Title: Put Out My Eyes
Rating: T
Warning: Character death
Summary: Nobody could really explain why Fai's magic was fading, but it was.
Author's Note: All my love goes to the wonderful, wonderful Litrouke, who provided much needed beta-reading to this story! Really, thank you so much! This was written for the Clampkink Anon Meme on LJ, filling the prompt for either Kurogane or Fai mourning the other's death.

Put out my eyes, I can see you,
Seal my ears, I can hear you,
And without feet I can come to you,
And without a mouth I can call to you.

Break off my arms, I will hold you,
with my heart as with my hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat,
And if you consume my brain with fire,
then on my blood I will carry you.

(Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn,
wirf mir die Ohren zu: ich kann dich hören,
und ohne Füße kann ich zu dir gehen,
und ohne Mund noch kann ich dich beschwören.

Brich mir die Arme ab, ich fasse dich
mit meinem Herzen wie mit meiner Hand,
halt mir das Herz zu, und mein Hirn wird schlagen,
und wirfst du in mein Hirn den Brand,
so werd ich dich auf meinem Blute tragen.)

Rainer Maria Rilke (1901)

Fai's hands were delicately skimming over the shelves. His eyes were milky and his gaze far. He felt his way forward, touching the spines of books that he couldn't read anymore, even though he had put so much energy into learning the language. As though he tried to assure himself that they were still there, still waiting for him. And there was grief on his quiet face. Kurogane stepped away from his spot by the door and into the mage's way. Fai halted. A smile pulled on the corner of his lips as his fingers wandered from the books to his lover's chest.

"Kuro-puu," and his voice sounded dry like parchment, crackling with the humor in it. "You're the only thing in this place that I can still read."

Kurogane snorted disdainfully and didn't know how to answer. "I've always told you that too many books are useless anyways."

Fai laughed huskily and sadly and Kurogane's chest was so tight that he couldn't help but kiss the man's lips.

Kurogane's hands were wrinkled and old and so immovable by gout that it was hurtful just to encircle the hilt of his sword. He trained every morning, anyway, maybe slower than before, maybe with less stamina and force, but he trained. His back creaked and his muscles were stiff, but Ginryuu parted the air sharply as it always had, every morning.

Fai sat at the veranda of the Japanese garden, weak and shaky. He carefully blew over the top of hot miso soup that the servant had brought out and his hands shook so hard that drops of the liquid fell on his padded kimono. It was autumn and he seemed to be cold all the time.

Nobody could really explain why his magic was fading, but it was. And with the magic, his eyesight and, slowly but surely, his life as well faded the last couple of years he had run through a shocking process of changing from a young into a very old man and now he was more fragile and less agile than Kurogane himself. Fai seemed to accept this. His gaze was empty, and secretly Kurogane sensed that this meant going home to the mage, home to a place he had been longing for for a long time.

Kurogane thrust Ginryuu back into its sheath and returned to Fai for breakfast. Neither of them did really get down any food. Fai was so weak that it made Kurogane feel ill.

"Rest for a bit," he murmured when kissing Fai goodbye.

"Don't be so strict with the poor generals," Fai grinned back. And for a moment he seemed almost there again and Kurogane desperately wished he could do something to hold Fai within this world.

"Who concocted this fucking plan!"

The lieutenant- and major-generals stared as he hurled his chair aside with the anger of a younger, less wise man. There it was again, the old, well-known wrath that made adrenaline pump through his veins and let the pain of old age vanish. His fist crashed down on top of the strategic map and his eyes were flashing at the general staff.

"What damn amateur has sent our men to death? Who is taking responsibility for this shit!"

"General, you yourself consented to the plans last week."

Kurogane faltered. His eyes whipped back to the insane maneuver that had cost him some of his best men. Silence descended, only filled by the rustling of clothes and Kurogane's panting breath. Somewhere, someone was whispering so low that Kurogane couldn't understand him and it wasn't the fact that they were whispering that had him worried, it was the fact that Kurogane'shearing had gone so bad that couldn't understand what they were saying. Was he really getting senile? His head was swimming.

Silently the men parted and Tomoyo stepped up to the desk. Even as a grown woman, her face still contained some of her youthful beauty. It was part of the magic, Kurogane guessed.

"Kurogane," and her voice was soft when she rested her hand on his cheek, a rare, intimate gesture. "Kurogane, my dearest general, leave the planning to your men. There is a place in which you are needed more, right now, than at war."

For a moment, Kurogane stared into her sad, knowing eyes and he understood and his heart plummeted. He inclined his head in silent consent.

