IN THE TOWN OF SARAJEVO, THERE'S AN OLD MEDIEVAL SQUARE

He has lived here since he was a child, yet every year spent has led him no closer to figuring out what it is that draws him to the town square.

Buildings that have been there for years longer than any living man or woman has walked the Earth tower from each corner, constructed in a time the young man cannot even hope to wrap his mind around. Brilliant work by ancient architects, however, has never been a subject of much interest to him, and while the other residents of Sarajevo may only come and go to see structures offered nowhere else within the city bounds, he's almost certain that his case is not the same. Could it be the smell in the air? No – it certainly is distinct from the rest of the city, but he isn't so much of a freak to idolize his sense of smell and the things that come about from it. Perhaps it's the crowds themselves, familiar faces or so-called “tourists” from further East who were foolish enough to chose a city such as this in a country such as this? … Of course not. The numbers make him sick, some of the people they harbor even more so, and if he ever pays a voluntary visit to the place, it's only ever in the night-time when the people have faded and seemingly the only sound that can be heard for miles around is the pitter patter of water drops cascading from the square's central fountain. It's funny how the city, even the people outside it seem to have come to a silent agreement that automobiles were never meant to drive the streets in this part of their home, industrial pollutants as far from its old carvings and statues as they could manage. He can see a heaven full of stars reflected into the shattering surface of the water of that fountain, a thousand constellations he's always meant to learn but could never bring himself to do displayed for any mortal who dare to come view it in the dark of night. They're beautiful – light in a world that has been shrouded under the darkness of what he thinks has been accurately called the Evil Empire – and, without fail, each time his mind wanders and his feet carry him here to a place untouched for decades, scores, maybe even centuries, he finds himself lost in the way they break in the ripples and are reborn anew, perfectly still. For years, he has wished the same could be said for the land he loves; they have been broken, and their time for rebirth has been long, long overdue.

Gargoyles – no, that's wrong; a gargoyle, maybe the only one in the whole city – is treated to a hunched position on the belfry, forever looking out over the reflective fountain, and even further beyond to the city that lies beyond. An aesthetic he has never been able to fully understand, seeing as the little demons look to be more unsettling than protective, but, like the bizarre familiarity and lull of the square in its entirety, there's something about this particular one that he feels oddly comfortable with. What with the way its crouched over the ledge, it certainly looks as though it could spring down at any moment to do away with anyone who dare to defile the wonders this place has to hold; given how he cannot see so much as a scratch caused by human interference has him applauding the stone for its job well done. How long, he can't help but wonder, though, has it been like that? How long has it held that torturous position? How long has it watched over the water and the buildings, over the entirety of Sarajevo? Does it suffer like the rest of its people, knowing full well that the land they love is nothing but a puppet, a soulless doll for cruel men thousands of miles away? Does it wish, like the rest of its people, to see freedom – true freedom – before it takes its final breath? These questions, however, flitting through his mind quickly and fading as soon as they arrive, are all such foolish ideas. Stone cannot see their plight, nor can it empathize with their struggles, and to wonder what it thinks of another problem that they can never solve is as foolish as... well, perhaps the aforementioned plight as a whole. There is solace to be found in the stars, the same celestial bodies viewed by those who have never known the grief caused by being nothing more than a dog for a distant master, but there is nothing to be found from a statue carved into a building that has long lost its purpose. Nothing at all.

Serdjan watches a single star shoot across the surface of the fountain, streaking, too, across the heavens above he dare not look at. How odd: As a child, perhaps he might have made a wish on it.

Now, he knows that wishes never come true the way they're wanted to.

THE TIME HAS ARRIVED, AND THIS IS THE ONE PLACE TO BE

They tear it down the day he turns twenty, decades of tyranny finally collapsing in on itself and leaving those it had enslaved to do as they so pleased, and Serdjan doesn't mind sharing his birthday celebration with the whole of Sarajevo – of Yugoslavia, of every country that had been hidden away by the Iron Curtain that is now no more. With the fall of the Soviet Union, they can celebrate their independence for the first time since the days of the Roman Empire, something that generations that had come before him had wished their whole lives to be able to see, to enjoy. He, himself, can't believe his fortune; he's alive and he's young and he's free, and as his friends, his family, the neighbor down the street he found abhorrent but now can't get enough of stream into the streets to celebrate the destruction of a wall that had once split Berlin in two, he imagines that he will enjoy the feeling of independence, true independence until the day he dies. And even if he can't, while he quite doubts that, the looks on the faces that surround him, the cheers of laughter and joy and emotions too deep, too strong, too unfamiliar to ever accurately pinpoint would be worth it all, even if their Russian “allies” chose to rebuild and reconquer over the night. They don't, of course. They don't strike in the dark like a thief, because there is no dark to strike in; not with the lights that illuminate the night sky, dying it golden and lighting the whole city in a way he has never once in all twenty years of his life borne witness to. He doesn't even mind the way they invade the square, decorating the fountain with small lanterns and swinging from the old structures with little regard for the stone that they hang from. It is a celebration that has no need for sleep, beginning in the morning and carrying on strong throughout the earliest hours of the next – and he, himself, feels as though he never wants this to end, that he could do this for an eternity. They drink, they eat, they tell stories, they mock an empire that is no more and will never again be and scoff at the idea of being a satellite country. This is the time. This is the place. Every sign that has led up to this is one they will honor in their memories – of that, he can be sure.

