Lucas only realized their destination when suddenly Claus began to trail behind him, slowing to a gradual stop so that Lucas had to rein his own sprint in to a canter and do the same. He turned backward to face his brother, who stood waiting several meters behind, and confusion crept into Lucas's heart once more.
"C-Claus?"
Claus's eyes snapped brightly to his, perhaps hearing the barest tremble in Lucas's voice, and smiled at him. Claus looked the faintest bit tired from running, but was still alive and bright with eyes reflecting the embers of joy that had warmed their hearts in tandem as they raced like kids. for the first time in so many years—or the first time, without any years behind them in a blank slate? The repercussions were still catching up to Lucas.
But Claus gave a half-shrug with a smile that was perhaps a tad nervous. But it was a nonthreatening nervousness, an almost shy-seeming type of nervous, and Lucas might have sagged with relief at the lack of any disaster imminent when he looked into that face so like his own and saw it full of understanding and reassurance first and foremost. Because Claus knew. Knew him even after all these years and being dead and being not.
"It's all right," Claus said anyway, shifting in place and looking bashfully at his brother and then past him, to some point behind Lucas's head. "I just…I just think it should be you, first. By yourself, you now?"
A bit mystified but drawn by Claus's words, Lucas turned his head to follow the other's gaze, and saw what he supposed he knew had been their destination once more from the same point they'd left it.
The smoking crater in the ground was difficult to see in the sunless scope of the island or what raw material was left behind in place of one for them to walk around, but Lucas could identify with immediacy the place Claus had died only a Needle's pull ago, where the final point of light came free of the earth in Lucas's hands. A lifetime back already, no longer than that ago. It…had been a true universe apart from this new reality, which even now, had not yet truly begun to solidify into anything beyond a sea of living faces no longer marred by the tragedy that had now been wiped away in brimstone and fire. And left them all with a pensive darkness that was nonthreatening but full of opportunity and…hope.
And Lucas had seen as much with his own eyes or perhaps without them in the dark. He'd gone and spoken to the survivors of the apocalypse, had seen his family reunited. He'd waited for Claus—living, breathing, organic, whole—to join Lucas at his place near the end of the scrawling parade of remembered faces, and then they both simply knew to push their legs into a a walk and from there to a jog then a run. It was the moment Lucas had so longed to earn for all his suffering, had not dared to dream for, but would have gladly taken if it were a dream if only because that meant it could possibly be dreamed again and what better way to feel alive than to pump your legs and run?
But, this was no dream, Lucas understood. And there would be more time for reunions and precious moments in the new world. This was going to be a new world. So first, he had to go and work out what the shape of it, and to do that…
He looked back at Claus. Claus gave Lucas one more reassuring smile. Lucas returned it with one of his own (somehow sensing, and then marveling how he was better at conveying the emotion now than Claus would be, how used Lucas had gotten to the role of the one being depended upon without wanting it), and then walked back toward the crater where he must find now and greet the Dark Dragon of legend that he had woken.