Chapter 1 – Thalia Anya Ward (Toothania)

A/N: Hello! I'm Annabeth The Unicorn, here to bring you one of the only pieces of Fanfiction on this sight that doesn't ship Jack/OC. (Unless we're talking bromance, in which case, Guilty!) Here's the first chapter, which focuses mostly (Completely) on Tooth. Enjoy!

She was found wandering the streets of the town, completely alone, in the dead of the night. A store clerk saw her stumbling around in nothing more than what looked to him like silky pajamas, and went outside to make sure she was okay. After all, who would be out at this time of night? He was only there because, due to a recent argument with the Mrs., he was sleeping in the shop tonight. The strange woman was quite petite, with short hair that stuck up slightly in the back, but not as if she'd just rolled out of bed; rather that she'd styled it to look like feathers. She looked like she was in her late twenties, perhaps.

"Hello, Miss!" He called, opening the store door. The woman turned to look at him, curiously. "Are you alright?" He asked.

"Oh, yes." She said, turning her head this way and that, like a bird. "I do believe so." She seemed lost in her thoughts for a moment.

The clerk walked towards her, pulling his robe tighter around him., shivering in his slippers. Winter was just on the first page of its three-month spell, and already it was freezing. For god's sake, this woman was likely to get hypothermia at this rate.

"What're you doing out here in the cold?" He asked. She seemed to come out of a spell.

"I'm not too sure about that." She replied. "I can't seem to recall…"

The clerk's expression changed from one of slight concern to one of confusion.

"You don't remember?" He took a few steps forward. She shook her head, as if he'd just asked her a question about the weather. "What's your name, Miss?" He asked. She tilted her head, considering the words.

"Well, I don't seem to remember that either. How interesting. All the memories, where could they have gone?" She looked around, as if they were hiding behind the next street post or in the next ally. "I mean, that's assuming I had any to begin with. I mean, maybe I was just born. Maybe I'm a child of the wind." The man stared as the woman continued, slack-jawed and confused. "I do like the wind. At least I remember that."

"Is this some kind of joke?" He asked. She checked around the corner, wondering if her memories were there somewhere. She turned back to him and smiled.

"I certainly hope not. That wouldn't be a very kind joke. Memories are important. Very…" She blinked, as if the words had awakened something inside her. "Important."

"Riiiiight." The clerk said skeptically. "Come inside my shop, I'll call the police and get this sorted out."

The woman let him lead her back towards the shop. When they were at the door, she took his arm and stared into his eyes intently, as though she were now checking to see if her memories were hidden inside his soul.

"It's important to remember." She said. She rolled the words around her mouth, trying them on for size. She wasn't satisfied and tried again. "R-remember what's important."

When the police asked for her name, all she could remember were vague things. "I think it starts with a 'T'? Maybe a 'Th'?" After being considered, she was given the name Thalia Ward. She chose the middle name Anya for herself.

Some time passed, and eventually she was set up with an apartment and some money to start out with. She had a job at a daycare center, and enjoyed working with the children. For some reason, while the rest of her life was nothing but unanswered questions, when she was with the kids, something clicked within her. It was right, she felt.

And the children seemed to agree.

They loved everything about her, from her beautiful smile ("You, too, can smile like me, if you brush your teeth every day!") to the way she flitted around a room. One girl had claimed that Thalia would make a good bird because she wore "pretty colors" and moved "like a hummingbird."

Every day she would come in to work, be greeted gleefully by a room full of kids and spend eight hours in paradise. Then she would bid them good bye and go to the tiny room on the tenth floor.

Thalia had no known family. No friends. Nothing. She was starting brand new, with no indication of what her past life was. But she didn't mind any of that. What she did mind, however, were her feet. She had checked all over the town, in every mall, nearly every shoe store, but she could not find a pair of shoes that fit.

In fact, she tripped on the curb on her way in to the very last of the stores in the area. She cursed the shoes she wore, which were far too big for her feet, and she cursed her tiny feet, which were far too small for her shoes.

Shivering, she walked through the automatic doors to the last shoe store in town.

She was wearing an overcoat over a colorful dress with a flower print. On her hair, she wore a beanie, so that only the tips of her short hair stuck out. She didn't like the way it stuck up in the back, and wore the hat always when in public.

A woman with fiery red hair, wearing an employee uniform approached her. She was about five minutes from the end of her shift, and thought she might as well help out one more customer before heading out. She was looking forward to going back home and seeing her children again after a long day at work.

"Hello!" She said, with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, "My name is Meredith, How may I help you?"

"Yes, hi." Thalia turned to look at her. "May I please have the smallest shoe you have in stock?"

"The- the what?" The employee had never received such an odd request before. I mean, sure, there had been little girls asking for sneakers to make them fly, and boys wondering if the right shoe could make them karate pros, but those were children, and as she knew very well, they were quite different beings.

"The smallest shoe you have in stock?" Thalia tried again. "I've been all over town, but no store carries them in a size that will fit me."

