Musing piece, featuring wangsty!Fye and a special appearance by drunkenly-insightful!Kurogane. Umm, enjoy?
Running In Reflections
Every world is different; every world is exactly alike. They pass like flickering images in a kaleidoscope, vivid and meaningless, each unique yet each a reflection of all the others, the same picture seen from a thousand angles. The same people, the same places, the same anger and joy and loss, countless doppelganger worlds, like being lost in a maze of mirrors.
---
This is a world that's beautiful like nothing Fye has ever seen, clean air and graceful trees with pale, translucent leaves, and the people are so very happy. There is no feather here, but Sakura is gazing around with unabashed delight and Syaoran's expression admits that maybe he might be tired, just a little, of searching and fighting and the constant skipping across dimensions like a stone skimmed over water.
They stay a while in the shade of the graceful trees, in the warm hospitality of these kindly people, and as the sun sinks below the horizon a fire throws up red-gold sparks, the music strikes up and people are singing, celebrating their guests. Fye laughs, drums his fingers to the tune, lets a pretty girl pull him up to dance a while before going to help Mokona tease Kuro-tan, who's not taking part in the festivities properly at all.
This place is peaceful, idyllic, a place to be happy; before long Fye is eager to move on, something in him warning of the dangers of delay. Go, it says, before you're tempted to stay.
"What's wrong with you?" Kurogane growls, scowls. "You're twitchy as a frog."
Fye grins and makes frog noises, and Kurogane shakes his head in disgust. They leave the next morning, and it isn't too soon.
---
His compulsion: keep moving, never linger, perpetual motion in any direction. He can appreciate the whimsy of fate (or of Yuuko, perhaps) that appointed him such travelling companions, whose means are his but whose goals are entirely opposed; while they all seek, he wishes to remain unsought. Or uncaptured, at the least, and he's always been slippery as a fish. Keep moving, keep jumping, keep running and they'll never find you.
(A line from a childhood tale springs to mind: run, run as fast as you can - you can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man! Except they did catch him, in the end, and ate him all up.)
He lets pieces of himself slip sometimes, splintered bits of Fye D. Flowright that were never intended for public viewing. Sheds them hastily, like a dog shaking off burrs, but he knows they're seen and is embarrassed for revealing such things as should never escape the innermost self. Not that his companions would judge him, but that perhaps is worse, because there are things he should be judged for, and he doesn't want their sympathy, doesn't need or deserve it in any case.
He knows, at least somewhat, about his companions' lives from before this strange odyssey. Kurogane rants about his princess, or maybe at her absent person; Sakura has little to recall, but Syaoran mostly talks about her anyway. For his own part Fye stays quiet, deflects their well-intentioned queries with banter and teasing, and either they don't notice or they don't press the issue. He talks enough to hide the fact that really he says nothing, shows only surface. It's safer that way.
---
This is a world that's cold and angular, sharp-toothed mountains with tattered storms catching on their peaks. There is a feather here, somewhere, but in the jaws of a blizzard there's nothing to do except sit in an inn drinking cheap schnapps. The wind is yowling outside, rattling the shutters like a tantrum; the children are in bed and Fye knows he's very drunk, his vision soft around the edges and warm fluff where his brain should be.
"Y'know whatchy're like?"
Not so drunk as Kuro-rin, though, who's wagging a serious finger in his face, apparently making some sort of point.
"You're like a mirror, 's what."
"Really?" he replies, and pushes another shot into Kurogane's hands to divert his attention. Kurogane downs it in a single swift motion and keeps talking.
"Yeah," he says, "Don't think I don't see - you never say ANYthing about yourself , jus' stuff about...other stuff. You just, whatsit...reflect stuff. Never you. So that's whatchy're like."
He's nodding slowly, sombrely, like an underwater owl, so drunk he can barely focus his eyes but his words still twist somewhere, and Fye smiles easily, painfully, nods agreement with Kurogane's accusation and then kisses him.
Two possible outcomes: 1) Kurogane will kiss back, or 2) he won't, and Fye will need to run for his life. Either way, a distraction.
Kurogane's mouth opens under his, hot and tasting of schnapps, and his fingers clamp onto the back of Fye's neck, drag him closer. A pleasant distraction, then, and by tomorrow Kuro-pon will no longer be this peculiar brand of clever-drunk, too inebriated not to cut with the truth he grasps. This is not the reason Fye kissed him, but it is the reason he kissed him now, and he hopes that doesn't make this wrong. Kurogane's hand slides down his back, over the unmarked skin, and Fye shivers.
---
When they move between worlds there is a feeling of peace, the serenity that comes from true helplessness. It is blind chance that guides them, and every time they emerge something clenches in Fye's gut, a spasm of apprehension until he ascertains that he doesn't recognise this place. It's a contradiction in terms, perhaps, that the wish he sacrificed so much for is the source of such unease, but then Fye has always been somewhat of a contradiction. Or perhaps it's just another of those whimsies of fate that seem to be cropping up lately. He doesn't mind, so long as the worlds stay strange; so long as he stays in motion.
You can't catch me, he thinks, I'm the magic man.
There's an itch between his shoulder blades where the tattoo should be; there's a jagged ache inside him where something should be, and maybe if he could decide what that was, he could stop running someday. He wouldn't count on it, though.
---
Every world is exactly alike; every world is different. The vital point: none is his.
He keeps moving.