me lie about what I could do. Maybe he'd heard the rumours." Yuui paused, raising a hand to his mouth, and bit thoughtfully at his thumbnail. "They didn't do it to him, whatever it is he can do."
"You honestly don't know?" Kurogane asked sharply, and Yuui shook his head.
"The man who discovered me let me bring him to their academy because he wanted to experiment on us," he said. "We're identical twins, we're rare enough in the normal population, among espers we were almost unique. The man... Professer Ashura, his name was - he was really really interested in how come I'm a kinetic and Fai wasn't. Fai and I did a lot of tests for him, and eventually they found out Fai was a clairvoyant.
"Thing is, clairvoyance is nothing special, not even on Earth. They say one in every ten women has it, particularly mature ones - all those mothers with the ability to know when something is happening to their kids, you know? Rarer among males, but not really rare enough to be remarkable.
"So they kept testing Fai, because I think they were hoping to find another power. A really strong one, like mine. And then one day they just... didn't send him back, after his tests, and I waited half an hour and I went to find them, and the Professor's chief lab assistant told me Fai had a rare medical condition and asked if he'd been having this... checklist of symptoms. And he had, so I said yes, because I was worried he'd had another seizure -"
"A seizure?" Kurogane interrupted sharply, and Yuui made a choppy, dismissive handwave.
"He used to have them sometimes when he was younger," Yuui said impatiently. "The hospital scanned him once when he was seventeen but they couldn't see anything wrong with him, and all the time we were at school and in the academy he was fine. Anyway, I said he had had the symptoms they were asking about before, and the lab technician told me... he said Fai was very very sick, and he wouldn't be coming back home for a while. And I said I wanted to see him, and he said I couldn't, and I knew he was lying."
"What happened next?" Kurogane asked, and Yuui snorted, the corners of his mouth turning up bitterly.
"You know I'm not very subtle by now. I trashed the lab. They sent another kinetic in to sedate me."
Wasn't that just typical. "Can't say I'm surprised," said Kurogane coolly, and Yuui flushed guiltily. The lighting from the screen made him look even more pale. "Do you have any idea what the hell it is that he can do?"
"No. I only have a few suspicions, like really powerful precognition. But I won't know until he wakes up, and I know he's not a kinetic, so the ship will be safe."
"Sakura's a precog," Kurogane pointed out. "She can't control it, but it doesn't hurt her."
"No, it shouldn't, but it's also not all that strong," Yuui said. He sat up and frowned, his expression slowly changing as his mind was distracted from his immediate problems. "Actually, Sakura ought to have more control than she does - a weaker talent is easier to control, not harder, since the time window you can see into is smaller. Hasn't she had any training for her gift at all?"
"When could she have gotten training?" Kurogane said in irritation. "She ran for her life. Did you expect us to just stop by your precious Academy one afternoon and say 'Pardon me, but we have an unregistered precog on board, do you think you could spare her some lessons?' "
Yuui raised his hands placatingly. "I didn't mean it like that," he said. "I just meant - Look, I spent a lot of time around the precogs when I was at the academy. I saw some of their training methods. They aren't actually all that difficult - it's not like free-fall training, where your trainer really has to be another kinetic. A lot of it is just certain routines and habits they keep, so that they always know when they are in time."
"So what?" Kurogane demanded; despite Yuui's reassurances, he still felt a bit nettled at the implication that he wasn't seeing to Sakura's welfare properly.
"So I could probably teach her some of the basic timekeeping and orientation routines, and even that would help her a lot." He looked up at Kurogane. "Would that be all right?"
"I don't know," Kurogane frowned. "It's her gift, not mine. If she's all right with it, then I don't care what you do."
"Okay. I'll talk to her when - ..." Yuui trailed off, and Kurogane glanced overly curiously to see him staring at the television screen, utterly expressionless; he followed his gaze to see a news bulletin, an immaculately coiffed Martian woman talking, muted, to the screen. The ticker along the bottom read Earth's Eurasian Federation issue Trans-Solar Warrant for missing terrorist.
Kurogane turned the sound up.
"... face criticism from numerous authorities concerning their security procedure for the Lunar Colonies. Yuui Flowright, aged twenty-five, is alleged to be the son of an Illinois triple murderer sentenced to life imprisonment on the United States' "Romulus" Lunar camp. A spokesperson for Earth's United States had this to say on the killings, reportedly one of the highest body counts since the destruction of Suwa Space Station back in -"
"They're talking about our mother," Yuui said, scowling.
"Your mother?" Kurogane asked, wrenching his attention from the television set.
"The triple murder case who escaped from the moon prison. They never could figure out how she got out."
"- Senior Minister Fei Wang Reed confirmed that Flowright is to be considered extremely dangerous, and is in possession of esper abilities. The public is warned that he may be in possession of a large crate containing incendiary -"
"Looks like they tracked your brother," Kurogane said, scowling at the bulletin. "Not like them to move that fast."
"Well, we're in Mars space, and Syaoran said -"
"The Eurasian Federation would like to remind citizens of Sol that there is a five hundred thousand yenbuck bounty on Flowright alive, and half that dead. There is also a five hundred thousand yenbuck reward for the safe return of the crate. Earth authorities have issued a dossier on Flowright's troubled home life, including an interview with his father -"
"Turn it off," said Yuui, in a voice colder than Kurogane had heard from him, but the screen flashed over anyway to a tall man, heavy set and shading to fat, his brown hair touched with grey. A ticker gave his name and listed him as 'Father of terrorist suspect', and Yuui made a noise like steam escaping from a pressure cooker, causing Kurogane to glance at him in surprise.
"Of course the boy is evil," said the man, seemingly in response to a question. He spoke in slow, measured Cantonese, subtitles at the bottom of the screen in Mandarin, Japanese and English. "All his life he was full of spite and hate, that is why I sent him to the academy. He tried to kill me."
"Fuck you," Yuui spat, his eyes flashing. His hands were tight fists on his lap.
"I grieve for those who have lost family members to his senseless acts of violence. Those kids were always getting in trouble, they were rotten from day one. I tried to teach them right from wrong-"
"Sir, if we can move on -" interrupted the interviewer, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes, suspecting that she was under orders to keep the man from mentioning the other blond, the one they were so eager to retrieve.
"The other one was worse. I tried with them, I tried -" continued Yuui's father, and then the interview lost sound suddenly. Yuui turned away, his shoulders shaking, but the subtitles at the bottom of the screen helpfully continued despite the absence of noise: but their mother was always getting in the way. She wouldn't let me teach them proper discipline, she spoiled them rotten, the monsters.
The image froze then, and cut back to the news anchor who looked apologetic and talked about technical difficulties. She looked smug, and Kurogane suspected the Martian channel had aired the clip deliberately. He hit the off switch and the screen faded to black.
"Your dad's a prick," said Kurogane, after a pause, and succeeded in startling a surprised bark of bitter laughter out of Yuui. But at least the tight, inward-pinched tension eased up a bit.
"You can say that again," he said. "We never got on. Fai hated him, he was always a bully."
"So, all this 'discipline' he tried to do," Kurogane asked. He wanted to get some measure of the circumstances Yuui had grown up in, but he couldn't think of a gentle way to ask.
"He didn't beat us," Yuui said slowly. "If that's what you're asking. Not often. He did it once or twice, but nothing more. Mostly he liked to shout at us or tell us how much he wished we weren't there. He gave me a black eye once when I was six, but our mother saw and she chewed him out for it. It really upset Fai, though, he used to say if he hit us again he'd sneak into our parents' room and kill him in his sleep. I don't think he was exaggerating, Fai hated him."
Kurogane raised his eyebrows, a little shocked at the thought of a child willing to do that to a parent - respect for his elders had been ingrained into him since he was old enough to talk. "Your brother sounds..."
