A/N: SUPER FAST UPDATE, WHOO HOO. The next one won't be as fast, but it'll probably be out by Friday or Saturday or something. Hope you like this one, as this is the first chapter showing them grow a little last their baby stage and into *le gasp* puberty.

Anyway, fair winds!

Unforgotten

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Pieces

Weddings were the dumbest ritual produced by mankind…ever, or at least that was what Aura had concluded. She watched as her aunt looked adoringly at her soon to be husband-she'd give 'em two years, tops- and only twisted her expression tighter when he began reciting his horribly composed and generic vows. If it had been any other day under any other circumstances, she would have laid herself flat on the plush grass and watched the clouds go by with Ken, and maybe he'd play with her hair if he didn't feel like he was pushing any boundaries, and she would braid flowers into crowns and eventually fall asleep under the stars.

But today, Agatha Zander was becoming Agatha

Lynn, and the eleven year old was stuck sitting in a fancy facaded lawn chair in a dress that reached way beyond her ankles, made up of nothing but layers of heavy, blush pink lace and she was miserable. The winds kissed her ears and tousled her hair- left down, flowers decorating her head like a halo- and she mocking mouthed her aunt's vows as she spoke them, and Ken sat at her right and tried desperately not to laugh.

The wedding party was small, as her backyard could only fit so many people, and the ceremony was simple and lacked anything extraordinary besides flowers placed anywhere you could fit them. Still, there were so many faces Aura didn't recognize and it made her head spin. With more force that would ever had been necessary, she threw rice at the new couple as they rushed hand and hand down the aisle, a simple cream line of satin, and it felt like the reception had begun within a blink of an eye.

"Ken." She grabbed his hand and leaned forward into his ear, a cheshire like smile spreading over her lightly glossed lips. "There's a place I want to take you. Wanna go on an adventure?" They stood in the middle of the small crowd of relatives and friends that didn't seem to belong to her and looked at him with hopeful blue eyes. He released a tense sounding breath and nodded, pushing his glasses back up the bride of his nose.

"Lead the way, lieutenant."

And she smiled, her single dimple appearing in her cheek and she wasted no time in pushing past whatever person that had happened to be in her way. Ken easily fallowed her, his hand in hers and a curious glint in his forest green eyes.

Soon, he found himself being pulled into the woods that were behind her house. Her mother had told her time after time that it wasn't a part of their property and not to go in there, but she did it anyway.

She really isn't a very good listener.

She kicked off her shoes and a relieved breath escape her lungs. Taking the corner of the hem on either side of the dress in her delicate hands, she stepped over slicked rocks and traced her toes over the top of the stream that ran between a barrier of pebbles the size of an ant and rocks the size of your hand. Ken smiled, discarding his too-tight tuxedo jacket and loosening the Whatever-forsaken tie his mother had practically choked him with that morning. Unlike his freckled counterpart, he carefully removed his shoes and placed them under a tree- it was their favorite tree, to be exact, and they had carved their names into it once upon time.

Which was second grade, by the way.

"Hey, Aura?" He asked as she skipped from one stone to the next, the stream progressively growing wider the further they walked. She carefully looked over her shoulder with her arms angled like wings out at her sides, her feet pointed and legs held straight as she teetered over to the next rock. Even after their escape, she still seemed tense; her father had forced her to play her violin instead of the usual wedding march as Agatha walked down the aisle, Aura's father, Alphonse, in uniform as he escorted his sister to her fifth (and hopefully, last) husband. She glared the whole time.

"Yeah, Ken?" She twirled around on the balls of her bare feet, her arms still outstretched as a sudden breeze rustled her hair and the crisp leaves that surrounded them. It was spring, her favorite season, and the flowers in her mother's garden were blooming in full force. Of course it was the perfect place for a wedding.

"Why do you hate weddings so much?" For a second, he thought he saw her stiffen, but any signs of afflicting emotions vanished instantly; she still didn't smile, but turned back around as if she was going to dodge his curious stare.

"…Because, I don't think 'true love' exists. And weddings are just a stupid binding ritual for people that think they won't get tired of each other." He halted on a rather large rock, easily a half size bigger than his head, and raised a brow. His parents had been together for thirty years; they had met as awkward preteens cursed with braces and weird acne in middle school, and loved each other despite that and never stopped, even when his father joined the military and left her alone in their small home town. But she waited for him, stood by him as he climbed the ranks, and went with him where ever he needed to be, because she needed to be there, too.

Of course true love existed. And he was positive that's what he was feeling, right now as he looked at her even though she was scowling so unpleasantly.

