Because there's too much you could do with the twins. Not hard to figure out what's going on here, so I won't explain.

Enjoy!

Proof of Consolation

It was the sudden lack of warmth that roused him initially, a feeling like having something drained away slowly. But it was the sharp intake of breath— the one that signaled the holding in of emotion, like a staggered burst of a balloon, that made him jump to consciousness with a start.

"Hikaru?" sleepy, drowsy, a mildly concerned inquiry, but Kaoru was surprised that Hikaru's back was turned to him, shaking, and he raised a hand to place it questioningly on his brother's shoulder.

"What?" he asked softly, inching to the space that Hikaru had created between them.

His mirror didn't answer, his body lying there, a teacup in an earthquake, and Kaoru now was seriously concerned, his touch transmitting this by the pressing of his fingertips deeper into that soft mound of flesh that was exposed to him in the near-absolute darkness.

"K-Kaoru…" no more than a low waver, the coming of the apocalypse rumbling in his voice.

Kaoru responded immediately by raising himself up on his elbow, leaning over his brother's form as Hikaru turned his face up, gazing up at him with eyes that were tortured and sick with thoughts that were like underwater mazes, never-ending, suffocating.

"Are you feeling sick?" was the first fleeting impression that tumbled from his mouth like the waters of instinctive concern. And when there was no answer, only that pitiful gaze that seemed to be pleading for answers to questions dancing their sadistic flames behind the gold of his eyes, Kaoru leaned closer, flesh against flesh noting there was no fever and no pallor apparent, but of course, it's what is unseen to the external eye that is often more damaging, so Kaoru didn't take that at face value.

"Did you have a bad dream?"

The slow shake of his head was at once desperate and graceful and Kaoru was kind of hypnotized by it. Their eyes locked, and Kaoru began to feel nervous at the way Hikaru's eyes raked his face and the way his mouth opened and closed wordlessly, and the sudden grip on his arms.

"Kaoru… smile for me," the whispered plead scared him, and it made it all the harder to force his mouth into the mask, what with the corner of his lips twitching violently. It was sort of like rape.

His mirror's soft hand cupped his face, tracing his lips, and Kaoru forced the plastered smile to remain painted in concrete. It was shaking, and Kaoru instinctively wrapped his fingers around the thin wrist in support.

"H-Hikaru… what's gotten into you?"

His twin bit his lip, the motion hardly apparent in the darkness, his thoughts like waves that roared in his mind and made him deaf to all else. Those golden eyes continued to rake across his face, fingertips tracing the paths carved by them in an anguishing follow-up.

"Tell me I did the right thing, Kaoru," the slightly hysterical pitch unnerved Kaoru to the point that his own fingers trembled as they tangled themselves in the messy mass of sunset hair. His brother continued in a sort of frightened rambling, distraught, and his eyes whirling to a tempo bordering on the frenzied and crazed, "I didn't really have a choice, you know, but I just wanted… I just want to know I did the right thing."

Baffled was his mirror, staring into identical golden eyes, save for that anguished glaze, "I… I'm not catching you, Hikaru," he breathed out his twin's name softly upon his shoulder, in hopes of easing him into something more rational, where he could reach his brother's scattered leaps of logic and emotion. His own body moved of its own accord, out of finely tuned intuition, to curve around Hikaru's, pressing into all the places he knew were comforting, cradling him by anchoring the inside of his elbow, the small of his back, the shoulder. Much like a protective cocoon, sheltering the confused caterpillar until it breaks free as an unburdened butterfly. It was Kaoru's job, something like a self-appointed purpose.

"Kiss me," Hikaru burbled, like his thoughts where all pushing to fall from his mouth at once, and those were the first that made it.

"Hikaru—"

"Just do it, I need to…" the sky was falling in his eyes, and this was his last request, and Kaoru barely had time to register the fear that was making this seem like a freakish nightmare of coming doom, like the world was ending and they were two estranged lovers on the brink of existence, before Hikaru leaned up at the same time that his arms encircled his brother's neck and wrenched him down.

"The right thing…" was shoved in his mouth, along with his tongue, and the bitter taste of hormone-driven fear invaded him, and he couldn't understand what made this so different from all the other times. Was it because he felt the hot sting of tears in his eyes, or because they were gripping each other to the point of stabbing and throttling, under some sort of unseen poison that made it harder to breathe and drove lunacy and never-shattering terror in them? Hikaru was moaning incoherence as he pressed his lips numbingly against Kaoru's, and the situation was so out of place and so nightmarish that Kaoru couldn't do more than just lay there over his mirror. His heartbeat thundered for Hikaru's pain, but it hardly reached Hikaru's ears, and that spurred it on faster and faster, searching to become the soothing rhythm to ease him from his personal hell.

