After seeing to their adult needs, Oskar and Tanya returned to the breakfast room later than anyone had expected.
The children's table was already abandoned. Cups sat empty, crumbs brushed aside, chairs pushed back at odd angles where small bodies had fled in a hurry. Morning light still poured through the tall windows, but the noise and chaos had moved on, leaving behind only the quiet aftermath of a family already dispersed.
At the main table, the adults lingered. The cloth had been half-cleared. Newspapers lay folded and refolded. Coffee had gone cold. A few glasses of juice and mineral water caught the light as conversation drifted lazily, unhurried.
When the doors opened, every head turned.
Tanya walked beside Oskar—too close, and not entirely steady. He kept one hand at her side, guiding her more than she cared to admit, while she leaned into him with legs that had not yet fully forgiven her. Her hair had come loose from its careful order, dark strands slipping free around her face and neck in a way that had nothing to do with haste and everything to do with distraction. Her red dress sat more loosely than before, the fabric rumpled at the waist, while faint marks lingered along her throat—unmistakable signs of kisses pressed without restraint.
Oskar looked little better. His coat hung open, collar imperfect, the faint trace of lipstick visible along his jaw and neck. His posture remained composed—always composed—but it was clear his attention had recently been elsewhere, and thoroughly so.
Anna noticed at once. So did Gunderlinde.
Neither said anything. Their expressions tightened only a fraction—nothing dramatic, nothing openly hostile. Anna's mouth pressed into a thoughtful line as she poured herself more coffee, eyes flicking briefly to Tanya before returning to her cup. Gunderlinde glanced from Tanya to Oskar and back again, her brows lifting with faint irritation before she smoothed herself into polite calm.
Cecilie looked up last.
Her displeasure was quieter—and sharper. There was no mistaking the jealousy there, the unmistakable sense of having been excluded from something warm and deeply satisfying. Tanya met her gaze for a heartbeat, unapologetic, then lowered herself into a chair with a soft breath as Oskar pulled it out for her.
"Sit," he murmured, low enough that only she heard.
She smiled faintly—and did.
The Kaiser, long accustomed to his son's… irregularities, barely looked up from his newspaper. The Empress was equally unperturbed, absorbed instead in reading aloud—somewhat enthusiastically—from the third volume of German Mann, its illustrations bright and a bit childish looking, which Oskar politely pretended not to notice.
Conversation resumed. Haltingly at first, then with ease.
Oskar ate what remained, spoke comfortably with his mother, listened to his father's questions, and answered them patiently. Christmas was mentioned in passing. Wilhelm II also asked about tanks and aircraft—and then, inevitably, about the carriers.
"Well father," Oskar said casually. "There truly is no need to worry, those floating airfields will be ready on schedule."
His father studied him for a long moment, then nodded slowly.
"Then the sea will keep changing," Wilhelm said. "And you, it seems, are incapable of letting things remain as they have been."
Oskar smiled faintly at that.
It all felt normal again.
Almost.
Then—casually, as if discussing the weather—the Kaiser asked whether the Eighth Army, the Black Legion, would be ready to support Austria-Hungary should war come.
The chill along Oskar's spine was immediate.
Wilhelm had very deliberately avoided visiting the shipyards. The aircraft carriers could wait; the Balkans could not. His father's attention had been fixed south and east for months now, following maps rather than hulls, borders rather than keels.
"Yes," Oskar answered without hesitation. "They will be."
A ceasefire had been signed in the Balkans—and broken almost as soon as the ink had dried. No one involved had truly wanted peace. Each state wanted land, leverage, advantage. Montenegro had struck first, racing ahead of its allies in the hope of carving out territory before anyone could stop it. The Balkan League pushed, while the Ottamons resisted the best that they could—and hovering over it all was the real question no one dared speak too loudly:
Who would be allowed to take Constantinople if the Ottamons fell.
For the moment, the Ottomans had managed to hold, beating back the Bulgarians just enough to force a fragile stalemate. But no one believed it would last. Russia would not tolerate another power at the Bosphorus. Austria-Hungary feared a strengthened Serbia. Armies already stood ready: the Habsburg Sixth at the Serbian border, another massed against Russia. Saint Petersburg hesitated—not out of restraint, but because Germany had made its position unmistakably clear.
Wilhelm did not press the matter further. He knew Oskar understood the situation as well as any man in Europe.
Breakfast ended quietly.
Chairs scraped back. The household dispersed—maids returning to their duties, the women drifting away to tend children and schedules, conversation dissolving into motion.