Meredith considered the woman, and stole a look at her feet. The shoes she wore were awfully small, and, surprisingly, didn't appear to be small enough. "I'll see what we have in the back."

"No, even when the laces are pulled all the way together, it's still too big."

"Try this one."

"That's bigger than the last one!"

"This one, then!"

Thalia and Meredith had been going at it for around an hour, and were having a grand time about it. Meredith was a naturally social person, and found it easy to make new friends.

"Nope." Thalia proclaimed, slipping her foot out of the latest attempt, a plastic pink ballet flat. "No way that'll stay on. Although, it looks like it might fit one of my kids. Christine, she loves pink."

"So you have kids?" Meredith asked, mildly surprised. The woman looked much too young to be married, let alone to have a kid old enough to fit into that shoe.

Thalia laughed. "Oh, no. I work at a Daycare. You?"

Smiling fondly, she handed the woman the next shoe box. "One son who just turned 9, a girl about 4, and a teenage daughter."

"Big family."

"Oh yes, but we get by. Between my job here and my husband's store, we actually do pretty well."

"How wonderful!" Meredith saw the look of amazement on her client's face and wondered…

"What about you, any family?"

Thalia paused in tying the laces of the latest shoe (a blue sneaker with green accents) and got a far-away look in her eye, as if she were staring at something that was just out of her line of sight, hoping if she just looked long enough, she'd be able to see it.

"Not really, no."

"Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to intrude-"

"No, not at all!" Thalia said. "Think nothing of it." She struggled with the laces for another moment or so before declaring them, for what must have been the hundredth time, too large.

Meredith reached for the next shoe box, only to find that there were none left. They had literally tried every shoe in the store.

"Maybe we could try kid's sizes?"

"No, I've tried before; they're either not long enough or too wide." But Meredith was already returning with three new boxes, this time of children's shoes. She grabbed one of Thalia's feet.

"Get… in… there…"

"It's not going to work."

"Damn." Meredith had to admit, this was starting to feel like a losing battle.

"What are their names?"

"Who's names?"

"Your kids' names!"

"Oh." Meredith smiled, thinking of her children. "The youngest is Ally, the boy is Ryan, and my eldest girl is Katherine." She could see them, in her mind's eye. Ally's curly blonde hair, Ryan's smile, Katherine's brown eyes. "Ally just lost her first tooth."

"Really! Oh, my goodness, that's great! That's fantastic, that's wonderful!" Thalia was, for reasons far beyond either of them, ecstatic to hear this. "Did you celebrate? You must have celebrated. Oh, let's celebrate!" Thalia bounced off her seat, wearing one sock and one boy's sneaker that was only covering the front of her foot. She grabbed Meredith's hands and began to dance around the store, gaining strange looks from everyone around them.

Meredith, for her part, couldn't stop laughing. When they finally stopped dancing, she was the one who collapsed with giggles into the seat usually occupied by the person trying on shoes. She eventually got her laughter under control.

"Actually, it's the strangest thing, but I keep forgetting to put a quarter under her pillow."

"Really?" Meredith nodded, suddenly serious.

"I mean, it's such a great childhood tradition, but I feel like we're so scatter-brained that we're depriving her of it."

Thalia looked at her. "But you've had two kids before her; surely you must be used to the Tooth-fairy routine by now."

"I thought we were, but…" She paused. "I always assumed my husband did it. Only, when I asked him why he didn't put a quarter under her pillow, he said he'd never done it in his life. He assumed that I'd been doing it!"

"So then who…?"

"Oh, I'm sure we're both just going senile, you know how it is."

Thalia sat down next to her on the bench, seeming to be lost in thought. The two were silent for a long moment before Thalia asked if there were any other shoes to try.

Meredith looked sadly at the shoe boxes all around them. There were no other shoes in the store.

She crossed her arms. She couldn't think of anything else to try, but she certainly wasn't going to let her new friend continue walking about in shoes two sized too big. After a moment a revelation came to her, and she snapped her fingers.

"I've got it!" She proclaimed proudly.

"What, what have you got?" Thalia said, smiling in an amused way.

"There's a carpentry shop not far from my husband's store, and they do a lot of custom leather work! I bet they could make you some shoes that will fit perfectly!"

The small-footed woman smiled widely; glad to finally have a solution to her biggest problem. Meredith gave her the address of the carpentry shop, and they chatted aimlessly about the weather for a while. ("Honestly, though, it's so odd how it's still raining. This time last year, we were knee-deep in snow, and had been for weeks!" "Must be global warming.") Until eventually Meredith asked the question.

"Just out of curiosity, which daycare do you work at?"

"'Big Smiles' happiness factory… don't ask me who came up with that name, I couldn't tell you." Thalia seemed to think a moment. "But I'd certainly like to slap whoever it was."

The other woman laughed. "No kidding! My little girl goes there! I was just heading to pick her up, actually."

"Really?" She frowned, confused. "That's odd, because we closed over an hour ago…"

Meredith looked at her watch.

"Shit."