Title: The Wizards of Ceres, chapter 19 - Aftershocks
Warnings: No warnings this chapter; it's a very quiet chapter and not much happens.
Summary: In which Kurogane and Fai survey the spoils of their triumph, and discuss where to go from here.
Pairing: Kurogane/Fai

Author's Notes: This is the abbreviated version of this chapter. The full version can be found on the kuroxfai comm on LJ, due to ffnet's content restrictions.

The fight against the Demon Master had taken only minutes, long as they had stretched. The clean-up afterwards, however, took hours.

Seishirou's underground lair was extensive, and not all of it had been devoted to his workshop and holding cells. There were also living quarters, a library of sorts, and other laboratories filled with equipment or work in progress that Kurogane could only begin to identify; he recognized enough of the items and runes that Fai had begun to teach him to know that it was magic, but not enough to discern their meanings. And then there were the onithemselves.

By mutual unspoken agreement, they divided the labor. Fai was soon absorbed by the library and laboratory, rifling through books and materials and sorting them into piles of various sizes on the workshop floors. ("One to take with us, Kuro-chan," he'd explained cheerfully, pointing to the smaller pile; then, to the larger, "And one to burn.") Kurogane, himself, went through the living chambers and found himself going through Seishirou's personal effects.

There was not much in the way of money, or treasure; apparently Seishirou was not very interested in such things. He did find Souhi, and was glad to get her back, long-time companion to his father's sword as she had been. He found part of his armor, although it was so crumpled and damaged - he didn't even want to think about what sort of forces could have done that - as to be completely unwearable. If not for the prohibitive expensive of iron in Nihon, he'd just leave it behind; as it was, it would have to be melted down completely and reforged.

He found a number of other swords and weapons, all of Nihon manufacture; although he did not recognize the maker's marks on them, it seemed plain enough that they were also various trophies from slain demon-hunters. He even found his tantou, which he had given to Fai outside the battlefield in Ceres and never seen again. The thought that Fai had carried it with him on his disastrous embassy was strangely warming.

There were also closets overflowing with an extensive cache of luxurious clothing, perhaps the vain wizard's one self-indulgence. Kurogane took a long time going through these, looking over every piece carefully. Underneath a pile of heavy velvet robes, towards the floor of the wardrobe, he found a delicate-looking silver box. Jewelry? Had Seishirou collected female victims, as well? He reached down to pick it up, but immediately dropped it when a shock went through his hand, like the box itself had bitten him.

What the hell? Despite the lingering ache in his palm, there was something... Carefully, using folds of heavy silk to protect his hands, he picked it up and pulled it out of the closet, depositing it on a wooden desk strewn with papers. With some trepidation, he reached out and pushed back the lid.

And quickly stood back, raising his hands and letting the lid fall. The ends of his fingers still tingled fiercely, enough that he half expected to see them glowing. "Wizard," he called out, raising his voice to carry to the next chamber. "You'd better come see this."

"Not right now," Fai's voice floated back; he sounded preoccupied. "I'm trying to figure out where all these linkages go."

"I think you'd better come see this right now."

There was a long pause, and then a series of scraping and thumping noises, which heralded Fai's appearance in the doorway. "What is it?" he asked, coming across the room. Then his eyes caught on the box on the desk, and he froze. "Oh..."

"This is yours," Kurogane said quietly. "Isn't it? It feels like you."

With trembling hands, Fai reached out and lifted the silver lid again. The blue-white glow from within lit up his neck and face; light so pale ought to have washed him out and made him look sickly, but instead it seemed to imbue him with an ethereal radiance. "How..." Fai breathed. "Why is this here?"

"Isn't it obvious?" Kurogane said.

Fai shook his head. "No, I mean - why is it still here? Seishirou said, he said... he was gathering souls for his master, channeling all the power he harvested to him. The next room is full of channel linkages to funnel that power to the end destination. That was the whole point of all this. So why - why did he keep this? Why didn't he..."

"Maybe he was planning something else with it," Kurogane suggested. "Some kind of wizard-demon. Or maybe he wanted to keep it all for himself, maybe he planned to set himself up against his own master. Does it really matter why? This is yours. Take it."

"But..." Fai reached a hesitant hand out towards the sparking white surface. Like mist rising from the surface of a river, it curled up towards his hand, then fell back. "I'm not sure if I can. Or even if I should. What if he's done something to it?"