“That girl down there is definitely looking at you, Serdjan.”

His group shuffles inside when the air outside turns too chilly, taking up residency in one of the few establishments that find themselves unlucky enough to have to work through the festivity outside, and while he, too, has had more to drink than he has in months (years), he's absolutely certain that his friend has had twice as much as he points to a pale-haired girl down the way, looking almost as though she's trying to look anywhere but at him. She's pretty, though, he'll admit, as well as having a familiar face that he struggles to put a name to – what was it, Katarina? Kristina? Kornelija? Despite this, though, he can't exactly appreciate the way the other male elbows him all too roughly in the ribs, enough that it leaves an ache in its wake, and tells him that he should go over and buy her a drink.

“I can't do that. Come on, I barely even know the girl.”

“Of course you can: You're a free man, now, Aleskovic! You can do anything you want!”

A free man. Such a funny concept; he'd never particularly felt enslaved or oppressed as an individual, although his whole life he had felt it alongside the rest of his country as a group, and to think, now, of himself as someone independent from anyone and anything was... something he hadn't exactly entertained in his mind, really. Something that filled his heart with a new kind of happiness he couldn't quite explain. He could go over there and offer that girl a drink. Goodness, he could dip her to the ground and kiss her on the spot. Not that he would, but the only one who could stop him was himself, right? And everyone here, from the man in the corner to the woman behind the bar to the children catching fireflies outside in the streets: Each and every one of them was just the same. Free.

“The moment's now in all history,” the drunk tells him, failing to press the subject any further beyond that before moving onto what must be a more interesting topic of focus, but the raven-haired man can't help but grin to himself all the same. This is truly the one place to be.

I SEE A LITTLE MAN THINKING THAT HE MIGHT NEED MORE

He hears the rumors before he ever sees them face to face, and there's something concerning in the way he doesn't hate them as much as he feels he should.

Jubilation can only last so long, celebratory times fading into a pleasant lull to a world very much mirroring the one they'd lived in before the fall of their Soviet suppressors, and while Serdjan can still always spare a moment to marvel at how his people no longer have to follow anyone else's orders ever again, most of his time is spent in a way that very much seems like nothing has ever changed. Sarajevo is still Sarajevo, the fountain in the square still reflecting the same old stars and that gargoyle still on its perch. And, as he has come to realize, the problems never really go away. They simply take form in new ways, often times hardly noticeable in the beginning until they are ruining anyone and everyone's lives, like stars broken in the fountain and given new life in the moments that follow. No longer do the reds pose a threat to his home, his life, his freedom, but that doesn't stop the negative talk he overhears when strolling through the city, and too many times does he hear of those who, perhaps reveling a bit too much in their new found freedom, are simply not pleased what they have. Will not be pleased until they have more. It starts with the man who lives downtown, threatening his neighbors with a gun in his hand until they offer half their land if only to appease him. But then it's the woman who works at the pharmacy, running the family at the street corner out of their larger home in order to upscale from her own run down trash heap. Threatening innocent people with guns makes him sick, the idea that people he knows the names of, the faces of making it all the worse, but it isn't until someone starts peppering the term “Muslim” into their retelling of the same old story that things take a shift for the... different. Not the worse, and maybe not the better, but definitely something he had not considered, and should have known better than to ever consider. Because suddenly it's not a matter of greed – it's a matter of rights. The family who lost half their land were Serbs, and that land clearly belonged to the Muslims. But, oh, the ones run out of their home were Muslim, as well, so the place they left must have belonged to the Serbs.

The trouble makers meet justice in being run out of the city soon after, law punishing them for thievery, threats, and a whole list of crimes that he couldn't care to remember, but the seeds they have sown in their wake are enough to start causing troubles. Without warning, the pale-haired girl he'd seen on that day is no longer “the pale-haired girl” to his friends, but “the pale-haired Muslim girl,” and the sweet old lady who frequents the place he works at starts mumbling things to herself – all “Well, I don't hate them, per say” and “I'd feel more comfortable if it wasn't a Serbian family next door” - that could make a man want to claw at his eyes. Should make him want to claw at his eyes. And yet, for some reason, it doesn't. He listens too intently when those who share his ethnicity speak of ill-will toward those who don't, speak of “This is our country, not theirs” slowly forming into a mantra that lulls him to sleep at night and wakes him in the morning. He keeps his head down as they pass, up when his supposed allies do the same, and even if he never consciously made the switch to such horrible thoughts, within the year's time, he, too, finds himself insulting “their kind” with his friends, head tucked low as they speak of how low they are, how unfeeling and unintelligent they are. It was all talk, though, right? Nothing wrong with disliking a person so long as nothing comes of it, right? Excuses like these fuel his mind, warding away the guilt that tries to eat at the back of his thoughts when the rowdiest of his little crew points and laughs at small children if only because they aren't Serbs, but even they can't save him when the house fires begin. Arson, ethnicity versus ethnicity. And then it isn't house fires that people can run from – it's guns pressed to foreheads, triggers pulled.