"He looked out for me," Yuui said, immediately. "When nobody else would. He always looked out for me. Our parents weren't so good at that. When we're sick nobody comes, nobody ever comes..." He trailed off then, and Kurogane got the feeling that he wasn't the one Yuui was talking to just then. Yuui wore a strangely soft expression, one Kurogane had seen him wear a few times before, always when thinking about his brother.
"We were glad to leave that house, Captain Curious," Yuui said, his eyes suddenly bright and piercing on Kurogane's face. "There wasn't anything left there that we cared about."
Yuui didn't remember much of the shuttle flight north. He remembered the hatchet-faced men in dark suits who came to collect them, the morning after Fai had decked their father hard enough he'd thrown up; he remembered the calm way they laid out their choices. The Eurasian Federation ran three military schools as an alternative to juvenile detention centers, and their father had arranged for the two of them to go to the one furthest from Hong Kong: Siberia's Onyx school. The serious-looking men in dark glasses had come to pick them up, and Yuui hadn't wanted to go, but he had hesitated and Fai had clapped him on the shoulder.
"We might as well," he'd said. "It's not like it's any better down here. Come on."
And he'd grabbed their bag, the one that contained all their stuff, and Yuui had fallen into step behind him as they walked down the narrow staircase of their cramped apartment block one last time. Neither of them had looked back, not even when they climbed into the backseat of the bulletproof Federation car to begin their trip to the shuttle docking station. Fai was right. There was nothing left in Hong Kong that they could see.
They weren't the only people headed north, either. Several other kids, ranging in ages from eleven to their age, were hanging around the suborbital station waiting for the shuttle when they arrived. The hatchet-faced men took them to a desk sitting in the docking gate, manned by a tired-looking woman with messy blonde hair and dull green eyes, wearing a black suit with a Federation tie. They gave her their names, and she tapped them into a tiny computer, then frowned when the screen flashed red.
"How do you spell that," she said, and Fai leaned over her shoulder and entered them into the system for her. The screen just flashed red again; she tried a third time and then looked at them thoughtfully.
"Okay," she said, worrying at her lower lip with a lacquered thumbnail. "You're not in the system. What're your parents' names?"
The twins looked at each other, and Yuui shrugged minutely at Fai, who nodded. "We don't know," he said, and she lowered her hand from her mouth and gave them both long, searching looks.
"Great," she said with a sigh, and reached into a desk drawer, pulling out two black rectangular metal cases. She popped them open and slid them across the desk; they each contained a sharp needle. "Fine, we'll take a blood test, see if we can track your information that way. Put your thumb on the pad and keep it there until the light goes green."
Fai did as he was told quickly, Yuui copying him a heartbeat later. It didn't take long for the light to go green; the devices were obviously connected to the computer terminal by wireless, as a database quickly opened up. It wasn't the one she had been using; it was blue and was crowned by a strange-looking bird with a white head. The woman blinked at it in surprise.
"U.S justice department?" she said, sounding confused. "What on earth...?"
She flashed them both a probing look over the top of her glasses, and Yuui swallowed. Fai leaned over the desk to see the screen. "Huh," he said, and smiled pleasantly.
"I think you two should go sit down. I'll send someone to talk to you shortly," she told them, and Yuui felt a creeping sensation in the pit of his stomach. Something was definitely wrong.
"Why would our blood test lead her to a North American website?" he asked Fai as they took their seats, and Fai snorted, dumping their bag on the floor between them. The Fed woman had summoned another Fed woman to her desk, and the two of them were talking animatedly, peering at the screen their DNA test results had pulled up.
"Because she was American, obviously," Fai said, and Yuui sat back in surprise, biting at his lower lip.
"How do you know that?" he asked in a low voice, and Fai paused, his face softening as he blinked. "She never said anything about that - she - she didn't even have an accent!"
"Yeah," Fai agreed, but he sounded less confident. The new Fed woman straightened up from the desk and touched the earpiece, turning to look at them and then back at the database as she spoke into it; she stopped, listened, and then nodded. Her shoes clicked across the floor as she came to them. "Listen, let me do the talking," Fai said in a low voice, and Yuui nodded.
"Fai, Yuui," said the new woman. "I'd like to ask you some new questions. Come this way, please."
Yuui glanced over at Fai, who had arranged his features in a pleasantly blank manner, and followed his twin as he climbed to his feet. The new Fed led them across the floor of the docking station to a small office, laser etching on the glass door identifying it as the station manager's office. It was empty, and she gestured them to seats in front of a rickety desk containing a rather battered workstation screen and piles of paper. An empty coffee mug sat atop a sticky brown ring, the words best mom in China! emblazoned across it proudly; she carefully took its handle between two fingers, tugged hard to unstick it from the desk, and moved it out of the way before she put down her own tablet and pulled up the plush leather chair.
"Are we in trouble?" Fai asked calmly, slouching in his seat, and she flicked her eyes up at him, then at Yuui, then back to him. Her brow furrowed and Yuui sighed, knowing what she was thinking, but for once she didn't comment on their matching faces and instead leaned across the desk to put her tablet in front of them. There was a photograph of a woman on its small screen, but Yuui didn't need to lean in closer to recognize her. He twitched, but Fai shot him a glance out of the corner of his eye and he subsided.
"Possibly," she said coolly. "Do you know that woman?"
Fai let his eyes rake over the picture for a long moment, and then gave a shallow nod; her mouth thinned. "Yeah," he said, neutrally.
"How do you know that woman," she said tightly.
"She's dead now," Fai said, as though he were talking about the weather. Yuui flinched again and her eyes flicked toward him; he swallowed. "She was our mother," Fai continued, in that same calm, bored voice.
"How long have you been living on Earth, Mr. Flowright?" she said, and now Fai lifted an eyebrow. The name was unfamiliar. "She was unmarried, that is your legal surname. How long?"
"All our lives," Fai said. "We're seventeen. Listen, she died when we were little kids, what has this got to do with us?"
She ignored them. "Five years ago we were alerted of her return to Earth by a Shenzhen hospital, who had retrieved her body from a low-rent apartment block by the old river. Apparently her death had been reported to the emergency services, but neither we nor the Americans could find a match for the voices of the caller who reported her death in our databases. It wasn't the registered tenant, so was it you?"
Fai scowled at her. "Maybe," he said, and she sighed, raising a hand and pinching her nose.
"I'm not interested in your teenage bravado, boy," she said. "I don't think you understand what kind of situation you're in. Your mother was a criminal and her escape from the Lunar colonies is what concerns us. Give me any more attitude and you could be facing charges as an accomplice."
Fai's face twisted as if he would like to call her bluff, but Yuui beat him to it. "She was a criminal?" Yuui blurted despite himself, and Fai turned and made a face at him. The Fed removed her hand from her face and eyed him thoughtfully, and he leaned back in his chair, swallowing.
"Three counts of manslaughter," she said, and scrolled back through the tablet. "Which one are you?"
"Yuui," he mumbled. "I don't - manslaughter? Who did she kill?"
"I don't know, the Americans didn't give us any details." The lady turned her scowl on the file frozen on the computer. "Tch, typical of them, they still think they matter. All I know is she's an American citizen, and after she killed those people they sent her up there instead of to the chair. What we want to know is, how did she get back?"
"How the hell would we know?" Fai snapped. "We were born here!"
She rubbed her hand over her mouth, and for a moment she looked tired. "So you say," she replied wearily. "And you're not in the system, so we can't prove that one way or another. What we want to know is, did she say anything at all? Anything?"
Yuui tensed quietly, her words ringing in his ears like a memory, Fai's voice distant and lazy and post-coital as he traced sweeping patterns over Yuui's skin: she was sentenced to the Lunar colonies for something she didn't do, and she was scared, so she jumped back here.
The whole universe, in her head. I think I see now.
"She never said anything about it to us," Fai said. "We didn't really talk much after we were eight or so. She wasn't the best mother out there."
