It was a strange thing, still half-undiscovered, to be happy, and not one that came without considerable cost: they pushed every day against the thousand small hardships of a hundred wide worlds and won in exchange only a small respite.
There were days when Syaoran woke in tears, astonished and ashamed, and could say only, ‘I saw them -’ before shaking his head and scrubbing furiously at his eyes. There were unprovoked and awful days when Fai could not speak at all, and had to spend hours curled into himself at the foot of a bed, arms locked around his head, lips moving soundlessly as he counted himself back to safety. These things could not be undone, but in turn they could not undo the better days: the days when Syaoran bought a little wooden comb inlaid with pink mother-of-pearl flowers and stowed it away in his pack in eager anticipation of a reunion, the days when Fai looked out at a snowfield and sang strange lullabies to himself with half a soft smile on his lips. These things outweighed all else, at least in Kurogane’s eyes.
- there were days, certainly, when the heavy mass of scar tissue at Kurogane’s shoulder pricked sharp as needles in the early cold: when the arm spat sparks and stuck still for a few heart-stopping minutes, when the weight of it tugged aching at his spine. He had chosen that smaller pain deliberate and full willing, and refused outright to regret it. He had thought that Fai had understood that. Angry more at himself than anything else, Kurogane kept his sleeves long and pinched out the candle before taking Fai into his arms at night. They pushed and pushed in silence against unhappiness. He believed more devoutly than he had ever believed anything else in his life that it was worth their while.
One night, as they slept on warm grass under the sight of the stars, Kurogane woke very suddenly and with dread to the touch of cold fingertips tracing the scars on his back. The motion was careful and deliberate and not at all tender, not at all fond. As a child, Kurogane had been instructed to sit with a stick and a tray of wet sand and trace the same ugly, meaningless shapes over and over again until they began to be reinforced by some degree of sense: so that he could pull from out the mess of harsh lines the shape for moon, for tree, for woman, for father, for sky. In this way, he had learned to write without wasting ink. He recognised that same rote drudgery in Fai’s fingertips, and wondered if Fai had taken it upon himself to build from his scars a bloody alphabet, to read from them in penance old miseries and past hurts. It was the sort of thing, he thought, with mounting frustration, that Fai would do. He gave a long, exaggerated yawn, and Fai flinched away in the dark, held very still. Suddenly blazingly angry, Kurogane made a great show of rolling over in the grass and stretching: rubbed at his eyes, pulled the thin cotton sheets resolutely up to his chin. Fai sat beside him still as stone. It took Kurogane a very long time to fall asleep again, and in all that time, Fai did not lie down.
A scar, to Kurogane’s mind, was a scar: they meant mending, if anything, and stood for nothing more than fact. When he looked down at the long white lines at his wrists, the product of desperation and cold steel, he remembered only that he had survived, and Fai with him: but Fai put his palms to those same wrists in the pale light of dawn as though desperate to cover them up, kissed Kurogane so miserably hard that they both of them tasted blood.
IV
The battle had been a good deal more vicious than anyone had anticipated, and although they had won, it was not without cost. Syaoran himself was unhurt, but the king of the little city, an old woman who had led them into battle, had lost a good deal of blood, and Fai had taken it upon himself to carry her back to her home, and to stay with her while her hurts were dressed. Bonfires had been lit in the shadow of the ruined village, the better to keep out the spirits of the dead, and were burning low in the chill before dawn. Pack open, bottle of Piffle Princess simskin heating at the fireside, Kurogane sat alone on a boulder beside the breathing coals, staring stubbornly out into the dark at the boundary-ring of witch-hazels, just in case anything else came through. There were no stars in this world: white moths moved silently over the grass.
Some secondary awareness he still couldn’t name stirred, and he turned to see Fai limping towards him, firelight flickering gold in his hair. He gave Kurogane a small smile: went soft to him where he sat and put his arms around his neck, pressed his lips to the top of Kurogane’s hair.
‘She’ll be alright,’ he said. ‘I think everyone will be. It wasn’t so bad after all.’
‘Told you,’ Kurogane said, careful to keep his arm pressed to his side. ‘Nothing we couldn’t handle.’ Carefully, he began to pull away, making to kick the bottle of simskin behind a boulder.
But Fai had already smelt the blood, and with one flinching motion had pushed the cloak away from Kurogane’s shoulder. His lips curled back when he saw the damage, and his fingers hovered as though afraid to touch. The claws had taken skin from the arm, so that the metal beneath flashed in the firelight and wrote gold all down Kurogane’s flesh, but the worst of it was the strain that had been done to the shoulder: several of the binding filaments had been wrenched loose from the mass of old scar tissue and were dripping an unpleasant mixture of blood and hydraulic fluid.
