Author's Notes: This was supposed to be the start of a much longer story set during the events of the very first Guilty Gear game. Alas, the rest never got written and almost certainly never will be, so what's left of the idea is a very angsty Sol/Ky reunion scene after their long separation at the end of the war.

The first time Sol saw Ky in five years was in the hallway of a shabby hotel, nowhere in particular save for being the designated accommodation for a so-called 'tournament' that had (on light of current evidence) attracted a greater variety of competitors than Sol had counted on. Apart from bad carpet and variously tarnished light fittings, the corridor had twelve doors, counting rooms on both sides, most of them probably already occupied, so Sol almost didn't look up at the sound of one opening. That was all the fanfare he got before a piece of his history stepped out, right on to the bad carpet not half a dozen yards in front of him.

Later on, when he needed an excuse, Sol would blame most of what happened next squarely on the fact that after five years, Ky had still had the nerve to look exactly the damn same.

He could almost have believed a ghost of the war years had stepped out of his past and come back to haunt him, except that Ky had lived through the war (miracle of miracles, certainly not for lack of trying to get himself killed) and wasn't likely to have bowed out for anything since. Sol was meant to be the one who was immortal, but Ky had apparently cleared the years between seventeen and twenty-two without aging a day (even if that was as much testament to how easily the real seventeen-year-old Ky could have passed for twenty-two). War had made Ky old beyond his years long before Sol met him, and by luck or design his body had matched it. He must have hit a growth spurt somewhere in his early teens and shot up like a bullet – it had never been for nothing that he'd been so good at making every other man in his army forget they were being lead by a teenaged boy. Even Sol had let himself forget that more often than he could justify. To look at Ky today it was hard to imagine him ever aging – unless he ran himself into the ground he was probably destined to be one of those rare, frustrating individuals who went on looking twenty-five until the day they hit fifty. Even the uniform was the same – nevermind that the Holy Order disbanded five years ago and its men scattered to the winds, old regimentals now only to be dusted off once annually for 'end of the war day' ceremonial parades. Nevermind that not even Sol had been entirely able to avoid the fuss the news outlets had made when the first chance to produce pictures of Commander Kiske in the IPF colours had presented itself. But there was no new IPF uniform in evidence here, not so much as a new haircut to mark the fact half a decade had gone by in the time since they saw each other last.

He might just have stepped through a doorway and found himself transported back to the very day he'd left the Order, every argument they'd never finished just waiting to picked up right where they'd left off. There, without a single word yet spoken, Sol could have written the whole script of everything either of them were going to say given half a chance, and it made him sick just to think about it. It was the last thing he had the stomach to deal with, and that might have been reason enough for what he did then.

In the several seconds it took Sol to cross the space between them he watched the whole series of emotions skitter across Ky's face – recognition, disbelief, rage, dissolving straight down into shock before he stopped gaping long enough to form a single word as Sol kept coming closer, until even the boy couldn't have mistaken his motives. It may well have been shock that kept him from doing anything but staring, riveted to the spot, when Sol stopped in front of him, grabbed him by the front of that stupid, damnable uniform and kissed him with everything in him that had missed having the freedom to do this in the last five years.

Sol may have spent his share of time mocking Ky for his naivety, but the boy wasn't slow; this had been sudden and crazy enough that Sol couldn't blame him if he took a minute to catch up – or if he decided a suitable response would involve punching Sol in the face. He felt Ky tense up under his lips and gasp, but then the next thing he felt was both Ky's hands tangling in his hair to hold him down, kissing back with every bit as much desperate need as Sol could have expected. Probably knowing as well as Sol did this was a moment he couldn't afford not to make the most of when it might so easily never happen again.

It wasn't like it used to be, back in the days when they'd been known to go straight from a match to struggling on the floor to trying to crawl inside each others' clothes without anything more than the technicalities of the exercise changing between them. A lot of arguments of theirs would probably never have gotten any kind of resolution if they hadn't gotten into the habit of doing this, back in that time when it had been a little too easy to justify taking a teenaged boy with a typical teenaged crush to bed and fucking him until he got over the infatuation. Less easy when the infatuation showed no sign of wearing off, even if Sol hadn't seen any need to complain about it at the time. Ky had grown up in a war-torn world, lost all his illusions well before he was old enough to join the fight; he had no excuse for mistaking a few encounters (or a few more than a few) for the sake of comfort or release for love. It certainly never stopped them arguing, didn't even slow them down. If the reality had had anything to do with a boy whose life was taken up with more responsibilities than an old man should have shouldered in a lifetime – a boy wanting even one thing he didn't have to answer for, didn't have to worry about breaking, then Sol had successfully avoided the thought until long after he'd already left. If it had struck him before that, it might still not have meant anything more than a reason to leave sooner.