There were hours when Fai didn't recognize him anymore. He was delirious for days and murmured in the foreign, lost language of Ceres. Kurogane lay a hand on his burning forehead and Fai's breath calmed and he fell back to sleep.

There was a strange kind of sadness descending upon Kurogane's heart. Fai was the last of a lost world, and it meant nothing to Kurogane, because it was Fai he was losing. He silently sat next to his dearest friend and he wondered ifold age had made him soft.

There where hours in which it would almost seem like Fai watched the first snow of the year falling outside the window, but Kurogane knew that it was only the cold, which he felt on his face, the sound of the wind that inclined his head, maybe a blurred kind of brightness.

He had never asked what it was like to be blind. They had lived a life together and they had said so much and so little. Maybe they had said everything there was to say by now.

"Kuro," Fai slurred so quietly that Kurogane had to guess that he was talking at all. Kurogane looked at him and grunted. Gingerly he grasped the bony hand that Fai lifted shakily. "Kuro-pon," he repeated and Kurogane squeezed his hand lightly and Fai's eyes slid shut.

Maybe there were things that didn't need to be said. And Kurogane hoped he'd never regret not saying them, after all.

At the end of all things, there were two deaths to die. One for the soul and one for the body.

There was the tossing and turning, the fever, the breathless whines and moans and Kurogane's hand almost crushed the fragile one inside his. Fai clung to him and his foggy eyes stared at Kurogane and at something not even there.

"Kuro-pon…" he whispered. "Let go."

Kurogane stared at him and it was clear as day that he couldn't let go of Fai. That he didn't know his life without Fai anymore.

"Let me go," the breathless plea was repeated and in his wide open eyes there was a kind of pain, a yearning that seemed to say: this belongs to only me. "Kuro-pon, if you ever loved me, then let me go."

And Kurogane went hot and cold and he couldn't remember ever feeling so frightened in his life, when he slowly, digit by digit, let go of his lover's hand. Infinitely slowly he stroked the sweat-doused strands of silvery hair from his forehead, almost a blessing. When had Fai ever asked for anything.

"Farewell," he spoke and his voice was breaking.

The silent answer was a hurting smile. A last gaze that didn't see. There was one more feverish spasm and the next moment the body in front of him lay still. And the other's heart was still beating but his lids had slid shut and his expression was that of silent slumber.

It took another hour until Fai's body fell silent, when his soul had already deserted it. Kurogane sat by him, incapable of keeping his hands from the body of the dying man. He stroked his forehead, his arms, his shoulders, his cheeks; he took his hands into his and let his fingers slide across the shell of his ear. And when the last breath had vacated the man and he was lost to the world, he laida kiss on still warm lips.

The first night was one of his worst. Kurogane lay awake and the soft breathing next to him was gone. It was the silence that kept him awake. He had kept watch by Fai's deathbed, had hardly left it and hardly slept, and being back to the abandoned and moist-smelling room they had shared left him cold and shivering.

He turned around and watched the snow-covered garden through the glass sliding door. And he remembered Fai sitting out on the veranda in summer, late at night and illuminated by the moon, his legs swinging carelessly. He had hummed a nonsense tune and the sweet scent of the camellia had hung in the air and there'd been fireflies resting on the lacquered wood.

And Fai had turned around, his mismatching eyes, blue and golden, strangely illuminated in darkness, and a feral other-worldly smile had lain upon his lips.

It was that moment in which Kurogane finally started crying, in helpless rage for all that Fai had given up, and finally in self-pity of all that he himself had lost.

It was the first time since the death of his parents that Kurogane was crying. It was the first time since his gentle mother, since his proud father, that he had loved another human being that much.

It was a trap and Kurogane cursed inwardly, because he hadn't noticed it beforehand. He watched his men die, die, die and it fueled a rage inside him that he had believed to be in control of for many years now. When he watched a boy fall that reminded him more of Syaoran than could be just, he realized that there was no reason to hold back anymore. Or maybe he just stopped thinking altogether.

Before he even realized it himself, he heard himself howling and Ginryuu was swirling through the air and he was galloping towards the fight. One of his advisors was screaming something that he ignored.

Ginryuu was piercing the first man and blood coated Kurogane's arms and when he tore it out to the side, slitting the man half open, he hacked at the neck of another soldier, sending his head flying and having blood well up the lonely neck. Kurogane screamed and three soldiers fell. He didn't even see whom he was taking down, looked at nothing but the color of their uniforms, heard none but the adrenaline rushing in his ears, and unending rage was pouring into his limbs and he was fighting and fighting and still fighting, when his arms were so heavy that he couldn't feel them anymore and each breath burned in his lungs like broken glass.