"But, what about…" His words trailed off as he watched her eyes go wide when she looked off into the distance, carelessly running through the stream as both her feet and dress became soaked. His words caught in his throat and he hastily rolled up his pants so his mother wouldn't yell at him later and trailed after her, utterly confused but utterly curious all at once.

"Here! Here's the place!" She exclaimed, pushing shrubbery out of her line of passage and taking care not to get smacked with tree branches. While she had made it out unscathed, Ken was sporting three new scratches on his face and stupidly crooked glasses.

"Hey, what the…" Twice in a row, Ken became at lost for words. It was almost like a meadow; flowers and over grown weeds jutting out of the ground every which way, and a small lake that could pass as a makeshift swimming pool if you weren't afraid of random fish getting into your swim trunks. But in the back, almost completely blanketed with thickly grown moss, was a tree house. A tree house, mind you, which looked older than dirt and probably hadn't had a visitor since the last ice age.

She had always had a thing for fix-her-uppers, he supposed.

And without warming, she fit her freckled hand in his and started pulling him towards the looming structure, and he was positive that even if he was pretty damn sure it would give out from under them, he'd be climbing it, anyway.

And he was right.

"How'd you even find this place?" He asked, once they had heaved themselves up the withering excuse for a rope ladder and sat on the greyed wood, which Ken noted felt surprisingly sturdy. He removed the now dirtied white button up, as the right sleeve had received a tear and his mom would kill him if she saw it. Having Aura as a friend meant you got creative when it came to making excuses for things, like why he wasn't wearing a shirt, or why the microwave had exploded, or why there was a hole in the wall suspiciously the size of his head.

She remained quiet, her forearm draped across her abdomen and left hand placed on the wood next to her head. Even as blinding sunlight filtered through the chunks of ceiling missing from the tree house, she didn't shield her eyes, and her stare seemed to become more and more intense as the seconds drifted by.

"…You know that old myth where the gods would cut you in half at birth, and that the other half was your soul mate? Like, two halves make a whole?" Ken nearly jumped from his skin when he finally heard her speak, watching as her brow furrowed slightly in thought. He nodded, his arms wrapped around his knees, an inquisitive look in his forest-like eyes.

"…I don't think that's what my parents are. They're more like those two leftover puzzle pieces that you can't find the correct match to, so you try really hard to force them together… to make them fit, but no matter how hard you try and force it, they still don't fit together like they would have if you had saved all of the trouble and just put them with the right piece in the first place."

A stunned silence settled over them, and Ken had to look the other way to avoid her calculating eyes. The sunlight was still blinding, he was still shirtless, and he didn't think he could have a response to that even if she had wanted one, which he didn't think she did.

"The only reason they got married was because he knocked her up, y'know." She said ruefully, her eyes never leaving the cut outs of wood that made up the ceiling. "They never really really loved each other, I don't think. And then there's my aunt whose been married so many times I can count them on one hand and not have any fingers left, and each time she always says 'get used to this one, because he'll be around for a while'… they never are."

"So… you don't think someone could love you? Like, be in true love with you?" He asked, trying to hide his cheeks by angling his face away from her and looking at one of the corners that had suddenly become mind blowing-ly interesting. His hands were balled in tight fists on his knees and he refused to look at her and she knew it; he could feel her eyes burning into his back like an all-consuming fire.

"No. Not really." They locked eyes and stayed like that, her back held straight with her arms and legs crossed, a position that dared you to argue. He thought, for a split second he saw something else in her eyes, but she knew he had seen it so she looked away, a pout forming on her lips. So instead of a stare down, he looked at her; I mean, really looked at her. From her everywhere freckles and tanned skin to her slender arms, to the way the dress she wore brought out her blue eyes perfectly, and the way the flowers that decorated her hair like some sort of dirty-gold Christmas tree, and didn't even flinch away as he felt his heart flutter. He hadn't even hit puberty, and yet he was hopelessly, aimlessly in love.

"…Well, I'm going to prove you wrong, Aura Marilyn Zander. And when I do, I get to say I told you so." In a span of five seconds, he reached over and kissed her cheek before springing into an upright position, climbing down the ladder with speed he didn't even know he could manage. But like always, she was never one to miss a beat; with her dress knotted on her right hip, she hurried down the ladder after him with an expression that no doubt meant murder.

"Dammit, Kentin! This so isn't Sweet Home Alabama!" She called after him, her feet not carrying her nearly as fast as she wanted them to, as the boy was already almost at the creek they had been walking along only an hour earlier. And for some reason, she felt something stir in her ribcage and wasn't exactly sure what it meant or what she thought about it.

But she did know that she was going to wring his neck out for making her blush redder than the roses in her mother's garden.