Disclaimer: I do not own Tsubasa. If I did……uh….ran out of funny things to say….dart.

Many great big hugs, kisses, chocolate and cream to my beloved (precioussssssss) beta Kitsunia-hime-sama-dono.

Warnings: Spoilers and mild mentioning of sex.

Speechless

He has it easy, doesn't he?

First of all the language is somewhat resembling his world's original word. He can often understand complete sentences said to him. He also has a foothold on the langue and can slowly learn the rest of the words he can't understand.

To me this language is a mess and I can't understand a thing. They don't know I can't understand them, they think I'm deaf. At least I work hard so they can ignore this 'handicap' of mine and treat me like any other soldier. They did at first anyway.

And we had to land in a combatant environment didn't we? All I want to do is to stretch my legs a bit (my ankle is still sore from that oni attack, it's especially snappy in cold weather) and relax. And where do we land if not in the tensest of places.

Ah, but I grow bitter and I shouldn't. Forgive me; I lie. I do not grow bitter; I merely let out some of the bitterness in me. And I have tons of it. If I wouldn't I wouldn't run away, would I?

I wouldn't send my king into slumber, I wouldn't turn my beloved Chi into a speechless web, I wouldn't beg the Dimension queen for her mercy, I wouldn't give up the tattoo I worked very hard and suffered oh so very much to gain. I am very bitter.

I don't show it. Usually that is. I show it now.

I'm sorry but it's tiring to be here. All day long running around people who are shouting things you can't understand at you. Training, getting dirty, getting tired, and eating only little.

I don't mind the diet and the exercise, its doing wonders to my muscles. I used to be skinny and agile, now I'm skinny and agile and carved nicely.

Now that I think of it everyone else is.

Well, not skinny, but agile and carved. Oh god, you have to be in the depth of an army to realize just how many powerfully built, well-carved men there are in the world don't you?

I mean I was in an army back in my world but I was away from them all, above them all. I was with my master and my colleagues but never with the infantrymen or anything like that. I am now.

The only thing I can say, and this makes me smile a genuine smile to brush back the bitterness, is this; I need to hide in a corner with my back to everyone when I take a shower. Yes, I do.

Speaking of which, they've put me in the same room as Kuro-tan because they think we know each other somehow. I mean, we do, only not that well.

Kuro-tit hates it. I don't but it doesn't matter. I hate it when he hates it.

I hate myself for making him hate it.

I can't help making him hate it can I? We are so different from each other and none of us can help it.

He hates it, he hates this, and he hates me. And I hate that.

I hate to hate. I've had my fill of negative emotions back in my world, hell, I ran away to another dimension to get away from negative emotions didn't I? And now I'm all flooded with them again.

Shit.

I hate swearing too.

You know what I hate about Kurogane hating it? I hate myself. I know I've said it before but it's so overwhelming that I can't help but repeating it over and over again like a mantra.

Kuro-lo loves this environment. Everyone's about three classes under him in swordsmanship, he can teach his high commander a few lessons about sword fighting, and everybody knows it.

I don't have to know the language to realize what they're saying about him. It's enough to see the glitters in their eyes when they look at him go by. It's enough to see his commanders' face lit up when his name is mentioned. It's enough to see the new recruits squabble for attention around him.

It's enough to see his face as he teaches them a lesson, as he wins another fight against another champion, as he draws "ooooh"s and "aaaah"s and their strange calls of amazement.

And I hate seeing his face in that fragment of a second when he enters our room, takes a look at me and it all disappears. The relaxed thick borrows gather to frown, the smooth forehead creases, the glittering eyes dim and darken, the upper lip draws to a snarl.

He hates me.

I hate myself.

I hate this place.

What do I do? What can I do?

I stay in our room and clean it up. I tend to Kuro's clothes and cook his food. I polish his boots and smooth his wrinkled uniform cape and do the laundry.

I'm a perfect little housewife and our marriage is a roaring failure.

Once we had to look after the children and that united us, letting us rest only enough to have a cute little squabble here and there but never anything grave.

Now the kids are off on an adventure of their own. They've grown and flown away from our nest and left us behind to leap at each other's throat. Two tense adults, weary, and angered at each other for a thousand little insults and mischief along these years of treating the kids. Now in the silence the children left behind at home all the little problems rise to the surface and fill the air with a foul stench. Now…

I think I stretched the metaphor quite long enough.

When he comes back home from training he gives me one nasty look and retires to have his meal. He mumbles something under his breath before eating but by now I know it's just a word of politeness before eating and not a form of thanks.