Kurogane tore his eyes away from the entrancing glow and glanced at Fai. He looked frightened and uncertain, but filled with a terrible hope. "You'd be a better one to judge that than I would. I don't smell anything of Seishirou on this. But you should think about this. He took your eye from you, and you won't be getting that back. He made you into what you are now, and I have no idea if there's any way to go back to being a normal man again. But he took your magic away from you, too. If you have any chance of getting it back, you should take it."

After a long moment, Fai nodded. He closed his eye and placed both hands in the box, in the writhing mass of light. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, but then the glow began to spread up his hands to his wrists. It spread inside his skin, lighting up his veins from within as it crept upwards to his heart, and Kurogane looked away, unnerved.

Fai tipped his head back as the eldritch light wormed through the vessels of his throat, and a small gasp escaped him; then at once it was done, and the box was merely an empty, tarnished silver jewelry box.

"You all right?" Kurogane asked quietly.

Fai opened his eye, and Kurogane's heart jumped as he saw it shining bright blue. But when Fai tilted his head forward again, the tears pooled and fell down his cheek, leaving a trail of blue-silver sparkles in its wake, and the color of his eye remained demon-gold. A second bright tear made a parallel track down the other side of his face. "I'm all right. Just a... strange feeling." He reached up to swipe his sleeve over his face, and gave an embarrassed chuckle. "Oh, sorry. Whatever must Kuro-pon think of me, getting all weepy over this."

"Don't be ridiculous." Kurogane said, somewhat uncomfortably. The light was quickly fading as the wet trails dried, and had faded from under his skin, but the memory of it was still unnerving.

"Well, then." Fai's shoulders straightened, and he lifted his head high. "Perhaps we'd better get back to work."

There were also Seishirou's experiments to be disposed of. Some of them, animals waiting to be used in experiments or only barely touched, could be released back into the wild; Fai took over the job of coaxing the angry and terrified animals out of their cages and back into the free air. Others had already begun their terrible metamorphosis; for them, a quick end to their suffering was the only mercy.

Fai did not return to the workshop when Kurogane started dispatching the remaining onis; Kurogane was not surprised. It would be cruel to ask Fai to return to those dark pits where he had suffered so horribly. Instead, he went to each one in turn, methodically dispatching each creature with his sword. Trapped in their narrow stone holes, there was little danger - even Kurogane felt a slightly sour taste at dispatching such helpless, trapped enemies like cattle at a slaughterhouse. But it had to be done.

There were enough pits to house hundreds of creatures; now, however, a bare few dozen remained, and the thought of what havoc those oni could now be wreaking on his home country made Kurogane itch to be finished and away. By the time he finished the last row, exhausted, filthy, and aching, Fai still had not returned.

Kurogane went to look for him outside. It was late afternoon, and the sun was already beginning to slant behind the higher western hills, giving an orange glow over the Valley of Demons. The ground was strewn with ashes and cinders of the destroyed tree, still slightly warm when crunched underfoot; a brisk breeze whipped the ashes into Kurogane's face, stinging his eyes.

Now that the illusion was dispelled, he could clearly see the terrain for what it was; hard-packed dull grey earth interspersed with broken stone, slashed by pits and trenches. Gaping stone mouths in the steep slope to the east probably led into the demon pits, although he had no particular desire to go and check it. While disposing of the captive monsters he'd taken a hit to his left arm that hurt like hell, and had trouble moving that arm around much.

Fai was about a hundred paces away, at the edge of the broad stretch of level ground that more or less marked the border of Seishirou's lair. The magician was crouched down, intent on the ground at his feet, but he looked up as Kurogane approached. "All finished?" he asked somberly.

Kurogane gave him a short nod. "What are you doing here?" he said. "If it's all the same to you, I don't want to spend any more time looking at this hellhole than I have to."

"I was just making some preparations of my own." Fai stood up and brushed his hands across his thighs, shedding ashes and dust from it. "Why don't you go and get the horses, and load them up here to go?"

"You want me to carry all those books you picked out?" Kurogane demanded. "Do your own heavy lifting!"

Fai gave him an impish smile, and as he breezed by him he gave him a quick peck on the cheek. "But I have big, strong, manly Kuro-pon to carry things for me," he cooed. "I'm almost finished here. I just have a few more to do, then we can leave."

Grumbling slightly, Kurogane made two more trips into the underground workshop to carry back the things they'd decided to take away with them; the stolen weapons, Seishirou's amulet - Kurogane figured his head would be more of a pain to carry - and the books that Fai had picked out, as well as a few other small pieces of equipment from his laboratory that Kurogane didn't even know the purpose of. Fortunately they were traveling light, or the horses might have complained at the sudden overburdening.

