In an attempt to kill my horrific writer's block, I started trying to write things for the most random pairings I could think of that might actually have a shot of working. Between all of my random Marth/anybody-else and Nezumi/Sion obsessions, I started turning around the idea of Claire/Lando. It's my general thought that you can pair Claire up with just about anybody and it works, so I figured I'd give this a shot.

I tried to keep it so that this could have actually happened within the framework of the story, and just so I don't get flamed by Layton/Claire supporters, I'd just like to clarify that I SHIP CLAIRE/LAYTON TOO. It just so happens that I also ship Claire/Dimitri and now I ship Claire/Lando. X_x In my mind, she always ends up with Hershel though. With that said, I hope that people who support Claire/Layton can still enjoy this. :)

Disclaimer: I own nothing. Professor Layton and all related thingimajigs belong to Level 5 and Nintendo.

Please read, enjoy, and then review!

xXx

Chapter 1: Meeting

The sun was beating down on the golden fields, flashing off of the vivid hair of the boy standing in them. His face was tilted up towards the warmth, the hoe that he had been working with until recently held in a slackened hand. A slight smile decorated the boy's face, and his eyes were closed. He breathed deeply, simply lost in the miracle of the sky and the ground and the world in general.

His serene meditation was broken—although not unpleasantly—by the slight puttering sound of a car rolling down the gravel road. His eyes opened, fluttering like camera shutters as they got readjusted to the strong sunshine. After verifying that the noise that had disturbed him was in fact a car, and it was driving towards him, he dropped the hoe and bounded happily towards the fence, thinking that the car was carrying someone he knew.

He vaulted the fence with no difficulty, muscles rippling up bronzed arms ending in strong shoulders as he leapt over the four foot wooden barrier, and skidded to a halt at the side of the road, his dusty shoes scraping up a brief confetti of pebbles and clay. He held a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun and caught glimpse of the yellow car inching its way, almost shyly, down the road.

The farmboy pulled a face. The car was the wrong shade of yellow to be the one he was watching for. This car was too mustard-y. The one he knew should have been a slightly dirtier shade, the sort of yellow that instinctively brought the image of soiled trousers to mind. And one of the headlights should have been put out, and the side should have been dinged. All in all, the car that was easing its way down the road now was a much nicer vehicle and obviously not the one that the boy had been hoping for.

Nonetheless, he had run all the way out from the fields. He might as well say hello and not waste the trip. He thought absently that it was the gentlemanly thing to do, although he wasn't sure why something like that would concern him. The thought was an errant one, one that he was barely conscious of.

Just as he raised his hand in greeting to whoever the owner of the car was, it pulled to a stop and the driver's side window slid down, revealing someone who was definitely not the person the farmboy had assumed he would see.

Instead of one of the local neighbors who were all well past fifty-years old and nearly all male, he found himself looking upon a bespectacled young woman with curly brown hair and piercingly dark eyes.

He blinked. It had been awhile since he had seen somebody close to his own age, much less somebody who was as pretty as this woman.

The girl looked equally uncomfortable and fidgeted a little in her seat, and then visibly swallowed her pride and asked, "I'm terribly sorry, but could you point me in the direction of the University? I've gotten lost—but that's probably obvious, isn't it?" She looked down in her lap and laughed embarrassedly.

He found himself blinking dazedly again and made himself stop. "Oh, um…" He fumbled for a moment, but then regained his bearings. "You're nearly there, really. You just keep on down this road and then turn left at the next intersection. You keep on that one for a few kilometers—it's about a twelve and a half minute drive if you're driving the speed limit, and about a ten if you break it—and that'll take you into the city. From there you should be able to follow the signs." He finished and shoved his hands into his pockets awkwardly, wishing that he had met this beautiful girl under different circumstances. Preferably circumstances where he wasn't caked with dirt and sweat.

"Oh," she grinned and pushed her glasses up her nose in a very endearing sort of way. "Thank you so much. I can't believe I got so lost when I was so close." Seemingly on a whim, she thrust her hand through the open window. "I'm Claire, by the way. Claire Foaly."

The farmboy took the offered hand and took it, noticing how tiny her hand was. Tiny, but her grip was pleasantly firm. He mentally sighed, for he always hated this part of conversations.

"My name's Jack," he said dully, still feeling no more connection with the random name he had decided to take for his own than he had the first day he had chosen it.

"Nice to meet you, Jack," Claire said immediately. "Did they call you Jack because of your hair?"

