Disclaimer: Don't own anything.
Author's Note: Finished Season three of Burn Notice and I can't wait to see Season 4. Also saw Toy Story 3 for the second time and it doesn't get any less sad.
This is all before Tales of Symphonia.
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"She still has the advantage over us."
"Everyone always does. That's what makes us so special."
-Zoe and Mal-Firefly
-/-
Kratos wasn't expecting to be at knifepoint when he finally caught up with Anna. Even with his angelic speed, a spooked horse that was rested was still faster. And still he found himself staring down the small silver blade of a knife at Anna's determined face.
"Are you going to kill me?" Kratos asked calmly. This certainly wasn't the first time this sort of thing had happened and he doubted that this would be the last.
Anna lowered the knife. "How'd you catch up?"
Kratos didn't answer right away, instead distracted by her trembling arms. They'd tired from even that small exertion of keeping a knife held up for a minute. Cleary, she was worse off then she was letting on.
"I'm good at what I do." Was Kratos' only answer. It wasn't as though he could tell her the truth.
"Do we have much of a lead on them?" Anna asked, putting the knife back in the saddlebags that Kratos was sure that Yuan had made sure were stocked full of provisions.
"Not enough to be able to rest. Was the knife in the saddlebags?"
"No. It's yours."
"What?" Kratos hadn't felt a thing, but now that she brought it up, he could feel the knife's slight weight absent from his left boot.
"You pick up a lot of skills in a prison. It was a just-in-case measure. I got it when we were going through the vent. Since you insisted on going first in case there were guards wherever we came out, it wasn't hard."
Kratos thought about arguing it, but decided that he didn't really need the extra knife. He had two others after all and his sword and she needed some way to defend herself if he wasn't nearby. "Get back on the horse. We need to get moving."
Anna obeyed, but held out a stick-thin arm, still bruised and red with welts. "Well come on. I'm not letting you run the rest of the way."
Kratos swung himself onto the horse, but refused to take her arm. He was afraid that he might break her, fragile as she was right now. His arms slipped around her waist to take hold of the reins. He gently kicked the horse into an easy gallop—he didn't want to wear the beast out after all—and headed for the forests that grew on the sides of the mountains.
They'd gone many miles before Anna started in his arms.
"What is it?" Kratos asked, searching for any sign of danger. He hadn't heard or seen anything out of the ordinary, but it was possible he could have missed something. To err was human, after all…
"That… monster!"
Kratos followed her arm to where she pointed and shook his head, dismounting in one smooth motion, though he kept one hand on the reins since the horse was looking mighty skittish.
"He's not a monster." Kratos told her as a wet nose was pushed into his palm. "His name's Noishe. He's traveled with me for years."
Anna tilted her head, studying the creature. Ordinarily, she wouldn't have trusted his words quite so easily, but Noishe was acting very friendly with the man. Noishe was as large as the horse and its coat looked as though pale green paint had been thrown on seafoam.
She dismounted a little clumsily, wincing at the pain in her back, and reached out warily to the creature. "What is he?"
Kratos debated on whether or not to tell her the truth. "…He's a dog. Or so I'm assuming. I was traveling a few years back and he followed me. I couldn't exactly chase him away, so I decided to keep him."
Noishe padded forward, watching her with surprisingly intelligent green eyes that were ringed with gold. Cautiously, Anna petted his head and Noishie's tongue darted out, licking her wrist.
"He's the weirdest dog I've ever seen." Anna commented as she scratched behind his large ears.
"You'll hear no disagreements from me." Noishe whuffed at him and Kratos patted his head in an absent-minded gesture. "The Desians won't search the forests at night. And they don't have enough manpower to search very far right now. Even searching the areas from Hima to Asgard would spread their forces too thin."
Anna eased herself on the ground; her legs were stiff and a little sore from the hard riding and her back stung something terrible. "You know an awful lot about the Desians, don't you?"
"I had to learn their movements, their ways before I could break everyone out." Kratos replied, digging through the saddlebags. He wasn't hungry (he doesn't need to eat, but he'll do it because he needs to play human, needs to pretend that the last four thousand years are some sort of terrible nightmare) but Yuan had packed foods that didn't spoil too quickly and Anna needed food in her if she was to get any better. And oh, he'd been kind enough to include two small pots and pans.
"You work with that other guy? Mr. Ponytail?" Anna asked as she made to stand. It wasn't as if they were going to sit here in the cold and they needed firewood. Well, cold wasn't quite the proper word as it was spring, but it certainly wasn't warm.