Hikaru's kiss was the desert's fervent call for the hope of the rain clouds that Kaoru's lips held.

"I just want to know I made the right choice, I just want proof…"

He wasn't crying when he fell back against the pillow, but his face was so exhausted, so confused, that Kaoru leaned down to brush his lips against Hikaru's again, this time in simple, chaste comfort and not whatever needy pain had driven Hikaru to draw from Kaoru everything he'd ever offered but not expected to be taken.

"I know it had to be you," he buried his face underneath Kaoru's chin, letting the lean arms pull him in, "Has, I mean, but, sometimes it hurts, and I wonder… we had something, but you and I have something too… It just hurts… but ours is stronger, of course. I made the choice, and I think I was right… sometimes I wonder though, not because you aren't enough, I love you, you know that, but because she… we had something, and I just don't know, cause you've always been smarter, and you probably would have chosen better. It would have been the same choice though, right?"

"Hikaru…" Kaoru whispers, because now he understands what's going on, and there's a nail on his heart being wedged into the working tissue and tearing the flesh apart. A piece of clay stabbed by a knife, "Did you get your proof? Do you think you chose right… or do you regret it?" trembling just a bit, because he almost doesn't want to hear the answer he would never expect at any other moment that wasn't oppressing night and the painful if's and regrets that swallowed one like a black tidal wave.

"What do you see in the abyss before you?"

Too cold and calculated. Kaoru vaguely recognized it as a rhetorical question from a poem, or book, but at this moment it chilled him, because Hikaru's eyes were suddenly too clear and expectant, and he knew this was no rhetoric at all. The only comfort was that the answer was immediate and clear in his mind. Always has been, but what's white to black if not the opposite? Pain to love, if not the obvious result?

"You. Only you."

Hikaru turned his head away, and muttered, "It must have been right… no one else… you… what else could I expect? That's why I said I didn't really have a choice— complete acceptance, what more could I want?" he was rambling again, this time with his eyes closed, and the words barely a breath that escaped his chapped lips, his grip relaxing from Kaoru's arms, "I mean, how could I have lived otherwise?"

"I wouldn't have been able to," not meant to be comforting, the most unfair of all the things Kaoru has ever told him. But it was the truth, the disturbing truth, a factor that they would forever have to take into account, when the fork in the road led to that abyss or to chains, "I would have died."

Golden eyes slid out of focus as they absorbed the truth, "…I would have killed you…?"

"Yes," Kaoru said, pressing himself closer, the warmth enveloping and washing over the both of them settling his stomach. Knowing that he'd been so close to the edge was the most frightening of all sensations, much like being dipped in a glass of ice-water—numbing and shocking.

Hikaru plucked at their sheets, pulling them tighter around them, and his eyes were once again drinking in every single one of Kaoru's characteristics, which varied in an almost insignificantly minute way from Hikaru's that it was an almost vain attempt, but it was those minute differences that Hikaru appreciated and drank in, the things that made him feel that affinity for his mirror because they were the same, and the differences that allowed him to admire him and respect him as something of his own, separate and beautiful.

"I would have died too, eventually," came the admittance, the steady calm back in his voice, relieving Kaoru, because he would never understand what exactly had spurred those hysterics from his brother, but they were over and still chained together, and that was all that mattered. It meant something so very different to them, the word 'chains'. Because they spoke of holding together and not imprisoning, as normal humans beings, who had yet to find their soulmate, seemed to think.

"…Did you get your proof, then?" Kaoru re-asked, wrapping his arms back around his twin and listening to their heartbeats pump in unison. The red string around their pinkies had tightened again, and the drums that beat at the same time signaled the rattle of the chains that will never break loose.

The chin that rubbed against his forehead was followed by a slow rumble, "In your lips, and in your voice. In you, which is in me."

They were silent for a moment, the contemplation that their chains came so close to being broken being almost too much to take, and they'd rather distract themselves with warm skin and silk sheets than thoughts of a death slower and infinitely more painful than the corporeal kind.

"Are you mad at me?" Hikaru asked timidly, the frightened child in him coming out, and Kaoru responded with that same child inside himself surfacing.

"Are you?"

"Never."

"Me neither."

Hikaru's tears were sliding like lukewarm fire down Kaoru's neck, following the dip of his collarbone and finally along the curve of his shoulder to sink into the mattress. There was a caravan of them, and Kaoru eventually let a couple of his own join the journey.

"Then we're alright, aren't we?" they whispered.

So, I trust it wasn't hard to follow, ... I felt like I had more I wanted to do with this, but lost the inspiration randomly and had no idea what to continue what seemed complete enough for a one shot here. Hope you enjoyed, drop in a review, will ya? Oh, and verb tense may randomly have switched cause I seem to unconsciously switch into present when I get real rhetorical. Whoops.