Pain on pain on play repeating
TODAY: REMIX.
OR DIE.
... but first more genderswap, just cos.
All I want, only one, street-level miracle
I could be your girl (but would you love me if I ruled the world)
1,678 words. Fai being emo. THE USUAL.
She didn't know what exactly it was that drove her to ask the witch for a way to keep Fai alive, but she thought it might be anger. She was tired and wounded and bleeding herself, but fury had sustained her through worse situations and it served her in this one; she fisted her hand in the front of his shirt and shook him savagely, barely aware of the startled movements of the other people in her peripheral vision, her concentration honed in on him, pale and weak and on his last legs and he was a fucking coward and she hated cowards but he could be more if he had time, so she let him go and turned to the pork bun, and she made her wish.
Distantly, as she drew the knife across her wrist and watched Kamui claw a matching line across his own, she heard her father's voice at the back of her mind: strength is necessary to protect. Was this, too, a kind of strength? She didn't know. She just knew it was Fai, who flirted and didn't mean it, who didn't act like she was incapable because she had fucking tits, who lied and was so sad underneath, and she wanted to see what could be.
What he could be was an idiot, but she should have known that underneath that smiling exterior was someone afraid and hurt and who would know how to lash out. Kurogane-san, he called her, chillingly polite, and she wanted to punch the fake smile off his face and do other things, things she didn't even know; so she tossed the blanket at his head, and she walked out, because it was all she could do.
Things continued in that manner in Infinity. She liked the chess game; it gave her a good outlet for her frustration, fighting every day against fresh foes, and he had her back for all he rarely spoke to her and never called her by her nicknames. She hadn't thought she'd miss the stupid things, Kuro-chan and Kuro-rin and Kuro-bra and Kuro-daddy and whatever else passed through his ridiculous head, but she did. She really did.
The vampirism was an interesting addition to their dynamic, and not in a good way. She didn't regret doing it, and she'd do it all over again if she had to, despite the tense, broken gap between them, his sullen and petulant silence, but the feedings forced a level of intimacy between them she wasn't sure she was fully comfortable with. Especially not the way her heart skipped a beat when he pressed his soft lips against her skin, or the way he met her eyes afterwards, licking blood delicately from his fingertips with a wet red tongue and a golden vampiric eye that said he had heard the change in rhythm, only to immediately and cruelly bid her, "Good night, Kurogane-san."
And that was before she started her monthly bleeding, when he walked around golden-eyed all the time and the princess kept asking him innocently if he was hungry. She could have done without that.
She tried to keep herself busy with other matters. The tension between the princess and the new copy of the kid, for instance, or training him; the kid said he had witnessed all her lessons through the eyes of his clone (her student, through the eye he had replaced with her Fai's) but she made him drill with her to test. He was fast but not as strong as the other one, which made sense; he'd been in a jar for years, by his own admission, and though he knew the techniques he didn't quite have his... clone... predecessor's muscle mass.
When they weren't fighting in the chess games she took him out to the city park and made him duel her until he was so tired he could barely hold the sword, and then she bought him home - carried, in one case - and put him to bed, trying her best to keep him from breaking his heart over the Princess. She didn't think it was working, which was about right. It felt like the group was falling apart, the easy camaraderie she had never known she liked faded, and she missed it as much as she missed chirping calls of Kuro-knockers~!
One night she split a bottle of sake pretty diplomatically between the three of them, her student, the pork bun and herself; she had taken to stealing and hiding every bottle of alcohol the mage brought into the hotel room, and it seemed like a good time to get rid of it. He fell asleep against her side quickly, just like his copy, and she leaned over to the far end of the couch for a blanket left lying there to drape it over him. Mokona hopped into her lap, then onto her shoulder, and she didn't bat it away.
"Kuro-daddy," it said anxiously, "Will things be okay again?"
Kurogane bit back the urge to ask how the hell she should know, and shrugged as she tucked the ends of the blanket around Syaoran's shoulders. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. Get some sleep, pork bun."
