Chapter Text
On an empty, silent December eventide, at approximately half an hour before the first stroke of midnight, the distant whistle of a locomotive cut through the stirring elms with fury and insatiable hunger—devouring coal and fire as it tore through the frozen air towards the station.
The station could hardly be called such; standing more as a weathered pavilion with tracks laid across its parallel platform. Swinging lights in its rafters casted strange shadows on the peeling paint of its latticed ceiling, where many spiders and hidden insects have made their homes over the many grueling years. A row of unoccupied benches sat alone in the station’s center, accompanied by nothing but pieces of gum beneath their seats and the carved initials of forgotten teenage summer romances. This desolate place—this forgotten place—is where the powerful train finally reached its journey’s conclusion. Sparks flew when its wheels screeched to a gradual halt, filling the wind with its smoke and fire.
Frozen in time, the fog began to settle. A door opened and two lone figures departed from the obscured carriage. One was very small, tightly clutching the other’s hand in one mitten and lugging a leather-bound travel case in the other. The taller of the two was a tired young woman, looking around as a force of habit rather than fear for her own safety and the child’s. She gave her mitten a gentle squeeze, a wordless reassurance that every twisted moment of the child’s ordeal was being left behind at last—it had been left on the train in a sense, chugging along before disappearing without a trace into an unforeseen tunnel.
The child spoke not a word of this country’s language. A week ago, she did not know that there were other countries at all. She had learned nothing in her homeland—or at least, what was left of it. Demobilization and wartime bombardments had rotted and made those lands hollow at their centers. The children of those who fled—the left behind ones—had no homes besides the carpet-bombed, abandoned shelters and the ever-burning hospitals and ammunition factories. Few knew any language at all.
This girl was one of those ones; and that is all she knew.
She looked up at the pointy ceiling of the pavilion, her face rustling beneath a thick, knitted scarf. She had never seen snow fall so peacefully. There were no sounds of distant machine guns. No tin can planes. No orange fire tangled with the black sky. There were only carefully layered sheets of fallen snow, giving way under her boots as the woman led her through the dark.
“Almost there,” the woman whispered. They approached the flurried parking lot, empty except for a darkened van parked inconspicuously in the northernmost corner. Behind the slightly-scratched tinted window on the driver’s side, one could see the faint glow of the sole occupant lighting up a cigarette.
The pair treaded carefully, minding the slick pavement before the woman released the child’s hand. She approached the window, exchanging hushed words with the man inside before the doors unlocked and the woman opened the back.
The child did not move. She had seen vans like these before. In the twilight hours, they often crept through the ruined streets of her village and lured the younger children away from their shelters with the promise of food, water, or medical attention. Those children were without names, and they were never heard from or mentioned again.
“Come,” the woman beckoned, motioning to the back seat.
The child looked over her shoulder at the peeling station and its lonely benches. She knew that there was nothing left for her there, so she obeyed; doing her best to pull her small body up and into the seat with her luggage lifted in front of her. The woman slid in the seat beside the kid, closing the door and emptying the vehicle of all light except for the cherry at the end of the driver’s cigarette. The child watched his shadow reach an arm outside of the window and tap away the stray ashes before he pushed the overhead light with his elbow.
The child retreated into the woman’s side, hooking her arm over herself and balling her purple sleeves up in her hands when the man’s shielded eyes glanced up at the rearview mirror.
“You ready to go?” He asked the woman, his voice quiet.
“Yep, we’re ready,” the woman smiled, glancing at the little one still hidden slightly behind her.
The child watched his eyes study her in the mirror, not noticing or caring that they held perhaps a hint of softness beneath his well-trained stare.
“Alright then,” he said at last. With that, he put out his cigarette in the ashtray that sat on the van’s dashboard and pulled carefully out of the parking lot. He made a right, his headlights blinking through the tightly-packed falling snow for a moment before he peeled into the empty street and left the lonely, aging train station behind them.