"The Unexpected Gift" by VjeraNadaLjubav

Summary: "Usually, a person would be looking forward to returning to his homeland and seeing his family for the first time in almost ten years, but all I want to do is turn around, get back on the plane and return to Chicago."
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Dang it. Luka's not mine. Grrr. He belongs to NBC, WB, Amblin, Constant C and whoever else owns him. Danijela, Marko and Jasna belong to them too. But the rest of his family is mine - all mine!
Spoilers: "The Greatest of Gifts" – sort of.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Caran for – well, just being Caran. Also, unending gratitude for Noa, for her encouragement and many good Luby fics to keep my feeble Luby spirit up. Also, a random thank you to Caryn, Raechel and Emily again. Friends like you are rare…
Author's note: Well – just imagine they talk to each other in Croatian. I could probably write the whole thing in Croatian with the help of a dictionary and my trusty buddies Jelena and Maya, but then most of the readers wouldn't understand what Luka's taking about. Any mistakes, in writing or in depiction of Luka's former life are mine, since my beta readers are hiding and all of my Croatian friends have better things to do than being on the Internet all day. I'm on a verge of a nervous breakdown - so I basically really don't care if I make mistakes anymore...
Author's note part 2: I have no idea how this will end, so if you have a good idea or something that you want to see happen, mention it in the review. And who knows, maybe you'll see it in the fic… if I won't go crazy before I finish it.

Chapter One - "Welcome Home"

Usually, a person would be looking forward to returning to his homeland and seeing his family for the first time in almost ten years, but all I want to do is turn around, get back on the plane and return to Chicago. Imagine a family reunion - multiply it by several occasional alcoholics, add some neurotics, mix in some widowers and put in a relative who has been away from the family for ten years, and you get our little get-together. As far as I know, all of the immediate family will be here, as well as some cousins and all of us will be squeezing into Dina's apartment by day and the nearest hotels by night. I am supposed to be staying at the house Vesna shares with my father, but now I'd rather stay at the hotel. The thought of seeing my relatives scares me. I haven't seen them for a very long time, and I have changed so much that I don't know how to behave myself around them, what to say, what to do. If it were up to me, I wouldn't have come at all, but if I did that, I would have disappointed my father - and I will never allow myself to do that.

I left Croatia almost nine years ago, and now I look nothing like the man who left then, with an expensive suit in place of jogging pants and a worn sweater, with a mask of careful indifference instead of a mask of numbness. I am a different man. When I left I was a refugee who had just received a passport of a newly minted country, and now I am an expatriate with a Green Card. Sometimes it seems that there is nothing left of the man who left nine years ago, nothing but memories of what he once was. In my mind, he has forever remained a name on the list of missing Vukovar residents, forever lost. I am sure that my family will be expecting him, not me. My siblings will want their baby brother back, my father his youngest son, my nephews their ujo or tec'e Luka, all of them wanting someone who doesn't exist anymore, who is now just a man who pretends that he doesn't have a past.

I am also not looking forward to seeing them because I am sure that there will be at least one family member who'll hate me for not coming to Mama's funeral. She could not deal with the war, with what happened to me and to my family and one day she just could not go on living. Vesna, my oldest sister, called me on the phone, and in tears, told me to come to the funeral. When I mumbled a stupid excuse and said that I couldn't, she screamed that I was not her brother anymore before slamming the phone down. But how could I go? I could barely make myself go outside my apartment when I wasn't at work, and she wanted me to go back, to go back when there was still fighting, and I could not make myself go. But I still could grieve, so the day that Mama was supposed to be buried, I took a sick day from work, went home, turned off all the light, and just lay in bed all day, crying for the first time in many years. Vesna called me back a week later and we made up – after all, she was dependent on my salary, so she was afraid to alienate me.

