Oh god please stop me xD
Story: Left with a feeling
Rating: G
Warning: Again, some angsting. And disgustingly adoracute kids. And the generic spoiler warning.
Summary: A year after his parents' death, Kurogane meets a strange boy in a dream
Note: ...I have a feeling I might be developing an obsession already ^^;;;
***
It's been a year now. Princess Tomoyo tells him he will heal, but it will be slow. Because it's her, he listens in silence and tries to believe it, even though he'd punch anyone else in the mouth if they tried to tell him something like that. But it's true that her presence calms him down, and during the days he can usually manage to find some kind of peace. During the nights, however, there is nothing to save him.
He's taken to lying awake for as long as he possibly can, staring fixedly at the ceiling and trying desperately to force his eyelids to stay open. Jerking awake over and over as he starts to drift off, a jolt of terror passing through his body each time, making his heart hammer wildly in his chest. For a short while the adrenaline helps him, but then his body grows heavy again, his thoughts turning sluggish, and before he knows it...
This dream, like the rest of them, forces him to relive all the things he wishes he could forget, and also some things that he doesn't remember during his waking hours. That time from taking up his father's sword until Tomoyo made him return to himself is just like the vague memory of a prolonged nightmare, a dark miasma of fear and fury, so maybe it makes sense, then, that he can recall it much more vividly in his dreams.
In a shadowy, slow-moving universe he is running towards his mother's crumbling frame, breathing liquid fire and fighting to get there in time even though it is already, inevitably, too late. Feeling like he's done so a hundred times before by now - like he will keep doing nothing else for the rest of his life - he falls to his knees next to her. She is heavy in his arms, her skin still unnaturally warm from the hectic fever which has been ravaging her body these last few days. But as he turns her over in his arms it isn't her face he sees, not her eyes looking up at him. He screams and lets go, scrambling away from the monstrous creature that isn't his mother, cannot be his mother. But it's her voice that cries out in pain as she hits the floor, her voice that pleads with him not to leave her as he presses his back against the wall and screams to drown her out.
And all of a sudden she's gone. It's all gone. Around him is quiet, blissful darkness. He moves, and feels something soft and cold shifting underneath him. Snow?
“You were having nightmares too, weren't you?”
Kurogane gets to his feet and twists around in one swift moment, but there's no threat here that he can see. There's just a small, fair-haired boy, slightly younger than him and wearing really strange clothes. He's sitting with his arms twined around his legs, watching him solemnly. He sort of looks like a girl, Kurogane thinks derisively, but at least he doesn't seem dangerous.
“I have a lot of nightmares too,” he continues, leaning his chin against his knees. “But sometimes, I can go here, and then it's not so bad for a while.”
“Where is this?” Kurogane asks, because he can't think of anything else to say.
“A safe place,” the boy replies simply, shrugging. “They can't get us here.” He looks up and smiles, and something about that smile worries Kurogane. It's too perfect, too simple, and he's learned by now that the world is neither. So when the boy pats the snow next to him in an open, friendly gesture, he sits down next to him a bit warily.
“I'm Kurogane,” he informs him. “Who're you? And what are you doing in my dream?”
“Fai D. Flourite,” comes the reply, and the boy's mood shifts, becomes more sombre, as if he was just reminded of something sad. “And I might as well ask what you're doing in my dream. I was here first, after all.”
Kurogane snorts, but says nothing. If that's the way this Fai person wants it. But he's pretty sure, since he's the one who actually knows what this place is, that Fai might be the one of the two of them who has an inkling why they're both here together.
“Will you tell me about it?” Fai asks softly after a moment of silence. Kurogane's head snaps up, and for a moment he fixes the other boy with a hostile stare. But nothing about Fai feels truly intrusive, and at this very moment, alone together in this cold, peaceful place, he somehow feels that it would be a relief to explain himself to this mild-mannered stranger.
Besides, it's just a dream.
“They killed my parents,” he says, in that flat tone of voice which has already become habit.
