Chapter Text
Noah stared up at the large Christmas tree erected in the square. Vienna was coated in powdery white snow that crunched beneath boots. It was the kind of snow that wasn’t wet enough to be heavy, but was just damp enough to make the sidewalks slip-prone. A cloud of gray breath puffed out of Noah’s mouth like cigarette smoke. The sharp cold air burned his cheeks and cut up his lungs.
Holidays never had much of an appeal. Before life on the run, holidays always meant more time his father spent at home. There was no rationality in acknowledging a celebration now; not when they could be back on the road in a matter of moments. Regardless, Noah remembered a few gift exchanges or ornament makings led by his school. It was the extent of festivities he’d partake in.
Noah’s brother had never lived through a Christmas holiday. Their mother wouldn’t be happy if Noah tried to rekindle festivities. She seemed adamant against showing her youngest any semblance of normalcy. She was worried he would get used to it. Noah understood, sometimes.
With her aversion to normalcy was the lack of a name. She claimed the baby didn’t need a name until he needed identification. Identification wasn’t necessary until they flew, and they came to Europe before the baby’s birth; a place notorious for easy public transportation. No one knew about Noah’s brother. Naming him, his mother claimed, was asking for trouble. Secretly, Noah started calling him Daniel. He found the name in a discarded paper and thought it was better than nothing.
Breaking several rules—city ones and ones appointed by his mother—Noah vaulted the small roped fence and approached the city’s Christmas tree. He broke off the tip of a pine branch. After shaking off the snow, a few flakes still clung to the spiky green needles. It smelled fresh and earthy.
Noah hurried away from the tree before anyone could call attention to him. He stuffed the pine branch into his pocket and started towards the motel they were currently staying in. It was too cold to post up in abandoned buildings, and hostels weren’t suited for babies. The motel was far from nice, but there weren’t too many roaches and the dry precipitation minimized leaks through the damp water spots on the ceilings.
As Noah walked, he fiddled with the pine in his pocket. He brought his fingers to his nose to smell. The streets of Vienna were bustling. Two days separated now from Christmas, and it showed in the hurried shopping and frantic haggling. When Noah passed a church, weepy hymns bled through the open front door. Noah peeked into its buttery yellow interior. Religion didn’t appeal to him in the slightest, but warm, open buildings did. More than once, Noah and his mother had found refuge in churches. They were notorious for leaving their doors unlocked.
Noah passed a group of businessmen and pulled down his hat on instinct. His back prickled when the men passed him. They didn’t spare him a glance, but Noah still wondered at their affiliation. He picked up his pace and didn’t let anything else distract him.
When he reached the motel, he knocked on the door three times before unlocking it. He caught the tail end of his mother’s aborted reach for her gun. The weapon sat ready and gleaming on the small round table next to the motel’s kitchenette.
“Noah,” she greeted. She didn’t smile, but she didn’t frown either. The baby was quietly sleeping on the motel’s double bed, sprawled on his back. “I have some errands to run,” she said in German. They only spoke in German now, even behind closed doors. Partly for practice, and partly to ensure Noah never slipped up in public. “Stay with the baby, will you?”
“Are we leaving soon?” Noah asked, shucking off his hat and outer coat but leaving on the other layers. The motel’s radiator couldn’t keep up with the cold.
“After Christmas. There will be a flux of travelers. We’ll blend right in.”
“Where to?” Before Vienna had been Salzburg, and before that was Hamburg, and before Hamburg was Stuttgart. Noah’s German was smooth and effortless after so long immersed in it. He wasn’t eager to learn another language, even though he caught his mother poking around in some French and Italian beginner books.
“Zurich,” his mother said. “But after that, France. Start practicing.”
“Fine.”
His mother pursed her lips at his tone but didn’t comment. She nodded to the gun. “I’ll leave that with you. I’ll be back before midnight.”
“Take it,” Noah said. “You’re visiting contacts. You should have it to protect yourself.”
“You need to get over your irrational fear of weapons, Abram.”
“I won’t use it. You’ll be in more danger, anyway.”
