This is NOT meant to be taken seriously! It’s just a crack fic for fun, though it will be insanely long and have a looot of crossovers and pairings. So be prepared, as they say. Het, shounen-ai, shoujo-ai, will all be present if all goes as planned.

Total pairing count: Kurogane/Fai, Mokona/Kurogane, Fai/Kyle, Hisui/Kokuyo, Fai/Geo, Geo/Eagle, Fai/Saiga, Xing Huo/Kyle, Kakei/Saiga, hints and mentions of Eagle/Lantis, Fuu/Ferio, Sakura/Syaoran, Syaoran/Fai and Taishakuten/Ashura. Might try to fit some Tomoyo/Sakura and Souma/Kedappa in there.

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There once was a lonely farmer named Ashura, who wanted very much to have a child so that he could have some god damned help around the tiny farm he worked by his lonesome. Biologically, of course, he was more than fit to father his own child, but the problem lay in the fact that his farm was so far away from the village that his closest neighbour, a nice man named Taishakuten who frequently hiked to his house to bring him fresh pies for some reason, was a half an hour away. It made socializing very trying.

It was during one of his infrequent visits to town that he heard of the village witch. The witch, he overheard the villagers whispering, could grant any wish for a suitable price. This seemed to him a rather convenient plot device, and so of course he went immediately to see the witch.

The witch gave him a tiny barleycorn and told him to plant it in a flowerpot, make sure it got lots of water and sunlight, and then and only then would it grant his wish. As the farmer took the offering, the witch warned him that she would come to collect the agreed-upon price in a few years’ time, and although it pained him greatly, Ashura agreed.

The next day, the flower blossomed. Pale blue petals curled open and delicate leaves unfurled as the sun began to rise. There, in the centre of the flower, slept a tiny blond child.

Ashura blinked down at it, confounded. He held up his thumb; the child was half an inch shorter and barely thick enough to compare. The little blond child slept on peacefully, a serene look on his face. Experimentally, Ashura crooked his middle finger and flicked the flower child awake.

“Eeeyaaah!” blondie yelped, rolling over the edge of the flower and falling with a fwap to the ground below.

“Oh, dear,” said the farmer, watching anxiously as the blond struggled dazedly to his tiny feet. “You are real.”

“Aaah, well, hello to you too,” replied the tiny man, leaning heavily against the flowerpot as he cradled his head dizzily. Ashura found he had to strain to hear the small voice. Sighing, he pulled up a stool, sat and cradled his head in his hands.

“I asked the village witch for a child and she gives me a fairy,” he muttered, poking the blond thoughtfully. “Hmm, but you have no wings. That’s strange.”

“Eek!” the tiny man squeaked, crumpling to the floor beneath the force of Ashura’s thumb.

“That’s quite troublesome, you know.” Ashura withdrew his finger and peered down at the tiny man with newfound interest.

“You have a name?” he asked, thinking. He had not specified that he’d wanted a regular-sized child, and thus suspected he would not be able to get a refund from the witch. If the child had a good head on his shoulders, however, he might still be able to find some use for him. Besides, he was just so cute, stumbling around the tabletop in an attempt to regain his balance in the face of yet another poke to the chest.

“Oww, that hurts!” the blond chirped with a strained smile, placing both hands on the tip of Ashura’s finger and pushing it away. “I don’t; you’re my father now, Ashura-san, you get to name me!” With that, the blond who was no bigger than the farmer’s thumb smiled brightly up at his new father. Birds sang and the sun seemed to shine brighter across the fields. A cow stuck its head obnoxiously through the window and “moo”d reverently, the whoosh of air knocking the tiny man over once again.

“Aiiieee!”

Ashura’s icy heart melted a little as his newfound son cried out for help against the crazed cow’s tongue, which was swiping determinedly at the blond as if eager to make breakfast out of him. He delicately scooped the tiny man up and swatted the cow over the head.