"She wasn't bad," Yuui protested, and Fai leaned over toward him and shot him a glare that said, as clearly as words, We are not doing this now, Yuui.
"You always blame her," Yuui hissed back, and Fai rolled his eyes and opened his mouth to continue when the Fed coughed.
"Listen, boys," she said. "We're investigating a potential major security breach. I don't care about your domestic squabbles, I just want to know how she got out of the Lunar colonies, are we clear?"
"I don't understand, though," Yuui said quietly. "How could she get back here from the Lunar colonies? Aren't they guarded?"
Fai sighed heavily at the idiocy of his twin, but the lady only leaned back against her chair and folded her arms over her chest. "Yes," she said. "When the Americans came to us we thought it was a problem with their security, but they were able to prove to our satisfaction that the machines were working as they should. Which means that she found a way out that the Yankees don't know about. They don't regulate the criminals once they're up there, they didn't even know she was missing until we told them we'd found her body. So, think as hard as you can of anything she might have done, anyone she might have spoken to."
"The man who owned the apartment. He called himself our father," Fai offered, but she was shaking her head.
"He didn't meet her until later, we were able to track him that far. You would have been two years old by then. We went over his story five years ago when we found the body."
"'We would have been two when - " Yuui repeated, realizing what she was saying - that their father was not biologically their father - and Fai nudged him and shook his head. "You knew?"
"We'll talk about this later," Fai hissed, but Yuui couldn't stop staring, feeling betrayed. Fai should have told him. They didn't keep secrets, that wasn't how it worked between them. The Fed was still watching them, so he let it drop, but he couldn't stop the tightness in his belly, the antsy mix of anger and fear that made his hackles rise.
"There was her dealer," said Fai slowly, and she raised an eyebrow and tapped the tablet's touchscreen quickly with its stylus. "He might have known - something. I think he lived near a chemical processing plant - sometimes when she came home she smelled kind of, crisp, maybe?"
"Dealer in what kind of drug?" the Fed asked, and Fai paused, tilting his head back.
"Chrysameth, mostly, I think," he said. "It was her favorite."
"Coroner said she died of poisoning after mixing it with alcohol," she remarked, and Fai nodded.
"Yeah, like I said, her favorite. But if she couldn't afford that, anything else. We caught her sniffing cans of lighter fuel once."
"Just once," Yuui said, quickly. He didn't know why it bothered him to have their mother portrayed as some mindless addict, not when she had been sick and the drugs had been her coping mechanism and Fai knew that. "She never did it again!"
"She stopped doing it where we could see her," Fai argued, and Yuui glared at him. "Other than that she didn't have many contacts."
"How did she fund the drug habit? Did she have a job?"
Fai snorted. "Yeah," he said. "Oldest profession in the world - ow!"
"Stop lying," Yuui said tightly, lowering his elbow from where he had jabbed it into Fai's guts. He turned to the Fed and said, quickly, "She spent the food allowance. She wouldn't do that. Fai just doesn't like her, I - she was our mother."
"She starved you," Fai retorted coldly, and Yuui glared hotly at his twin. This was the crux of Fai's dislike of their mother. She'd starved both of them, but Fai only cared about him, and it got old.
"Okay, enough," said the Fed, sounding tired. "We're done here, for today at least. We'll send you off to the Siberian school, but if this dealer lead doesn't pan out, we'll be sending more officers to talk with you."
"Fantastic," Fai muttered, and she pushed her chair back, picking up her tablet and tucking it into the crook of her arm. Yuui glared at him as she held the door open for them and hailed a male Fed to take them direct to the shuttle, which had arrived while they'd been talking.
Neither of them said a word until they were safely ensconced in their seats at the very rear of the suborbital, Fai with the window seat and Yuui sitting by the aisle. One of their Fed escorts made his way down the middle of the vessel checking everyone was securely fastened in, and Yuui realized the shuttle had been waiting on them. He waited until the Fed sat down before nudging Fai harshly to get his attention.
"Why would you say all those things?" he whispered angrily, and Fai huffed out a breath.
"Because they were true enough," he hissed back. "She starved you, Yuui! She took the money that was supposed to be for food and she spent it on anything that would get her high!"
"You starved too," Yuui said, and Fai rolled his eyes.
"Do you really think that's going to make me look at her with more fondness or something?"
"She was sick," Yuui said quietly, and Fai's mouth thinned.
"Yeah, I know. The colors she saw. Great excuse, except I see them too , Yuui, and I'm not like her! Okay? It's... I don't understand why you can't just let her go. You don't need to defend her - "
"Yes I do," Yuui snapped. "You spend all your time making her out to be - wait." He paused. "You're still seeing colors?"
"Oh gods," Fai groaned, leaning back in his seat, and Yuui turned as much as the safety harness would let him to face his twin. The seething feeling in his stomach had morphed to a tighter, more dangerous one, one that only Fai could make him feel.
"You said that had stopped," he said in a low, angry voice. "You said you were fine, Fai."
Fai opened one eye to face him and sighed, deeply. "Yes, Yuui. I lied. Sorry, but - "
"Don't just tell me you're sorry," Yuui growled, and Fai looked at him in surprise. "Don't just - Fai, haven't you learned by now? When we're sick nobody comes, okay? Nobody ever comes, it's just us, and you can't keep lying to me. Did you ever really stop seeing them?"
Fai hesitated for a good long moment before answering, and when he did it was after the shuttle engines had started, the heavy whining drone almost sufficient to drown out his very quiet, "no."
Yuui closed his eyes and let his head tilt back until his neck thumped against the head rest. "You lied to me," he said. "You didn't tell me about - about dad. Are you even my Fai?"
"Of course I am," Fai said immediately, affronted. "I'm just trying to protect you, I -"
"I know you are! I know," Yuui said softly, tilting his head to look at his twin again. Fai looked distinctly concerned, and Yuui reached out and rested his arm on the armrest between their seats, palm up. "I do, but Fai... you can't lock me out. That's not how this works."
"You're all I have," Fai told him quietly, as the shuttle began to jolt around them. They'd never flown before, but Yuui found he didn't care about the movement or the view outside; he kept his eyes on his twin's face as Fai reached out and took his hand. "I don't like making you worry."
"I'm not a child anymore," Yuui said. "We're not children any more. We're going away, Fai, and things will be so different there and -" he broke off, turned away.
"Yuui," Fai murmured, sounding somewhat helpless. "Yuui, don't do that. I - I don't like it when you -"
"Just promise me if things get bad, you'll go to a doctor at the school," Yuui said. "Since you won't tell me when you're sick. I don't - I don't want you to die like she did, Fai, I can't - just don't."
"I promise I'll tell you -"
"No. I've heard that before," Yuui interrupted, and slouched in his seat. "You're all I have too, Fai. Don't lie to me again."
"I'm sorry," Fai whispered, but Yuui didn't answer. He had nothing new to say anyway.
The intercom bleeped then, and Fai tightened his grip on Yuui's hand as the last few members of crew buckled themselves in. Yuui swallowed, closing his eyes, and the entire shuttle began to vibrate as it went through the launch process; the force generated shoved them rudely back in their seats, but neither of them let go, and it passed soon enough as the shuttle gained momentum.
Yuui swallowed nervously and didn't look out the window. It was the first time he'd left the ground, and he didn't think he liked it; but he risked a glance at Fai, and the marvel and wonder he saw on his twin's face as Fai peered intently out of the tiny window at the Earth spread grey and smoky and blue under them, the curvature of her globe clearly visible under them, made him look younger than he really was.
Yuui knew then that he wasn't mad with his twin. He never could be, and he squeezed Fai's hand gently in his; Fai turned to him in surprise, and with a boldness rare for him, born of being in the very back seat, Yuui leaned over and kissed him softly, their dry lips chapped and warm. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.
"Yuui!" Fai whispered, his blue eyes wide and bright, and Yuui tried to copy Fai's confident smile, the one that made him seem so very invulnerable.
