The driveway is long - too far to see the road at the end of it, and it's lined with massive trees, easily a hundred years old. They look like pale yellow candy floss is spun about them in little clusters. Tiny, creamy white petal and a bright yellow centre, with so many fine stamen coming off it that the cluster looks fluffy. Sarissa’s a kid, maybe eight or nine, and she picks a cluster of the flowers and crushes it in her hand to inhale the bright, citrusy scent. Lemon myrtle.

“Greeks, we grow up with the water. Island to island, Doryoula.”
Her grandmother’s voice is audible beneath her as Sarissa swings down from a tree branch, grinning brightly. Eunike carries a basket, and is moving along the cascading trees of lemon myrtle, gathering blossoms and leaves as she goes. “You are a fish of the trees as well as of the water.”

When Eunike smiles the scar on her cheek stands out starkly, and she smiles all the more as Sarissa snorts out a laugh.

“Fish don’t swim in trees,” comes the typically cocky response of a child, with all the requisite attitude.

Eunike tilts her head. “They do, until you can tell me this in Greek.”
Sarissa huffs at the challenge, and runs along the branch (no hands, no hands) until she has suffer the indignity of dropping down to the ground to run to the next tree.



A summer. Everything's touched by dry heat. There's an old federation farmhouse a ways off, beautifully kept despite its age. Grapevines grow over a pergola-covered path connecting to another house maybe a hundred metres off, but Sarissa isn’t paying attention to any of it. She’s maybe thirteen or so, and simmering with anger, as Eunike sets down a box of tools, cleaning rags, a plastic tub with a collection of bottles in it - the sort that every family has in their shed and nobody really knows what it contains.

Before them? A tractor that’s well past being any use. By the looks of it, the thing was left out in a field, so plants and grasses could grow through it.

“This is stupid,” Sarissa huffs, kicking the dirt.

“This is history,” comes the correction, and Eunike holds out a rag to her granddaughter. “Destroying things, that is stupid. I think you need to see what fixing can do.”

Sarissa exhales furiously, but Eunike’s calm is unrelenting, and she takes the stupid cloth and stupid cleaner, and gets to work on starting to clean the tractor up, as her grandmother watches - careful, assessing, focused on Sarissa rather than the task at hand and trying to piece together what’s wrong.



She sits with her grandmother, older now. Sarissa’s in her late teens. Eunike’s hair is more white, now, though she still holds a cigar between two fingers. Her knuckles are a little more swollen now.

“You didn’t think it would stay a secret, hm?”

Sarissa’s gaze is downcast, fingers twisting around each other, picking absently at her nails as her grandmother watches the setting sun, so soft purples and pinks stretch across the sky. “No. I just—” She twists her hands around each other awkwardly. “I don’t know.”

Eunike laughs quietly, leaning over to gently pat Sarissa’s cheek. “Nicky told me. He was worried I would be…” She gestures, a little tilt of her head and one-shoulder shrug. “Cold, I think.”

Her pause is pensive, sad. “You know, when I was fighting with the rebels, there was a young man from my village who joined us. He was, uh—“ Another gesture, as she searches for the words, “he was like you. I don’t know if he liked women as well, but… he was just as brave as all the others. Just as brave, and strong, and clever. Simon was a good man.”

Was. There is a contained sadness in Eunike’s gaze, as she leans against Sarissa’s shoulder. It was a war, after all, and they were fighting occupation. Simon was not the only friend she lost. “The only reason I knew this of Simon was because we were always so much in each other’s lives. It is sad, I think— that a man who was so good had to keep his heart so secret. I don’t want this for you, Doryoula.”

Sarissa's wrapped up in a hug, and thank fuck, because she wasn't going to be able to avoid getting teary after that.