“Get out of here, Syaoran!” Ashura snapped, and the cow looked abashed and lowered its head, trotting determinedly back towards the cow field to graze. “Hmm, a name, huh?”

Ashura raised the blond up to the level of his eyes. The little wingless fairy waited patiently in anticipation, clasping his hands behind his back.

“You will be… Thumbelina,” Ashura said finally. The blond’s smile wavered dangerously but did not fall out of place. “Or Tiny for short.” Ashura chuckled a little at his own unintentional joke.

“O-oh. Thank you Ashura-san. Those are some… nice adjectives,” Tiny said, wringing his hands together anxiously and giving his new father a weak smile. Ashura smiled gently.

“Though, perhaps we should give you something nicer for when you meet other people. I’m not sure everyone would understand the irony of ‘Thumbelina’ if they have particularly short or lengthy thumbs that you don’t match up with,” Ashura muttered to himself, setting Tiny down on the kitchen table. “Alright, then. We’ll call you ‘Fai’, for ‘fairy’, since you look like one,” he said, sitting down at the table, quite pleased with himself.

Fai nodded in relief, his smile now much more genuine.

“Thank you for the name, Ashura-sama!” Fai chirped, glad that he didn’t have to go through life as Tiny. “But… what is a fairy?”

“Well, a fairy is…” Ashura hesitated, looking around the room. “Hmm…”

He finally spied what he had been apparently searching for and rose, plucking a book from the shelf above the stove and flipping it open to a specific page. He set the book down on the table and picked Fai up by the scruff off his collar, placing him on a brightly illustrated paper.

“This is a fairy. It’s a little person with wings. They have lots of magic power and they make the seasons change, do you see?”

Fai knelt down and peered curiously at the illustration of a beautiful blonde woman with long, flowing hair and intricate golden wings.

She held a scepter in one hand and a crown in the other, which she held aloft over the bowed head of a second figure, this one male and muscular with black wings and only one eye. A closer look revealed the location of the man’s second eye.

“Why is the yellow-haired one wearing an eye for an earring?” Fai asked, tilting his head to one side in confusion.

“Oh, well, this is the story of the beetle King and the fairy Queen. The King gave up his eye in order to proclaim his love for the Queen, and they eloped. It’s a very romantic legend,” Ashura explained. Fai squinted at the picture, trying to figure out how his father considered that romantic.

“A legend means they’re not real,” he echoed weakly, tracing the outlines of the woman’s wings. “So I can’t be something like that.”
Ashura looked down at Fai sadly.

“It’s true that most people regard fairies as superstition, but there are some who believe they’re real. Even I thought I saw one once.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Maybe one day you’ll get to rip out your eye for the person you love,” Ashura said warmly, shutting the book after Fai had scrambled off it. “Now, we must decide what to do with you.”

That day, Ashura set up a tiny bedroom for Fai on the table beneath the windowpane. He used the book of Fairy Tales as a wall to give Fai some privacy, opening it to the page with the King and Queen and propping it up to one side. He laid a lace handkerchief down on the wood and set a teacup down on one corner, filling it with forget-me-nots from the garden in order to serve as Fai’s bedding. He cut a magnolia leaf from the plant on the kitchen table for Fai to use as a blanket. It was not the best of rooms, but Fai loved it. Some nights he would turn the giant pages of the book to have another picture to fall asleep to, while other nights he would close the book and drag his teacup out onto a windowsill to look up at the stars as they lulled him to sleep. That is, when Syaoran the cow wasn’t lurking beneath, waiting for another change to gobble Fai up.

It soon became Fai’s job to feed the chickens. Ashura had asked for a child with farm work in mind, after all, and upon finding this out Fai had asked to help. Even though he would have much preferred lounging around all day in his teacup or floating around on top of Ashura’s floating candles, Fai felt a certain obligation to the man who had taken him in despite Fai not being exactly what he had wanted.

