Since everyone keeps asking about my high school headcanon for Sean…

He’s not a foreign exchange student, technically, because at the end of the school year they get to go home. Sean wants to go home more than anything. He misses that big, drafty castle with its opulent furniture and hallways echoing with centuries of history. He misses his father, busy most of the time but always so jovial and glad to see him. He misses his Latin tutor and his brother and cousins.

He hates his ugly American school with its concrete walls painted in the garish school colors. The curriculum doesn’t offer Latin; it doesn’t even offer German. How anyone expects to learn anything in such a noisy, ugly place he will never comprehend.

Most of all, he hates his classmates. They’re all loud, uncouth, ill-mannered…and they keep asking him to say things over and over again, and then doing terrible imitations of his accent.

So Sean puts his head down and works very hard on eradicating every trace of Austria from his voice. At the end of a year, he sounds almost like a native. By the end of the second year, everyone seems to have forgotten that he was ever an “exotic” foreign boy.

But Sean never forgets that he was chased from his home, and he can never quite find a place in his new school…because he can’t let go of what he’s lost.