Oskar promised he would join the children outside soon. For now, he did not follow.
He kissed his mother's cheek. Clasped his father's hand. Exchanged a few quiet words.
Then he turned away from the sunlight entirely.
He went down.
Past the servant corridors where footsteps softened out of habit. Past locked doors that only opened for hands the palace trusted. Down stone steps that grew colder with every level, until the warmth of breakfast—coffee, bread, laughter—was replaced by the steady, metallic smell of oil and steel and chemicals that did not belong in a royal home.
At the final landing he stopped, drew a key from his pocket, and worked it into a heavy lock. Metal clicked. Bolts shifted. Another key. Another lock. The doors were not ornate—just thick, functional slabs meant to resist fire, prying eyes, and the century itself.
They opened.
He stepped inside.
The space beyond was less "lab" and more war room for the future.
Maps and technical drawings covered the walls—some sketched in neat German hand, others in his own harsh, modern shorthand. Tables were crowded with parts that looked innocuous until you understood what they were: spools, coils, casings, improvised molds, experimental gears, wires bundled like nerves. Glass vessels held half-successful compounds, cloudy liquids, crystalline mistakes. In the corners stood rigid frames of armor—some crude, some disturbingly advanced, silhouettes that looked as if they had walked out of a century that had not yet been born. Neat stacks of steel plates waited beside labeled crates, and prototypes lay laid out like stubborn thoughts that refused to become finished products.
Even the maps weren't just borders. They were population charts. Resource distributions. River systems and rail networks. Notes about coal seams, iron deposits, agricultural yield. It wasn't a prince's hobby room.
It was Zhang Ge's brain made physical—logistics, leverage, survival.
There were things here that should not have existed in 1912.
And there were other things that should have existed—things he remembered from his old world as ordinary—that refused to come into being no matter how hard he pushed.
Oskar stood in the center of it all, hands braced on a worktable, and felt the weight settle back onto his shoulders like a familiar punishment.
The plastic bricks—his absurd little miracle—had nearly broken his patience. People in his old life treated them like toys, like harmless nonsense. They had no idea what precision really meant. A brick that didn't lock right, a tolerance off by a hair, and the whole system failed. He could make them—just barely—but mass production turned small errors into mountains. For now, he could produce enough for his children's Christmas. Not enough to change a nation's industry.
Radios were worse. The principles were simple in theory, cruel in practice. Fragility. Interference. Components that behaved differently every batch because consistency was a luxury the early twentieth century did not naturally provide. His engineers were improving. Progress existed.
But it crawled when he needed it to sprint.
And the chips—those cursed, invisible foundations of the future—remained a wall he could not climb. No clean rooms. No lithography. No way to jump straight to the kind of precision that made computation cheap and universal. He could sketch the logic, dream the structure, understand the why—but the how refused him.
He'd tried to cope by pushing other tools forward instead—practical things. Drilling systems. Mining improvements. Even a tricone bit design that, if he could bring it into real production, would let German miners tear into the earth faster with fewer men and fewer broken backs.
Useful.
But not enough.
His gaze drifted to the armor again.
Kevlar remained beyond reach. The chemistry wouldn't bend—not yet. So he fell back on what the era could give him: bulletproof plates. Heavy, unforgiving, brutally simple. He experimented with ceramics and metal bonding where he could, with layered designs meant to crack and absorb, to trade material for survival.
Plates saved lives.
He told himself that as he ran his fingers along the edge of one. A small dent from a pistol round. A deeper scar where a rifle shot had bitten too hard at close range. Not good enough. Not yet.
He exhaled slowly and sank into the armchair, rubbing a hand back through his short, light-blond hair—hair that still didn't feel like his if he thought about it for too long.
Beside him, on a small round table, sat something ridiculous:
A red Santa coat. A matching cap. A sack meant for presents.
Absurd.
He stared at it, and for a moment a reluctant smile tugged at him anyway. He could already see the children's faces, the way their violet eyes would widen, the way they'd swarm him like a conquering army.
For a few seconds, the ridiculous red coat and the sack on the side table almost made everything feel lighter. Almost.
Then his eyes drifted back to the stacked reports.
The Balkans. Again.
Newspaper ink and telegram paper, columns of names and places that were starting to feel like a curse—Adrianople, Salonika, Skopje, the Chatalja line, Constantinople itself sitting there like a loaded gun on the map. Every sheet carried the same stench, even without blood on it: artillery, refugees, hunger, the slow unraveling of men into animals.