He plucked at an orange strand that had fallen over his eyes and shrugged pathetically. "I suppose that crossed my mind. Jack O'Lanterns and all that…"

If Claire had found his use of the word 'I' instead of 'my parents'' odd, she didn't say anything. Instead she just kept smiling sheepishly at him through the window and said, "If you don't mind me asking, why aren't you heading off to school as well? You and I must be around the same age."

"Um…" He leaned up against the side of her car and adopted a joking tone as he said, "I'm getting a degree in agriculture, and they shipped me out here to intern."

Claire looked as if she at least partially believed him, so he quickly cleared up the confusion with, "No, I'm only kidding. You don't need to go to any school to be a farmer."

"So that's what you do?"

"Yes. Well, no. …Sorta?" the boy with no name fumbled, "I mean…I don't really know."

Claire laughed again, the sound reminding him of the bells the chimed on a clock. "How do you not know, Jack? You seem bright. Not every young man can give me the exact time it takes to get from a farm in the middle of nowhere into the city depending on whether or not I break the speed limit."

"I don't know," he repeated truthfully. With an impish grin that spoke of him having this same conversation many times before, he leaned in towards her window. "I honestly don't know."

Claire, who had been in the act of shifting her car back into drive, paused and turned slowly to look at him. Their eyes met, and something strange clicked between them.

"You really don't know," she whispered wonderingly. "…And that's not the only thing you don't know, is it? Are you lost? Short-term memory loss or something?"

"Nothing like that," he assured her. "I'm an amnesiac."

Claire's eyes widened even further. "So how much don't you remember?"

He smirked, unsure of why he was suddenly speaking to this girl, unsure of why he felt the need to tell someone. All he knew was that the words were suddenly tumbling out of his mouth, and he would have been nearly powerless to stop them even if he had wanted to, which he strangely didn't. "I don't remember anything before last year."

Claire started. "Wow."

"I know," he sighed, now fully expecting her to zoom away from him at any minute.

"So," she said quietly, dropping her hands away from the steering wheel to regard him with a piercing stare. "You honestly don't remember anything? You're not just pulling my leg, are you?"

"Zip," he confirmed. "I don't remember my name, I don't remember my past, I don't remember who my friends are, I don't remember my life until a year ago. It's like I was born into this world at age seventeen, which might not even be how old I am because I don't remember my own birthday." The words were pouring out faster now. These were things that had been eating away at him for nearly a year now, all of the unanswered questions that had been plaguing him ever since he had woken up. Ever since that awful moment when he had woken up and realized that he didn't know his own name. "That is why when I say I don't know, I am speaking the truth, Claire. I do not know who I was. I scarcely even know who I am, and even if I know who I am now, what if that makes me different than the me I was then? How does a person reconcile that?"

He realized that he was rambling and choked off, truly expecting Claire to stomp on the gas and speed off down the road, away from this strange, red-headed amnesiac.

Instead, she just sat there, watching him. After a moment he realized that he was practically leaning in her window and he beat a hasty retreat back to the fence. He paused there, rubbing at a patch of sunburned skin on his nose.

"So, um…You just keep on this road for a bit," he said lamely, his voice muted.

"Thanks, I got it," Claire said tersely, finally starting her car back up again.

He looked down at the grass, grappling with feelings that were in equal part wonderment and ashamedness.

"You know," Claire said thoughtfully, her voice floating over to him as her car started to roll down the drive. "You don't look like a Jack."

"What do I look like, then?" he couldn't help asking.

She smiled warmly at him, her brown hair stirring a little in the wind. "…I think you look like an Alaric," she told him, and there was an air of certainty, an air of rightness about the name. It wasn't like the name triggered a memory or anything like that, and he was nearly positive that the name wasn't the name he had been born with, but all the same…

"Alaric?" he echoed, rolling the name around his mouth experimentally.

"Yes," she nodded confidently. "That's definitely what you look like." She sped up a little, and now she had to shout to make sure her words reach him. "Thanks again for the directions, Alaric Amnesiac. Maybe we'll meet again someday!"

"You're welcome…and maybe," was all he could think to say, but by that point she was already down the road, juts a trail of dust that would soon be whipped away by the warm breezes of the countryside.

xXx

Um, yeah. Alaric=Lando (I'm hoping everybody got that...). The first name to pop into my head was actually Cathan, but that seemed a bit off, and the next name I came up with was Rhys, but that didn't seem to suit him either, so I went with Alaric.

Apologies to anybody who has me on author alert for the Game. X_x I'll get back to that ASAP, but I've been tied up with other stuff lately. Rest assured that I'm not dead, and I fully intend to return sometime around the end of October when XC finally ends.

But anyways, Claire/Lando. Unusual pairings FTW. I hope you enjoyed. :)

Please review! If you liked it, I might do something else with this idea.