Disclaimer: I don't own anything.
Author's Note: I was watching Sherlock Holmes and this idea decided to spring itself on me—random, yes. So here I am, staying up far too late to write this. It was indeed inspired by Anastasia and I'm using the animated version as a reference point. If you haven't seen the movie, I am sorely sorry and I insist that you find it on Netflix or on Youtube or something, because it is fantastic.
I'm also going to be trying to expand on relationships and characters that I haven't really written much on before, so if you see something that needs correcting or doesn't seem right, please tell me.
-/-/-/-
We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails. ~Author Unknown
-/-/-/-
The smoke is suffocating and it's difficult to see anything through the flames, but they trudge through because this is what they do. The heat stings his eyes and they must be careful of where they step, lest the floor fall out from underneath them.
"Sir! Sir, we found something!"
He hops carefully through the debris, momentarily distracted by the crack of splintering wood as fire overclaims it. "What is it?"
The man looks slightly uncomfortable. "Well, really sir, it's more of a…someone."
-/-/-/-
It's the anniversary of That Day and Regal knows that Zelos is likely to be holed up far and away from the crowds of people out today. There are only two anniversaries that matter to Zelos and the next one wasn't until around Celsius Day.
"Have you heard the rumors, sir?" Someone calls.
"What rumors?" Regal asks, frowning.
"They say it's possible that the Alesandre girl could still be alive and that her grandmother is more than willing to pay a generous sum to anyone who can bring her granddaughter back to her."
Regal shakes his head. The rumors come around every year around this time. He doesn't blame people. It had been a mystery for a decade and a half, what had had happened to the Alesandre's only daughter, but Regal is certain that it's going to remain a mystery until the end of time.
The climb up the rickety stairs to the apartment he shares with Zelos is quick, though sometimes Regal swears that one day, one of the steps are going to fall out from beneath his feet. Not that they have much choice in living here. They can't go back to live in Tethe'alla, not with the Pope acting as puppetmaster to the King and out to destroy just about every piece of magic there could be. The elves had retreated behind their borders, rarely coming out, and the half-elves were scrambling to escape persecution.
He and Zelos were part of the old regime and he Pope wouldn't think twice about killing either of them. They'd been reduced to forging papers and smuggling half-elves into Sylvarant and it didn't pay particularly well.
"You can't mope in bed all day." Regal tells him, jerking the curtains open.
Zelos yawns as he rolls over to look at him. "I don't see why not. They're only saying the same old things out there that they said last year, and the year before that and the three before that."
"The rumors are the same, but something else is new." Regal isn't surprised when Zelos' icy blue gaze instantly becomes incredibly focused.
"What's new?"
"The Lady Alesandre is willing to pay, what I hear, is a generous sum to anyone who can bring her granddaughter back to her."
The light fades a little from Zelos' eyes. "Of course she is. She's the only Alesandre left and she's desperate for an heir." The light comes back as though someone flipped a switch. "What happens if we find a girl to be Shera?"
"Zelos, what are you talking about?" Regal is an intelligent man, but sometimes Zelos makes leaps in logic that he simply can't follow.
The redhead sits up. "Think about it, Regal. It wouldn't be hard to find a girl to pretend to be Shera Alesandre. We can teach her what to say, how to walk and talk. We'll dress her up and take her to Meltokio and we get the reward. We're the perfect team to do this. We can finally get out of this crappy apartment and get a decent place."
"That's insane." Regal says flatly. "And you'd probably give the old woman a heart attack once she finds out that it's not the real Shera."
"But that's the point. This girl, whoever she is, has to be able to act convincingly enough that Shera's own grandmother can't tell the difference. Besides, it's been twelve years. People change."
"And, hypothetically, if the Lady does find out?"
"By then we'll be long-gone. "
"This doesn't sit right."
"Think about it—no more forging papers, no more dodging the government. "If you don't want money for a reward, I'm sure the old lady can drop the charges on you. You can go home. Don't you want to go home? To Altamira with Alicia?" Regal stiffens. Zelos knows better than to bring that up. Zelos catches the movement. "For Alicia."
