Atonement

The night has an unusual air to it.

Yasuo pauses walking, looking around, moving his hand to hover over his sword. The crickets are chirping and there's water rippling nearby, and it should be a normal evening, but there's something peculiar about the night that makes Yasuo's hair stand on end. The stars are mere pinpricks in the darkening sky, glittering coldly overhead. A full moon, a night going cold.

The brush rustles and Yasuo grabs his sword and whirls to face the foliage but finds a mouse instead, twitching its whiskers at him curiously.

Yasuo exhales and relaxes. "You startled me."

The mouse turns and scurries away, and Yasuo, after a moment, continues on his way as well, still somewhat put off by the atmosphere. He is somewhere deep in Ionia, travelling side paths and weaving through woods and following the breeze. As he walks he considers where he'll sleep tonight, what he'll eat, and he notices that the air gets heavier as he travels, eerie almost.

He pushes through the hanging branches into a clearing and freezes in place.

The moon is but a sliver, but it provides plenty of light to reveal who is standing under the earnest night sky. A man wrapped in bandages, wearing a red mask, wielding two swords. He is facing away from Yasuo but turns as if expecting him, sending a chill down Yasuo's spine.

"Hey, I'm not looking for any trouble," Yasuo says immediately, putting his hands up. This man is definitely the source of the malicious air, and Yasuo notices that in this clearing it's dead silent, as if all the noise had been sucked out of the space.

"Well, I have been looking for you." The man replies, taking a step forward.

That voice. It's heart achingly familiar, one that makes Yasuo tremble at his very core. He hasn't thought of that voice in a long time, perhaps he repressed the memory of it, even.

"Brother?"

"Does my presence alarm you?" Yone steps closer. "Are you feeling panicked?"

Yasuo stumbles backward. "Y-You're supposed to be..."

"Dead? Slain by your own blade?" Yone grabs Yasuo's jaw, pulling him close. He's taller and skinnier than Yasuo remembers, and stronger, Yone's fingers must be bruising his skin. "Yet I come walking."

It feels like Yasuo's stomach has dropped out of him. How could this even happen? Certainly, strange things happen in Runeterra, but a dead brother returning from the grave is a new one.

"What did you come here for, Yone?"

Yone cocks his head and it is a startlingly alien gesture, the movements are so stiff compared to how his brother's used to be. The eyes that gleam from the mask are red and blue, foreign eyes that do not remind him of his brother's gaze. But the voice, the voice is just as he remembers.

"You tarnished my honor, brother. The honor of our family, of our people." His hand clenches Yasuo's chin painfully tight. "So I will spoil your own respectability, or at least, whatever is left of it."

And then Yone releases him to draw his swords.

Yasuo fights back. Once upon a time he defeated his brother in a duel, drove his sword into the stomach of his kin and had to cry over the corpse while the sky weeped above him. Two brothers, one honored and respected, the other a castaway and a traitor. Wind and steel clashing.

But 'then' is not now. The person wielding the two blades before him is no longer his brother. He's consumed by something else entirely - hatred, fury. A gash in Yasuo's arm splatters blood onto the emerald grass below in crimson petals. The stench of iron. The reek of death. He does not want to kill his brother a second time - anything but that! It was hard enough the first time, wearing that guilt, carrying it over his shoulders like a cloak. Sparks shred the air as their swords clash, ringing metal, ringing torment.