They're monsters, half the city feeds him. Every Muslim is a monster, and if you don't kill them first, who's to say they won't turn around and kill you?

And the scariest thing is that Serdjan believes them.

WE NEVER FEAR THE NIGHT – WE BRING OUR OWN STARLIGHT

A rifle isn't enough.

On nights like this, he thinks, he would stargaze, captured by the beauty of the heavens reflected on the water or staring upward at the sky itself and beholding its glory in unbroken stillness. The stars look different through a sight, however, the city below him more so, and there's something underwhelming with the way the third bullet he fires tears through his target silently – painlessly. Maybe there's something morbid about wanting to watch one's enemies suffer before death, a bullet through the heart or a bullet through the skull not enough (never enough) to sate his desire to make these monsters in human flesh pay. So many allies he has lost, friends he had known since they were small children slaughtered before his eyes, and while part of him knows that all of them would still be alive had it not been for their involvement with the Serbian Militia that formed in the wake of ethnic tensions some time ago, he can't blame his own kind for crimes they allowed, but did not first-hand commit. By the time he'd watched his best friend go, the one who'd pointed out that girl in the restaurant and started sowing the first seeds of hatred in his heart what might have already been a year ago, he swears that he will end at least one Muslim for every finger on that man's hands, and, if that alone doesn't soften the vengeful blood lust taking over his mind, he might go on to kill one for every pore across that man's flesh. That's all it is out here on the rooftops, really; everyone below is a hateful enemy or a hateful ally, and even those who stay clear of the fighting are all too quick to prove support, moral or otherwise, to the side with whom they think deserves to win the most. At this point, the blue-eyed male doesn't even know if he wants his side to win. All he wants is to make the other side suffer for the loses they have caused and the hundreds of more they would cause in the near future. They can't possibly remorse during a painless death; he needs either a slow process (too risky), or a more painful one. A more painful on that he finds just up the hills surrounding the city he has loved since he was no more than a child.

The stars were supposed to be brighter up here than in the bustling streets below, clearer, still, than they were in the town square that he had failed to visit in some great amount of time, but the lights of their mortar shells drowns out any white specks in the navy blue canvas above their heads. But that's quite alright; long gone are the days of such frivolous things as watching the skies, and the near-blinding explosives remind him of the bright lights of the celebrations they'd held just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Better, still, is the sight of blackened earth and stone below, caused by the shells they launch from above, and while the accuracy is anything but desirable, the destruction each one leaves in its wake is just the sort he needed after watching one too many a familiar face die by his side.

There's talk outside of the city, of course. No, no, that's not right. Outside of the country. It's been so long since this was nothing more than a squabble between the Muslims and the Serbs, acid comments and the occasional thrown stone having exploded into a country-wide civil war in such a short amount of time, and like every civil war that has come in all of the world, in all of history, no one is too quick to approve of it. None of them can understand what it's like to look upon the fiery destruction of a city once so pristine every night, can understand what it's like to bury a brother one day and your lover the next, and yet they still have the audacity to speak of the atrocities carried out by the people within Yugoslavia's borders. Such a cause of bother at first, really, although the pain had since numbed to nothing but a buzzing in the back of his ears after much reassuring from the people he fought to protect, who fought to protect him. They don't understand what it's like to live with scum just next door, to be under someone's foot for so long only to be given the idea of freedom while still having your sworn enemy taking what rightfully belongs to you no more than a block away. To them, everyone involved is heartless, unfeeling toward the enemy's plight; but as someone here, someone who has lived this since the day it began, he knows it's more than that. He cares not for them because they care not for him, and the things he does are for the people he has loved and has lost. Goodness, if he must bomb his city from the hills every night until the day he dies to avenge them, he thinks that's perfectly fine.

There's nothing to fear from the night up there on the hills. Even if they drown out the real stars, they bring a light all of their own, and with it, they will truly set Sarajevo, then the rest of Yugoslavia free.