Fai had moved from one point on the perimeter to another as Kurogane worked, apparently marking points on an invisible line with some sort of sigil. He'd looked at it, but not recognizing any of the runes in its makeup, left the magician to his work. Now, as Kurogane stood impatiently by the horses and tried not to lean too heavily on his horse's bridle, Fai came to his feet and headed over towards him.

"All finished?" Kurogane asked him in return, and Fai nodded.

"Just a few precautions," he said, as he saddled his own horse. "There are some very dangerous things downstairs, and I didn't quite think it was all right to just leave them there for anyone to find if they happened to wander in this way. It could be quite a lot of trouble."

"Huh," Kurogane said. He wondered if Fai meant trouble for that unwitting traveler, or trouble for everyone else if they got hold of Seishirou's research. Or both.

"You know, in his own way, he was a genius," Fai was saying, sounding almost wistful, almost regretful. "If he hadn't been so twisted, he could have made wonderful contributions to the world. I wonder where he came from originally... what his story was."

Kurogane gave him a sarcastic look. Who the hell cared, as long as he was gone now? "Well, if you'd like, I can go and get his head and bring it up here, and you can ask him."

"It would be pretty risky," Fai said seriously. "Trying to raise a spirit so soon after death has the possibility of infecting you with their death energy, and even if I could get hold of him, he probably wouldn't be any more helpful dead than he was alive."

"...That was a joke, wizard."

"Oh. Oh, right. Sorry."

With some relief, they turned their horses away and led them at a walk up the slope to the east. When they crested the ridge, Fai reined his horse around; Kurogane glanced behind him and also pulled to a stop. "What is it?" he asked.

Fai was looking out over the valley, an open, blackened sore on the landscape, stripped of all illusions or defenses. He raised both hands in the air, and Kurogane saw a glowing sign appear in the ashes of the valley floor - then another, and another, appearing in sequence in a perimeter around Seishirou's lair.

"Reth," Fai said softly, and with a start Kurogane recognized the word; it was one of the command words for burn.

A huge, rushing wind seemed to roar past them; the lights on the valley for flared into sudden brightness, streaming in the high wind to join into a single unbroken circle of light. Within that circle, the blackened husk of the monstrous tree began to glow; first red, then yellow. Then, in an explosion of heat and light that nearly blinded him and caused his horse to shy and whinny in panic, the valley floor caught fire.

Fai turned to look at him, streams of pale hair whipping in the hot valley wind below. "We should probably go now, Kuro-sama," he said, and he had to shout to make himself heard over the noise of the flames.

His horse was more than willing enough to surge away from the sudden inferno; in fact it was all Kurogane could do to hold him to a trot, down the barren, broken slope, and not a full-out gallop that would probably break its leg. What the hell did you do seemed like a redundant question, given the circumstances; instead, he reined his horse in until he was riding level with Fai, and shouted to him: "Are you sure that was a good idea?"

"It was necessary, Kuro-chan," Fai called back over his shoulder. "Don't worry. The cleansing fire itself will be limited to the circle I cast."

Kurogane glanced around them incredulously. These slopes were still littered with dry, dead tree husks, the floor underfoot crunching with dead leaves and brambles. "Limited? You think so?"

"Well, the spell fire will be. Ordinary fire is another matter. All things considered, it would probably be a good idea for us to get away from here." Fai grinned at him, then spurred his horse on ahead.

The image of the streaming ring of light, the sudden explosion of flames, kept replaying in Kurogane's mind as he followed Fai down the hillside. This was the first time, he realized, that he'd seen Fai at perform magic at full strength. Always before he had been restrained; either injured and weak, or dissembling, or pulling his punches, or fettered. But Fai was free of the geas and restored of whatever magics Seishirou had robbed from him; he was now at the top of his powers.

As Kurogane rode away from the conflagration behind him, for the first time he began to wonder what the hell he'd gotten himself into.

They rode hard through the afternoon hours, putting as much distance as possible between them and the burning valley. They picked their way over the dry and broken ground and through the dry husks of the dead trees, until night began to fall in a soft blue-grey haze and it was no longer safe to continue. Even when the last of the daylight faded, it still wasn't completely dark; a towering orange light from behind them underlit the overcast sky and reflected off the glowing column of smoke.

Occasional breezes blowing towards them were unnaturally warm and carried the smell of smoke, but not the dry hot winds that would preface a wildfire. They found a riverbed with some water still trickling through it and secured their uneasy horses to a nearby snag, and settled down for the night. In that warm, eerie red light, surrounded by dead trees, neither of them particularly felt like risking a campfire.

