Title: Settling In
Rating: PG
Summary: Five aspects of Kurogane's culture that Fai struggled with after settling in Nihon. Assumes a future ending where Fai comes to live with Kurogane in Nihon.
Author's Notes: Written for the 'Five Things' meme.

1. baths!

Fai remembered his first bath vividly. Well, not his first bath ever - there must have been some in far-off Valeria, too dim and miserable to remember clearly. But the first night that King Ashura brought him to Ceres, when a small army of servants had brought him to the washroom and stripped off his filthy, rough prisoner's tunic and lowered him into a broad round washtub filled with steaming, bubble-frothed water (Fai would later find out it had been King Ashura's own;) ...well, he thought he'd died and gone to heaven for sure. If there could be any better rest for the weary in the afterlife than going from the old, miserable filth of the world into being submurged in hot, gently fragrant water, he couldn't imagine it at the time.

Ever since then Fai had taken the opportunity to recreate that bath whenever he could - much to the consternation of the palace staff. Ceres was a cold, frozen country most of the year and Ruval Palace, as high in the mountains as it was, never thawed. Water was difficult to get and melt and purify in the first place without wasting it on large, extravagent baths; most washing was done in small hand basins with damp cloths. That combined with the elaborate, heavy clothing the country had developed to guard against the cold, meant most of the people of Ceres - even the high court - went months without bathing.

Being the ward of a King had its benefits, though; although Fai did not usually take advantage of his position, frequent hot baths was the one indulgence he seized and gleefully ran to its limits. He managed to wheedle possession of his own bathtub by the time he was ten - one of the few in the kingdom - and before long the servents grew weary and resigned to having to haul and heat water enough to fill it once every few weeks. The palacefolk regarded Fai as an anomaly (although tolerently so; he was well-liked despite this one extravagence) for insisting on bathing at least once a month.

Fai had kept up his bathing habit as best he could during their journey - not every world they came to made provisions for hot indoor baths, so Fai seized on the opportunity every time it presented itself. (The weird, overhead-falling-water contraption a number of worlds adopted called a shower just wasn't the same, although it was better than nothing.) All of his companions accepted his quirks easily, for which Fai was grateful - and, well, if he and a certain ninja found themselves sharing a bathing facility more and more often in the worlds following Yama, well they were just conserving time, space and water, now weren't they?

When he came at last to Kurogane's world and began to learn of the bathing customs there, at first Fai was delighted. Finally, a culture that really understood the value of staying clean! Why, they had whole buildings dedicated to baths, often built over hot springs that drew enough water to stay full and steaming all the time! To say nothing of the innumerable little bathing accessories - and even rituals! - that Kurogane's people had developed in their infinite ingenuity. Fai was a little dubious about the practice of scrubbing yourself down with a bucket of cold water before bathing, but as long as long lazy soaks in hot water were still on the table he was happy as a clam.

That lasted about a week into their stay before the novelty began to wore off.

For the first time in his life, Fai found himself well and truly getting sick of baths. He loved hot water, but the bath-houses kept their springs and pools to a temperature that was almost painful - they seemed to think that the more uncomfortable the water was, the more 'healthy' it was. That would have been bad enough - combined with the inevitable discomforting stares he drew when he disrobed among a group of Japanese strangers - but there was another problem, as well.

All his life Fai had been the odd one out for bathing too much; now, for the first time, he found himself attracting disapproval for not bathing enough. Weekly baths still seemed an extravagent luxury to Fai, but some of these people bathed once - or even twice - a day. That seemed to Fai entirely a waste of time, as well as (he soon found) causing his hair and skin to dry out unpleasantly.

When he tried to settle for what he thought a reasonable compromise - two baths a week - he began to attract disapproving looks, haughty sniffs, and smoothly disguised insults from other members of the Shirasagi court. When one particularly disagreeable courtier actually came out and called Fai a 'greasy mongrel' in company, Fai had to drag Kurogane away before he started breaking some heads.

Fai himself was more amused and irritated than hurt by the insult (after all, he knew how it felt to be REALLY dirty, which he doubted any of these court buterflies had ever been in their life) but Kurogane brooded for the rest of the evening. Fai was astonished then, as they turned down the lamps for the last time that night, Kurogane abruptly came out and assured him that he was happy to have Fai share his futon no matter how often he did or didn't bathe.

Fai laughed incredulously until he realized Kurogane was serious, which was somewhere between flattering and insulting; so instead he pounced on Kurogane, determined to get him nice and sweaty and sticky in revenge.

2. cold!

Fai thought he'd been prepared for a Nihon winter; after all, Ceres had been a land frozen solid and Valeria, from what he remembered of it, not much better. Fai didn't like the cold, but he knew it well, and naively he'd assumed that a Nihon winter would be easy and mild in comparison.

What he'd neglected to take into account was the very differing styles of architecture between Nihon and Ceres. Ceres built its castles and homes and outbuildings in thick walls of stone and mortar (or, for the peasants, heavy huts of split logs;) every crack chinked and mortared and the interior walls lined with tapestries to keep in the warmth of the roaring fires built in every room.

Nihon buildings, on the other hand, were built of wood frames and all too often their walls were nothing more than double rows of heavy paper stretched over wood frames. Stone walls were considered purely military fortifications; at the most, exterior walls were built up with plaster on the exterior to repel rain and snow. Then again it hardly mattered what substance the outer walls were built of when it seemed to be tradition to leave the sliding doors wide open in any weather except an outright storm!

