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It was cool out, not too terribly cold but a long way from warm, as Astrit trudged down the streets that led to his home. The school day he'd had today had felt pretty long, not because anything in particular had happened so much as just because it was that time of the year when things started to pile up. It was just one of those days... one of those birthdays.

Another year older. Astrit wasn't sure how to feel about that, really. When his sister had been alive, she had always made a point of marking their birthdays, some years celebrating separately when they'd had a little extra to spend on the small luxuries, other years together on the grounds that their birthdays were only two days apart anyway and they didn't really have the time or money for two "parties" in one week. But now he didn't have a sister anymore. It was only him left, out of their entire family. There was nobody to celebrate his birthday with, certainly nobody who knew that it was today, and he hadn't quite dared to tell the few friends he had made about any of that. Sometimes he wished he could, but he feared how they would react if they were aware of exactly how much he didn't have.

He missed his sister, he had to admit. If she had lived, she would have been another year older two days ago, and they would have celebrated together. If she had lived, she would have known it was his birthday today, and at the very least she would have said something about it this morning. If. In some ways, that was such a dreadful little word. Sure, there were good ways to use it, but right now it was the word for what he could never have again.

The boy sighed and adjusted the scarf, now showing mild signs of wear that certainly hadn't been there when he had gotten it, that was wrapped around his neck under his sweater. His luck had really been awful for a long time now. Every time he reached out to someone, looking for a family, something bad happened to them. The scarf had been a gift from a friend, a surrogate mother-figure (his first since Sestra had died), who had disappeared some time ago. Word on the street was that she had been identified as an illegal immigrant and deported back to Macedonia. Astrit hoped that Vesna had not suffered any worse fate, either here or once she returned home. More specifically, he hoped that his bad luck hadn't gotten her killed, like the birth mother he couldn't even remember, like the father he had only briefly known, like his sister. He was beginning to fear caring about people. He was beginning to worry that those he loved would always be doomed.

His thoughts wouldn't stop straying in these dark directions, as he made his way down the street he knew so well, heading home.

For all they seemed to have so little in common, Astrit and Charlie had ended up getting along pretty well ever since the incident with the history assignment. The teacher had been alarmed, to say the least, by their take on World War I, and the resulting detention seemed to have cemented a camaraderie of sorts between them. They had become “partners in crime,” as it were—a designation which made the odd secrecy of their friendship somehow appropriate. It was a comfortable and weird thing, hiding that they were on good terms from their classmates. Astrit often found himself tucking away some incident from the day into the back of his mind to share it with Charlie later.

The afternoons in the library were consistently great fun. Even when they did their homework, it was far more interesting than usual because of having somebody else to joke with about the teachers and the strange subjects that occasionally came up. Doing other things, of course, was generally even more fun. Astrit had never known anyone who cared enough about the stories he knew to listen to him retell them, so it was quite a treat to get the experience of doing so before an appreciative audience. In turn, he found Charlie's drawings to be delightful things, and was particularly pleased by her rendering of him as a literal knight in shining armor.

Today, Astrit arrived at the library as usual, and found that Charlie was already there, staring at a blank sheet of paper. He pulled up a seat nearby and extricated his own supplies from his book bag. “Are you having artist's block, or is it a hard assignment?” he wanted to know, rifling through his own stack of assorted papers to find a blank one for some of his own work.

“Your sister would be a very good history teacher,” Charlie said, and Astrit couldn't help smiling in response.

“She'd have done better than the one we got, at any rate,” he admitted easily. “Though I guess he's pretty talented in his own way. How is it even possible to make wars boring?” The question was rhetorical, largely because Astrit wasn't sure there was any real answer. War was about as inherently exciting a topic as existed. It could easily be presented as glorious or as horrific, but you had to work at it to make it boring.

His classmate's reminder jogged the boy's memory about what they had been discussing. World War I, that was it. They had been talking about the war, and he had been telling stories about what had happened to his family before and after it, before he had distracted himself. And there was a project they had to do...

“I don't feel much like using it to do our project with,” Charlie said, referring to the textbook, at almost the same moment as Astrit remembered that the project existed. “Not when it's telling us things that are wrong.”

She showed him something she had just drawn. It looked like a sketch of the British flag, but it was colored in totally differently from the real thing, in green and orange and black instead of red and blue and white. The boy inspected the picture for a long moment before offering his answer.

“I don't think the textbook is wrong, exactly, as much as it's just... only telling part of the truth. I'm not gonna argue about generals and battle lines and dates and all that. It's just that there's a lot of important stuff—half the point of everything—that isn't there.”

Astrit met his classmate's gaze and grinned, a wicked look creeping into his eyes. “And I bet you and I are the best people in the class to bring some of what was left out back in.”

He knew what she was proposing, all right. He knew it, and he was entirely on board with it. It would be a tricky thing to do well, but it would be worth it just to shock everyone and fill in some of those missing pieces.

Much to Astrit's delight, Charlie seemed to be genuinely enjoying the story, so he continued talking even as the proceeded by some unspoken agreement into the library and sat down together at a table. When he checked to make sure, his classmate confirmed that she was following his train of thought fine, and asked further, “So what happened when your ancestors were no longer an empire? The Ottomans left soon after the war didn’t they?”

