Ohai ^^
Story: Black cat, white mage - Part 13
Pairings: Kurogane/Fai, Sakura/Syaoran, Yukito/Touya, the usual suspects.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Swearing, icky cutesiness, angst.
Summary: A lost princess. A mage running away from his past. A crippled warrior doing his best to forget the man he used to be. And a young man carrying a terrible curse. All of them are inevitably drawn into an adventure where love might save them... or doom them.
Note: Okay, so apparently having a full-time job eats your spare time and makes you really tired. I realize I should've known this already, but. uhm. yeah. Anyway, here's a less short part as compensation? Translation notes will be at the end. Cut quote from Remembrance by Emily Brontë.
***
Syaoran would never have believed that he’d end up getting lectured by a very pretty girl about the finer points of thievery and fencing, but that was in fact what he spent several hours with that evening. Fai was apparently preparing something for his magic, something that included murmuring strange words at a gemstone and making it grow brighter with each strange infliction. Whatever his own father was doing seemed to mostly involve trying to fry Fai into a crisp with his stare, and he didn’t seem to be succeeding. Since the tense silence was getting awkward, Little Cat started detailing to Syaoran their plans to see a fence for some money later that night, and this eventually turned into said lecture.
Syaoran had been a thief when he was younger, but not nearly as professional as Little Cat and Big Cat were. He’d just preyed on the drunk and stupid, going for money, because trying to sell a valuable object would’ve been pointless. Attempting it would just result in the object being taken from him any old how, and who could he complain to when he’d stolen it in the first place? So he’d never known how much work you apparently had to put into simple thievery.
“We got jewellery the last time,” Little Cat said, casually tipping out a black leather sack on the floor. Long strings of pearls coiled like snakes on the floor, rattling ominously against the floorboards. Rings bounced and skittered, casting reflexes as they wobbled away and then fell flat with surprisingly heavy sounds. Gold chains, bracelets, ornamental hatpins, brooches.
“Where did you get all this?” Syaoran mumbled, dumbfounded and uncomfortable with being presented with this amazing wealth, no doubt amounting to more money than he’d ever seen in his life.
“From a store, of course,” Little Cat said with a mischievous wink. “Just not the usual way.”
Syaoran nodded, surprised at how disquieted he felt at the thought. Introspective and analytic as he was, he’d still never really reflected on how much his time with Kurogane had changed his view of the world. All he could think of now was what must’ve happened with the shopkeeper, if he’d perhaps lost his livelihood, or if maybe someone innocent had been blamed for the whole incident. Little Cat and Big Cat were decent, considerate people, and probably wouldn’t rob someone who wasn’t very well off, but...
But what, demanded the street rat that still lived somewhere inside him. Who cared what happened with rich people? They made their living off of people who were poorer than them, so wasn’t it just fair if others made a living off of them?
But that was simplistic and unfair, and he recognised it as such. Being rich didn’t make a person bad, and it certainly didn’t mean that you deserved losing everything more than people who had less to lose. And decent and considerate as the two thieves were, Syaoran was pretty sure that there was no way for them to know everything about the people they robbed; if they perhaps had a sick relative depending on them, or debts they needed to repay, or if they were in the habit of giving away a part of their earnings to the poor and destitute... The possibilities were endless, and there was no way of covering them all.
And he couldn’t say this to Little Cat, not without coming off as if he was judging her, and he really wasn’t. Sometimes, life would give you no other option than what most people would consider dishonest, immoral, and you just had to do your best with what you’d been given. And if the two of them had to keep travelling because of whoever it was hunting after Fai, then there really wasn’t that many options except thievery.
Things were just... difficult.
“That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?” was all he said, running his fingers over an enamel brooch, cold butterfly wings in red and gold.
“Not really,” Little Cat said with a shrug. “Not as much as the jeweller would’ve made, anyway. All of these pieces are hot, the way they look now. No fence would accept something that’s this easy to recognize. So we strip off the jewels and we melt down the gold and we sell it all in bits and pieces. But it’s worth less like that. Worth even less than what the jeweller paid from them in the first place, because that’s how it is with swag. The fence has got to make a profit too, after all.”
