Summary: Kurogane has a foreboding dream.
Warnings: Yaoi pairings. KUROFAI! Hospitals, a bit of humor and a bit of angst. Fai being Fai (and hiding things from everyone else). Kurogane being Kurogane (meaning that there will be swearing. Like duh.) Fluff interspersed. THIS IS NOT DEATH-FIC. FAI GETS BETTER. Erm. A bit of blood in this chapter?
A/N: This was in response to a prompt given to me by a friend, which is "Fai gets cancer. BUT DOESN'T DIE PLEASE!".
It was dark. Loud desperate gasping filled the endless space. He couldn't see the source of the noise, couldn't see anything in the pitch blackness, though he could feel sensation gradually returning to his numbed limbs. His body felt like lead, and as he attempted to roll over and get up, he realized that he couldn't seem to move at all. He wondered briefly what was making the sobbing pants; it sounded like a dying thing.
His memory came back in little trickles of thought: a world of icy mountains and scattered villages in the snow, laughing faces of villagers. A coal-mining village, he thought dreamily, remembering the feel of the pick in his hand, Fai lazing behind him on a cart (Why aren't you doing anything, you lazy mage?) surrounded by the miners from the village—fathers and sons and brothers and husbands—all laughing and smiling at their banter. Then something had happened. He knew it. But what exactly had happened? He knew it was important, but he just couldn't remember.
It hit him like a knife to the gut.
There had been a cave-in. A minor earthquake, he remembered, and the entrance to the mine had been no more than ten feet away. Fai had gotten the villagers out with a combination of magic and lightning-quick reflexes, sparks of blue light spiraling from his fingertips and twining around the panicking men, forcefully shoving them out of the collapsing mine. Then in the span of a second—the second in which the mage had successfully evacuated every single villager from the site—the tunnel had collapsed on them. The last thing Kurogane remembered was blasting a hole through the falling rocks with a desperate cry of Hama-ryou-jin! and pushing the wizard out into the light, before everything went black. He didn't even know if Fai had gotten out, or if they were both currently crushed under the weight of the entire mountain.
The frantic wheezing registered more forcefully in his head, and Kurogane shot up—lethargy and aching limbs forgotten in his panic—horror curdling in his gut as he found the source of the noise. Fai was lying in a tangled heap in the snow, limbs twisted into obscenely distorted angles, spasming and jerking and twitching and gasping like a dying animal.
"Fai!"
He found himself lunging towards the mangled form of the blonde magician, red (oh god, there was so much) blooming across white like roses. He fell into the snow as his legs failed to support him, and pulled himself bodily towards the mage. Fai made a terrible gurgling scream as Kurogane lifted his head into his arms, shoulder jerking back into its proper position with a sickening pop, his elbow soon following with another pained cry. The gashes torn into his sides closed before the ninja's wide eyes, and he realized that it must have been the vampire blood at work. Red spurted from plump lips, blue eyes wide with an unseeing panic. Kurogane could hear himself shakily muttering prayers as he wiped the blood from Fai's lips with a trembling thumb, revealing the shockingly blue hue of normally pink lips. Against the snow, Fai seemed just as deathly white as the ice he was sprawled upon.
Remembering Tokyo, he grasped at a pale wrist to prevent the vampiric wizard from hurting himself. Eyes widening, he pressed his palm to a blood-soaked chest. Because although Fai was thrashing and wheezing and very much alive in his arms, he couldn't feel a pulse. Horrified, Kurogane dropped the smaller man into the snow, pressing his palms over the bloodied breast of the mage's tunic, and shoving. At that, Fai let loose an unearthly shriek, crimson splattering from his lips as he began to push the warrior away. As his hands were knocked away, the tunic slipped right open, seemingly sliced right down the middle. Red eyes widened. Kurogane fell back with a loud cry of horror.
