Disclaimer: Not mine

"I don't want to go to another orphanage," he said

"I won't ever let that happen. I promise you that."

The Kite Runner, page 324

I sighed heavily; suddenly very tired, and half sat half fell back on to the bed. The best option open to me was to do exactly what I promised I wouldn't and leave Sohrab at an orphanage while the necessary paperwork was processed. I could feel his eyes on me and I knew that the way I answered this next question would define our relationship for the rest of our lives, the same way my decision in the alley all those years ago defined mine with Hassan.

"Amir agha, what did he say? When will we leave?" It was the most Sohrab had said all week, his voice hesitant and afraid. The moment I heard him I knew how the question must be answered.

"There is a way, but it will not be easy. In fact it will be very hard and we will all have to be very patient and fight very hard but it can be done. For you it can be done," I said and as I spoke I heard my voice change from tired to confident with a hint steel in it that I had never been there before this moment. "For you, a thousand times over."

And when Sohrab turned and smiled for the first time in a week and wider then I had ever seen from him before I knew that I had made the right decision. There would be no orphanages. Not now and not ever. This time I would keep my promise and wrestle the bear on my own terms.

It was late when the phone call from Soraya came and, exhausted from the events of the day and still not fully recovered from my injuries, it took me a few minutes to understand what she was saying.

"… only need to get him into the country after that keeping him here will easy. Kaka Sharif came through for us. He pulled some strings at INS and got Sohrab a humanitarian visa that lasts for a year which is plenty of time to get through the paperwork." She was so excited that she hardly seemed to be breathing between sentences.

We talked for a while longer discussing the details of the visa and what still needed to be done with the government but soon strayed into happier subjects. How she was going to redecorate the guest room for him. How I would take him fishing and camping during the summer. All the places we would take him to. How much his grandparents would love him. But eventually my weariness conquered my excitement and I was forced to say goodbye and return to my room.

Sohrab was sleeping peacefully, face relaxed, curled tightly up in the blankets. The sight made me smile. I would tell him the good news in the morning and then take him out to a restaurant for breakfast to celebrate. Then we would catch the first flight we could out of here and go home.

Together.

Sohrab and I had been back in America for nearly two months and he still seemed almost perpetually in awe of his new surroundings. He had taken to Soraya surprisingly fast and she adored him, as I had known she would. Khala Jamila had found in him a perfectly attentive audience who would listen with concerned sympathy for hours as she listed her own and the general's ailments.

As for myself I had found, just as Rahim Khan said, a way to be good again. And tomorrow I was going give Sohrab the latest in long line of gifts, a beautiful blue kite, the best I'd seen since I was a boy in Kabul.

And while we fly it I will tell him stories of his father and I as children. Of Amir and Hassan the sultans of Kabul, who lived in an Afghanistan not yet torn by war where they had played and fought and laughed and promised each other beautiful impossible things.

There will be time enough in the future to tell him everything else. Years from now when he is grown, when the trauma of what happened to him has had time to fade, when he has had time enough to realize that I truly mean it when I promise that for him I would do anything a thousand times over, then I will tell him a story that seemed doomed to end tragically but found a happy ending in him. I will apologize as many times as I must and be content to hope that Soraya and I will have raised him in a way that allows him to forgive me.

I will make him a thousand promises.

I will keep every one of them.

A/N: The original version of this was written as an assignment for my Contemporary Lit. class and then I saw that there was a category for this so I tweaked it a bit and then posted it.