[04.07.2077, 20:51, SUNDAY]

Berlin basked in the light of the setting sun, sparkling bright red at the outlines of the skyscrapers. The summer day smothered the glittering city, the sun's rays warmly spilling across abandonned streets. Everything screamed an eerie silence, an unintelligible loudness that permitted no speech.

She did not break this silent agreement with the world, not even to respond to the blissful chirpings of the birds in the park. They danced from branch to branch above her head, eager to speak to her, eager to hear what she had to say, perhaps to tell them where everyone went. But their songs did not pierce through the veil of silence, they did not reach her.

What had happened roughly five minutes before - five whole minutes? She shuddered at the thought - seemed like distant memory to her, like something she might have experience in a different life, in a different reality. Right now, there was only the beauty of her surroundings, more radiant than she had ever seen it before, than she had ever been able to appreciate before. It was a symphony, the last display the city scenically offered of itself.

Three more minutes were granted to her, to further drink in the artwork and the music, to perceive the harmony between the silent city and nature, an alliance that would save neither.

Three minutes until the bomb hit.

Three minutes until those who had won at the time of the announcement would set down their mark as to why and prove it with a horrendous atrocity, the wiping out of an entire city, possibly accompanied by a just as horrendously high death toll - depending on the amount of people not yet in shelters, or the amount that naively believed they could flee the blast by car.

Three minutes until America officially ruled a battered Europe.

It was then that she saw him, sitting on the grass with a smile defying everything, head tilted, face turned towards the sun, eyes half closed. Casually he had an arm resting on his right knee that was lifted slightly off the ground and his left hand lay flat on the bristly lawn, fingertips dug into the rich earth. He did not see her, or he did not bother to look across.

It took her an eternity to realise she had stopped a few meters away to look at him. Even if advised and convinced to find a shelter now, they would both be too late. She remained silent, before finally moving and seating herself beside him.

The view was stunning. They gazed down a perfectly straight road that divided the city, slashed into the landscape like perhaps a huge canyon, with the shimmering red of the sun nestled at it's end, leaking it's light in a river through and across the street, the hot tar causing the air to bend the rays to look like true waves.

She clung to her legs, shape seized by a shiver as she wept in silence. It had been a mistake. She should have done as the radio had announced, she should have fled, she was a coward, not someone with a wish to suicide.

"It's hard to appreciate things until they are gone." spoke a soft, surprisingly calm voice, seemingly out of nowhere, so sudden it startled her into letting her knees go, till she realised it was spoken by the other absurdity sitting beside her. He had still not moved.

Her gaze drifted back to the sun that bled out, leaving the face of the full moon as the only shining disc in the sky, without competition, pale light oozing through the enveloping darkness.

"They just rarely tell you that this appreciation can destroy you." she added in a whisper.

And her fear fell away.