The look she gave him was stern and unyielding. “You will keep it here. Use it if necessary. I’m trusting you to protect your brother, and I expect you to take that seriously.”
Noah was sufficiently cowed. He nodded. “Yeah, alright.”
His mother stood and approached Noah. She reached out to grab his shoulder firmly. Her thumb pressed right where the tip of Noah’s iron burn scar was, but he suspected the placement was unintentional. She smelled faintly of cigarettes and her dark hair was frizzy from the dry air. Noah scanned her face and was pleased to note the lack of fear. No one was on their tail. This move was precautionary rather than a sprint from flames already ignited.
She released his shoulder and pulled on her coat. Without a backward glance, she left. A key was fitted in the slot on the other side and Noah waited to hear the snick of the lock. He checked it to make sure.
Sighing, Noah plucked the pine from his pocket and shuffled to the bed. The snow had melted completely from the needles, but it was still unusually festive in a beige, stained motel room. Noah sat at the edge of the bed and pulled a spare blanket over the baby. It was too cold for him to sleep without.
The unexpected thing about life on the run was the endless boredom. When Noah wasn’t learning a new language or running for his life, he was trying to pass the time in ways that didn’t drill holes of inactivity into his skull. His brother helped. A baby took up a lot of time—sometimes more than either Noah or his mother had to spare. When his brother slept or wanted for nothing, Noah fell back into the dull mindless boredom.
He flopped onto the bed, legs dangling off the side. He tried to find shapes in the ceiling water stains. Creativity wasn’t his strong suit, and he only saw yellow splashes like upside down piss stains. Despite the cold, he wanted to go on a run.
What he really wanted was to join an Exy team. Austria wasn’t as fanatic about Exy as the States or Japan, but there were teams here and there. The junior high school Noah attended as an eighth year offered Exy. The team was shoddy at best, but Noah wanted desperately to try out. Naturally, his mother put a stop to it. She didn’t like his Exy passion, even in the form of far-removed admiration.
There was a box TV in the corner of the motel. Noah fished for the remote and turned it on. He scrolled the channels, looking for any Exy reruns or news broadcasts. The only channels the TV covered were some obscure Christmas movies, cooking shows, and local weather news. Dejectedly, Noah let the TV play a Christmas movie, which was once in English but had a German voiceover that didn’t sync with the characters’ mouths. He turned the volume low so he could listen for any scuffles outside.
Noah’s brother eventually roused. Noah shifted on the bed to look over his rosy cheeks and the way his nose screwed up with displeasure. It was mildly amusing how much the baby hated waking up. Noah wondered if it was because the good dreams were ending or simply because the real world fucking sucked.
“Hey,” Noah greeted. He used English with his brother when his mother wasn’t around. He worried irrationally that the baby would grow up speaking German otherwise.
The baby opened his eyes slowly, took Noah in, then screwed up his face again. Noah frowned. It felt a bit like betrayal. Granted, their mother knew more about caring for babies than Noah ever could, but he was improving. He thought he was past being the unfavorable one to wake up to.
The baby started to cry quietly. He always cried quietly. It probably had something to do with the way his mother smothered his mouth or used microdoses of sleeping medication when shushing didn’t work. The tears now leaked out of his eyes and the noise was minimized to gasping sniffles and hiccups. Noah grimaced.
After trying and failing to diagnose the issue for nearly five minutes, Noah finally noticed the soiled diaper. He felt like a massive idiot. His mother would have known to check that first.
He changed the baby quickly and propped him on his hip to scour the kitchen for food. The cupboards and fridge were mostly empty except for three cans of chicken and a loaf of bread Noah snatched from a food drive collection outside of a church. He took one of the cans and pried open the top. After dumping it onto a plate, he microwaved it for less than the allotted time and took the meal to the table. Noah pushed the gun aside and sat. He placed the baby on his knee and tugged at one of his growing locks of auburn hair. The color was almost brown in the dim light.
