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A pretty face would never be enough.
So Fai told himself as he watched the blond, sweet-talking bartender pass Kurogane another drink “from an admirer.” The run-down, leaky bar was the only dive in the area that served anything not cut with water. Even so, patrons were scarce. Around happy hour it saw a fair few customers, Giorgio (the silver-tongued bartender) explained, but they were it for the moment, aside from a bald, hiccuping businessman whose tie trailed forgotten in his whiskey glass. And Fai doubted a man whose wife had just discovered his secret mistress (“Eavesdropping is immoral,” Kurogane tsked while Fai almost tipped out of his seat gleefully leaning toward the pay phone) felt admiration for anything about Kurogane, or even that he had enough cash to pay for his own steady stream of shots.
Fai grinned broad and silly as Kurogane knocked the drink back. “Someone’s popular.”
“Don’t know what you mean,” gruffed his companion, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His brow quirked. “It’s good for you not to be the one ogled for once.”
“Oooh, Kuro-rin. Owch.” So he had noticed the ogling. Both in the past and now. Fai couldn’t decide if he was surprised or not.
A flush darkened Kurogane’s cheeks, rare and unexpected. He was far too pleased with himself for catching Fai off-guard, the magician thought.
Before he could retaliate with another glib one-liner, a rough thumb grazed his forehead. “Your face is red,” said Kurogane as he moved a few pale gold hairs behind Fai’s ear.
“My face is —” With a slight stammer, Fai rolled his eyes, hmphed, and made a show of interesting himself in the complimentary tray of salted nuts. Apparently Kuro-tan needed a mirror. “There’s no reason for that. You said yourself, I am not the object of admiration today. You’re the one with an ogler. Thus making you the — uh — oglee.”
Kurogane's chuckle echoed unusually smooth and rich in the dimly lit bar. Damn him. Fai's immature side (an eternal eighteen-year-old with a penchant for snacking between meals and sleeping till noon) wanted to sock the guy in the nose. Then they’d see whose face was red.
“Excuse me.” Giorgio was back, with his ostentatious red bowtie and simpering How-may-I-be-of-service? smile. Gee, he sure was attentive. A thick smell of rot hung in the air. The furniture in the bar was old and damp from the rain that dripped in through holes in the ceiling, but Giorgio himself was as crisp and fresh as Sunday at a beach resort. Fai couldn't help a smug feeling of satisfaction, though, on noting that Giorgio’s hair was more of a dishwater blond than gold.
Then he realized Giorgio was addressing him for a change, rather than his surly eye candy. “Ah — Yes?”
“Would you be Mr. Fluorite?”
How had he gotten that name? “Indeed I am!”
“There is a young man asking for you at the door. Because he doesn’t look of age, I requested he wait there while I fetched you.”
“Oh. Fetch away, then.”
It really wasn’t that Syaoran looked so young. At sixteen, with his bookishness and sharp, carrying-the-weight-of-the-world brow, he could pass for a young adult if he tried. But as Fai met those honest brown eyes, he knew it wasn’t going to happen. Not without a really good reason to lie. Like if someone in the bar were defacing books, or something else truly evil.
“Everything alright?” Fai asked.
“I just wanted to let you know I’ve found us a place to stay,” Syaoran said. The light from the wall lamp reflected off the rain drenching his cloak. His boots squelched as he stomped them on the mat.
“Good for you! Always so resourceful. Where is it?”
“Well, it’s… a little off the beaten path, but on the bright side, we’ll have it all to ourselves.”
“No landlord to take advantage of three live-in servants this time, you mean?” Fai smirked at Syaoran's sigh of aggrievement. Not that many people could take advantage of them. In that last world they were just a little slow on the uptake, working day in, day out for an estate only to find that they wouldn’t be paid because they didn't get their agreement in writing.
“If only Mokona could translate orthographies,” Syaoran said.
“Mokona does her best!” piped up an indignant little voice from the depths of Syaoran’s hood.
“And we’re very grateful,” Fai reassured her. “So, just where are we hanging our hats tonight?”
