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Kirito stops.
He doesn’t really quite know why he does, but-
He stops. Pivots on his heel, turns back to look at Klein. There’s something vaguely distraught in the man’s face, and Kirito thinks that if he had a mirror, he’d find his own looking exactly the same.
Klein’s eyes feel misty and heavy, like they have the weight of the world in them. Without much remorse, he thinks about how intriguing they look in the shadow of dusk.
“Please,” Kirito whispers, voice thick with tears. He’ll beg if he has to. “Please.” He can’t do this alone.
And Kirito can’t breathe, because Klein is reaching up a hand and Kirito is taking it taking it taking it-
They clear out the first few plains they come across in record time. When Klein wants to stop, wants to rest and take a breather, Kirito just pushes him onward. They don’t have time to rest; they have to gain as much experience as they can right now before all that’s left are dungeons.
There’s an edge to Klein’s face that persists through the first night; then the second, and third, and fourth and fifth and then it’s been two weeks, and Kirito can’t stand it anymore so when the man starts tearing up when he’s supposed to be asleep, Kirito crowds up against Klein’s back.
Kirito’s real form is smaller than Klein’s, so it’s sort of awkward trying to wrap his arms around the man’s body. He must get that, though, because he turns towards Kirito and engulfs him. It’s warm, and settling. For both of them, really.
They don’t talk about it in the morning, but it becomes a routine. Just like their decimation of the monster population on this floor, the pair come to know another thing besides death and destruction and lost friends and family.
Klein wakes up looking more refreshed, and less like he was struggling through the hell they had been given. It’s a nice look on him.
And by the time the floor’s been leveled and cleared of any experience cache left, they’ve begun to finally feel alive again.
“So did you end up buying the sword?” Klein asks, face intense with concentration as he uses a small knife to carve up a piece of wood. He’s making some sort of bear out of it, small and cute and everything that Kirito would never have expected him to make before he did.
“Yeah,” Kirito replies quietly.
The blade is thin and shiny, black with an edge of silver that makes it feel tangible. He hates it.
There must be something in his voice, because Klein looks over at him. A question is clear on his face, but he doesn’t ask it. Kirito wonders what it was.
Instead of talking, Kirito just goes over and sits next to Klein. It’s late in the afternoon, a hazy glaze pasted over everything that helps him look around and see just how fake this world is. It’s terrible and Kirito doesn’t want to think, so he doesn’t. Just-
Presses back into the log and rests his elbows on his knees. Puts his face into his hands and watches the clouds lazily drift across the sky. There’s nothing worse than losing yourself here.
He’s watched it happen too many times, had felt the beginnings of it hit him sometimes, because he’s just a kid and was never meant to deal with this kind of thing.
(It hits the worst when it’s Klein who feels like that, because he needs the man to be his rock just as much as he needs air. And yeah, sure, that’s terrible and he knows he should distance himself from Klein, but he hasn’t even learned the word codependent yet and that must mean something.)
Kirito’s fourteen, but he feels like he’s over a hundred.
He startles when Klein’s hand drops down onto his shoulder, but settles when he’s dragged over to the man’s side. Kirito burrows into him and tries not to cry.
(It doesn’t work.)
They join a larger group to take down the first boss. Kirito’s senses feel on edge and he presses more closely to Klein as they lurk amongst the others. He tries not to be too hurt when he sees Klein’s eyes searching out the crowd and chancing upon a familiar face, but he doesn’t walk over. Doesn’t even call out to the man among many.
Instead, he looks down at Kirito. And for him, that’s enough.
“You ready?” Klein asks, quietly and intense.
“Yes,” Kirito says, sure and ready and knowing that between Klein and his own blades, they’ll come out on top.
He supposes that once upon a time, things might have been different. Kirito thinks that if he had to, he could’ve gotten used to being alone. Could’ve really gotten used to having to do things himself.
As it stands, though, Kirito has Klein and Klein has Kirito, and he wouldn’t have it any other way come hell or high water.
They enter the boss room with careful trepidation, Klein’s hand a warm, solacing print on his back edging him forward. The throngs of players around him feel less ready, less sure. There’s a cloaked individual standing on the edge of the group that makes Kirito want to take a second glance, so he takes care not to. Nothing good ever comes out of seeking out people like him, after all.
When all's said and done, the boss isn’t the same. No one could have really predicted that sort of change from the beta, not even Kirito. It sends a cold shiver of fear down his spine when he realizes just how useless he is right now.
Klein fights beside him, his blade ending where Kirito’s begins, and nothing has felt better than their parries lining up perfectly with one another. There’s no moment of hesitation, no second of question.
And then people are dead, real people, not just players, because Kirito could never really surpass his own guilt at knowing but not being able to do anything.
Sure; he had seen people pixelate and fade to numbers, then to nothing at all. Sometimes he sees it in his dreams, late into the night when Kirito has given up the pretense of not needing Klein wrapped around him and the man’s face replaces every nameless person he’s ever seen die.