Her voice was matter-of-fact, and Syaoran thought that she must’ve known this since she was too little to even understand it. He took it all in, watching her play idly with a ruby-encrusted ring, as if it was nothing more valuable than a bauble, a toy. “How d’you melt down the gold?” he demanded. “I mean, it’s not really something you can mess around with at home by the fireside, right?”
“Of course not.” She smiled widely at him, as if she was genuinely happy that he was catching on, and Syaoran once more felt himself go red. He knew Kurogane thought he was being silly, but the fact was that despite how awkward he was in her presence, he still felt more comfortable, more free with her than he ever had with anyone else before. This realization overwhelmed him slightly, staggered him, and this in turn wasn’t really helping with his constant blushing and stuttering at all, but it did fan the initial spark of attraction into something deeper, something more. And if that was silly... well, there wasn’t much to do about it.
“So, how d’you do it?” he prompted after having been derailed by her smile for a while.
“Well, there are certain places, certain people that you find out about when you’ve been in the business for a while. For most of the time they’re ordinary craftsmen, but just now and then they’ll lend some help in the shady kind of business transactions.” She ran her fingers over a thin gold chain, and then shrugged. “But that’d take too much time right now. So we’re just gonna chip loose the most valuable of the gemstones and slip off to our usual fence.”
“Can I help?” The question was instinctive, and Syaoran said it with absolutely ulterior motive. But as he was rewarded by the most brilliant smile he’d seen yet, and then later by Little Cat’s hands on his as she taught him the finer arts of gemstone removal, he was suddenly very grateful that Kurogane had taught him to always be helpful and polite - even if his father didn’t exactly practice what he preached. It had, after all, been for his own good.
~*~*~
“Och om mitt hjärta darrar, och likblek är min kind...”
Kurogane blinked in the gloom, and after a few confused, vaguely panicked seconds he realized that it couldn’t be morning yet. It wasn’t his inner clock that had woken him up, but Fai’s voice, muted and soft as it wound its way through the melancholy melody. As Kurogane propped himself up on his elbow, he found the mage sitting by the foot of Little Cat’s bed. A single candle was burning, and his head was bowed, so his face was partly in shadow. But his wide open eyes still shone blue, pure and haunting.
His daughter was curled up next to him in a tight ball of blankets and messy hair, and in his lap the white creature, the familiar, slept the deep sleep of something that had consumed enough food for a grown man while still being roughly the size of a small melon. He didn’t seem to be singing to either of them. But maybe, without knowing it, he was singing to the curled-up figure of a child by his feet, barely visible right now to Kurogane’s Sight except for his eyes. They were the colour of polished gold, shiny and bright with tears which would not fall.
“…det vet du inget av, du är försvunnen som en vind, försvunnen som en vind.”
”Valerian,” Kurogane remarked in the silence that followed, and Fai almost jumped where he sat before composing himself and smiling at him.
“Now you know Valerian too? My, aren’t you full of surprises,” he teased, idly scratching Mokona behind one long ear.
“No, I don’t,” Kurogane replied with just the faintest hint of annoyance. “But I had a…” The lie twisted itself on his tongue and almost strangled his voice, but he managed to press out the hateful word anyway. “…friend who does. Did. He’s dead now.”
Fai didn’t automatically say, “I’m sorry,” like most people would’ve, and Kurogane was glad for it. Sorry wasn’t enough, not if you’d known him. And if you hadn’t, then you had no business pretending like you cared. “Was he from Valeria then, your friend?” the mage asked instead, a safe question, not prying or poking. But there was an infliction on the word ‘friend’ which suggested he questioned it. Kurogane choose to simply ignore it.
“No. But you are, ain’t you? I’ve heard people there all look like they’re made from matchsticks and paper. Skinny, pale bunch, just like you.” Just like the child by Fai’s feet too… except that now that he really looked, it wasn’t Fai’s natural gangliness so much as the emaciated frailty of sickness. The child’s translucent hands looked like claws.