Fai was inclined to fuss over Kurogane's new injuries, and Kurogane was inclined to let him. After a victory like this one he knew he ought to be proud and triumphant, but the letdown that came after the rush of battle and the thrill of victory left him feeling rather depressed and aching, all the bruises and hurts he'd sustained during the fight coming back to him. His left arm was either sprained or fractured, and they both agreed that the best course of action was just to support it with a sling and strain it as little as possible for the next few days. Once they'd cleaned and bandaged his injuries and Fai had fed him enough dried and leftover food to his satisfaction, they fell to talking.

"We ought to get back to Nihon as soon as possible," Kurogane said. "Tomoyo had warning, but I don't know what sort of defense she'd be able to mount in such little time..." Despite the urgency in the situation, his voice was tired; he was tired. To bring warning to Nihon before it was too late, to track down and kill the enemy that had plagued him for so long... that had taken nearly everything he had. He could do nothing more tonight.

"Seishirou said she did," Fai reminded him. "That she and someone from Ceres had managed to work together to put up some kind of defense. I don't know what's going on in Ceres, but he certainly seemed to think someone from there was helping her."

"We're supposed to take his word on anything?" Kurogane made a sound of disgust in his throat. "Anyway, we know his creatures didn't all just curl up and die when he did - the ones in the lab didn't, anyway. Whatever ones he created and sent out before are still out there, and they need to be hunted down and killed."

"And what about after that?" Fai asked him. The question had a teasing tone, but this being Fai, that didn't mean he wasn't also serious. "When all the demons are killed, and no more new ones will be created. What will you do once you've put yourself out of a job?"

Teasing or not, the question sent a cold shock over Kurogane. All his childhood he'd been trained to follow in his parents' footsteps as stewards of Suwa, but that would never be, now; all his adult life he'd trained and worked towards killing the oni. What would he do, when that central pillar of his life was removed? Who was Kurogane Demon-Queller without any demons left to fight?

Kurogane looked over at his companion. Fai's features were already losing definition, a pale red-tinted blur in the shadows. But his weight, leaning against Kurogane's good arm, was heavy and real. "I don't know," he said at last. "I think it's too early to call it done, anyway. Don't get me wrong, it's good that we killed Seishirou - he's been our enemy for far too long. But we don't know that more demons will never be created - after all, that guy wasn't acting alone."

"You're talking about Seishirou's master?" Fai said softly. "He mentioned one to me during - a few times, but he never said his name. I know that he exists, and that Seishirou was sending power to him for some purpose. I don't know any more than that."

"Yeah. He exists." Kurogane reached into his hip pouch - the place he'd always carried his oni trophies as proof of a kill - and pulled out Seishirou's amulet, holding it up to the smoke-stained sky. Where the gold of the bat design caught the fiery light it glowed red, like the amulet had been dipped in blood. "That guy was wearing this, but it wasn't his sigil to begin with. I searched his entire lair and I never found the sword with the bat hilt; and I never found the robe with that design on its sleeves, either."

The image of that sword flashed across his memory again. He'd only seen it for a few seconds, on that terrible night, but that had been enough to sear every detail of that sword, of that arm, into his memory forever. "It wasn't him. It wasn't the same man." His hand clenched around the amulet, feeling the jagged edges dig painfully into his palm. "He's still out there, somewhere, laughing -"

Fai's hand covered his on the amulet; gentle, exerting no force, but his intention was plain. Grudgingly, Kurogane relaxed his hold on the amulet, let it fall on its chain.

"I saw him, you know," he said lowly. "Seishirou's master, the one who planned all this. I didn't see his face, but I saw him. On that night - on that night, I was with my mother in the shrine. She wasn't well - she had been sick for a long time - but because my father had gone out to fight she sat up in the shrine anyway, doing the rituals to strengthen the border wards. There was a noise from outside, like something crashing, and someone screamed... I went to the door to see what it was and when I turned back, there was this... hole in the air, over the altar..."

He turned his head sharply towards Fai. "You saw too, didn't you? When you were - feeding from me - I saw some of your memories. You must have seen mine."

"I saw some things," Fai said quietly. "I don't understand all of what I saw."