IF YOU NEVER USE 'EM, YOU CAN SAVE 'EM FOR YOUR NEXT CIVIL WAR

Serdjan isn't entirely sure why he decided to watch her. He's never been the terribly social sort, but nor has he ever been a “people watcher,” and the idea of silently following a face wherever they go within eyesight would normally seem bizarre and... admittedly, creepy to him. He doesn't even really know her, outside of her vaguely familiar face, the name that he is so sure started with the letter “K,” and the fact that she is one of the enemy, although one who's yet to take up arms. Of course, casually watching one of the few passive faces in the city he's helped to destroy seems hardly like a stretch compared to his nightly ritual of raining fire on them all over again, something that he would have never imagined himself doing before the war came about, so he doesn't fight the curiosity that tickles him as he watches her go about her business. And that's all it is at first: curiosity. She hasn't done anything nefarious, and despite the fact that he's never spoken to her, and more importantly that she's one of them, he almost feels as though there's some sort of connection between them. They look to be about the same age, and she has an uncanny way of happening into each of his more memorable moments – like the party over a year ago. For a moment, he wonders what would happen if he was ever in a situation where he'd be forced to hurt her, or even kill her, but even as someone who finds a bit of joy in watching the blood of their lot spill, he still has moral codes, and he and the rest of his militia have sworn to not raise a hand against someone who has not first raised a hand against them. This, however, only serves to comfort him for a few short moments, God perhaps mocking him in the way that, almost in the same moment that he's thought her to not be any sort of threat, he realizes where, exactly, it is that she's going. An arm's dealer. At this point in time, the city's found itself in shambles so terrible that not even they have to hide their shady businesses, AK-47s, Tomcats, F-11s, Claymore land mines, and anything else they can offer about as common to see on the streets these days as a cart selling fresh fruit. Realizing that she was approaching the stand should have given him some amount of triumph when he noticed that this was the same dealer who had sold to the militia he was a part of, claiming to have come in from the North upon hearing of the Serbian battle and hoping to help in what little ways he could. Instead, there's something sick that floods the pit of his stomach at the though of him turning her away for her roots, potentially even killing her for trying to arm herself as an enemy. He doesn't turn away, though, not out of morbid curiosity or even because he wants to see if she will, in fact die, but simply out of an inability to turn his head; and a good thing he hadn't.

He deals to her, anyway, taking her bills and handing her, in turn, three snipers of varying sizes and models. The man who'd sworn to be a Serb sympathizer selling to a Muslim girl? Had she fooled him into thinking that she was one of them? Some part of him wants to give chase to her, but another demands he stay still at his perch, watching the stand as to make sure that such an incident does not happen again. Much to his horror, it does. Repeatedly, in fact. By the time he'd slowly inched his way closer toward the stand, far enough to be kept hidden, but close enough to just barely catch the words being exchanged between Muslim and businessman, he was able to hear enough of their conversation to come to a terrifying realization: This was the same story that he had been told, only this time, it was not the Serbs he had come South to aid. They'd been tricked. All of them, each and every person from both sides, fooled into handing over their money to a stand that worked to profit from both sides suffering. How could he have not noticed sooner?

He goes to his comrades in a rage, barking of how the ones supposed to be helping them were feeding the same lies to the ones they were still firing their nightly mortar shells at, but each and every nameless face seems to have come to an agreement without him: So long as they're getting the things they need to win this war, what does it matter who they're getting it from? No one even bothers to think that all of them, all of them are being played for fools, each ethnicity lowered to the same level of dirt by those slimy enough to exploit them both -

- and for the first time since he'd had to part ways with his best friend, Serdjan thinks that maybe each side isn't quite as different as he'd been starting to believe.

PLEASE UNDERSTAND: THIS ISN'T WHAT WE MEANT

It begins in November.

For almost three years now, the routine has all been the same. Snipe, bomb, set ablaze – anything to be rid of the opposing side in battle. The weapons have found themselves more precise, but the people have found themselves more weary, and the blood that is spilled nightly is as much as every night that has come before it. The methods, the numbers, the people: all of them, melding together into one continuous cycle that has caused a man once so young and full of life, only twenty-four years old, to go numb to most everything that goes on around him. There are no longer people being fired at with his hillside shells. There's no longer anything being fired at with his hillside shells. They find the usual spots and then bomb and bomb and bomb until the sun's lights finally overpower that of their war machines, and he can't even remember what it was that made him want to fight so badly, so bloodily so long before. So much time spent tugging around the same ball and chain has drained him of most everything, his mind as lifeless as the bodies he's sometimes able to leave, and it doesn't come back to him until it begins in November. Crisp and clear and strong, its source from the heart of the city in the untouched town square that used to give him so, so much joy, the noise breaks through the gun powder and the canon fire, the whole world pausing for a moment alone to listen to what has broke through the violence. It's bizarre, quixotic, too impossible to be anything but a trick on a tired mind. However, looks passed between his comrades prove that they're all as baffled as the next, each hearing what has broken through a night air that was anything but silent and none of them understanding why. It isn't until he pauses his gawking, using the sights he hasn't touched in months in order to get a closer look to the distant square that he can assure himself that this is all very real, and only just begin to realize what it means.

Mozart.

Someone is playing Mozart.

His fellow soldiers flash him questioning looks, begging in silence to know what it was that he managed to see, but even the blue-eyed man can't properly explain what it was. The best way he can describe it is suicidal. The square has been left undamaged for quite some time, but it still falls directly into the No Man's Land of gun fire, perhaps safe from the mortars on the hill, but not from a stray bullet coming from the city alleys. If the man wanted to play his cello, there are one hundred places he can think of off the top of his head that would be a better spot to do just that, and none of them come even close to the city, much less the rest of the country that surrounds it. However, the music alone breaks the fighting for the better part of an hour, hundreds of people all over pausing and trying to understand what a person plagued by civil war for four years simply cannot. Things revert back to the way they were in time, yes, the sound of a sub-machine gun being fired in the heart of Sarajevo coming in to accompany the classical music and quickly followed by the nightly symphony of death, but no one cannot deny the short reprieve that the sound had brought and the awe that they had felt during it. The next night, as well, the music begins again, another look down his sights showing that same man with that same cello playing on the stone around the fountain, watched over by the gargoyle on the belfry.

