The morning air is fresh and clear after last night's rain, but the sky is interlaced with gauzy gestating clouds. The waters of the Nerevta shine a deep inky blue in the weak daylight, sure to reflect the dawning sun.

The house they finally stop at is indistinguishable from the rest of the block: skinny, teetering upwards as tall as its rudimentary stone structure will support, with a chipping red door facing the cobblestoned street.

The woman who answers the door when he knocks is nearing her mid-twenties but has the face to make strangers assume she's younger; thick black hair, large eyes, dark smooth skin; of gypsy decent, or thereabouts. Wanderlust's blood ran through her veins at the least.

She looks at each of them slowly before she speaks, light-brown eyes narrowing.

"Where are you from?" She asks in good but accented English, arms crossed.

"Not here." Sherlock answers. "Same as you."

Her eyebrow arches. "You guessed this?"

"I never guess, I know." He smiles then, his most charming smile, and practically hears Mycroft's suppressed eye roll. "I believe Milo is expecting me."

"There is no one here by that name."

He offers her a 50 mark note. She stares at him hard for a moment before reaching out and grabbing the money.

"One moment." She answers, tucking the bill away.

"Sherlock—" Mycroft begins, and he can hear the doubt in his brother's voice. For all of his brilliance, Mycroft had an annoying tendency towards suspicion. Holmes' blood and all that.

"He's here." Sherlock interrupts. "I know it. The Buddha is in the window; honestly, it's like you assume bribery isn't a second instinct here. And you must be mistaken, my name is Petyr."

Mycroft is silent, but stiff-backed.

The door creaks open and the woman reappears.

"Come in."

Sherlock steps through the threshold, into a narrow, dim corridor panelled with rustic wood and brick. Through the room at the end of the hall, the sound of water and clinking dishes. Upstairs, there is movement.

The door shuts behind them.

"Follow."

There's a man in the kitchen, older than the woman but not by much, and looking like a bull in the shape of a man. He glances over them with the same callousness as his w—oh, stupid, of course they're related, they share the same eye colour, not to mention the attached earlobes and the slightly deviated septum—before setting down his spoon into a nearly-finished bowl of creamed polenta.

"You are Mr—?" The man begins in an accent thicker than his sister's, but Sherlock cuts him off.

"No names, please. You understand why."

The man nods, holding out his hands. "Of course. What can I do for you?"

"Ja sam tražim Milo."

"Ah." The man stands, hurriedly wolfing down the rest of his polenta, and sets the bowl down with a clatter, striding past them into the next room, gesturing for them to follow. "This way."

He leads them through the den, carpeted in rich red rugs and home to a natty old couch, before opening a door and letting them into a small, cramped office, with piles of papers building towards the low ceiling and a dinosaur of a computer on a desk bending with the weight of various stacks of books and a lamp shaped like a Hawaiian hula dancer.

"Milo will come in one moment." The man says, before leaving them alone.

"'One moment' seems to be the family motto." Mycroft says monotonously, observing the titles of the books on the desk.

The woman who answered the door comes in, collecting the sundried abandoned coffee mugs and plates into a stack on a tray, a dishtowel slung over her shoulder.

"What do you need Milo for?" She asks, examining a cup where a neglected evaporation of coffee took place long ago.

"We're looking for someone." Sherlock answers.

"Da, he gets those often. People go missing all the time here, you know. Why can he help you?"

"The man I'm looking for is a British citizen—"

"British, French, American, European…you all look the same to us. Unless you are a seven-foot tall Nigerian with a flashing sign attached to you, you may as well be invisible here."

"Thank you for that vote of confidence." Sherlock mutters as she leaves, tray in hand.

"She has a point, Petyr." Mycroft says after a moment of silence. "He isn't very indistinguishable. Quite ordinary, in fact. One of the reasons, if I recall correctly, that drew you to him in the first place."

"Yes, thank you Boris for that enlightening information—"

Mycroft's face sours at his nom de guerre just as the woman returns, wiping her hands on her towel. "What is this man's name?"

"We'd prefer to tell Milo himself, if he will deign to grace us with his presence." Sherlock responds acerbically.

The woman shrugs. "My name is Zana. I'll be helping you today."

"Although it is appreciated, Zana, your help is not required."

"Then why come see Milo?"

Sherlock purses his lips. "I was hoping to enlist his services."

"Why? You have mine."

Sherlock halts the beginning of a rude retort—the essentials of which were telling her to shove off—as realization sets in.

"Milo, Zana; two names, one person." She shrugs then catches his face. "What? I am seeing you now, aren't I not—and I got 50 marks. Worse deals have been made. This way, I am safe when I want to be."

"Your English is better than I assumed it was." Sherlock replies through his teeth, frustrated at having not seen the truth sooner.

"Kao što je i tvoja srpski," she replies and he can't repress the grin that emerges. She has a double-identity and a spine.

This will be fun.

