Disclaimer:I don't own anything!

Author's Note:

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Most of us, swimming against the tides of trouble the world knows nothing about, need only a bit of praise or encouragement - and we will make the goal.
~Jerome Fleishman

-/-/-/-

They glanced at each other, not quite sure what to do. They'd reached the capital, as promised, but now that they were standing here, they didn't know where to go or who to see.

The capital was in the way of half-elves, rough edges and patchwork buildings built and cleaned up to create a strange, grand portrait. The buildings were flat-topped—something that made Yuan smile because he hadn't seen buildings like that for years. They'd had buildings like that back in his village and they would do their laundry and collect rainwater from the sun-stained roofs—and were more colorful than many would expect.

The city was built on hills and the roads—stone roads, Yuan marveled, in a half-elven town. How alien—sloped with the landscape. There are flowerboxes on the window sills and small gardens in between houses. Tall trees slant over the city walls and poke out of alley ways. The people were a cacophony of combinations of colors and features. Some more human, others could pass for elven save for a broadness of the brow or the rough scrape of a beard on the cheeks.

The people here had the hardy look of people accustomed to war. Nearly everyone seemed to have some kind of weapon on them, whether it was knife at the belt or an arched sword, perhaps a spear. Even some of the children have small daggers and the older ones keep one eye on the younger ones and the other eye on the newcomers.

"I never imagined it like this." Yuan said quietly, still looking around.

"What did you picture?" Kratos asked, trying to make himself look small on instinct. As a rule, half-elves weren't particularly fond of humans and making himself invisible was easier than it should have been.

"I-I can't remember right now." Yuan glanced at Martel. "Any idea where to go?"

She looked just as uncomfortable as the rest of them. "How should I know? It was you guys' idea to come here."

"Well, we're kind of 'big picture' people." Yuan glanced around. "Let's see if we can't find a place to at least spend the night while we figure out a plan."

-/-/-/-

The inn was small and there were chickens in the yard that poked and pecked at their feet as they walked by. A goat tethered to a post eyed them as they passed before returning to his grass. The building was painted the gray of ashes with streaks of charcoal black over where, once, it might have been a pale, inviting pink.

There were two women at the desk—one of whose feet was kept up by a thick book and Yuan wanted to both smile at the look on Kratos' face at the use of a book and lament with him. One of the women was older, not that it was entirely visible save for a few stray lines around her eyes and mouth. Her hair was still black as night and her eyes sharp.

The other woman—girl, really. She couldn't be much older than Yuan and Kratos—had the same dark hair, but her eyes were bright silver, not of blindness, but the simple color, and her skin was rather pale compared to the others that they'd seen in the city, whose skins were browned by long hours in the sun.

The girl smiled at them. "Welcome, travellers. You'll be needin' a room, I take it?"

Yuan returned the smile almost automatically. "Yes, please. But, uh…"

"You don't got no money." Yuan stopped himself from correcting her grammar, but only just and he knew Kratos had done the same.

"We're willing to work." Martel told her. "All of us."

Before the girl could say anything more, the older woman—her mother?—said, "Don't bother, Delia."

Delia frowned. "Why, mam? 'S only fair."

"They got themselves a human," Her mother said the word like humans would say 'half-breed' and everyone would say cockroaches. "We don't got no rooms for that kind and no blood traitors neither."

Yuan bristled. "Blood traitors?"

"Aye. Humans are to blame for our husbands dyin' in the battlefields and for our sons comin' back with missin' arms and legs, if they come back at all."

"No, you're to blame for that." Martel stared at him, as did Kratos and Mithos. "They don't have to go. Yes, there was a draft, but if you felt that strongly about it, there were ways around it."

Kratos settled a hand on his best friend's shoulder. "Yuan." He said quietly. "We should go."

Yuan opened his mouth to continue ranting, but then he saw the look on Kratos' face and snapped his mouth shut, nodding. But he didn't leave before shooting a dirty look over his shoulder at Delia and her mother.

"I don't get it." Yuan snarled under his breath. "You didn't do anything to 'em."