Regal struggles with himself for a moment before deciding. "…Fine. For Alicia."
-/-/-/-
Kuchinawa is leaning by the village gate, arms crossed and eyes glittering coldly. "So you're leaving."
Sheena glances at him. "Isn't that what you wanted?"
"I didn't think you'd actually do it. You've been known to be a coward."
Sheena glares at him. "I'm not afraid of anything."
"You mean other than lightning, right? Because you jump four miles in the air during a thunderstorm."
This is what Sheena hates so much about Kuchinawa sometimes. He knows her too damn well. They'd been friends, once. They weren't ever terribly close. Not really. But friends are friends, especially in a village as small as Mizuho where there were really only three people in their generation. Her, Kuchinawa and his older brother, Orochi.
If you had never seen Kuchinawa and Orochi, you would never know that they were brothers. Kuchinawa is a blazing summer's day to his brother's calm autumn night. But they do look alike. Their dark hair refuses to stay down half the time and they smile the same.
"I don't have to listen to this anymore." She says, striding past him.
"And where are you going to go?" Kuchinawa called after her.
Sheena doesn't answer and keeps walking. But he does bring up a point. Where was she going to go? Baby steps, she reminds herself. Don't focus on the big picture. Ozette was the closest village. She'd go there first so she could figure out a plan.
Some part of her—the lonely orphan part—wants to try and find her birth parents, but she has no idea where to start. All she had was her name and that she'd been found in the Gaoracchia Forest by her grandfather when she was a little girl. It wasn't much to go on.
"Ozette, huh?" Corrine comments as they pass the fork in the road.
Sheena glances at the creature on her shoulder. Corrine was a small Summon Spirit, about the size of a house cat and he weighed even less. "What, is there a problem?"
"I'm just that Ozette's a small village. How're you going to find anything there?"
Sheena glances down at the necklace that hangs around her neck, that's hung around her neck for as long as she can remember. The pendant can fit in the palm of her hand and it has two circles, each with runes inscribed around it. In the center is a golden tree.
"I told you, I'm not expecting to find anything."
"But if you go looking in Ozette, you probably won't find much. They don't have much in the way of great libraries and old ruins."
"Ruins? How old do you think this pendant is?"
Corrine gives his version of a shrug. "Dunno. But it's worth a shot."
Sheena glances at the sign in the center of the fork in the road. The one pointing right read Ozette. The one pointing left, Asgard. And beyond Asgard were the big cities. Sybak and Meltokio, both of which might have some answers for her. "So, what, you're saying I should go to Asgard?"
"Sounds like a better place to start than Ozette."
"If you say so."
-/-/-/-
"I'm beginning to think that this is impossible." Regal says. It's their fourth day of looking at possible candidates and so far, none had made even the preliminary cut. "Your standards are too high."
"They have to be." Zelos replies, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "If we want to fool the Lady, we need high standards."
Regal glances at him. "Do you even remember what Shera Alesandre looks like?"
"I remember." Zelos says softly. Of course he does. He can't forget that face, those mischievous eyes, the wide grin. Hard as he tries, he can't forget them.
-/-/-/-
"What visa?" Sheena asks.
"An exit visa. Without one, you can't go through the Pass."
"But I need to get to Asgard."
The guards shrug. The girl had obviously been living under a rock for the past ten years. The visas had been a routine thing ever since the Pope stopped allowing half-elves in Tethe'alla. "Sorry. No exit visa, no ticket."
Sheena snarls softly under her breath and starts walking away. Why did she listen to Corrine? Ozette would have been easier. Perhaps she could have gone to Altamira from there. Someone touches her shoulder and she looks back at an elderly woman.
"I heard your trouble with the guards." The woman says.
Sheena tries for a smile. "Yeah. They should really have a sign or something. It'd probably save them some time."
"If you want travel papers, you should go and see Zelos Wilder. He can help."
