Note: Somewhere during the chorus of "Do-Re-Mi" I got the urge to write this. Sorry. It's a catchy song. :)

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Alek has never been one for the cinema, but after watching his granddaughters swoon around the house for the better part of a week, singing on and on about edelweiss and brown paper packages tied up with string, he decides he has to see the source of all this fuss.

The girls are thrilled; they invite their friends and chatter merrily all the way to the cinema. His daughter, also in attendance, tells him that she's just glad to see him getting out of the house – "but I do think you'll like it, Papa."

He does like the film, in fact. He's enchanted from the first opening vistas: the mountains and lakes, forests and hills, the picture-perfect little towns... It's unmistakably home, and he would love it for that alone. But the story is quite enjoyable, too – although, towards the end, it raises some unhappy memories he'd rather have left buried.

Edelweiss, indeed.

On the way home the girls alternatively giggle over and bemoan the traitorous young soldier. Alek watches them with a fond eye, still nursing his melancholy. Of course his daughter notices.

"I'm fine, my dear," he tells her when she asks. "Just sentiment."

She smiles. "I know it's only a story, but - was it anything like that for you?"

"No," he says, smiling back. For one thing, he met his version of Maria after he fled Austria, not before. He doesn't say that. What he says is, "There was much less singing, as I recall. The acoustics inside a Stormwalker are really very poor."

His daughter laughs.