Title: Forgetting Dreams
Series: Tales of the Abyss
Pairings/Characters: Arietta, Sync, (Ion)
Notes: For Snow. Otherwise, uhh, OMGIMTIRED. Oh, and my first Tales fic! I think...

Only a girl like Arietta could be perfectly content to sleep on the bare ground. Sync would never become used to such a thing (nor did he want to) so this was why he decided to sit up and keep watch. Not that there was much to watch in this barren land. The lowly bandits in the area would be easy enough to deal with, and the monsters prowling the shadows kept their distance. They likely considered Arietta one of their own, and he an extension of that. He snorted. It figured he’d be piggybacking on the influence of even a little girl.

It hardly mattered that she was older than he was. Age didn’t matter to something like him anyway. Everything was artificial, even the amount of years he had spent on this world. His appearance didn’t match with that time. It was all fake.

Arietta was the one who remained vulnerable. Sync could see it now as she lay sprawled on the grass, her arms and body curled around the doll she always carried with her. The position made her look even smaller than she was, her whole body curled up in a near ball. It was hard to imagine that she had lived in the wild for all those years. Of course, she had also had that monster family.

Heh, family. What a joke. If a human girl could find family in a pack of ligers then the whole thing was complete bullshit. Sync hadn’t needed it. That kind of thing was for originals to base their sorry lives off of.

Arietta was making a sound like a whimper now and, as Sync looked back over at her, he could see that her eyebrows were furrowed in their usual way and a harsh frown spread across her face. She must have been having a nightmare.

As a breeze blew across the trees, Sync removed his mask. In the dark of night, even if she woke up, she shouldn’t be able to see his face.

The Commandant had been the one to inform them. He had said in no uncertain terms not to tell Arietta of the death of Ion, the real Ion. He had placed extreme emphasis on Sync. He was to keep his mask on in Arietta’s presence. It wasn’t explicitly said as an order, but no one went against what Commandant Grants said, even in jest. Thing was, The Commandant never joked around, leastwise not with his generals. Largo had also enforced the Commandant’s decree, apparently not wanting any more harm to come to Arietta. He shouldn’t try to replace his daughter with this wild child. She wasn’t his anyway.

Either way, since then Sync had rarely shown his face, not that he really had before. Who would want to show off a face that wasn’t even theirs? He had even tried his best to conceal his voice, raising it up to an even more annoying pitch than the original Fon Master. If only he had hit puberty. Then Sync would have had something better to go on.

Another whimper and Arietta curled up even further, her fingers working nervously into the cloth of her doll. That was when he heard it.

It started quietly, a soft call, before rising to a volume where he could deny its clarity no longer.

“Ion...” Arietta breathed, her eyebrows tightening and loosening as her eyes flickered restlessly beneath her eyelids.

Sync leaned over her, and before he could think about it or ask himself why he was doing it, he was responding.

“I’m here, Arietta.” The voice that left his mouth was distinctly like another person she knew.

With a sharp intake of breath, her whole body tensed before relaxing, her arms loosening from around the doll’s neck. She lifted one hand and reached out into the dark. “Ion, Ion...”

He took it, clasping it tightly between his hands. By this time his mind had begun to move once more. He still couldn’t be sure why he was doing this. Was he doing this just to mess with her, or was there something else to it?

A smile slowly spread across her features. He could see it even in the dark. “You came back,” she said, a few tears streaming down her face, contrasting harshly with the smile still in place there.

It was strange. In the short time that Sync had known her, he couldn’t remember her smiling. He definitely hadn’t smiled at all himself. He might have smiled now if he wasn’t still aware of one thing.

He wasn’t Ion.

It was pure deceit. Sync had his face and voice, but he wasn’t the Ion Arietta knew. As long as he let this go on, he was only toying with her. Her Ion was dead. She didn’t even have that ‘family’ of hers anymore, did she?

They were similar. Much too similar. The only difference was that Sync had already learned to give up on anything in life bringing him happiness. But she still held onto that hope. He could see that from the way the tears still streamed down her cheeks, the way that smile stayed on her face, and the way she was trying to move closer to him.

He didn’t let her go any farther. He removed his hands from hers and shifted away, grabbing his mask as he did so and slipping it on. He did it just in time, for the sun was rising and as soon as the light touched her eyelids, Arietta stirred and woke.

The tears left wet spots against her cheeks, and as she stared up at Sync she began to wipe them away. He stared forward, showing no sign that he even noticed her veiled attempts to be discreet.

He stood up, signaling without words the start of the day. Arietta stood up wordlessly beside him.

“Have a nice dream?” His tone had a hint of sarcasm in it, and one would imagine that he was grinning under that mask of his. But as he hastened forward, his true expression held a small frown.

Arietta looked after him with surprised eyes, her eyebrows furrowing once more. She brought the doll up to hide her face, before running to catch up with Sync, who was a ways down the path now.

He grit his teeth as she caught up to his side. Sneaking a glance at her, he could see that she was crying again, the tears falling silently. Heh, so she had realized it was only a dream.

True happiness wasn’t real. The sooner she realized that, the better off she’d be.

But when he thought of her smile, that smile meant for Ion, a small voice rose from the back of his mind, wondering if that was really true.

He beat it mercilessly back into the recesses of his mind and continued on, the wild girl by his side.