Evening. Reading room, Academia Nicosia. Cyprus.


He had arrived at the maghrib hour, by portkey, and stopped over at a local mosque to to pray before heading down to the university. Haroun lost touch with his daughter since she left school in Istanbul - he knew she was in Nicosia to further her education but the letters had stopped.

The news in May[1] was troubling but it was only when a fellow cousin, a witch in the Savaşçıları, reached out that Haroun felt himself prompted to make the journey. It meant leaving his current apprentice in charge of the costumes hall at Stardust, though Edgar Carstairs was understanding. He was a father too.

"Hunter."

Haroun eventually found her in one of the academy's smaller reading rooms. He'd been directed by familiar faces - faculty members of Nicosia who had known him in Istanbul, even one who had fought alongside him before exiling herself to Cyprus.

The reading room was lined by bookshelves. A great round table took up the centre space, on an emerald green carpet that matched the stained glass windows.

"Salaam," he shut the door behind him and hesitated before crossing to the table with a softer expression. "You stopped writing."

His attire was very simple, much as it was when they had lived together. Cream white linens, and a gold embroidered vest of navy blue in the Ottoman style. He removed his hat.

1.	[ARCHIVE - 2001] - Academia Nicosia Student Led Fasting

Her eyes drifted up from the opened book when she heard her father's familiar voice call out to her. "Babam!" Hunter's green eyes wrinkled into half moon smiles, and she stood up to give him a hug. Walking around the table to close the distance between father and daughter.

There was still warmth, even if she thought he wouldn't understand.

"I know. I'm sorry father." Bending over, she gave him a quick hug and took a chair next to him, wanting to be close.  After all, he made her dream to attend secondary school in Nicosia a reality.

Though his sacrifices to make her dream a reality were unknown to her.

Hunter was heartbroken, yet invigorated with purpose with her involvement in LET. She'd had relations and lost them, watching friends and comrades fall around her by the recent attack from a mercenary group that 'did not have ties with Turkey'. How she escaped with her life, she didn't know. The guilt of surviving beginning to haunt her.

"I've been so busy with school midterms, I haven't had time to put quill to paper." Her comment was made earnestly, but a few stray tears fell down her gaunt face. Only recently had she started eating regularly again.

Physically, the witch who embraced him was a shadow of the Hunter he knew - down to skin and bones that sharpened her brow, narrowed her cheeks. The roundness of youth had fled and in its place was something hard, something brittle.

But he recognised a sense of determination and grit, also. A sense he once saw in himself, too.

Haroun reached to her as he took his seat, brushing tears aside with the back of his hand.

"Oh, kuzum..." he smiled faintly. "What have you done?"

The anger he had felt when he first embarked on this trip, it was gone. It had already begun to fade when he prayed maghrib and now, in the face of Hunter's obvious emaciation, it crumbled.

Even so, he knew she was letting herself into a very dangerous world. "You are not made for this."

When his hand reached out to wipe away her tears, the youngster intuitively moved closer to let him. Hunter knew what she was doing, at least she thought she had when she joined. At first she was enthralled by the experience, and community. Now, she wasn't so sure it was worth it. "I grew up." She tried to smile, but the smile was no where to be found. Tears kept falling, involuntarily, a part of her knew she was in over her head.

"You are not made for this."

Of course she was. She was just a little sensitive. If she kept moving forward, it would get easier with time! "Babam, I can't leave now." Her lips trembled, "I can't." Hunter bit her cheek, she was told from another comrade that her dad might try and change her mind. "If I leave, I'm letting everyone down." Her arms reached out, and wrapped around her father and she buried her head into his chest to release a shutter that reverberated through her body and sobbed.

It was too late to look back. She was going to graduate and join the militia, the choice already made.

She had grown up - and grown up when he wasn't looking, tucked away as he was in his sewing room at Convent Garden. Haroun felt a prickle of regret but he did not linger on the feeling. They cannot live in the past, they cannot live in the what-if. It was not in his nature.

