When Leo was born, he was torn from his mother's side and taken away, far away. She was Polish and beautiful, but his father couldn't let it be seen that he had been with someone who was considered the enemy just before the start of the war. His father erased his past and Leo never heard anything about his mother when he was growing up. The only thing he knew was that Xander's mother wasn't his mother.
When Leo was a year old, he was living in a time of prosperity for Germany. The war was going well, everyone was happy, everything was good. His father was a busy man, he never had time for any of them, but Xander's mother paid a little attention to the baby she had been given a year before with no warning.
Leo was three years old when he learnt to read on his own, and from then there was no way to stop him from sitting at the table in the dining room and reading all day long. Camilla, seven years old, always tried to pull him away so she could play with him ("I don't like playing with the other girls at school, they're boring!"), but there was nothing that could make him budge. Not in a million years.
When Leo was four, he begged his brother to let him take a lamp down to the bomb shelter every night so he could read. He couldn't sleep through the noises of bombs falling on the homes around him. It was the first night of bombing when the house next door was destroyed, before they even had a proper shelter, and Leo vowed the next morning that he would never sleep through a bombing raid ever again. He had dark circles under his eyes for the next few years.
On Leo's fifth birthday, his father came home with a baby who was a few months old. He was drunk, and said she was a birthday gift for Leo. She didn't have a name, but Xander and Camilla helped him pick the name Elise before they took her to Xander's long suffering mother for whatever she needed.
Two months before Leo turned six, he nearly died while his father tried to flee Berlin. His father stepped outside, told them not to leave the house, and ran with Xander's mother. Leo knew what was going on, he knew they were losing the war, he knew that maybe soon he wouldn't be able to hug Elise every day and comfort her when she cried.
They stayed inside, and after a few days, loud soldiers who didn't speak German broke down the door while they were looking for his father and they didn't go back to the house for over a month.
Leo was seven years old when Xander told him to leave the room for a minute with Camilla and Elise, and he was seven years old when he refused, leaving Elise to be held by Camilla in the rooms outside while he watched. He was smarter than Xander gave him credit for, he knew what was happening and he knew what he was about to see.
Leo was in the room when his father and all the colleagues he'd spent days entertaining were sentenced to death. He knew it was coming and he knew why it was coming, too. He'd always pretended to be plain in front of his father and at school, because that's what Xander said was safest. He wondered now if he should have ignored Xander's instructions back then, but he didn't think it ever could have made any difference. He knew enough about his father to know that he wasn't a good man, and he didn't want a bad person to know anything about him that he could use against him.
And his father was a very, very bad person. He'd heard a little bit during the trials about what had been done. Even in his mind it was hard to put the numbers to real amounts of real people, or the descriptions of atrocities into real images. He didn't think that Xander wanted him to put the descriptions into images. Xander hadn't even wanted him to hear that his father was going to be killed for what he had done. He imagined that Elise would never know much about father at all, because he doubted that any of them would want to speak to her about it.
Once the trial was over and the dust had settled and Xander had very politely refused to go and say goodbye to father despite the man's requests that they did, a woman took them back to the mansion that had been thoroughly destroyed by the soldiers in their hunt for evidence. Leo kept Elise away from her bedroom, because they hadn't spared a single thing in their search.
Leo had never cried over anyone dying before, he'd been surrounded by it for his whole life, but he cried when he entered the library of their huge house and there were no books on the shelves. Each one had been taken and many were strewn around the floor, ripped to pieces. He didn't understand why he was crying, he logically knew exactly why this had happened and he knew why they had done it. They were looking for evidence to convict his father with, but they surely hadn't needed to do it so wastefully.
Xander took one look at him and hugged him. Leo still wasn't sure how to feel. Now that everything was done, now that he wasn't constantly fearing for his life (he was still afraid whenever he saw one of the bigger British or American soldiers), he didn't know how to feel. Should he be happy that bad people like his father had lost? Xander didn't like to say it, but their future was so uncertain now. They were trying to protect him, Xander and Camilla, but they didn't realise that he knew. He knew that there was nowhere for them to go now, that Berlin was destroyed and half of Germany was destroyed, and they were sitting on the wrong side. No one wanted to help the children of a Nazi, even if said children had never committed any terrible acts of brutality. Their only crimes were the crimes of their father, and that shouldn't count. He was already being adequately punished.
