This literally came to me in a dream. There was more to the dream than Greece's fall from grace, but the rest of it is just either really weird or I forgot. As usual, only a little historical accuracy, and review! :D
The room was maroon colored, filled with trash and a glass monument. His head hurt as he slept, papers scattered left right and center, bottles cascading in wavelets along the corners of the room. A knee-deep sea of junk. His prison, quite literally, as the chains proclaimed.
He shifted within the coils of sleep. He could sleep anywhere, except for the memories that flew through. Right now, instead of napping outside in his mother's ruins, he was forced behind a desk, doing work that was undesirable, and ultimately pointless. He was falling deeper into a web of debt as the UN threw more and more Euros at his economy. His own money was worthless, and he had to work it off. But for every form filled out and filed, it tripled. Impossible.
As a young nation, the first thing he remembered was light. Beautiful golden light, streaming in through a window fogged around the edges with rust and dust and gold, and his mother, beautiful like the light, picking him up and smiling, green eyes meeting green eyes. When he grew old enough to speak, she told him she'd found him curled in a pile of stray cats. He clung to his mother's skirts, watching with wide, awe-filled eyes at the world around him being built up to a shrine of magnificence. Buildings, famous, and literature, almost as famous, and the beauty of a Spartan phalanx marching out to war against the Macedonians, or the perfect symmetry of Athens and the Parthenon. His mother raised him to shoulder her burden, the marvelous empire laid out like jewels in front of him. To be his.
And then there was the passage of time, and the creation of enemies, and then a beautiful time living with Cyprus and Turkey and Egypt and even TRNC, the ones that made up the oasis, and all the friends and more enemies he could get. A normal life, though when Macedonia and Persia finished off his -his mother's- empire once and for all, he'd hung his head down and cried.
But his friends and enemies made up for the loss, and he was happy again.
He jolted back awake, rattling the bottles that'd built up on his desk. Sleep used to be his drug of choice, but it still hurt from when he'd fallen. He was an empire, and falling for the first time had hurt. Rising slowly only to decline again. And in the heat of it, he'd made a stupid gamble.
"You're selling the Parthenon? And all the rest of the temples?" Cyprus's voice rang back clear as day. Again, he felt regret. He was old, even if he didn't show it or actively complain about it like China or Japan. He should never have done it.
He'd rallied. That was a way to put it.
He turned and cleared the bottles off the old, stained form he'd been trying to fill out. Hardly paying attention to the papers, he placed his forearms on the desk and massaged his temples before sliding his glasses off his face and closing his eyes.
The memories. The cursed memories.
What had inspired him to do that? To just reach out? Were his empire days waking up, stirring inside him like a medusa? Nonetheless, he'd funded his army. First to be absorbed was Cyprus, nearly his little brother, and then TRNC's insolence. Why? Gone now, even when he was beat back, adding a third layer of scars.
He lay his head on the desk and fished around in the bottommost drawer for a new bottle. Kill the memories and the aches in his back. An empire could only fall so many times before something went wrong.
The room was dark, and the only light was dusty and orange, a bar of sunlight gleaming through the shuttered windows and the layers of dust on the careful sculptures of glass bottles and broken stubs of pencils, empty pens, even the dust itself was shaped. The one thing left he could do in his life, the one thing he could control. A Parthenon of glass and anything, a memorial to all the things he'd done wrong.
He'd claimed Japan and taken a bite out of Italy before the German forces put up a good fight and decided now was the best time out of any to test their new weapon. He'd woken up one time, snapping out of the battle-weary daze he was frozen in -a general can only kill so much- to the world gone out of focus. Impossible to see. And thus he'd lost, the bomb tearing a hole in his outlying islands, and rendering him sightless for a week, before the surrender and the terms of it were official, and the reparations had given him the square-lensed glasses.
Everyone hated him now, which is why England kept him penned down here in the dust-gatherer room, where everyone must've forgotten about them. He wondered if his people were happy serving under Russia, and laughed at the thought. Of course not, look at him now, all jutting bones and planes. Green eyes still vibrant, but clouded with the drink. The scars were bleeding again, and he groaned and popped his back, vertebrae stretching and creaking.