His arms came around her as she hugged him, and he pressed his cheek against the crown of her head. He didn't say anything at first but allowed her to cry as he rubbed her back soothingly.

"You can always leave..." Haroun spoke softly. "Not now, not if you do not want it. But remember that you are a free person, Hunter. You can always leave."

He did not think it would be easy but few things were, in this life. Once he had been in his daughter's shoes and nothing short of God could have pushed him off his path.

How could he tell her not to leave, when his own decisions had brought Hunter into his life?

It was unsettling to be this afraid.

Gripping at Haroun's navy blue vest, Hunter held tight to her father, trying to stifle her free-falling tears. With her face pressed against his chest, she could feel the thumping of his heart beat, and his breath on her crown. She was beginning to feel herself calm under his careful ministrations.

In a way, she hadn't grown up at all, but her father had. His beard was beginning to pepper, and their were crow lines around his eyes. His life away from her must have been full of life, of joy. Away from her...

Haroun spoke quietly, lowering his voice to a low tenor, and Hunter listened intently to his words. "I...I don't know if I can." She looked down, ashamed of herself for thinking that involvement in the student party's branch of the militia was far-removed from the real political conflict. "I r-ran away a coward and m-my friends..."

Death. Had he seen the newspaper? Did it make international news? Had he known about the 'massacre'? She held tighter, Hunter had been a coward. She ran from the fight.

He sighed very softly, pulling away a little to search for his his daughter's downcast face.

Hunter was a woman and there was no shame in a woman running away from such things - although, similarly, the reward for staying in a fight is much higher than that earned by men. He understood the feelings in her voice, either way.

"You ran, yes..." he trailed off and placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing. "But now you are alive. And because you are alive there will be other fights, Hunter, and other decisions to stay or run."

There was no end to such battles, no corner of the earth in which you could not find one being waged against an oppressor. And nothing is owed to an oppressor.

"Kuzum, leave judgement to the Almighty." Haroun touched the back of his hand to the side of her face and he smiled. "Do not think so badly of yourself."

His grip was firm on her shoulder, and grounding. Hunter knew her dad was trying to be comforting, but she wasn't sure if she understood the depth of his words. Did he have personal experiences in this realm? Did he know what it was like to run away?

She put her hand over his, to acknowledge his words. "Babam, I don't know. It feels like my fault." Sniffle, "Maybe if I stayed we wouldn't have lost so many." She looked away and down at the table. "Maybe, maybe this is punishment for not trying hard enough. This guilt."

"Kuzum, leave judgement to the Almighty." Her father's words were meant to be comforting, "Do not think so badly of yourself." However, Hunter couldn't accept it. Why would Allah let her friends, her comrades die if he loved them, so?

"How would you know? Huh?" Hunter spat back, pulling away from Haroun. "You don't know what it's like!" She seethed. "They're never coming back, and I have to live with it on my hands."

The corners of his eyes crinkled as his soft smile became a pained one. This was not how he intended for Hunter to find out about his reasons for leaving Istanbul.

He sat back, crossing his legs as if this were an additional barrier between them. His fingers interlaced over his knee and he sighed.

"I understand more than you think, kuzum..." Haroun searched her angry expression - not a daughter by blood yet certainly one by spirit. "They called me the Tailor[1] at that time. The uprising. Obvious, maybe, my name. I had to leave everything."

And he had left behind him more bodies than he cared to think of right now. Their names were in every doa and their faces in his dreams. Haroun endured because of his belief in the righteousness of his actions. So too must Hunter.

"I lost your mother to the uprising," he lowered his voice. "I do not wish to lose you to another."

1.	The name Haroun went by during the 1983 house-elf uprising in Istanbul.

An anger brewed under her skin as her father disclosed truths that she should have been aware of. He may have felt justified in holding those secrets, but Hunter found herself stung by his reveal. Her fingertips found the opened book and she gripped the edges while her heart hammered in her chest.