It takes them a day and the better part of the next to get from Dejčići to Mostar. As the cart bumps along dirt paths worn into the earth and the sky bruises deeply into morning, John leans against the front of the cart and stares up at the stars. This far out in the country the view is incredible. It makes him feel lucky to see it; makes him grateful that they survived all the smoke and fire and violence so that he might see this with his own eyes.

He doesn't remember seeing so many stars in his life. Thousands pepper the infinite sky, passed over occasionally by wispy clouds, and he can't help but look up into them. They've remained the same, more or less, for centuries, ignorant and uncaring to the bloodied, surging tide of life that looked up into them for answers. Amazing.

He'd pointed out a few constellations to Mikheia without any response before the boy dropped off, carried into a deep sleep by the adrenaline crash and an exhaustion that was burdened with a heaviness that is impenetrable to outsiders and incongruent to any other emotional state. The weight of death sits in the cart with them, has bound them inextricably to one another, and tied their wrists together in the most terrifying and brutal way humanly possible. Although John tried to reason with him—for all they knew, Moran was still alive since there hadn't been time to check—he quickly realized the headspace his friend was in, and let him weather his storm alone as long as he wanted to.

He understood it well enough. Of course he did. His first battle alone had ended in him cornered and panicking, allowing an enemy combatant to charge at him, then hurriedly firing three bullets into his skull at point blank range. The body had crumpled into the sand and he had learned what it was then to feel as if he was a god. The heady power that had coursed through him, the knowledge that he had done this, and then the immediate following of the overwhelming fear that anyone could do this to him as well, if he let him. If he was stupid.

Later, adrift in the medical bay after his first wartime injury—a sprained ankle after a rough rugby match, go figure—he realized that the other man was not stupid. Of all the times in all existence to be stupid, war was not one of them. Ignorant, sure, egotistical and rash, absolutely, but stupid could not be applied here. That implied that whoever had won—John himself, in this case—had been smarter than his opponent had. That he had used some sort of higher intellect and that was why he was sitting here, breathing and eating and alive, not the other man. That wasn't why. He had just been lucky. He had just drawn his gun faster.

Mikheia had been lucky. Smart, too, of course, with a good instinct, but goddamned lucky more than anything. Of all the times in his life that he could have died, he didn't. Gunshot wounds, red-hot pokers, explosions, fires, a hail of bullets—this boy was a marvel. His coterie of injuries would soon rival John's, and Sherlock's, if he made it out of this intact.

He looks over at the boy, slack-jawed in slumber, arms curled into his chest, the stars dusting the lightening sky above his curly hair, dirtied and tangled from their frenzied flight. He looks at him, and wonders if there will be a day when he will have a normal life.

"Georgiy?" He calls softly to the man, who sits behind him on the cart on a small cushioned pillion seat.

"Da? Yes?"

"I'm sorry. For all of this—for everything. You'd still have a home if it wasn't for me. You'd still—"

The old man cuts him off with a wave of his hand. "Come…" He replies, patting the seat beside him. "Sit. It smells like chicken shit back there."

John stands, carefully manoeuvring to the front, grateful for the opportunity to work his sore muscles. They had deemed it too risky to stop for anything but the occasional piss break, and even those were rushed.

He settles in beside Georgiy, adjusting his feet so that he doesn't kick Sasha, curled up and sleeping in the bed of the seat.

"I build the house with my wife, as you know. We live there fifty years before she pass. Now that she gone, I go too. There was nothing there any longer but shells. Like a tree who rots from the inside. Nothing, nothing any longer…"

"Where will you go?"

"My children—all three—they live in Mostar. I think I was a good father enough for a roof over my heads, da?" He grins and John smiles. "And you, Janko, you will find your man? Your Sheerlocks?"

"Sherlock, yes." He nods. "Well, I hope I will."

"And the boy?" Georgiy asks, nodding backwards to the sleeping Mikheia. "What of him?"

"I don't know." John admits, speaking aloud for the first time what he's been turning over since the boy saved his life by pulling him out of the river. "I can't take him with me."

"Why?"

John lets out a mirthless laugh. "I've killed too many men, Georgiy. I can't kill him too."

"You ask him this?"

"No. I know he'll try to join me. He's very persistent…always seems to get what he wants one way or the other."

"You needing someone who knowing Serbian, or Russian maybes."

"That's not worth his life. I've adapted before…I can do it again."

Georgiy shrugs. "If this is your choices, that is alrighty. He stay with me until he going home."

"Thank you."

"Is no worry. We went to one war together, what is another?"

"One war?" John says, brow furrowing.

"Da, the one of Republika Srpska and…all else. My family, we Croatian by blood, so we hide in the hills, away from fighting. This is why my home there. Mikheia, his family Russian, so they go too. The VRS, they bomb markets, they kill woman and rape too, babies die…we thought war would not come back after Stalin i ostali, but—war came. I did not love any who died, but I was sad. All the times, I was sad. My country ate itself, for what? The war, we who survived it, survived together. We will this one too."

Georgiy glances back at Mikheia and turns to John, grim faced.

"He live with me, da…fine. But he stay away from my daughter."