Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Author's Note: I read a story a while ago with the Pietro/Anna pairing-don't ask me which one. I can't remember now-but it was a pretty fascinating idea for me. So I started writing and then I stopped. I found this on my hard drive a few weeks ago and now, it is finally done. Shazam.

"Sometimes, the things that may or may not be true are things that a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil.
And I want you to remember this: That love, true love, never dies. You remember that, boy.
Doesn't matter if it's true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in."
-Uncle Hub (Secondhand Lions)

It's his first day here. In this town of sunshine and lakewater. Everything smells fresh here. Not like back home, where there's a lot of dirt and miners and a one-room schoolhouse with creaky floorboards. Back then, he had been in a class with everyone, all at the same time.

Here though, here he is with only about ten other children. He has just turned eleven and he is one of the older ones. He's told that the other students take class at a different time or on different days. Or in the classroom next door.

The first time he sees her, she is sitting by the window, cheek leaning on her palm and doodling in her notebook.

The first time he hears her name, it's in the teacher's sharp voice. "Anna Irving!"

Other students flinch at the tone. Anna looks up, almost bored and asks, in a poisonously sweet voice, "Yes, professor?"

"Since you are clearly paying close attention, what is the answer to this problem?"

Anna glances at the board. "…Forty-three."

She gets detention on suspicion of cheating. No one looks surprised.

He's checking the mailbox when he sees her coming home, schoolbag slung over one shoulder and looking tired. He hadn't known that she lives only two houses down from him.

"Anna! You're home!"

A little girl slams a hug into her and he sees her chuckle a little and kiss the top of the girl's head. "I missed you too, sis."

She's called inside by her parents, but he's already intrigued by this girl.

Summer means swimming in the lake. Everyone. Young, old, it doesn't matter. The kids jump from the pier—the braver ones from the church roof before the adults catch them. After that, they tie a rope around a high tree branch and swing themselves in. The water is refreshingly cool after the relentless heat

Pietro has never learned to swim. Hima has no bodies of water nearby that are big enough. Their water supply is small, pumped from some underground well. So he sits in the shade and watches the small bubble of chaos that the lake creates. Learns how people smile and how they shout. Learns who tans and who burns.

She plops next to him, perfectly at ease with her lack of grace. Her hair is sticking to her forehead and her neck, a little tangled. She's in her underclothes, like all of them are. It's nothing strange to the people of Luin to see each other in little else during times like these, when all anyone wants is to beat the heat. (Pietro found it very strange. Hima was a bit more modest and he didn't quite know where to look with all of her skin just…out in the open like that. Not that there's a whole lot to see. She's all of twelve and has no curves to speak of just yet)

"Aren't you hot?" she asks.

"Yes." Pietro finds it impossible for anyone to not be hot out here.

"Don't you like to swim?"

"Never learned," he replies.

She tilts her head, observing him with sharp brown eyes. She is intelligent and intuitive and she must see something he doesn't because she hops to her feet and offers him a hand up. "I'll teach you."

"What?"

Her grin is unsubtle. "You can't live in Luin and never go swimming." As she pulls him to his feet, she adds, "I'm Anna, by the way."

Pietro is unsteady in the water, even after two weeks of her helping him. She swims easily, trusting the water to hold her, catch her when she jumps. He knows the logic of swimming, knows the science behind how the body stays afloat, but every time he tries, his mind panics and he has to stand again.

"You're too nervous," Anna tells him. "You have to relax. I won't let you drown."

She doesn't seem strong enough to hold him up, to fight the water. But her muscle is lean and wiry and she's proven that she's stronger than she looks when she's hauling him up after he panics and his head goes under.

It will take another few weeks before he learns to relax properly. Until then, he hovers near the invisible line between where he can stand and keep his head above the water and where he has to swim to do the same. She floats on her back and paddles lazily and sometimes, one of the other kids will try and scare her by grabbing her ankle. Anna only grins ferociously and it starts a wrestling match. She's small and slippery and the match only ends when they're breathless from laughter.

Pietro laughs at those times too and he thinks he likes Luin much more than Hima.

The summer storms are powerful, fleeting things. Their winds whip and the lightning crashes, thunder rumbling through the buildings. But there is one day of that summer where Pietro is holed up with Anna in her father's store. He teaches her to play Rats and Riches, a card game his uncle had taught him back in Hima. They play sitting on uneven barrels with a crate as a table. Anna sits cross-legged, comfortable around these objects, in this room.