"I didn't understand what I saw then, either," Kurogane said. "But I think I'm starting to now. It was a portal. I recognized the look of it, when you cast that spell to get us out of the dungeon. It was a portal from somewhere else to my mother's shrine, and someone was reaching through it. He had a sword, and he'd thrust it right into her - I could see the blade coming out of her back, towards me. I was there - in the very same room - but I couldn't do anything... All our defenses, all our walls and wards, and he just reached right into the heart of our home, into our shrine and snuffed her out, like she was -"

His voice broke; that surprised him. His parents' death had been years ago, and he'd thought on it long enough, often enough that time and exposure had worn away the first flush of grief. He could think of his father's death, his mother's murder, his home's destruction now calmly, with barely a touch of distantly-kindled rage. He'd thought he had come to terms with it long ago.

But now, as he took a breath and opened his mouth to give voice to these things, it was as if he'd lifted the stopper on a surge of grief that roared up from some deeply hidden place and swamped him. His throat tightened; his voice choked. He had to swallow hard before he could speak again.

"You know, I've never talked to anyone - about this," he said, and it came out somewhat steadier. "Not even Tomoyo. When I woke up Shirasagi castle, she already knew. She'd seen. I never told anyone else."

Fai moved closer, an unpressing presence in the spring twilight. Just listening.

"I heard the screams from outside... I went outside, and Suwa was burning. The oni were everywhere - they came right through the walls, right through all our defenses, they tore everything apart. One of them came right towards me, and I saw - it had Ginryuu, my father's sword. He would never have let go of that sword, not while he was alive."

He had to stop there, stop talking while he struggled to push the memories down, put them back in their box.

"So your father..." Fai said tentatively, his hand tightening on Kurogane's arm. "What happened to him?"

"My father was killed by the oni," Kurogane said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. "His soul was destroyed by them. He can never go on to the next life, now, he can never be reborn. That was why - because that happened to him - I always felt that... I was never afraid to suffer the same fate, myself."

"Because you felt you deserved the same fate as him?" Fai asked softly.

"No, not like that!" Kurogane sat up straight, stung by the implications. "It was more like - he never balked at that fate, even though it would be the final death. If he didn't flinch from that death, then how could I, and still be a person that he would be proud of?"

Kurogane continued, struggling against his unsteady voice, against the insistent burning in his eyes. "I always wanted - both of them - to be proud of me. Sometimes I wonder - I wonder if they would be."

After a moment of silence, Fai said tentatively, "I'm sure they would be proud of you, if they loved you. And - if they loved you - then surely they'd want you to be happy, as well... wouldn't they?"

It was the sort of shallow, meaningless platitude that people said at funerals, and Kurogane was about to bite Fai's head off for it; the only thing that stopped him was the hesitance, the uncertainty in his voice. Fai had never had parents who loved him; Fai honestly did not know.

"I guess so," Kurogane said, his voice strained. His throat was tight with too many feelings, his eyes burned. He didn't want to talk about this any more. Talking about it brought all the feelings back too strongly; words made it all real again. But the sorrow and loneliness ten years gone came boiling up in him now, too strong to push them back down again; and he burst out before he could stop himself, "But I'll never get to hear them say it."

He broke down then, and Fai reached out to pull him into his arms as he gasped and shuddered, trying to fight against the sobs that wanted to tear themselves free from his throat. Never, never again... never see them again, never touch them again, never tell them I love them ever again...

Fai held him without saying anything, his face buried in Fai's neck, the silky blond hair tickling at his nose. Fai was warm tonight, his heart beating steady and alive. He loved him and he was still here, still alive. Kurogane squeezed his eyes shut against traitorous tears and vowed to any gods listening that he would do anything,anything it took to keep him so.

In time the shaking quieted, the spasms eased and he was able to take a breath again without it choking into sobs. His arms went around Fai in return, and the man willingly shifted around to accommodate the embrace. "They were amazing people," Fai said softly, reverently. "And they would be proud to have you for a son."

"You never met them," Kurogane said; his voice was as rough and gravelly as though he'd just woken up after a long sleep. "How would you know."

"I met you," Fai said.

They lay together in the twilight, their soft breaths slowly coming into rhythm together. After a long time, under the burning sky, they slept.

~tbc.

Additional author's notes: Just because a couple of readers seem to have been confused, Fai does NOT return to normal from being a demon and his eye was NOT restored. I'm not really sure why people think it was, except that in the manga he got them both back at the same time - but in this chapter the only thing he got back was his magical power.

I keep saying that the next chapter will be the last. And then another chapter appears. I give up, I'm not going to jinx it again, THIS FIC WILL GO ON TO INFINITY. Or possibly for one more chapter. Twenty is a nice round number, don't you think?