A/N: Okay, I know Rosethorn and Crane are a bit OOC here, but oh well… enjoy!

Crane left his workroom and walked out of Winding Circle. He needed to just, get away. To the woods. It was too much. All the work, every day, pressing on him. A break, that's what he needed.

He left the road almost immediately and strode in the trees. They towered above him, stretching towards the sun for its light and heat. The leaves crunching beneath his feet. The young trees, fighting desperately to reach the top, to get above the other trees, to get the sunlight that they so needed.

Sunlight. That's really what everything needed. No sun, no life, no nothing. If the sun left, it would get colder and colder and the plants would die and the animals would either freeze or starve, which ever came first. Not a pleasant death either way.

Oh, how nice it would be to be a, a bird. To lead a simple life of just hunting and sleeping. And to fly! To soar through the air, the wind rustling past your feathers…

Crane sighed and leaned against a tree. The birds wouldn't know. They wouldn't know when the end was near, when the moment came, the moment before death swallowed everything.

He reached a tree, a tall sycamore, stretching higher then the other trees. It's white bark gleamed in the late afternoon sunlight, sunlight which might not be there very much longer. The ripple of water rushing over stones, would never be heard again, for the creatures to hear it, and the creek itself would be gone. The water which the sycamore so loved to grow near. Crane stepped up to the old tree, running his hands on the smooth bark. The tree must have been thousands of years old. It would take at least five tall men to wrap around the tree completely.

Crane felt for a hand-hold in the bark and pulled himself up. The nearest branch was, what, fifty feet up? Crane paused to look. It was more. Still, Crane climbed. He climbed, asking for the tree to help him. After ten minutes he reached the first branch. A branch so wide it must have been three feet in diameter. He sat on it for a second to catch his breath, looking out at the trees that went on for miles, full of life, rich and happy, and ignorant. Would it all be gone, or would it go on, oblivious to the fact that it nearly missed destruction?

Crane smiled wistfully and thought again about how much better it would be to be ignorant. To be able to live happily until the end. But to know, to be able to count the seconds to death…

Crane shook his head to rid himself of these thoughts. The whole reason he was here was to escape them. He stood up on the branch and climbed as high as the tree would let him. So high that the branches he leaned his weight on where no larger then his leg, and he could see the entire forest stretched out before him. Winding Circle was below him, and he could see clearly why it was called that. Why hadn't he ever come up here before? Why, the hawks flew this low sometimes. He could see one, circled uncertainly over a kill, no wait, it was a vulture.

Crane smiled wryly to himself. He could identify any tree in the entire world, yet when it came to birds, and even though his name was a bird, he couldn't tell a robin from a osprey.

A wind picked up and brushed pasted the leaf filled branches, moving the tops of the trees slightly. As the branches of the trees below moved, Crane saw a figure walking down there. Who was it? It looked from here like a dot of hair. Rosethorn. He could tell that hair anywhere. What was she doing here? Looking for escape, as he was?

Rosethorn stopped at the sycamore Crane was perched in and looked up among the branches. But Crane was to far up to be made out. She looked back down and continued on, striding through the forest until she disappeared under the leaves.

Crane felt a strange twinge at his heart. If all this came to pass, what would become of them? Would they argue till the end of their days, a time only prolonged from this point? An image formed in Crane's mind…

Crane stands in front of his green house, his hair gray and his face full of wrinkles, his figure stooped, yet proud.

"My green house is doing just fine," he croaks proudly.

An old lady, also stooped and leaning on a walking stick, hair all white and skin in wrinkles stands in front of him, "you still haven't learned that your green house is not right! Forcing plants out of their regular growing seasons," she mutters, still short tempered despite her age. Rosethorn…

Beautiful, yet dangerous, Crane thought with a smile. A rose, that's what she was. The name fit her perfectly. Was that really his future, if of course, they didn't all die? To stand up proudly for his green house, arguing with Rosethorn? Or were they destined to be more then that?

Crane stared at the trees below him, thinking of the figure that just passed under. Did he really want to live like that until the end? Or did he want something more from her? Did he want to be something more then just a friend?