Fai chuckled quietly. “You have such a way with words, Kuro-syrup. It’s impressive, because I don’t think you’re even trying to be offensive. But yes, I am Valerian by birth, even though I don’t even remember anything of the country.”
“How’d you get here?” Kurogane asked, intrigued despite himself. “Everyone knows Valerians hate mainlanders.”
Fai made a small, amused sound at the back of his throat. “Oh no. ‘Hate’ requires at least a basic level of respect, Kuro-treat. No, the Valerians despise mainlanders, they view us as lowly and barbaric and unworthy of anything else. If there’s anything Valerians do hate… well, it’s probably other Valerians.”
“You’re not very kind about your own birth-people,” Kurogane noted.
“Is that disapproval I hear in your voice, Kuro-pudding?” Fai singsonged, but his smile melted into a sigh as Kurogane glared. “I’m not saying that Valerians are horrible people. But Valeria in itself…”He shook his head, unconsciously reaching out to touch Little Cat’s hair. “…is truly horrible. It has turned into a back-stabbing, poisonous country; where the poor are worked into early graves and the rich die more often by someone else’s hand than of old age.” He smiled mirthlessly. “Of course I don’t remember this myself. But I have read the history, and I remember what my parents told me when I was a bit older. There are so many unspoken rules, so many alliances, so much superstition... The last especially is a poison to the whole society.”
“And you still haven’t answered my question,” Kurogane noted. “How did you and your family end up here? You said ‘us’ before, so you don’t count yourself as a Valerian anymore.”
“I don’t,” Fai agreed. “And neither do Valerians. Once you’ve left, they consider you an outsider from then and on. And with everything I’ve just told you, it shouldn’t be too hard for a clever man like you to figure out how we got here.”
Kurogane sat up, leaning his back against the cold brick wall and watching Fai closely. He didn’t want to tell this story, and still he was. He just wanted Kurogane to figure out things for himself to he could tell himself that he hadn’t really told him, just answered his questions. And Kurogane didn’t like the idea of playing along with the mage’s self-deception, but at the same time… he wanted to know. He shouldn’t want to, but he did, and he wasn’t going to try to fool himself that he didn’t. He left that kind of shit nonsense to Fai.
“Political refugees,” he said. “Your family ended up in trouble and had to escape. From the way you were talking I’m guessing that it had something to do with some kind of superstition, something bad enough to make your parents flee even if that meant being mainlanders and never coming back again.” Fai had gone even paler now, and Kurogane couldn’t help smiling, grim and feral, as he went in for the kill. “So I’d say it was something to do with you.”
He was watching the boy by Fai’s feet as he said it, and as he’d suspected he did react, but not as he’d expected him to. The Sight showed secrets; often it showed memories long buried, or silenced guilt; sometimes it showed things that were forgotten, and sometimes they showed things someone wanted to forget. And when someone else came too close to a secret like that, it wasn’t uncommon for them to try to flee. But the child looked right at him - right through him - and his golden eyes were pleading and sad.
Fai smiled a strange, hollow smile. “You really are far too clever, Kuro-sugar,” he said, and his voice sounded flatter and duller than before.
“Are you gonna tell me or not?” Kurogane demanded gruffly, still maintaining eye-contact with the child. He’d never seen this happen before. There was a secret here that wanted to be told, even though Kurogane was fairly certain it also was a secret which Fai would rather die than give up the truth about. At least for now.
“There is a very old superstition in Valeria,” Fai said so suddenly that Kurogane was caught off guard completely. “It’s one of the oldest tales, and it is also part of the Valerian religion, such as it is. To them, birth date and place are very important, and are said to determine the fate of every individual. And the superstition is that if two people are born on the same day, by the same mother… then they share one fate. And since it is not possible for two people to live the same life, sooner or later one of the twins has to die at the hands of the other.” Fai fell silent for a moment, his eyes distant and flat as the moon, and by his feet the child shivered. “According to this superstition, the one that is born first is the ‘real’ child, while the other is a usurper placed there by evil powers. And so all second-born twins in Valeria are drowned.”