There will probably be an unpleasant confrontation with my brother as well. I have talked on the phone with almost every member of my family in the last couple of years, but not with Janko. I can't make myself talk to him. We used to be close as children, but we grew apart, and our political views have drastically grown apart over the years. Janko made some bad choices, which I found out about, and since then, I've ignored his existence. He's the only one in the family who has not asked me for money – almost everyone else has. I currently earn well over a hundred thousand dollars at the hospital as an attending. Almost a quarter gets swallowed up in taxes, and I wire about a quarter of what is left to various family members. The remaining money is still quite comfortable to live on, and since I live in a hotel room and drive a car which was new when I was still in medical school, I can afford to travel first class anywhere I want to – and I enjoy that ability, because I hate being in overcrowded spaces – but that's yet another thing I don't want to think about…

I sigh and follow the horde of passengers towards passport control. Almost everyone, save for some confused American tourists is speaking Croatian, and it is so strange, so unusual and so scary that I want to go back again, to leave Croatian the role of the language of my past, the language of my fears, nightmares and long distance phone conversations, and not of the everyday use I hear around me.

Finally, it's my turn to show my passport, and I give my crisp, almost unused Croatian passport to the bored border patrol officer in the booth, who has been suffering from several moronic American tourists for the last ten minutes. He stares at it for a moment, his face reflecting the obvious struggle of his brain trying to switch back into Croatian-speaking mode, and finally he grins and looks up.

"You here for vacation?" he asks informally, as he searches for a stamp in a drawer of his desk.

"Yes," I say nervously, and mentally will him to work faster, but fail. He finally locates the stamp and stamps my passport.

He reaches it to me and I take it and briskly walk away, feeling a great need to leave the airport before I have a panic attack.

A half an hour later, I find myself exiting customs, with no memory of either getting there or having retrieved my luggage, and along with several other travelers I am thrust out into the crowded meeting area and moments later enthusiastically greeted by one of my sisters. For a moment, I am not sure which one it is, but after smelling her perfume I can tell it is definitely Dina, the younger twin.

After she is done pushing my face into her hair she releases me and I finally see her face. She has aged, but for a woman who is fifty she looks quite good. After all, not that many fifty-year old women can manage to look good in a mini-skirt, and Dina manages to attract quite a few glances from passing men and jealous glares from other women.

Dina is quite unique. From all the twins that I have known, I have never seen two so unlike each other as my sisters. They look the same, and this is their only similarity. Dina is a risk-taker, a creative nature who is unpredictable and very liberal, whereas Vesna is overtly careful, sometimes mind-numbingly dull and possibly still convinced that God will smite Dina one day for her affairs. Dina is so unlike the rest of the family that she jokingly says that the stork that brought her and Vesna let go of her too early and she bumped her head. She is the definite free spirit of the family, since she has managed to survive the last thirty years as an artist.

"Cura, you're all grown up!" she exclaims loudly and I cringe, since no one has used this particular nickname for many years, and now perhaps half of the airport has heard it. When I was a baby, I had long hair, and my brother kept thinking that I was a girl, so he introduced me to curious adults as his sister "Luka, the girl." My sisters found that incredibly hilarious, and have been using it to torment me ever since.

I manage a shaky smile and a hello, and follow her outside. She is telling me something, but I have no idea what she is saying, because I'm once again feeling overwhelmed. I have not been in Zagreb since 1992, and I feel like an outsider, and although the changes are bound to be small and not very significant - for me it will be a foreign town, and not the one I spent six years of my life in.

When we reach my sister's car I am finally torn out of my morbid musings by a rare happy thought. My sister still drives the same poison green Yugo she mysteriously acquired one day in 1975. I learned how to drive in this car, and Dina nearly killed me when I barely avoided driving it into Lake Jarun on a particularly wild night in my youth.

My sister, fed up with my trance-like state, takes my suitcase and squeezes it into the trunk, and then pointedly opens the door and holds it for me with mock courteousness. I manage to look a bit guilty for my absentmindedness and get into the car, finding that the Yugo still manages to make me contemplate my knees, since they are always dangerously close to my nose whenever I'm in it. Dina gets in, turns on the radio so loud that the car starts vibrating and drives off like she's in a brand new race car and not in a 25-year old example of Yugoslavia's failure in car manufacturing. Deciding to break the silence, she makes the first move.

"Thinking too much can hurt you," Dina says, or rather screams over the happy song blaring from the radio.

