So I wrote this thing, and for a while I thought I might hate it, but after some encouraging comments I've decided that I don't. Fye/Kurogane in deed, Fye/Syaoran in desire, and (per usual) wangst throughout.
Drift Course
Set a man adrift without a compass, watch his face as dry land slips away, slips beneath the horizon. What do you see?
---
Syaoran is a person who is learned not to rely on anything so fickle as place: a child who grew up vagrant, moving too much to ever settle. Instead he defines himself by people, words like home and self shaped around those he cares for, grounded in his own loyalties.
There is only one familiar face for him here, and she is the strangest of them all, removed further from him than distance could ever take her. There is nothing to anchor him, and so he drifts.
And so they drift.
---
In Outo, in the café, Syaoran gets drunk and leans against Fye, eyes hazy bright and tongue loosened by alcohol.
Can I tell you a secret? he whispers loudly in Fye's ear, breath furnace hot, and doesn't wait for an answer to continue:
I don't know what I'm doing. It scares me sometimes.
Fye wants to tell him it's okay, that nobody ever really knows what they're doing, not really. He wants to tousle Syaoran's hair reassuringly, slide the soft brown strands through his fingers and pull the boy close. He thinks he might want to kiss that wet, liquor-slicked mouth, kiss it breathless and red and gasping for more.
But he's supposed to be a cat tonight, and cats don't talk, and they don't kiss lost, frightened boys, so he just grins and tops up Syaoran's glass, and scrambles off to meow at Sakura.
Later that night, much later, he's slumped against the wall with Kurogane's mouth on his throat, but it's all right, this is all right, because Kurogane knows enough not to think he's a good person, knows enough not to want to know more. The kids are asleep, oblivious, and it's all right, it doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything at all.
---
Fye wonders what it's like to become lost. He's been a little lost his whole life, has never quite known where or what he is, and if you've never had a map it's difficult to imagine losing one.
He thinks he's never met anyone so lost as Syaoran is. He finds this funny at times, because Syaoran's the one with the purpose after all, his quest they're all on, and if he's lost what does that make them? He also finds it terrifying at times, for much the same reasons; which view he takes depends on his current mood.
---
There is a look that Syaoran gives him, sometimes. He looks at Fye with the one eye that isn't, and the other eye pleading, saying I never asked for this and I can't do this alone. His drifting out to sea look, as Fye thinks of it, and knows that really it's there all the time, lying just beyond the devotion and determination that he wears like armour, like a true princess' knight. What he doesn't know is what Syaoran wants him to do with that look, what Syaoran wants from him. He's not sure he wants to know.
Fye's been lost in one place his whole life, and now that he's running he's not about to go getting found. He knows better than to orientate himself around people, and he certainly knows better than to look for direction from someone who's just lost his way for the first time.
So when he sees that look that Syaoran gives him, the strange hopefulness of it, he simply pretends that he doesn't It's cruel, perhaps, and selfish, but Fye can't afford to be anything other than cruel and selfish, if he wants to survive. If he wants to live to run another day, and he does.
---
See a man adrift at sea without a compass, with no land in sight; see the look in his eyes. You can save me, it says, and you have to. It says: don't turn away.
Fye has been drifting for too long; he can't save anyone, not even himself.
He turns away.