“We’ll probably have to start dying it like mine,” Noah said. His own hair was a pale brown this time around. Unsurprisingly, the baby didn’t respond. “Just be happy you got brown eyes,” Noah added. “Contacts are a pain in the ass.”
The chicken was cold in some spots and scalding hot in others. Noah scarfed most of it but left a few of the less slimy chunks for his brother.
After they both finished eating, Noah brought them back to the bed. He sat on the floor, back to the mattress. The Christmas movie was in some emotional peak that Noah wasn’t very interested in. He fished for the pine branch on the bed.
“From a Christmas tree,” Noah said, brushing the end of the branch delicately against his brother’s cheek. At first, the baby startled before he slowly let his eyes flutter shut. Noah dragged the delicate pine needles across his forehead and down his nose. “We never had trees at the house. They were a waste of space, and who was going to put it up? Not Mom, and definitely not our dad. But the real ones kind of smell good, I guess.”
His brother reached out and grabbed hold of the branch in his little fist. Noah relinquished it to him. He watched his brother wave the branch around before settling with pressing it to his nose to smell.
“Smells good, right?” Noah asked, lip twitching up. “You’re supposed to hang ornaments on it. I thought about stealing one of those, but it was too risky.” There were many times that Noah caught himself talking to his brother like it was worth the effort. He felt stupid; the baby wasn’t going to respond and most likely didn’t even understand what Noah was saying. But at the end of the day, what else was there to do? Who else was there to talk to?
“Exy gets put on hold during the Christmas season,” Noah said, holding out his palm so that when his brother started waving the sprig around again, he could entertain himself by knocking it against Noah’s hand. “Football doesn’t take a break. Some football games even fall on Christmas. What a waste.”
They sat in silence for a bit, the baby getting comfortable with the sprig of pine and Noah entertaining himself by watching. Eventually, the baby flung the pine several feet away and they both turned to stare at it.
“That reminds me,” Noah said, shifting to his knees so he could crawl over to the pine sprig and retrieve it. “I got a new article I need to show you.”
After replacing the pine in the baby’s hand, Noah took them both to his duffel tucked next to his mother’s. He set the baby down and unzipped it, fishing out his binder. The baby watched curiously, pressing the pine into his cheek.
“Here,” Noah said, sprawling out on his belly. The baby started poking his shoulder with the pine. “Kevin Day and Riko Moriyama won the little leagues tournament. Unsurprising, but look at their stats. It’s already confirmed that they will join the Ravens after graduating high school. It’s a world record at their age. Day is only sixteen and he’s already training with college players.”
Noah pointed out the posed picture of Moriyama and Day standing back-to-back. Number One and Number Two. Briefly, Noah indulged in his more pathetic of pastimes: imagining himself as Number Three. It felt less like an unachievable dream, and more like a horribly missed opportunity. If he was feeling especially pathetic, he would let himself stew in the unfairness of his life until self pity became something a bit more violent and angry.
It was dangerous to dwell on it. The angrier he got, the more trouble he stirred up. In Vienna alone, he’d nearly started three different fights. Before things got ugly, he always managed to shut his mouth and high tail it out of school. Noah Kogl was meant to be a shy and polite boy who moved frequently enough to not want friends and explain away his strange accent. After each slip-up, Noah would run five to eight kilometers and earn a bruise around the ears when he returned to the motel.
When Noah’s temper started getting the best of him around his mother, she allowed designated exercise time where he could be away for so many hours to run. They weren’t around each other constantly before, but she usually liked knowing Noah’s exact location at all times. It had been two weeks since the allowance was implemented and he felt the freedom of it like ten kilos off his chest. Sometimes he entertained the idea of asking to bring the baby along with him, but he knew it was stupid and hopeless.
Whatever the case, he was better at managing his temper now. Even better at suppressing his spells of self pity. They were pathetic, and more importantly, useless.
Noah started flipping through his older articles; all gathered, curated bits of Exy fanaticism his mother surprisingly allowed. Eventually, his brother grew tired of being ignored and threw the pine again. Noah shut his binder and strained his arm to grab the sprig.