"We might not get to do that for a while," he whispered back, and Fai smiled at him crooked and sweet, and Yuui took advantage of their isolation yet again.
Hong Kong was behind them now. But home - home was wherever they were together.
Onto chapter ten →
-tbc
Fandom: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Pairing: Fai/Kurogane/Yuui
Author: Co-write between mikkeneko & reikah
Rating: R
Word count: 7,908 this chapter (60,999 so far. for srs?)
Notes: "In a future where science and psionics rule the skies, and both are controlled by the iron fist of the Earth government, two young men make a desperate leap into the unknown in order to evade capture and slavery. AU, Kurogane/Yuui/Fai."
Part One - Earth: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Part Two - Mars: [8] [9] [10] [11]
← back to chapter eight
Part two: Mars
searching for the future
"Things are kind of tense between Earth and Mars right now," Syaoran said as they walked back from the shopping district. They had a new round of pastries, as well as a few bags of baking supplies; Syaoran's repeated assurance that they would face no more harassment seemed to have been true enough.
"I thought things were always tense between Earth and Mars," Yuui commented.
Syaoran laughed a little. "Well, that's true," he admitted. "But especially now. You were in the academy right? So you must know about the psychics - that so many more of them are born in space than on Earth."
"Yes," Yuui said, "although given how many more people Earth has, there are still plenty to choose from. I'm from Earth, after all."
"Yes, but people like you are incredibly rare," Syaoran said. "The percentage of potential espers goes up exponentially in any of the space-born populations compared to the terrestrial ones. And since Mars has more people than any other extraterrestrial colony, we are still the primary source for new psychic talent."
"Which means?" Yuui said warily.
Syaoran shrugged. "Mars is a lot friendlier than Earth to psychics in general. Of course, it helps that we don't have a large peacekeeping force to supply or too many contacts with deep-space colonies to maintain… but the fact is that Earth needs psychics, and they don't have enough. So they want ours."
"Oh." Yuui's mind went back to Sakura's chilling tale of kidnapping - he'd heard rumors that such things happened, of course, but nobody ever had any proof; it was just something that happened to a friend of a cousin of a friend. "So they steal them?"
Syaoran's pleasant face was unusually flat and grim. "The raids have really picked up in the past few years," he said. "But before that, they tried to be a little more subtle about it. They'd scope out a psychic they wanted, then come up with a bunch of false criminal charges and demand that Mars extradite them to Earth for trial. After they lost a couple dozen of espers to Earth that way - none of them ever seen again - the Martian government caught on. And now they simply refuse to extradite any psychics to Earth, for any reason."
"Oh," Yuui said, reviewing the past hour in this new light. "But - but I'm not Martian."
Syaoran shook his head. "That doesn't matter," he said. "I said Mars was friendlier to psychics than Earth - and right now they're so mad that they don't want to hand any espers over to Earth, no matter where they're from. But at the same time they can't officially withhold Earth citizens from Earth justice - so they just quietly look the other way.
"Whenever someone comes in hot from Earth - like you did - and the Feds are demanding that Mars instigate a local search, the government just… sends out a few people, very discreetly, to find out if that person is a psychic on the run. And if they are, then they just pretend they never saw them."
"But doesn't that run the risk of letting real criminals run loose?" Yuui asked, guiltily aware that psychic or no, Earth's accusations of his 'terrorist' crimes had quite a lot of basis.
"Maybe," Syaoran said seriously. "But it's like this - if they commit crimes in Mars space, the police will come down on them like the hammer of God. And if they really did commit crimes on Earth but none here, then it's not our job to do Earth's police work for them!
"Besides, the number of 'real criminals' who escape from Earth to Mars is much smaller than the number of innocent Martians they've kidnapped over the years - like Sakura." Syaoran's normally open, easy-going face hardened into a mask of hatred. "They'd still be looking for her, if they didn't think she was dead. They put her face in the newsfaxes next to murderers, arsonists and rapists - and she never harmed a soul!"
"I see," Yuui murmured, hunching his shoulders and clasping his hands in front of him. "I had no idea that the Federal government was so - so ruthless."
And he should have known, just given their treatment of himself and his twin. But the truth was that up until they had taken Fai away from him, the Academy had given them more than they'd ever had in their lives - warm housing, steady food, comfortable clothes. An education. A purpose, a chance to become more than a pair of worthless street rats. For all that they'd used and exploited Fai - and himself - a deep-down part of Yuui couldn't help but believe that they didn't deserve any better, and that they should be no more than grateful for the time and expense that Earth had spent on them.
But he did know better now - now that he'd had a chance to get outside the system, see and hear about its abuses and excesses from other people's ears. And while it should have reassured him to know that running away had been the right move, it didn't make him feel any better to think of Earth's enraged fury at losing them.
"Don't worry about it," Syaoran reassured him, and Yuui realized that his usual pleasant expression must have slipped, revealing some of his worry. The boy patted his arm, anxiously trying to cheer him up. "That's on Earth. This is Mars now! You're far away from them, and they can't touch you any more."
Yuui gave him a small smile. "I suppose you're right," he said. "Come on, let's get back to the ship. The others will be waiting."
When the shuttle pulled in both Kurogane and Sakura were waiting on the other side of the airlock; Sakura had her arms folded over her chest and her back to the wall, her expression a little shadowed, and Kurogane paced back and forth before the small door as the Mokona closed the shuttle bay doors and then pumped air back into the room.
Syaoran was the first out, wearing his EVA suit but no helmet, clutching a couple of bags; Yuui followed in his civilian clothes, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes at the blond's overconfidence. It was wildly irresponsible not to take your suit on an orbit-to-surface shuttle flight, but just like an Earther to forget his suit in his cabin. Stupid, Kurogane thought.
"Syaoran," Sakura said with some relief when the two of them opened the doors. "Are you alright?"
"I - I'm fine, Princess," Syaoran said, looking a little flushed at her regard, and Kurogane snorted. "Did we hear from the triads? When is the meeting?"
"Three days," Kurogane said, scowling. "They want us to sit on our thumbs and sweat."
"Is that normal?" Yuui wanted to know. He had several bags too, and he shifted uncertainly in the corridor behind Syaoran.
"Depends," Kurogane said. "Normal business practice, no. But if you mean 'is it something to worry about,' also no. It's just bullshit power games."
"So we just hang in orbit until they're ready to meet with us?" Syaoran asked, and Kurogane nodded. "The Security Services know we're here, Captain... is that really okay?" His eyes flicked to Yuui, who bit his lower lip, and Kurogane let out a long sigh.
"Should be," he said. "They won't sell you out to Earth, and the triads won't either. For all their faults," he said bitterly, "they're Martian to the bone."
"If you're sure," Yuui said, but he looked doubtful. "What are we supposed to do for three days?"
"What we did for the last ten," Kurogane said. "Wait. There's a lot of waiting in space travel; you'll get used to it. Don't recommend you go shopping again, though."
"Oh!" This seemed to trigger Syaoran's memory, and he fumbled, one-handed, in the bags he had hooked over his wrist for a small white cardboard box; he held this out to Sakura, blushing furiously. "Th - that's for you. I hope you like it."
"What is it?" Sakura asked, her brow furrowing even as she opened it, and Kurogane was startled to feel Yuui nudge him.
"We bought some new stuff," the blond said. "I'm going to put it in the galley - you should come too, Captain Third Wheel."
"Huh?" Kurogane asked, and Yuui sighed and put on a long-suffering look.
"Let's leave your young crewmembers together, yes?" he said, and Kurogane jerked, coloring as he realized what Yuui was after; Syaoran gave them a slightly pleading look. Yuui took some of the bags from him with a grin and turned on his heel, and he was walking down the corridor as Sakura finished opening in the box and squealed in delight. Kurogane rather hastily followed him.