He doesn't understand right away. He won't pretend he does. But in time, as days turn to weeks and that first snowfall accompanying Mozart amidst madness becomes a blanket of white over the land, he realizes what that meant. He realizes what that man was trying to tell them all. (If only he could make the rest understand, as well.)

WHERE THIS ALL HAS LED: DEAD WINTER DEAD

They learn in the month to come that that moment, the one where the whole world stopped to hold its breath at the sound of the cello man's music, was a calm before the storm. He has known death for four years of bloody civil war, and for quite some time, he'd believe that it simply did not get worse than what it had already been. At night, he prays that he could have been right, that the war around him did not escalate to the level that it did. The snow falls fresh nightly, the night beginning with a thin layer of untainted white, but come morning, it's stained crimson with the blood of the city's people.

They had asked for change for years – change from the tyranny they'd suffered under, change from their directionless future, change from their every day lives – but, as he stares across the wreckage, wondering how he could have ever thought that any of this was justifiable, he thinks that this was not at all what they had meant.

ONE CHILD CLOSED HIS EYES AND DISAPPEARED

It is one thing to put a shell in a mortar and another to see where it lands.

They don't assign him patrol of the city often, his aim with a gun far less impressive than what he can do up on that hillside, but rotational policy ensures that, even if rarely, he's still forced to move through the wreckage of the city he'd once loved by his lonesome, reporting back to his superiors any notable changes in the streets and, more importantly, in the enemy formations. In the years that preceded this, this would have been a monotonous job that had him groaning under his breath, poking at fallen rocks with the barrel of his pistol, and paying little attention to what all was going on around him; he was never very good at noticing the blatantly obvious, anyway, and it often took what he was to be seeing to hit him in the face before he truly realized what was going on. The winter of 1994, however, has been proving to be the worst, bloodier than each winter before it and more dangerous in the streets than he could have ever remembered it being. Needless to say, he was on a higher alert than he'd possibly ever been, gun consistently at the ready in case he was ambushed by one of the Muslims and eyes taking in absolutely everything there was to see. On the one hand, returning back with nothing to report would probably have done him well, considering that finding results put him at a higher risk of being sent out to gather information sooner than he would have otherwise, but he'd come to realized quite early on that he wasn't paying attention so closely for their sake; he was honestly terrified that this broken night was to be his last. Terror, in fact, flooded his head when his footing failed him, leg caught beneath what he immediately thought to be an exposed tree root and leaving him to face plant into the cracked concrete before him. The damage to his jaw, however, seemed like a minuscule worry to him when he realized that there were no trees around, so an exposed root would have made very little sense to explain the tumble that he had just taken. Curious and terrified all at once, the black-haired male slowly turned his head in the direction from which he'd come, blue eyes turned down to the ground to bare witness to the atrocity that he'd just stumbled over: a severed limb.

A child's severed limb.

Horror flooded his being at the sight, eyes widened to the size of saucers as he scrambled as far away as possible from the detached body part. It had to have been a child's – no grown adult's was that small, but that didn't answer the question of why. They only fired a few shells during the day, and never in locations like this area, so it couldn't have been caused by the hillside firing, could it have? A glance to his right, however, had more color draining from his face still, the sight of a schoolyard he'd seen in one peace just weeks prior now reduced to nothing more than a bloodied rubble. The bodies of teachers and students alike littered the scene, some whole and most in pieces, and while he could no longer say that there was any pride to be taken in watching a human being fall to their knees, dead, there was something absolutely disgusting about seeing the bodies of innocent children piled up on one another, forgotten by the rest of the city in their petty little war and left to rot amongst the rubble of what could have only been a misfired shell from the hill he dared to walk nightly. Each one of these... these corpses had a name, had a future. They were supposed to be free. Where was the freedom in losing their lives to another person's war? Serdjan chokes back a sob, fist pressing to his mouth to stop the tears streaming from his eyes from being accompanied by any sound that could have him caught. If he had known that his militia would have brought about this, he would have beaten them all to a bloody (alive) pulp before they ever even so much as looked at a mortar, and the fact that there is nothing he can do, nothing at all makes the agony flooding his heart all the more worse. He hasn't even the right to give them a proper burial, his hands bloodied in the same manner as the people who directly caused this. To leave them here to rot is a crime, yes, but to dare to move them from where they have fallen is a crime greater still, and he honors them instead by running. Running as fast as he can, pushing his legs passed limits he hadn't pressed since his days in school. Forget the rest of the patrol, forget the information he was to gather – forget the faces of dozens of souls who would never live to see the free world they had celebrated together in the streets all those years ago.

