A/N: Before I type anything else I have to tell you the style of clothing for humans in this story. Think of Fai's outfits in Spirit, think of Syaoran's outfit in Recourt. That's basically the style for men. Womens clothing is a mix of Sakura's outfit between those two worlds. Hope that's not confusing.

I love how I seem to have reversed the roles of people here. Fai is utterly annoyed by Kurogane while Kurogane is only mildly annoyed by Fai...

"You know, I've heard of seasickness before. In fact when I was first starting out as a sailor I got it a lot, but I've never even dreamed of land sickness before." Kurogane chuckled as he watched Fai empty the contents of his stomach for what seemed like the millionth time.

Fai was wearing a typical male outfit that blue and white in color. However this blue did not take away from the tinge of green that was in Fai's face. He'd been fine for the two to three days that he'd spent on that ship, but the moment his feet had touched dry land he'd become sick to his stomach and it hadn't faded since. "Shut up. It's your fault for...bringing me here." Fai gulped and tried to avoid throwing up again as they kept walking.

Mr. Kurogane Flourite wasn't exactly helping with Fai's illness either. The man always had something to say and it offered little comfort in these matters. Fai supposed it was because Kurogane was a sailor. The sea was hardly ever kind to them, so they in return learned to be rough.

"You can't have anything left in your stomach to vomit. Really, it has to be just bile by now..."

"Oh..." Fai's voice portrayed his stomach sickness, but his tone took on a mocking tone as he spoke. "I just imagine that I'll start to throw up my internal organs soon...It'll start with something small and unimportant, like my appendix, but then it'll slowly go to larger and more important organs, like my lungs, and at last I'll just throw up my stomach itself and then it'll stop."

"Urg, don't talk like that. It's very unlady-like."

Fai chuckled and then groaned as he wrapped his arms around his stomach. "I'm so glad it's unlady-like. I wouldn't want to sound like a lady since I'm a man." Fai was getting pretty sick of Kurogane's repulsion to the idea that Fai was a man. It was getting a little ridiculous. Fai had no chest, no hips, and hardly any hips to speak of. He was straight up and down like a stick, and taller than all women and most men, yet Kurogane still considered him a woman because he had a pretty face and long eyelashes. Absurd! He even wore mens clothing to get his point across. How could there be any doubt as to his gender!

"You're still going on with that story..."

"It's not a story! It's fact! You wished for a man to be your bride!"

Kurogane shook his head. "You're just confused. There's no way you could be a man."

Fai huffed and folded his arms in annoyance. "And just why not?"

"Because you're a mermaid."

Fai's jaw dropped, he completely forgot about his sickness and shook his head back and forth wildly as if trying to convince himself that he had not heard what he'd just heard. "Are you suggesting that all mermaids are women? Are you suggesting that there are no men? How do you think we get little baby mermaids? From bubbles!"

"Sounds good to me." Fai just stared at Kurogane as he wanted to just scream and pull his blond hair out in chunks.

"Why are you still wearing those clothes?" Kurogane asked Fai as he walked into the living room of his home. The house he lived in wasn't extravagant, but it wasn't simple or small either. It was neatly decorated in a mostly nautical design which he was pleased to find Fai liked.

At the moment Fai was examining the titles of the books he had on his shelves. Kurogane found this a little strange since women during this period of time never learned to read. "These clothes? They look nice, they fit, and they suit my gender." The blond's fingers gingerly pulled a book off one of the shelves and he began to look through it.

"But we bought you clothes today. They fit you and I'm sure they'll look nice on you."

Fai snapped the book shut and walked across the room to Kurogane. He reached out with two fingers and gently poked the sailors chest. "Yes. They do fit. Yes. They are good looking. No. They do not suit my gender, seeing as they are dresses! I thought you'd have caught on by now Kuro-pup."

Kurogane grit his teeth in slight annoyance at this name. For two days now Fai had been calling him by strange things such as Kuro-pup, Kuro-chan, Kuro-rin, and so on. "I thought I told you to stop calling me those stupid nicknames."

"Really? I had no idea you didn't like my pet names for you...hm..." Fai seemed to go deep into thought. "And you know what, I was pretty sure I told you I was a man as well..." The blond shrugged it off, "Oh well, I guess neither of us are very good at listening." Fai shrugged again and strayed off into the house, his nose in that book he'd picked.

