A/N: I just want to say a huge thank you to the random reviewer who pointed out the mistake in my French! Usually, I would have checked it before I included it in the story, but, for that particular sentence, I was just going off my primary school French aha. It's a big hassle to change it now, as I would have to take the chapter down, edit it, and then upload it again, so let's just pretend that she in fact said " Est-ce que parler-vous Français" when talking to Eugene. I am a lazy bum. c:

Your reviews and support mean the world to me, guys. This fic is pretty much all that has occupied my mind recently (is that bad? xD) Enjoy this little drabble of a chapter; the next one will be up soon, and I'll start slotting in the flashbacks in a little while. Also, fun fact: I'm basing the Austrian boarding school off of a place my Oma was sent to for a little while during the war. 'Course, she wasn't that much of a pain in the ass ahaha. And can I just say how fun and easy Rene is to write for? I don't even know why. (;

xx

Emilie had fallen into uneasy unconsciousness a few more times that night, each after long intervals where she fretted over what her dreams could mean; the more she thought about it, the more it hurt. Each time she awoke, she was once again met by the stink of the church. She swore she would never get used to it; all the death and sickness in the hospital she had served in back in Australia had been masked by disinfectant. She awoke yet again at what must have been midday, judging by the activity in the room and the light. After that, she couldn't get back to sleep, which may have, in fact, been a blessing.

The first thing she did when she woke up was wiggle her toes, seeing if she could still use her injured foot. Success. She wasn't particularly looking forward to being on crutches, however. Every other child she had gone to school with had broken at least one of their bones by the time they were ten, usually from falling out of trees they had been climbing or tumbling off their bicycles. But, though Emilie had always been sent outside to give her mother peace whenever she was home – when she wasn't doing chore are bloody chore – she had rarely run off to join her friends, of which she had had few as a child, and thus had never done anything dangerous enough to warrant a fracture. She had always been different, treated as the odd one out in school and as such left to sit by herself while the other children laughed around her.

As she had grown older, particularly in high school, she had begun defying her mother; drinking alcohol, staying out past her curfew, purposely putting herself in harm's way just to see if her parents actually gave a crap, but still her bones had remained unbroken. It had gotten so bad that her mother had sent her to a boarding school in Austria, a place only the smartest minds could get into. Her mother had wanted to fill out the application herself, figuring she was smarter than her daughter, but, when Emilie looked over the sheet, she had taken immense pride in correcting her mother's work. She had then been accepted, and had seen the boarding school as a holiday, only without her baby brother.

It had been located on a beautiful, isolated hillside; emerald green as far as the eye could see, broken only by glistening lakes and small pine forests. It had been like something out of a fairy tale. The building itself head been beautiful, too, and huge; bigger than anything Emilie had ever seen in her life. When the other children had written postcards home to their parents, Emilie had only ever addressed hers to her brother. But it hadn't lasted long. The people who had run the school had had sticks so far up their asses Emilie had been surprised when they were actually able to sit down.

They had caned the other disobedient children into submission, but Emilie had refused to be broken, being purposely rowdy and smartass just to piss them off. She had been caned so many times that she could no longer write without reopening the injuries on her hand and bleeding all over the paper. She had then been sent to work in the kitchen, but even there wasn't safe from her; she had "mixed up" the salt and sugar, putting salt in the teachers' coffee and sugar on their roasted chicken. She had promptly been expelled, and some of the other students had cheered her as she left, praising her for sticking up to the teachers, while others muttered she had just made things worse for all of them.

Her mother had never been so mad in her life, saying she was a humiliation to the family. And thus, their battles that would last well into adulthood had truly begun.

Emilie couldn't resist a small smirk at the memory, before a bout of coughing from her left reminded her the reason for remembering that. She couldn't be on crutches. How could she go back to the line, with snow up to her goddamn hips, on crutches? Either way, she knew something for sure: she would be going back to her army. After what she had been through, nobody could have blamed her for taking this as an opportunity for an easy ticket home. But she didn't want to go home. She had nothing to go home to. This was her home now. And she was going to fight for it, even on fucking crutches.