She learns the game quickly and she gives him a good challenge. They snack on peanuts and some pears—Luin's best export. It's a peaceful sort of thing, with the rain drumming against the windows, the world outside muted, but not gray.

Pietro rather likes having a friend here. Most of the other kids think he's strange. They don't like his miner's accent or the way he dresses, all long sleeves in neutral colors. They dress more colorfully here, but Pietro doesn't feel very comfortable like that. He feels too obvious. But Anna—in her favorite red shirt that has a patch on the left sleeve and is fading after all these years—doesn't judge him for it. Just accepts him as is and teases him friendly-like when she wants him to crack a smile.

School is more bearable with someone to talk to. He sits next to Anna and they write notes back and forth and share hidden smiles at jokes the teacher will never hear. Her handwriting is a scrawl with occasional dots for the I's and slashes for the T's, but he learns to read it as easily as his own.

Anna is smart—particularly in math. She says it's because of her father, the shopkeeper. He had taught her math first. How to run the register, how to take inventory, how to know how much of something to order. It's history where she falls short. She is terrible at remembering dates.

But Pietro isn't. Not that he's great at it. He's just better at it than she is. So he helps her out with history and she makes the math make sense. They read the same books and they'll argue over everything inside those books. It's a good system that they have.

She turns thirteen in the winter. Luin gets cold, but it doesn't snow like it does in Hima. The lake gets frosty and the ice coats the rooftops, but Pietro isn't bothered. That's nothing compared to back home.

She gets a dress for her birthday, now that she's a proper young woman and all. (She told him this with air quotes and rolled eyes, but she wore it anyway to humor her mother). The dress is a striking shade of blue and he thinks she wears it well, but Anna insists that it's awkward.

She invites Pietro to have dinner with them. They feast that night on chicken and fish with vegetables that her father transported from Asgard. Her mother is the quiet kind, but her father is loud and energetic and Anna takes very much after her father. They laugh and share stories and it's kind of a perfect night.

Everything changes four days later.

Her father isn't the one the one that rebels. He's loud, but he accepts what the Desians take.

Anna doesn't. Anna is fierce, her fiery temper and spine of steel planting her at the door before the Desians leave. She doesn't want to let them leave without paying.

They take her as their payment. She fights them, kicking wildly, teeth bared. But they're stronger, have her arms pinned and it takes only a second to knock her out.

Pietro doesn't see Anna Irving again for years.

He stays in Luin even after having the option to move away. He can go to Palmacosta, to Asgard, back to Hima. He can go anywhere. He's eighteen and he's got a little bit of money saved up from working part time in the Irvings' store. (It was quiet there now. Her father was subdued, his energy lacking and her mother hardly spoke anymore, didn't look up, didn't seem to register anything. Pietro hated it, but he couldn't imagine doing anything else)

He buys a blue shirt when he's sixteen. It's the same blue that Anna's dress had been. It's the first really colorful shirt he owns. Everything else is in shades of white, brown and black.

He lives under the Desian rule and doesn't fight back when they come into the shop. He imagines it sometimes, being brave. Standing up to them. Being taken away to the ranch to find Anna and they can break out together.

But that's a child's dream and he knows it.

He's twenty-four when someone new comes into the shop. They get travelers, sure. Luin is the only real stop in between Asgard and Hima. But there is something strange about this man. Something different.

The sword at his hip is well-maintained, and there's a dagger at his belt. His posture is military-straight and his auburn hair is disheveled. When he talks to Pietro as he counts out the gald to pay for the gels and the bits of food, he's perfectly polite, but he has an accent that Pietro can't place.

Pietro writes it off as an isolated incident. But that's before he's going home—he lives across from the inn, in the same house where he's lived since he got here. His mother is dead, died three years ago because they can't afford the good medicine to keep her alive—and he sees someone calling to that same man.

"Kratos!" the person calls. It's a woman, brown hair cut raggedly short, a bit too skinny, but otherwise, ordinary. "Got us a room."

The man—Kratos—joins her and she takes a bag from him. He says something and it makes her laugh.

Pietro recognizes her in an instant. He knows that laugh, that smile, even if it looks a little different from before. But that's impossible. Anna Irving had been taken to the ranch and no one makes it out of the ranches alive. Everyone knows that.