Kurogane jerked back, hot with shame and frustration, and dropped his eyes. ‘Look, if it bothers you, you don't have to -’
‘Of course it bothers me,’ Fai said, his voice harsh and brittle, his mouth all twisted.
Kurogane stared up at him, aghast. ‘I don't want it to,’ he snapped.
‘Well, it does,’ Fai snapped back, and suddenly they were one wrong word short of the petulant sort of squabble that could last for days. For a moment they glared at each other, full of resentment and uncertain how to proceed: but then Fai took a deep breath, seeming to rally himself, and continued, ‘But that's for me to deal with. I don't want you to feel like - I don't want you to hide from me.’
‘That’s not how you’ve been acting,’ Kurogane said, ashamed of his own shame and angry because of it: and then, ‘I notice, OK? Don’t think I don’t. And I think you’re making a big deal out of nothing, but if you’re not comfortable, then -’
‘Then I need to learn to handle it,’ Fai said, resolutely, and pressed his lips tight together.
It was not what he would have said a year ago. He was trying, Kurogane saw: trying to remember that he was worth a little blood. Kurogane supposed that if Fai could try to understand that, then he could understand that a world’s worth of innocent blood had been spilled on Fai’s account, once, and that that left scars of a very different kind. They worked at it. They filled what cracks in each other they could. It was worth their while.
‘Where’s the, ah, the -’ Fai said, turning away, ‘the -’
Kurogane watched him a long moment, his heart aching a little, before saying, ‘By the fire.’
And so Fai knelt and took the little crystal vial into his palm, shook it to check that it was properly melted: unscrewed the cap, which extended into a small applicator, and took Kurogane’s arm into his hand. Working very carefully, he dabbed generous helpings of the stuff onto each long rent in Kurogane’s false flesh and carefully smoothed them close. The liquid simskin glistened gold as it dried, so that for a little while, the wounds seemed almost beautiful in the dark.
‘A pity Tomoyo-chan hasn’t invented something like this for real skin yet,’ Fai said when he had done, offering Kurogane a bit of a smile as he carefully screwed the bottle closed and stowed it away in Kurogane’s pack. He touched the binding filaments at Kurogane shoulder and straightened them out as Tomoyo had taught him, watched determinedly as they burrowed their way back into the flesh.
‘Give her time,’ Kurogane muttered, wincing a bit, then reaching up to massage the bruised flesh. It would hold, he supposed, and he would make do. ‘That girl can invent anything.’
Fai busied himself with their packs, stripping off his own battle-torn cloak and folding it up neatly, finding a stick with which to stoke up the fire: came, after a time, to sit on the grass just beside the boulder. He leaned back, drawing his knees up to his chest, and put his head on Kurogane’s knee with a long sigh: said nothing, only closed his eyes. Kurogane let fall the weight of his steel hand, twined its fingers gently with Fai’s hair, carded through the mass of gold threads slow enough to match his heartbeat.
‘It happened,’ he said, quietly, when Fai’s head had already begun to nod in the early stages of sleep. ‘All of this, all of - these - they happened. And it’s not a good thing that they happened, 'cause they hurt like hell at the time. I won't lie about that, not to you. But it’s not a bad thing, either, ’cause you’re here. I look at the scars and I think, he’s still here. So then it’s not so bad.’
The fire cracked as the morning wind began to creep in through the witch-hazels. There was no other sound in all the world. Just as Kurogane was beginning to think that Fai really had fallen asleep, there came a murmur: ‘Do they still hurt?’
‘Sometimes,’ Kurogane admitted. He swallowed, remembering the first time he had held Fai’s head in his hands: said, ‘When it rains.’
Fai nodded in his lap. ‘I suppose,’ he whispered, yawning, ‘if Kuro-sama can survive all that, he can survive pretty much anything.’
‘Course I can,’ Kurogane scoffed, offended. ‘So you don’t need to worry.’
A bird sang, very suddenly, from the heart of the witch-hazels, and the wind kicked up the coals and sent sparks spiraling out into the dark. When next alone, a world away, Fai would put his fingers to the edges of each scar in turn as he kissed Kurogane into breathlessness. He would not seek to rewrite them, which would have done them a great disservice, only to illuminate them, filling up each rough hollow with the understanding of its value, and with the knowledge that not all broken things are unlovely.
That was still to come. Kurogane grumbled and rearranged himself in the grass, back to the boulder, and Fai and curled up into him, yawning loudly. They slept well into the dawn.