His whole world moves in a blur after that, a scolding from the higher ups making as little sense to him as a novel read aloud in a language he could not speak. They send him off, thinking him exhausted and incapable of proper comprehension, but even as he lays down to close his eyes, each rest of the eyelids flashes the images of severed heads, flattened torsos in his mind. How many hours does he lie awake, replaying the event in his mind? He imagines what their final moments must have been like – everything from the sound to the light to the heat to the... to the nothing. And then he thinks: This war isn't nation building. It isn't, and Serdjan cannot believe it has taken him so long realize it. For four years, he has fought his fight in hopes of avenging the fallen, of building the perfect Yugoslavia that could not exist under the rule of the Soviet Union, could not exist when “soiled” by its Muslim population. What is a country, though, that is build on corpses? There's nothing “perfect” about a place that relies on the death of innocents, of children, of people who look and talk and feel just like him, and this war they all so desperately wage can never really give them what they seek. The only end is mutual oblivion – and he refuses to be a part of it any longer.

CHRISTMAS EVE [ SARAJEVO 12/24 ]

Four years ago, Serdjan would not have imagined himself spending his Christmas Eve hidden away in a bunker, face pressed against metal once cold and ears desperately listening to the sound of Christmas carols played on a cello out there amidst the sound of savage warfare. Four years ago, though, he muses, he would not have been able to predict any of the horrors he had borne witness to, nor any of the horrors that he, himself, had caused. So desperately does he want to flee from this miserable life, surrounded by blood and the sound of bombshells colliding with a city full of innocent lives that spend their nights praying that they will live to see the next, but it's impossible to simply walk away. There is too much that he has here: His money, his clothes, his job in the militia. No doubt, they will label him a traitor and seek him out should he attempt to leave, and if he ever wants to be free from Yugoslavia and it's Bosnian War, he needs to wait for the proper moment to do so. A moment, though, he is afraid, that is simply too far away from him to wait for. His only lifelines are the idea of what his life might be like outside the country's borders, away from a place that calls itself free while oppressing the people that lives inside it to places that have never known what it was like to be cut off by that Iron Curtain, and the sound of the ever brave cello player playing in the bloodied snow. Every night he has gone out to that square, standing firm on that fountain as he pours his heart into songs that he must pray will somehow reach the hearts of the people who hear it. That man – does he know that he has already touched one person's heart? Does he carry on every night wondering if his struggle is worth it at all, never knowing how much he has moved a single no-where man by standing in a place where no one else would and doing something that no one else could. And maybe – maybe he won't flee entirely. Maybe he'll abandon his station and stand by that man in the snow, in the middle of the gun fire, protesting with nothing but the sound of music against a war that will never have a winner. He – he can't play an instrument, and he's never been very good at singing, but he hopes that the cello man can accept what he has to offer all the same.

Small windows, pressed against the top of the walls are the only way to see out into the world beyond, and the Serb presses himself against the wall, tip toed and struggling to see if he can see that square from where he is. It's a futile feet, and deep down, he knows it, but just one look at that fountain, one look at that gargoyle, one look at that man is all he needs to be able to make it through this Christmas's harsh night, and he certainly won't be able to see any of those things if he doesn't try. Sure enough, the view from the small opening does not include what he so desperately needs to see (he should have known), but the effort does not find itself wasted. Just as a sigh manages to burst passed his lips, the clouds break away, snowfall that had been plaguing the city for most of the night having slowly ceased before and the dark clouds that had been hanging in the sky for weeks, now, finally choosing to separate just enough for him catch a glimpse of the stars beyond. He lied; the light of mortars could never compare to real starlight, and the sight of the small patch of black sky sprinkled with silver alone is enough to have him thinking back to days in that square by himself, watching those same brilliant lights in that fountain that a man he adores now stands on. He'd like to do that again. More than anything, though, he'd like to – It stops, though. The thought. His mind freezes, the entire bunker solidifying and time pausing for one heart stopping second, and even the sounds of war from outside seem to slow if only for a moment; because they're not the only things that have stopped.

They're not the only things that have stopped.

Serdjan yanks the handle of the door down and pries it open in a frenzy, tearing up the stairs beyond at a speed that almost has him tripping upward more than once and has him up and out of the building as a whole in no more than two minutes alone. Throwing the main entrance doors has a burst of frigid air biting at his face, but even if he hadn't the winter coat shrugged over his shoulders, he doesn't think he would have stopped for the cold alone, anyway. Disorienting, though, is the sudden chill, and it takes him a moment longer to figure out where he is and, more importantly, where he needs to be going. There. Someone from deeper inside barks his name, demands he tell them where he is going, but his mind is in a state of hysteria, and he doesn't imagine he could form proper words long enough to give them a response if he tried. Alley ways pass him by, nothing more than black ticks in the periphery of his vision as he tears down snowy, bloodied, broken streets to the one place in this whole blasted town that has ever really mattered. He can't hear it anymore: the music. It's gone. Every explanation that dares to rush through his mind is cast out immediately, each and every one too gruesome for him to possibly entertain unless he knows for absolute certain that the man is not okay, and he won't let the stray Muslims or his own Serbian militia hold him back from seeing what has happened with his own eyes. Unfortunately for him, God seems to have another plan for him entirely.