It all ended with a thick thump to his shoulder and an explosion of pain. He blacked out and collapsed on his horse. The only face he was seeing was not even here, the only eyes upon him blue and golden like the cloudless sky.

Kurogane looked up to the ceiling of the tent and he thought that something must have broken inside him, when he had lost Fai. Something that had kept his wrath contained, something that had made him the person he thought he was. And for the first time he realized that not only Fai had gone, but also a part of him.

And he wondered how much of him was left.

The light of the oil lamp danced across the fabric that concealed the stars above him. He didn't feel the hole which the arrow had ripped into his shoulder, but to be honest he didn't feel any part of his body with the amount of painkillers they had given to him. He thought of the fright in Fai's eyes, when he had been wounded that last time, the fright of being alone again. And Kurogane wondered, if maybe that was part of the reason for Fai to go first, because he didn't want to be left alone in a world that didn't make sense without the other one.

"You at a better place, now?" His voice sounded rough and ridiculous to his own ears. It wasn't even as bitter as he had thought, but simply sick and tired.

"It is not like you, to do something so inconsiderate." Tomoyo sipped her tea and watched Kurogane's bent body at the open door, where he was looking outside into the snow. The snow had been falling for a long time this year, starting in the eleventh month and still falling in the second of the new year. They were wrapped in layers of cloth, and puffs of breath dissipated like ghosts, shaking with silent laughter before dying.

"It's not like me?" the old man in front of her repeated. His voice was rough: it ground the words until they sounded broken and bent. "Can't remember that well, but wasn't it me, who has always given you nothing but trouble?"

Tomoyo laughed and her voice was light and soft. Her thick hair had grown white, but it really was the only thing betraying her true age. When looking into the mirror, she looked at a young woman, and sometimes she wondered. "You are speaking of times, when you were a young, impulsive man and I was but a child."

Kurogane looked at her silently and his eyes seemed to ask her if anything had really changed since then. Tomoyo smiled sadly and there was a lump forming inside her chest. "There are a lot of things that change us, Kurogane. But never forget that the things which we have experienced are never lost, as long as we remember them."

Kurogane stared at her and straight through her and when she carefully stood and walked up to him and rested her hand on his hot, wrinkled forehead, his eyes slid close for a long moment and he was so still that Tomoyo wondered whether he was still breathing.

When Fai had been dying, he had been with him, even when they weren't in the same room. Kurogane had heard his shallow breath in the noise of the wind, smelled the feverish sweat in the old rooms of the castle, found his milky, unseeing eyes inside ponds and the clouded sky. Kurogane had listened to Fai's voice calling his name when he was falling asleep. He had been hearing the smoky, aged laughter of the mage, feeling his dry fingertips against the back of his hand, the slim, chapped lips against his own.

After his death, silence descended around Kurogane and it didn't matter whose eyes he looked into, whom he heard laughing, whose hand brushed against his. It was as though, along with that one person, he had lost everyone else, forever, too.

Kurogane stayed at Shirasagi when the troops rode out again, as his shoulder was still giving him trouble, and he wasn't that young anymore, anyway. He sat in the library, open book before him. It was about tactical warfare and Kurogane wondered. Fai had never begged him to stop fighting, but he could read the wish in his eyes, whenever he set out for the next battlefield.

The war was lasting all his life. War against the Tokugawa-clan, against the Emishi, war against the Chûgokujin. As a young man, as Tomoyo's guard, he had loved his own omnipotence more than the people surrounding him.

There had been the time of traveling, in which he found part of his reason to wield the power he possessed. Even then Kurogane wouldn't accept that there were things that he couldn't change. He had used force, if necessary, and he had protected whatever he could protect.

And then there had been the time in which he lived in Nihon with Fai. And after it had ended, he was wondering if he had failed.

Kurogane sat in the library and was leafing through the book, without reading what was inside.

Fai had loved Shirasagi's library, even when he didn't understand the language at first. Magically he had been pulled into the dusty rooms and he had spent days and nights with books and textbooks, quietly mumbling away in the dead language of his home country while he was translating. It had taken him no more than three years until he was speaking all but flawless Japanese and could read most of the books stored inside the castle walls. Kurogane couldn't remember a time, in which he hadn't had to climb over stacks of books to reach their shared bed, in which Fai's fingers on his skin hadn't left stains of ink and in which Fai's hair hadn't smelled of old paper.

