#kurogane just wants to remember loving fai but fai is a difficult and stupid man

[kurogabae]

i’m on an angst kick and memory loss!AU calls to me like no other

“Oh! Miss Caldina was right!” Sakura cried in delight, pulling Syaoran along with her. “The city skyline is beautiful at night!”

There was no arguing it. The shimmering lights of the modern city were breathtaking from their vantage point at some tourist sightseeing cliff face. They were a few miles out and had a great view of the impossibly tall buildings and all their dancing lights, like stars stolen from right out of the sky. Since losing his memories, Kurogane had been to many cities like this one, but he’d never seen any the way they were seeing this one now. He found himself hoping he wouldn’t have to forget this one day as well. 

Hanging back, he watched Syaoran, Sakura, and Mokona lean on the safety railing, gazing out at the skyline in awe. Sakura and Syaoran’s fingers were comfortably intertwined with each other and upon noticing Kurogane felt that inexplicable, powerful pang of satisfaction, like one would feel after a hard job well done. He knew that the two kids -- young adults really, old enough to think about settling down by his wager -- had had to fight tooth and nail for the happiness they enjoyed now, and Kurogane was sure he had played some part in all of that, but he couldn’t imagine it would have been enough to warrant such a reaction.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Fai said beside him. “Seeing them so happy. You don’t remember, but I know you love them and want them happy all the same,” he added with a sly smile. 

Kurogane didn’t see anything to deny about what Fai had said. “How does it make you feel?”

Fai shrugged. “I don’t think I’ll ever have words for it,” he admitted, and Kurogane could understand the feeling. “Some days I still wake up and think this might have all been a dream.”

Even now, months after waking to the unfamiliar faces of people who claimed to love him, he still knew next to nothing about Fai, where he had come from before joining their small, traveling family, or who he’d been to all over them in their early days of travel. He knew there was a lot of pain hiding in the past, especially where Fai was concerned, but Kurogane wanted to know, even if he’d never really remember.

“Don’t suppose you’re ever going to tell me why you feel that way,” Kurogane said, trying to make it sound offhanded. 

The smile Fai gave him was sad but honest. “You don’t want to know those things,” he said. “They only hurt, and they’re behind us.”

“You told me before, didn’t you?” he pressed, latching on to Fai’s train of thought. He didn’t know why it was so important to him that he know Fai’s past as well as their shared past. Kurogane was not a man that cared about where people came from, it was more important where they were going, but it just wouldn’t stop niggling him. “Why won’t you tell me now?”

Something painful came over Fai’s face and for a moment his eyes for focused somewhere far away from Kurogane. “I never told you,” he finally admitted. “You were shown by someone else.”

The flatness of Fai’s voice was enough to have Kurogane drop the subject. It wasn’t that important.

-- 

Kurogane’s nightmares were things of smoke and fire, the air was always filled with screams and ash and he could feel himself burning away inside and out. Everything would be red and he would be calling names, looking for familiar faces, praying that when he met their eyes they were still looking back at him.

He had never had a nightmare about snow before, where the silence was more deafening than anything he’d heard from a demon. There was no red -- fire or blood or evil eyes glowing through the smoke and shadow. In fact, there was no color at all. Grey was all there was, shades of it. This nightmare was different than all the others, except for one thing.

He was still burning.

It was cold, though. The burn was not fever or flames, but ice creeping into emptiness. It was a sense of complete hopelessness overwhelming him, burning away everything that he was until all that was left was a husk of a person. It was terrifying. He tried to scream, to call for help, but he had no strength, he could only lay there in the snow and let the grey surround him and swallow him and erase him.

He couldn’t give up, but he couldn’t fight. He needed help, he needed to help...

... to help... someone... some...one...

Kurogane felt the scream more than heard it as he jerked awake. When he opened his eyes the suffocating world of his nightmare was gone and it was replaced by blue. 

“Fai.”

“Yeah, it’s me, Kuro-sama,” Fai said. He looked worried, bordering terrified really. He was gripping Kurogane’s arms tightly and was all but sitting in his lap, both of them tangled in Kurogane’s bed sheets as if there had been a struggle.

Slowly, it dawned on him that Fai must have been trying to wake him up. “What was I-”

“You were calling my name,” Fai said. That look was back again, the one that was sad because of something Kurogane didn’t remember. It didn’t make him as angry as it used to, but Kurogane knew it would always hurt to see. Fai loosened his grip on Kurogane’s arms. It was still dark outside and Kurogane hoped he hadn’t woken the children with his ridiculous screaming. “What were you dreaming about?”