Kurogane nodded. Now he knew how the story went. “Your mother realized she was carrying twins. So she made sure she was alone when she birthed you, and then she refused to tell which one was born first.”
“Even better. She made sure that she didn’t know.” Fai chuckled unhappily. “Which of course meant that they sentenced us all to die.”
Kurogane grimaced in disgust. “You’re right. That place is fucking horrible. So how’d you get away?”
“Magic,” Fai said, once again speaking the word as if it was poisonous. “My mother and father were both mages - it is uncommon for Valerians to be born without at least a little magic. And they realized that both their children were uncommonly powerful. So communicated in secret with the Mage’s Circle, and struck a deal with them. They would help the four of us to flee, and in exchange their children would be bound to serve the Mage’s Circle. They thought it was a cheap price to pay for our safety.”
There was something about the way he said it, screaming silently in loss, but even more in anger, and moments later something happened to the ghost child by his feet. He started wasting away, growing thinner and paler as Kurogane watched. Swallowing the bile rising in his throat, he forced himself to keep looking until at last there was nothing but bones and hair and rotting cloth, and then nothing. That was a clue too, he thought, head ringing with some horrible emptiness. Without a word being spoken about it, he now knew for sure that Fai’s twin was dead. He wondered if Fai knew he’d figured it out. The mage wasn’t looking at him anymore, and it was impossible to tell.
“Inatt jagar vargar, inatt är varganatt,
Och barnet mitt det gråter…”
Kurogane lay down again. Fai wasn’t going to say more, he knew that, so he might as well try to get some sleep. But for a long while he lay awake, watching the shadows wandering over the ceiling as the candle slowly burned down, listening to the mage singing songs to a shadow that was no longer there.
***
Translation note: The "Valerian" here is really Swedish, because I'm lazy ^^ The words of the first song translate to "And if my heart does tremble, and my cheek is deathly pale / Then you know nothing of it, you are gone just like a wind, gone just like a wind". The second tranlates to "Tonight wolves hunt, tonight is a wolfnight / and this child of mine is crying".
Pairings: Kurogane/Fai, Sakura/Syaoran, Yukito/Touya, the usual suspects.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Swearing, icky cutesiness, angst.
Summary: A lost princess. A mage running away from his past. A crippled warrior doing his best to forget the man he used to be. And a young man carrying a terrible curse. All of them are inevitably drawn into an adventure where love might save them... or doom them.
Note: Okay, so apparently having a full-time job eats your spare time and makes you really tired. I realize I should've known this already, but. uhm. yeah. Anyway, here's a less short part as compensation? Translation notes will be at the end. Cut quote from Remembrance by Emily Brontë.
***
Syaoran would never have believed that he’d end up getting lectured by a very pretty girl about the finer points of thievery and fencing, but that was in fact what he spent several hours with that evening. Fai was apparently preparing something for his magic, something that included murmuring strange words at a gemstone and making it grow brighter with each strange infliction. Whatever his own father was doing seemed to mostly involve trying to fry Fai into a crisp with his stare, and he didn’t seem to be succeeding. Since the tense silence was getting awkward, Little Cat started detailing to Syaoran their plans to see a fence for some money later that night, and this eventually turned into said lecture.
Syaoran had been a thief when he was younger, but not nearly as professional as Little Cat and Big Cat were. He’d just preyed on the drunk and stupid, going for money, because trying to sell a valuable object would’ve been pointless. Attempting it would just result in the object being taken from him any old how, and who could he complain to when he’d stolen it in the first place? So he’d never known how much work you apparently had to put into simple thievery.
“We got jewellery the last time,” Little Cat said, casually tipping out a black leather sack on the floor. Long strings of pearls coiled like snakes on the floor, rattling ominously against the floorboards. Rings bounced and skittered, casting reflexes as they wobbled away and then fell flat with surprisingly heavy sounds. Gold chains, bracelets, ornamental hatpins, brooches.
“Where did you get all this?” Syaoran mumbled, dumbfounded and uncomfortable with being presented with this amazing wealth, no doubt amounting to more money than he’d ever seen in his life.
