1940

Contrary to popular opinion upon first impression, Annabeth Chase was not five years old. In actuality, she was seven, though she was small for her age. In fact, her birthday had come and gone just a week ago; they'd had cake from the shops in the tiny London flat she used to stay in with her parents.

"Used to" because she stayed there no longer. In wake of the War, the Government had decided to evacuate all the kids from the cities and towns to the countryside, where the bombs did not target. Annabeth's school (this was done in groups) was a little late; she had already experienced at least three bomb raids.

In any case she was now waiting at the train station to be picked up by her hosts. It was a little pathetic, actually; nothing more than a wooden platform with rickety steps overlooking crackly, gravel-engraved train tracks and endless rolling green hills. A town mouse all her life, Annabeth had never seen that much green and she worried that she had stepped off an entirely different planet as opposed to just somewhere off in the country.

There was someone else on the platform, a little boy about her age with a neatly pressed suit and a vaguely foreign looking face. She figured he was waiting for someone as well.

After a few minutes of absolute boredom, Annabeth went over to him. "What's your name, then?" she demanded and the boy started. When it took a few seconds longer than she would've liked to respond, she peered at the block letters on his tag.

"Mal-colm Le-vin is that it?" she asked, drawing out the syllables. He nodded meekly. "Who are you waiting for?"

"My hosts," he said uncertainly (he looked like the type that carried a folded hanky in his coat pocket wherever he went) in an accent she couldn't quite place.

"Who are your hosts?" She asked with a touch of childish exasperation.

He shrugged and mumbled, "The Winchesters." It was slightly a toff name for country-goers, she'd imagined a barn house with cows and the like of which she'd only ever seen in picture books that the other children left over; she'd been the only one who delighted in reading.

"I'm waiting for the Winchesters too! "She said and he nodded weakly. Annabeth sighed and sat down on the platform with the sun in her hair, waiting for the Winchesters to pick them up.

-x-

As it turned out, the Winchesters were hardly farming folk. They lived in an ornate hulking mansion with an iron-wrought gate that sort of sat awkwardly in a spot between the golden-green orchards. In fact it had been a butler who'd greeted them at the station and drove them (in an actual car, no less) to the house.

The two got out and were huddled through a carved door into a marble foyer, where a rather grandiose lady of about forty was waiting to meet them. She was dressed in puffy pink silk.

"Darlings!" she said when they entered and rushed to engulf them into the folds of her dress, which smelled oddly enough, of tinned peaches. "Look, you lot are so precious!" She pinched Malcolm's rather pale cheek and ruffled Annabeth's curls. "I am Mrs Winchester, but you may call me Auntie."

"Hello Auntie," Annabeth mumbled and Malcolm inclined his head.

The lady clapped her hands together, addressing Malcolm, "You're the love whose previous hosts had to give you up because they couldn't afford it, yes?"- Here he blushed, nodding- "The one from Germany?"

Here Annabeth yelped, pointing at him, 'He's a Jerry? How come no one told me? I'm not living with a jerry, miss!"

"I'm not a jerry!" Malcolm protested, tripping over his words a little bit in the way foreigners sometimes do, "I am not!"

"Oh, stop arguing, loves!" Mrs Winchester murmured worryingly, fanning her face, "Annabeth, sweetheart, Malcolm is no more a jerry than you are; in fact he had to leave Germany because it was dangerous for him!"

"Why was it dangerous?" Annabeth asked suspiciously.

"Because I was a Jew!" Malcolm responded, somewhat hotly.

"Where are your parents, then?" Annabeth asked suspiciously.

He avoided looking at her, focusing on the spiralling staircase and the carvings of cherubs over a huge fireplace. "I don't know. My parents' friends sent me a letter when I first came. The Nazis took them away. I could not read English then."

This announcement brought another round of "Poor dears!" and embracing from Mrs Winchester and Annabeth bit her lip, mumbling a hasty apology.

Deeming them too grubby for her taste, Mrs Winchester ruffled them up those steps and into their new rooms, which overlooked the bumpy tops of the sun-drenched trees; she called the rooms 'parlours'.

-x-

Malcolm's room was just next to Annabeth's. They had had a "scrumptious" dinner which included a whole host of food: various salads (that none touched except Mrs Winchester), lots of roast and chicken (which the other two gobbled and were chastised for having bad manners) and at least four types of pudding (everyone had them).

Despite the wonderful meal and the soft pyjama set- "silk, sweetheart"- that Mrs Winchester had laid out for her, Annabeth was feeling sick. She missed her parents very much and could not shake the strange feeling that she'd been abandoned by them. She missed the noisy row of the London streets and the narrow grey of the city. She was worried that there were going to be lots of spiders here- after all wasn't' the country where they had most beasts? - And she was just feeling very unsettled. She had a ragged teddy bear named Poffy that she'd brought from home, with one button-eye loose, and she hugged it to comfort herself.

As she was finally about to drift to sleep, a strange noise scratched her awake and she hugged Poffy. She thought of the ghost stories the older lads would scare the younger children with. The noise did not stop and she was becoming very afraid. Finally, still clutching Poffy, she got out of bed to find the source of the noise; it was a mixture of her not wanting to be cowardly and an innate curiousity.