Kratos snorted a little. Yuan was sure to like that one. Mr. Ponytail. "Yes. He has contacts that allow him to get the supplies and places for you escapees to stay." Then he noticed the way she was standing; a little wobbly, but from what he'd learned of her, she was sheer pig-headed and wouldn't admit that her injuries were bothering her. "Sit down." He told her patiently. "I'll get it."
Kratos was startled when, rather than agreeing, Anna immediately whirled to look at him, hands on bony hips and hazel eyes flashing. "Look, I've been feeling damn useless for the past eight years. I need to move, stretch my legs!"
"You're exhausted." He told her flatly. "Relax and let me do it."
Anna eyed him, but she knew the look in his eyes. It was similar to the one her father used to get when he was determined to win an argument, even one as small as deciding who had to get up to get the forks. She sat herself carefully back down and Kratos doesn't have to say anything for Noishe to curl himself around her, head resting just by her right thigh and his tail constantly brushing her left.
Kratos knows that Yggdrasill will be looking for him and Yuan both to see if they had any information on the breakout, but Kratos also knew that he couldn't just leave Anna on her own. Unlike the twins and Cheri, who had only been at the ranch a few days or weeks, Anna was clearly malnourished and the Exsphere on her left hand was a dead giveaway.
Heaven's above…the other prisoners…he and Yuan had forgotten about the Exspheres. If they tried to remove them…
Kratos couldn't ignore that. He'd been planning to lie low with Anna for a few days until she got her feet under her and they had a decent lead on the Desians, but now he absolutely needed to go to Cruxis. Immediately. Because that was where Yuan was and Yuan was the one who was in a position to do something about those escapees.
Anna is dozing when Kratos returns, arms full of firewood. She's leaning on Noishe's shoulder and on a steady path to true sleep. She was shivering a little and Kratos knows that it would have been worse had Noishe not been lending her his warmth.
It's only after he get s a fire going that he looks over to Noishe (Anna being safely sleeping by then) and murmurs, "Well, this is quite the predicament, isn't it?"
-/-/-/
He can feel the half-elves' eyes on him. He can't blame them. After all, Yuan hasn't been this worked up in a while and it was all Kratos' fault because he'd had to get cocky this one time and jinxed it, making the whole operation get compromised.
"You should calm down." Someone tells him.
Yuan wants to snarl at them because, while he had complete faith in his best friend's abilities, he was also completely aware of just how much Kratos couldn't leave well-enough alone and he'd probably end up getting himself killed because of it.
But he doesn't snarl. Doesn't snap.
"Thank you, Makar. How's the progress going?" Yuan needs to get his mind off of the ranch situation and his second-in-command had a very noticeable presence.
White blonde hair was mussed from being inside a turban most of the day and his eyes were a very pale green, all a sharp contrast to darkly tanned skin. He was taller than Yuan by almost a head. He'd been a traveling sheepherder, originally from Triet, before Yuan found him.
"We've finished the beams for the ceiling, sir. The slabs were being put to dry tonight and we can most likely finish it by tomorrow." Makar said, voice still holding a trace of an accent.
"That's good news. Everyone sleeps inside the building tonight. No going outside of it except for extreme emergencies. Is that clear?" Yuan couldn't take the chance that the Desians might glance one of the half-elves going for supplies or a midnight stroll. The invisibility spell (if they ever got it functioning) would only cover the building and a few yards outside of it.
"Yessir."
Yuan glanced up at the sky. The moon wasn't quite at the center of the sky yet. He would give it another hour. If he hadn't heard from Kratos yet, then he'd go to Cruxis and explain them both out of suspicion.
-/-/-/
There was something cold and wet nudging at her cheek and Anna instinctively rolled away from it into something warm and furry. Memories (nightmares) flooded her mind and she sat bolt upright, glancing around wildly.
"Good morning." Kratos greeted, stirring some oatmeal in a small pot. It was a sight that Anna had already become accustomed to, despite having woken up to it only three times. When Anna doesn't reply, Kratos glances over at her. "Something wrong?"
"Bad dreams." Anna tells him, standing stiffly from where she had slept, as she had the past three nights, beside Noishe. "Do we have a plan to reach a town anytime soon?"
"We should be able to reach Hima by this afternoon." Kratos told her, ladling her a bowl of oatmeal. It was bland and Kratos knew that it didn't taste very good, but he'd never been the best of cooks. Not with anything other than meat.