"Where can I find this guy?"
"In an abandoned church outside of Luin. If you follow these mountains west, you can get there by tomorrow night. But if anyone asks, you didn't hear it from me."
Sheena smiles sweetly. "Heard what?"
The old woman laughs before hobbling away. This new generation had quite a lot of spunk. Corrine pokes his head out of her pack. Sheena glanced back at him. "You ever hear about this guy?"
Corrine shakes his head before crawling out to get to his customary place on her shoulder. "Do you really think he can help?"
"It isn't as though there's much choice." Sheena reminds him. "We can try the Ossa Trail, but that's on the northeast side of these mountains and it's at least a month's ride away. It'll be winter by then and we won't be able to get through the pass." She scratches at Corrine's ears absentmindedly. She rolls the name on her tongue. "Zelos Wilder. It sounds a bit familiar."
"Maybe someone in Mizuho mentioned it once." Corrine suggests. It's perfectly plausible. Mizuho seemed to hear about everything in the world, whether it be through notes passed through pigeons or late-night telephone calls or even meetings in alleyways.
"Maybe."
-/-/-/-
The church is the only thing remotely standing other than Luin in the distance. There might have been other buildings there once—perhaps enough to make a small town—but now there are only crumbling ruins left. The church must once have been grand, but now the mosaics are missing pieces, the colored glass windows broken. Bricks are missing and there are chunks of the stone stairs that are gone. The main doors are blocked with debris.
Sheena listened for any sounds at all, but there were none other than the wind whistling through the holes in the windows. "Hello?" She called, peering in through a dusty window.
"Maybe this Wilder guy already left." Corrine suggested.
"If he did, I am going to track him down and punch him. Think you can fit through there?" Sheena asks, indicating the hole in the corner of the window. "See if anyone's in there?"
It takes some careful wriggling and squeezing and Sheena's hands are a little cut up from making sure the glass didn't turn Corrine into slices when he got through, but he made it. Sheena can barely make out the furry blur dashing through the building.
-/-/-/-
Luin was a much more populated area than Asgard and with a heavier traffic flow. It's easier for them to try and find a Shera look-alike, but so far, their acting had been lacking.
Sadly, the church is a better place to live than their apartment back in Asgard. The mattresses that were in the bedrooms on the second floor of the church were unusable and the blankets were threadbare with a few moth holes, but enough blankets folded together make sleeping on the cold, half-rotted wooden floors bearable. There's an unbelievable amount of dust, but they'd managed to coax out some mostly clean water from the pump out back into an old bucket and thrown the water across the floors.
Zelos is poking through the other rooms to see if there's anything useful when he hears scratching. There had been a few rats here when they first went through the rooms—after having broken down the door to the back kitchen where the wood had warped from the heavy rain in this area and gotten stuck—but there hadn't been any sign of them for a few days.
"Regal…" Zelos calls quietly down the hall. "You hear something?"
Regal's head pokes out from the room he'd claimed as his. "No." But now that he's listening for something, he can hear the scratching. They're both going down the stairs in the next instant to the sanctuary where the prayers had taken place, but they stop suddenly when they see a small fox on the step below them.
The fox looks up at them and there's an awareness, an intelligence in those eyes that isn't animalistic in the least. Both men jump when they hear it speak. "Sheena! There are people here!"
The fox is down the stairs in three leaps, leaving trails of dust in its wake.
Regal and Zelos stare after it, dumbfounded. "I'm not imagining things, am I?"
"If you are, then so am I."
Zelos glances at him. "That fox was talking to somebody."
"A late tryout, perhaps?"
They finish going down the stairs carefully and their eyes immediately focus on a girl—young woman, really—looking at the remains of the mosaics curiously. The breeches and loose violet…Zelos didn't want to call it a robe, but that's almost what it looked like, do little to hide a most certainly feminine figure. There's a traveling pack over her shoulder and the fox is nowhere to be seen.