Without so much as breaking contact between them Sol was walking Ky backwards through the door he'd just come out of – mercifully left open a crack – barely tearing himself away long enough to navigate them in the direction of the small hotel room bed. The Order uniform had approximately a hundred different complicated buckles and fastenings – a part of this process Sol had decidedly not missed, but one he'd gotten down to a fine art long ago, back when this was a regular occurrence. Ky's fingers fumbled over the buckle on his jacket, learning Sol's new outfit by touch and halting guesswork (this would shortly be the first time in years Sol had cause to regret adding so many belts to his pants). But it wasn't long before he was pushing the jacket back over Sol's shoulders and dropping his hands more efficiently to the belt Sol had sudden cause to be glad he hadn't changed since his Order days.

No matter how many years he might have spent lying to himself about whether he'd missed this it was ridiculous how easy it was to fall back into it like nothing had ever changed.

Whatever quota of desk-work was involved in Ky's new job, he hadn't let it do his physique one iota of damage; he was as familiar under his clothes as he'd been in them, body kept stubbornly at the peak of physical fitness down to the last muscle and sinew, not one new scar added to those Sol remembered (a little more faded now by time, but little enough to make no difference). Sol knewthis body, still remembered what made it arch under his hands, how to make Ky moan and clutch at him with shaking fingers until he was inches away from climax – knew how to keep him there on the edge until they were both spent. How to prompt Ky to take his turn to go down on him without a word needing to be exchanged, and find out by doing so that Ky remembered all this just as well as he, could approach this with a passion and single-mindedness that none of the thousands of people who saw only his public face would have believed he could have in him. (That it was there at all was very probably Sol's fault anyway.)

It was probably stupid to stay afterwards long enough for them both to fall asleep, crowded into a bed hardly selected with more than one occupant in mind. But – or so he told himself – it would have taken a far bigger coward than him to leave.

Didn't matter how much he was going to regret this in the morning. Avoiding Ky never had done more than delay the inevitable. Five years had to be long enough.

There was no pleasant period of sleepy forgetfulness when Ky woke up the next morning – not even the nostalgia was nearly enough to let him believe for so much as a moment that they were back during the war again – when times could hardly have been described as 'better' but waking up next to Sol like this had been a relatively common occurrence, and frequently the most peace they'd be given by either the world or one another for the rest of the day. Of all the times he'd ever pictured meeting Sol again over the last five years – an event he'd known was inevitable from the day Sol left – this scenario had never crossed his mind. It was unlikely Sol could have caught him so utterly off-guard otherwise.

Beside him, Sol was stirring and sitting up, something Ky might have slept right through in the old days. It had been fairly typical once upon a time for him to be awake before Ky was but not bother rising until much later. Funny how the little things could bring the nostalgia on so much more than the big ones; so many memories he'd long since shelved away, never even recognising how many pages there were in that volume until it opened again. The memory closed down sharply as Sol got out of bed, back turned to Ky, and began the long search for wherever his pants had ended up.

The brush-off would have been more insulting if Ky had been expecting anything else. Finding Sol still here in the morning had been far more than he'd counted on already.

"What on Earth was that supposed to be?" he asked Sol's back. It felt uncomfortably like a question read from a script, but some mornings there was just no getting around it.

"Didn't hear you complaining," said Sol, gruff in a way Ky would have called defensive on anyone else, a hit on a nerve Ky hadn't expected to be there. Could he really have been worried he was being accused of forcing what had happened on Ky?

It had been sudden. It had all been very sudden.

"All this time after you left us," enough time and practice that Ky wasn't even thinking 'left me' anymore, small victories where he could get them, "you avoid every attempt I make to track you down, and now this?"

"It was that or fight. Which one do you call more civilised?"

"That's your only reason?" Ky wanted to laugh at him – laugh at both of them, coming to this. There'd been a time when he could have laughed at Sol and it would have been no more than childish mirth, but it would be a very different laugh today.

