Notes:Written for LiveJournal's 31 Days.
I have tasted the bitter and the sweet of affairs
And walked over the rough and smooth path of days.
-- August 20th
How Stories Continue
It began with a fairy tale.
Simple, easily deposited onto a strange and distant shore, they found a path faded with casual use through a grove of birds with all the colors of light seen through water. They'd barely had to touch metal to wood and vines at all while passing beneath the jungle canopy. At night they built a fire that burnt huskily against the night, but with little smoke. Kurogane and Mokona wandered off to collect kindling and were found again later, paused beneath a sweeping tree on the way back to camp with an armful of twigs and Kurogane starting to twist Mokona's ears into raging knots.
He didn't seem much happier as Fai hoisted the creature from the depths of its torment into his arms to begin a tender moment. "Kuro-tan," he said cheerfully, tilting a glance, "Mokona can cuddle you too if you're lonely!"
"Mokona has plenty of love to give," Mokona agreed, peering out from the circle of Fai's arms, and waved sweetly at Kurogane, who glowered back.
"I do not want to be cuddled! And it's Kurogane! Not Kuro-tan, Kurogane!"
They exchanged a glance.
"Kuro-tan sounds so sad," Fai noted mournfully as Kurogane roared noisily in the background to the general theme of someday planning both their deaths and dancing over their graves.
"Tell stories!" Mokona proposed, with a bright, slanting look. As Fai's arms loosened, he hopped down to the soil and bounded towards the fire, which threw peculiar casts of light over his wide eyes, the jewel that gleamed in his head. "Stories will make Kuro-kuro feel better!"
"Stories?" said the princess (to the background of Kurogane protesting that he'd feel better if someone buried the white manjuu), with a sudden flare of interest that dropped as her lashes curved low over her (empty) eyes, remembering what she could not. Fai, watching, caught how the boy twisted back, touched the corner of her wrist as his mouth curled encouragingly. Her face untensed from its terrible loneliness. She laid long fingers over his elbow as they crouched and sat in a splayed, open position around the fire.
"My father used to travel," Syaoran said, to break the unsteady silence that had built itself around her. "I know stories."
He was not a born raconteur, and sometimes he used words that even Fai could not recognise – outlandish terms and ranks for which his world had established no meaning that Mokona's spell could translate. But it was clear from each gesture that he was not telling them for Kurogane, who brooded darkly in the tangling shadows of a tree as Mokona nestled merrily in his hair and wondered whether the swordsman had stored anything to eat in it. ("MY HAIR IS NOT A PICNIC BASKET. GET OFF, DAMNED MANJUU!") Nor was it for Mokona or Fai – not when he held so carefully the rapt features of the girl bent beside him as if he thought that the sight might shatter.
The words drifted over him harmlessly: familiar themes threaded through the tales like colors that a half-blind man might recognise. A girl in danger, a magician draped in mystery – things that audiences knew and could hear without breaking. He was telling the simplest ones, where good and evil could be cut apart with an edge, a line that did not stretch as wide as the lands it divided, where the endings always faded into the same delirium of contentment.
Not all of them were so.
Stories, he knew, were dangerous territory. A stray word might draw them back to the places from which they had fled. A sentence could betray, a saying – anything that might seem as familiar as thoughts flown from the heart could be turned to an eldritch definition that only a stranger to the culture could find among all other meanings. Strangers were the most dangerous. They might not be blinded into seeing the slim paths that the narrator's eyes did – they might pluck, out of the core of all the woven words, some memory that had slipped thought and speech to become an undercurrent.
As Syaoran moved to a startled, decisive finish, Mokona broke in to tell a quick story about a man who spent so much time making faces that eventually the wind changed and it stayed that way, and he could never go into towns again for fear of cracking all of their mirrors. (It was not a fate as bad as it might have been. Magicians had uses for broken mirrors, which could be pieced together to show the universe as it was: deeply seamed, barely knotted together, chasmed and impossible.) He paused dramatically, and took his gracious bows from Syaoran and Sakura (bemused) and Fai (clapping enthusiastically with the cheerful uprightness of an admirer).
Kurogane was considerably less pleased with the moral. Shortly afterwards, he commenced dragging grotesque expressions into Mokona's face, waiting for the wind to change and hold it that way.
And inexorably, the wheel turned…
He smiled as if he had learned from a mirror when they looked at him – inquiring, serene, wary. "Ah," he sighed regret, wryly, waving a hand in the air. "Fai doesn't know any stories. Sorry!"
Fai knew only memories, and spells he could not use. All of the subjects that he had spent centuries learning turned to scattered ash by the amputation of a piece he had never thought to lose: it was very nearly funny, though not something he thought he could laugh at.
(The Witch of Dimensions had transported them with careful agreements, language precise as knives. She had never spoken of tearing out the dimensions that they carried with them, which might have cost, he thought, more magic than even the Far-East Sorceress possessed.)
-
Later, at night, he shaped the stories inside his head, as he might have carved an enchantment out of air and blood and ink beneath the skin, simply to see if he could.
A boy, he thought – they always began like that. Something fractional stirred restlessly over his face like the jump of a needle at the stinging memory. A boy, hair tousled fine as light or snow and eyes the color of oceans in winter, stooping over a book--
It was very nearly a fairy tale in itself – he shifted against the soil, smiling to himself again in the movement of a reflection – with a magician and a king, magic that would give them everything but what they wanted, power that could not be spent, an enemy as unalterable as time.
He trailed his fingers through the soil, flattened his palm over the sand. (With the powers she had stripped from him in a single marking, the Sorceress had removed, too, all traces of the man they would be seeking, now, in the absence of the king in that other world.)
"A different story," he said to the flat summer air, "for a different time."
A time that had already passed, he thought – with all the worlds unfurled before them for the journey, the quest, Fai would have had to know less of magic than he did to think that there was some remote chance of never returning, of lingering forever in kingdoms outside the reach of his own monarch. He didn't need to stay away forever, for peace to find him… only for long enough.
Some spells require keys. Others may be broken only by the passing of days. But whatever cruelties the final moments may hold, these times that have passed will not fade.
end