Sheena turns at the sound of footsteps. There are two men standing at the base of the stairs. One is older, probably in his thirties by now if she had to hazard a guess, with blue hair tied back rather messily. His clothes are worn, but they might once have been of good quality.
The other is closer to her own age, with a mane of crimson hair kept out of his face by a headband. He has one hand on the hilt of the sword hanging at his hip. He was left-handed, Sheena noticed, as the sword was worn on the right side.
"Who are you and what're you doing here?" The redhead asks.
Sheena takes three steps towards them before the floor is falling out from under her and she has to grip the splintered ends of wood to keep from falling. She can't see anything below her and that doesn't strike her as a good sign. The men are immediately running towards her, each one gripping an arm to get her up and out.
"This a habit of yours, hunny? Falling into holes?"
Now that Sheena's on (mostly) steady ground, she can properly take in what had happened. The wood had rotted through and her weight had been the last straw. She glares at the redhead. "You call me 'hunny' again, and I'll break your nose." Zelos takes her word for it. That tone of voice isn't one to be tested.
"Are you hurt?" The other man asks.
Sheena shakes her head and gets to her feet. The room spins a little when she does, but other than that, she's fine. "No. It takes more than a hole in the ground to hurt me. And why is that anyway?"
The men blink at her. "How are we supposed to know?" The redhead says. "We just met you."
"Not the part about me. The part of the hole in the ground. We're on ground level."
"There's a basement." Regal says as though it explained everything.
Sheena makes a sound of acknowledgement and Regal thinks that she's very calm for someone who had nearly fallen through the floor.
"You never answered my question." Zelos says. "Why're you here?"
"I'm looking for a Zelos Wilder. That you?"
"That depends. Do I owe you money?"
"Not that I know of."
"Then yeah, I'm him. Why'd you come looking for me?"
Sheena shrugged the strap of her pack higher onto her shoulder. "I need travel papers and word on the street is that you're the man to see."
"You a half-elf?"
Sheena bristled. "Let's say I am. Does it make a difference?"
"Half-elves are impossible to get over the border legally. Blood tests are performed on anyone that's suspected." Zelos explained. "If you're a half-elf and trying to get to Tethe'alla—though I can't imagine why—there are…less legal…ways of getting there."
"No, I'm not. One hundred percent human."
"Good. Then we're in business, Ms…?"
"Fujibayashi. Sheena Fujibayashi."
Zelos narrowed his eyes at her. It was too dim to see her properly and he couldn't detect much of an accent, so she could be from anywhere. "Where're you from?"
"Does it matter?" Sheena countered.
"She has you there, Zelos." Regal extended a hand out to her. "Regal Bryant."
Sheena smiled as she shook his hand. "Nice to meet you."
"We should conduct this meeting where we have some more light."
Sheena's nose wrinkles. "And where I don't feel like I'm about to sneeze every time I take a breath. Of all places, why here?"
"It's out of the way and near a popular place." Zelos replies as they walk back to the kitchen. The kitchen didn't have any food left when they'd checked, though there were still plates and glasses sitting on the table, still pots and pans hanging from underneath the cupboard. Cobwebs and thick layers of dust coat everything, but it's like looking at a faded photograph.
"Seems like a bit of a contradiction there." Sheena squints into the light when Zelos opens the back door.
"I'm a complicated guy. What can I say?" Zelos pulls a pad of paper and a pen out of his back pocket. He's about to ask the usual questions—height, weight, birthday—when he glances at her and then he can't stop looking at her.
It's not that she's the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. She isn't. Black hair is messily held back by a clip, though a few locks have escaped it. Her eyes are slightly slanted, her irises hazel.
"Regal…I think we just found our girl."
Regal glances at Zelos before looking Sheena over. Zelos isn't wrong. The basic features are all there. "She could be."
Sheena stays still as Zelos circles her slowly, but finally she whirls around. "Why are you circling me? What, were you a vulture in another life?"
Zelos chuckles at that. "Don't think so, darling."
"So then what's with the circling?"
Zelos shakes his head. "It's nothing. You said something about travel papers."