He opted to follow Yuui into the galley - Sakura's voice raised in excitement behind him until the door hissed shut after them - and stood for a moment inside the doorway, uncertain. Normally he'd use the opportunity to use the machines or practice sword play, but he didn't feel up to that with Yuui present, and he didn't think it would be fair to toss the blond out. Yuui seemed at home in the kitchenette, unloading strange and arcane items from the bags and putting them in cupboards.
Kurogane tilted his head to one side as his passenger went back to unloading more bags, including white boxes not unlike the one Syaoran had presented Sakura with. "You're in a good mood today," he said, keeping his voice level, and didn't say what he was thinking: what happened that you forgot yourself?
"Well," said Yuui. "We had a run in with Martian security and I am, as yet, unarrested. I'm a little relieved by that, you could say. I made my twin a promise concerning capture."
"Oh?"
"It's none of your business, Captain Nosey," Yuui said lightly, and Kurogane scowled as he poked through the bags.
"What the hell is this stuff?" Kurogane asked, confused, lifting a small plastic... thing. It looked like a hydraulic pump, but much too small and fragile.
"If it's got a nozzle, it's an icing piper," said Yuui, bent down to rummage through the cupboards. "Please don't move it, I'm planning on experimenting with cakes later."
"We don't have room for all this," Kurogane complained.
"Don't underestimate my packing abilities, Captain Nitpick," Yuui countered. He finished emptying the bags and rummaged in a drawer for a fork, opening one of the boxes on the countertop to reveal a slice of chocolate cake, decorated with whipped cream and glazed cherries, and Kurogane recoiled away from it instinctively. Yuui's eyes lit up, however, and it transformed his face.
"How can you eat that stuff?" Kurogane demanded.
"With a fork, usually," Yuui replied. "A spoon is also a good idea. I could use my fingers, but that just gets messy."
"Tch," Kurogane growled, and Yuui scooped himself a slice of chocolate cake, putting it into his mouth; his whole face softened in obvious pleasure at the taste, and he slid the fork back out slowly, obviously cleaning every last shred of the cake from its tines with his tongue as he did so. Kurogane didn't think he was trying to be seductive, the gesture was unconscious and filled with a kind of quiet satisfaction rather than overt flirting like the times Yuui had tried to offer himself up, but it was damn arresting anyway.
Yuui looked up to meet his eyes, and Kurogane realized he'd been staring. Yuui grinned. "Jealous?" he asked with a sly wink.
"Hell, no," Kurogane said, turning sharply away and trying to calm the suddenly-kindled heat in his body. "Sweet shit like that makes my teeth ache just looking at it. Don't tell me you're going to fill up my galley with that junk."
Yuui laughed. "Don't worry, Captain Sourtooth," he said. "Not all desserts have to be sweet. I saw that you drink coffee - at least I hope you aren't letting the kids drink it, that would stunt their growth! - so I got the ingredients to make tiramisu. I thought you'd like that."
Kurogane grunted noncommittally, not wanting to admit that the idea actually sounded pretty good. Then he frowned and turned to the table again, looking Yuui square in the eye. "All right," he said. "What's this supposed to be?"
Yuui blinked several times, appearing at a loss. "What is what supposed to be?" he asked. "The… chocolate and coffee, and a shortbread…"
"Not the cake," Kurogane interrupted. "Look. This is a small ship, there's not really room for misunderstandings. So I'm just asking straight. The kid brings back a special cake for the girl because he wants to show her he cares, now you're talking about making some weird pastry that you think I'd like. What I want to know is, what message are you trying to send here?"
Yuui looked lost, stuttering as he answered. "I wasn't… trying to do anything like before," he said, and flushed. "I'm not trying to bribe you for favors or anything, I promise. I…"
"I didn't say you were," Kurogane said. "I just want to know if you're coming on to me or not."
"I… no," Yuui said, although the flush in his cheeks as he stared down at the table suggested that wasn't entirely truthful. "I just - you've been very kind to us, to me and Fai. I wanted to do something nice for you. That's all."
"You don't have to," Kurogane said sharply, just to dispel any notions of bribery or payment owed. But when Yuui only looked more hurt and annoyed, he added, "But if you still feel like making that tiramisu, I might have a bite. Just to see if it's any good."
He set himself down rather heavily upon the couch, flicking the television on with the buttons attached to its arm. The couch had been a recent purchase; the one before it had been too small to let him stretch out, and this one was bigger by it by a good four decimeters.
Normally he preferred to watch movies in his room; he had a stack of older video formats and outdated films he wanted to see. Now he took the opportunity to flick through the Martian channels - mostly reality television and chat shows; he settled on a film he liked and had seen a few times before - a dramatic retelling of the construction of the first great deep space station.
"I wouldn't have thought you'd be into older films," Yuui said, from across the room, and Kurogane snorted.
"My dad took me to see this one," he said. "We ordered it in from Mars special. You seen it?"
"No." Yuui paused, and Kurogane could hear the hesitation in his voice. "We didn't see many films. I didn't... we couldn't until we left home."
For some reason that we nagged at Kurogane like it did most of the time Yuui used it, like he was only half a person. He would have dismissed it as a twin thing - he had never had any siblings himself, but he could see how it might be to grow up with one - but Syaoran rarely used we, defaulting to Kimihiro and I or me and my twin.
"It's near the end," he said. "Too bad, you should watch it."
"Isn't that what I'm doing now?" Yuui retorted, but Kurogane heard the whisper of cloth as he got to his feet and came over, fork in one hand and box in the other, and settled himself on the arm of the sofa furthest away from Kurogane.
He stayed quiet while watching the movie, at least, and Kurogane took a small amount of pride in the fascinated excitement in his eyes during the climactic scene. Just when an outbound colony ship seemed like it would hit the bare-bones space station, it was saved by the movie's heroine - a young Japanese kinetic, stretching her gift past the breaking point and suffering an aneurysm after the ship was diverted. It was based on a true story; his father had once shown him the memorial plaque with her name on it on the space station walls.
"She must have been very strong," Yuui said softly as the credits rolled.
"Yeah," said Kurogane. "She was a hero."
"'Was'?" Yuui turned to him, tilting his head, and Kurogane turned away and shrugged.
"The station she saved is gone anyway," he said, keeping his voice carefully neutral. Figures that an Earthie wouldn't even know basic near-space history. "It was destroyed decades ago."
"Oh." Yuui paused, digesting this. "That's sad, but at least the people she saved got a few more years. It wasn't for nothing, was it?"
"She was prime material for Earth's propaganda machine," Kurogane said, ignoring this. "When they started up their Kinetic army. It was all 'join now and save lives like she did'. I guess they've moved beyond that if you don't know who she is."
"No." Yuui hesitated. "We didn't go to school, Captain, I... They didn't have to inspire me to join them by appealing to my need to be a hero or anything. For me it was 'join now and get three meals a day,' but for others we heard it was... it was 'join now or be lobotomized.'"
"What the hell?" Kurogane asked, sitting up straight. He hadn't heard that one, and his palms prickled. On the screen the credits were finishing to a stop, and he muted the television set absently as commercials for the next program started up. "I've never heard that."
"It's not like they said it outright. But yeah, if you didn't sign up then you had to be really careful, because the first time you did something wrong you'd get a laser burning out your frontal lobe." He twisted his fingers by his temples, mimicking smoke pouring out of his ears. "Unregistered, unaffliated espers were dangerous, they said."
"Fuck," said Kurogane, thinking of Sakura. He'd never asked why Syaoran and she had run; he'd thought they just hadn't wanted to lose their autonomy, and supported them fully. Now, though, he thought he understood a little more.
"Fai made me lie about what I could do. Maybe he'd heard the rumours." Yuui paused, raising a hand to his mouth, and bit thoughtfully at his thumbnail. "They didn't do it to him, whatever it is he can do."
"You honestly don't know?" Kurogane asked sharply, and Yuui shook his head.