"Awesome. I can't wait to have a real bath." Anna would have bathed in the stream, but it was still too cold. As it was, she'd just scrubbed her face and arms as clean of grit and dirt as she'd been able to get them.
Mealtimes between them were often a slightly awkward affair. However they tried to fill the silence, there was always the elephant in the back of the room that was the knowledge of the ranch, of the Desians still chasing after them.
Kratos motions her over and he doesn't have to ask her to lift her shirt anymore so he can get to her injuries. Anna still didn't entirely trust him, but she had nothing to blame him for. Kratos had touched her no more than necessary and always kept his eyes politely diverted.
As he inspected the wounds, he nodded to himself.
"What's up?" Anna asks.
"They're no longer infected and have closed up sufficiently so that there is no chance for infection anymore."
"That's great, I suppose." Anna's understanding of medicine was as basic as it got. If you were bleeding or something was bent in a way that it didn't look like it should be bent, something was wrong. You cleaned it out with water and put a bandage on it. That was all she knew.
Anna jumps when he lays a hand flat against her side (his palms are rough and calloused and they scrape against the wounds uncomfortably). He murmurs something, something she doesn't catch and there's a pale green light surrounding his hand and seeping into her skin. Even as she watches, the bruises and broken skin heal over, leaving healthy, new skin in its place.
Anna stares at him as he pulls his hand back, carefully rewrapping her back. "How did you do that?"
"Magic."
"I thought only those of elven blood could use magic or did I just fall asleep on my schoolbooks one too many times?"
"You're not wrong." Kratos paused, trying to come up with a lie. He'd never told anyone since Mithos and Martel exactly how he'd gotten the small traces of elven blood in his system. "My great-great grandmother, on my mother's side, was elven."
"Who taught you? The magic, I mean."
"The same man who taught me to fight." Though granted, Yuan hadn't been a man yet. Kratos rocked back on his heels before standing, offering her a hand up. Anna doesn't accept the hand up, as he'd known she wouldn't. A very independent woman, was Anna. "We must get going."
When they traveled, there was a sort of hurried peace to it. Anna had ridden Noishe the day after their flight from the ranch, but that was only to give the horse, Rosamund as Anna had dubbed her, a break. She hadn't ridden the 'dog' (Anna refused to believe that that was what it truly was) since. Most of the time, Noishe was at his master's side, his shoulder even with Kratos' elbow. Sometimes, Anna thinks she catches Kratos talking with Noishe when he scratches absentmindedly behind Noishe's ears.
They're like a piece of an entirely different puzzle, Noishe and Kratos. Anna woke up in the night once to find them standing just on the edge of the firelight (They were never too far away). The firelight had cast exotic and eerie shadows across their faces, had highlighted the part of their bodies facing the fire in warm golds, where the darkness of the night seemed to welcome the rest of them with slender, bewitching arms.
It had made Kratos not look entirely human.
-/-/-/
Yuan was staring at him.
"Is something the matter?" Kratos asked as he closed the door behind him.
The next instant, his head was whipped to the side as a fist cracked across his face. Flexing his jaw to assure himself that nothing was broken, Kratos looked at Yuan, trying to keep down the instinctive flare of temper that came with being punched. "You'd better have a good reason for that."
"That was for making me worried out of my mind and for making me come up with a convincing lie for Yggdrasill on the spot." Yuan hissed.
"…Guess I deserved that then." After all, it wasn't as though Yuan went around punching him in the face every day. "What's the story then?"
"You were in Heimdall, checking on the elves seeing as how the rest of us aren't exactly welcome there. I was in Meltokio, getting news about the laws that the Pope's been trying to instate."
"Not bad."
"I thought the same thing. Now, how about you tell me where the hell you've been the past four days?" Yuan crossed his arms, leaning back in his favorite armchair. "Did you drop off the woman? I hope so, since you flew over here."
Kratos sometimes thought that Yuan knew him too well. Yuan had taken to staying in their small Palmacosta apartment for the past few nights, knowing that if Kratos had sent any news, it would be there.
"She's in Hima right now. Noishe is watching her."
Yuan's eyes darkened a little at the implication of those words. "So you plan on going back then."
"Only until I get her to a town where she can make her own life. I was thinking Izlood."
Yuan shook his head. "No, there are already enough escapees there. When the Desians don't find them at any of the bigger towns, they'll check Izlood and it's not a big enough community to keep her hidden as well as them."
"From Izlood, we could double back. Come back here, to Palmacosta. The Desians don't have a sea branch. They won't check any boats already at sea and once we get here, it's too busy. It would be easy to sneak past them."
