Hot baths and chilled wine waiting for them restored and even improved Kurogane's mood, bringing him down from the high of battle and then helping to wash away the after-tremors of receding adrenaline. By the time the servants withdrew for the night, taking with them the wooden bucket clinking and sloshing with half-melted ice and empty bottles and cups, the ninja's shoulders were down and his brow smoothed out from the frown that had marred it most of the night. He could even grant the mage's watchful assistance the gratitude it deserved, though he hadn't been able to communicate it in much more than some extra thoughtfulness in his manner. Fai had seemed to take it as it was meant, however, returning thoughtful looks and quick smiles that were unlike his usual cheerful masks whenever Kurogane handed him something just out of his reach or refilled the mage's cup before it was quite empty.

It was time to sleep again, this time for a bit longer than the noon rest period, but Kurogane moved to the inner room only to bring out the paper and brushes. He brought with him a small covered dish of clay containing various baked crackers that had been added to the room during the afternoon, picking them on impulse as a better substitute for markers than wadded up strips of paper. To get them started, he laid out a handful of creamy white button-like crackers on one side of a paper and then picked out a similar number of black sesame buttons.

"Shura, Yama," he noted, gesturing to the crispy little armies. Fai nodded and improved on the scene by adding larger crackers and designating them the king of each army. Kurogane watched him narrowly but that serene face gave nothing away even when Ashura-ou was named. Fai then pored over the clay container thoughtfully before picking out two more items; a seaweed-wrapped square and a similarly shaped cracker baked golden brown. He made an unfamiliar noise while pointing at the toasted cracker which Kurogane assumed was Celesian for "me" and then the ninja quirked an eyebrow when the black square was named "Kuro-seir".

It was not a mangling of his name he recognized. It did not even sound like the ones he was familiar with, and he realized that even his nicknames had been washed through the bun's translation ability all this time. Whatever silly baby noises Fai had been making in Celesian had reached Kurogane's ears as "wan wan" and "tan", "pipi" and "pii". Now he was Kuro-seir.

Putting that little realization aside for now, Kurogane set to work in drilling Fai on whatever words he could think of that might help the man in battle. They determined which side of the crackers were front, Fai adding eyes to his own cracker with careful little dabs of a brush and to Kurogane's by scraping away bits of seaweed to show the cracker underneath, and then Kurogane and Fai began moving their snacks through a series of maneuvers.

Enemy and ally. Army, battalion, company, platoon, and squad. King, captain, lancer, archer, swordsman, healer, and priest. Kurogane called the flat crackers that the captain-crackers rode on "horses" for lack of a better word. Front and behind, left and right. Move forward, retreat back, and swing around. Fight and hide. Stay together and run.

Kurogane was no teacher, but Fai was quick to learn and surprisingly engaged enough to more than make up for any lack of finesse or patience on his tutor's part. Contrary to the ninja's expectations, Fai wasted hardly any time in teasing or playing about, and perhaps because of it, Kurogane himself put greater effort into explaining things patiently than he otherwise might have. In the end, the hardest part of each lesson was not in getting concepts across or in memorizing any particular phrase, but in Kurogane's attempts to pronounce the Celesian equivalent of each phrase he taught to the mage.

He'd thought it over during their washing up and decided that it was no less crucial that he learn some Celesian than it was that Fai should be able to understand the basics of what was going on around them. They wouldn't always be able to wait for time alone for Kurogane to be able to mime out some crucial information, and some things might need more than just a look or simple gesture to communicate. If he could speak to the mage without anyone else understanding that he was prompting the mage or some other such thing, it would be useful indeed.

It took some work to even get across to the mage that he wanted to learn the other man's language, not just teach him the one spoken here that so closely matched the ninja's native language. He ended up having to use the nicknames that he so often raged against, saying first "Kuro-sama" while pointing to himself and then "Kuro-seir" while gesturing to the mage, then moving on to his word for "king" and then looked expectantly to the mage. After the pattern was established of communicating concept and then exchanging words, first in Nihongo and then Celesian, things went fairly smoothly, with no other tangles beyond the occasional pause to try and twist Kurogane's tongue into knots.

They both took copious notes, and after they'd managed to exchange all the words and phrases that Kurogane felt would prove most important at the sky-castle he led them through a quick review. He went first, to show the mage what was next on the curriculum. Putting his pages of notes face-down, he began listing off words in Celesian, pointing at or pushing around crackers to illustrate what each word meant. He got most of it right on the first run-through, except for the differing army formations and needing further coaching on pronunciation.

Fai did even better, getting all of the words correct and only being awkward in his speech, putting stresses in strange places and melting some of the syllables together. He was still understandable, however, so Kurogane deemed it good enough and did not bother being overly fussy about the man's accent.