He skids to a haphazard halt, barely avoiding a collision, and immediately, the pale-haired Muslim girl is preparing to retrieve what can only be a firearm, expression (while considerably watered down compared to what must be coloring his own features) showing that she is just as shocked to see him as he is her... and that she knows all too well what group in this war he has sided with. She doesn't, however, he notices, completely pull the weapon from its holster, instead seeming to be frozen with her hand at its hilt and her eyes narrowed dangerously as if daring him to move from his equally stone-like spot. Despite the fact that she could easily end him now, and from the looks of it may be contemplating doing just that, the raven-haired man can't help but think of the day he'd seen her and the arms dealer, years ago or no, and the dread he'd felt at the idea of her perishing at the dealer's hands. Thinking about it, that had been the first sign of empathy for the other side that he'd felt since being wrapped up into all of the nonsense, although he still couldn't exactly put a finger on why he cared so much then and why he was remembering such a trivial thing now. More baffling was what he finally managed to remember next.

“... Katrina?”

The girl – no, no, Katrina, he's finally remembered – seems to stiffen even more at the sound of her name, if that was even possible, but it's soon followed by a slackening of the shoulders. To assure her that he means her no harm, as well, he lifts his arms into a surrendering gesture without skipping so much as a beat, and while she's certainly slow to relaxing, there's no denying the gradual way she straightens, hand removing itself from her weapon without so much as another word. He's tempted to ask her what she's doing here, or more likely ask that she let him go, but the sound of a shell exploding not far away (in the direction of the town square, no less) rips them both from their thoughts and has two pairs of eyes snapping in that direction. A pause, a locking of their gazes, and something about the look he sees there in her passive hues tells him that she's come here for the same reason as he has: to figure out what has happened to the cello man. As such, both go tearing off in the direction of the most recent explosion rather than away, Muslim and Serb staying close together as they plunge deeper into the heart of No Man's Land in pursuit of something possibly only they can understand. What they find, however, may be what they'd already known they would be seeing, but neither one wanted to admit to themselves that this was the most likely reality. The most recent shell had been further off into the distance, but the square had not gone unscathed, water from the fountain spilling across the stone walkways and tinted red from the blood seeping from the corpse not far off. The cello man, broken and bleeding with his equally broken instrument, strings and base snapped in two and splayed across the corpse of the man who had so bravely wielded it in a war fought with weapons, not music. And to think – he had just been thinking of joining this man on this very same broken fountain, fighting along side him in a war fought with music, not weapons. If he had only gone sooner, he wondered, could he have saved this man? Or, perhaps, he would have had the honor of accompanying another nameless martyr in his death.

Water. A drop of water. Blood had been splattered on the poor man's face in death, cast from the hole in his chest, but a single drop of liquid falling from the heavens onto his features wipes a trail of it away. Holding out a hand into the air in search of some sort of precipitation turns up nothing, and when the soldier lifts his head to the sky, the only thing he can see are the clouds, the stars, and the gargoyle on his belfry. Katrina sucks in a pained breath behind him, hand brought up to her mouth as she stares at the bloody spectacle before her, but Serdjan can only scoff at the situation that has played out before them; how pathetic that, outside of their mismatched duo, all the pity the world has to offer this hero is a stone statue forever watching from above, teary eyed over the passing of the only man in the city with the courage to speak out against what they should have all known in their hearts was wrong.

“... Leave with me.”

IT'S NOT WHO I AM, BUT I KNOW IT'S ALL THAT YOU SEE

Katrina stares at him, hollow eyes ghosting of what can only be described as disbelief, and he can't find it in himself to blame her; honestly, he hadn't truly thought the words over before letting them tumble passed his lips. A second thought, though, doesn't make him regret the words, and running them over in his head only goes to further convince him of their meaning and the conviction behind it. He needs to leave, to be free of this war and everything that it entails. Too many innocents have fallen dead at the hands of his people for him to affiliate with them any long, and if the cello man's death has shown anything, it's that this misery can only end in the way it began: through violence. All the same, though, he owes it to this girl – no, this woman's family, friends, comrades who he has wronged either on his own or through the militia he was a part of, and if he can save one person from sitting through another day of this misery, he will do everything in his power to do just that. Four years ago, she wasn't the pale-haired Muslim girl. She was just the pale-haired girl. She – she has only ever been just the pale-haired girl; how could he have ever thought that this foolish ethnic division ever had any real meaning? It doesn't quite show as much on her face, but she had felt enough to leave the safety of her side and brave the most dangerous part of the city just to see if a man who she must have listened to every night was dead or alive, just like him, and the reaction playing on her face is exactly what his own would have been had the roles been reversed. She was broken up over his death, perplexed over the liquid from the sky, is shocked at his proposal, and everything that had colored her face and everything that would can only make him wonder how he could have ever thought she and the people she fought alongside were monsters, unfeeling, less than the stone beneath his feet. He has to save her, because she is the only one he can save; it is all a matter of convincing her to say yes. A feat, he quickly learns, that is easier said than done.

“You're one of them,” she says, tone hushed and devoid of true malice, but the underlying message is still there: He is a Serb, the people who made her own suffer, the people who suffered because of her own, and their momentary time of truce to confirm the life or death of a neutral party does not mean she's going to be so quick as to trust him, especially enough to do something as drastic as flee the city with him. He can see it in her eyes, too. She desperately wants to ask him why she should leave at all, but they both already know the answer to that question, and he won't confirm it for her even if she does voice the question aloud. He stares at her for a long while after that, knowing that he has to convince her but struggling to think up the right words to do just that, and she seems to have just about given up on him before he begins. To her, he's nothing but the uniform and a solider inside it. He knows she can see further down – he just has to open her eyes a little wider.

