Note: So I had a continuation picking right up from the last post, but no matter how many times I tried to write it, it wouldn't work. So instead I wrote this epilogue, which is just marvelously cheery. Enjoy, and sorry this took so bloody long.
Things never turn out the way you think they will.
You think people have changed. You think they'll have learned from that terrible, bloody thing called the past.
But history has an awful way of repeating itself.
She shudders as she turns the pages of the newspaper. Germany is rising again, with that monster of a man at its head, ready to devour anything and anyone in his way to power. And that includes her and her family.
"I'm too old for this," she mutters, but no one's the right age for war. She'd hoped, though, that she wouldn't have to see it again so soon. And now two powers are gearing up for combat, and her family may very well be stuck in the middle.
History, she's discovered, has a wicked sense of humor.
"The only thing left is for us to get poisoned on some diplomatic mission," she tells her husband.
He doesn't laugh. "Let's try to avoid that."
She sighs. She'd hoped, at her wedding, that it would fix everything. She'd get her happily ever after, and life would be perfect. It was a daft thing to hope for, and she'd known it, but for almost a decade she'd thought she'd been right.
"What do you think they'll call it?" she asks.
He shrugs. "The second Great War?"
"The Greater War?" She laughs bleakly and folds the paper, to pretend for a little while longer that everything is fine.
But really, nothing is.