Syaoran took a napkin and drew a crude map. After labeling one ambiguous square on a hillside with the word “Lodging,” he left to return to scouring the local library.
With a thoughtful frown, Fai held the napkin to the light. “Hmm. Left at the blacksmith’s, then straight past the… statue of copulating satyrs?”
He reentered the musty bar (dodging a veritable river that poured out through a crack above the men’s lavatory) to find Giorgio resting his elbows on the counter near Kurogane. Their foreheads were close enough to touch. Fai hung back, focused on the low rumble that was Kurogane’s voice when he was content, when there were no demons on hand to draw him away from good sake and the whine of the cicadas. The bartender’s thin lips stretched over pearly white teeth with his open laughter, slender arms stretching either way across the counter as he murmured in Kurogane’s ear. Along with the red bowtie, he wore a button-up shirt with a starched white collar and dark slacks, and for a moment Fai felt as if he were sitting in the Cat’s Eye Café, staring at a happier, much less complicated version of himself across the room.
The heartsick businessman had begun to overwhelm the ambient lo-fi music with his compulsive sobs, and Giorgio left Kurogane to offer him a tissue and the number for a cab. Fai slipped between a pair of tables into his abandoned stool beside Kurogane.
“W’zit the kid?”
“Yeah. He found us somewhere to stay.”
“Damn, he’s good.”
“Syaoran-kun has a way with people. They trust him.” Fai drummed on his chin, gazing absently at the racks of bottles behind the bar.
“You do too,” Kurogane pointed out. He had another drink, Fai noticed. And it wasn’t sake, so he hadn’t ordered it himself. He sipped it as he jabbed a finger at Fai’s nose. “When you want to.”
“Unlike you, with your scowly, lone wolf act.” Fai swiped the drink and sniffed. Gin and tonic. You’d think a bartender could come up with something more creative. “Though you seem to be on a hot streak tonight.”
“Like I said,” the glass was reappropriated with one deft maneuver of broad brown hands, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Anyway, we might want to get going. It would be nice to figure out food and beds before Syaoran-kun gets kicked out of the library. And if you pickle yourself any more, I’ll have to stick you in a jar in the pantry.”
A grunt of acknowledgement. “Gotta use the facilities first,” Kurogane announced as he pushed back his stool. The ceiling was too low for him to stand at full height. He stooped and headed toward the lavatory, pausing on his way to tug Fai’s ponytail. The brush of knuckles across the bare skin of his neck burned like ice.
Suddenly waiting around here seemed unbearable. Fai couldn’t think what to do with his hands. They hung at his sides, long and thin and pale — almost skeletal. They itched in his lap. They itched on the hardwood counter. His fringe, too, did it always get caught in his lashes like this?
He tried blowing it, and the bright wisps were dancing in the air when Giorgio slid a tall, narrow glass towards him filled with some zealously orange beverage. A mimosa. Fai turned a questioning eye on the bartender, who had the gall to wink.
“I'm told it's from an admirer.”
At first Fai squinted dubiously at the businessman, who was now passed out in a heap by the pay phone. Then he glanced back at Giorgio and appraised him. He didn’t look the type to flirt with one person all night only to hit on his friend the moment he left the room, but how could you ever tell?
Giorgio watched him as he wiped the countertop, the rag moving with precise, circular motions. Fai got the sense that he, too, was being appraised. He heard Kurogane exit the men’s room. The creak of the door drew Giorgio’s attention away, and he leaned back, tucking the rag into his pocket.
Then he cracked a smile at Fai. With a shake of his head, he muttered, “Must be those eyes,” and moved farther down to continue cleaning.
Kurogane grabbed the back of his stool. “We going or what?”
Fai peered at him brazenly as he drained the drink. Kurogane said nothing, but his scowl deepened, that lovely streak of crimson beginning to creep over his ears again. Then Fai stretched, limbs long and spindly, into Kurogane’s space and out. “Follow my lead.”
“Why?” Kurogane demanded, to reassert himself as "father," Fai thought fondly.
“Because,” Fai brandished the neatly folded napkin. “I have the map.”