"The man who discovered me let me bring him to their academy because he wanted to experiment on us," he said. "We're identical twins, we're rare enough in the normal population, among espers we were almost unique. The man... Professer Ashura, his name was - he was really really interested in how come I'm a kinetic and Fai wasn't. Fai and I did a lot of tests for him, and eventually they found out Fai was a clairvoyant.
"Thing is, clairvoyance is nothing special, not even on Earth. They say one in every ten women has it, particularly mature ones - all those mothers with the ability to know when something is happening to their kids, you know? Rarer among males, but not really rare enough to be remarkable.
"So they kept testing Fai, because I think they were hoping to find another power. A really strong one, like mine. And then one day they just... didn't send him back, after his tests, and I waited half an hour and I went to find them, and the Professor's chief lab assistant told me Fai had a rare medical condition and asked if he'd been having this... checklist of symptoms. And he had, so I said yes, because I was worried he'd had another seizure -"
"A seizure?" Kurogane interrupted sharply, and Yuui made a choppy, dismissive handwave.
"He used to have them sometimes when he was younger," Yuui said impatiently. "The hospital scanned him once when he was seventeen but they couldn't see anything wrong with him, and all the time we were at school and in the academy he was fine. Anyway, I said he had had the symptoms they were asking about before, and the lab technician told me... he said Fai was very very sick, and he wouldn't be coming back home for a while. And I said I wanted to see him, and he said I couldn't, and I knew he was lying."
"What happened next?" Kurogane asked, and Yuui snorted, the corners of his mouth turning up bitterly.
"You know I'm not very subtle by now. I trashed the lab. They sent another kinetic in to sedate me."
Wasn't that just typical. "Can't say I'm surprised," said Kurogane coolly, and Yuui flushed guiltily. The lighting from the screen made him look even more pale. "Do you have any idea what the hell it is that he can do?"
"No. I only have a few suspicions, like really powerful precognition. But I won't know until he wakes up, and I know he's not a kinetic, so the ship will be safe."
"Sakura's a precog," Kurogane pointed out. "She can't control it, but it doesn't hurt her."
"No, it shouldn't, but it's also not all that strong," Yuui said. He sat up and frowned, his expression slowly changing as his mind was distracted from his immediate problems. "Actually, Sakura ought to have more control than she does - a weaker talent is easier to control, not harder, since the time window you can see into is smaller. Hasn't she had any training for her gift at all?"
"When could she have gotten training?" Kurogane said in irritation. "She ran for her life. Did you expect us to just stop by your precious Academy one afternoon and say 'Pardon me, but we have an unregistered precog on board, do you think you could spare her some lessons?' "
Yuui raised his hands placatingly. "I didn't mean it like that," he said. "I just meant - Look, I spent a lot of time around the precogs when I was at the academy. I saw some of their training methods. They aren't actually all that difficult - it's not like free-fall training, where your trainer really has to be another kinetic. A lot of it is just certain routines and habits they keep, so that they always know when they are in time."
"So what?" Kurogane demanded; despite Yuui's reassurances, he still felt a bit nettled at the implication that he wasn't seeing to Sakura's welfare properly.
"So I could probably teach her some of the basic timekeeping and orientation routines, and even that would help her a lot." He looked up at Kurogane. "Would that be all right?"
"I don't know," Kurogane frowned. "It's her gift, not mine. If she's all right with it, then I don't care what you do."
"Okay. I'll talk to her when - ..." Yuui trailed off, and Kurogane glanced overly curiously to see him staring at the television screen, utterly expressionless; he followed his gaze to see a news bulletin, an immaculately coiffed Martian woman talking, muted, to the screen. The ticker along the bottom read Earth's Eurasian Federation issue Trans-Solar Warrant for missing terrorist.
Kurogane turned the sound up.
"... face criticism from numerous authorities concerning their security procedure for the Lunar Colonies. Yuui Flowright, aged twenty-five, is alleged to be the son of an Illinois triple murderer sentenced to life imprisonment on the United States' "Romulus" Lunar camp. A spokesperson for Earth's United States had this to say on the killings, reportedly one of the highest body counts since the destruction of Suwa Space Station back in -"
"They're talking about our mother," Yuui said, scowling.
"Your mother?" Kurogane asked, wrenching his attention from the television set.
"The triple murder case who escaped from the moon prison. They never could figure out how she got out."
"- Senior Minister Fei Wang Reed confirmed that Flowright is to be considered extremely dangerous, and is in possession of esper abilities. The public is warned that he may be in possession of a large crate containing incendiary -"
"Looks like they tracked your brother," Kurogane said, scowling at the bulletin. "Not like them to move that fast."
"Well, we're in Mars space, and Syaoran said -"
"The Eurasian Federation would like to remind citizens of Sol that there is a five hundred thousand yenbuck bounty on Flowright alive, and half that dead. There is also a five hundred thousand yenbuck reward for the safe return of the crate. Earth authorities have issued a dossier on Flowright's troubled home life, including an interview with his father -"
"Turn it off," said Yuui, in a voice colder than Kurogane had heard from him, but the screen flashed over anyway to a tall man, heavy set and shading to fat, his brown hair touched with grey. A ticker gave his name and listed him as 'Father of terrorist suspect', and Yuui made a noise like steam escaping from a pressure cooker, causing Kurogane to glance at him in surprise.
"Of course the boy is evil," said the man, seemingly in response to a question. He spoke in slow, measured Cantonese, subtitles at the bottom of the screen in Mandarin, Japanese and English. "All his life he was full of spite and hate, that is why I sent him to the academy. He tried to kill me."
"Fuck you," Yuui spat, his eyes flashing. His hands were tight fists on his lap.
"I grieve for those who have lost family members to his senseless acts of violence. Those kids were always getting in trouble, they were rotten from day one. I tried to teach them right from wrong-"
"Sir, if we can move on -" interrupted the interviewer, and Kurogane narrowed his eyes, suspecting that she was under orders to keep the man from mentioning the other blond, the one they were so eager to retrieve.
"The other one was worse. I tried with them, I tried -" continued Yuui's father, and then the interview lost sound suddenly. Yuui turned away, his shoulders shaking, but the subtitles at the bottom of the screen helpfully continued despite the absence of noise: but their mother was always getting in the way. She wouldn't let me teach them proper discipline, she spoiled them rotten, the monsters.
The image froze then, and cut back to the news anchor who looked apologetic and talked about technical difficulties. She looked smug, and Kurogane suspected the Martian channel had aired the clip deliberately. He hit the off switch and the screen faded to black.
"Your dad's a prick," said Kurogane, after a pause, and succeeded in startling a surprised bark of bitter laughter out of Yuui. But at least the tight, inward-pinched tension eased up a bit.
"You can say that again," he said. "We never got on. Fai hated him, he was always a bully."
"So, all this 'discipline' he tried to do," Kurogane asked. He wanted to get some measure of the circumstances Yuui had grown up in, but he couldn't think of a gentle way to ask.
"He didn't beat us," Yuui said slowly. "If that's what you're asking. Not often. He did it once or twice, but nothing more. Mostly he liked to shout at us or tell us how much he wished we weren't there. He gave me a black eye once when I was six, but our mother saw and she chewed him out for it. It really upset Fai, though, he used to say if he hit us again he'd sneak into our parents' room and kill him in his sleep. I don't think he was exaggerating, Fai hated him."
Kurogane raised his eyebrows, a little shocked at the thought of a child willing to do that to a parent - respect for his elders had been ingrained into him since he was old enough to talk. "Your brother sounds..."
"He looked out for me," Yuui said, immediately. "When nobody else would. He always looked out for me. Our parents weren't so good at that. When we're sick nobody comes, nobody ever comes..." He trailed off then, and Kurogane got the feeling that he wasn't the one Yuui was talking to just then. Yuui wore a strangely soft expression, one Kurogane had seen him wear a few times before, always when thinking about his brother.