Oskar's jaw tightened.
He had chosen this version of events—at least in part.
In this timeline, Germany had pulled away from the Ottomans deliberately. No German money. No German advisors. No quiet pipeline of rifles, shells, instructors, and modernization. He had let the old empire stand alone, hoping the weakness would force an internal collapse and end the Balkan question faster, cleaner, before it could poison the whole continent.
And it had worked—partly.
Libya had fallen hard and fast. Without Berlin's shadow behind the Sublime Porte, the Italians had taken what they wanted and held it. The Ottoman state had staggered out of that war bruised, divided, and exhausted. The Young Turk revolution had already cracked the old structure in 1908; now the government and army still bickered like wounded dogs over who had failed and who deserved blame. The empire was weak in a way even foreigners could smell.
So why wasn't it over?
Because weakness didn't produce peace. Weakness produced opportunity.
And opportunity brought predators.
The Balkan League—Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece—had thrown nearly a million men into the field, a tidal wave of bodies compared to the Ottoman forces in Europe. The Ottomans had maybe three hundred thousand there at the start, and far fewer now after the early defeats and the grind of retreat. By any clean calculation, this should have been quick. A brutal victory, yes—but decisive.
Instead, the Ottomans adapted.
They conscripted relentlessly, pulling in fresh men wherever the state still had reach, and scraped together weapons from across Europe. Winchester rifles appeared in growing numbers, alongside older British Martini–Peabody rifles sold off as surplus. Ammunition arrived through neutral channels, black markets, and quiet transactions no one officially acknowledged.
The war did not end.
It hardened.
The Bulgarians had driven the Ottoman forces almost to the walls of Constantinople itself, and there the line finally set. Trenches were dug. Forts reinforced. Guns emplaced in depth. A last defensive belt rose from the soil, built with the desperation of an empire that knew it was fighting for its heart.
With real coordination, it could have been broken. The Greek fleet could have strangled reinforcement across the sea. Greek and Bulgarian armies together could have crushed the choke point. Serbia and Montenegro could have added weight enough to finish it.
But coordination never came.
What should have been a decisive blow instead froze into stalemate—steel against earth, men dying in place while victory waited just beyond reach.
But the "league" was a lie held together by hatred that merely pointed in the same direction for a few months.
They hated the Ottomans—yes.
They hated each other too.
Every one of them wanted the same lands. The same cities. The same pride. Even the dream of Constantinople—spoken like a holy prize—was a knife between them. They were Christian kingdoms and still they circled one another like wolves, measuring who would get the largest mouthful when the old prey finally fell.
And above them all hovered the Great Powers like thunderclouds that refused to rain.
No one was "allowed" to touch Constantinople.
Russia watched it like a starving man watches bread. The Straits were not just water; they were destiny. If another power took that city, Saint Petersburg would treat it as a personal wound.
Britain watched with the cold paranoia of a naval empire that never trusted anything near its trade routes. France watched because France always watched—fearful of any shift that made Germany and Austria-Hungary look taller. Vienna watched Serbia as if it were a lit fuse. Berlin watched it the same way.
And Oskar—Oskar watched all of it knowing the simplest, ugliest truth:
If he stepped in, he could end it.
Not in a week. Not in a month.
In days.
German rail. German artillery. German logistics. His Eighth Army—his Black Legion—would rip through the Balkans like a modern machine moving through a village of wooden wagons.
He could smash the Ottoman line. He could crush Serbia before it ever grew fat enough to threaten Austria-Hungary. He could decide who got what, and force signatures onto paper at gunpoint until the map stopped bleeding.
He could do it.
And that was precisely why he could not.
Because the moment German boots marched decisively into that region, the Entente would react—not out of love for the Ottomans, not out of pity, but out of fear. Fear that Austria-Hungary would become too dominant. Fear that Germany would shape southeastern Europe into a locked corridor of allied states and resources.
They would rush to stop him.
And then the war he remembered—the one he had been trying to strangle in its crib—would be born early anyway.
So he sat, jaw clenched, reading about a slaughter he could prevent but was not allowed to prevent.
Worse still were the smaller paragraphs buried halfway down the page—the ones editors didn't place in large type because large type required certainty, and certainty required numbers no one wanted to print.
Atrocities.
Villages emptied.
Columns of people forced onto roads with whatever they could carry. Muslims fleeing east, toward Constantinople and deeper into the Ottoman heartlands, chased by vengeance. Christians fleeing the other way, chased by fear of what retaliation would look like when refugees became a flood.