Noah sat up straight and handed back the sprig. The baby held it close to his chest like he was afraid it was going to get taken away, which was ridiculous because he was the only one discarding it. Noah poked his cheek. The baby screwed up his face so it was pinched and wrinkled. Noah poked him again, this time in the center of his forehead. It was mildly entertaining to see the reactivity of his expressions.
“Daniel,” he tested. It still wasn’t the right name. It wasn’t like Abram, which was grounding and real. What the baby needed was a name given by their mother. She would probably pick something that sounded better than a columnist Noah read from an Austrian newspaper.
Noah suspected the baby wouldn’t get a grounding middle name and would be stuck with an ever changing first and last. It would probably get confusing. Noah could wrap his head around the constantly changing names, but he was also old enough to understand the stakes.
It was late when their mother returned to the motel. Noah had to pry the pine out of the baby’s hand to hide it before she noticed. It was only a branch, but she was clever enough to know why Noah felt the need to carry it around. He stood, leaving the baby bundled in a blanket on the floor. Their mother shut the door behind and locked up, threading in the chain. She had a thick manila envelope under her arm, which she dropped on the kitchen table next to the gun. She tapped the cover.
Noah knew the drill. He opened up the envelope to dig out the new papers so he could get acquainted with who they would be in a few days. As he weeded through the paperwork, his mother shucked off her coat and went to scrounge dinner from the cabinets. There were only enough papers for two: Clara and Ben Ehlert. They were reusing identity photos, which meant he wouldn’t have to get a new supply of hair dye or contacts. Zurich had French and German as official languages, but they primarily spoke Swiss German which Noah had no practice in. Pretending as Germans would explain away their accents and language difficulties. Noah assumed the hope was that Zurich could also be the shifting point to start practicing their French before moving into France.
“School?” Noah asked. He turned around to find his mother watching her food rotate in the microwave. The baby threw the blanket off even though there was no way he was overheated.
“No,” his mother said. “We won’t be in Zurich for long, and you’ll stand out as a foreigner too much. I also don’t want to risk this ID getting scanned and saved anywhere. Instead of school, you can spend time practicing your French.”
Noah didn’t like school, but it was an escape. Cities were always worse when he didn’t at least have the ability to break away and pretend normal with other kids his age. Locked up day-in and day-out with his mother and language books was equal parts mind-numbing and painful. At least this time, he had his brother for company.
“Don’t make that face,” his mother scolded. “I let you attend school plenty when I shouldn’t. This is what makes sense. This is what keeps us alive.”
“I know,” Noah said. They’d had this conversation more than a few times.
His mother looked him over with a stern eye. Noah held her gaze until she broke it off to grab her plate from the microwave. At the foot of the bed, the baby was trying to squirm over to Noah. If Noah didn’t do something about it soon, he’d probably start making noise to get attention.
“Put it away,” his mother ordered. Noah slipped the papers and IDs back into the envelope. “Relay,” she demanded.
Noah listed off their upcoming names, ages, birthdates, and prior residence. His mother made him repeat it twice before she finally took over, explaining their cover story for why they moved. She was in the middle of explaining what her ‘job’ would be when the baby started to whine. Noah was out of his chair in a split second to retrieve him from the floor.
Noah held him to his chest, and the noise immediately stopped. His mother pinned him with a stern look.
“He stopped,” Noah said.
“You know that’s not the issue,” she returned coolly. “We can’t expect that we will always be around to pick him up and make it better. He has to learn now if we want to keep living.”
Noah didn’t know how to argue with that, but he also couldn’t stomach the firm reprimand his mother wanted him to give the baby. Instead, he sat on the edge of the bed, situating the baby on his lap.
“Abram,” his mother said reproachfully. If Noah pushed any further, he could expect bruises or a stinging scalp.
“I’ll do it next time,” Noah promised. “You said it yourself. At this age the punishment can’t be delayed or he won’t even know what he’s being punished for.”
Noah didn’t fully expect that reasoning to work, but his mother was in a good enough mood to purse her lips and let it slide. “Has he eaten?” she asked, which sounded like an open-handed truce.