"Leo," Xander's voice was quiet in the huge room full of the destroyed books, "you need to go up to your room and collect the belongings that are left." Before they'd been forced to leave, Leo had always thought that he barely had anything that was precious to him. But living for months without all his things, he'd realised that the toys and all the things he belittled himself for being childish and liking meant a lot more to him than he'd initially thought. And maybe he wasn't too ashamed to hug his favourite soft toy in front of Xander. It was miraculously unharmed, and Leo told himself that he would never willingly part with it again.
Once they were away from the mansion for what was probably the last time, Leo felt relieved. When he was little, he'd always hated being away from the mansion because that usually meant he was at school, which was the one place he really never could be himself. But now, he wanted nothing more than to be far away from that place forever. There was nothing left there now, no father, no Xander's mother (he hadn't seen her at the trial and he hoped she was okay), and most importantly to him, no books. There was no reason to be there, and now that the good things were gone, the only things left were the bad memories and the bomb shelter.
From there, they were taken back to the place they'd been staying for the last few months. Since the soldiers took them away, they'd been moving between the homes of the people who were willing to take them. He understood why they kept moving around, because four children was a big commitment to take care of, especially on top of your own, and a lot of people were a bit scared when their father was mentioned. But even though they'd moved a lot, they had been treated fairly in each place, and that was what mattered to Leo. Some places had even let them attend school temporarily, and it was nice to be able to learn without pretending like he was at the same level as his peers. Every single home had loved Elise, but he was loathe to part with her for more than a morning or afternoon of school. He had to protect her, and when he was away from her, he worried.
This place was one of the more understanding, because they'd been here for most of the court case. They were an old couple with no children of their own (anymore, it was implied, and Leo still felt personally responsible for his father's actions even though it was illogical), and their house was small, as was their income, but somehow they managed to support them. Leo didn't mind sharing a bedroom with Xander, honestly, even though his brother was far too serious and always insisted that he stopped reading books when he thought it was time to go to bed.
When they got back, though, the couple weren't there, and Xander made all four of them sit at the table, Elise propped up on several cushions so she could see over the top. "I know it might be a bit soon after what happened today," he said, "but they found somewhere for us to go."
"Where?" Camilla asked, and Leo held back an excited question of his own. He liked it here, but if somewhere specific had been found for them to go, did that mean that Xander's mother would look after them again?
"Where!" Elise called out, and Xander smiled at her.
"Mother...she was found about a week ago." Leo couldn't help it, his heart leapt. He'd never thought that he cared much about Xander's mother, but he did. He missed her. "She's in a better place now."
Leo stood up. No. No, that couldn't be right. She'd always been there. Every day of his life, she'd been there to comfort all of them and hold them when the bombs fell and she always gave them treats that Leo knew were probably illegally traded. She was always there, and though he'd never called her mother, she was. She had been a mother to him as much as she had been to Camilla and Xander, and he'd never even said goodbye properly as she rushed out of the door. He'd been too scared of all the fighting to venture outside of his room, and now he was being made to regret that.
"Leo!" Elise said, stretching her hands out to him, and Leo bit his lip. He felt so...he didn't understand, this wasn't right.
"Leo, please, sit down," Xander said, and Leo obeyed without a word. He didn't know where he'd been planning to go when he stood up anyway. "Mother had another daughter, not with father, who was far away from here. This girl, her name is Azura, was in contact with mother's sister. She lives in England and she says she wants to take us in and look after us."
"She won't want me or Camilla or Elise," Leo said. There was no way. No English person would ever take care of children she wasn't even related to, especially not children of an awful person like their father. "And we barely speak any English."
"Please, Leo, let me finish," Xander said, and Leo felt so angry. Why was Xander so calm? He'd just told them that his mother was dead and now he wanted to leave them here in this broken country while he went off with his half sister to England, abandoning them forever. "She wants all of us. I would never leave you here on your own, never. I promise. You are all far more important to me than an aunt I've never known."
Leo could do nothing but shake his head. Xander must be lying. There was no way that this was real. He didn't even want to go to England. It wouldn't be safe for Elise. He could protect himself a little from the soldiers that hated them so much, but Elise was only little and he couldn't protect both of them on his own. He couldn't do this and he wouldn't. Xander couldn't make him go to places he didn't want to go to. If he cared for them that much, he'd let them stay here, where they were safer than in the hands of the people who would probably gladly murder them.
When Leo was seven and a half, he got on a train with his older brother and sister, holding his little sister's hand as she tugged him into the carriage. The train was bound to Denmark, where they would meet Xander's half sister for the first time before getting on the boat to England. Leo was terrified, but he was determined not to let Elise know that they were going somewhere they were hated even more than here.