Too many things. He took the bottlecap off and poured the scalding liquid down his throat. He missed the sunlight, missed the scents of wine and cheese and the roads weaving round and round. His empire, he missed it all the way a prisoner missed freedom. Which is what it was, but it is and will always be.
It was too dark to see the words on the paper and the scars had stopped, so he slumped back in his chair and did what he did to pass the time. The words of the Oddessy flowed out, worn smooth by constant repetition, and he sang it in a mellow, deep tone, trying to imitate the way Homer had done.
He was so lonely in here, so he imagined Odysseus next to him, and the muscled hero was there. He closed his eyes, and heard the shouts in Greek, the spray flying over the bow as the ship seesawed wildly in the wind. He was sailing with them, sailing past Charybdis and Scylla, sailing onwards to Ithaca, to home.
He opened his eyes and refused to cry. He owed himself that much. Never cry. Never show weakness. His mother's voice in his head as he learned at Sparta, small brown-framed face stern with concentration. Sleep like a bound creature, and a thousand loves until the sun. His mind was confused again, and he lay his heavy head on the comfortable pillow of paper. He wondered if he was sick again, and decided against it. Russia admittedly had a good economy idea, but it was too different, like getting a heart transplant and rejecting it.
In his moments of deepest misery he knew they'd forgotten about them. He didn't blame them. He was too prideful, too confident in the fact his empire could be rebuilt, and if he soared too close to the sun, he would fall. Fall and miss the cool ocean, but land on a thousand upthrust spears of hopeful men and the sudden thought: I can't do it. England's voice as the nations had forced him, alive and active, hissing and spitting like a cat, into the room that became the only thing he'd seen for centuries. "You have done this to yourself, and here you will stay." And all the regretful hardness in the faces of stone, looking down upon a wild creature for the pound.
The world had gone differently after that, a recession of sorts, and the inflation had risen to match him. Empires leave impacts, and withdrawing them was pulling teeth. The last news he'd heard -the last paper he'd been given- he'd heard England and China conversing in hushed tones outside the door, and he'd shifted in his shackles and pressed his ear to it.
"This can't go on! We're all spiraling down! You're older; tell us what's wrong."
"I can't tell you, aru. There is not enough money to go around anymore. Think what happened to America, aru! Remember?"
There was a pained silence, and then "...I'd almost forgotten him. Why did you have to bring him up?"
"Because," said a voice he didn't recognize, which startled him. "Because it is all an alliance."
The frigid silences of the two nations told him the others hated his nation too. "Oh. It's you, Macht."
Macht? Were new alliances being made? The last time this had happened...he couldn't remember. It hurt, not remembering, but the sting of the scars as a warning erased the thoughts.
"You only think everything is an alliance because of the War of Balance, and there were no winners, you bloody fool! You came out of Germany and Austria, Prussia and Switzerland, that block of land! You're what most of Eurasia used to be!"
There was a slam, and the sounds of England choking. "Insult us? Insult me? Why, I'd thought you were more intelligent than that. You do not insult the one that has conquered Russia."
England didn't respond, and China shouted "You're killing him, aru! As much as I hate him, he's the only original left!"
"So?" asked Macht archly. "There only needs to be one alliance."
There was the ever familiar sound of a knife being unsheathed, and China went silent, suddenly.
Macht...German for Power, for power is what made up that nation, and the nations in the original...War of Balance were the Germanic ones.
How had he not noticed? Had he not cared? But the truth was, only the key on a non-existent nation's neck could free him. England was gone, dissolved into Macht, as well as China. It was pretty much assured that he ruled nearly the whole place, and sooner or later he would remember him and take him out.
An ocean for the hubris of Icarus to fall into.
But until then...Greece, or the nation that used to be called Greece before being annexed by a nation dissolved, had work to do.
A\N: This came out far different than I imagined, and a lot different from the dream, and it seems like it just rambles on and on and on about I don't even know. Also, I made a derp, I wrote that the Coliseum was in Greece...oops...but I fixed it! *bows* Here you go.