Chapter Fifty-One

Kurogane sighed and sank into one of the chairs next to the kid's bedside. "The mage and the princess will be here in a few minutes."

"Sakura-hime is coming?" A shred of hope slipped into Syaoran's voice, then vanished with the next words. "Does she know what happened?"

"She knows as much as the rest of us. How we found you, what we saw before then, what condition you're in now." His eyes flickered to the bandages peeking out from under the sheets. He suspected the gauze covered most of the kid's torso, just as he suspected the elongated bump under the sheets was a cast for his leg. With a sigh, he stood again and approached the bedside. "Will you be ready to see her when she gets here?"

Syaoran nodded, life returning to his face. Kurogane moved to tousle the boy's hair, then stopped, his hand dropping onto the sheets. This wasn't the time to be mending their relationship—he wasn't even sure he wanted to. Hadn't he been steering the kid back toward some sense of normalcy? Hadn't he been trying to get him to interact with the others? He should want the kid to be with the princess, especially now, when he needed comfort more than anything else.

Uncertainty danced in the boy's eyes, mingling with a spark of hope. Kurogane withdrew his hand and watched that hope gutter out like a candle left to die.

"I was scared," Syaoran whispered after a moment, looking away.

Of course you were, he wanted to say. He kept his mouth shut. Even in his head, the words sounded too comforting, too affectionate. Breaking that connection now would save them both a lot of pain.

"I was scared they were going to kill me. I was scared no one was coming for me."

"We were looking for you the whole time you were gone."

Syaoran continued as if he hadn't heard. "And I kept telling myself that I could hold out as long as I had to, but then I was there for hours, and no one . . ." His eyes clouded. "And I wondered how long it would take for someone to hear me screaming—"

Kurogane winced.

"—but no one came, so I just sat there and told myself that I couldn't die, that I was stronger than that. I'd been screaming and crying for hours, and I thought Fai-san had gone back to the apartment without looking for me, or no one cared that I was gone." He took a shuddering breath. "I'm not invincible. I can die, just like everybody else. I almost did."

Kurogane stared at the boy for a long moment, remembering how thoughts of mortality had hung around him like a toxic cloud in the months after his parents had died. He'd had to come to terms with the fact that if he didn't keep getting stronger, someone, somewhere, would eventually kill him. And some had come closer than he wanted to admit during this journey.

But for all the boy had acted like he was unafraid of death, it was only now that Kurogane saw how it weighed on him. Only now that the kid had lost that childish sense of immortality. A necessary change, since they faced constant adversity, but it pained him to watch. He gave in and tousled the kid's hair, being careful of the bruises on the side of his head. And he said nothing, just letting that point of contact be enough. After a few moments, Syaoran's body relaxed, eyes sliding shut. "You're not saying anything."

"Just rest."

The boy shook his head. "I'll have nightmares."

Kurogane sighed and buried his head in his hands. Can't fix that. Can't fix any of this. He took a deep breath, squaring his shoulders and forcing himself to meet the kid's eyes. Syaoran's expression revealed nothing. "Hey, kid . . . Are you going to be all right?"

"My worst injury has to be my knee, right? That'll heal eventually, and I'll be back to normal."

"You know that's not what I mean."

"I said I was fine."

"Then talk to me! Tell me what they did to you. Tell me what I can do to make it better." Just fucking talk to me.

"Talk?" Syaoran echoed, eyes sliding over to his face. "To you?"

"I don't see what's so damn difficult about it."

Anger twisted the kid's features, followed by puzzlement, then guilt. Finally, he sighed and stared up at the tiled ceiling, his gaze a thousand miles away. He took a deep breath, collapsing in on himself like a log turning to ash in a campfire. "You said we couldn't do this anymore."

He made a frustrated gesture. "I meant—you know what I meant." Oh, hell.

Syaoran's voice dropped to a whisper. "You said we couldn't be together. You said the others were getting suspicious. And I was starting to accept that." His lips twisted into a grimace. "That I didn't need anyone to hold me up, that I could manage things on my own. And then this happened." He gestured to the bandages on his torso, then winced.

"This isn't your fault."

"What makes you think it's not?"

"You couldn't have known this would happen."

"I should have."