“Yes.”
“Changed?”
“Yes.”
She finished her food and washed her plate in the sink. She picked the gun up to tuck under a pillow at the head of the bed. Rather than lay out to sleep, she joined Noah at the foot of the mattress. Noah passed over the baby when she held out her hands. He watched her closely as she maneuvered the baby in her arms with natural ease. Noah could never tell if she was holding the baby for a specific purpose, or if she too did it for the double-sided comfort.
“What’s this?” his mother asked. Noah followed her eye line to the TV screen. The previous Christmas movie had ended, but it only started in on a new one.
“I turned it on for sound masking.”
“Good,” she said. Together, they stared at the screen as a claymation Rudolph’s nose lit up. Noah stole glances at his mother. There was something distant in her eyes that meant she was lost in thought. She didn’t even seem to mind when the baby pressed his cheek against her collarbone. Her attention was only disrupted by sounds outside the door.
Noah was up before his mother had to order him. He padded silently to the door. Half his attention was on his mother who smothered the baby into her chest and reached for the gun under the pillow. Thick curtains covered the window entirely, so Noah lifted a tiny flap to see through. No matter how many times they did this, his heart always pounded in his ears.
The night sky was cloudy charcoal gray and thick snow fell heavily to blanket the parking lot. Most of the cars were covered in enough snow to eliminate the possibility of new arrivals. Noah heard the scuff of someone’s shoe on gravel and the rustle as they messed with the door handle. Behind him, the safety of his mother’s gun clicked off.
The angle made it impossible to see who was at the door. Noah crept away from the window to peer through the peephole instead. If someone decided to kick the door down, it would crash into his face and break his nose.
On the other side was a woman bundled in a coat and scarf. Small wreaths and paper door hangers nestled in her elbow. She finished setting one on their door before moving on to the next. Noah exhaled heavily. Relief made quick work of slowing his heart rate and settling his nerves. He gave his mother an ‘all good’ gesture, and waited until he was certain the woman was gone before cracking the door open to retrieve the items she hung on the knob. Sticking his head out, he eyed the other rows of doors to see them with matching garnishments.
Noah shut and locked up the door. He turned the paper hanger over in his hand. On one side was a smiling picture of the motel staff dressed in holiday sweaters and on the other was the sermon schedules for a few nearby churches. Noah tossed it and the mini-wreath into the trash. By the time he returned to the bed, his mother had already tucked the gun back out of sight.
The baby squirmed in her arms, trying to force her to ease up the pressure of her grip.
“We’ll go darker after Zurich,” his mother said, eyes on his hair. “And I spoke to someone who can get us green colored contacts.”
“Okay,” he said. It was easy to move on like nothing had happened. There were a dozen false alarms per month, but the few times his father’s men caught up to them were all Noah needed to be constantly wary. Dwelling on panic was about as productive as dwelling on self-pity.
“Let’s sleep.”
She handed the baby off, and Noah was careful to give him some air after that smothering ordeal. The baby rubbed his face into Noah’s shirt, huffing and uncomfortable. Noah silently pleaded with him to keep quiet. Luck was on his side because after a few moments, he quit fussing.
They always slept the same way: back-to-back with his mother facing the door and the baby cradled in Noah’s arms. They turned the TV off and flicked off the lamp. An outside streetlight was enough to illuminate the room in a dim glow. Noah waited until he was certain his mother was asleep before digging the pine sprig out of his pocket. He tucked it beneath the baby’s chin so a few needles tickled skin. He realized his mistake at the same moment the baby let out a tiny giggle. Instinctively, Noah clamped his hand over the baby’s mouth. The noise was stifled, but he still waited to see if his mother roused. When he was certain she was still asleep, he pulled his hand away. It was too risky to apologize, so he pressed the pine into the baby’s hand instead. The baby closed fingers around it but made no move to play around like he had before. Noah told himself it wasn’t worth getting guilty over. It wasn’t the first time he’d squashed his brother’s laughter and he knew it wouldn’t be the last.