[align=center][size=9pt][font=andale mono]It had been two years, and the whole thing still felt like a fever dream. Even if he tried, it was still so strange to realize that everything that had happened was real, that it could not be undone and could not be changed. Not, of course, that he thought about it often - it still hurt far too much for that.
The truth was, it had all happened a little too fast for him to believe. The war had not been wholly unexpected - and, being of the appropriate age, he had gone off to fight for his country. He had not expected many other things, though: the horror war would bring him; the sight of his friends dying around him; the bomb that blew off half his left leg. This, of course, had taken him out of the war. However, he had not been able to go home, not yet - he had been forced to remain where he was, slowly recovering, slowly learning to move around again with only one leg. Once this was getting somewhat better, he had to deal with another fact: he was a prisoner. It was not his own comrades who had found him on the battlefield and carried him off, but their enemy. This had been a very small thing when he was still confined to bed, feverish and on the verge of death. It had remained small while he tried to sit up, attempted to hobble around on crutches. But it could not remain small.
Fortunately, the war ended before too long. The treatment he had received had not been unkind, and he had picked up a bit of the language in his time as a prisoner - but overall, he wanted to go home again. He had a fiancée waiting there for him, after all. They were young to be engaged, certainly, but they had been in love, and in the chaos of him going off to war he had wanted to leave her with a promise. It would have hurt if he had returned home to find her in the arms of another man, but such a hurt could have faded with time. Instead, he found her in the cemetery, a victim of illness, with only a gravestone to commemorate her. In another place, another time, he would have fallen into despair. As it was, he could not afford to. There was nowhere left to go home to, nothing left but the broken shards of the life he had left behind.
So he left.
Leaving was not hard. He had left places before, had stepped out onto the road with the wind at his face and the sun at his back. But before he had not had this sorrow weighing on his heart. Still, he went - what else could he do? He left, carrying only a coat and a violin case, hobbling along unsteadily on a wooden leg. He went to the city, where he had come from originally and where he had hoped to never return. And he played, sending melancholy notes soaring through the streets in exchange for a few coins - enough for a little bread, enough for one night here and there of sleeping in a real bed, enough once in a while for a new shirt, new pants. Shoes were always too expensive - especially when he could only ever use one. His hands were wrapped in rags; gloves were also unaffordable, but he needed to keep his hands warm, especially as winter approached. His violin was his only source of income. To lost his ability to play would be deadly.
It was on a cold November day that he went out to the street corner again, setting his violin case open at his feet, and lifted the old instrument to his shoulder. He was a young man - not more than twenty - with clear grey eyes and thick red hair, yet upon his shoulders seemed to rest the weight of the world. As he had done day after day, he closed his eyes and drew out the first sad notes, spinning an old folk song of lost love, feeling the pain come back as sharply as it always did. Perhaps if he could express it well enough, someone would have pity on him, would give him a few coins so he could buy himself something to eat.