"Fai?" Kurogane knocked on the door. The sound of running water dully heard from behind it.

"Yes Kuro-myu?" Kurogane grit his teeth, as he always did when he heard a name like that, and opened the door to the bathroom. The sound of running water got much louder and clearer. He knit his eyebrows and walked in. He tripped over Fai's thigh high boots. Fai wasn't very good at walking on his own yet, and the very high boots made it easier for the blond to stand and keep his knees locked, but they were one hell of a path blocker...

"Don't leave your things in the middle of the floor!"

Fai flinched slightly. "Sorry. I didn't expect you to just walk in...want to take a bath with me Kuro-rin?"

"There you go again. Being unlady-like..."

"Oh good, I've been practicing so hard."

Kurogane rolled his eyes and pulled himself to his feet. His lips frowned as Fai clumsily left the room with his bare feet and then came back with a box of table salt. "What are you doing?

"I'm homesick." Fai started to pour the contents of the box into the bathtub. It took Kurogane a full ten seconds to make the connection between the box of salt, the bathtub, and Fai's statement about being homesick. Fai was trying to make his own little ocean in the tub...

He shook his head and smiled. Really smiled. Despite all the fights they had and how they annoyed each other ninety-five percent of the time, there were still moments when he was glad he'd wished for Fai. "There's such a thing as bath salts. Would you like some?"

"Are you willing to buy something that probably seems so trivial to you?"

"Just because I won't go along with your guy story and just because your names bug me doesn't mean I want you to suffer. If giving you bath salts will improve your mood..."

Fai made a humming noise. "It wouldn't make me as happy as you giving me my belt would..."

"You know I'm not giving you your belt...I hid it very well."

"I realized that after I couldn't find it under your floorboards..."

Kurogane choose to ignore Fai's comment about floorboards, it would only cause another argument and they seemed to be doing so well at the moment. "Since it is my fault that you're stuck here I will buy you whatever you please...within reason."

"In that case bath salts sound wonderful." Kurogane made an eeking sound as Fai rolled up his pant legs. "What? Afraid your gay?"

"Even if that was the case I wouldn't be gay for you since you're a woman."

"I'm really not..." Fai said in a sing song voice as he stuck his legs into the salt soaked water. He shivered slightly and picked up the box to add even more salt. "Join me Kuro-tan. You're a sailor. Surely you have nostalgia for salt water too."

After the annoyance of the name faded away, Kurogane sighed and pulled off his own boots before copying Fai's actions, only he sat on the other side of the tub...he promptly jumped out of it. "Fai! That water's boiling hot! How can you stand it!"

Fai gave a nervous laugh and smiled. "Sorry Kuro-min, I didn't mean to harm you." The grin his face held said that he was laughing at Kurogane's sensitivity to temperature, but the look in his eyes said that he hadn't really meant to harm him.

Fai had decided that Kurogane was half good and half bad. He was good because he did seem to care, and try to make Fai happy, although these intentions were thrown off by his thoughts that Fai was really just a tomboy. He was also evil to Fai because he kept his belt and kept him in one place. Although Fai was trying to annoy the man into giving him his belt back, he couldn't help but be nice every once in a while. He was a mermaid, it was in his nature.

"Are you okay? It didn't burn you, did it?" Fai's blue eyes gazed up at the man who just folded his arms, huffed, and looked away.

"I'm fine." Fai chuckled at Kurogane's stubbornness. It was cute in its own way.

"So you really can read?" Kurogane picked up Fai's legs and placed them on the floor so that he could sit next to the blond who once again had his nose deep in a book.

Fai crossed his ankles almost immediately so that his legs were as close together as possible. "Of course. My teacher taught me when I seven years old. I knew how to read this language before I knew how to read the mermaid language."

"They're different?"

Fai shrugged. "The way we say words and such are the same, but the writing is different..."

Kurogane leaned back against the back of chair they sat in. They were silent for about ten minutes. The only thing that would break the silence was Fai's occasional turn of a page. At last Kurogane couldn't take it anymore. "So. Tell me about mermaids."

The book dropped from Fai's fingers. It didn't even seem intentional, that was just how shocked he was by the question. "What?"

"Tell me about mermaids. Their legends and stuff."

Fai now looked to the man showing him the shock that glittered his face. "You kid me Kuro-myu."

"No. You've been here for two weeks, and while I've learned how much you miss the sea you've never said why. You've never said anything about your culture and how this one is different. I'm getting curious. I want to know."