He scans his ironed, washed and clean clothes, and looks away.

He collapses on his bunk and sinks into sleep without even a look at me. I like telling myself that he's doing that because he's exhausted from all the training and military stuff.

I like lying to myself.

I like doing his laundry. Besides the socks that is, my nose is rather sensitive to those things.

It's his body odor that I love; deep, sweet, musky, hints of salt and dirt and no stench. This is the smell of sweaty clothes before they linger on enough to develop a stench. This is the odor of someone's body in its purest form and I love it.

When he's not home and I'm doing the laundry I take his shirt and bury my face in it, taking a deep breath. I wrap his cape around me and cover my face with its collar, closing my eyes, shutting my ears, and locking myself in a cave of his smell.

It feels like he's holding me close. And he's all sweaty. And we're lying curled up to each other. And we're both exhausted and happy because we've been making love.

We don't make love anymore.

Hah! 'Anymore' like we ever did.

Ah, but you did, didn't you, Big Kitty. You had sex with him, all drunk and happy and wounded from a battle.

You squirmed out of his arms, Big Kitty, and you wrapped yours around him and drew close enough to him to smell his own intoxication on his breath. And you glued your lips to his, Big Kitty, and probed enough to taste what he drank, to let him taste what you drank.

And you made love to him, Big Kitty, sweet intoxicated love. Clumsy love, passionate love; swift and painful and pleasure-filled like a first orgasm. You opened your eyes into a world that swirled around you, Big Kitty, and his face was looming above yours swaying back and forth powerfully. You wrapped your legs around Big Doggy, didn't you Big Kitty, and you screamed enough to make Syaoran blush burgundy the next morning. You wanted to laugh lightly in his face and wrap your arm around his youthful shoulders, Big Kitty, and tell him 'that is what adults do Syaoran-kun, that is what adults do' like any good parent would do once their child grows old enough.

But I'm not Big Kitty anymore and Kurogane is not Big Doggy anymore. I don't have the nerve to be Big Kitty again.

I'm lying again. I walked straight into the big kitchen in our barracks and emptied three bottles. I didn't down them all down in one go though.

I sat on a chair with a glass by the bottles and me and drank one cup after another. I waited for Big Kitty to come.

But he didn't come and I sat there miserably with one hand on the glass and the other on the bottle, looking like a sad pathetic drunk (which I was). The men around me tried sitting by me and took a sip from my bottles but I didn't speak to them and I didn't understand what they said until they grew tired of the silence and left.

Then I got really drunk. The room swirled around me and Big Kitty just wouldn't come to me.

I called Big Kitty, I shouted at him to come. I even kicked a nearby chair with frustration. But Big Kitty won't come.

Kurogane came. He looked down at me and for a moment Big Kitty poked his head in to say hello.

"Nyaaaa."

Kurogane 'tssk'ed at me.

"Nyaaa?"

He shook his head and spat something at me. I heard soldiers call the young and stupid in that word. He swore at me…probably.

And Big Kitty was gone.

That's when I started shouting at Big Kitty and kicking things even more. The MPs came to get me.

I woke up the next morning with a hangover from hell and a burn in my chest. I curled up to my duvet and wept so much I had to hang my pillow out to dry.

Its summer here but I like to curl up in my duvet anyway. If I get too hot I kick it off of me in my sleep but when I cool down again I snuggle up in it immediately. I've always been a duvet fan because when you're curled up in a duvet it feels like a great big hug.

That morning I had much laundry to do. Kuro-pup's cape was waiting for me on a chair. I sat down on my bed, drew my knees to my chest and hid in the cloak like I always do.

Kurogane entered.

I heard him come in but I couldn't do anything. My body was still heavy from last night, my ankle was hurting because I used that leg to kick a table and my head was still a bit foggy.

He walked up to me and stood right in front of me. I think he could hear me crying.

He sighed and walked out of the room again.

I think he thought I was frightened of this place and saddened because no one can understand me and that it was taking its toll on me.

Its better then hating me, isn't it?

He thinks I'm so weak, so fragile and silly and inappropriate to any situation I'm in.

Kurogane will claw death's eyes out if the Grim Reaper came to claim him. Kurogane'll bite and kick and scratch his way out of things if he needs to.

I will lay docile and let death take me. Let my soul whiff away on the wind. I sit and wait for someone to come and take me away from all of this. I refuse to live life to the fullest because magic says so.