“From a store, of course,” Little Cat said with a mischievous wink. “Just not the usual way.”
Syaoran nodded, surprised at how disquieted he felt at the thought. Introspective and analytic as he was, he’d still never really reflected on how much his time with Kurogane had changed his view of the world. All he could think of now was what must’ve happened with the shopkeeper, if he’d perhaps lost his livelihood, or if maybe someone innocent had been blamed for the whole incident. Little Cat and Big Cat were decent, considerate people, and probably wouldn’t rob someone who wasn’t very well off, but...
But what, demanded the street rat that still lived somewhere inside him. Who cared what happened with rich people? They made their living off of people who were poorer than them, so wasn’t it just fair if others made a living off of them?
But that was simplistic and unfair, and he recognised it as such. Being rich didn’t make a person bad, and it certainly didn’t mean that you deserved losing everything more than people who had less to lose. And decent and considerate as the two thieves were, Syaoran was pretty sure that there was no way for them to know everything about the people they robbed; if they perhaps had a sick relative depending on them, or debts they needed to repay, or if they were in the habit of giving away a part of their earnings to the poor and destitute... The possibilities were endless, and there was no way of covering them all.
And he couldn’t say this to Little Cat, not without coming off as if he was judging her, and he really wasn’t. Sometimes, life would give you no other option than what most people would consider dishonest, immoral, and you just had to do your best with what you’d been given. And if the two of them had to keep travelling because of whoever it was hunting after Fai, then there really wasn’t that many options except thievery.
Things were just... difficult.
“That’s a lot of money, isn’t it?” was all he said, running his fingers over an enamel brooch, cold butterfly wings in red and gold.
“Not really,” Little Cat said with a shrug. “Not as much as the jeweller would’ve made, anyway. All of these pieces are hot, the way they look now. No fence would accept something that’s this easy to recognize. So we strip off the jewels and we melt down the gold and we sell it all in bits and pieces. But it’s worth less like that. Worth even less than what the jeweller paid from them in the first place, because that’s how it is with swag. The fence has got to make a profit too, after all.”
Her voice was matter-of-fact, and Syaoran thought that she must’ve known this since she was too little to even understand it. He took it all in, watching her play idly with a ruby-encrusted ring, as if it was nothing more valuable than a bauble, a toy. “How d’you melt down the gold?” he demanded. “I mean, it’s not really something you can mess around with at home by the fireside, right?”
“Of course not.” She smiled widely at him, as if she was genuinely happy that he was catching on, and Syaoran once more felt himself go red. He knew Kurogane thought he was being silly, but the fact was that despite how awkward he was in her presence, he still felt more comfortable, more free with her than he ever had with anyone else before. This realization overwhelmed him slightly, staggered him, and this in turn wasn’t really helping with his constant blushing and stuttering at all, but it did fan the initial spark of attraction into something deeper, something more. And if that was silly... well, there wasn’t much to do about it.
“So, how d’you do it?” he prompted after having been derailed by her smile for a while.
“Well, there are certain places, certain people that you find out about when you’ve been in the business for a while. For most of the time they’re ordinary craftsmen, but just now and then they’ll lend some help in the shady kind of business transactions.” She ran her fingers over a thin gold chain, and then shrugged. “But that’d take too much time right now. So we’re just gonna chip loose the most valuable of the gemstones and slip off to our usual fence.”
“Can I help?” The question was instinctive, and Syaoran said it with absolutely ulterior motive. But as he was rewarded by the most brilliant smile he’d seen yet, and then later by Little Cat’s hands on his as she taught him the finer arts of gemstone removal, he was suddenly very grateful that Kurogane had taught him to always be helpful and polite - even if his father didn’t exactly practice what he preached. It had, after all, been for his own good.
~*~*~
“Och om mitt hjärta darrar, och likblek är min kind...”