Yuan sighed. The plan was a good one, and Kratos knew it. "You're getting awful involved with this one."
"It needs to be done. I thought of something while I was out there too."
"Oh really?"
"Yes, really. The Exspheres on the prisoners' hands…they need Key Crests."
Yuan paled. How had they both missed that? "You're right...but the dwarves that are actually capable of making the Key Crests are all under Yggdrasill."
"Get word to the escapees then. Tell them that, under no circumstances, are they to remove those Exspheres."
"This is why we need to get the magitechnology at the base up and running." Yuan said, already on his feet and grabbing his cape from where it was tossed on the counter. "I could send them the information from here and they'd already be working on it."
Kratos reluctantly got to his feet as well. He always hated to get up from that armchair…"Is the structure finished?"
"The outside of it, yes. We're working on putting up walls and some windows. My second-in-command, Makar, is designing traps for intruders."
He'd met Makar once or twice. The man was a good strategist, if the game of chess he'd been playing against one of the others had been anything to go by. "Your base is going to be a fortress."
"That's the plan."
"Remember to give your people a way through the base without having to get through the traps." Kratos reminded him as they both stepped out the door. The constant sea breeze in Palmacosta was something that they'd both appreciated from the first day they'd ever seen any city on the coast.
"Good call. I'd hate to have to do backflips and who knows what else just to get through the front door."
The people of Palmacosta glance at them, but there are so many people that come through the city that they don't question the odd clothing or the accents that still tug at their consonants (Their accents don't exist anymore, not anywhere.)
"Knowing Makar, he'd make you do them too." Kratos' first impression of the half-elf was that he had a bit of a prankster in him.
Yuan's smile was ironic and a little bitter, but his voice still held that amusement that it had had when they were children wrestling in the snow. "And being the old man that I am, I don't think my body can contort itself into whatever acrobatics Makar can think of."
"It would provide entertainment for the underlings, at least."
They turned into a small alleyway just outside of the guardhouse.
"Look, Kratos, I don't have any moral high ground to stand on at this particular point, but I think that this hero complex that's apparently coming back to you isn't good for you."
"And why's that?" Kratos knew that he had to at least hear his best friend out.
"Because this could all end up being one mistake that will snowball into something monumental."
Kratos reads the look in the familiar bottle green eyes. "…This isn't the same as it was for you with Martel." He says quietly. "I'm not attracted to this woman."
Yuan would be the first to admit that he'd been attracted to Martel the moment he'd seen her, but Kratos…Kratos had never been like that. Kratos had been with women, naturally, and he and Yuan had been together for a little bit, not that they could remember exactly when or even how long (Because the days all blend together when you're, for all intents and purposes, immortal).
"So you're not attracted to her. Fine. But I stand by what I said. This isn't good for you." Yuan couldn't explain why he thought that, only that this whole thing didn't feel quite right.
"As much as I appreciate your advice, I'm not taking it."
"I had a feeling you wouldn't.
-/-/-/
Kratos enters the room without thinking or knocking. The result? Having to quickly avert his eyes so that he was looking anywhere but at the naked young woman standing in front of a free-standing mirror.
He can hear the slight shift in the air as she jumped, can feel the vibrations in the floor as she hurries to cover herself with a blanket from the bed.
"Where were you?" It isn't the question he'd expected her to ask. "It's a small town and I didn't see you anywhere."
"I was meeting my friend." Kratos chances a swift glance up, grateful to find that Anna was seated on the bed, blanket covering all that needed to be covered.
She'd bathed while he was gone, Kratos noted. There was no dirt in her rather pale skin (Eight years with minimal sunlight tended to do that to a person) and her brown hair was still tangled, but now proved to be a chestnut color rather than the muddy, almost black it used to appear.
"Mr. Ponytail?"
"Mm."
Anna looked like she was about to ask more, but decided better of it, eyes going once again to the mirror.
"You seem troubled." Kratos said a little cautiously. Anna had already proved to be unpredictable, fiery and opinionated and he'd learned long ago to tread carefully around such women.
Anna doesn't look directly at him. "Y'know, I haven't seen a mirror in eight years…I guess I just didn't know that I would change that much." A slight snort. "Goddess, I don't even think I know how old I am anymore."
He doesn't know how to answer to that and goes with his preferred method of avoiding such things—staying silent.
"Y'know what else I learned today?"
"…The date?" Kratos ventured.
