I do not understand this man, who skips while I walk, and who ambles when he should flee.
He jokes when the skies are grey, and yet when the sun is at its sweetest, he merely hangs his head and closes his face.
He is like nothing in my world. His eyes are like the bluest depths of the ocean, and his hair is like wheat, waving in the wind. In his fingers, I am told, flickers the crackling energy of lightning magic.
I do not understand his words. Without an intermediary, I have no hope of comprehending a single syllable uttered from those cherry-blossom lips. And yet he speaks on, in that tongue which sounds like the chirruping of birds, as he hangs his fine, borrowed cloak, and sits beside me on the high bed to unstrap his boots. I growl my response; he knows perfectly well that I can't decipher his meaning, and he is talking at me just to get on my nerves. He hears my irritation, and laughs; a high-pitched, feminine ringing. I do not know what any commanding officer would make of a man like this. He should be ashamed of his obvious failings as a warrior, and yet he seems to have no idea of how naive and girlish a language his body speaks. It troubled me less, I suppose, when I found meaning in his words; deprived of speech I look for other paths to communication, and find only this travesty of a creature; a fighter who wears white, who takes sake with the womenfolk, who crosses his legs one over another when fiddling with a difficult buckle.
Who constantly attempts to whistle, when it's plain that his lips won't make the right shape.
Inadvertently, I tut my irritation, and he pauses in his fumblings to smile at me, and laugh again.
Impossible creature.
I don't know how to tell him how infuriating this little tic of his has become. I say his name, and as soon as he looks up again, I point at my lips, and whistle a low note. I grimace, and make an erasing motion with my arms, rolling my eyes for emphasis. He chuckles, and tries again, perhaps catching my meaning and wishing to aggravate me, or perhaps, less likely, mistaking my frustration for encouragement.
Pweet. Pweet. Pweet.
I turn my back, and kick off my thick socks. Strange things they are, seemingly padded to prevent the heavy riding boots from chafing. I rather like them in fact, but it wouldn't do to show undue care over these things, not as I'm trying subtly to point out to my de facto companion the effeminacy of his over-careful way with possessions. That seems to trigger something. Fai tuts himself now – is that a parody of my own reaction? Do I really sound like an angry hen? Or am I become paranoid, imagining his response to be more nuanced than it actually is? I look up from my seat on the bed, and his eyes twinkle knowingly at me, as he picks up the thick woollen socks, and with some strange deft twist of his hands, rolls them into a manjuu, and starts to toss them from hand to hand as he walks back to his side of our shared, enormous bed.
Thank the fates for that generosity of our hosts, I think, as he removes his breeches. It isn't that I think there to be necessarily anything untoward about sharing a bed with another man – what old campaigner would? The heat of the bodies of other men has gained notoriety as the saving of many an exhausted warrior pushed to his last, on forbidding and hostile border territories where the icy winds blow, and so I hold no fear of the meaningless proximity of soldiers – no, it is the bizarre way (and it always seems to come back to his otherness, doesn't it?) the bizarre way in which he has taken to sleeping. Did he always do that? Surely I would have found it disturbing, even at that start of our strange journey; the realisation that one of the companions forced upon me sleeps not like a normal warrior, lightly, and battle-ready (should I even count him among the adults of our party? Am I the only competent man who can protect our group? The thought, which would once have been an isolating burden, rings hollow as I remember yet again that we have lost them and we are powerless), but endures his repose face-down and corpse-like? How does he breathe? On the first night in the Yasha-ou country, I woke to see him in that now-familiar position and it took my breath away for a split second. It was only as I stared at him in the darkness of our room, the slim lines of his back lit only from the hallway candlelight slipping under the heavy wooden door, that I realised I could see his shoulders rising and falling in a reassuring rhythm. I left him be, certain that he would soon right himself.
On the second night, I had tried to push him onto his side. It can't be healthy, I had reasoned, and he looked light enough. The expression which I thought I perceived upon his face as I did so, of theatrical horror and grief, could only have been my imagination, played upon by the poor light and the stretched shadows. I settled back into my own sleep, ruffled and, dare I say it, disturbed by what I had imagined for myself.
On the third night, waking to find him face down again, I turned him once more, somewhat insistently. This time he had cried out, and seized my wrist, with a crushing grip. I know that it is impolite to disturb the sleeping, but he had left me no choice, do you see? I could hardly sleep myself, knowing that the idiot was probably killing himself by strokes in my very bed. I wrenched my arm towards me in reflex, perhaps harder than I might have under other circumstances, and I am ashamed to say I woke him. He looked at me wildly for a second, his sleep-clouded eyes doing little to hide his horror, and in that instant, not knowing what else to do, I placed my hand upon his shoulder and gave it a rough squeeze. "Ah, Kuro-pii," he had finally responded muzzily, and if he'd wanted to ask me what in the name of all that was pure I was doing, shaking him awake, he lacked the language or perhaps the focus, and instead started to drift back into that happy realm, his slender fingers resting against mine.
I'm sure you can see why I was grateful for the generous size of that strange bed, knowing the kind of madman with whom I was forced to share it.
He is disrobing now, with elaborate care. He keeps half an eye on me as he shrugs off the thick layers, and I feel sure that he is playing with me; watching my reaction. I gesture to him; hurry up, I am waiting. I cannot snuff the candle out until he is beside me. For that, of course, is my reason for observing him so closely tonight; he does not normally make me linger so. Presumably he was merely detained in the hallway by some glittering gewgaw, for he has had to travel by my side at nearly all times in this land, lest some linguistic puzzle befall him. It is a dangerous place to be unable to comprehend shouted orders. "Fall back!" "Enemy approaching!" "Arrows overhead!" I have tried to teach him some of these terms, with simple pictograms and hand gestures, and it seemed for a while as if he was listening, but how can I make sure he understands without asking him? As the last sane member of the group, it is surely my responsibility to ensure that the grinning simpleton remains intact until we are able to contact the Dimension Witch once more.
He climbs into bed beside me, and I feel a sharp breeze strike my bare skin. I must retract that simpleton remark, I muse, as he smiles his strange almost-smile, meeting my eyes far too directly. Only a man with great depths could be so sure to appear shallow at all moments of import.
He is still staring at me, his eyes almost over-bright in the dimmed room. He moves one of those long, artist's hands of his towards me, slowly. I do not pull away. He might be the strangest being with whom I have ever had the misfortune of travelling, but he could have killed me many hundreds of times over, had he so wished. No, I do not fear this man, for all his questionable ways.
His fingers touch my cheek. I am suddenly made aware of my own battle-hardened features, as those implausibly soft digits run the course of my jawline, and he inclines his sunshine features towards me.
Softly, he murmurs to me, in his sing-song tongue, and I hear my name, torn out of all logical inflection, but mine nevertheless. And for a moment, as the candle gutters, I know exactly what he means.
"Goodnight, Fai," I reply, with a smile.
And I blow the candle out.