Thankfully, it wasn’t a large farm overall. Ashura only had a handful of cows, one of which was for show and the others for dairy, four chickens, and a horse. Still, Ashura was the only man for miles around with any dairy cows ever since old man Clef had up and left, and so he had recently become quite the milk mogul in town. The chickens were quite cranky and peckish, and at first Ashura feared for Fai’s safety, but as it turned out, Fai’s size was an advantage. Though he could only throw a handful of seeds at a time, he was so little that the chickens assumed he was one of their chicks, and would not peck at him when he hit them in the face with his wild, careless way of chucking feed at them. It took Fai hours to get enough food from the satchel of chicken feed to the ground where the chickens would peck diligently at it, waiting for another teensy handful, but he worked hard and got the job done every day, which Ashura supposed was all he could ask for.

Fai was content, for the most part. He had a place to live and a father who cared at least enough to not want him to be pecked to death by chickens. Still, sometimes Fai would sit on the windowsill with Ashura’s book of fairy tales turned to the one of the many pages that featured littler creatures and wonder about whether or not he would be feeding chickens and ducking Syaoran’s inquisitive and determined tongue his entire life.

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Meanwhile, far, far away in an abandoned cherry blossom tree, the fairy court had gathered to discuss the matter of the crown prince.

It had become abundantly clear in the last couple years that the prince had no intention of selecting a wife and going about producing an heir the old fashioned way. Prince Kurogane appeared to have no interest in any fairy beyond the potential for a sparring partner, another worrying issue in itself. His parents had begun to suspect that their darling son was about as straight as a pig’s tail, which was not an issue seeing as fairies had many strange and glorious options when it came to conceiving children, but not something the prince was likely to admit. The council, on the other hand, was beginning to worry that the prince’s strange habits were not something the other fairies would respond to kindly.

“It is not particularly normal behaviour for a fairy to possess; it is not, after all, typically in our nature to be so violent,” one council member put delicately, hoping not to offend the fairy king and queen. Both royals exchanged a somber look.

The fairy queen was ethereally beautiful, with porcelain skin and soft eyes that radiated patience and love. Her long ebony hair was swept up into an elaborate style and ornamented with violet flowers and golden pins, and her body was adorned in a beautiful plum dress with blue lining and a mass of silver frills cut to resemble falling leaves. The fairy king was harder-looking than most fairies were, with dark, spiked hair and garnet eyes, but he was dressed elegantly as well, with an elaborate robe that sported a swirling design of russet and brown thread. A sword with a golden hilt hung at his side, usually worn only during official meetings and ceremonial events, although the sword had seen real battle one or two times during its lifetime.

“It’s hardly hurting anyone,” the fairy queen said, clasping two lily-white hands, heavy with rings of copper and gold, together. Her azure wings, curved like a wave creeping up on the sand, glowed faintly in the dim light of the council chamber. “You know as well as I that Kurogane would never do anything to bring harm upon the kingdom.” The fairy king nodded, one large hand resting loosely on the pommel of his sword.

“It is not that we are threatened by him,” another council member spoke up, her long auburn hair braided and hanging over her shoulder like an attractive satin rope. “It is that the community as a whole cannot, in every respect, relate to him, and if they cannot understand their king, there will be a great disconnect between the general populace and the monarchy.”

“Give the boy time, he’s only 17,” the fairy king insisted, his auburn wings twitching with an emotion that he otherwise kept carefully hidden.

“Yes, and you were already engaged at that age, sire,” a third council member piped up, a brunette fairy with a scar across his eye from the legendary war of the Sparrow five long years ago. Kurogane had wanted to fight the offending bird with him, the fairy king remembered, but he’d forced the boy to stay behind; he’d been too young at the time, and he sometimes wondered if denying the boy the chance to fight had made his bloodlust even more determined in nature.

“I understand the issue at hand, but I am not going to ask my son to change or do anything that contradicts his heart,” the fairy queen said, her voice soft but her words firm and resolute. All council members recognized this tone as one of finality.

“We will respect your wishes, of course, and would not want such a thing for our beloved crown prince,” the council leader said, the words sounding forced and pre-rehearsed. “Still, if we may offer a compromise…?”