"Sorry - it's a habit." I realize I should be polite and try some small talk, but for some reason I can't come up with a single thing to say. Any normal person that hasn't seen his or her sister for ten years would be bursting with things to say, but all I seem to think of is going back to Chicago.

"Oh no - it must be bad, then." Dina laughs, turns the volume down slightly, and smiles at me, and I can't help but smile back, because at this moment I feel like I belong somewhere, that someone here has remembered me all of those years. But bliss doesn't last long, since Dina asks the dreaded question that ruins any illusions I've had about this car ride being without problems.

"How have you been?" Short and to the point, and this question can ruin my mood faster then any other. I hate the concern in her voice, and dread this question just as I always do, even more so when it comes from Dina, who is perhaps the person I feel closest to in my family.

"Fine, I think." If this isn't vague - I don't know what is.

"How fine?" she presses on, obviously not accepting my bullshit answer. Something about the tone of her voice reminds me of plates breaking against a wall.

"I'm feeling better then in Baltimore," I elaborate.

Dina sighs with exasperation and shrugs her shoulders.

"I'll leave you be for now," she promises, sounding somehow disappointed, not in my reply but in something that is beyond my understanding. She suddenly bends down to get something out of her handbag and nearly swerves the car off the highway. Just before the Yugo flies into a ditch she rights herself up and directs it back into the lane. I nervously recheck the seatbelt, and continue to stare at the road ahead.

After hearing some rustling sounds I look back at Dina and see that she has extracted a cigarette out of a pack and now is rummaging for a lighter in the pockets of her jacket, muttering curses under her breath. Finally, she locates it, lights the cigarette, and jams it between her lips, grabbing the steering wheel before the car can once again try to dive into the ditch.

She takes the cigarette between her fingers and holds it as she breathes out the smoke, and I can't help but stare at the Marlboro with a stain of her bright red lipstick, and her long nails, painted a blood-red color.

While I stare, she tracks down the cigarette pack once again and thrusts it in my direction. I startle and hit my elbow on the window, and begin muttering a swearword when I realize I am about to say "Fuck!" in English. I've been away for too long.

"I don't smoke anymore," I mutter, half-truthfully.

"Since when?" Dina asks, putting the pack into her pocket.

"Can we leave it be?" I snap, getting angry at Dina's incessant questioning. I am dangerously close to getting out of the car and walking to Zagreb.

"Fine, fine, no need to yell," she murmurs, lifting her hands up from the wheel for a moment to show that she's giving up with the questions for now, but still, can't resist a last one. "Can you at least tell me something about your new job?"

I stare for a moment at the cigarette smoke escaping her lips and can't come up with a polite reply.

"It's like any other job."

"Fine. I get it. I'll shut up," she says sourly and turns the radio up again. Some eerily happy hit song from a long time ago fills the cold silence between us, the singer going on and on about how easy it would be if he didn't have to love his beloved. I pointedly stare out the car window, not really seeing anything other then the gray winter sky.

The rest of the ride is reasonably quiet and the tension in the car has gone beyond "you can cut it with a knife" cliché. I become more aware of my surroundings when the car valiantly tries to drive up a steep hill to Vesna's house, and after a long succession of muffled curses from Dina and noises from the Yugo that sound remarkably like a small elephant dying, it finally succeeds, getting so accelerated that it nearly drives up the terrace steps. To prevent us from arriving right into the house, Dina stops the car rather forcefully, and I get a view of my knees that is closer then any I ever had or wanted to have.

Dina pulls the key out of the ignition, gets out of the car and slams the door. I closely examine the material of my trousers for a moment, which is not hard since my knees are still in front of my eyes, sigh, unbend myself from the interesting position into which I got twisted when Dina slammed her foot on the brake and then get out of the car as well.

Dina ignores me as I wrestle the suitcase out of the trunk, and after I finally get it out she slams the trunk and marches up the steps to the door, which she just might slam when I'm about to enter. I cautiously edge closer and am pleased to see that she is holding it for me despite the fact that I pissed her off. I manage a small crooked smile, take a deep breath, and walk inside, hoping once again that I will not regret this visit.