Kurogane leafed and read a few lines and he didn't know what he was hoping to find. It was the last book that Fai had read, before giving up as his eyesight had dwindled to nothing.

It had been breaking Kurogane's heart to watch him standing inside the library, feeling across the pages, as though he could suck the letters out of them. Turning through them, as though they were something living that was worth his love, even when it didn't present any use to him anymore. Seeing the silent longing in that face, when he shut the book and had to feel around for the empty space it had left on the shelf.

Kurogane stared down at the script and suddenly he wished he could embrace Fai, absorbed in his books, from behind, pressing his nose into the crook of his neck and smelling him, that peculiar smell of the notion of rain, old parchment and sweet ink, and he imagined he would promise him that he'd stay with him, that he wouldn't ride to war any more.

Kurogane's fingers rushed through the book that had seen Fai scowling in concentration, and maybe smiling, and its smell reminded him of Fai. And he wanted to tear it and burn it, and he wanted to sit here and breathe and never leave again.

A drop trickled down on the paper and smeared the ink.

Kurogane slammed the book shut and pinched the bridge of his nose with forefinger and thumb and took a long, unsteady breath. This wasn't getting him anywhere.

Kurogane laid down his sword. After the wound on his right shoulder had healed, his muscles had felt older and stiffer than they had ever before. He must have been far into his seventies, maybe his eighties. When had time passed by?

And one morning, sitting with Ginryuu sheathed before him, silently and deep in thought, he let the hours of his daily training go by without moving. The sun went up and he thought about swirling the sword and thought of the gout in his fingers and of his shoulder, which hurt when the weather changed. And most of all, he thought of Fai's sad eyes.

He resigned from his post in the army and spent his days in the garden and conversing, and he started reading some, which he had never really liked before.

Kurogane laid down his sword, before he got unable to lift it. And he wondered what life would be like, without it.

Something strange happened. About a year after Fai had stopped breathing, when the snow was falling again and Kurogane's bones were hurting, Kurogane suddenly and unexpectedly started hearing his voice again.

There was his voice in Kurogane's ears, his feathery touch on his hands and shoulders, his lips stretching into a smile against his skin. Kurogane didn't ever see him, but sometimes he felt Fai sitting at his back, a book in his hands, and he imagined hearing the pages turn and the soft whisper of his lips while he deciphered the characters. He could feel Fai's soft presence in everything. Summer came and Fai stayed. Winter came and he could almost see him. As years went by, the image of Fai, that Kurogane treasured, got younger and his eyes were blue and yellow, and then both cornflower blue again and his skin soft and smooth and his mouth so red that Kurogane thought it was his own blood staining them.

Sometimes he started talking to him, without noticing, and when he turned, there was no one there. Kurogane started forgetting things, too, and it was frightening, because he couldn't tell whether he had just dreamt of Fai's death and forgotten about him living.

Sometimes, Kurogane lay awake at night and wondered whether this was the dream – the gentle feel of fingers against his cheeks, the soft hum that was always a bit too low to really reach his perception, the warm breath against his chest. Or the silence which enveloped him, when he tried to listen, the darkness, when he tried to see. And Kurogane was ashamed that sometimes when the sun rose there were tears in his eyes when Fai's gentle figure was dissolving against the morning sky and he realized that it was but illusion and shadow that had accompanied him at night.

The dead didn't stay. The dead went on. And the receding memory of them was all that stayed with one. But Kurogane didn't wonder too much that his memories of Fai seemed to get stronger than even the life around him as he grew older and the servants started calling him senile, because nothing had ever been normal with Fai.

It was winter again, when he finally followed Fai's shadow into the snow that bit coldly into the naked soles of his feet. And he stood and watched the sky that was clear and star-covered. He sat down, shivered, and waited for the break of dawn. Waited for a sky that was blue as the eyes in his memories. He knew what he was waiting for and at the same time he wondered.

They found Kurogane frozen in the garden, lying in the snow next to the camellia. His eyes were open and staring into the blue sky, his face hollowed and his skin the waxen skin of an exhausted, old man. Hoarfrost was upon his lips and lids and glittered in his gray hair. And while the servants stood helpless and appalled around the still body, Tomoyo kneeled silently next to him in the crunching snow.

A single tear fell from her eyes and onto his withered cheek, almost as though it was him that was crying. It froze, before ever reaching the ground.

On the slightly opened lips lay a last, unspoken word.

Fai.