"But Sakura is so sad," Mokona said, sounding close to tears itself, "And Fai..."
"Yeah, well," she said. She reached up and seized the walking poached egg by the ears, and then, with a glance at the kid to make sure he was asleep and thus unable to bear witness, tucked it into her tank-top, just over her heart. Mokona made a small noise, but quickly burrowed in, and Kurogane let her head thud against the back of the couch and wondered when the group had become like this.
The door to the princess' room clicked open then, and she turned her head sharply to see Fai emerge into the main room. In full black he looked more wan than usual, but Kurogane narrowed her eyes at him thoughtfully; he had fed yesterday and usually needed at most one feed every three days, but the bones of his face looked a little sharper... yes, she decided, as he raked his blue eye over her impassively, focusing on Mokona for just a second, better safe than sorry. His lip twitched like he wanted to comment, but instead he turned toward the room they shared.
"Hey," she said. "You need to feed."
He paused. "I drank yesterday, Kurogane-san," he said.
"And you'll drink again today," she said in a tone that brooked no argument, and carefully wriggled out from underneath Syaoran. Fai didn't move, although his upper lip curled slightly as she fished the pork bun out of her cleavage and tucked it into Syaoran's armpit. That wasn't a good sign; it meant he was saving most of his viciousness for behind closed doors. She scooped up her sword belt as she walked past the armchair she had left it on, Souhi's hilt shining on one side, the dagger she used to bleed herself with on the other, and swept past him to their shared room; he followed without a word.
He said nothing as she cut a small wound in her wrist, although his eye changed so fast she missed the transition; one moment it was cold and blue and icy, the next golden and warm and fixed on the shining red of her blood, beading to the surface. She held her wrist out for him and he took it, bending his head, and she felt her cheeks heat up as his tongue slid out to rasp softly against her skin.
Stupid, she told herself. It's just feeding, and he hates you.
She wished she could hate him, too, for his coldness and his cowardice and his stupidity. It would make things easier. It was surprising how sensitive her wrist was turning out to be; or maybe it was his tongue, wet and warm and slightly rough, like a cat's...
He reared back, daubing lightly at her wrist with the tips of his fingers and then turning his palm over critically to examine the red smeared over them, and then raising them to his mouth to suck on. She swallowed and narrowed her eyes, letting her wrist fall limply to her side, and the awkward tension that always followed feeding filled the air, when both of them simply did not know what to say.
"Enough?" she asked curtly, and inwardly sighed at herself deeply. Of course it was enough.
He looked amused, the bastard, but it wasn't any kind of amusement that extended as far as his eyes. "Yes."
"Good," she said, and could almost hear the awkwardness creep back into the room, if it had ever left at all. She gritted her teeth and turned away from him, picking up the rag she'd left on her night stand and sitting heavily on top of her bed to clean her blood off her dagger; he stayed standing, watching her thoughtfully.
Normally he went right to bed after a feeding; she didn't even know whether or not he really slept. He always lay there stiff as a board, facing away from her. She hoped he did; it made her a little uncomfortable to think of him stuck awake in the room with her. This time, though, he stayed standing, long enough that she grew irritated pretending to polish the dagger long past the point where any trace amounts of blood might remain and said instead, "What?"
He tilted his head to one side, his one eye as unreadable as his face. "What you're feeling," he said. "The thing that makes your heart beat like that. It's called arousal, and it is highly distracting. I'm going out, and I suggest you deal with it while I'm gone."
"What?" she said, feeling like she had missed a vital part of the conversation, and he paused with one hand on the door handle and looked over his shoulder at her, his eye narrowed. "What?"
"You smell needy, Kurogane-san," he told her, with vicious passive aggression riding high in his voice. "It's not good on you."
He closed the door quietly after him, and after a few seconds she threw her dagger at it hard enough the blade wedged in the thick wood. She didn't want to wake the kids by screaming in frustration, after all.
ok now remix. \o/
OR DIE.