"We were glad to leave that house, Captain Curious," Yuui said, his eyes suddenly bright and piercing on Kurogane's face. "There wasn't anything left there that we cared about."
Yuui didn't remember much of the shuttle flight north. He remembered the hatchet-faced men in dark suits who came to collect them, the morning after Fai had decked their father hard enough he'd thrown up; he remembered the calm way they laid out their choices. The Eurasian Federation ran three military schools as an alternative to juvenile detention centers, and their father had arranged for the two of them to go to the one furthest from Hong Kong: Siberia's Onyx school. The serious-looking men in dark glasses had come to pick them up, and Yuui hadn't wanted to go, but he had hesitated and Fai had clapped him on the shoulder.
"We might as well," he'd said. "It's not like it's any better down here. Come on."
And he'd grabbed their bag, the one that contained all their stuff, and Yuui had fallen into step behind him as they walked down the narrow staircase of their cramped apartment block one last time. Neither of them had looked back, not even when they climbed into the backseat of the bulletproof Federation car to begin their trip to the shuttle docking station. Fai was right. There was nothing left in Hong Kong that they could see.
They weren't the only people headed north, either. Several other kids, ranging in ages from eleven to their age, were hanging around the suborbital station waiting for the shuttle when they arrived. The hatchet-faced men took them to a desk sitting in the docking gate, manned by a tired-looking woman with messy blonde hair and dull green eyes, wearing a black suit with a Federation tie. They gave her their names, and she tapped them into a tiny computer, then frowned when the screen flashed red.
"How do you spell that," she said, and Fai leaned over her shoulder and entered them into the system for her. The screen just flashed red again; she tried a third time and then looked at them thoughtfully.
"Okay," she said, worrying at her lower lip with a lacquered thumbnail. "You're not in the system. What're your parents' names?"
The twins looked at each other, and Yuui shrugged minutely at Fai, who nodded. "We don't know," he said, and she lowered her hand from her mouth and gave them both long, searching looks.
"Great," she said with a sigh, and reached into a desk drawer, pulling out two black rectangular metal cases. She popped them open and slid them across the desk; they each contained a sharp needle. "Fine, we'll take a blood test, see if we can track your information that way. Put your thumb on the pad and keep it there until the light goes green."
Fai did as he was told quickly, Yuui copying him a heartbeat later. It didn't take long for the light to go green; the devices were obviously connected to the computer terminal by wireless, as a database quickly opened up. It wasn't the one she had been using; it was blue and was crowned by a strange-looking bird with a white head. The woman blinked at it in surprise.
"U.S justice department?" she said, sounding confused. "What on earth...?"
She flashed them both a probing look over the top of her glasses, and Yuui swallowed. Fai leaned over the desk to see the screen. "Huh," he said, and smiled pleasantly.
"I think you two should go sit down. I'll send someone to talk to you shortly," she told them, and Yuui felt a creeping sensation in the pit of his stomach. Something was definitely wrong.
"Why would our blood test lead her to a North American website?" he asked Fai as they took their seats, and Fai snorted, dumping their bag on the floor between them. The Fed woman had summoned another Fed woman to her desk, and the two of them were talking animatedly, peering at the screen their DNA test results had pulled up.
"Because she was American, obviously," Fai said, and Yuui sat back in surprise, biting at his lower lip.
"How do you know that?" he asked in a low voice, and Fai paused, his face softening as he blinked. "She never said anything about that - she - she didn't even have an accent!"
"Yeah," Fai agreed, but he sounded less confident. The new Fed woman straightened up from the desk and touched the earpiece, turning to look at them and then back at the database as she spoke into it; she stopped, listened, and then nodded. Her shoes clicked across the floor as she came to them. "Listen, let me do the talking," Fai said in a low voice, and Yuui nodded.
"Fai, Yuui," said the new woman. "I'd like to ask you some new questions. Come this way, please."
Yuui glanced over at Fai, who had arranged his features in a pleasantly blank manner, and followed his twin as he climbed to his feet. The new Fed led them across the floor of the docking station to a small office, laser etching on the glass door identifying it as the station manager's office. It was empty, and she gestured them to seats in front of a rickety desk containing a rather battered workstation screen and piles of paper. An empty coffee mug sat atop a sticky brown ring, the words best mom in China! emblazoned across it proudly; she carefully took its handle between two fingers, tugged hard to unstick it from the desk, and moved it out of the way before she put down her own tablet and pulled up the plush leather chair.
"Are we in trouble?" Fai asked calmly, slouching in his seat, and she flicked her eyes up at him, then at Yuui, then back to him. Her brow furrowed and Yuui sighed, knowing what she was thinking, but for once she didn't comment on their matching faces and instead leaned across the desk to put her tablet in front of them. There was a photograph of a woman on its small screen, but Yuui didn't need to lean in closer to recognize her. He twitched, but Fai shot him a glance out of the corner of his eye and he subsided.
"Possibly," she said coolly. "Do you know that woman?"
Fai let his eyes rake over the picture for a long moment, and then gave a shallow nod; her mouth thinned. "Yeah," he said, neutrally.
"How do you know that woman," she said tightly.
"She's dead now," Fai said, as though he were talking about the weather. Yuui flinched again and her eyes flicked toward him; he swallowed. "She was our mother," Fai continued, in that same calm, bored voice.
"How long have you been living on Earth, Mr. Flowright?" she said, and now Fai lifted an eyebrow. The name was unfamiliar. "She was unmarried, that is your legal surname. How long?"
"All our lives," Fai said. "We're seventeen. Listen, she died when we were little kids, what has this got to do with us?"
She ignored them. "Five years ago we were alerted of her return to Earth by a Shenzhen hospital, who had retrieved her body from a low-rent apartment block by the old river. Apparently her death had been reported to the emergency services, but neither we nor the Americans could find a match for the voices of the caller who reported her death in our databases. It wasn't the registered tenant, so was it you?"
Fai scowled at her. "Maybe," he said, and she sighed, raising a hand and pinching her nose.
"I'm not interested in your teenage bravado, boy," she said. "I don't think you understand what kind of situation you're in. Your mother was a criminal and her escape from the Lunar colonies is what concerns us. Give me any more attitude and you could be facing charges as an accomplice."
Fai's face twisted as if he would like to call her bluff, but Yuui beat him to it. "She was a criminal?" Yuui blurted despite himself, and Fai turned and made a face at him. The Fed removed her hand from her face and eyed him thoughtfully, and he leaned back in his chair, swallowing.
"Three counts of manslaughter," she said, and scrolled back through the tablet. "Which one are you?"
"Yuui," he mumbled. "I don't - manslaughter? Who did she kill?"
"I don't know, the Americans didn't give us any details." The lady turned her scowl on the file frozen on the computer. "Tch, typical of them, they still think they matter. All I know is she's an American citizen, and after she killed those people they sent her up there instead of to the chair. What we want to know is, how did she get back?"
"How the hell would we know?" Fai snapped. "We were born here!"
She rubbed her hand over her mouth, and for a moment she looked tired. "So you say," she replied wearily. "And you're not in the system, so we can't prove that one way or another. What we want to know is, did she say anything at all? Anything?"
Yuui tensed quietly, her words ringing in his ears like a memory, Fai's voice distant and lazy and post-coital as he traced sweeping patterns over Yuui's skin: she was sentenced to the Lunar colonies for something she didn't do, and she was scared, so she jumped back here.
The whole universe, in her head. I think I see now.
"She never said anything about it to us," Fai said. "We didn't really talk much after we were eight or so. She wasn't the best mother out there."
"She wasn't bad," Yuui protested, and Fai leaned over toward him and shot him a glare that said, as clearly as words, We are not doing this now, Yuui.
"You always blame her," Yuui hissed back, and Fai rolled his eyes and opened his mouth to continue when the Fed coughed.