If this came to pass, if it did, he would say something. Say what? Okay, Crane, come to your senses and look at your feelings. Its no use hiding anything, it'll come out sooner or later. He would tell her, he would tell her what he thought of her, what he had thought of her for a long time, yet not knowing what it really meant. He would tell her that he loved her, that he only wished to be with her forever.

But what if, what if his feelings were not returned? It doesn't matter, it would come out sooner or later, face your fears, Crane. As he stared at the spot of ground beneath the sycamore that he could see beneath the branches, where Rosethorn stood and looked for, for what? For him? Impossible.

He imagined that he saw here there again, smiling up at him, wondering what he was doing up in the top of a tree. He could imagine her shouting up to him… Wait, she was really there! What was that she was saying?

"What…doing?" Rosethorn's sharp voice could go a long way. Crane sighed and scrambled down, sliding from branch to branch, his robe's catching on the smaller twigs. Then he was sitting on the first branch. The first branch of many, and there was Rosethorn, standing there, looking up at him in confusion.

"Well?" she asked.

"I'm sitting in a tree!" Crane called down, then mentally slapped himself. How lame could he be? The whole way down he had known what he would say, something smart, a good comeback, a good reason to why he was in a tree. He couldn't really say that he was trying to get away, or could he?

"Why?" Rosethorn asked, leaning against the sycamore trunk.

Crane slid down the trunk slowly, using the same handholds as when he was coming up. Once at the bottom he brushed himself off and smoothed his hair. He didn't look at Rosethorn, afraid she would think him silly, childish, to be climbing a tree.

"So?" she finally asked, her eyes not demanding but, for once, only curious.

Crane lowered his eyes from his brief look into hers.

"To tell you the truth," Crane paused, had he ever really told Rosethorn the truth? That he only said what he said for sake of habit, habit or being proud and arrogant, and of disagreeing with her? What would she say, to his telling the truth? Or should he just say he was trying to get a closer look at the sun? No… that was silly. Two hundred feet was nothing. The sun was billions of miles away, truth was best.

"I needed a break. All work and no play makes Johnny a dull boy," Crane mentally slapped himself again. Why was he making a fool of himself in front of Rosethorn? That was not what he intended to say.

Rosethorn was stifling a laugh, but she managed to control it, "I can understand that." A smile was still playing about her lips. This was certainly something she had never heard out of Crane.

Crane searched blindly for something to say, something to cover up his totally unreasonable remark. But what? He felt Rosethorn's eyes on him, wondering with humor what had come over him. Crane himself wasn't sure of that.

"It's nice out here," he finally said, hoping to distract Rosethorn into a different conversation.

"Yes, it is. I love the trees."

It worked! Crane was delighted, although he didn't show it. Instead he replied, "I must be going," and nodded to her before striding off.

As he was walking away he realized that maybe leaving wasn't so great after all. Standing there, talking to Rosethorn, even if she was laughing at him, wasn't so bad. Now he had to go back to his workroom. How he wished now he had just stayed and talk to her, for once, without arguing. Lately it seemed harder and harder to think of reasonable things to say in front of her. They all came out like… like that. Crane thought of what he had said and grimaced. He couldn't even imagine himself saying anything like that, even now, after he had said it.

Now he was on the road, and walking into Winding Circle. There were Briar, Sandry, Tris, and Daja, sitting on the roof of Discipline Cottage, talking, laughing, enjoying the afternoon. There teachers would have told them already what was going on, yet, in their youngness, it just wasn't as important. He sighed, even if he couldn't become a different creature, how nice it would be to be young again. To laugh, to run, to play; without a care in the world.

He could remember his childhood quite clearly, always striving to be the best, yet he always remembered to take time off to play. As his age increased though, that disappeared and he became… obsessed… with how good he was at school.

He stepped into his workroom and settled himself resignedly into his work. Work all day and all night seemed to be the idea at Winding Circle now, how else would they find out what was going on? It was four in the afternoon, yet the light was almost gone from the sky. And no one knew why.

A/N: Please review and tell me what you think! I love reviews, no matter how small! I'm not going to say I won't put up the next chapter until a certain amount of reviews, but I would appreciate it if you did review and tell me what you think of this. The idea itself didn't come until I was half way through page one… Just some bits and pieces of a story popped up in my head and insisted I write them down. More chapters soon. Thank you.