With a grin, Astrit returned to the story. “Yes, the Ottoman Empire ended when the war did, and it's been just Turkey ever since. Now, there's a bunch of different groups of people in the Balkan Peninsula—the area where I was born—who spent maybe five hundred years or so getting treated as basically the same by the Ottomans, so it was a really big deal when they finally got to have all different countries for the most part. Problem was, five hundred years of getting treated as all the same thing meant that they'd been forced to move around and gotten mixed up according to what the Ottomans wanted, so they had a lot of disagreements of what places belonged to who and where the borders between them ought to be. They argued a lot, and I think they might have started killing each other over it at least once.”

The boy paused, frowning, before speaking half to himself. “My sister didn't like this part of the story as much. Honestly, I think telling it to me scared her. She was always really uncomfortable around the idea that I belonged to two of those groups that were fighting with each other, probably because she didn't know if I was going to start agreeing with the one she wasn't part of.” There was more to it than that, of course; Astrit was half-aware that if his parents had been as socially respectable as his sister liked to think, he wouldn't exist. The thought was a little odd to him, especially because he had grown up in England, where the breaking of most comparable taboos was quite frequently celebrated at least as much as it was disapproved of, and none of the people who had played parental roles in his life had wanted to teach him that he shouldn't have existed. Most of what he knew, he had gleaned from reading between the lines in stories like the one he'd been recounting for Charlie, or from his father's long-ago explanation (back when he'd had a father) of why he didn't have grandparents like all the other children he knew.

Astrit shook his head, having lost track of what he'd been saying. “What were we talking about, again?” he asked, refocusing on his classmate.

Honesty was rare, in this part of town, and yet Astrit would never have even considered lying about what he was doing. Withholding the specifics, sure, but lying just wasn't part of how he approached life.

Still, it surprised him that Katya noticed what he said and actually responded, asking him how it was going. He hadn't really expected her to care at all, though admittedly her interest did match up with everything else about her behavior. "It's going fine," he commented casually. "I'm nearly done with this assignment." After this, he would only have one more little thing to do, before he

It wasn't long after that that the woman rose, put Morning down nearby, and apologized for having to leave. Astrit had expected something like this sooner or later. What he hadn't expected was that she would extend an invitation to dinner some evening, should that be permitted to him. That was the sort of offer that he found genuinely tempting, and he surely didn't have to worry about permission...

"There's nobody left to say it isn't allowed, since it's just me and Morning now," he explained that last detail aloud, albeit more quietly than his normal speaking voice. The story of how that happened was a long one that he doubted he needed to explain; there were enough orphans around here that he was sure Katyusha would be able to fill in the blanks as far as was necessary. She didn't need to know that he had been orphaned thrice now; nobody really needed to know exactly how bad his luck had gotten as far as guardians went. He figured he was old enough to look after himself by now, and not risk losing another one. After all, he had now passed the age his sister had been when she had become responsible for herself and him...

Astrit now made a mental note of the directions Katya gave him to her house, and returned her goodbye with a polite one of his own. As for her parting advice, he accepted it with a cheerful smile. "I'll definitely take the time for that," he assured her. "I suppose I'll see you around sometime!"

Astrit had expected that Charlie's “contradictory” stories would be interesting, and although it took her a moment to answer she did not disappoint. The correction about the tank interested him on a number of levels: it added more layers to the story of where that weapon had come from, and also highlighted the possibility that Britain's relationship with its old empire might be a bit different from the hagiographic version that certain classmates were so eager to relate. He could see what she meant, now, about the contradictions, the little discrepancies that left everything seeming just a tad off; it was very similar to the conflict between the “official” story from school and the private stories his sister had told him.

Charlie wanted to know more about the stories Astrit had heard. He took a few seconds to think it through; he had never told anyone about this in much detail before, since on every previous occasion he had brought it up, the person he was talking to had either been satisfied with that much or demanded he stop talking. Charlie's interest seemed like a rare opportunity to really discuss this, and he wanted to take proper advantage of it. How would be the best way to say this?

“There were empires, in those days,” he began, with perhaps a bit more of a dramatic flourish than he had strictly intended. “Huge empires, which together spanned almost the entire planet. They had found out that just about every place on Earth existed, and conquered most of them with ease. And so their leaders imagined themselves gods, capable of overcoming any foe—but the only remaining foes were one another. And none of them were willing to accept that they were equals.

“Where was my family in this? We were subjects of one of the smallest of those empires, which was dying but refused to believe that its prime was past. The Ottoman Empire was called the 'sick man of Europe' by then for a reason, but it still had control over a good bit of land, and it too was going to compete with the much healthier empires, like Britain and France and Germany. The trouble with that ambition, of course, was that the Ottoman Empire still existed only because the other empires in Europe wanted to put off the feeding frenzy they were going to have over the scraps. Knowing that, maybe it was naïve of my ancestors to think they could make their own countries anyway... but then again, they succeeded.”

He paused at that point, realizing he'd gotten caught up in the story, and glanced at Charlie. “Still with me?”

SO! Obviously no one has posted here since, like, forever and a ton of plot changes ago, so I thought I'd show up to rectify that!

I love, love, love your portrayal of Katya. To start with, she's adorable, which is a nice counterpoint to all the dark and gritty stuff that happens around her. And she is just so sweet and I love our thread where she's so nice to the cat!

She's still such a lovely rounded character (both literally and figuratively, heehee), though, so basically she's perfect. I'd say more, but... yeah. She's just perfect.

Please keep being awesome.