Magic tells you to always leave a bit of yourself on the side to use as preserves in case you'll have to sacrifice yourself for something bigger then you, for that something big to rise and save your king.

Ashura wanted to sacrifice me like that. He thought it would be his last line of defense.

I lived in the palace as a scapegoat waiting his turn to be tied up and rolled down the hill. So I waited for someone to take me away from it all. And no one came. So Ashura went to sleep. And I ran away.

Kurogane doesn't know it, that I did something to save my own life. So he hates me.

And I hate myself.

I don't hate myself enough to let the prying men into our room. They think I'm lovely (I think, I don't really understand what they say but their eyes are speaking for them) and they want a piece of me. But I say no.

I say yes sometimes. I can't help it. I told you about the showers right? The common showers, carved muscular bodies, Remember? Good.

During daytime I say no to any man who 'drops by for a visit' and try to tell me, using sign language, that they'd like a piece of me.

They even bring flowers, the poor idiots.

And I say no and slam the door in their faces.

I say yes in the showers because I'm lonely and miserable and self-destructive and I like the pain and I like their bodies. Lust rampages in the body of a man until he can't control it and I'm a man, despite the part I take in the sex.

One day Kurogane dropped by in the middle of the day and caught one of the men who had managed to sneak into our room and was just trying to force me down to the bed.

He kicked the living shit out of that man.

Then he yelled at me. I didn't have to understand the language to know what he was saying. He threw his arm towards the door as if to show it to me and I knew exactly what he was saying. He was saying "What do you expect from them when you're the shower rooms' whore!"

He was right. I nodded. I shrugged when the change in his tone meant he was asking me if I was all right.

I lied; I said I was all right when my shoulder was dislocated. I turned the side of my face with the bruise away from him so he won't worry.

See he worries about me and I don't get it. If only he hated me and nothing else but he cares for me when I'm injured. It's the cruelest thing he could do, to care for me. Because it gives me the illusion that he cares beyond that…

But he doesn't or his face wouldn't change so much when he walks into our room. His face wouldn't change so much when I come back from the shower rooms.

I hate myself so much.

He walked in one day and pushed a huge bow and quiver into my hands. He closed my fingers on them and snarled things at me. He shook his head a lot and swore a bit (funny how the first thing you pick up in a foreign language is the dirty words) but not at me.

Then he looked at me and suddenly his tone was a lot softer when he spoke.

Okay, I'll stop here and tell you something to make this sound sensible. If you'd listen to that conversation and it'd be the first time you heard Kuro-tweet you'd think he was monotonous.

But I know him better and I grew accustomed to his different tones of voice.

The fact that I can't understand a thing he's saying only sharpens my sensibility to the difference between one pronunciation to the other.

And believe me, his tone was a lot softer.

He looked deep into my eyes and spoke for a very long time, gesturing with his hands that what he's saying is very important. He got gesturing with his hands from the people here. They speak with their hands so much you could see what they're talking about from a great distance.

I stood there in a stupor with the bow and quiver in my hands like an idiot and stared at him stunned.

Then he got angry and almost shouted. Then he grabbed my shoulders and shook me.

He does everything so coarsely that it's hard to tell the difference between when he's being mean and when he has a lack of physical tact. I have that problem. I can understand his different shades of speech but I can't understand his physical language of that sort. He simply doesn't touch me enough for me to learn it.

I think he shook me to try and make me snap out of my stupor. But I was still confused.

So he pointed at himself and at me and my heart skipped a beat. He did it again.

I almost ran up to him. I walked very fast to him and placed my hands on his chest (big, muscular, carve bodies remember?) and looked up into his eyes.

Something flickered in his eyes and I was rendered speechless, even if I wanted to say something.

Then he took my hands off of him and held them harshly, talking some more. I did not understand something fundamental.

He stormed out of our room and scurried off somewhere. Leaving me behind.

To torment myself and beat myself up for crossing the lines… Things like what I just did belong to Big Kitty and Big Doggy. None of them were at present. I did a mistake.

His cape was missing and the duvet was for sleep time.

Time stretched on forever and my chest became so painful that I wished to take his dagger and stab at it to let the anger out a bit.

I think a lot of thoughts like that when I'm sad. I used to think more of them when I was back in my world. That's what happens when you're trapped and you know you're going to die. When you feel the walls are shrinking around you, pressing on your temples whenever you go, wherever you turn your head to.

Then he came back with a scroll, speaking in the same half stressing half soft tone as before.

It was all for nothing, this moment of distress of mine; he just went off to bring that scroll.

