A/N: Whoo! Another oneshot glazing over Fai's mask. This one wasn't even planned, haha. I hope to actually get to Cops and Robber soon, but that's a dream far, far, away..

Disclaimer: TRC does not belong to me. I wonder if I can bribe CLAMP to just make KuroFai real already, though...

Enjoy:D

A fat kitten was raised up to Kurogane's face.

"Isn't she cute?" a certain magician piped from behind it, the hands that held the cat lifting it up and down in a bobbing motion slowly.

The kitten mewled in alarm and scratched Kurogane's face.

The sudden pain stunned him for a moment before he came back to his senses. "What the hell was that for?" he growled, backing away from the thing, wiping the blood from the three parallel scratches on his cheek.

Fai was cradling the thing in his arms now, berating the cat with a congratulatory tone: "Now, even if you like Kuro-sama, you mustn't hurt him so, neko-chan!"

"Get that thing out of here, mage!" he snarled, making the cat squirm and try to make a swipe at him again, hissing.

"You're making neko-chan scared, Kuro-wanwan!" The mage was pouting at him in that indignant way, hugging the cat closer to himself.

He took another step backwards, the mage and the cat still too near for his personal comfort. "Where the hell did you get that thing, anyway?" He ignored the pouting, crossing his arms. It needed to go. It was acat, for the love of--

"Well…Sakura-chan and I were on a platform when the kitty jumped on her," the mage replied with a smile, pausing for a moment to pet the cat's head.

Kurogane waited patiently for the rest of the explanation.

None came.

…How the hell was that an explanation?

Kurogane was fuming now. "Get rid of it."

"Waah! Kuro-tan won't let me keep neko-chan!!" the idiot wailed, hugging the cat closer to his body with his arms wrapped around it. Kurogane swore that he was going to get a headache pretty soon from the high pitch of the mage's voice, and that would probably put him in a worse mood than he already was in.

So he gave in. "At least give the thing a proper name," Kurogane grunted. He was going to leave to find the princess' feather. Nothing else to do, and the white pork bun wouldn't leave otherwise; staying here would endanger his sanity. He turned around, getting ready to do just that.

"Okay, I'll name you Sakura-chan!" the annoying voice piped from behind his back.

What the hell was up with the implications? Calling her "Little Kitty" and then him being "Big Kitty"… The amount of bizarreness was alarming.

Ugh. He was going, anyway--

"Kuro-rin, where are you going?" The voice was annoyingly inquisitive, and he just needed to get out of that infuriating mass of smiles.

"I'm going out," he growled. "Away from cats and kitties and whatever the hell you call them." And after a moment of thought, he frowned and said, "And don't call me your stupid nicknames."

"Ehh?" the mage exclaimed, completely disregarding his statement. "You aren't going to play with Sakura-chan? She'll get lonely without you!" He didn't even have to turn around to know that the magician was holding the paw and peddling it up and down in a beckoning motion.

He twitched. "If I say I'm going out, I'm going out!" he snarled.

"Mou… Did you forget that we're in a cage, Kuro-chan?" He could hear the pout in Fai's voice.

…

He had forgotten, but it didn't mean that he'd let the magician have the pleasure of knowing that, so he just stomped over to the nearest couch and sat there. In this world, the houses were cages, hanging in the sky by some invisible string. People could change at will to some animal that could fly--and apparently, they couldn't. The kids were in another cage.

Come to think of it, how the hell had the mage found a cat here?

Upon closer scrutiny, he saw that the cat had tiny wings, though how it sustained it in the air, he didn't want to know.

"Yay! Kuro-sama is going to play with us!" the magician waltzed around the room with the cat, which squirmed and eventually got out of his hold.

The tiny wings grew out so that it seemed at least a little bit plausible for the cat to fly, and it zoomed around in circles around the mage's head. "Sakura-chan's so lively!" he heard him laugh, and he nearly buried his head in his hands. Another minute of this, and he swore he would go insane.

Thankfully, it stopped after a moment, the cat falling on the mage's head with an exhausted look on its face. The smiling mage cooed after it, and picked it up as he made his way towards where Kurogane sat and thumped on the seat next to him. The mage laid the cat on his lap, running his hand through the short fur.

The cat purred softly from the mage's lap, and a spark of genuine content made its way to Fai's face as he smiled.

Kurogane just watched silently. It was times like these that made him think the mage had a heart. It was these moments that made him think that he really did care, even through that mass of lies.

"So easy to please…" he heard him murmur. "Wouldn't it be so easy for us to be like animals, Kuro-pi? We could all have fun all the time." The smile directed at him was as fake as ever.

Kurogane knew that it meant a lot more than that. "If we had fun all of the time, we wouldn't know how to cherish things," he grunted in reply.

The stricken look that crossed the magician's face wasn't his imagination, but it certainly seemed so after the smile came back. "I guess so," Fai replied, turning his eyes back to the kitten in his lap, "I guess so…"

There was that tinge of sadness again, and Kurogane couldn't possibly hope to understand what it meant, or what it signified, or what it was as a whole.

He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to.

A/N: Liked it? Hated it? Thought it was completely pointless? Thank you. :) I'm taking requests for fictions. Don't hold your tongue.