i really love fye/fai d. flourite (tsubasa reservoir chronicle) as a character but ship-wise it's fuuma/kamui (x/1999) all the way through.

i really love x/1999 in general, and central to its theme is the repeating motif that love is choosing--even when it's the more painful of the choices, even knowing the price you must pay for it, the sacrifices you have to make. the idea that love can be something ruinous but worth it a million small, personal, broken ways.

kamui's path in the series comes down to two choices: to save the earth at the cost of humanity, or to save humanity at the cost of the earth. he chose the latter because the earth itself, as a habitat, does not matter to him. it matters because fuuma (and kotori) are there, because they love <i>this</i> earth that they live in. his exact words are: "but to me, the world is the people i love. it those people aren't there, the whole world might as well be gone, too."

it is, in the grand scheme of things, the wrong choice--the series has made it explicit that humans are destroying the earth with their exploitation. kamui's own mother died burning as a direct result of this destruction. i love how personal, how <i>selfish</i> of a choice it is. even in their imageries, it's fuuma (as The Kamui of the dragons of earth) who's drawn with angel wings and kamui's the one drawn with devil's wings.

i also really love that kamui's greatest failing in the series is his desire to bring fuuma back, even knowing from very early on that if his wish were to come true, it will bring him so much sorrow. that desire is the one thing that brought him back from his comatose state, but afterwards he's paralyzed by his unwillingness to actually harm fuuma, even when kamui!fuuma has no qualms stabbing him homoerotically at least once every volume. that wish cost people their life, and kamui knows this. he chooses not to abandon fuuma regardless.

kamui's weak willpower when it comes to fuuma would have been frustrating in other circumstances, but even when fuuma should have been fully possessed by The Kamui of the dragons of earth, glimpses of the fuuma-as-himself still peek through and it's also such a small and broken thing but it also stops him from being a full-blown Sadistic Dom Daddy(tm) which i dislike...deep inside him the "real" fuuma who is gentle and kind and full of love still exists, all because kamui (+ kotori) does not give up on him.

x/1999 in general is good and exploring facets of flawed love like this imo. of course there's the classic seishirou/subaru's rainbow bridge scene ("if nothing else, i wanted you to be the one to end my life."), but there's also sorata/arashi (arashi falling for sorata and choosing to sleep with him knowing full-well it will cost her her powers), fuuma's parents (his mother being in love with kamui's mother, his father knowing this and still deciding to be her husband because he loves her enough to make that sacrifice)...i love it so much i'm still holding on to hope that it'll get a proper ending that it deserves or at least a reboot ;;