*Disclaimer* I don't own Tales of Symphonia, it belongs to it's creators, this little thing just popped in my head while I was trying unsuccessfully to sleep. Quick little one shot into a certain someone's heads. Warnings- implied m/m. Spoilers if you haven't reached the night at Altessa's.
It was never love.
Yuan came up behind the silent auburn haired warrior, and draped an arm around his shoulders. He didn't say anything as he felt the tenseness drain away, he merely sat down and leaned his head closer to Kratos' shoulder.
They didn't love each other.
No, they would never love each other more than those they had already loved and lost. However during a cold night's bitter embrace, the warm whisper of a comforting word, a gentle understanding meant more than most fathom.
It wasn't love. But it wasn't mere friendship either. They'd been through and seen too much for that. Countless lifetimes spent together had cemented something far greater than most mortals could comprehend with their limited grasp of time and it's passing. Not just a thousand days, but a thousand nights, for beings who can't sleep, it would be like living 8,000 years, no respite from the passage of time to be given over to the serenity of dreams.
Each lost in their own pain, their own sorrows, their own losses. An endless sea of the future stretching out before them, the only certainty that the one they loved more than any other would never come back. That they would never be able to hold the one they cherished again, and tell them what they meant to them. To whisper sweet nothings, and a promise of a future.
Kratos at least had his son - his hope, who he spent years believing dead, but even that couldn't bring his Anna back from the grave. A cold stone all that remained to mark her place through the passage of time.
They didn't love each other. But they understood each others pain, and loneliness, and more than that, they were together through even the years, and decades, and eons. And that was enough.