Kurogane blinked in the gloom, and after a few confused, vaguely panicked seconds he realized that it couldn’t be morning yet. It wasn’t his inner clock that had woken him up, but Fai’s voice, muted and soft as it wound its way through the melancholy melody. As Kurogane propped himself up on his elbow, he found the mage sitting by the foot of Little Cat’s bed. A single candle was burning, and his head was bowed, so his face was partly in shadow. But his wide open eyes still shone blue, pure and haunting.
His daughter was curled up next to him in a tight ball of blankets and messy hair, and in his lap the white creature, the familiar, slept the deep sleep of something that had consumed enough food for a grown man while still being roughly the size of a small melon. He didn’t seem to be singing to either of them. But maybe, without knowing it, he was singing to the curled-up figure of a child by his feet, barely visible right now to Kurogane’s Sight except for his eyes. They were the colour of polished gold, shiny and bright with tears which would not fall.
“…det vet du inget av, du är försvunnen som en vind, försvunnen som en vind.”
”Valerian,” Kurogane remarked in the silence that followed, and Fai almost jumped where he sat before composing himself and smiling at him.
“Now you know Valerian too? My, aren’t you full of surprises,” he teased, idly scratching Mokona behind one long ear.
“No, I don’t,” Kurogane replied with just the faintest hint of annoyance. “But I had a…” The lie twisted itself on his tongue and almost strangled his voice, but he managed to press out the hateful word anyway. “…friend who does. Did. He’s dead now.”
Fai didn’t automatically say, “I’m sorry,” like most people would’ve, and Kurogane was glad for it. Sorry wasn’t enough, not if you’d known him. And if you hadn’t, then you had no business pretending like you cared. “Was he from Valeria then, your friend?” the mage asked instead, a safe question, not prying or poking. But there was an infliction on the word ‘friend’ which suggested he questioned it. Kurogane choose to simply ignore it.
“No. But you are, ain’t you? I’ve heard people there all look like they’re made from matchsticks and paper. Skinny, pale bunch, just like you.” Just like the child by Fai’s feet too… except that now that he really looked, it wasn’t Fai’s natural gangliness so much as the emaciated frailty of sickness. The child’s translucent hands looked like claws.
Fai chuckled quietly. “You have such a way with words, Kuro-syrup. It’s impressive, because I don’t think you’re even trying to be offensive. But yes, I am Valerian by birth, even though I don’t even remember anything of the country.”
“How’d you get here?” Kurogane asked, intrigued despite himself. “Everyone knows Valerians hate mainlanders.”
Fai made a small, amused sound at the back of his throat. “Oh no. ‘Hate’ requires at least a basic level of respect, Kuro-treat. No, the Valerians despise mainlanders, they view us as lowly and barbaric and unworthy of anything else. If there’s anything Valerians do hate… well, it’s probably other Valerians.”
“You’re not very kind about your own birth-people,” Kurogane noted.
“Is that disapproval I hear in your voice, Kuro-pudding?” Fai singsonged, but his smile melted into a sigh as Kurogane glared. “I’m not saying that Valerians are horrible people. But Valeria in itself…”He shook his head, unconsciously reaching out to touch Little Cat’s hair. “…is truly horrible. It has turned into a back-stabbing, poisonous country; where the poor are worked into early graves and the rich die more often by someone else’s hand than of old age.” He smiled mirthlessly. “Of course I don’t remember this myself. But I have read the history, and I remember what my parents told me when I was a bit older. There are so many unspoken rules, so many alliances, so much superstition... The last especially is a poison to the whole society.”
“And you still haven’t answered my question,” Kurogane noted. “How did you and your family end up here? You said ‘us’ before, so you don’t count yourself as a Valerian anymore.”
“I don’t,” Fai agreed. “And neither do Valerians. Once you’ve left, they consider you an outsider from then and on. And with everything I’ve just told you, it shouldn’t be too hard for a clever man like you to figure out how we got here.”
Kurogane sat up, leaning his back against the cold brick wall and watching Fai closely. He didn’t want to tell this story, and still he was. He just wanted Kurogane to figure out things for himself to he could tell himself that he hadn’t really told him, just answered his questions. And Kurogane didn’t like the idea of playing along with the mage’s self-deception, but at the same time… he wanted to know. He shouldn’t want to, but he did, and he wasn’t going to try to fool himself that he didn’t. He left that kind of shit nonsense to Fai.