"Listen, boys," she said. "We're investigating a potential major security breach. I don't care about your domestic squabbles, I just want to know how she got out of the Lunar colonies, are we clear?"
"I don't understand, though," Yuui said quietly. "How could she get back here from the Lunar colonies? Aren't they guarded?"
Fai sighed heavily at the idiocy of his twin, but the lady only leaned back against her chair and folded her arms over her chest. "Yes," she said. "When the Americans came to us we thought it was a problem with their security, but they were able to prove to our satisfaction that the machines were working as they should. Which means that she found a way out that the Yankees don't know about. They don't regulate the criminals once they're up there, they didn't even know she was missing until we told them we'd found her body. So, think as hard as you can of anything she might have done, anyone she might have spoken to."
"The man who owned the apartment. He called himself our father," Fai offered, but she was shaking her head.
"He didn't meet her until later, we were able to track him that far. You would have been two years old by then. We went over his story five years ago when we found the body."
"'We would have been two when - " Yuui repeated, realizing what she was saying - that their father was not biologically their father - and Fai nudged him and shook his head. "You knew?"
"We'll talk about this later," Fai hissed, but Yuui couldn't stop staring, feeling betrayed. Fai should have told him. They didn't keep secrets, that wasn't how it worked between them. The Fed was still watching them, so he let it drop, but he couldn't stop the tightness in his belly, the antsy mix of anger and fear that made his hackles rise.
"There was her dealer," said Fai slowly, and she raised an eyebrow and tapped the tablet's touchscreen quickly with its stylus. "He might have known - something. I think he lived near a chemical processing plant - sometimes when she came home she smelled kind of, crisp, maybe?"
"Dealer in what kind of drug?" the Fed asked, and Fai paused, tilting his head back.
"Chrysameth, mostly, I think," he said. "It was her favorite."
"Coroner said she died of poisoning after mixing it with alcohol," she remarked, and Fai nodded.
"Yeah, like I said, her favorite. But if she couldn't afford that, anything else. We caught her sniffing cans of lighter fuel once."
"Just once," Yuui said, quickly. He didn't know why it bothered him to have their mother portrayed as some mindless addict, not when she had been sick and the drugs had been her coping mechanism and Fai knew that. "She never did it again!"
"She stopped doing it where we could see her," Fai argued, and Yuui glared at him. "Other than that she didn't have many contacts."
"How did she fund the drug habit? Did she have a job?"
Fai snorted. "Yeah," he said. "Oldest profession in the world - ow!"
"Stop lying," Yuui said tightly, lowering his elbow from where he had jabbed it into Fai's guts. He turned to the Fed and said, quickly, "She spent the food allowance. She wouldn't do that. Fai just doesn't like her, I - she was our mother."
"She starved you," Fai retorted coldly, and Yuui glared hotly at his twin. This was the crux of Fai's dislike of their mother. She'd starved both of them, but Fai only cared about him, and it got old.
"Okay, enough," said the Fed, sounding tired. "We're done here, for today at least. We'll send you off to the Siberian school, but if this dealer lead doesn't pan out, we'll be sending more officers to talk with you."
"Fantastic," Fai muttered, and she pushed her chair back, picking up her tablet and tucking it into the crook of her arm. Yuui glared at him as she held the door open for them and hailed a male Fed to take them direct to the shuttle, which had arrived while they'd been talking.
Neither of them said a word until they were safely ensconced in their seats at the very rear of the suborbital, Fai with the window seat and Yuui sitting by the aisle. One of their Fed escorts made his way down the middle of the vessel checking everyone was securely fastened in, and Yuui realized the shuttle had been waiting on them. He waited until the Fed sat down before nudging Fai harshly to get his attention.
"Why would you say all those things?" he whispered angrily, and Fai huffed out a breath.
"Because they were true enough," he hissed back. "She starved you, Yuui! She took the money that was supposed to be for food and she spent it on anything that would get her high!"
"You starved too," Yuui said, and Fai rolled his eyes.
"Do you really think that's going to make me look at her with more fondness or something?"
"She was sick," Yuui said quietly, and Fai's mouth thinned.
"Yeah, I know. The colors she saw. Great excuse, except I see them too , Yuui, and I'm not like her! Okay? It's... I don't understand why you can't just let her go. You don't need to defend her - "
"Yes I do," Yuui snapped. "You spend all your time making her out to be - wait." He paused. "You're still seeing colors?"
"Oh gods," Fai groaned, leaning back in his seat, and Yuui turned as much as the safety harness would let him to face his twin. The seething feeling in his stomach had morphed to a tighter, more dangerous one, one that only Fai could make him feel.
"You said that had stopped," he said in a low, angry voice. "You said you were fine, Fai."
Fai opened one eye to face him and sighed, deeply. "Yes, Yuui. I lied. Sorry, but - "
"Don't just tell me you're sorry," Yuui growled, and Fai looked at him in surprise. "Don't just - Fai, haven't you learned by now? When we're sick nobody comes, okay? Nobody ever comes, it's just us, and you can't keep lying to me. Did you ever really stop seeing them?"
Fai hesitated for a good long moment before answering, and when he did it was after the shuttle engines had started, the heavy whining drone almost sufficient to drown out his very quiet, "no."
Yuui closed his eyes and let his head tilt back until his neck thumped against the head rest. "You lied to me," he said. "You didn't tell me about - about dad. Are you even my Fai?"
"Of course I am," Fai said immediately, affronted. "I'm just trying to protect you, I -"
"I know you are! I know," Yuui said softly, tilting his head to look at his twin again. Fai looked distinctly concerned, and Yuui reached out and rested his arm on the armrest between their seats, palm up. "I do, but Fai... you can't lock me out. That's not how this works."
"You're all I have," Fai told him quietly, as the shuttle began to jolt around them. They'd never flown before, but Yuui found he didn't care about the movement or the view outside; he kept his eyes on his twin's face as Fai reached out and took his hand. "I don't like making you worry."
"I'm not a child anymore," Yuui said. "We're not children any more. We're going away, Fai, and things will be so different there and -" he broke off, turned away.
"Yuui," Fai murmured, sounding somewhat helpless. "Yuui, don't do that. I - I don't like it when you -"
"Just promise me if things get bad, you'll go to a doctor at the school," Yuui said. "Since you won't tell me when you're sick. I don't - I don't want you to die like she did, Fai, I can't - just don't."
"I promise I'll tell you -"
"No. I've heard that before," Yuui interrupted, and slouched in his seat. "You're all I have too, Fai. Don't lie to me again."
"I'm sorry," Fai whispered, but Yuui didn't answer. He had nothing new to say anyway.
The intercom bleeped then, and Fai tightened his grip on Yuui's hand as the last few members of crew buckled themselves in. Yuui swallowed, closing his eyes, and the entire shuttle began to vibrate as it went through the launch process; the force generated shoved them rudely back in their seats, but neither of them let go, and it passed soon enough as the shuttle gained momentum.
Yuui swallowed nervously and didn't look out the window. It was the first time he'd left the ground, and he didn't think he liked it; but he risked a glance at Fai, and the marvel and wonder he saw on his twin's face as Fai peered intently out of the tiny window at the Earth spread grey and smoky and blue under them, the curvature of her globe clearly visible under them, made him look younger than he really was.
Yuui knew then that he wasn't mad with his twin. He never could be, and he squeezed Fai's hand gently in his; Fai turned to him in surprise, and with a boldness rare for him, born of being in the very back seat, Yuui leaned over and kissed him softly, their dry lips chapped and warm. Nobody noticed. Nobody cared.
"Yuui!" Fai whispered, his blue eyes wide and bright, and Yuui tried to copy Fai's confident smile, the one that made him seem so very invulnerable.
"We might not get to do that for a while," he whispered back, and Fai smiled at him crooked and sweet, and Yuui took advantage of their isolation yet again.
Hong Kong was behind them now. But home - home was wherever they were together.
Onto chapter ten →
-tbc