“Who?” Fai wonders, displaying nothing but honest curiosity and genuine sympathy.
“Monsters,” Kurogane replies, but then he hesitates, because that isn't really true, is it? The hand holding that sword hadn't belonged to any monster, had it? He frowns unhappily and wraps his arms around his own body, suddenly shivering even though the cold hadn't bothered him before. “But there... was something strange...” he mumbles, feeling strangely exposed. “I don't think there was only monsters.”
“Someone interfered,” Fai says softly, drawing a simple design in the snow and then quickly erasing it. From where Kurogane is sitting, it looked sort of like a feather.
“Why would you say that?” Kurogane demands, trying to keep his temper in check like his father tried to teach him, but suddenly as tense as a bowstring.
Fai looks up, watching him intently, and Kurogane suddenly notices how blue his eyes are. “Someone did the same thing to me, a long time ago. They interfered.”
“They killed someone important to you?” Kurogane guesses, and even though it's a pretty personal question, he isn't at all prepared for the reaction he gets. Fai flinches away as if the question has burned him, and as he turns his face away he lets his hair fall in front of his face, hiding his eyes from view.
“No,” he mumbles, slowly shaking his head. “That... isn't what happened at all.” He draws a long, shaky sigh, and then turns his face and smiles at Kurogane as if nothing had happened. “I don't think we'll remember this, you know.”
The older of the two frowns. “What's that supposed to mean?”
“It means I think this is real, somehow.” The boy shrugs. “Anyone with a bit of magical training would suspect the same. But I don't think we'll be allowed to remember.” He sighs, looking so deeply sorrowful that just for a moment, Kurogane almost wishes he could stay there in the dream with him. There's something lacking, something half about Fai that makes it seem like a cruelty to leave him alone. “That would be too easy, I suspect.”
“Too easy to do what?”
“Ah, if I told you that, I'd be making it too easy on you.” He laughs lightly, his sadness disappearing underneath unexpected brightness. With swiftness that surprises Kurogane, Fai is suddenly on his feet, staring up at the sky. “I'm afraid it's starting again,” he notes, his voice frail but full of a strange kind of acceptance. Kurogane is just about to ask what he means, and what exactly it is he's not telling him, when something heavy lands on the ground right next to him. Only seconds later, the same thing happens just a bit further away, and Kurogane stares in horror.
Corpses are falling from the sky.
“You're not supposed to be here any longer,” Fai says, turning to smile sadly at him. “This is my nightmare.” He bends forward, placing his ice-cold hands on Kurogane's cheeks and tilting his face up. His lips are just as cold as they brush over his forehead, feeling colder still when they touch both his cheeks, which are blazing by now. “Goodbye Kurogane. I'll keep an eye out for you.”
The last thing he can remember before he wakes up is the distant sound of a child crying, loud and inconsolable, and Fai turning toward the sound. For a moment, the look on his face reminds him of something...
He looks down, finding Ginryū in his hand. At his feet, his mother is cold and still. His father's blood is still drying on the hilt.
And then the dream ends.
~*~*~*~
“It's a pity you can't remember,” Tomoyo says, studying his face carefully. “I have a feeling it might be important.” She blows gently on her tea, thinking. “Then again, things like this are never as simple as they first appear. Maybe it's not important that you remember it now. Or maybe,” she looks up, tilting her head with a smile, “what's important isn't what happened in the dream.”
“What do you mean, princess?” Kurogane asks respectfully, keeping his eyes cast down but watching her every move nonetheless.
“Maybe what your dream was supposed to leave you wasn't information,” she says, her voice warm but dreaming, distant. “Maybe it was just... a feeling.” She suddenly reaches out and touches first his forehead, then his left cheek, and then his right. For some reason, he feels his skin burn where she touched him, and he glares down into his lap, embarrassed, although he really can't say why. Tomoyo laughs softly. “Such things have changed the world before,” she remarks, and that is the last thing she says on the subject. But Kurogane often thinks about her words after that, and wonders.