Chapter Five

No one disturbed him until dinnertime. Syaoran looked up from the book he'd picked up at the town library, turning it over so the spine was facing up, saving his page. He hurried over to the door to unlock it, then peered out through the narrow crack.

Kurogane stood outside, his expression unreadable. "It's time for dinner."

"I'm not hungry."

"Don't give me that crap, it's been almost eight hours."

His fingers twitched. He wondered if he'd be able to avoid another nightmare like this morning. "Thank you for the concern, but I'm really not hungry."

"You're going to need the energy for sword practice tonight."

"What?" Sword practice?

"You heard me. You've got five minutes." The ninja closed the door without another word.

Sword practice? he thought again, shaking his head. While he had enough of the Other's memories to understand the basics of sword-fighting, his body didn't have the muscle memory and reaction time that resulted from the weeks of training his clone had gone through. He'd thought Kurogane had figured as much and decided it wasn't worth it to train him again.

Syaoran stood at the door for three of his allotted five minutes, turning it over in his head. If the ninja wanted him to resume practice, did that mean he trusted him not to misuse whatever skills he acquired? Or was the practice an excuse to get him out of the apartment for a while, so the others wouldn't have to suffer his presence? Surely, the ninja wouldn't want to stress the rest of his relationships by being cordial to him. Was this his way of compensating—keeping him away from the others so they would look the other way?

Moreover, did he even want to relearn everything the Other had learned? He had noticed his reaction time was slower than before, as evidenced by the scrapes and cuts, but was it worth it to go through all the extra training just to get that fraction of a second back? Even if it was, facing the dining table again had become, in his mind, the rough equivalent of going to war. Would Kurogane expect this of him in exchange for teaching him?

He didn't know. Even if the ninja didn't hate him like the others, he didn't have enough knowledge to guess the exact reason behind his offer. And he couldn't assume things would get any better, or that he wouldn't be expected to sit at the dining table with the others, even if he stayed locked in his room.

He opened the door and stepped out into the living room, enduring the cool glance Fai gave him and the ignorance Sakura favored him with. As he approached the table, he noticed there were four plates set out, instead of three. Had Kurogane done this himself, or had Fai accepted the fact he would be eating with them from now on?

He hated not knowing. That was one thing he and his clone had in common: they both had to know as much about what they were dealing with as possible.

They oriented themselves around the table much the same as they had this morning, the only difference being Mokona's position on Fai's lap instead of Sakura's. Silence descended on the group, and for a while, the only sound in the room was the noise of the forks scraping across the smooth surfaces of the plates. Syaoran sat with his shoulders hunched, scooting back whenever he was satisfied the tiny motion would go unnoticed. By the time dinner was done, he was almost two feet away from the table, his plate sitting on his lap rather than on the tablecloth. Quietly, he stood and marched over to the sink, rinsing the remainder of his dinner down the drain.

Kurogane still had a third of his food uneaten. Feeling out of place standing in the middle of the room, Syaoran moved toward the door, waiting for a glance of approval before he went out.

He waited in the hallway for a few minutes, studying the decorations on each of the doors to pass the time. After about five minutes, Kurogane stepped out into the hall, Souhi on his hip. "Back in Tokyo, you summoned a sword out of your own magic. Are you going to be able to do that reliably?"

"Yes."

"Good. That means we won't have to get you a new one."

Syaoran felt a twinge of guilt for letting his clone get away with Hien. "What kind of training will we be doing tonight?" he asked.

"Nothing too intense. We need a baseline of your physical abilities; that's about all we'll have time for. Besides, we don't want to hurt your shoulder any more than it already is." His red eyes slid over toward Syaoran, as if waiting for a denial of his pain.

He kept his mouth shut.

"There's a park between here and the hospital. It's got enough open space for what we need to do." They turned left at the next hallway, then went down the stairs leading to the main floor.

The park was smaller than the one they'd trained in during their stay in Outo. No, I wasn't there, only watching, he reminded himself, annoyed at how the memories all blurred together. His real memories were, for the most part, years back. The false ones, though lacking the realism of his true memories due to the secondary experience, were close enough that they stood out in his mind better. The result was . . . confusing.

"We're going to test your reflexes first, see if there's any difference between the sides of your body. Stand over there," Kurogane said, indicating a patch of grass approximately at the same distance from him as in Outo. As Syaoran moved to the correct spot, the ninja picked up a handful of stones from the rock garden behind him.

Syaoran spent the better part of the next hour wondering if Kurogane didn't hate him after all. Why did my clone volunteer to have rocks thrown at him? he wondered, narrowly dodging a small stone as it flew past his face. Another followed close behind, moving faster than the previous one. Before he could lift a leg to kick it away, it hit his bandaged shoulder. His knees buckled under him like overstressed building supports.

"Shit . . ." he heard the ninja hiss as he hit the ground. The ninja approached as he clutched his shoulder. "Kid, you okay?"

"Fine," Syaoran gasped, rolling onto his hands and knees.

"Your reaction time is slower than the other one's."

"Really?"

He laid down a moment longer, waiting for the adrenaline to seep through his bloodstream and numb the pain. Slowly, he sat up.

Kurogane extended one arm out to him. Syaoran stared for a moment, then grabbed the hand with his good arm and allowed Kurogane to hoist him up to his feet. He stood there a moment, thinking.

"What's bothering you?" Kurogane asked before he could say anything.

He hesitated.

"Spit it out, kid."

"Do you . . . Do you wish the other Syaoran was here instead of me?"

The ninja sighed. "What would you do if I answered yes? Off yourself? Pretend to be him?"

His eyes drifted down to his feet. "I would . . . do nothing, I guess."

"There's nothing you can do to bring the other kid back without him being a threat. There's no way you can act that will make you like him without being a transparent attempt to win us over. So quit worrying about it."

He closed his eyes. "Okay."

The ninja sighed. "We won't be able to test your arm strength until your shoulder is healed, and there's not much I can teach you about sensing things except to put a blindfold on you and tell you to find your way back to the apartment, which I'm not going to do until you're feeling better. All I can say for now is that we're going to have to start right back at square one."

Wonderful, he thought.

"Let's go home. It's time for bed, anyway."

He let Kurogane lead him back to the apartment.

Quit worrying about it, he'd said, almost in annoyance. And honestly, what else could he do? He had enough to worry about: whether he would survive the next fight, how long it would take to find the next feather, which world they would travel to next, and how dangerous it would be.

Enough to worry about that I don't have time to focus on the Other, he thought, wishing he had some way to put it out of his mind.