The scroll had a picture on it of a riding beast with two riders; a swordsman and an archer.

He placed the scroll on the table and tapped his finger violently on the swordsman saying "Kurogane, Kurogane!" then he tapped on the archer and said "Fai, Fai!" and said more things in a questioning tone.

Did I understand it? He wants us to be a team in this war. He wants me to learn archery.

He swung his head towards the door and not because I'm a shower rooms' whore but because of his commanders. I can understand that because I can see how they look at me and how Kurogane looks back at them.

They think I'm useless; they want to throw me away. But Kurogane does not want that.

I cross the lines again and embrace him. He tries to pull me off but I won't let go. I claw at his back and dig my face deep into his chest.

Because I need to prove him that I'm no longer the man who waits for his knight in shining armor. Because I need to show him that I can fight for what I want, that I will not sit docile and wait for whatever ominous fait I have.

And after a while he understands and stops fighting, despite the fact that he swears under his breath and calls me an idiot and a million other nasty things.

I don't claw him anymore, I stroke him, and I move closer in an unquestionable way.

We go to the kitchen and drink with the men.

They look at me waiting for me to start kicking things and shout in a strange tongue. Kuro-dip crouches over his drinks and glares around.

I'm sure his back is permanently bent forward from all that nefarious crouching.

How can he drink such strong things and not show it. My mind's a blur by the time I drink three glasses, no matter what they contain.

Big Kitty isn't there. I guess it's because I'm waiting for him so impatiently. I do get lightheaded though and just a little happy. When I mix my bitterness with alcohol I get lightheaded silliness.

If I'll 'nyaa' here the men will start laughing.

They laugh already, darting their eyes to my quickly emptying glasses and me.

Kuro-plop shoots to his feet and drags me to our room, pretending that I am far too drunk to be up on my feet.

The men cheer him on. They know what's behind his act because I'm a shower rooms' whore. I'm so plain and obvious, used and run-down and cheap and there's no reason why Kuro-tat shouldn't have a taste of me as well.

Kurogane throws me on the bed and yanks at his belt violently, impatiently. I gasp.

Then he glares down at me. Big Kitty isn't shining from my eyes and he wants to pretend he's Big Doggy.

"Nyaa!" he tells me, commanding.

I blink.

"Nyaa!" he's becoming angry.

Big Kitty won't come but I'm a darn good impersonator.

"Nyaaaaaa, nyaaaa." Then I giggle at the absurdity of it. Bitterness bubbles out because he has to pretend he's drunk enough to want me, that this is what he's selling himself to silence his conscience.

Because he hates me so he needs to be really drunk and I have to be equally drunk and seducing to let this 'accident' happen.

I hate myself so much.

But tonight I'll be Big Kitty and drunk and seductive and we'll make the bitterest, sweetest, most painful and soul wrenching love ever.

When he's done I crawl away from under him, eaten with guilt and self hate, to curl up and cry in the corner.

He gets up and walks towards me.

His silhouette looks horrid in the dark room. When you see him in this lack of light you see just how big and intimidating he is. For a moment I'm sure he's going to kill me. I forget that he's naked because we made love and that he has that wonderful muscular curved body.

He's still drunk because I hear the table almost splintering as he crushes into it. His curses drip with venom and anger, like all the things he says hatefully in all the languages.

He's clumsy when he pushes the bow and quiver into my hands.

I'm naked too and all curled up in my crying corner. The bow feels a lot rougher against my naked skin and the quiver feels rugged and clumsy.

The moonlight falls on my tear-covered face, my tiny naked body so skinny and weak in the pale glow. He is invisible, covered by the darkness and the light that blinds me when I look at him.

It's always like that; I'm completely vulnerable to him while he's hiding in his deep dark shadows.

He pats the bow and quiver into me a little more and suddenly he's not rough and scary; he's sweet and clumsy, my drunk little puppy. Dragging himself back to bed, banging into the table again, he mumbles something before going to sleep.

I don't know what he mumbles but his voice sounds so soft and light it seems that it's not his at all. I think I dug, with seduction and alcohol, into something deep into Kurogane and dragged out something that is the purest of him. and maybe I'm still drunk too.

I get up and walk back to bed. I curl up to him and shower kisses on his lips. He's out of it completely; drunk and exhausted. But I couldn't be happier.

I love archers. I always have. Since I was small and up until now. In my country, when I was enlisted, I grew to love archers and archery even more.