"You're too greedy to understand."

"Then don't make me understand. Tell me so that my greed for knowledge can be satiated."

Fai frowned and pulled his legs up and folded them under his body, much like a cat would as he thought. "Legends...well I can tell you the legend of how we came to be. Every mermaid is literally born knowing this legend...but really it makes it seem like we're miserable when we're not..."

"Tell me. I want to know."

Fai sighed and closed his sapphire eyes. His voice took on a tone that Kurogane would have never expected from the blond. It was calm and loving, as if it longed for something."'Long ago we did not exist. We came to be when the sailors from the world that we cannot see rode the ships that ride the waves of the surface fell into the water and began to sink down.

"These sailors would cry for help, for they as we now know cannot breathe underwater like we can. They wished for some way that they would not drown for they could not swim." Fai opened his eyes and Kurogane saw that they were glazed. Fai was in a trance. "The ocean granted their wish. It gave them a second life, but this life required that they never return to the land. These new beings that the human's later dubbed mermaids were thankful to be alive, but they had lives, they had wives on land. They loved the sea, but they wished to go and see the ones they loved again.

"No matter how much they wished they could only go so far as the shoreline. Their loves would sometimes find them and they began to gather things from the sea and it became known that if they could offer enough of the sea's fineries that they could wish a wish that would get their husbands back...or they could go to the sea themselves. This is said to be the earliest form of what we now call our belts. For our belts are made from pearls and shells just like those offerings were, and our belts are also exactly equal to what we are worth.

"Some did return to the land, they went back to their greedy lives, but some stayed within the ocean with their wives and loves, they stayed there until the end of their days and left children behind. Even though they chose to stay within the sea they were originally from the land. They all died longing to return to he land. They told their children of the land and their children told their children about it. As time passed the land became a mystery to our kind, but we all are left with the longing our ancestors had. We wish to return to the land, but at the same time we cannot leave the sea. We cannot have both. Every mermaid must choose. To bond to a human like the first of our kind did with a wish, or to never go to the surface, but we cannot have both."

Fai's eyes returned to normal. He looked to Kurogane's face and he sighed shaking his head. "I knew you wouldn't understand. It's a legend. It's probably correct on most points, but that isn't the reason we have our wishes. Or it's not our modern reason for having wishes. I probably confused you to no end..."

"No...not really...It's a bittersweet story..."

"Yeah...like I said it's a legend, so I don't know exactly how much is true..."

"What isn't true?"

Fai shrugged and placed his hands carefully in his lap. "Probably our origin. The fact that we're descended from transformed sailors. That in an attempt to get back to the land that we were bound to belts. The wish part is most likely wrong."

"How did the wish come into play?"

"As far as I know it was to save our lives. We would perform a magic trick to get our belts back from humans because if we didn't we'd die." Fai paused. "The longing is correct though..."

"The want to live on land?" Fai nodded. "But you don't seem to like it."

"I have nothing to be here for. Truly, if I loved someone here, or I had a life to live for here, I'd want to stay, but there is nothing, so I have chosen to remain loyal to the ocean."

"So you really can never have both."

Fai shook his head. "Not with the greed humans have. Hypothetically, it is possible. If a human were to wish for the mermaid to be free of their belt, if they wished for the mermaid to be able to choose and go where they pleased in life. If they wished for the mermaid's freedom it would be possible. You are an example of how that would never happen. You wouldn't give me my belt back, you had to be selfish for yourself, there is probably not a soul alive who would wish for a mermaid's freedom of form."

Fai's serious face instantly vanished into thin air and he grinned widely, laughing. "But that's okay Kuro-chu! Mermaid's were made from greed, it's only fair that we should be wanted for greed as well! I don't blame you in particular!"

"I'm sorry."

Fai got that shocked look about his face again. "Huh?"

"I've given you nothing to make you want to stay here instead of the home you've lived in all your life, have I? I'm sorry. I'll...try harder from now on Fai." The sailor stood to his feet. "Keep reading your book...come to bed soon. My room this time."

"We've never slept in the same bed..."

"Just come." Kurogane started to head out of the room and then stopped. "Fai?"

"Yes Kuro-pon?"

"If I can't...make you happy in six months. I'll let you go." Fai stared at the spot where the sailor stood. He just stared with a blank minded expression.

Perhaps humans weren't as greedy as he thought.