Both royals nodded, willing to listen.

Outside the meeting, the sullen fairy prince kicked touchily at a bead of dew, watching as it slid down the curve of the petal to drip down to the damp earth below.

If one had cloned the fairy king without the gene needed to produce a smile, one would have a fair portrait of the fairy prince. He was tall and muscled like his father, with his father’s red eyes and hard features. The only thing he received from his mother was the shape and size of his wings, which were a dull scarlet colour and flecked with dots of black. His hair was mussed up from constant flying and little brushing and a thin scar hung beneath his eye, the result of particularly troublesome battle with a mole. The prince huffed and crossed his arms moodily. What could they possibly need him for, and if they needed him so badly, why was he just waiting outside?

He snorted; they were probably worried about offending him. Everyone in the field worried far too much about offending people.

Back in the meeting, both royals were looking at the lead council member strangely, as if wondering why they had ever appointed him as head of the council. The council member held up his hands reassuringly.

“I don’t wish you to think I am implying we force the suggestion on his highness; merely that we suggest it. If he is willing, his image would undoubtedly improve in leaps and bounds. If he does not, we go back to the way things are, no harm done. Nobody will force him to accept, no obligations will be thrust on him.”

The king and queen were quiet, thinking the plan through carefully.

“I suppose we could suggest it,” the king said reluctantly. “Just suggest, mind.” The queen smiled softly, though the skin around her eyes was creased slightly as though she still carried with her a trace of worry.

“It would be rather charming if he were open to the idea,” she admitted hesitantly. “And I suppose he need not agree if it would not make him happy.”

The king nodded, agreeing with his wife.

Outside, Kurogane sneezed. His wings fluttered anxiously, folded against his back like an insect’s. He had trained himself to keep his wings that way to minimize wind resistance when fighting on foot, something he did often despite the fact that nobody in Fairydom was prone to fighting. Everyone was too beautiful and ethereal to want to cause a fight, which drove Kurogane nuts. He had started venturing out beyond the cherry blossom tree, looking for squirrels and other large beasts to fight. He hadn’t been overly successful in finding good opponents.

The council door creaked open. Kurogane shot to his feet as his parents approached him, his mother wearing a reassuring smile and his father holding out two bracing hands as if worried his son would bolt as soon as he opened his mouth. It made him tense and prepare to do just that.

“Oh, Kurogane, don’t fold up your wings like that! They’re so beautiful, it’s a shame for them not to be seen!” his mom chirped, clasping her hands together imploringly.

Kurogane blushed at the praise and bristled in annoyance, looking away petulantly.

“Quit sayin’ that, mom!” he hissed, nevertheless slowly unfurling his wings. His father beamed proudly at him.

“That’s better. You’ve got strong wings like your old man.” Kurogane somehow managed to look pleased at this without actually smiling. “Now, son, listen. You’ll be King soon and that title comes with certain responsibilities. We’ve decided to be completely frank with you: there’s worry that you’re not connecting enough with the people,” Kurogane’s father explained, clasping his son on the shoulder as if to soften the accusatory words with an affectionate gesture. Kurogane raised one eyebrow.

“Connecting? I’m getting stronger each day so I can protect them!”

“Kurogane, dear heart, I’m afraid all your… what was it? ‘Training’? I’m afraid it’s made the others a little wary of you,” his mother snatched up his hand and patted it lovingly.

“You do give off quite the intense first impression, my boy,” Kurogane’s father added, laughing heartily as though at a thoroughly satisfying joke. “I don’t believe it’s necessary to carry that sword of yours everywhere you go, but I must give you credit for being prepared for anything, I suppose!”

“So what do you want me to do about it?” Kurogane growled, sulking. He had never been a particularly social person, but he couldn’t let his training go to waste. There was no use trying to protect a group of people who were more afraid of him than of anyone they would need protecting from.

His mother’s smile widened.