The infantryman, what must he understand to do his job? Nothing. He knows only of the steel in his hands and the earth under him.

Not that I have any disrespect towards infantrymen. Kuro-sping is a swordsman; he has his own knowledge and his own world of magic and forces. But they are beyond me so I like archers.

Archers must know the air's condition and the wind's direction, the distance from their victim and the ability of their weapon. I love archery because I am more connected to the wind and the air around me then to the ground under me.

In my home, during out war, my only friend who was not a sorcerer was a head archer. He taught me the wisdom of the wind. This is, I think, why my kudan was air and why I was so able with it. I liked my friend. I mourned for him greatly.

He died in the last campaign before our men retreated and fled to the main city. My fellow sorcerers were killed one by one around me. I alone survived and so I was the one to become the high sorcerer.

It's sad, of course it's sad, but if it weren't for that I would never be taught the extras of a high sorcerer's powers; dimension traveling. And I wouldn't be able to run away and meet Kuro-blab.

But I diverse…

I was assigned to a class of arching beginners.

The teacher was anything but an archer, if you judge the book by its cover. He's all curled up like a hunchback and ugly as an ogre. His hands are crooked and bony, twisted like branches of an ancient tree. He has a tiny eye and a huge eye and both have a red taint to their blackness. He's as filthy as a sewer rat, as he walks into the archery range my fellow classmen and I wince at the whiff of him.

But when he gets the bow into his hand and the arrow between his fingers he's a different man. His back straightens; his arms jump into fitness and the small eyes expands until the two are equal. And suddenly instead of the court freak you find a noble warrior standing before you.

My fellow classmen and me gasp together when the arrow hits the unimaginable target: a butterfly, splitting it right in half.

My fellow classmen drop out one by one, giving up on the impossible training. It is rough.

But when I'm tired or dizzy with malnutrition and exhaustion I see the scroll and it's painting before my eyes and I find strength in me.

Of course I find strength in me.

Are you surprised! You think I'm nothing but an effeminate waif, don't you! The housewife, the shower rooms' whore; nothing but a pretty face, a dumb blonde. Curse you.

I fought my way through clouds of war and smothering fog, from the cries of the wounded and the silence of the dead. I scrawled out of the death ditches, covered in blood, and I survived. I fought the enemy soldier by soldier and I found my strength. I brought a whole kingdom down when I put its king in sleep and ran away like a thief in the night.

Soon there was no one but the teacher and I in the class. I was his one and only student, his star, his promising project.

I stifled the coughs when he crouched around me to teach me how to hold two arrows as one. I bit back the disgust and anger whenever he'd rebuke me. And I learned.

I became so good they showed me off to their ghost of a king (I seem to be the only one sensitive enough to notice it). The commanders who spat at my direction and darted angry looks at me now stared in wonder and beamed at me, clapping.

Kurogane was not there. He was training alone, so mighty was his skill that they found no match for him.

At night we were both too exhausted to think of anything but food and sleep. Our room grew to become a mess but we didn't see it anymore. The mud in the archery training court and the need to see beyond that stuff at times of war made me immune to the nags of a messy environment, just like in my home.

Time came to make an elite unit out of me and Kuro-zoom. Time to make the scroll come to live.

They found a fine beast for us to ride and we began practicing on collaborating our skills.

Poor silly things, they knew not what hit them. They didn't know we already fought side by side, that we were both old veterans and that the surprises of the squirming beast under us were nothing to us.

During trainings we chased our 'enemies' away, scattered them all across the camp and into the barracks.

I dreamt that Kuro-huff would stir the beast after the man who tried to take me forcefully in our room. I saw us driving him into his own room, making him tumble into his own bed, frightened and weeping. I saw the beast's front legs kicking in the air only a bit above his head.

But we never did that because Kuro-flap never cared enough. Because he still made a face at me whenever I returned from the shower rooms and his face still darkened when he entered the room. My only comfort was that when he did enter he'd mumble something in a tone that said that he sees me as an equally exhausted fellow soldier. And that is better then a leach of a housewife, yes?

I don't do the laundry anymore but I get my whiff of him still. When we ride in the open fields on the way to and from our training fields, when we ride in action. His cape is on him, fluttering in the wild wind all around me.

We are in action and we practice; we're a team, a unit of our own, and a whole together.

Kurogane is all dirty and smelly and sweaty before me on the beast.

When the roads get rough and the beast becomes unstable I can "Kyaa" and throw my arms around him 'for balance' then giggle.

When I giggle, I giggle sincerely.

(The End)