(But he knows. Despite what his logic is telling him, he knows it's her)

She chuckles and has to go on her toes a bit to plant a brief kiss on Kratos, grinning a familiar fierce grin.

(His heart broke a little. The pieces that were left, at least. She wasn't his. Maybe she could have been, once, but the Desians changed that. She was this man's now. Kratos'. Or perhaps, she was never anyone's and Kratos was the first to see it. See her independently and love her just the same)

Pietro means to go talk to her. Means to at least get that confirmation that it's really her. But by the next morning, before he goes to work, they've already left.

He puts it on the Desians. Lets the anger fester inside.

He's forty when the girl comes. The girl that's dressed strangely in shades of purple with an accent he's never heard. She's polite and a little funny and a bit…nervous. She stays in town for a while, makes friends with people easily. When she introduces herself, it's with only one name. Sheena.

The kids love her. She plays and climbs with them, sometimes jumps in the water to swim with them. But she goes away for days before returning, bruised and sore and he'll toss her the packets of apple gels and she chews on the, perched on a barrel that had once been a seat for two children playing cards.

Pietro asks her where she's from once. Sheena gives him a sad smile and says, "Pretty far away."

(He never forgot Anna. And Sheena reminded him of her, just a bit. For brief flashes. She grinned in a similar way, like a challenge. And she had the same kind of intelligence. But she was quieter than Anna had ever been. And sadder)

"Why do you let the Desians overpower you?" Sheena asks one day. She helps out in the shop in exchange for room and board at the inn. She would work at the inn, but they already have enough staff.

Pietro looks up from the bookkeeping to where she sweeps. "They have numbers. And if we don't comply, they'll take us to the ranch. And no one leaves the ranch." Except for Anna Irving, the girl who had done the impossible.

(But surely, Sheena would know that? Would know why people were afraid of Desians? There was no place in Sylvarant that wasn't touched by their presence)

"But why not fight back? Why just stand and take it?" She isn't looking at him, finding the broom fascinating.

"We don't have that kind of strength."

"You could. If you really wanted to fight them, you'd find the strength." (This, she knew. She didn't want to kill anyone, but that's what she'd been trained for. For her world, for her village, she would kill the blonde girl that didn't look threatening at all. She could deal with the guilt later)

"Why does this bother you so much?" He hates it too, but he's accepted it.

"Because people are suffering for no reason at all."

"Don't start." Pietro is surprised at his own anger. He knows. He knows that Sheena's right, but he can't do anything about it. He's just a shopkeeper.

Sheena opens her mouth like she wants to disagree, but she closes it and finishes sweeping.

She leaves and doesn't come back for a while. But her words stick in his mind annoyingly. So when the Desians come, his temper flashes and suddenly, he can't control his mouth. He doesn't remember much. Remembers fighting. Remembers fists and boots.

When he comes to himself again, he's in chains, being hauled away.

The ranch is a horror that's engraved in his mind in shades of red. He doesn't want to imagine Anna here. He sees what happens to the ones who rebel. Sees how they're beaten practically to the edge of sanity. And he knows that Anna would never have stopped. She had been strong like that.

But he listens to the Desians. Hears them when they think he can't. And he finds out about this orb. And it things grow heavy around it. Like it controls gravity. It's a ridiculous thought, but it's the key to getting out of here. Because there's a vent that he sees all the time, marching through the yard. It has bars, but he knows that it can break them, can get him out.

He steals the orb and runs for the nearest vent. It's an entire system, surely he can make his way through them.

The orb is a terrible weight though. It feels wrong in his hands, makes things seem woozy. But he keeps going. Keeps turning in the direction where he smells fresh air. And he finds the bars. He doesn't know what the orb does. Just knows that at one moment, the bars are there and the next, they're not.

He can't leave it like this. Can't leave any evidence. So he manages to push a boulder in front of it. (It's the orb, he knew. He didn't know what it did, but he knew that it's the reason that this was happening)

He doesn't know where to go. He can go to Luin. But that doesn't seem smart. They'll look for him there. So he walks. And doesn't stop. Doesn't let the lashes on his back stop him. Doesn't let the way his feet bleed hurt him. He can't. He's tired, but he can't stop. Otherwise, this will all have been for nothing. Because the Desians have a plan. A terrible plan that they're constructing and he needs someone to know. Someone who can fight it.

If you really wanted to fight them, you'd find the strength.

Sheena. She needs to know. She can fight them. She has that kind of strength.

