painted white, sarajevo

X

What's our plan, Elias?"

"Plan?" He looked over at Kane curiously, his train of thought having been frozen by the beautiful view of the city. Of the city wrapped in a blanket of melancholy.

"Yer tryin' to convince Boss not to destroy Wistinburg, aren't ya?"

Elias blinked, tapping his lip. The reality of Kane's words hit him—he had to convince his boss that Wistinburg was worth it, that Wistinburg shouldn't get knocked down as he had intended. "Oh, yeah," he mused.

Ada, across from them, raised an eyebrow.

"I think I need more translations before I could make a convincing argument," Elias remarked. "I need buildings that are still standing, descriptions of great things that happened here. I've only gotten a couple of entries so far. Ada, could you try and quicken the translating pace?"

"I wasn't aware that you had a purpose, nor a deadline," Ada said, tracing the table with her nails. "But, yes, I could do that. When's the deadline?"

"A few days, actually."

"Wait, what deadline?" Kane cocked an eyebrow, looking at the other. "Since when is there some kinda' deadline?"

"Boss called me yesterday and told me I had to be back in the building in ten days, I think. I need to get some information and compile it into, like, a PowerPoint or something. I don't have enough evidence yet."

"I will pick up my pace, then. We all need to play our parts in this."

Kane unlocked his hands from behind his head, eye twitching. "Since when were ya 'part of this'?"

Elias held up a hand, shaking his head. The other stopped speaking, but let out a huff and looked in the other direction.

"Ada's right. We all need to do this, together. Kane, I'll be relaying the information I get to you. You're going to be in charge of linking information from the notebook to what you can find online."

"Aye, sir." Kane snapped his fingers against his temple in form of a salute. "I gotcha."

"Ada, all you have to do is translate." Elias pressed his fingertips together, his gaze set on the table, deep in thought. "I'll take care of the rest. Does that sound like a plan?"

"A very ambiguous one, but yes, it does."

"Awesome. Uh, I'd like it if we could get to work immediately, actually. My time's... kinda short."

Just like that, Elias had slipped back to the person they were both used to. Not the planner type, nor the one that was organized in such a sharp way—he felt somewhere right in the middle.

"Perfectly understandable." Ada nodded, standing up from the table. "Then we shouldn't just laze around as we're doing now. This was nice, but we must get to work!"

As they walked, Elias could see the change in both Ada's and Kane's eyes—and they could see it in his. The change of determination, of sharpness. They were going to show the truth to the world, the truth about history hidden until now.

"May I take the notebook back with me?" Ada said as they walked.

Elias' fingers froze on the bag. There was a wariness to him that wasn't there before—fear that that the diary would get lost.

He forced himself to slacken, offering a tired smile in her direction and saying the accursed words: "Yeah, yeah, of course. No problem!"

She smiled, inclining her head in agreement. Elias unzipped his bag while he kept walking, fingers digging around for the said diary.

"H—Here it is." Elias bit his tongue as he handed over the diary, the tale of Safet. There was longing in his fingers, now that he understood how important the diary was. It was something that belonged in the museum, not in the hands of someone he had met a few days ago, nor in his own hands.

Ada seemed blind to the emotion stirring in his eyes, letting her nails run up and down the folds of the paper. The spine. The careful binding of the cover. She then smiled, bowing politely. "May I go to my own place to translate?"

"Yeah, go ahead," Elias answered numbly.

In response, Kane raised an eyebrow in his direction, questioning in a silent manner. He met his gaze with a bitten lip, eyes unsettled as Ada left.

"Was that a smart idea?"

"We have to do what we have to do," Elias replied, his heart heavy in his chest. "We're on a tight schedule, if I was picky, we would have gotten nowhere."

Now, the change was obvious. He looked around with a sense of seriousness in his eyes, one that showed that he cared for this city as if it was a brother or sister he never had. He was in love with its past that had been buried underneath the land and tossed away by the people of this world.

He couldn't let it fall.

The chances that the diary was going to be taken away from him once revealed to the public was high. But he needed it for reference, for the complete and utter truth that lurked underneath the world's surface. He wanted it for his own, as selfish as it sounded.

"We're here, at the hotel." Kane held out an arm in front of Elias, snapping him from his daze.

Elias peered at the building.

February 3rd, 1993.

It was covered in scars. Each building in Sarajevo was on the verge of crumbling, miraculously still standing because of the people it had to hide.

It was protection, survival, a way of shielding them from fires, bombs, the weather, and bullets. Gray became even more tired, weathered, and torn away at.

Yellow paint peeled off the walls, glass shattered, and walls peppered with bullet holes.

Some of the buildings had burn marks and cracked plaster; others had fallen into rumble and lay in a heap at the side of the street.

It was what they had done to us. It's what they're doing to us, right now. They want to hurt us. They want to show us that we don't deserve this land. They want to destroy us. They want to erase us.

- Safet Kapić

In his mind's eye, stirred by something unknown, the building in front of him became riddled with holes, tan paint peeling away to reveal the white underneath, dust powdering everything within vicinity. One side had been utterly destroyed, bricks brought down to the ground and spilled over the concrete.

"Yo, Elias. Ya okay?"

Just like that, the vision was gone. The hotel became normal once more—standing and untouched aside from the graffiti that littered its sides.

"Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." Elias let a shudder ripple through his frame, pinching himself to rid of the vision fully. "Just got a little bit distracted."

"Lil' bit distracted, huh? Ya looked like you're in a different world. But we gotta get to work. C'mon, hurry up yer pace. Ya wanna stay inside the hotel or what?"

"If you want to. I'm open for working anywhere."

There was a huge gap between Elias' world and Safet's world, surely. He knew that.

But that didn't mean they weren't similar.