Kratos' eyes looked ancient again, looked sad and too understanding. "Just like you hadn't done anything to us, but they made you slaves anyway."

Martel's breath caught. Yuan? A slave? Neither of them had never mentioned it.

"But they're not wrong." Mithos piped up. "Humans hurt us."

Yuan rounded on the boy. "Yes, they hurt us, but not all of them. Most of them don't even know what's going on. You shouldn't blame everyone for what only a few people are doing."

Mithos blinked slowly at him, not in confusion, but in processing. "…So what do you plan to do about it?"

"Right now? Stew it over, looks like." Kratos said and Martel looked at him, surprised. How could he be so accepting of the words that had been spat at him, of the accusations?

"Don't act so unaffected." Yuan snapped at him.

"You can't do this every time someone says a bad word towards me." Kratos told him, an undercurrent of a temper that Martel hadn't known he'd had tingeing the words.

"So, what? I'm supposed to just let it go?"

"You can't change the world like this, Yuan. Stop trying."

The half-elf frowned at his best friend, for the first time not understanding what had prompted these thoughts. But perhaps something in him sensed that, right now, a fight wasn't what Kratos needed. "C'mon, kid. Let's find a place to sleep for the night."

-/-/-

Martel and Kratos sat themselves on an abandoned house's doorstep. There wasn't much room—particularly for Kratos' larger body—but they managed to get settled comfortably enough.

"What's wrong, Kratos?" She asked, leaning her staff carefully against the wall. "I've never seen you and Yuan like this before."

"…The first few times it happened, I wanted to think that, maybe, it was just these half-elves. Not all of them." He looked up quickly at her, apology and traces of panic on his face. "Of course, it's still not all of them."

Martel waved away his apology. "I get it. Keep going."

"But I guess I thought that, here, in the capital, things would be a little different. I didn't expect them to trust me, or to like me, but I thought that maybe…"

"They'd be willing to try?" Martel suggested.

"Yeah." Kratos leaned his forearms on his thighs. "…Yuan keeps trying to pick a fight with the whole world and he still thinks he can win."

"And you think he can't."

"People don't change just because of words, Martel. You know that."

She shifted uncomfortably. Kratos looked, suddenly, too old and jaded to be the boy she knew. And he was right, she did know that. How had he known that he would find an ally in her, of all people? "Maybe not words, but I think—or, I like to think—that actions change people."

"So you're saying it's the act of speaking up for equality rather than the actual words?"

Martel noted how he said 'equality' and not 'humans' rights'. It seemed significant somehow. "I think so. I mean, the people here, I don't think they're used to seeing humans outside of the battlefield and, honestly, that sword isn't helping."

"I need to be able to protect myself." Kratos said and she knew that it was more about defending others than himself, but Kratos still had some of that boyish pride that wouldn't allow him to say that. "I don't have magic like you guys and I'm useless at hand-to-hand."

"I know. I'm just telling you it from their point of view."

Kratos stilled and Martel could almost see him withdrawing back into himself. "…Is that your point of view too?"

"You want the honest answer?"

He nodded, as she'd known he would. Kratos had such a strange sense of honesty.

"It was. And it still kind of is. I look at you and I see all the humans that've hurt me and Mithos before." He opened his mouth to tell her why, exactly he wasn't like those humans and she continued soothingly, "I know that you aren't like that. I know that, but something in me won't let it go. I want to, especially after seeing you and Yuan and even you with Mithos. He trusts you so much already."

"Let me guess, you don't think I should give up on the whole equality thing."

"I think you'd hate yourself if you did."

His eyes—that strange red-brown, lacking the slant to their shape like those of any elven blood—flashed to her. The next minute, he chuckled and ran a hand through his tangled hair. "You know me too well."

"Hey! Martel! Kratos!" Both turned at the childish voice to see the blonde child running and skidding through the sloping streets towards them, Yuan's blue head not far behind. "You'll never guess who we found!"

Martel stood, dusting off the seat of her skirt and grabbing her staff before extending a hand to Kratos. "Shall we?"

He smiled and took her hand. "You are surprisingly persuasive."

Martel laughed. "Call it my feminine wiles."