He dies in Hima. Or, that's what the story is. They bury the orb he came with there. The orb that has made him delirious. He can't organize his thoughts anymore, can't quite make things out when he sees them.

Or he sees things that aren't possible.

Like Anna. Sitting on the windowsill, back to the room and heels bouncing on the wall. She is as he remembers her, in that red shirt of hers that she liked so much. Hair long enough to cover her shoulders. Brown-skinned from constant summer sun.

She smiles at him. "You did good," she says.

"You're dead. Or hiding. I don't know. You were with that guy." The words don't come from his mouth. Words don't work that easy anymore. But he feels the words and knows that she doesn't have to hear him.

"Dead," she says quietly. She flashes, older, hair shorter and scarred, before going back to her twelve year old self. "The Desians killed me."

"Bastards."

A snort of laughter. "Yeah. But…I made it out."

"You got lucky."

"So did you."

"I'm…broken. Can't be with people."

"Don't be stupid." She stands then, balancing on the balls of her feet like she's ready to take flight. "No one comes out of the ranches whole. I was broken too. But…you're not beyond fixing. Kratos taught me that."

"The swordsman?"

She smiles, fondly. Sadly. "My husband too." And she is older again, scarred and he can see where she had been broken too. "You can't just stay here, in this room. Locked away. Not much better than the ranch, is it? You need to go out there, Pietro. With people. With fresh air and water and storms. With everything the world is. It's how you heal."

"When'd you get so wise?"

Her laughter doesn't sound the same this time. It echoes and he hears the brokenness. "Live and learn, I guess." She tucks her hair behind her ear. "I'm serious though. Try. Please."

"I will."

He is outside, like Anna said. He doesn't remember Hima very well. Thirty plus years of memories do that. But he feels like it hasn't changed much. The dusty air, the dryness of it. It's everything Hima feels like.

He thinks he's dreaming when he sees Sheena again. She is the first shape he really registers, in her purple and pink, with her strength.

The next thing he focuses on is the other one dressed in purple with auburn hair. The man he knows. But he can't articulate it and perhaps Kratos recognizes him, perhaps he doesn't. It doesn't matter. Their connecting point is gone, apparently. Anna is gone.

But what he sees is red. A red red shirt. And boots. And gloves. With very brown hair and a familiar smile. He thinks Anna. But it's not and he knows it.

When Pietro sees Luin again, it has been nearly a year and half since he had been taken away. And Luin is destroyed. In pieces. He wants to cry. Wants to curl up and hide and never get up. Because this is too much. This is home. Luin is peace. Has always been that way.

But now, it's nothing but ash.

He spots movement out of the corner of his eye. A rope, dangling in the wind. The rope hung from a tree so many years ago. It's frayed now. Probably wouldn't hold any weight. But he sees ghosts on it. Children swinging. People laughing in the water. His younger self, learning to swim.

He wants that again. So much. Wants to feel this place with life again. So he gathers himself together and decides that he can make it happen. He's not sure how. But he will.

Rebuilding is hard work, but Pietro appreciates it. And, with every building that is erected, with every bridge that reconnects with its broken pieces, he can feel himself coming back together too. He talks easier. Sometimes he can't. Sometimes, he needs paper and a pen. Rarely, he needs to just be outside of the town, wandering. Getting air that doesn't have the aftersmell of soot.

Sheena and her friends stop by every now again. They donate money and they'll occasionally spend a day helping out. Sheena is stronger than he remembers. Not physically. Mentally. She seems more put together. Less afraid. And he's happy for her.

He thanks her one afternoon.

"What for?"

"For waking me up."

She doesn't understand and Pietro doesn't think he can explain it to her.

The day that he steps outside and sees Luin—more glorious than it had been—is the last day that he sees Anna. She is balancing on a post of one of the bridges, twelve and thirteen and older, in that blue dress.

She grins at him and it's not as fierce. A little softer, a little mischievous. "Told you so."

"About what?" This time, his voice does work and he makes the sounds. If people think he's crazy, he's fine with that.

"You. Look at what you've done. Look at yourself. You're a new man."

"Well. You helped."

"Not much. You just needed a push." She turns and hops down so that she's eye-level with him. "Promise me something."

"What?"

"Don't lose it. This strength of yours. Never lose it."

"I don't want to."

"Good. Oh, and one more thing," She leans up to kiss his cheek and whispers something in his ear before she's gone. "Be happy."