Disclaimer: I don't own anything!

Author's Note: Thanks to Universal, I got to go to an advance screening of the final Harry Potter movie last night. It was so bittersweet and so absolutely amazing.

-/-/-/-

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.

~Frederick Buechner

-/-/-/-

That summer, they feel it. The future is like a weight, hardly there, but at the same time, so heavy. Like a hand on their backs pushing them forward even as they try and keep themselves back.

They race and swim and laugh beneath the cool shade, beneath the powerful sun. Here, in this forest, it's their world and no one else's and they want to stay there forever because they know that, once they step out of this forest, Time will move forward, dragging them along stubbornly.

Outside of the forest, with its river and the birds fluttering from tree to tree and the doe and a half-grown deer watching them curiously before darting back into the trees that they only see once, it's difficult for them to remember that they were ever master and slave, that they're of two different races.

But they remember when the half-elves in the fields watch them from the corners of their eyes, when they split up in the evenings. They're so accustomed to staying in the same room now that it's strange to sleep alone. Even if Yuan isn't technically alone. He has a top bunk where, if he positions himself right and squints a little, he can see some stars through a gap in the wooden ceiling. He can hear the other half-elves—who he's shared these barracks with since he first arrived—as they snore and toss in their sleep, but it isn't the same. He's become accustomed to Kratos' breathing being near enough that he can hear it.

"Hey, Yuan." Someone hisses.

He blinks out of his concentration—the stars were particularly difficult to see today with the clouds—and looks over to see Russell, the boy in the next top bunk. He's thin and tall with very large blue eyes and his dark hair is always in his face. "What is it, Rus?"

"Wha's it like? With that human?"

Yuan almost tells him the truth. All of the truth. Russell had always been one of the other slaves that he liked better. But Yuan catches himself before he does. No one could know. "'S not so bad."

Russell smiles, a flash of teeth in the darkness. "Yeah?"

"Mm." Yuan hesitates before adding, "Humans aren't all bad, you know. Some of them are actually nice."

Russell snorts. "You must be dreamin', Yuan. Humans don't 'bout us for nothin'."

He hates hearing those kinds of words. And, somehow, he hates the ones against the humans more than he hates the ones against his own race, his own people. He doesn't understand it, but it's true. Perhaps, he muses, it's because of Kratos.

"What're you doing?" Kratos asks the next morning. Yuan is high in a tree, which isn't so strange really, but it's pouring rain out.

Yuan looks down, sees Kratos soaked, his bangs plastered to his forehead. "You ever climbed a tree to ride out a storm?"

Unsurprisingly, Kratos shakes his head, but he climbs up without another question, his feet slipping a little on the wet bark. Yuan shifts so that there's enough room for the both of them on the branch.

From this high up, they could see the fields—not endless like they had seemed in Yuan's village, but still expansive—and the mountains in the distance, both closer and farther away.

Thunder rumbles and they watch as lightning dances between the clouds, flashing across the sky. With that thunder comes another, lower rumble of hundreds of trees bending in the same powerful wind. From their vantage point, they can see the way that the other trees' branches and leaves rippling like water. Needles rain on them and they laugh as they shake them from their hair and clothes, squirming when one drops through the backs of their collars.

The sound of the rain falling merges with the trees and thunder, creating their own powerful symphony. The water runs down the trunks, cascading down the branches and twisting through hollows.

Kratos smiles at him. "This is incredible!"

Yuan laughs in agreement. Here, they're free, even if only for a moment.