ABOUT KATRINA

[attr="class","omapponestatusimg"]

[attr="class","omapponestatus"]

[attr="class","omapponepersonality1"]SUBJECT TEMPERAMENT

[attr="class","omapponelikes"]

[attr="class","omapponelikes"]

[attr="class","omapponemisc3"]

[attr="class","omapponemisc4"]

[attr="class","omapponemisc1"]

[attr="class","omapponemisc2"]

[attr="class","omapponemisc2"]

[attr="class","omapponebio1"]

midnight, not a sound from the pavement

”Leave with me.”[break][break]

The soldier’s words are a blow to the gut, a knife to the chest, an arrow through the tightly wound muscle of her heart.[break][break]

Leave with him?[break][break]

With him?[break][break]

has the moon lost her memory?

Here is one of the men who had killed her neighbors, her friends, her family- here is one of the men who hates the very core of her being simply because she does not share his religion, simply because she is different.[break][break]

And here he is, shoulders dusted with snow, emotions tossed askew in the wake of mortar shells and the polished rosewood of a destroyed cello. Her mind is reeling, a spooked horse in a starting gate locked tightly on all sides. Here is the man whose uniform had plagued her every step with complete and utter disregard for the lives he’d taken and the lives he’d ruined in a flurry of gunsmoke and white noise. He wears his shame plain on his chest in the folds of the Serbian flag and the slump of his shoulders.[break][break]

He stands over the broken body of the cellist, gun lowered, and he asks her to leave with him.[break][break]

As if it’s that easy. As if she can just take one look at the wreckage around her and the ruins of her home and leave.[break][break]

she is smiling alone

Her gaze finds the body of the cellist and revulsion crawls up her throat like a wild animal as her attention sweeps over the blood painting his face a deep, deep red. Like the red of the Serbian flag printed so boldly on the soldier’s chest.[break][break]

”You’re one of them,” She whispers, her tongue thick with unspoken despair. He is one of them- one of the men who’d ransacked her livelihood, tossing bits of her soul and shreds of her hope around like confetti to the wind. But deep down- deep down, in the darkest recesses of her heart, in the pit where hope still fluttered like a bird in a locked cage, she knows that the uniform he wears is just fabric. The gun he carries is only metal; the blue of his eyes are less of an abyss and more of an open sky.[break][break]

She can see the indecision in his frame, and in that moment she knows that the two of them, Serb and Muslim, are grappling with the same monster, fighting the same war- just as they had come here together, in desperate search of a broken cellist. [break][break]

Katrina knows that beyond the uniform lies a boy. [break][break]

A man.[break][break]

A man who’s seen the horrors of war, just the same as her.[break][break]

She mends broken bones and stitches up bulletholes. She closes the eyes of the dead and pumps blood from one body to another with the expert precision of a seasoned surgeon.[break][break]

in the lamplight, the withered leaves collect at my feet.

She’s every bit the soldier that he is, uniform or not. Gunpowder, coaldust, steel- it’s all the same in the hands of a nurse, in the hands of a woman who’d rather see her patients die than see them suffer for the color of their skin. For the gods they worship, for their ancestors, for the family they’d been born into. But then he shifts- a breath between them, two, and the snow still dusts his shoulders, the stars overhead illuminate the line of his nose, the dip of his brow.[break][break]

”One of what? A human?”[break][break]

A human, she thinks, fighting down the sob that rears in her chest.[break][break]

Human.[break][break]

Not the animal that her neighbors had made her believe that she was. Not the monster that put a scalpel in her hands and told her to fix them quickly, they need to get back to the fight.[break][break]

Human.[break][break]

He tells her of a party. Of a glance her way, of drinks and friends and false accusations that led to the destruction of Sarajevo. He tells her the story of an ignorant boy led by the nose into a battle he’d never wanted to fight. A war he’d never wanted to win.[break][break]

and the wind begins to moan.

And try as she may, she can’t be angry. She can’t look at him and tell him that she hates him, that she’d rather die than commune with one of the men who’d torn her city to shreds. Because it would be a lie- a bald-faced, blatant, glaring lie.[break][break]

She doesn’t hate the Serbs. She never has, and certainly never will. Because that’s just it- she is just as much a Serbian as he is. Roped off into some definition of other by petty ethnic differences- but every inch the Serbian that the man before her claims to be. She’d drank the same water, had bathed and lived and dreamed under the same stars. [break][break]

And here he is, a man who had once hated her, taking her hands between his own and confessing his troubles to her as though she’s an altar and he’s a sinner fallen to his knees. She can’t hate him, she thinks, as he so breathlessly admits, ”I can’t save them. But I can save you.”[break][break]

i remember the time i knew what happiness was.

So gentle, she thinks, his hands warm around her own. Here is a sight for sore eyes- a sight the cellist, the poor cellist, would’ve loved to see. A Serbian boy and a Muslim girl- or, rather, a boy and a girl- putting aside their differences in hopes of a brighter future. ”Please: let me save you.”[break][break]

She can see the light at the end of the tunnel- the first rays of sun after a thunderstorm, the first hint of Spring after a long, icy Winter. A break from the destruction, the sadness, the heartbreak.[break][break]

A chance to put down the guns and strip their uniforms and tear the flags from their chests in a final act of desertion, of defiance.[break][break]

”Okay,” she finds herself telling him, and she squeezes his hands, those deadly, deceitful, gentle hands. ”Okay.”[break][break]

let the memory live again.

Their love is a slow one.[break][break]

It burns like the cinders of a fire long since put out- hot, rigid, furious- but slow and gentle, careful all the same.[break][break]

Serdjan is not a hard man to read. He loves her, she thinks, long before she ever considers loving him in return-[break][break]

But he sneaks up on her, like a thief in the night, with stolen glances and weary smiles. He takes her heart in his hands and runs away with it, and she’s left with no choice, no option, but to follow.[break][break]

it’s so easy to leave me all alone with the memory of my days in the sun.

Katrina Brasic becomes Katrina Aleskovic with no small amount of effort- he wrangles her restless heart into a quiet submission, and she lets herself give him everything she’d forgotten how to give.[break][break]

She takes his name the way he’d taken her heart- with a smile, a wink, and a gentle, careful kiss- so fragile, it might break in the wind if the gust is just right.[break][break]

if you touch me, you’ll understand what happiness is.

Their child is just as beautiful as she’d dreamed. Carrying a baby, feeling that second presence within her, Katrina felt that hope she’d kept in a cage now fluttering freely, spreading a golden light over the face of her child- their child- like a wish finally granted.[break][break]

It’s one last act of defiance towards the war that had torn her life to pieces- and as she puts herself back together, bit by bit, the gunsmoke and the blood fade into a dream. A nightmare, maybe, but an alternate reality all the same. [break][break]

It was a dream. 

A dream.

look, a new day has begun.

[attr="class","omapponeplayerimg"]

[attr="class","omapponeplayername"]

call me
NORTHY

[attr="class","omapponeplayer1"]

[attr="class","omapponerenown"]

5%