  "I lost your mother to the uprising,"

She reigned in her temper, tired of the tears. "What?" Disbelief colored her voice.

  "I do not wish to lose you to another."

"It's too late." She spoke under her breath. Her head lowered, and her knuckles reddened from the tight grip. Had he told her earlier, maybe Hunter would have thought against joining the militia. Maybe she would have done something different with her life, found different friends. Now, she had a responsibility to uphold and she couldn't redact her offer. There were people who had expectations for her. She had to be brave, and commit.

Looking up at her dad, Hunter tried to smile. "I'm not abandoning my comrades." Her eyes puffy and swollen; was that why he left her in Turkey? Why he shipped her back to Istanbul while he lived out his life in London? Her hands trembled as she held onto the book, Hunter was afraid of what she'd committed herself to.

He did not, could not, expect more understanding from her at this time.

To be told at this difficult age and hour of her father's history - her mother's death. Haroun watched the anger take hold of Hunter, the way she held herself so tautly, as if she might break at any moment.

Arms crossed over his middle, he leaned in very slightly. "If you feel you must do this, then it is what you must do."

The struggle, her jihad, was within herself as much as it was with LET. If she was anything like him then she would carry it wherever she went, to whichever conflict drew her in.

"Only, Hunter, I ask you to remember," he spoke slowly as he tried to catch her eye, "that you can walk away. Should there come a time where you feel you have done enough. You can lay down the burden you have taken up here."

She turned her head slightly, towards her father's soft and stern voice. "If you feel you must do this, then it is what you must do." The tension of her fingers on the brim of the book released, her knuckles white from the grip.

Blinking away the few stray tears, Hunter rubbed her shoulder into her eye to catch the current and stymie the breach. So many emotions swirled inside of her, outside of her and she didn't know how to process them. There was fear, fear of her own death. Betrayal, finding out the identity and truth of her father. Anger, secondary to her grief.

Her eyes drifted up when he called her name, and her father caught them. She froze.

   "that you can walk away. Should there come a time where you feel you have done enough. You can lay down the burden you have taken up here."

"How?" She couldn't see the possibility. Couldn't see a branch where her life didn't end with LET. Swallowing her fear, divorcing her feelings, might lead to a path where she survives. "I just don't see how."

He wished he could help in some way - like any parent, fight her battles for her. But that was not the way of things.

"I don't know." Haroun reached out, brushing strands of blonde out of Hunter's teary eyes. "But I know it will come to you, eventually, that knowledge. As long as you trust it will."

It was too easy to become a cynic, to condemn months and years long before their coming. He wanted more for his daughter. He wanted her to retain the capacity to surprise herself and to allow the world to surprise her in delightful ways.

"I'm sorry this is the path you must talk," he shook his head, smiling gently. "But you are strong, Hunter. And if ever you feel you are not, come to me."

She didn't know this would be the last time she saw her father in the foreseeable future. Couldn't see that her choices would separate them and make it unsafe for her to reproach him. Understand the depth of lies she would tell herself to survive.

Hunter, brazen, held herself steady as her father let his defenses down and leaned forward, reaching to move her hair from her face. He tucked it behind her ear, and her freckled gaunt face was illuminated in the light.

"Promise, baba?"  Hunter stood to to hug her father tight. "You'll always keep a room for me?" The child buried her face in her father's chest, unashamed of her desire to be close to him.

If she wanted to come to England. Would he wait for her?

His arms came around her with equal vigour, this girl who would always be a girl to him before she was anything else - student, freedom fighter, criminal.

"Promise, I promise..." Haroun kissed the side of her face. "Always a room. And tea, waiting for you, kuzum. Always."

He did not believe that this was the life meant for Hunter. How could it be? Beautiful child, her life ought to be full of beautiful things and summery days, and adventures on paths that always circled round to home.

But every person is responsible only for their own soul. She made a decision. All he could do was promise to be there for her when she needed him.

"Come," he pulled back to look her in the face, smiling. "Walk me out. Talk to me of other things."