But Klein had always been there when he woke up with a silent startle, hands blindly clasping at Klein’s shirt under the blanket, under the cold of the night, under the stars of wherever they happened to be camping or in the dim candlelight of a room they had rented.
And right now, Kirito doesn’t stop; can’t stop. He has to keep going. But even with that adrenaline coursing through his veins, he lets his free hand drift over Klein’s lightweight armor in the split second before he needs to charge forward.
The cloaked figure from before dashes with him, and even though it feels wrong with Klein not at his side, there’s another sense, deep and flourishing, that yells at him at how right this is.
It’s a cold thing, the defeat. It should feel like a victory, but all it leaves Kirito with is the pungent taste of regret. The girl under the hood must feel the same way, because she barely gives him a pause before turning her eyes downward.
“Asuna,” is all she introduces herself as when they are about to part ways. Their comms link them as friends, and Kirito has just enough time to see a small grimace on her face before she’s trodding off.
“New friend?” Klein asks him when he’s caught up to Kirito. If there’s a limp to Klein’s walk or a pull in his smile that seems fake, he doesn’t say anything.
“I guess,” Kirito murmurs, looking at the space she disappeared from. The path before them is open and ready. “One down.”
“One down,” Klein repeats, and it sounds like a promise for the future.
Kirito only sees Klein cry when things are at their worst. He’s seen the man grant tears of joy over Kirito’s health, seen him take a moment to shed a tear for a fallen player, seen him cry when he’s asleep and nothing can keep the nightmares away.
The only time he sees the man truly give out, sees him break into deep and terrible sobs that are almost completely silent in the air but feel more emotional than any loud wailing, is when he finds out one of his other friends has died.
Miura, because the man deserved a name for a hazily remembered face in Kirito’s mind, if only for Klein’s sake. They can’t attend any sort of funeral, because that just never became a thing in Aincrad. Remembering someone in any kind of procession is hard without a body.
Even so, he takes a moment of silence with Klein in their tent to let him shudder and heave through the pain. The rest of Klein’s group waits outside, murmuring quietly.
When he leaves to let Klein have a small moment for himself to grieve for a man Kirito never knew, he hastily opens up the flap on the tent and closes it just as quickly. He doesn’t want their image of Klein to be tainted with any sort of perceived weakness. And he thinks, when he looks in their eyes, that it’s-
Good. That Kirito doesn’t see any bad intent. A small part of him had worried that they might blame Kirito, or even worse, Klein, but there doesn’t seem to be any of that. It feels more like a simmering frustration, along with a more prominent sorrow that tinges the edge of their expressions.
Later, after Kirito has left them and Klein to talk in hushed tones with each other, he’ll sit inside the tent and trace the lines of the menu screen.
(And even later, Klein’ll come in and sit down next to him, not really touching until Kirito pulls him down so that Klein’s head rests in Kirito’s lap. He cards his hands through Klein’s hair long after the man has fallen asleep.)
They grind the floors. Mercilessly.
There’s a particular way that the time passes when he’s back to back with his partner, blades dancing and searching for more flesh to carve. One of the most eerie experiences he still can’t quite shake is how real the monsters feel. How hot their blood is when he’s wiping it off of his cheek, or how hard it hurts when their claws and fangs and own blades tear into his own skin.
Klein tells him one night, away from their current party and sequestered at the edge of the campfire, waiting out the full moon so that they can strike the next boss, that he can’t really feel it all anymore. That the flesh on his bones felt more like code than skin.
“I would say I’m jealous, but…”
Klein laughs, before saying, “Don’t be. It’s better to feel alive than nothing at all.”
And it’s the truth, but Kirito can’t help the shiver that crawls up his spine, settling into the notch of his neck like a parasite. He grips Klein’s hand with a feverish certainty.
“You’ll always have me for that.”
“For what?” Klein asks, but Kirito thinks that he already knows the answer.
“Feeling.”
Time passes.
They clear floors, they lose people, they mourn and they grieve but start to forget the feeling of the air in their noses or the wind in their hair. Their breath feels real, but not the smells, or the air itself.
Kirito’s tired, and so is Klein. But they’ll win this, someday.
Because if they can’t hope, then who will?
They get married.
The two do it when it’s the middle of winter on the current floor, and it’s more tedious than anything to swap supplies back and forth manually. Kirito just clicks the marriage option in the interface menu, Klein accepts the request, and then his and Klein’s inventory are merged. Just like that.
He feels like there shouldn’t be anything special about it, not really. Not when they are doing it for convenience, or for saving the hassle of trading items (or when one is in trouble and the other needs something, but Kirito doesn’t want to think about that just yet.)
But, it’s-
Kirito’s fifteen, and he’s just been married for the first time. It’s special, even when it has no right to be.
He looks at their stuff. Their whole entire inventory is just right there, like a short monologue of their time in Sword Art Online. The items seem to mock him, but all he can feel is an undulated fondness that goes from the tip of his nose to the bottom of his feet.
