Just thought I should do something with someone other than Dimitri, and so I chose Christian because it's so damn hard to find anything about Adrian to elaborate on. (He has emotional layers, yeah, but there isn't much back-story, other than his dad is kind of a jerk and he's related to the Queen.)
In his Child Psychology class (he needed the health credit, so why not take it with Lissa?), all Christian had learned in the past four weeks was that children are supposed to know when something is wrong, even if they don't understand what it is.
He didn't know why he was finally thinking about it now, when they were almost at the end of the unit, but he was.
Should he have noticed more when he parents turned themselves into Strigoi?
Yeah, he eventually noticed that they had become pale, even by Moroi standards, and that there were rings of red in their eyes. But should he have noticed more?
In hindsight, yes he should have. He should also have been afraid.
But he hadn't been.
He hadn't noticed how graceful they were when the moved, or how still they had become when not in motion. He hadn't noticed how cold their skin seemed when he reached up to hold one of their hands. He hadn't noticed anything different when his mother tucked him in at night, kissing his forehead before she turned the ceiling light off and left the room, leaving the door open a crack so that a bit of heavily-tinted light could get in.
He had never really thought, "My parents are Strigoi, so now they're evil and I should probably stay away from them." Back then, he was too young to realize that Strigoi were even real – he had just thought they were monsters his mother had made up to scare him into doing what she asked.
When his parents started looking funny, he had just thought it was a weird thing grown-ups did, like worrying about which school their four-year-old was going to go to. (Personally, his parents had never done that, but he'd heard that Camille Conta's parents had freaked out when she had gotten rejected by Alder – St. Vladimir's had been one of many safety schools, apparently.)
He had only understood what his parents had become – evil, almost personified – when he'd visited Aunt Tasha in the hospital. Seeing her face – the thick black stitches especially, but her expression had helped, too – had cemented the fact. They had made it real. Aunt Tasha was family. You didn't hurt family – not ever physically, and only, very rarely, verbally.
Seeing the guardians attacking his parents had been harder than seeing Aunt Tasha in the hospital, though. Because they had been people who had sworn to protect Christian's parents. He knew some of them well – they'd show him their molnija marks, laugh and tell him stories (edited so as not to scare the little boy) about being a guardian, saving peoples' lives and having all sorts of adventures. But then watching them kill his parents? Christian had been very glad when they'd all gotten spirited away to other households, other schools. It felt almost like a betrayal to keep in touch with them.