“We thought you could start this way,” she said, moving aside. Kurogane was about to ask what she was going on about before he had a face full of manjuu bun.

“Hello, my fairy prince! I am Mokona Modoki! Aren’t you happy?” the bun asked merrily. Kurogane grabbed the thing and peeled it off his face, staring down at it incredulously. The round, white thing resembled a meat bun save for the fact that it sported two tiny, fluttering fairy wings on its back, red as his own were.

“What the hell? H-happy about what?” he stammered. The thing called Mokona grinned creepily, keeping its eyes resolutely shut.

“That you are to be Mokona’s wife!” the manjuu bun trilled. Kurogane simply stared at it for a moment, his face twitching as the creature’s words sunk in. There was a long, tense silence, before-

“WHAT!?” the crown prince roared, absolutely livid. “THAT’S A LIE! I AM NOT!” He chucked the bun as hard as he could away from him, but the white thing merely squealed as if Kurogane was playing with it and turned in the air on a dime, tiny wings beating furiously as it floated back towards its fiancé. It glomped onto Kurogane’s neck and hummed happily.

“Fairy prince can be the husband if he wants, Mokona doesn’t discriminate!” Mokona declared, snuggling into Kurogane’s neck before slipping beneath the hem of his tunic.

“GET OUTTA THERE, YOU FREAKING BUN-”

“However, Mokona tops!”

“WHAT DID YOU SAY, YOU DAMN MEAT BUN?!”

“Kurogane, please, try to be a little more welcoming,” Kurogane’s mother suggested. Kurogane grabbed the white thing as it tried to scurry around under his clothes and squeezed it painfully in one fist. Mokona whimpered.

“I’m not marrying this thing!” Kurogane yelled.

“Is it because it’s a girl, son?” Kurogane’s father asked sagely.

Kurogane stared, momentarily shocked into silence.

“W-what?!” he squeaked, unable to completely convey how utterly embarrassed he felt. “N-No! Of course not! It’s because it’s a damn manj-!”

“Darling, you don’t have the most approachable personality,” his mother began with a pacifying tone, gently prying open her son’s now-white fingers from around his fiancée. “It would, perhaps, help greatly to improve your ‘tough-guy’ image if you took Mokona here to be your wife. You must admit, nobody would be hesitant to approach such a cute thing.”

Mokona pretended to blush and hid its face behind its stubby hands.

“Mokona is a delicate flower that blossoms only to bring smiles to the world!” It gushed over itself, twirling in a happy circle and seemingly forgetting that Kurogane was around for now.

“We’re not going to force you into anything, mind,” Kurogane’s father said, crossing his arms. “We just want you to think about it.”

“I’M NOT GONNA-”

“Kurogane does not want to be Mokona’s red hot lover?” the white bun asked, its ears drooping sadly and its tiny mouth curling downwards into an exaggerated frown. Kurogane stared down at it incredulously, fluttering up a few inches to get away from it. He looked up; beyond his parents and the crazy white bun were the five council members, all looking delicate and beautiful as they always did, carefully regarding the situation with varying looks. Some looked hopeful while others looked as though they expected him to storm off as was his habit. None of them looked as though they approved of his attitude.

“Just think on it, will you, darling?” his mother asked, guilting him perhaps unintentionally with those pleading eyes of hers. He looked down at her for a moment before giving a long, aggravated sigh. “We hold you under no obligation to accept. Just consider it.”

“Fine, whatever,” he said, taking off into the fading afternoon light. His parents watched him go pensively as their potential future daughter-in-law fluttered off to explore its new honeymoon suite.

“He’ll do the right thing,” Kurogane’s father assured his wife.

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Author's Notes: In case anyone actually reads this closely enough to realize that I made Syaoran a cow and that all cows are female, the only response I have to this is that “I am aware.”

…And this would be where I wink suggestively?

Also, um, this won’t be an “everyone hits on Fai and just takes it like a weepy uke” fic, so don’t worry, Fai will have a backbone and will not be a total girl.