Torn into Fai's torso as if with claws were two bloody chasms, one low on his abdomen, the other right where his heart should have been. There was red erupting from the empty hole, like blood was still pumping into the vacant place where his heart once was. Still stunned, Kurogane could feel hands on his arms, panicked voices surrounding him, and it took him a moment before he began to struggle against the faceless people dragging him away from the blonde.
"What are you doing? What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
It took him a moment longer to realize the inhumane snarl had come from him, brain still fuzzy and disoriented from just having come to and seeing the man he lo—Fai dying a few feet away from him. The shinobi was slow to recognize the wide-brown eyes and messy brown hair, as well as the high pitched voice and white fur to the side. There were other people around, men and women and children, but he barely registered them as he lashed out like a wild animal.
There was a stunning blow to the back of his head, and he found himself fighting the darkness once again as he collapsed into the snow beside Fai.
"Fai!"
Kurogane bolted out of bed, promptly falling over as the sheets tangled around his legs. Syaoran leveled a sleepily concerned look at him from the other bed, Mokona in his lap. The sun shone through the window, gilding the loose fibers of the embroidered sheets on the bed between them, conspicuously empty. Ignoring the puzzled looks from the two other occupants in the room, the ninja kicked the blankets away from his legs and dashed for the door, irrational panic clouding his thoughts.
As he burst through the doorway, he was met with the sight of a pale figure standing in front of the stove, wheat hair tousled and a blue apron tied securely about a slim waist, head turning towards him.
"Oya," he says, cocking his head, mischief lending a devilish flint to blue eyes, "Wet dream, Kuro-hentai? How inappropriate of Daddy."
Kurogane spluttered indignantly, red-faced, and Fai laughed as he turned back to the stove. The smell of waffles, coffee, and sizzling eggs wafted atop the sweet morning breeze that blew gently in from the open window over the sink. The muffled sounds of rustling sheets as Syaoran got out of bed issued from the open doorway behind him. Mokona squealed, and Syaoran laughed; Fai smiled at the sound, humming to himself as he flipped the eggs over onto a white plate. Everything was peaceful. Life was perfect.
Kurogane couldn't shake the feeling that a storm was coming.
A/N: Sigh. I haven't added anything in the longest time, because of school and all. To be honest, this was supposed to be a oneshot, but because life is a real bitch sometimes, I decided to cut it up into chapters. I have so many different fics that I'm trying to finish at the same time, and I just keep getting distracted, so that's why I just cannot seem to finish the whole fic and post the whole thing up. I'm not really sure how long this will be, but I sometimes get carried away and my oneshots become like... 10k words. Oh, and I will repeat, this is NOT going to be death-fic people. Not sure when the next chapter will be up, we'll have to see.
Updated 29/03/2012:
IMPORTANT UPDATE!
I realized that there probably some discrepancies that I did not properly address. Thank you Honest Alice for bringing that up! As Honest Alice pointed out in a review, cancer should not be an issue in the TRC verse. I completely agree with that. In fact, in my own personal head-canon I would think that a magic-user/ vampire like Fai would probably be completely immune to cancer, both because of some strange magical whatnot that as well as his biological state. Especially since vampires have different structure from humans, as Kamui explained in Acid!Tokyo ("The structure of his body is changing, of course it hurts"). I considered this issue when I took on this story, and I have an explanation for it. I do not wish to spoil the story for you, but the explanation comes to light later as Fai has been keeping it a secret from Kurogane, whose POV this is story is written from.
I hadn't considered before that this issue may put off some readers, and discourage others from reading. This disparity is accounted for, so please don't write this story off at a glance. Thank you once again for being honest, Alice (hehe, see what I did there? Honest Alice, and honest, alice? Geddit? Geddit? :DDDD *shot*) and telling me plainly what you thought. If you hadn't told me about this, I suppose there may have been many other readers deterred by this same issue. There is a reason why this is set in canon and not in an AU setting, so don't worry too much about that. Honesty is something I appreciate in reviews, so thank you again!