Chapter Text
All Terra wants to do is touch her.
It’s been next to impossible. It wasn’t exactly seamless to be all in one piece again after nearly twelve years, suddenly and violently responsible for the oxygen entering his lungs and the muscles holding him off the ground, every cell protesting his rude intrusion back into his own flesh and bones.
There had been rapid introductions, and altogether not enough time to get caught up. Enough time to see that she was safe, that their younger brother’s eyes had opened. There’d been nigh instant war. There’d been grazes of arms, the feeling of other backs against his own, hands closing around his wrist to yank him just clear of a blast of magic. He still found himself glancing into the back of his mind, nervously turning inward as if he was going to find that taint, ever-present and ready to drag him back to drown in the depths while it used his mouth to speak, his eyes to see.
The times he hits the ground, he silently cherishes. Pain is real. The dirt under his fingernails is real. He scrapes his fingers through the dusty cracks in the earth, churning it up, making him splutter, feeling air in his lungs, the violent sounds of life in him and around him. He presses his forehead to the ground, the earth under his knees giving him purchase, grounding him, pushing him back upward.
He finds his feet again, and his successor pulls him the rest of the way up, hooking the crooks of their elbows together. He grips his shoulder briefly in thanks, and the battle rages on. He will have to wait a little longer.
—
All Aqua wants is to disappear.
Nothing has stayed still in so very long. The walls and floors of the place she called home, the parents she never knew, the friends she was always one moment too late to catch. Respite in the dark only stuck around long enough to let her body come down from rapt attention, only to leave her exposed the moment she let an eyelid flutter. She couldn’t trust the ground beneath her feet, a hand reaching for hers, the permanence of any sort of fleeting happiness.
She’d tried to keep herself safe. She had. Berating herself when she found herself wishing, disbelieving anything upon sight, and it had only rewarded her with the feeling of the floor falling out from beneath her when her fingers passed through air instead of Terra’s hand, and doubly so when the young king had found his way out of hell without her. And eventually, that despair had become the last human feeling she felt before there was nothing but inky blackness.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. She’d trapped herself of her own free will, and she knew the dangers of hope and of despair. Better to feel nothing at all. At least nothing held no heartbreak, no disappointment.
The small bloom of hope in her chest when she’d been beaten to her senses, broken out, been reunited with children she now had to incline her head to see—she had been rescued as part of a much larger plan and not had a moment to fully comprehend how her own smaller story had turned for the better. And yet, she had to tamp that down, too.
Nothing was whole, and nothing was broken, so long as she did not dare to hope.