Disclaimer: I don't own anything!

Author's Note: The Forbidden Kingdom, such an awesome movie. It had been a while since I'd seen it, but Wal-Mart is awesome and was selling it for $5. And I did start replaying ToS for…the God knows which try. Every time I play, I wonder how the hell I could've missed that Kratos is Lloyd's father the first time.

And I watched Young Sherlock Holmes for the first time—an excellent version, by the way, if anyone's a fan.

About two weeks until school starts again. Not sure if that's a good thing or not yet.

-/-/-/-

We saw the lightning and that was the guns and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.
~Harriet Tubman

-/-/-/-

Yuan woke because something was irritating him and he didn't know what it was. He shifted at first, trying to displace it—he could've simply slept wrong, after all—but the irritation didn't go away. So he squinted his eyes open to the lightening sky, the sun not yet entirely risen. He turned a little, trying to find the source of the irritation.

He shoved gently at Kratos, whose cheek was on his arm. Spring was well underway—by Yuan's estimation, it was actually going to be summer soon—and the nights were still rather chilly here. When Kratos didn't even stir, Yuan shoved harder, nearly dislodging Kratos entirely.

"Wha-whaz goin' on?" Kratos sat up sleepily, yawning.

"You were scratching me."

The human blinked at him, not entirely awake yet. "What?"

"You. Scratching. Me." Yuan said slowly, knowing how Kratos was in the morning. He even held up his arm, whose skin was red, as proof.

Kratos stared at the arm for a moment. "How'd I scratch you if that's where my head was?"

"I dunno. You've done weird things bef—hold still for a minute." Kratos frowned but obliged as Yuan's hand came up to poke at his cheek.

"Is there something particularly fascinating on my cheek?"

"Um, kind of. But you might want to feel for yourself."

Kratos' frown deepened, but he did anyway. "…It's rough. Yuan, I've got stubble."

Yuan pretended to wipe a tear from his eye. "My boy's all grown up…"

Kratos rolled his eyes and pushed him just hard enough so that he would fall off balance. "One of us has to be."

The half-elf laughed as he stood up before holding out a hand to help Kratos up. "Come on, mountain man. We're already running late. The sun's up."

-/-/-/-

The fishing village was the first they'd seen in months and it showed. They were cleaner than most travelers because they'd washed themselves in the ocean that they'd been travelling parallel to for months now. The village was small, but busy and there were fishing boats already out on the water.

"I've never seen anything like this." Yuan said, trying to take everything in.

"Me neither." Kratos' eyes were focused on the nets of fish that the fishermen were hauling onto the dock and the way they were skinning and preparing them to be sold.

Yuan followed Kratos' eyes. "Do we have any money left? We could share a fish."

Kratos dug in his pocket and grimaced at the few coins that they had left. They'd been living on rabbits and—if they could—fish that they'd tried catching in the ocean. Sometimes, Noishe brought back enough for all of them, but food was still fairly scarce. "We have some. Hopefully, those fish aren't too expensive."

"Nothing tried, nothing gained. Isn't that a human saying?"

Kratos snorted. Yuan had picked up human culture surprisingly quickly, not that that helped much. He was 'elf-pretty' as a lot of the villagers called it, but there was something about him that said that he wasn't a pure elf. "Yeah, it is. C'mon then."

The men on the docks are huge—or, they were to the two thin, half-grown boymen—and they were eyeing them suspiciously. But there was no shouting insults, no stones being thrown at them. As far as strangers went, these people didn't seem so bad.

"H-how much? For a fish." Kratos asked. He did most of the talking these days. Humans seemed adept at ignoring half-elves.

The fisherman was grizzled, scarred and very brown. He looked them over carefully before shaking his head. "Don't pull out any o' that money, boy. Take one. Ya look like you be needin' it."

Kratos waited for him to burst out laughing, to tell them that he was just kidding, but it never came. Instead, he chose a moderate-sized fish—didn't want to take advantage of the man's hospitality, after all—and smiled as he thanked him.

They found a place by some crates and took turns taking bites from the raw fish there. It's the best food they've had in a week.

"Over there!"

They froze instinctively, pressing themselves flat against the crates and hoping that they wouldn't get noticed. But the soldiers were there, pointing at leveling weapons at them and all they have was what was in their packs and Noishe was staying outside the village limits like he always did because people tended to get antsy at the sight of an enormous white bird.

Yuan came to his senses first, grabbing Kratos' arm and breaking into a run. They slipped a little on the wet wood, but kept going because if the soldiers caught them, there would be no more travelling, no more familiar, murmuring voices reading aloud at night, no more seeing the ocean, no more Yuan-and-Kratos.

The soldiers blocked them in and they're shouting at the boymen, telling them to surrender and that they were under arrest. The world suddenly felt so very small and the salty air was tight in Yuan's lungs because he can see the dank, dark cell where they might throw Kratos and the gallows where he knows that they'll hang him if they don't just roll his body into a swamp first.

Something sizzled in his blood and the world flashed violet for a moment and it felt absolutely right and free. Dimly, he heard thunder crackle and someone saying something to him.

"…An…Yuan, you did it." Kratos' eyes were very wide as he looked around them.

"Did it?" Yuan frowned, but he looked around and saw the burnt bodies of the soldiers. "…I did that?" He felt a little sick because people weren't supposed to burn like that, weren't supposed to stare at the sky without seeing it and he wanted nothing more than to run and never look back.

"Yeah. You-you made lightning."

Yuan remembered the storms that he could see coming from miles away over the fields, the storms he saw from his perch in the pomegranate trees. He remembered seeing the shadows fall over the grass and the trees, remembered the way he'd watch his kinsmen herd their flocks back towards the village. He remembered watching the world bend and sway beneath the storm's might (But never break because you can't break the world).

The lightning he'd seen then was nothing like the lightning he knew he'd called down. He'd thought that when he used magic, it would feel wonderful and liberating, but right now, seeing soldiers who probably had families back home (Like Poppi and Dehua and Kail did) he felt terrible.

Kratos tugged at Yuan's arm. "C'mon, we have to go. More soldiers'll be here soon." Yuan followed him, mind still distant and reeling, but his thoughts caught up sharply when he saw Kratos bending to pick up one of the soldier's swords.

Red-brown eyes met blue. "I need to be able to fight too."

Yuan didn't know why that bothered him. Of course Kratos knew how to fight. Of course Kratos was going to be just as protective of Yuan as he was of him.

But it still felt inherently wrong. Where was the nervous boy who'd first walked into the slaves' quarters? Where was the boy who'd read beneath the tree in the schoolyard? Who loved reading so much that he wanted to teach it to a half-elf, even though it was illegal? Who'd taught him to write his name?

Logically, Yuan knew that that boy was here, in front of him, but the boyman that was Kratos right now, a sword in hand and shadows in his eyes, wasn't him.

If this was growing up meant, becoming someone so off-kilter with who you'd been that you didn't recognize yourself, Yuan thought, then he wanted no part of it,