“One of what? A human?” Incredulity dances across her countenance, and he realizes that this was not as strong as a start as he would have liked. So he begins again. He begins where one should: the beginning, in this very same square and in that restaurant where he so desperately wanted to buy her that drink, but never brought himself to do it. He tells her how he fed out of the greedy's palms, drank up their lies like water after days of traveling through a desert and let it corrupt him. Dead friends, mortar shells, a need for vengeance; disloyal drug dealers, comrades who did nothing, the girl he didn't want to see die for reasons he couldn't explain. Bodies of children piled up on top of one another and the cello man at their feet who made the world pause and listen, who made the heavens part its clouds and made him remember what it was like to wish for freedom, not to be a slave to it. He knows that they are the same because they came here for the same reason. They could have killed one another, but they didn't, and when that man died, they were both so moved as to risk their own lives just to see him in death. No life's so short it can't turn around – no life's so short that it never learns. Someday, everyone in this country will learn. The city will crumble, the families will crumble, and finally the war that they waged on themselves will crumble, and only once they have seen the destruction for themselves will they finally be able to understand. There is nothing they can do for this country they love but leave it, and if they really do hold any love for it, that is what they must do. She doesn't hate the Serbs. She hates the gunfire, the shells, the greedy dealers and the ones who sit back and watch as the world burns around them without so much as offering a bat of the eye. And that's not him.

“I can't save them. But I can save you,” Serjdan breathes, taking her hands in his own and praying with all his might that she understands. “Please: let me save you.”

The world pauses and listens for a cello song that is not there, her own eyes betraying that she seems to be looking for answer that cannot be found within her own mind, and he holds his own breath in fear that she'll turn him down yet. Her hands are so small, so limp in his own – and it isn't until they tighten around his fingers that he finds the strength to breathe again. “Okay,” she whispers, staring down at their held hands.

“Okay.”

...

Everything that holds any shred of meaning to him is clutched to his chest, meager possessions he'd kept over the years buried in a mound of clothing, food, and currency held close to help keep warm from the unforgiving winter air. In his right hand, he clutches the cello man's bow, untouched by the wreckage and dropped just inches from his limp hand, and he thinks that he will keep this for as long as he can in memory of the man who had used it. Perhaps it would impart in him the strength that it had taken to stand on that fountain ledge and play through ruined night after ruined night; goodness only knew that he would need it to get he and his new partner out of the country, and hopefully to places beyond that still. The sound of crunching snow, however, tears him from his thoughts, blue eyes ripping themselves away from the bow in his hand and lifting to the figure before him, now towing a pack of similar size and content of her own. He would have liked to have left right then, and he likely would have if she hadn't advised him how dangerous it would be to go on with nothing but the clothes clinging to their backs, and as such, both had visited to their homes to gather what they could before returning to the place where they had first properly met where they would begin their journey from the city (their country, their home). By now, the sounds of battle had petered off into almost nothing, the sun beginning to peak its way over the horizon on the far side, and he allowed himself only a moment to wonder if anyone would miss him once they were gone. Instead, he drowned the thought out with a question that required no answer, what with the way she was standing before him. “Are you ready to go?” Still, she answered with a small nod, not moving at all from the spot where she stood still before one of the many buildings of old, and he couldn't help but grin at her. “Well, then, we'd better get going.”

He lifted himself from his spot sat on what was left of the old spring, both his bag and bow in one hand, and before he'd even the chance to fully turn around, he felt her small hand slip into his own once again, distance between them silently closed in the time it had taken him to rise. He would be lying if he said such a feeling was familiar to him, but he'd be lying even more so if he said that he did not enjoy the feeling of it. And, well, considering all of the new things that would await them outside the city he had known since he was a small child, he supposed he would simply have to grow more accustomed to what he wasn't accustomed to. Still, despite all of the horrors that the country had offered him in the years that had passed, something tugged in his heart at the idea of leaving it all behind for good, and it was against his own will that he turned to look at the stone statue on the belfry behind them, the last stars of night disappearing behind it. If only it was as easy for the poor creature to leave as it was for them, he couldn't help but think even if he knew that a being of stone could not think or feel long enough to want to leave this place at all. Although, the liquid from earlier...

“Serdjan?”

Katrina's voice grabs him once again from a stupor, mind snapping away from something he couldn't quite understand to a world he should have been saying his goodbyes to. He flashes her a grin to assure her he was quite alright, giving her hand a squeeze just to make sure and feeling his heart warm as the gesture is returned after a moment's hesitance. To the gargoyle, he mouths his parting words, and with a turn of his heel, the two – a Serb and a Muslim, Serdjan Aleskovic and Katrina Brasic, the two who had cared – say their goodbyes to the town of Sarajevo and it's old medieval square.

“Take care of them. All of them.”