Even before this war, in Libya Italy had pushed thousands—then tens of thousands—into flight. Now the Balkans were doing it again on a far larger scale, and the displaced carried their grief into crowded cities like sparks into a dry forest.
The Great Powers had sent fleets to Constantinople to "calm" the situation—steel in the harbor, flags displayed like moral authority. As if a battleship's presence could make hatred forget itself.
It wasn't working.
Not really.
Oskar set the papers down slowly, as if the act might stop his hands from tightening into fists.
He could feel the anger there—not the clean anger of a soldier facing an enemy, but the frustrated anger of a man watching stupidity reproduce itself endlessly.
He had tried to change the inputs.
He had changed much of the world.
And still, the results didn't seem all that much different from the history he remembered.
Then the same old thought surfaced in his mind.
What if the Eastern Roman Empire had never collapsed—if Constantinople had remained an imperial capital instead of a prize to be fought over—if the Balkans had grown beneath a single, continuous authority instead of being carved and re-carved by conquest and revenge—would any of this even exist?
Would there be fewer ghosts in the hills? Fewer names passed down only to be avenged?
He knew the answer was not simple. The Eastern Romans had not been saints. They had ruled with iron and intrigue, with taxes and armies and sharp hierarchies. But they had held the land. They had enforced order. They had made the roads safe enough to travel, the borders firm enough to matter.
Stability, even imperfect stability, had weight.
Oskar leaned back, staring at the ceiling, jaw clenched so hard it ached.
He did not want Germany to become some reborn Rome.
But maybe Greece. Maybe Austria-Hungary reshaped, rebalanced, forced to stop being a patchwork that trembled every time a border sneezed. A restored Eastern Roman function—not a costume, not a title, but a regional pillar: rooted in the land, strong enough to dominate it, stable enough to pacify it.
A power that could end the Balkan cycle instead of feeding it.
Because Oskar knew—truly knew, in a way no other man in this century could—that even when this war ended, even when the next war ended, the Balkans would not rest. Not in ten years. Not in fifty. Not in a hundred.
He had seen the maps of the late twentieth century. He had watched the borders fracture again like old glass. He had read the same place names paired with new atrocities, new migrations, new mass graves—proof that time did not heal hatred. It merely buried it until the next man with a flag and a gun dug it up again.
In his old world, even the twenty-first century still carried the Balkans like a scar that refused to close.
The hatred did not fade.
It waited.
And Africa gnawed at him the same way—different names, different faiths, the same pattern. The Fulani horse lords and the coastal Duala peoples, raids and reprisals, power vacuums filled by fire. In Cameroon—his three Bauxi towns—were stable for now. But beyond that thin layer of German stability, the fault lines were already shifting.
The Fulani pressed outward from the north, swallowing territory with the quiet confidence of men who believed conquest was simply the natural state of the world. Along the coast the Duala gathered strength as well—merchant power hardening into political power, small wars and alliances folding jungle peoples under their banner. Sooner or later those two forces would collide.
And Oskar knew that he would be expected to choose.
To "bring peace" the way every strong man brought peace: with a hand on the throat.
He hated that the choices felt so narrow.
He could move, yes. He had the means. He had the army. He had the ships. He had the money.
But moving too early could cost everything.
And waiting too long could cost just as much.
So he sat there, trapped between action and consequence, and hated the universe for making him do the math.
If peace could not hold itself together, then someone would have to hold it in place.
And until Germany was so far ahead—economically, militarily, technologically—that no one dared challenge her authority…
He would have to watch.
Build.
Endure.
He exhaled slowly and opened his eyes.
The silence of the lab pressed in around him—steel, glass, unfinished ideas refusing to become finished tools. His gaze drifted, almost unwillingly, to the small round table beside his chair.
The red coat. The ridiculous hat. The sack.
And beside them, the bright little bricks—his absurd, stubborn miracle.
Legos.
A quiet huff of laughter escaped him before he could stop it.
"Enough," he muttered, more to himself than to the room.
He pushed the papers aside and stood. There were presents to finish. Children waiting upstairs. A promise he had made—to play outside, to be Papa, not war-god, not strategist.
The world would not be saved today, and it would not be solved in this room.
Time would show what his choices had earned.
For now, he would play his role. Build his future. Protect his family.
And let history wait its turn.
Above him, the palace breathed—warm, loud, alive.
Below, the machines waited.
And like so, the year of 1912 began to close.