"Good," he said shortly, and then began sweeping up the crackers after quickly miming going to sleep. He didn't bother making "sleep" another language exchange item; they'd made good progress already and things like "eat" and "bathe" could wait for another time. A pale hand shot out and rescued some of the baked goods from him, however, making him stop and frown lightly in confusion. Fai's other hand was lifted up with just one finger raised, either asking for one more lesson or one more minute, or perhaps just asking him to wait.

Kurogane watched as three of the white button crackers that represented Shura's soldiers were lined up. Fai then took a sesame cracker and made a show of bumping it against each of the white buttons, one by one. He then took a tiny fragment out of the middle button with a fingernail, and then crushed the third button utterly by grinding it down with his thumb. The first button remained unscathed.

"What," Fai prompted, grabbing the sesame cracker again and making a show of it rushing but not hitting the first round cracker.

"Miss," Kurogane said. He then pointed at the white cracker and added, "unharmed."

The sesame cracker made contact with the chipped cracker.

"Hit. Injured."

The sesame cracker jumped up and down a few times, further pulverizing the third button cracker.

"Kill. Dead."

Fai murmured over each word and then painstakingly dusted off his hands, looking thoughtfully at the table and then at the ninja as if thinking something over. The air in the room was expectant somehow, and Kurogane stayed still, waiting.

"Kuro-eliour no kill?" Fai asked finally, folding himself into a childish sitting pose and tipping his head to smile winningly at the ninja as if he were only asking if they could have more to drink. But his dark eyes were intent upon the ninja's face, too serious and seeking above that carefully casual smile, and Kurogane frowned.

It was in point of fact a perfectly valid and natural question. Kurogane had fought many that night and been victorious every time, but it had been obvious - especially to one such as Fai who had seen him fight before - that his focus had been mostly on disarming and routing, crippling and maiming. Every enemy he'd put down had gotten back up and limped or crawled away, or sometimes been carried away but at least had still been breathing. He'd had opportunities aplenty to end a fight permanently, and had never taken them.

He didn't have the words yet to explain to Fai about the curse laid upon him and to be honest, would not have made use of them even if he had. He didn't think of the mage as an enemy, but a weakness was still a weakness and not something he would willingly share with anyone except the handful of people that he truly esteemed and trusted through and through, and they were all in Nihon. He was getting a sense of the man behind the mask of smiles and did indeed trust him to some extent, but not enough to reveal secrets such as this.

And so he merely shook his head and replied, "No. I don't kill."

"Yes kill...bwooaaargh," replied the mage, earning a strange look as he raised his hands and made clawing gestures to accompany his odd vocalization. "Outo," Fai added for clarification, when the ninja only stared at him like he'd lost what little he'd had of mind in the first place. "Kuro-grou yes kill Outo."

"I kill demons," Kurogane agreed, mimicking the claw gesture a bit to explain the new word, though leaving out the weird cries that apparently were meant to be spooky. "I don't kill people." Well, he didn't kill people right now, at least, thanks to the curse that his too-clever brat of a princess had seen fit to lay upon him. He'd killed more men than he could count before and was fairly certain there was a good amount of killing yet to be done in his life, but for now, he was on restriction.

And all this was nothing he felt like explaining to Fai, so when the mage looked as if he would keep pressing, Kurogane quickly swept up the remaining crackers and shook his head.

"We're done for tonight. It's time to sleep," he said firmly, repeating the pertinent verb and miming laying his head down again for emphasis, and turned his back on any further attempts to engage him in conversation. The table was cleared and preparations for bed made all in silence, Kurogane's stolid and Fai's thoughtful again. The mage wriggled into his bedding first and Kurogane scoffed at the lazy-bones as he went to extinguish the last lamp.

Once the room was plunged into darkness he made his way quietly across the room to his own blankets, relying on simple memory rather than his unseeing sight. Just as his feet transitioned from smooth matting to padded fabric Fai suddenly spoke, soft and subdued, a long string of Celesian that almost seemed like a single word with how the syllables rushed together one after the other. He waited, but all that met his ears was night noises after that; quiet breaths and the rustle of blankets shifting against each other.

Kurogane pondered it over a while after laying himself down, poring over the thing as an item of no account but that it was something to do while he waited for sleep to overtake him. He could make nothing of it, however, and finally drifted off with no more than the conviction that the sentence had begun with "you" and ended with "me".


Author's Note: What Fai said in the end was a mention of Kurogane's policy on not killing people and the conflict it presented with Fai's own mission, which includes an order to kill Kurogane if the ninja gets in the way of Reed's schemes. Feel free to make something suitable up, as I don't have it scripted out in my head. XD