Bruno the Younger stepped foot within his family’s estate and was imdiately enveloped in his mother’s embrace.
Eva looked up at her son, cupping his chiseled chin in her delicate hand, tears glimring as she pressed her forehead against his chest.
"My baby boy has returned to ! I was so worried when I heard Sicily had co under attack! We all were!"
A weary sigh escaped Bruno’s lips as his hand gently stroked his mother’s golden hair.
Any grief that had weighed on him during the journey ho seed to dissolve beneath the warmth of her voice.
For the first ti since he had left the burning shores, the scent of smoke was replaced by the faint perfu of lilac, the sll of ho.
"I’m alright, Mother," he said softly, steadying her shoulders. "The worst of the fighting ca after we were already hobound."
Eva looked up at her son again, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
For a mont, brief, fragile, and impossible, she could have sworn she was staring into the eyes of her father, the very man after whom her son was nad.
In that instant, mory overlaid reality: her father in his old uniform, standing in a similar haggard state.
His eyes shadowed by years of war, and now his grandson before her, the sa blood, the sa bearing.
It took a slow blink and another rub of the eyes for Eva to realize she wasn’t looking at her father, but her own son. When she did, she smiled through her tears.
"You really are just like him..."
Her voice trembled with affection and unease. Bruno furrowed his brow, confused by the strange tone in her words.
"Just like who, Mother?"
Before Eva could explain, the sound of a cane tapping against cold marble echoed across the foyer of the Hohenzollern Great Palace.
Kaiser Wilhelm II appeared at the top of the stairs, followed by his eldest son and grandson, the line of succession embodied in three generations of iron and pride.
The old Emperor had defied ti itself. Even in his twilight years, there was a defiant fire in his posture, a refusal to yield to mortality.
When he stood before his great-grandson, Wilhelm straightened and raised his hand in salute with all the precision of a soldier.
"Hauptmann Bruno von Hohenzollern!" he bood.
Bruno instantly snapped to attention, instinct overriding fatigue.
"Yes, sir!"
The Kaiser lowered his salute with a grin and grasped the young man’s hand.
"Good sport, boy! Very good sport! I heard of your stand at the Gulf of Gela, magnificent work! Truly befitting of my great-grandson!"
He chuckled as he continued, "I even contacted the Reichsmarschall himself to recomnd you for the Pour le Mérite... but that stubborn old bastard wouldn’t have it! Can you imagine? , the Kaiser, being scolded by my own general!"
He wagged a finger theatrically. "Sothing or another about how it was inappropriate to award my great-grandson such a prestigious honor when he’d yet to earn any other dal for valor. The nerve of that man! Your grandfather can be a real bull-headed fellow, I’ll tell you that!"
Eva’s cheeks flushed with indignation, her expression twisting into a pout that made her look half her age.
"Grandfather! That is an entirely inappropriate way to speak about your generals, especially that general, and especially outside his company!"
Wilhelm rolled his eyes, pointing toward her with an almost mischievous smirk.
"See? She sounds just like her father! It runs in her veins, the sa as yours, that von Zehntner stubbornness I keep warning you about!"
Eva glared at him, though the corners of her lips twitched upward in reluctant amusent.
Bruno the Younger couldn’t help it, he burst out laughing. The absurdity of it all, the clash of regal decorum and familial bickering, was simply too much after everything he’d endured.
His laughter was the spark that lit the room. Eva joined in, then her husband, Prince Wilhelm, and finally even the Kaiser himself, his booming laugh echoing through the marble hall.
For the first ti in weeks, Bruno felt sothing close to peace.
The tension in his shoulders eased; the war felt a little farther away.
When silence finally returned, Bruno wiped a tear of laughter from his eye and turned to his great-grandfather with a grin.
"You know, Great-Grandfather," he said, tone playful but edged with sincerity, "you say that stubbornness runs in the blood, but perhaps it is environntal. You seem to have grown quite obstinate yourself in your old age."
The Kaiser stroked his snow-white beard, feigning deep contemplation. After a pause, he nodded solemnly.
"Highly probable," he said, lips twitching into a smirk. "That brat of a marshal does have such an effect after all."
Eva rolled her eyes once more, unable to suppress a laugh. The notion that the Kaiser still referred to her father, a man in his early sixties, as that brat was simply too absurd to take seriously.
Bruno stood quietly for a mont, letting the laughter die out. The light from the chandelier caught in his eyes, reflecting both youth and fatigue.
Outside, the night was clear over Berlin. For all its grandeur, the palace felt like a fragile island, untouched yet surrounded by a world at war.
He excused himself softly, stepping toward the balcony where he imdiately began to smoke.
The plu drifted through the cold night air as Bruno the Younger stared into the distance, where the Alps surely rested.
Tiless and immortal as the heavens themselves.
He knew without a doubt in his mind that his grandfather was there, the man he had been nad after, still awake and burning the midnight oil to keep watch over the Reich.
As he finished his cigarette and flicked the ashes into the wind, Bruno lingered for a mont longer.
He wondered, quietly, deeply, just what kind of battles his grandfather had waged to beco the kind of man he was now.
And whether they could truly compare to those he himself had survived.
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