Anna chuckled a little, moving to stand and making Kratos look away once more, eyes focused intently on the ground at his feet. "Besides that."
Noishe was howling outside and Kratos answered a little distractedly. "Nothing else comes to mind."
"The old woman who helps her husband run this place…she gave me these clothes and I didn't know what to say" Her voice is a little farther away and there is a rustling of cloth. "I think I forgot how to interact with people."
"I doubt that. You seem to have no trouble talking to me."
"Let me rephrase. I forgot how to interact with normal people."
"Thanks so kindly." Kratos muttered.
Anna laughed this time, a full-throated, honest laugh. "You are a lot of things, Kratos, but normal could never be described as one of them."
And it was entirely true. Anna knew next to nothing about the man who had saved her life other than his name, but she knew that there was something about him that just didn't fit with the rest of the world. Like a puzzle piece that had wandered into the wrong box.
But now that she's remembering his ways of speaking and the way he treats her, Anna wants to describe it more as he'd been the piece of the puzzle that had been forgotten to get thrown out before the new puzzle came in.
"…We won't be able to stay here, will we?"
Kratos finally moves across the room from where he'd been standing since he'd entered to the small window. Noishe was still howling and he trusted the protozoan's instincts as much as he did his own. Noishe was prowling back and forth, all subtle danger and liquid muscle, but Kratos could see no sign of any danger.
"No."
"So is this what my life is going to be from now on? Constant running?"
He looks over at her. She's dressed now with her hands propped on her hips. The pale green dress that looks a little outdated for this time, but it suits her quite well. The long sleeves are a tad short at the wrist, like the skirt is at the ankle, but it still fits her well enough. The torso is a darker shade of green. Anna is fiddling with the neckline, tugging it up and the shoulders down, but she looks like a normal person of society once more.
"There is a plan."
"That so?"
"We go to Izlood and then take a boat from there to Palmacosta."
"Isn't there a ranch near Palmacosta too? I heard the guards talking about it sometimes. It would put us right back in the same situation."
"No, it wouldn't. Palmacosta is considerably bigger than most of the other cities. It makes it more difficult for the Desians to keep control and to find people. It will be much safer for you there."
"I…I can't ever see my family again, can I?"
Kratos hadn't been particularly fond of his parents and he'd never had any siblings. He can't say he misses them. "Not for a while."
"We leave in the morning, I take it?"
"Before dawn."
Anna was staring at him as though he was insane. "Does the concept of sleep mean anything at all to you?"
"You can sleep in the saddle if needed. We can't stay here very long and Izlood is but a two day's ride away."
"You sound like you've been to all these places. Izlood, Palmacosta…Have you? Been there I mean?"
"I lived in Palmacosta for a time and Izlood has the only other port in Sylvarant, so I've had to pass through it often."
"…What is it that you do?" Anna asked. "As a job. You can't live off of begging and being a wanderer."
"I'm a mercenary." It wouldn't be the first time he used the lie. It was a simple one that explained everything.
Anna tilted her head as she looked him over. "A mercenary doesn't quite suit you."
Kratos blinked in surprise. "Excuse me?"
"A mercenary. It doesn't suit you. You look more like the kind of guy who prefers to stay—what's the word I'm looking for?—grounded, I guess, grounded in one place."
Kratos didn't quite know what to do with that observation. Another one of Noishe's howls broke the air and this time, they both stuck their heads out the window to see what was the matter.
"Goddess, but don't these Desians ever give up?" Anna muttered as she ran to stuff her feet into a pair of fuzzy socks and some fairly clumpy brown boots.
"Apparently not." They were both heading towards the door when they heard the sound of booted footsteps and shouting. "Out the window, go."
Anna doesn't think twice, vaulting herself over and it's only once she's out the window that Kratos remembers that her body's still fragile and healing from the ranch. He should have gone first, to catch her. But it's too late for such thoughts and he launches himself outside, landing lightly on the balls of his feet.
When he looks over, Anna is half-sprawled on Noishe's back and Kratos realizes that of course Noishe would have caught her. He was starting to recognize Anna's scent and had taken a liking to her from almost the moment they'd met.
"Are we just leaving Rosamund?" Anna asks, already righting herself on Noishe so that she's sitting just behind his shoulder blades.
"No time to saddle him up." Kratos climbs atop Noishe behind her. Normally, he would have refrained from doing so. Not because Noishe couldn't handle the weight—the dog was extraordinarily strong—but because he didn't like to put the burden on his old friend. "Let's go, Noishe."