(For this next bit I’m warping timelines a little because I know nothing about Marleau except that him and Ilya are friends).

Marleau sees right through him and that’s how he spends his first American Thanksgiving at Mrs Marly’s Mom’s dinner table delightedly eating everything he can and it’s time for dessert and drinks and Marly tells him it’s just easier to say yes to that and also piles of leftovers and no one says anything when he goes out back for a quiet smoke and realizes that the lump in his chest (in the shape of him missing his mama and being homesick) had lessened a little sometime over the past two hours when a family took in not only a friend of their son a world away from his own but someone marly saw as lost, someone who needed to be told “come, sit, eat, be loved today”

-

But now it’s different - when he gets handed a birthday card from Yuna and David. There’s a cake with candles, and some gifts approved by Shane. He takes a moment when he gets handed the card, has to blink hard twice, shocked he has to compose himself. Shane tells his parents later, when Ilya’s asleep next to him, that he thinks it’s the first birthday card (that’s not from himself) that Ilya’s gotten in a very long time.