"Yes. I need to get to Meltokio."
"Meltokio?" Regal and Zelos repeated.
"Yeah. I heard that there's a Research Academy there. They might be able to help me."
"Help you with…what?"
"My village found me wandering around Gaoracchia Forest when I was about seven years old. All I had on me were my clothes and this pendant." Sheena holds up the chain to demonstrate. "I don't know what this pendant means, but someone in Meltokio might."
Zelos did some mental math. "And before you were seven?"
"It's weird, but I don't remember anything other than my village. Nothing from before I was eight. This pendant is my one clue and I'm going to get my answers. So, can you two help me or can't you?"
The pieces fit together in Zelos' mind, but he shakes them away. They fit because he wants them to fit, that's all. "Regal, you still got the tickets?"
"Of course. We were going to Meltokio ourselves and we have three tickets."
Zelos sees the question on Sheena's face before she asks it. "Unfortunately," He cuts in smoothly. "The last ticket is for Shera Alesandre." Sheena just looks at them blankly. Had she really not heard any of the rumors? "She disappeared, about ten years back." (Twelve years, seven months and nine days, not that Zelos has been counting)
"We were going to reunite the Lady with her grandmother." Regal tells her.
"Although," Zelos shifts his weight to one leg. "Now that you mention it, you kind of resemble her. The same eyes."
"Same smile."
"You're the right age, the right physical type…"
Sheena shook her head and looked at the both of them. "You're trying to tell me that you think that I am this lost heiress or whatever?"
"I'm just saying that I've seen dozens upon dozens girls from across Sylvarant and not one of them looks as much as the Alesandre heiress as you."
"You're both insane." She said, turning to walk away.
Zelos is quickly in front of her again. "Maybe, but why this time? You don't remember what happened to you."
"And no one knows what happened to her."
"You're looking for clues in Meltokio."
"And her only family is in Meltokio." Regal points out.
"It's a possibility."
Sheena rolls her eyes. "The chances of me being an heiress to some rich family are about as high as you two being royalty."
Regal and Zelos are carefully not looking at each other. That comment had been a little too close to the mark. "Wish we could help, but that third ticket is for Shera. Good luck."
Zelos walks back into the church, Regal on his heels. "You're not going to tell her about the scam?" Regal asks quietly.
"I don't see why we should. All she wants is to go to Meltokio."
"You're conning her into agreeing." Regal accuses.
"I don't see why you're complaining. Everybody gets what they want this way."
Sheena stays outside, staring at the remains of the church. She had no way of getting travel papers (Going back to Mizuho isn't an option. Not at all) and she needed to get to Meltokio. The problem was that Mizuho and Ozette were all in the east, separated from the rest of Tethe'alla by tall mountains. The only way to get to the big cities, like Meltokio and Sybak, from Tethe'alla was by boat. The only problem was that, since it was winter, the waters up north had almost completely frozen over by now. There was supposed to be a bridge being built, but that wouldn't be ready for years and years.
Sheena isn't stupid. She'd grown up in Mizuho, where manipulating people was how you got food on the table. She knows when she's being conned and these two, they were most certainly conmen. But that didn't mean that they didn't have train tickets to Meltokio that she needed.
"Zelos!" She yanks open the door and jogs after him. "Zelos, hold up!" Both men turn to her. "If I don't remember who I am, then who's to say I'm not a princess or an heiress or whatever this Shera girl is, right?"
Zelos nodded. "Okay…go on."
"And if I'm not Shera, her grandmother will know right away and it's all just an honest mistake."
"But if you are the heiress, you will finally know who you are and you'll get your family back." Zelos points out.
Sheena's mind automatically rebels at that. She wants to tell him that in no uncertain terms, her family is back in Mizuho, even if Grandpa is in a coma.
"He's right." Regal told her. "Either way, it gets you to Meltokio."
Sheena pretends that this hasn't already occurred to her. "Right!"
"So you're with us?"
She smiles. "Yeah, I'm with you."