Sighing, he sat up more and didn’t shoo Fai off his lap, taking comfort from the warm weight of his friend. “I don’t know,” he said truthfully. “It was jumbled. Everything was cold and covered in snow, and I was alone and trapped even though there weren’t any chains I-- I knew I was trapped.”

The harder he thought about the dream the more he could remember about it. It was the first time in months memories were coming back to him when he chased after them, so he didn’t let up. In his lap, Fai was silent.

“It was a punishment,” he continued slowly, the worlds coming as realizations. It was like a memory that wasn’t his emerging from the haze that constantly clouded swaths of his mind. “A punishment for something we hadn’t even done.”

He paused when he realized there had been a second person there. In the tower, so far away and just as alone. There had been other people too. “There were corpses. People who had been killed, thrown in as punishment as well.”

Suddenly, flashes of it all came rushing at Kurogane. Two young boys, innocent and frightened and helpless. Unfairness and blame, bodies raining from the sky. A dark man who spokes twisted words of half truths and lies. The need for help. The need to help... the one he had needed to help in the dream, the one in the tower. The reason he had been calling for Fai.

“You’re not Fai,” Kurogane said, his voice disturbingly plain for the realization. “That isn’t your name.”

Chancing a look up he saw unshed tears shimmering in blue eyes. 

“You never met him,” he said. “My brother died when we were still young.”

Kurogane reached out a hand, slowly, as if he were reaching out to a wounded animal, and wiped away the tears with no small amount of reverence. “I know.”

Fai had stayed the rest of the night with him, neither of them had gotten any more sleep, but they hadn’t spoken any more either. Memories continued to accost Kurogane throughout the night and by morning his head was pounding and his mood was foul. When Mokona summoned Watanuki he let Fai do all the talking.

“Why does he remember those things?” Fai hissed. Perhaps they should have left this to the kids. “Of all the slip ups you could have made, you had to leave him with my scars?”

For his part, Watanuki did look wholly apologetic, possibly even a bit heartbroken, but Kurogane had a hard time feeling charitable at the moment. He was with Fai on this. If he was going to remember something from his past travels why this? Why not something kinder? Or at least more useful?

“They aren’t his memories,” Watanuki said after Sakura had ushered Fai to the side. “They’re yours, Fai-san, and so they were not his to give as payment. They will remain with him.”

There was not much to be said after that. Watanuki exchanged a few words with Syaoran and Sakura before Mokona disconnected and all eyes were on Kurogane and Fai, but the two adults were already retreating and none of them were surprised.

The morning sunlight shining through Kurogane’s bedroom window betrayed the mood surround he and Fai. He didn’t want to talk about this, but he wanted these memories hanging between them even less. 

“You intended to kill me,” he said without preamble. 

“We all see how good a job I did with that,” Fai said and Kurogane almost laughed. From would-be assassin to would-be husband. It was a bit funny. Or it would be in a few days after he had some time to let all of this new information settle into his world view. 

He could tell, knew it in his gut, that Fai had never actually made an attempt at his life. Kurogane knew it like he knew his own name. Fai had been right the other night, though. He hadn’t wanted to know any of those things. The pain of Fai’s memories had begun filling in the empty spaces left by Kurogane’s missing ones. It ached and raged in his chest, made all the worse by the knowledge that he was separated by those responsible by so many years and worlds. The only comfort he had in this was the knowledge that everyone person who had hurt Fai was now dead.

Kurogane had more questions, but he wasn’t sure if either of them were able to handle the answers without breaking after the morning they had just had. No for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Kurogane cursed the fates. 

“Well,” Fai finally said. “Know you know everything.”

He’d been wrong. He wasn’t able to handle anything more right now without breaking. Unfortunate. 

“What the hell do you mean?” he snapped, rounding on Fai in an instant. “I don’t know anything!”

Fai stared up at him with a mix of disbelief and frustration and opened his mouth to speak, but Kurogane wasn’t finished. 

“All I know is how you’ve suffered,” he said, voice low and rumbling with fury. “I don’t know anything of your life, of our life.” He saw the understanding slowly dawning on Fai’s face as he spoke. “You speak of how this all feels like a dream sometimes, but you never tell me why. You’ve told me you love me, but you won’t tell me why.”

He wanted to understand Fai, but in hiding his pain so steadfastly he’d hidden everything from Kurogane. How was he supposed to find the man he had once loved if Fai kept him hidden all the time...