Shaking his head, he said, "You're only delaying the inevitable. We both came here for the same tournament. Sooner or later, we'll meet each other in the ring in combat, if not before."

"Maybe," Sol grunted, head disappearing under his singlet for a moment in the process of dressing. "Think you'll last that long?"

While it was a bit late to realise Sol had actually had rather more justification for dressing so quickly than avoidance alone, Ky would have given a lot to have been clothed and on his feet at that moment. "This is no game to me Sol, I came here for a reason. I will tell you now I have not the slightest intention of losing a match before I have the opportunity to face you as an opponent. And I have not the slightest intention of letting you defeat me either."

Sol snorted and turned to face him properly for the first time since the conversation started, the look on his face straight from another page in Ky's nostalgia-volume, covered with scrawl about arguments on the edge of bloodied battlefields and too many days when dragging Sol to a deserted training hall only left him limping away humiliated. "You're going to beat me, boy? Five years isn't long enough for you to have forgotten that much."

"On the contrary, Sol," not even the uncomfortable suspicion he was indulging in little more than bluster could have stopped Ky now, "Five years is more than long enough for everything you thought you knew about me to have changed. I am hardly the same man who you remember. I have spared no effort to improve my skills in that time."

Sol gave him a humourless grin that, more than anything else, proved that the full irony of them having this discussion while one of them was naked in a strange bed hadn't escaped him. "How's that working out now there's no war for you to lead?"

Ky glared at him with as much authority as he was in a position to muster. "The Holy Order and the Gears may be no more, but that has scarcely brought an end to the conflicts facing this world. I'm a member of the International Police Force now, and I see battle enough in the line of my work even in these peaceful days."

In the search for his second shoe, Sol recovered Ky's pants out from the floor on his side of the bed, and tossed them at their owner. Ky snatched them from the air just short of his face, quietly grateful that Sol had enough pity not to make him spend what little dignity he had searching for his own clothes in the midst of this, despite a certain kneejerk embarrassment at losing sight of Sol even for a moment under the cover of a lot of white fabric.

The moment proved long enough for the last trace of humour to have leached from Sol's face.

"You come here just to fight me, Ky?"

"Of course not," Ky bristled, caught by a sudden and painfully familiar paranoia dating from his teenage years that surely Sol would be able to hear how fast his heart was beating. "I didn't have the slightest idea you'd be here last night, did I?" If that was neglecting to mention the little voice in his head that always wondered whether his next mission was the one where he'd cross paths with Sol again, it was scarcely relevant. Pulling on his pants at last, he continued, "There's more at foot here than the revival of old rivalries."

"When you're still wearing the uniform of an army that disbanded five years ago?"

Ky looked up sharply, feeling he'd lost track Sol's meaning completely. "Do you imagine this to be foolish sentimentality? Of course I wear this uniform today." Or half of it, as the case might have been, but at least he was on his feet now without the self-consciousness of parading around naked. "This whole tournament was convened under the premise of selecting members for a new Holy Order – they seek to undermine the very pride and good name of the Order for purposes I cannot begin to imagine!"

"That what they told you?" Sol grumbled, reviving yet another old talent by dismissing all of Ky's concerns with hardly even a hand-wave. "Ch, figures."

Ky narrowed his eyes. "I take it you were lured here under a different premise? But of course they did, it's hard to picture you of all people being first in line to join a second Order."

"Musta been. Whatever you want to hear," Sol muttered.

"Why are you here, Sol? What did you hear that make you come here?"

Sol made no reply.

"I have spoken with some of the other prospective competitors," Ky offered. "Most seem to be under the impression the winner will have their greatest wish granted."

"Who knows?" Sol snorted, which was good enough to be taken as a 'no'. "Something you got to wish for, boy?"

"Wishes..." Ky mused, shaking his head for what was very much not the first time since waking up today, "they always seemed like the most ridiculous nonsense. If something is worth having, a goal worth achieving, then it is to be achieved by one's own hard work, not by relying on miracles."

The sound of Sol's footsteps crossing the short space to the doorway was the only warning he had to look up before Sol was at the door. "Save the preaching for the rest of these losers. Maybe you can go home early."

"Do you realise that's the closest you've come to agreeing with me all morning?"

"Like old times," Sol spat, and let the door slam closed behind him.

The impulse to run after him faded well before Ky had the rest of his uniform in order.