... but first more genderswap, just cos.
All I want, only one, street-level miracle
I could be your girl (but would you love me if I ruled the world)
1,678 words. Fai being emo. THE USUAL.
She didn't know what exactly it was that drove her to ask the witch for a way to keep Fai alive, but she thought it might be anger. She was tired and wounded and bleeding herself, but fury had sustained her through worse situations and it served her in this one; she fisted her hand in the front of his shirt and shook him savagely, barely aware of the startled movements of the other people in her peripheral vision, her concentration honed in on him, pale and weak and on his last legs and he was a fucking coward and she hated cowards but he could be more if he had time, so she let him go and turned to the pork bun, and she made her wish.
Distantly, as she drew the knife across her wrist and watched Kamui claw a matching line across his own, she heard her father's voice at the back of her mind: strength is necessary to protect. Was this, too, a kind of strength? She didn't know. She just knew it was Fai, who flirted and didn't mean it, who didn't act like she was incapable because she had fucking tits, who lied and was so sad underneath, and she wanted to see what could be.
What he could be was an idiot, but she should have known that underneath that smiling exterior was someone afraid and hurt and who would know how to lash out. Kurogane-san, he called her, chillingly polite, and she wanted to punch the fake smile off his face and do other things, things she didn't even know; so she tossed the blanket at his head, and she walked out, because it was all she could do.
Things continued in that manner in Infinity. She liked the chess game; it gave her a good outlet for her frustration, fighting every day against fresh foes, and he had her back for all he rarely spoke to her and never called her by her nicknames. She hadn't thought she'd miss the stupid things, Kuro-chan and Kuro-rin and Kuro-bra and Kuro-daddy and whatever else passed through his ridiculous head, but she did. She really did.
The vampirism was an interesting addition to their dynamic, and not in a good way. She didn't regret doing it, and she'd do it all over again if she had to, despite the tense, broken gap between them, his sullen and petulant silence, but the feedings forced a level of intimacy between them she wasn't sure she was fully comfortable with. Especially not the way her heart skipped a beat when he pressed his soft lips against her skin, or the way he met her eyes afterwards, licking blood delicately from his fingertips with a wet red tongue and a golden vampiric eye that said he had heard the change in rhythm, only to immediately and cruelly bid her, "Good night, Kurogane-san."
And that was before she started her monthly bleeding, when he walked around golden-eyed all the time and the princess kept asking him innocently if he was hungry. She could have done without that.
She tried to keep herself busy with other matters. The tension between the princess and the new copy of the kid, for instance, or training him; the kid said he had witnessed all her lessons through the eyes of his clone (her student, through the eye he had replaced with her Fai's) but she made him drill with her to test. He was fast but not as strong as the other one, which made sense; he'd been in a jar for years, by his own admission, and though he knew the techniques he didn't quite have his... clone... predecessor's muscle mass.
When they weren't fighting in the chess games she took him out to the city park and made him duel her until he was so tired he could barely hold the sword, and then she bought him home - carried, in one case - and put him to bed, trying her best to keep him from breaking his heart over the Princess. She didn't think it was working, which was about right. It felt like the group was falling apart, the easy camaraderie she had never known she liked faded, and she missed it as much as she missed chirping calls of Kuro-knockers~!
One night she split a bottle of sake pretty diplomatically between the three of them, her student, the pork bun and herself; she had taken to stealing and hiding every bottle of alcohol the mage brought into the hotel room, and it seemed like a good time to get rid of it. He fell asleep against her side quickly, just like his copy, and she leaned over to the far end of the couch for a blanket left lying there to drape it over him. Mokona hopped into her lap, then onto her shoulder, and she didn't bat it away.
"Kuro-daddy," it said anxiously, "Will things be okay again?"
Kurogane bit back the urge to ask how the hell she should know, and shrugged as she tucked the ends of the blanket around Syaoran's shoulders. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. Get some sleep, pork bun."
