#eternally emo over these two thanks 😭😭 TRULY THANK YOU FOR SENDING THIS IN!! )

[balladetto]

reasons to cup a face / always accepting / @gloryseized ( Shion )

GROUND, during a moment of intense emotional stress, the sender gently takes the receiver's face in their hands to ground them until they're calmer again.

     It happens in snapshot moments.

     As he registers the feel of a palm between his fingers, somehow heaving against him without toppling him over, Kane opens his eyes. He blinks — blinks again, and the inside of the Temple of Time comes into focus: a muted colour to the light that pours in through its stained glass windows as if the very air has mildewed. There's a silence here that unnerves him. He realises, at once, three things.

     Kane is in a body he does not recognise but knows, deep down, is his.

     He is holding onto someone he does not recognise but knows, deeper down, is his brother.

     This is a Dream. Which is different from a dream, 'cause this is the type — the only type — he can still vividly recall after waking, like echoes bleeding into reality. He's been getting these recently.

     Almost as though he's been waiting for these things to connect, the likeness of Shion wrests his hand from Kane's. He steps away. He's— so tall like this, figure looming, shadows on his face that can't be cut through, but so is Kane; so is the form he's been warped into, and they are two brothers divided by a space that shouldn't be making his breath quicken so hard.

     "I promise," Shion's image signs, a bold declaration with bold movements, and Kane — for the same reason he knows without recognising — wants to scream at him. What are you promising? Do you have any idea? You can't promise me something like that. You can't promise me something you've already broken!

     Don't leave me!

     The quiet stretches. He can't move. He's stuck in a moment he doesn't know how to break out of, hand vainly outstretched and wide eyes pinned on a face he can't see. His skin feels one touch removed from splitting apart the way his heart feels one nudge off from falling over the precipice of some knife's edge, yet he aches anyway, willing to be ripped open if it means his brother will be there.

     His brother will not be there.

     Kane watches in helpless horror as Shion turns, boots tapping out a decisive farewell march. He's distantly aware of the little light following after him — Navi, it takes a second to place, blue and a perfect fit and so out of place at the same time. They're going ahead without him, approaching the pedestal made for the sword on Shion's back, and Kane is struck with such a sudden desperation that his body, frozen as it is, trembles. Convulses.

     Stop, he can't cry. Don't leave me, he can't plead. It's only when his brother raises the Master Sword high, about to return it to its resting place, that the stone Kane's trapped in releases him. He stumbles forward — forces himself to keep stumbling forward, throat strained raw as he calls for his brother, but he can tell— he's too late. He's too late. The Dream stills, suspended on knowledge he can't look away from—

     Kane wakes up to arms binding his hands to his sternum and a hot face pressed into the back of his neck.

     For a second, the change thoroughly dazes him. He blinks, capturing nothing, and in its span: the world rearranges itself. Pain flares from his chest, throbbing in time with the harsh, too-fast breaths strangling him. The night is lit by firelight, casting a dim glow over cave walls and along the things in a campsite for two travellers. With how sticky his nose and cheeks and eyes feel, he thinks he's probably been crying. His brother is here.

     His brother is here.

     "Shh-ii—" he starts, and finds he won't complete the name.

     Shion jerks against his side, inhaling so sharply it sounds like it'd hurt before hurriedly pulling away from where he's curled around Kane. The motion has him nauseous with a fear carried over, snatching at a forearm the right size with hands the right size, but his brother isn't— isn't going away. He moves until they're facing each other, gaze searching for Kane's. This up close, he can trace every contour. He can delineate every crease, put an emotion to every feature — helped by a nearby fairy's shine. Yellow. Tatl.

     He— lets go. "Shion," he shakily, unnecessarily, forms with his hands. It's too cramped for brother to be signed well, so he repeats it again, and again, and again. The shape falls apart further each time, until it's little more than his left hand knocking atop his right.

     Don't leave me. Don't leave me. Don't leave me. If he could carve this into his skin so Shion can see and understand it when his voice and fingers are as useless as they are now, he would. And maybe some part of him really tried, maybe that's what the twinges running along the lengths of his arms are, but— his brother has never needed Kane's words to know what to do.

     Shion holds him gently. Carefully, palm and fingertips assured in their own tenderness. He presses a different message into the skin of his cheeks, the answer to all that goes unsaid but not unrealised.

     Don't leave me, Kane begs with a bitten lip, heaving shoulders, and a weird, awful certainty that he'll be ignored.

     I'm here, Shion swears with circling thumbs, eyes that reflect his twin's pain, and a steady, near irremovable warmth.

     Kane's voice trips over an ugly sob. He pushes his hands over his brother's, drinking in the touch with an overwrought exhaustion, and tries to match his breathing to the slow cadence of that terribly profuse love.

     ( What a strange Dream, he will later think as they drift back to sleep. A strange fear, he will correct, squeezing-hand-in-squeezing-hand. Shion would never leave him. )