After finding nothing in her room despite the continuing noise- and nothing outside the window- she walked over to Malcolm's and jumped on the bed.

"Hilfe!" he yelped in German as he jolted awake to see Annabeth staring at him. "What!" he shouted, "Why do you do this?"

The noise could be heard from his room as well and Annabeth said in a low voice, "Do you hear that… hoo-hooing thing?"

"Yes." He mumbled sullenly, slightly glad to have been awoken; he had been having one of those nightmares again- "I hear that hoo-hooing thing."

"What is it?" she demanded.

He raised his eyebrows at her stupidity. "It is an owl, how do you not know this?"

Annabeth blushed at the notion of being thought of as an idiot. "I've never heard an owl before, and we never learnt in school that they made sounds!"

"You are not smart." Malcolm said with a touch of finality, "Now I would like to sleep. Goodbye."

Annabeth glared at him and went back to her room.

They both had nightmares that night.

-x-

The next night, Annabeth was woken from a dream of bombs exploding into a shower of spiders that crept into her mother's room and ate her by the owl again.

Angry, she went over to Malcolm's. The boy was awake this time, staring out of the window.

"Oi!" He turned around and sighed when he saw Annabeth, who squinted. "Have you been crying?"

"No." he said staunchly, rubbing a hand over his eyes. "Can you not mind your own business?" realising the torch in her hand, he continued, "What is it now?"

"We are going to find the owl."

"Out there, in the darkness?"

"Out there in the lovely sunshine, you idiot!"

He glared at her, "But we're not allowed-"

"Oh, Auntie's in bed, anyway. Come on!"

"What are we going to do when we find it, anyway?" He protested.

"I just want to see it, I'll be home very soon and I want to see a country bird before I leave."

Malcolm frowned. "I don't think you'll be home soon, my old host told me that it would take a while for kids to be sent home."

"I will be home very soon." Annabeth said again. "Back to my mum and dad with Poffy."

She grabbed his wrist and dragged them out into the night.

-x-

The night was a bit chill, the lurking trees with their twisting trunks looking menacing. The hooting seemed to be coming from somewhere to their right so they followed it, still on the outskirts of the forest. Malcolm was muttering little bits of caution but Annabeth was ignoring him.

"There it is!" she muttered, shining the yellow beam onto the trees- the veins of the leaves stood in crisp clarity in the sudden light. A ruffle of feathers and agonised hooting told them the owl had left, its whiteness blurring through the dark as it flew away to peace.

"You've seen it." Malcolm said, "Let's go back!"

Annabeth frowned, she'd been hoping for a more substantial glimpse but she nodded in agreement. They were crossing back through the trees when they heard a different sound; a scraping whirring from the sky. They turned their heads up to the heavens and they saw a little plane tumbling through the boundless night. They both ran out of the forest as quickly as they could as the plane crashed into the forest, sending up spurts and dancing ribbons of fiery colours into the dark sky.

"German plane. I saw the wings. German plane." Malcolm had gone very titchy and paler than usual. Lights had gone on in the mansion and soon enough the butler, was rushing out. Annabeth and Malcolm, who were in essence still children trying to avoid trouble, hid behind the trees.

Annabeth then dragged Malcolm along through the trees, shadowing the butler's footsteps.

What they saw was a mangled wreck of smoking metal and charred earth, and sort of stuck between the lower branches of an old oak was a pilot with blood streaming down his side.

The butler looked slightly repulsed. "Trying to let go of some bombs, eh?" He asked.

The pilot shook his head and began to stammer in German, his words rushing over one each other and causing his sentence to trip.

The butler shrugged helplessly, "I'm going to go get help- I don't think you can escape, what are you even saying?"

Before Annabeth could stop him, Malcolm had rushed forwards, his little hands tugging on the butler's jacket. "Please, sir, I understand."

"What in blazes are you two-" Annabeth had appeared as well- "doing out at this time of the night?"

Malcolm shook his head. "He says that he was never carrying bombs. He was just a spy. He is telling you this because he knows he is going to die." The pilot was crying, shiny tear tracks tracing down his soot-smudged face. Underneath his straw coloured hair, he looked very young. Nineteen at most, they supposed.

The pilot spoke again in German and Malcolm replied.

"What does he say?" Annabeth asked curiously.

"He asked if I was German. I said yes. He asked me what I was doing here. I said his people made me leave my family. I told him I don't know where my parents are, or my brother, or my grandfather."

The pilot's had begun to shake even harder, the blood slowly trickling down his skin.

"Entschuldigungen." the pilot whispered. Malcolm had gone over to the tree, taking off his small jacket. He gently placed it over the wound.

"What did he say?" The butler asked.

"I'm sorry." Malcolm said simply. The young boy looked at the older one and said something else in German. The pilot gave a weary laugh and nodded. His head drooped forward silently, and he was gone.

Annabeth looked at Malcolm who shrugged. "I said to him that Germany must be very nice this time of year. It's spring, after all."

"Come on," the butler said after a while, putting a hand on the children's shoulders. "I'll bring you back to the house and I'll get the town police down here."

They walked out of the forest, leaving behind the broken plane and the boy-pilot, the moon casting her liquid-silver glow down their backs.