“Political refugees,” he said. “Your family ended up in trouble and had to escape. From the way you were talking I’m guessing that it had something to do with some kind of superstition, something bad enough to make your parents flee even if that meant being mainlanders and never coming back again.” Fai had gone even paler now, and Kurogane couldn’t help smiling, grim and feral, as he went in for the kill. “So I’d say it was something to do with you.”
He was watching the boy by Fai’s feet as he said it, and as he’d suspected he did react, but not as he’d expected him to. The Sight showed secrets; often it showed memories long buried, or silenced guilt; sometimes it showed things that were forgotten, and sometimes they showed things someone wanted to forget. And when someone else came too close to a secret like that, it wasn’t uncommon for them to try to flee. But the child looked right at him - right through him - and his golden eyes were pleading and sad.
Fai smiled a strange, hollow smile. “You really are far too clever, Kuro-sugar,” he said, and his voice sounded flatter and duller than before.
“Are you gonna tell me or not?” Kurogane demanded gruffly, still maintaining eye-contact with the child. He’d never seen this happen before. There was a secret here that wanted to be told, even though Kurogane was fairly certain it also was a secret which Fai would rather die than give up the truth about. At least for now.
“There is a very old superstition in Valeria,” Fai said so suddenly that Kurogane was caught off guard completely. “It’s one of the oldest tales, and it is also part of the Valerian religion, such as it is. To them, birth date and place are very important, and are said to determine the fate of every individual. And the superstition is that if two people are born on the same day, by the same mother… then they share one fate. And since it is not possible for two people to live the same life, sooner or later one of the twins has to die at the hands of the other.” Fai fell silent for a moment, his eyes distant and flat as the moon, and by his feet the child shivered. “According to this superstition, the one that is born first is the ‘real’ child, while the other is a usurper placed there by evil powers. And so all second-born twins in Valeria are drowned.”
Kurogane nodded. Now he knew how the story went. “Your mother realized she was carrying twins. So she made sure she was alone when she birthed you, and then she refused to tell which one was born first.”
“Even better. She made sure that she didn’t know.” Fai chuckled unhappily. “Which of course meant that they sentenced us all to die.”
Kurogane grimaced in disgust. “You’re right. That place is fucking horrible. So how’d you get away?”
“Magic,” Fai said, once again speaking the word as if it was poisonous. “My mother and father were both mages - it is uncommon for Valerians to be born without at least a little magic. And they realized that both their children were uncommonly powerful. So communicated in secret with the Mage’s Circle, and struck a deal with them. They would help the four of us to flee, and in exchange their children would be bound to serve the Mage’s Circle. They thought it was a cheap price to pay for our safety.”
There was something about the way he said it, screaming silently in loss, but even more in anger, and moments later something happened to the ghost child by his feet. He started wasting away, growing thinner and paler as Kurogane watched. Swallowing the bile rising in his throat, he forced himself to keep looking until at last there was nothing but bones and hair and rotting cloth, and then nothing. That was a clue too, he thought, head ringing with some horrible emptiness. Without a word being spoken about it, he now knew for sure that Fai’s twin was dead. He wondered if Fai knew he’d figured it out. The mage wasn’t looking at him anymore, and it was impossible to tell.
“Inatt jagar vargar, inatt är varganatt,
Och barnet mitt det gråter…”
Kurogane lay down again. Fai wasn’t going to say more, he knew that, so he might as well try to get some sleep. But for a long while he lay awake, watching the shadows wandering over the ceiling as the candle slowly burned down, listening to the mage singing songs to a shadow that was no longer there.
***
Translation note: The "Valerian" here is really Swedish, because I'm lazy ^^ The words of the first song translate to "And if my heart does tremble, and my cheek is deathly pale / Then you know nothing of it, you are gone just like a wind, gone just like a wind". The second tranlates to "Tonight wolves hunt, tonight is a wolfnight / and this child of mine is crying".