Blood Price

A/N - Friendly little note: I highly suggest that you don't read this if you haven't read up to chapter 120 yet!

It will screw with your head; trust me on this one.

That being said, I do apologize for writing this; I do love Fai to pieces and it's inordinately cruel to write this, but it's practice and the stupid thing wouldn't leave me in peace until I wrote it out. I hate it. But sometimes things grab me even when I wish they wouldn't.

Disclaimer - I will never own Tsubasa…

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I don't know what the hell is going on - I just know that the sudden rumbling of the stairs beneath my feet as I run downwards is traveling, vibrating, up my legs, my spine, and deep into whatever part of my brain tells me: this is bad. Get out of here!

Except I can't, dammit, I can't because the little princess is down there, somewhere, helpless, and I can't leave her in the middle of whatever it is that's happening. The dream-seer says the other two are down in the basement as well, and though I think it's stupid to trust pictures your subconscious comes up with, I know the kid and I know what he would do if the manju bun said he sensed a feather or the princess' soul down there. And that's tear hell for leather down there and do something about it.

Kind of like what I'm doing now, actually.

The stairs are wide and crumbling, and the ground shaking beneath me doesn't help my balance at all. I see dust and small chunks of rock raining from the ceiling as the place shakes, and I get the sudden vivid mental image of the whole building, weakened by the acid rain, creaking, swaying… collapsing and burying us all under tons of rock and steel. It's against all common sense to run deeper into the bowels of this building, but it's not like I have much choice. Something's up, something big. I have to find out what - even though the rumbling tells me that this is not the kind of something that I can hit with my sword. That thought pisses me off, because it means that I'm helpless, and I hate feeling helpless. It creeps me out, and there's been enough creeping being done here today.

Only moments ago the body of the little princess in my arms dissolved into random Brownian swirls and disappeared. She hadn't been breathing for nearly ten minutes. The dream-seer said she might have transported to join her body under the water. All the more reason for me to find her, then.

Things are beyond my control now, and it makes me mad.

But all thoughts of anger and helplessness evaporate into nothing as the dream-seer and I break out of the corridor and into the basement.

There was a reservoir of water here - I remember someone told us that. But now that water is boiling upwards in an angry cyclone, whirling and howling in a furious, demonic, wordless howl, so furiously that the place shakes even more fiercely beneath my feet. It's hard to run; the ground slips back and forth, dancing underneath me as I go. I'm not sure where my foot will land; the ground might suddenly decide to slip a few inches, and then you'd be down, rolling until you caught hold of something, or slammed into it… or simply fell off the edge. I don't like to look over that edge; it's a hell of a long way down. It's so loud that even if I were capable of a rational train of thought right now I would be hard-pressed to hear myself think. I still don't know what's going on and I'm even less sure that I want to.

At the landing I see the manju bun sitting on the shoulder of one of the cloaked men crowded together on the landing, staring out at what's left of their water reservoir. I increase my speed, leaving the dream-seer behind, and skid to a stop a few feet away. The thing spots me and turns, apparently too scared to take a flying leap at me like it usually does, crying, "Kurogane!" There is fear in its voice and that does nothing to improve my own state of uneasiness; if it's bad enough to worry the manju….

"Syaoran and Fai haven't come out of the water!"

I stare at the waterspout and cannot help but think dumbly that if those two are in that, they're probably not going to get out of it in one piece. I can just see the outline of something in the waterspout, something huge and shadowy, and I think that if the water knocks them hard enough into it that it will probably kill them.

Oh, damn! Just my luck to arrive in time to be forced into saving their asses! Why is it always me!

"Get back!" I snap to one of the cloaked guys, pushing him aside as I make my way to the edge. The raw power of that thing makes me wonder what the hell I'm thinking if I'm thinking of a way to go in and get those two idiots out, let alone not get myself killed. It's a steep drop-off past this point and I don't know what the hell I'm going to do - just that I need to do something. I'm not entirely clear on why, and I know it's sheer madness, but I've still got to try.

And then the water is gone, whirling up into nothing, and we can see what it was that was hidden under the calm surface of the reservoir.

Down in the place where all those tons of water were is an enormous, pulsating sphere of… something, like an enormously fat spider sitting hunched and twisted and supreme in the center of a web made of its own fleshy legs. I think I see it twitch; I can feel the power pulsating off it like a thousand mini-flesh-spiders burrowing around somewhere under my skin. I step forward, seeing a familiar figure standing on one of the arms, torn and beaten but upright, straight - the kid, he's OK, and I feel a momentary surge of relief until I take a second look.

"What… the…"

Something about him is very, very wrong, and as I stare harder I can see that his eyes are blank, cold, empty of every spark of light that I knew as his soul. I know what's happened, and I don't need the sudden chill in my gut to confirm it - it's his other side, the side that has only begun to show itself recently, the dark side of his fire. And my eyes leave his and are drawn to his right hand.

It's covered in blood and gore, and for a second I don't get it, I'm wondering how he hurt himself, I don't understand…

- Syaoran and Fai haven't come out of the water! -

And then my eyes slide over to the kid's other hand, and this one is clean and clenched on the shoulder of a slumped, slender, limp figure of a man in a black shirt and a beat-up cloak, the red of which is darker by several shades than the bright, almost arterial red of the blood that is dripping from this man's lowered, hidden face, pooling beneath his twisted rag-doll form and dripping off the edge into the abyss, soaking into and clumping the fair feathers of hair hiding him. But I know who it is. Of course I do.

My eyes reject what I'm seeing as an impossibility, but at least some part of me knows it is no illusion. I can feel my eyes dilating, and that can't be right, you're not supposed to be able to feel that happening, I can feel every capillary and arteriole in my face draining of blood; I can feel the roughness of the crumbling rock under my feet, the sigh and swell of the air moving through this place in cool, slow, breaths, feel the presence of the others behind me in the press and faint heat of the air. I can't think, but I swear that I can count the individual drops of blood as they fall from the kid's hand…

He's got something, pale and glinting, in his bloody hand, and those pupilless, soulless eyes calmly watch us watching him in disbelief and horror as he raises that hand slowly to his mouth. I'm unaccountably reminded of a man deliberately savoring the last bites of a good meal, and it hits me that whatever he's got he's going to actually swallow. And finally it hits me what he must have in his hand.

The mage's bloody, dripping face - the glint of something pale - and I feel my stomach lurching even as I furiously order it not to, as the kid's hand goes to his partly open mouth. If I believed in a god any more, I'd swear: oh dear god, that is disgusting. Dark Syaoran is a monster - it even makes me sick! The kid can't possibly be human. How could he do that? Even like this, even in this state? The kid I know loves that goddamn mage like a big brother.

This is the price we pay for not telling the kid about what happens in his little black-out spells, not warning him so that he might have a chance to control them. This is the price we pay for keeping it secret to save him from more worry; the price we pay for assuming that it would sort itself out on its own, that it wasn't that big of a deal.

Actually I'm not the one paying the price, except to curse myself for a gullible, lazy fool. The one who's really paying for it is the mage, and he's not even the one who noticed it first and still decided to say nothing. He might find a bit of black humour in the irony of that.

Maybe.

Except that I don't know if he's still alive to appreciate it.

Because he's not moving; the kid's just standing there, swallowing; but that stupid, annoying, unfortunate bastard is not moving and if he's breathing it's very, very shallowly… and oh, shit, what do I do now?