Rating: PG-13 bordering on R? DON'T ASK ME, MAN. /hands of despair
Pairing: Still KuroxFai het.
Notes: In which I take a wide look at the start of the manga.

Lady of War part two
(there there baby it's just textbook stuff, it's in the ABC of growing up)

She disliked him as soon as she saw him.

Part of it was her tension and distaste for the circumstances that had brought her here. She had been thrust from her home world, defensive and unsure and still spattered with the blood of the would-be assassins she had killed; her father's sword was heavy across her shoulders and her armour tight around her ribs, and she was hunkered defensively low to the ground. A warrior, every motion deliberate and poised and with her every thought focused toward death - someone else's, for sure.

But he... he had been poised and graceful and tall, his staff in the crook of his arm and the rain slicking his shining hair to his face. He was pale and blue where she was dark and red; he wore an open and affable expression to her surly growl, he knew where he was while she didn't, and he was at peace with their location while she sure as hell wasn't.

Useless pretty boy, she had thought and curled her lip at him, and nothing about that initial meeting in the rain and gloom of the witch's world had changed her mind. He was frivolous and airy and smiled that useless smile, and he called her Kuro-kun and she just didn't like him.

"I'm not a boy," she growled, and he laughed.

"Lady Black looks like one in that armour~" he'd said, and she narrowed her eyes and showed him her teeth, wondering if he even knew how rattled he looked, tension lines faint but clear around his eyes and mouth. Whatever it was he didn't want to go home to had left its marks on him, no matter what he wanted to pretend.

She also didn't trust the witch of dimensions as far as she could throw her, which didn't help any. For all her great power she had a sly smile and there was something off, something wrong about her aura that she couldn't quite pinpoint; almost as if the witch wasn't really a person at all but a reflection of one, moving and breathing and walking around but cold. When the witch demanded her copy of Ginryuu - of Ginryuu, her father's sword, blessed by her mother's magics! - she had refused, but the stupid wizard had convinced her to give it up and she wanted to bite his head off.

At least, she thought in those first few days as they explored the foreign world of Hanshin, the other members of the group seemed like decent individuals. The boy was studious and intense and very obviously infatuated with the sleeping princess, who was pretty and tiny and delicate and everything Kurogane was not. Syaoran had the right coordination to learn sword play, but she didn't offer to teach him because she told herself that she wasn't going to get attached.

She needed to get home. She needed to be home, so she could wring Tomoyo's little neck for this stunt and concentrate on her quest for power. She didn't see what she was supposed to learn from a pair of children and a liar, none of whom were even close to her equals with the blade. She didn't want to care too much and so she tried not to, not about the quest or the kids or the fucking pork bun and definitely not the idiot wizard with his stupid smile. Her palms itched every day for the hilt of a real sword, and without one to hand she felt -

(like a little girl again, staring at a sword protruding from her mother's back; like some stupid spoilt kid helpless in the face of danger)

- unsettled.

But even though she told herself to ignore him, the wizard kept sticking out.

Fai proved to be a quick and skilled fighter in Hanshin and by the time they left Koryo she had to revise her initial estimation of him, changing him from a 'total idiot' to 'acts like a total idiot'. There was more to him than just blue eyes and a silly smile, although he certainly liked to pretend that was all there was. He was fast and smart and a decent actor, but she was starting to see past the exterior and he didn't like that, either.

He didn't care too much about her gender and certainly didn't skimp her on the hard work, the lazy bastard, currently sitting on the ground with a tray of iced tea while she fixed their host's roof all by herself in Koryo, and she kept glaring down at him through the partially repaired rafters and fantasising to herself what he might look like dead. It wasn't just the liar's smile that got to her.

He had a stubborn inability to pronounce her given name and instead clung to a whole barrage of nicknames, some more irritating than others. The first time he called her Kuro-daddy she was in the midst of banging together some ceiling beams in the rafters, and she threw the carpenter's mallet at his head hard enough she might have caused some serious damage if she wasn't confident he would duck.

"Hyuu, Kuro-boy is so cruel~" he pouted, raising his glass toward her. "She made me spill my tea!"

"It's KUROGANE, and stop making whistling sounds with your mouth!" she roared back at him and he simply beamed at her, and she told herself that it wasn't worth killing him because of Tomoyo's damn curse. It wasn't. It wasn't. It really wasn't.

Repetition seemed to help.

"Kuro-rin would make a good daddy!" chirped a third, also annoyingly-familiar voice just then, reminding her that the moron wasn't the only one who she needed to hurt; she looked down to see the pork bun and the two kids, fresh from their journey to the market. With a growl she jumped off the roof and landed neatly on her feet, starting to gather her borrowed tools. With any luck they'd found something and could get the girl's feather and go.

"Um, Mokona, Kurogane-san is a woman," Syaoran tried. "They're not usually, um, daddies." His whole face was burning red, and Kurogane folded her arms over her chest and glared at the damn pork bun, which promptly launched itself from Sakura's arms and tried to burrow into her cleavage again while she yelled and tried to fish it out.

"The fuck is wrong with you, pork bun?" she bellowed, holding it at arm's length where it swung backward and forward between her thumb and forefinger and pouted.

