Things You Said Over The Phone
He doesn't mean to pick up the receiver when she is on the phone with her mother, her soft sniffles breaking up the fluid Swedish that he had barely ever heard. With a start, he realizes that, though he'd known he'd be partnered with Marie for over a month before it actually went through, he had never bothered to learn much Swedish. He knows hardly any, a fact that is astonishing to him, but he'd never had to think about it in the past. Other languages he had learned, but never Swedish.
"Jag saknar dig."
He puts the phone down after that, silent as a tombstone, making sure there was barely a click. It doesn't take long to find the translation: he has more books than he knows what to do with, and he can't be surprised by what it is.
Of course she misses her mother. Of course she misses home. The DWMA could be so painfully lonely.
He remembers leaving Germany, at 8. His own mother babbling about how proud she was that he had been chosen by a God, though it was not their own. The Star of David hanging from a golden chain was still dangling from his doorknob in his room.
His brows had come together, but he couldn't place when it happened.
She was barely 14, barely in a partnership with him.
He didn't know why he cared so much, but he flipped the page, anyway.
She doesn't expect it, and he knew she wouldn't have. Not when they were studying for an exam and she thought she was being annoying by asking so many questions, sprawled out on the floor as he read through his textbook, almost silently.
He already knew all the answers, even if he never went to class. But he didn't mind being around her, spending that time.
Something about her was calming.
So, when she stood up, quietly apologizing in heavily accented English, saying she was going back to her room, he decided that he didn't have much to lose.
"Du kan stanna här om du vill," he said, and he'd practiced it enough times, tracing the phonetics with a determination he couldn't help but be baffled by, to have the accent down well enough.
When she turned to him, her eyebrows were high on her forehead, the surprise evident in her amber eyes.
'You can stay here if you want.'
She forgets how to say "Thank you" for a moment.
But her smile is enough.
