Disclaimer: I don't own anything!
Author's Note: I forgot that it was Father's Day until we were in the middle of watching Green Lantern, so naturally, this would be late.
Happy (Late) Father's Day to anyone celebrating!
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"I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn't believe it would come, and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true, he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.
He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…"
-F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
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"Come walk with me." There was a lilt in Yuan's voice that made it—almost—seem like a question. Almost.
When Kratos did nothing but look at him, Yuan just sighed. "You can't stay stuffed up in this room forever. Well, you can. I wouldn't recommend it. There's a thing called cabin fever going around. Wouldn't want you to catch it."
Kratos wondered distantly how Yuan managed to convince him into everything. Perhaps it was because, even underneath the cynicism and aged bitterness in Yuan's eyes, Kratos could still see the boy he'd grown up with.
And so they walked among the worlds, their footsteps little more than dust in the wind. They were as ghosts in these worlds. They didn't know these places anymore. Not like they knew them.
They didn't know the smell of the grass, the way that the sun shone too brightly in Tethe'alla and in Sylvarant, it was no less bright, but it was different somehow. More soft-edged. Like the sunlight was constantly streaming through thin clouds. The sky was too small and stretched too thin, like an ill-fitting shirt. The water is all that remained the same in both worlds, but even the water was not the same as it was in their memories, in their youth.
They walked through the towns—they avoided Luin and the Iselia area altogether. The memories and grief were still too near—and it was only when they were standing on the broken aqueduct in Asgard that Yuan spoke.
"Did I ever tell you about my father?"
Kratos looked sideways at him, confusion creasing his brow and the corners of his eyes. He had been getting old before his time in their youth. Twenty-eight and wrinkles were appearing. Faint, hardly detectable, but there to those who knew him.
"He was drafted when three weeks before I turned seven. Him and my two oldest brothers." Yuan began quietly. His words would be inaudible to any but Kratos. "But I can still remember his face sometimes. He was a good man, always taking time out for my brothers and I. Even after he was drafted, he would send photos to us. I think he would've written to use if he knew how. I don't have much for comparison, but I think he was a good father. The kind I wanted to be."
They're silent for long moments that stretch and branch out, each new bud a new minute. The memories of green and blonde haired angels painted themselves before their eyes, laughing almond-shaped eyes, dancing in the night beneath the stars, running in the rain and smiling over the campfire.
"Even after he left, my youngest older brother," Yuan paused at the awkward words that left his mouth before continuing. "He would insist on celebrating."
"Celebrating what?" Kratos' voice was hoarse from disuse. Or so he would have people believe. Yuan knew better. He knew about the nightmares that had Kratos screaming himself awake at night.
"Every summer, there was a day set aside for fathers in my village. They wouldn't have to work; they could simply sit and relax. Then there were stems and small branches from the pomegranate trees that were put in little jars and we would burn the ends of them and set them on our window sills. It was a sign of respect, or so we were told. My brother did it every year."
"No, you never told me that." Kratos said. He remembered every story that Yuan had told him.
"I thought I hadn't." It's one of the very few memories he had never shared with him. Some part of Yuan was still the child holding tight to his memories, not wanting anyone else to know them.
"Not that I don't appreciate it, but why the sudden nostalgia?"
"Wait here."
Yuan returned several minutes later with an inkpot and three twigs. "There are no pomegranate trees here, not anymore—the War must've wiped them out—but," Yuan lit the ends of the twigs with a word and set the pot down at their feet, close to the edge of the aqueduct. "I suppose this will have to do. Happy day of the fathers, Kratos."
Kratos stared at the gently burning, sweet-smelling twigs and then looked up at Yuan. The half-elf had his hands shoved in his pockets and wasn't looking at Kratos, but out at what, once, had been his village. It had been little more than a year since…Then…and Kratos had been well into his plan of forgetting that any of it ever happened
(It's impossible, he knows. He can't ever forget her steel-and-fire personality, can't ever forget a chubby, pink-cheeked face looking up at him with his eyes.)
"You didn't have to do this." Kratos told him. He knew how much it must have hurt Yuan to go back through his memories, to remind himself of what he almost had before it was ripped away from him.
"No, I didn't." Yuan agreed, still not looking at him. But he did because he wanted to and because, somewhere in their dusty four thousand plus years, they'd lost sight of what they had been. They'd nearly forgotten that they had been brothers once, friends and comrades. And, even after all this time, they're still here.