"That's ridiculous."

The boy shook his head. "That's not the point. The whole time I was down there, I was helpless. I couldn't do anything to stop the pain. I couldn't even kill myself because there was a chance that maybe you were looking for me after all. All I could do was sit there and wait to be rescued. Do you have any idea how awful . . ." He trailed off, as if the conversation had exhausted him. Perhaps it had—healing took a lot of energy. The kid couldn't really afford to expend this much effort in pointless arguments.

"Syaoran."

The boy went still, as if paralyzed. Then, slowly, he folded his arms over his abdomen, gaze returning to the ceiling even as his eyes glittered with unshed tears. He said nothing, but his knuckles went pale as his hands bunched up into fists. Fighting for control.

Kurogane laid a hand on Syaoran's forehead and smoothed his hair back. "I don't know how to fix this. I can't make it any easier. But I can try. Now tell me what you need."

The kid closed his eyes, body going limp under the sheets. He pulled them tighter around himself. "Could you get me another blanket? I'm cold."

A strange sense of disappointment rippled through him. "Sure, kid." He stood and searched the room for something to keep him warm. When he found a colorful, handmade blanket with tassels, he laid it over the boy. A contented noise escaped his throat, like the sound an animal might make as it retreated into its den.

"Thanks."

"Yeah, no problem. Need anything else?"

Syaoran shook his head. "This is enough."

Kurogane collapsed into one of the chairs, letting out a sigh. He hadn't realized how integral his relationship with the kid had been to his sanity until he'd broken it off, or how much he'd missed talking to him. But it's over now, he told himself. It has to be.

Syaoran dozed, mind swimming with painkillers. The agony he'd experienced in that basement had vanished beneath the haze of painkillers, but that same medicine made his whole body feel heavy—eyelids, arms, legs. A solid white cast clung to one leg, holding his broken knee in place, and there were bandages wrapped around his hand where Cassie had jammed a knife through it, but his mind was so far removed from his injuries that it took him several minutes to understand the purpose of the gauze and cast. At least, he thought it was several minutes, but the clock on the wall claimed fifteen had passed, and the spinning in his head wouldn't stop.

Regardless of how much time actually passed, Sakura and Fai arrived at his room not long after he woke, both of them looming in the doorway until Kurogane gestured for them to enter.

"How are you feeling?" Fai asked, perching himself at the edge of a chair.

"Fine." His eyelids grew heavy again, and he struggled to keep them open. "I'm sorry I wandered off." A lot sorrier given the consequences, but still sorry he'd been so petty.

Fai tousled his hair, hand moving faster than Syaoran's eyes could track. "Don't worry about that. It's not your fault."

The corner of his lip twitched. "It's not your fault." As if that really assuaged his guilt. As if such platitudes could lessen his recovery time or erase the horror of the past twenty-four hours from his mind. At least they came, he told himself, shifting his gaze over to Sakura. Her jade eyes stared back at him, mouth set in a worried frown, eyebrows furrowed. The wind had tossed her hair into disarray, leaving dozens of sunset-tinged strands sticking up from her scalp, and the cold had turned her cheeks rosy.

"It's good to see you," he said, throat closing up. It was so easy to forget, sometimes, that she wasn't the Sakura he'd fallen in love with. So easy to meld the two together in his mind so they were a single image. An issue that was likely just as pressing for her whenever she looked at him. Even though he knew she was a clone, he wanted to stand at her side and protect her as if she was the original. Wanted to fall in love with her even though she was mourning for his copy. Wanted to pretend everything was all right, and that they were normal teenagers, and that he'd never come so close to loving somebody else.

No wonder she could hardly stand to look at him. It had to be just as hard for her to separate him from the Other in her mind.

Sakura approached his bedside, her black and white skirt catching on the edge of one of the chairs so she had to pull it free. "Fai-san told me what happened. I'm sorry."

Sorry? He raised an eyebrow. "Don't be. I'm fine." A tremor slipped into the last word, and he looked away. He wasn't fine. He was about as far from fine as he'd ever been. The only time he'd been less fine had been when Fei Wang Reed had printed the seal of death across his Sakura's body while he'd been helpless to stop it.

No, he wasn't fine. Not at all.