Do Not. Ask Me How I Came Up With This Plot Idea

do not. ask me how I came up with this plot idea

Historical fiction. Kirill is a soldier in a war, and after some things go wrong, he gets stuck in the tents of soldiers who are injured and sick. A member of the clergy tells him to keep them company and listen to their stories. He sits beside a teenager who's dying, someone he's seen a few times in the past months but never really got to know. He doesn't even know his name. The teen (who speaks in broken Russian) asks Kirill to write a letter to his uncle. Kirill is half worried whoever his uncle is won't understand Cyrillic, but he does so anyway.

The letter travels all the way to Norway, where the uncle, Mats, finds it in his mailbox one morning. He speaks a little Russian, but knows nothing about Cyrillic. So first he finds someone who can translate it in his village, but when he does they can't fully read it. They tell him it's about his nephew and that another soldier wrote this letter for him. It has his name and troop number. Mats can mentally put the pieces together, but he wants to know what the rest of the letter says. Not just that, he wants to meet the soldier who was with his nephew in his dying moment.

And so he sets forth on a journey, traveling between countries, to puzzle together who this soldier may be and where he can find him. And well... when you learn so much from others about a single person, and you spend months of your life searching for him, sometimes it's hard not to fall in love with him, right?