It was a design that made sense, Fai supposed, in the hot and humid summer when every breeze caught was a miracle - but in the winter, apparently people were expected to just bundle up in heavy kimonos and fur cloaks even when indoors and just live with it. A few weeks into the snowy season, Fai simply shut himself into their own (thankfully interior) room with a heating spell and refused to come out except for meals.

Kurogane complained in aggravation about Fai's supposed cold-bloodedness, but Fai couldn't help but notice he spent most of his time in the warm bedroom, too.

3. food!

Ceres had been a landlocked country, and Ruval a mountain stronghold; even the rivers that ran through the country in the rare warm months were too shallow and rocky to host much in the way of fish. Fai had studied, of course, and part of his education was maps and geography, so he knew what oceans were - at least in theory. He hadn't actually encountered the sea in person until they went on his journey; and while the beaches were warm and the tides fascinating, overall his impression of the ocean was of something big, salty, smelly, and gross. Even the idea of swimming in it was not very exciting; the thought of actually eatingsome of those creatures that washed up dead and stinking on the shores was abhorrent.

Let alone the thought of eating them raw.

The whole concept apalled Fai; food was food and food was meant to be eaten hot, or at the very least cooked. As spring shifted into summer and the weather grew hotter, the Shirasagi court shifted to traditional 'summer' foods, most of which were served cold and clammy and gross.Fai lost a lot of weight during his first summer, and endured a number of scoldings from Kurogane for it.

He wasn't sure what was worse, the foods which were chopped and trimmed and presented so so that they were completely unrecognizeable and he didn't realize that they were seafood until he bit into them and they squished; or the foods which he did recognize because they had been served up whole - head, eyes, feelers and all. On the rare occasions he gritted his teeth and forced one down, it was often just as appalling as the sight and smell suggested, and he was cheerfully informed by more than one old grandfather that this was how he knew it was healthy.

At most public meals Fai eventually just stuck to plain white rice, garnering either amusement or disapproval from the other diners. Kurogane had never shown much sympathy for Fai on the subject of fish during their journey, but as the months wore on cruel amusement turned to real concern as Fai continued to lose weight.

At last, after one particularly tearing argument between them on a night where Fai skipped both breakfast and lunch, Kurogane dragged him down to the kitchens (which Fai had mostly only visited before in pursuit of wheedling sweets and pastries out of the cooks.) What followed was a bizarre night somewhat resembling a cooking competition with the world's most humorless and heavily-armed judge, as nervous cooks prepared a variety of cooked fish dishes for Fai to sample until he finally found something he could enjoy.

4. emotion!

It was no secret to Fai that he was much more rexlaed and open about displaying emotions - well, with a fewnotable exceptions - than his grumpy ninja boyfriend. However until they came to Nihon, Fai had simply put it down to a natural difference in personalities. It wasn't until he'd come face-to-face with Shirasagi's cadre of warriors - ninja and samurai both - that Fai realized that stoic repression of emotion wasn't just a personality quirk, it was a way of life.

Ceres had been different. Verydifferent. Men there - especially nobles and courtiers like those that had surrounded Fai during his childhood - took great pride in being expressive. Great depths of passionate emotions (and of course expressing them so that the entire world knew exactly what you were feeling) was considered a very refined and noble attribute to have. It was considered perfectly acceptable and even approved for men to laugh loudly, or weep openly, or even swoon from a particularly intense emotional moment. Fai's apparent indifference, in the years of his childhood before he'd relearned how to smile, had been an object of shocked concern to more than just Ashura.

The men of Nihon, in contrast, seemed to be competing with each other to see who could out-granite a tree stump for inscrutability. The only expression that was permissible to show was a faint irritation, like a man experiencing dyspepsia - even anger was frowned upon. Compared to some of those staid old sticks, Kurogane - especially now that he'd returned from his years-long journey - was practically a study in emotive expressiveness.

Or maybe it was just that Fai knew Kurogane so well that he could read his every change of expression and body language like an open book. That would be only fair, since Kurogane was the only one who saw past Fai's own long-practiced circus act of laughter and mischief to see who he really was inside.

5. love!

It wasn't that it was never done in Ceres; it was just... strongly frowned upon. And certainly never talked about. It had been quite a revelation to Fai, once he'd gotten old enough to read the subtext between the lines of certain historical texts, or interpret the significant pauses and glances in court gossip. But while men sometimes did lie with other men - the records were peppered with references to royal or noblemen's "favorites" and "hunting companions" - there was always a lingering sense of stigma and shame attached.

Fai had resigned himself, once he'd become old enough for his body's wishes to make themselves clear, to a lifetime of hurried secret flings in dark stables and a life of concealment and pretense.

In Nihon it was all different. True, public displays of affection were frowned on for any kinds of couples - male or female - but the court at Shirasagi, which had choked on so many of Fai's other foreign quirks, accepted the bald-faced fact of his relationship with Kurogane with nary a blink.

Afterwards, when Fai gradually learned enough of the local language to be able to read history and philosophy texts of his adopted home country, he learned that physical - and romantic - relationships between men had a long and respected history among the samurai class. Nobody turned a hair when Fai took up residence in Kurogane's quarters; while his first outing at Kurogane's side in the furisode that Tomoyo insisted he wear did garner some stares and chokes, he gathered it was more from the shock of seeing Kurogane with a partner than with the sex of his partner at all.

And for that - that calm acceptance, that tacit permission to be by Kurogane's side without argument for the rest of their life together - Fai thought that everything else was worth it.

~end.