"But Sakura is so sad," Mokona said, sounding close to tears itself, "And Fai..."
"Yeah, well," she said. She reached up and seized the walking poached egg by the ears, and then, with a glance at the kid to make sure he was asleep and thus unable to bear witness, tucked it into her tank-top, just over her heart. Mokona made a small noise, but quickly burrowed in, and Kurogane let her head thud against the back of the couch and wondered when the group had become like this.
The door to the princess' room clicked open then, and she turned her head sharply to see Fai emerge into the main room. In full black he looked more wan than usual, but Kurogane narrowed her eyes at him thoughtfully; he had fed yesterday and usually needed at most one feed every three days, but the bones of his face looked a little sharper... yes, she decided, as he raked his blue eye over her impassively, focusing on Mokona for just a second, better safe than sorry. His lip twitched like he wanted to comment, but instead he turned toward the room they shared.
"Hey," she said. "You need to feed."
He paused. "I drank yesterday, Kurogane-san," he said.
"And you'll drink again today," she said in a tone that brooked no argument, and carefully wriggled out from underneath Syaoran. Fai didn't move, although his upper lip curled slightly as she fished the pork bun out of her cleavage and tucked it into Syaoran's armpit. That wasn't a good sign; it meant he was saving most of his viciousness for behind closed doors. She scooped up her sword belt as she walked past the armchair she had left it on, Souhi's hilt shining on one side, the dagger she used to bleed herself with on the other, and swept past him to their shared room; he followed without a word.
He said nothing as she cut a small wound in her wrist, although his eye changed so fast she missed the transition; one moment it was cold and blue and icy, the next golden and warm and fixed on the shining red of her blood, beading to the surface. She held her wrist out for him and he took it, bending his head, and she felt her cheeks heat up as his tongue slid out to rasp softly against her skin.
Stupid, she told herself. It's just feeding, and he hates you.
She wished she could hate him, too, for his coldness and his cowardice and his stupidity. It would make things easier. It was surprising how sensitive her wrist was turning out to be; or maybe it was his tongue, wet and warm and slightly rough, like a cat's...
He reared back, daubing lightly at her wrist with the tips of his fingers and then turning his palm over critically to examine the red smeared over them, and then raising them to his mouth to suck on. She swallowed and narrowed her eyes, letting her wrist fall limply to her side, and the awkward tension that always followed feeding filled the air, when both of them simply did not know what to say.
"Enough?" she asked curtly, and inwardly sighed at herself deeply. Of course it was enough.
He looked amused, the bastard, but it wasn't any kind of amusement that extended as far as his eyes. "Yes."
"Good," she said, and could almost hear the awkwardness creep back into the room, if it had ever left at all. She gritted her teeth and turned away from him, picking up the rag she'd left on her night stand and sitting heavily on top of her bed to clean her blood off her dagger; he stayed standing, watching her thoughtfully.
Normally he went right to bed after a feeding; she didn't even know whether or not he really slept. He always lay there stiff as a board, facing away from her. She hoped he did; it made her a little uncomfortable to think of him stuck awake in the room with her. This time, though, he stayed standing, long enough that she grew irritated pretending to polish the dagger long past the point where any trace amounts of blood might remain and said instead, "What?"
He tilted his head to one side, his one eye as unreadable as his face. "What you're feeling," he said. "The thing that makes your heart beat like that. It's called arousal, and it is highly distracting. I'm going out, and I suggest you deal with it while I'm gone."
"What?" she said, feeling like she had missed a vital part of the conversation, and he paused with one hand on the door handle and looked over his shoulder at her, his eye narrowed. "What?"
"You smell needy, Kurogane-san," he told her, with vicious passive aggression riding high in his voice. "It's not good on you."
He closed the door quietly after him, and after a few seconds she threw her dagger at it hard enough the blade wedged in the thick wood. She didn't want to wake the kids by screaming in frustration, after all.
ok now remix. \o/