[fic] tsubasa, "green fairy"
TITLE:  Green Fairy
CHARACTERS:  Kurogane/Fai, Seishirou
NOTES:  For 30 kisses prompt #24: good night. 
SUMMARY:  Fai and Kurogane are from different worlds; they can't be soulmates.  Fai drinks.  Someone listens.


GREEN FAIRY

Fai is dead drunk.  He knows this because his shot glass has somehow split itself into perfect triplicates and because he is drinking alcohol instead of blood.

"I am going to die," he announces.

"Surely that's melodramatic," replies the man sitting across the table.  Fai pushes himself upright, tilts his head, and squints at the man through his bangs.  The man has dark hair and wears glasses and is smiling with every part of his face except his eyes.

"No," Fai says.  "I'm dying to go.  Going to die."  Despite his advanced state of inebriation, the magician's diction is textbook perfect.  "I'm a vampire.  Can only drink from one person.  He hates me.  Didn't even kiss me goodbye."

"He hates you enough to let you die?  I can hardly imagine that, Fai-san."

Fai lets his head fall against the chair back and gropes around blindly for a bottle.  He knocks over three empty ones before his wrist bumps against a bowl and sloshes liquid over his hand.  He has a high tolerance, even higher now that he's a vampire. 

"He hates me," Fai repeats.  "Kuro-chan hates me."  He tilts his chair back and manages to get most of the wine in the bowl into his mouth; a few splashes run down his front, staining his white coat to a familiar red.

"And you know what else?"  He bolts forward, his chair's legs thump against the floor, the empty bowl goes scattering across the table until the stranger stops it with one long finger.  "Have you ever heard of soul-mates?"

"I have, yes," the man says.  He hasn't lost that faint detached amusement the whole time Fai has been sitting here.  "Two people who complete each other so much that even across the worlds, they are always together."

"Hitsuzen," says Fai, and the man's detached amusement morphs into detached surprise.  "Hitsuzen is shit."  He takes pleasure in the obscenity; he hasn't cursed ever, not since Ashura told him forty years ago that every word a magician says has a deeper meaning and that if Fai wanted to do bad magic, he should use bad language.  So he says it again, rolls the taste of the phrase around in his mouth like a connoisseur:  "Hitsuzen is shit."

"Oh?"

"Oh.  Yesss.  I'll tell you why:  because if I have a soul-mate anywhere, it's him, and he's not from my world."  Fai lets his head drop against the table.  One arm curls around the nearest bottle of liquor.  This moroseness, this frankness is both unbecoming and unlike him.  He feels like he's channeling someone else.

The man reaches out, liberates the bottle from the the crook of Fai's elbow, and pours himself two fingers of absinthe through a slotted spoon.  He adds a sugar cube and then the ice water and speaks without bothering to drink.  "I'll tell you a story, Fai-san," the stranger tells him.  "Maybe it will make you feel better."  He pauses, waiting for a reply; when Fai shifts he continues. 

"In Valeria," the stranger says, "to the north of that land, there lived a small family.  The father was a soldier in the king's army; the mother was a seamstress.  They had one son, a young boy named Kurogane.  When you were born, he was being rocked by his mother as she stitched by candlelight; when you were locked away, he was learning his father's art.  Do you know what happened to him, Fai-san?"

"No."  Fai lifts his head.  "What?"

The man chuckles.  "Why he died, of course.  Your king killed him.  Didn't he kill everyone in Valeria?  You probably stood on his corpse as you tried to climb to your brother."

Fai stares, the alcohol turning the ice in his veins.  "Is that true?"

"Maybe."  The man leans forward, grips Fai by the chin, and blows hot breath against his ear.  "Did it make you feel better?  Would you rather I tell you that you and Kuro-chan are a mistake, that you were never meant to be?"  Fai stiffens when he hears the man use one of Kurogane's pet names.  "How can you think he would love you, with your filthy hands and your suicide scars?"  The stranger stands, walks around the table so that now he's bent over Fai's shoulder.  "Oh no, Fai-san," comes the whisper, comes the caress of cruelty, but worse it's apathy - "Oh, you're not meant for him.  Not Kuro-sama, not Kuro-tan, not - "

Fai chokes and starts upward, knocking his chair back.  "Be quiet," he hisses.  "Be quiet!" but the man's still in his ear, chanting filthy hands and fratricide, suicide and scars, one eye blind of course he doesn't love you -

Fai opens his eyes.

"Such a difficult position, a lover's spat," the stranger says from his seat across the table.  "Well.  I'm afraid I have to take my leave now, Fai-san.  Thank you for sharing your drink."

"Yes," Fai says numbly.

The man studies him for a moment, then smiles, his eyes curving into half-moons behind the outdated glasses.  For a moment he looks familiar; something about the mismatched shade of his irises, perhaps, or the way he straightens those glasses with one finger, but Fai blinks and the resemblance is gone.

"Good night, Fai-san," the man says.

"Good night," says Fai.

The man leaves, and Fai turns back to his bottles.  He's going to die soon.

He pours himself another glass of absinthe.