Re: Kintsugi, 2/2
iii
It was a strange thing, still half-undiscovered, to be happy, and not one that came without considerable cost: they pushed every day against the thousand small hardships of a hundred wide worlds and won in exchange only a small respite.
There were days when Syaoran woke in tears, astonished and ashamed, and could say only, ‘I saw them -’ before shaking his head and scrubbing furiously at his eyes. There were unprovoked and awful days when Fai could not speak at all, and had to spend hours curled into himself at the foot of a bed, arms locked around his head, lips moving soundlessly as he counted himself back to safety. These things could not be undone, but in turn they could not undo the better days: the days when Syaoran bought a little wooden comb inlaid with pink mother-of-pearl flowers and stowed it away in his pack in eager anticipation of a reunion, the days when Fai looked out at a snowfield and sang strange lullabies to himself with half a soft smile on his lips. These things outweighed all else, at least in Kurogane’s eyes.
- there were days, certainly, when the heavy mass of scar tissue at Kurogane’s shoulder pricked sharp as needles in the early cold: when the arm spat sparks and stuck still for a few heart-stopping minutes, when the weight of it tugged aching at his spine. He had chosen that smaller pain deliberate and full willing, and refused outright to regret it. He had thought that Fai had understood that. Angry more at himself than anything else, Kurogane kept his sleeves long and pinched out the candle before taking Fai into his arms at night. They pushed and pushed in silence against unhappiness. He believed more devoutly than he had ever believed anything else in his life that it was worth their while.
One night, as they slept on warm grass under the sight of the stars, Kurogane woke very suddenly and with dread to the touch of cold fingertips tracing the scars on his back. The motion was careful and deliberate and not at all tender, not at all fond. As a child, Kurogane had been instructed to sit with a stick and a tray of wet sand and trace the same ugly, meaningless shapes over and over again until they began to be reinforced by some degree of sense: so that he could pull from out the mess of harsh lines the shape for moon, for tree, for woman, for father, for sky. In this way, he had learned to write without wasting ink. He recognised that same rote drudgery in Fai’s fingertips, and wondered if Fai had taken it upon himself to build from his scars a bloody alphabet, to read from them in penance old miseries and past hurts. It was the sort of thing, he thought, with mounting frustration, that Fai would do.
He gave a long, exaggerated yawn, and Fai flinched away in the dark, held very still. Suddenly blazingly angry, Kurogane made a great show of rolling over in the grass and stretching: rubbed at his eyes, pulled the thin cotton sheets resolutely up to his chin. Fai sat beside him still as stone. It took Kurogane a very long time to fall asleep again, and in all that time, Fai did not lie down.
A scar, to Kurogane’s mind, was a scar: they meant mending, if anything, and stood for nothing more than fact. When he looked down at the long white lines at his wrists, the product of desperation and cold steel, he remembered only that he had survived, and Fai with him: but Fai put his palms to those same wrists in the pale light of dawn as though desperate to cover them up, kissed Kurogane so miserably hard that they both of them tasted blood.
IV
The battle had been a good deal more vicious than anyone had anticipated, and although they had won, it was not without cost. Syaoran himself was unhurt, but the king of the little city, an old woman who had led them into battle, had lost a good deal of blood, and Fai had taken it upon himself to carry her back to her home, and to stay with her while her hurts were dressed. Bonfires had been lit in the shadow of the ruined village, the better to keep out the spirits of the dead, and were burning low in the chill before dawn. Pack open, bottle of Piffle Princess simskin heating at the fireside, Kurogane sat alone on a boulder beside the breathing coals, staring stubbornly out into the dark at the boundary-ring of witch-hazels, just in case anything else came through. There were no stars in this world: white moths moved silently over the grass.
Some secondary awareness he still couldn’t name stirred, and he turned to see Fai limping towards him, firelight flickering gold in his hair. He gave Kurogane a small smile: went soft to him where he sat and put his arms around his neck, pressed his lips to the top of Kurogane’s hair.
‘She’ll be alright,’ he said. ‘I think everyone will be. It wasn’t so bad after all.’
‘Told you,’ Kurogane said, careful to keep his arm pressed to his side. ‘Nothing we couldn’t handle.’ Carefully, he began to pull away, making to kick the bottle of simskin behind a boulder.
But Fai had already smelt the blood, and with one flinching motion had pushed the cloak away from Kurogane’s shoulder. His lips curled back when he saw the damage, and his fingers hovered as though afraid to touch. The claws had taken skin from the arm, so that the metal beneath flashed in the firelight and wrote gold all down Kurogane’s flesh, but the worst of it was the strain that had been done to the shoulder: several of the binding filaments had been wrenched loose from the mass of old scar tissue and were dripping an unpleasant mixture of blood and hydraulic fluid.
