[Fanfiction] "Demain il fera jour"
Title: Demain il fera jour
Characters: Netherlands (Jan, age 16), Belgium (Margot, age 9), Luxembourg (Thei, age 6)
Rating: T
Summary: Post-Apocalypse AU- A young Dutchman has a vested interest in making sure that he and his two younger siblings stay under the radar of people who would misuse them. A shame that his sister seems to welcome them with open arms.
He knew the definition of the word “home”, but he couldn’t give an actual meaning to it. When he had been younger, he’d been quizzed on words as a productive way to pass the time as they packed up and moved again to a new location for any number of reasons.
Food was perhaps becoming scarcer or nigh impossible to catch.
Maybe Jan couldn’t tap down into the groundwater any more.
Or there were traces of people coming closer.
People themselves weren’t so alarming, but there was danger when they travelled in groups of three or so. It was usually a sign of rogue nomads who would sooner shoot you between the eyes and raid your corpse, take your younger siblings and sell them to migrating slavers for a tidy profit than talk over a shared can of beans and come to some sort of agreement.
So when they needed to, they moved further down the Meuse and sometimes away from it altogether, which put Jan on edge and consequently made Margot more prone to irritating him.
“Home…is the place where you go to sleep at night…?”
Margot had only smiled at him weakly as Jan smoked his looted tobacco from an old pipe. Thei felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach; her expression and Jan’s cold silence meant he’d been wrong. She’d picked another word for him to try to define while she loaded their winter clothes into a decrepit old carpet bag, held shut by a length of dirty, fraying twine.
The winter after he’d turned six and Jan turned sixteen, both of them had been struck down by a blinding fever that made night indistinguishable from day. Margot, all of nine years old, had taken up Jan’s ancient gun and went out on her own every day to try to hunt something up. She’d returned with a brace of whatever she’d managed to shoot and a shoulder covered in dark bruises and knots from the rifle’s recoil. She stewed the bones down into a broth in their ancient cast iron pot, spoon-feeding both her brothers while she kept up a constant stream of cheerful words and reassurances.
“Come on, Thei. You remember this word, right? Demain. It’s when the sun sets and comes up again and makes a new day,” she cajoled him gently for his silence as she wiped a drip of broth from his cheek with her sleeve.
It wasn’t as though he and Jan even remembered what the sun looked like anymore.
Winter broke and so did the fever. They’d made their way away from the Meuse again in an achingly slow pace, knowing that the snow would soon melt and flood the river.
“We’re fairly near to where Charleroi used to be. We’ll have to get to Mons before the basin floods,” Jan said in a hoarse voice one night as he bent tiredly over a wrinkled old map. The three of them huddled close together by a scantily-fed fire. The words meant nothing to Thei, so he continued to stare blankly into the embers as he ran a finger over the dipped bone where his thumb fused into his wrist.
“So we have about a month.”
They made it by the end of the month, though just barely. They moved at a snail’s pace, still weighed down by sickness and Margot’s flagging stamina. As soon as they’d reached the very outskirts of Charleroi and set out the bedrolls, Margot collapsed into them and slept for nearly two days straight.
A week later, the spring rains began in earnest. The three of them crouched under a tarp, half dry and half drenched as they watched the water droplets bead together and roll down the sides of the waxed cloth to drip in a steady stream to the ground.
“It’s going to be impossible to find dry wood for a fire now…” Thei observed quietly. Margot grimaced and wrapped her arms tighter around her knees at the prospect. Jan narrowed his eyes as he stared into the distance where Charleroi lay.
“Tomorrow,” he began abruptly, tugging his coat collar up higher on his neck, “Tomorrow we’re going to go into town and try to find something dry to burn. Paper maybe.”
Margot looked up with a hopeful shine in her eyes. “We’re staying in town?”
He shot her a disparaging glare and snorted dismissively.
“Don’t be stupid; of course we’re not. We’re getting in, we’re getting what we need, and we’re leaving. There’s no reason to stay,” he scoffed.
Her green eyes dropped to the damp ground and rested her chin against her knees in a childish sulk.
“We haven’t seen anybody else for months…” she muttered, her words muffled by the fabric of her skirt, “It’s not like it would kill us to-”
“-except that it could, zus!” Jan cut in fiercely, “It’s not safe to be around other people-”
“Only because you’re so paranoid!” she retorted bitterly.
“You’re only nine, you don’t understand! Other people are dangerous, Margot! They hate us just for being what we are!”
And that had been the end of it, though Thei observed the tense set of Jan’s shoulders and the fierce light in Margot’s eyes with trepidation.
The anxious mood was broken when a thin stream of water found its way through the tarp to trickle down Thei’s neck in a frigid line, causing him to squawk in dismay and launch himself away from the edge and into Jan’s lap.
Margot had bitten her lip to try and stifle the laughter threatening to erupt from behind her lips, her shoulders shaking with the effort. Jan remained as stoic as ever, a slight quirk to his eyebrows the only sign of his changed humour. Thei eyed them both with a flat, annoyed expression and settled more fully into Jan’s lap, pulling the sides of his elder brother’s coat in around him like a cocoon so that only his face showed as he scowled at them both.
Margot immediately burst into laughter, falling on her side and curling into a small ball as she shook with loud giggles, not noticing how her blonde curls were becoming streaked with mud and bits of brown grass. Jan sighed and rolled his eyes at both of them but ran his fingers lightly through Thei’s dark brown hair, fingertips coming to rest lightly at the base of his neck and smoothing down the fine curls there. Thei tipped his head back, trapping his brother’s hand between the back of his skull and his narrow shoulders and grinned broadly up at Jan, smile revealing the missing tooth he’d been so proud of.
It encouraged Margot to crawl closer when she overcomes her fit of giggles and Jan smiled back, just a small uplifting at the corner of his lips that’s nearly invisible but still there.