"Kuro-daddy's chest is nice and warm," it said, and she was just drawing breath to tell it what she thought of that idea when Fai stepped neatly past her and pried Mokona out of her grip. It fled onto his shoulder and buried its face in his hair with a sob, and he petted it absently.

"There, there," he said, turning away, and she deflated. "I know, Kuro-cleavage is mean."

Oh, that was it. "Kuro-what?" she thundered, drawing her knife and missing Ginryuu more, and the ensuing chaos bought the neighbours running, convinced a murder was taking place. They almost weren't wrong.

Perhaps it was natural that as the adults of the group they'd be forced to spend time together. It certainly wasn't by choice that somehow when it came time to split up - for sleeping arrangements, for scouting, for fighting - she ended up with Fai as her partner more often than not. She'd never had a partner, but she didn't think this idiot counted.

Either way, as the worlds passed Fai's mask began to crack more and more, and by the time they ended up in Outo she was seeing great chunks of it flake away as she became aware that there was more to Fai than he let on; a recklessness that pissed her off, a lack of regard for his own life, a desperate fear of something in his past that made him keep his bonds with the group light and superficial which paradoxically made her want to know more.

By the time she put her sword to his throat after a demon attack on Outo's dark streets she could no longer say she cared nothing for his well being.

She picked him up by the collar and dragged him into the bar and, mindful of his ankle, got him a seat at the corner of the room. While he whined about his ankle she leaned against it backwards with her arms folded over her chest, studying his face thoughtfully, and she was so wrapped up in tracking the tiny flicker of emotions he didn't want her to see that she almost missed the singer approaching the microphone.

She was a beautiful woman, the singer, just the right height and busty with long thick hair, nothing like Kurogane. She looked away, remembering something Kendappa had said to her once when she'd been a teenager, teasingly: I should really order you to stop growing. No man wants a woman twice as tall as he is! Not that that would stop me.

Fuck men, then, she'd replied candidly, and Kendappa had laughed and Souma had looked amused if faintly scandalized and even Tomoyo had covered her smile with her sleeve, and it was something she stuck to as she grew even taller than that, a message hammered home over the years by Nihon society at large: that she was flat-footed and tone-deaf, that she couldn't dance or sing or play a musical instrument, that her manners were beyond dreadful and while her ability to cleave a demon in half with her father's ki attack had made her the pride of Suwa, out in the larger world she was an undesirable mate and an even less desirable wife.

She'd heard it over and over again, and so she decided not to care. If she didn't care, then it didn't matter. She was still the strongest warrior in Nihon, and what did she want with marriage and babies and all that gross stuff noblewomen were supposed to do? Her family and their lands had been destroyed. She wasn't the only heir of a noble family any more, she was an orphan and she knew she would grow strong to live up to her father's reputation, and that was that.

But Fai... there was something about Fai, and when she saw his expression during the singer's performance she thought she knew what it was: loneliness, and a sad acceptance of it. He didn't look like he was wowed by the singer's beauty, and she found herself kind of gladdened by that even as she pushed the thought away. He was an idiot and a liar, and she was a six-foot-four swordswoman who could cut a demon in half and had the muscles to prove it, and she was incapable of the kind of etiquette even rustic nobles expected of their women and she didn't care.

She really didn't. Really.

After that things seemed different between them, somehow, although she couldn't put her finger on what exactly it was. He still called her those stupid nicknames and insinuated she was a boy right up until he walked into the tent they were sharing in Yama and saw her without her traditional chest-bindings, the cloth that flattened her breasts and kept them from aching when she exercised. After that the Kuro-kuns and Kuro-boys faded in favour of Kuro-G-cup and Kuro-endowed and other mammary based bastardisations of her name, and if she didn't punch him as hard as she could it was only because she was resigned to it.

And then along came a ruined cityscape and rain that burned and it was about then that she realised maybe she did care, and it sucked.

Suddenly everything changed for the worse.

-tbc

Author's notes: Another part down! Vamp!Fai incoming, but for now, a brief omake set post-series at some point!

She woke up later that night, just before dawn judging from the shadows on the walls. There was a heavy weight on her chest, but after this many years she didn't even have to look down to see what it was; just groped blindly until she found what she was looking for, running her fingers through the soft fine hairs at the nape of his neck, and then curled her hand into a fist and pulled her lover's face out from between her breasts by his hair.

"I am not a pillow," she told him, as he blinked at her sleepily. "Keep to your own side of the bed, moron."

He pouted at her, but his eyes were bright with warm amusement. "But Kuro-chan is so squishy," he said cheerfully, and she gritted her teeth.

"I am not 'squishy,'" she said, with what she considered to be heroic reserve; it would have been easier just to throw him across the room and have done with it.

"Yes you are," he said, with a quick feline grin, and reached out, cupping one of her breasts in his palm. He gave it a gentle squeeze. "See? Squish~!"

Times were she'd've decked him for that, but that was then and this was now. She released her grip on his hair and flopped back on the mattress with a sigh, and rolled her eyes when she felt him return happily to his favourite resting place, face-down.

Truth be told, it was kind of flattering.