Kurogane jerked back, hot with shame and frustration, and dropped his eyes. ‘Look, if it bothers you, you don't have to -’
‘Of course it bothers me,’ Fai said, his voice harsh and brittle, his mouth all twisted.
Kurogane stared up at him, aghast. ‘I don't want it to,’ he snapped.
‘Well, it does,’ Fai snapped back, and suddenly they were one wrong word short of the petulant sort of squabble that could last for days. For a moment they glared at each other, full of resentment and uncertain how to proceed: but then Fai took a deep breath, seeming to rally himself, and continued, ‘But that's for me to deal with. I don't want you to feel like - I don't want you to hide from me.’
‘That’s not how you’ve been acting,’ Kurogane said, ashamed of his own shame and angry because of it: and then, ‘I notice, OK? Don’t think I don’t. And I think you’re making a big deal out of nothing, but if you’re not comfortable, then -’
‘Then I need to learn to handle it,’ Fai said, resolutely, and pressed his lips tight together.
It was not what he would have said a year ago. He was trying, Kurogane saw: trying to remember that he was worth a little blood. Kurogane supposed that if Fai could try to understand that, then he could understand that a world’s worth of innocent blood had been spilled on Fai’s account, once, and that that left scars of a very different kind. They worked at it. They filled what cracks in each other they could. It was worth their while.
‘Where’s the, ah, the -’ Fai said, turning away, ‘the -’
Kurogane watched him a long moment, his heart aching a little, before saying, ‘By the fire.’
And so Fai knelt and took the little crystal vial into his palm, shook it to check that it was properly melted: unscrewed the cap, which extended into a small applicator, and took Kurogane’s arm into his hand. Working very carefully, he dabbed generous helpings of the stuff onto each long rent in Kurogane’s false flesh and carefully smoothed them close. The liquid simskin glistened gold as it dried, so that for a little while, the wounds seemed almost beautiful in the dark.
‘A pity Tomoyo-chan hasn’t invented something like this for real skin yet,’ Fai said when he had done, offering Kurogane a bit of a smile as he carefully screwed the bottle closed and stowed it away in Kurogane’s pack. He touched the binding filaments at Kurogane shoulder and straightened them out as Tomoyo had taught him, watched determinedly as they burrowed their way back into the flesh.
‘Give her time,’ Kurogane muttered, wincing a bit, then reaching up to massage the bruised flesh. It would hold, he supposed, and he would make do. ‘That girl can invent anything.’
Fai busied himself with their packs, stripping off his own battle-torn cloak and folding it up neatly, finding a stick with which to stoke up the fire: came, after a time, to sit on the grass just beside the boulder. He leaned back, drawing his knees up to his chest, and put his head on Kurogane’s knee with a long sigh: said nothing, only closed his eyes. Kurogane let fall the weight of his steel hand, twined its fingers gently with Fai’s hair, carded through the mass of gold threads slow enough to match his heartbeat.
‘It happened,’ he said, quietly, when Fai’s head had already begun to nod in the early stages of sleep. ‘All of this, all of - these - they happened. And it’s not a good thing that they happened, 'cause they hurt like hell at the time. I won't lie about that, not to you. But it’s not a bad thing, either, ’cause you’re here. I look at the scars and I think, he’s still here. So then it’s not so bad.’
The fire cracked as the morning wind began to creep in through the witch-hazels. There was no other sound in all the world. Just as Kurogane was beginning to think that Fai really had fallen asleep, there came a murmur: ‘Do they still hurt?’
‘Sometimes,’ Kurogane admitted. He swallowed, remembering the first time he had held Fai’s head in his hands: said, ‘When it rains.’
Fai nodded in his lap. ‘I suppose,’ he whispered, yawning, ‘if Kuro-sama can survive all that, he can survive pretty much anything.’
‘Course I can,’ Kurogane scoffed, offended. ‘So you don’t need to worry.’
A bird sang, very suddenly, from the heart of the witch-hazels, and the wind kicked up the coals and sent sparks spiraling out into the dark. When next alone, a world away, Fai would put his fingers to the edges of each scar in turn as he kissed Kurogane into breathlessness. He would not seek to rewrite them, which would have done them a great disservice, only to illuminate them, filling up each rough hollow with the understanding of its value, and with the knowledge that not all broken things are unlovely.
That was still to come. Kurogane grumbled and rearranged himself in the grass, back to the boulder, and Fai and curled up into him, yawning loudly. They slept well into the dawn.