Klein starts laughing, and Kirito joins in on it. The man giggles even as snow starts to fall again, coating the ground with a fresh top coat and leaving their cheeks even redder with the onslaught of cold.
He’s still laughing quietly when Klein wraps the heavy, furred blanket around either of his shoulders. He flicks his finger out and scrolls through the inventory until he finds two silver glasses, then keeps going until a bottle appears. Klein hands one glass off to Kirito, before popping the top off.
“To the newlyweds,” Klein grins, topping both of their glasses off with what he assumes is bubbling champagne.
“To us,” Kirito replies, and they clink their glasses together. A bit of his own sloshes over the top, but he likes the way it spills over and into Klein’s cup.
They drink heartily that night, and even though it’s the dullest bottle of alcohol he’s ever had the pleasure of drinking in the sorry excuse of the year and a half that he’s been in the game, he feels tipsy by the end of it, and there’s a warmth in his chest and in his heart that he can’t really contain.
They fall asleep curled up against one another, pressed into the cracks and crevices and filling whatever space the other has available. Kirito doesn’t know what marriage feels like, but if he had to guess, this must be pretty damn close.
There are periods where Asuna stays with them, but for all that Kirito can sense a kindred spirit in her, she remains aloof. Her smiles become more frequent, though, as do her words. They exchange terse messages interspersed with the occasional dead yet? in between, but it’s all kinds of fond.
Klein prods him about it sometimes, jerking his elbow into Kirito’s side and raising his eyebrows in a hearty manner.
It really isn’t that funny, though, because he knows when Klein is unwell, and Klein knows that Kirito knows, so. It’s a pointless gesture, and more for the sake of others that he does it. Later, he’ll tuck close to Klein and run his hands over the man’s neck; his own gesture, but private and almost claiming. They won’t talk about it in the morning, because they never do.
Kirito is in one of those moments where no one’s around, and Asuna is asking him about things he might want for his birthday before he realizes, oh.
There’s not really much that goes on terms of celebrations. Sometimes there are small events to keep up the morale and make sure that the few that still remain have at least the drive to live.
Last year, Kirito had forgotten about his birthday, and Klein had been left knowing only a month after the fact that his birthday had already passed. He still brought it up, sometimes, and Kirito always just laughs in the man’s face before promising that he’ll have some sort of party for it.
Even just the past attempts at chastising Kirito for the whole thing makes him chuckle quietly, and Klein looks back up from where he’s carving some wood.
“What’s so funny?” Klein questions, and there’s already a pout in his voice but Kirito can’t help it, he just starts laughing. “What?”
(And yeah, they throw him a birthday party and there are only three people there besides him and Klein, but it leaves him with an intensely sharp ache in his gut that feels like home. The gifts are nice and especially useful; things that he can use in a pinch. Kirito thinks that Klein didn’t show to the party with anything, but when all the guests have gone back to their respective jobs or training fields, Klein pulls him over to the fire and sits him down on a foldable chair from their inventory.
Kirito watches Klein cook him dinner, the kind of thing he might’ve gotten at home and definitely only mentioned one time, and he can’t help but cry, just a little bit, because it’s the best gift he’s ever received. And that includes the precision blade-sharpener Asuna had gifted to him.)
They beat the game, mostly.
Because it was never a game, not to them. When Kirito sees Kayaba, he wants to slice him open like the countless monsters he had taken down.
It’s only the force of Klein’s grip on his hand that assuages his impulses.
The creator, the tormenter, the destroyer, the god.
The man, Kirito reminds himself. And Kayaba says so many things in the span of a few minutes that feel like an eternity on that heaven-esque haven of light and purity, but manages to leave everything as unexplained as it was the first day they had arrived here.
For the first time, and for the last time, Kayaba looks at Kirito. Looks at his face for a second, then to Klein’s. Looks at their hands, connected in the bare air.
“Huh.”
It’s the last thing Kirito hears, before the world collapses in on itself.
The first thing Kirito hears is the sound of silence.
As he slowly wakes up to the dull thumping of his own heart and the static of his deathbed, Kirito breathes. He tries to get up, but fumbles at trying to support his weight on shaky arms. The helmet is still attached to his head, and he removes it with trembling fingers.
It tumbles off the bed, and he can barely hear a sharp cracking noise from it before he’s trying to get up again.
It goes better this time, if he could call it that. Kirito manages to get out of the bed and feels his feet cut and scrape against the shards of glass from the headset, but it’s-
Blood is red and red is life and Kirito is alive, and that must mean that Klein is alive somewhere, too.
Kirito stops.
Because the first time Kazuto lays his eyes upon Ryoutarou his heart stutters and his mind fluctuates and breathing is altogether sort of hard, but there’s a line that connects them, invisible to the eyes. One that pulls them closer and closer on tired, aching limbs that are too weak to stand on, and through the haze and clarity of the space between them.
Kazuto takes Ryoutarou’s hand, and they smile and laugh and cry and everything and anything in between that, because they are alive, and no one can take that from them.
Not now, not ever.