Take me away from time and season
Far, far away we'll sing with reason

This is one of the moments that I begin to think that hope is nonexistent; a memory from better days, a light at the end of a tunnel that I am not even halfway through. My bones are stiff as if my physical body matches that of my true age, every century I have lived through taking their toll on me all at once. My eyes are blurred, stinging as much as the sores on my body. And although I haven't yet broken for real, it's utterly pathetic.

We have been through things that a human could not even bear a fifth of. We have seen tens of wars, been in tens of wars, and felt the suffering of generation after generation of our people.

This is only another one. This is merely something that will end up in the books again. Someday I will read those and again it will be nothing more than a past experience, a brief moment of pain.

That was supposed to be my mantra. I keep forgetting now, it keeps slipping.

I cannot do anything as of now.

My blood stains the bottoms of the walls, like like red shadows of clumps of grass found by walls anywhere...I have no memory of the last time I have seen walls other than that of Russia's. Nothing but the same color of bruised hard-boiled eggs, a white aged and darkened. Like my skin, ashy; my hair, dirtied. On the ceiling of this hell of a room is a long, dark crack. I wonder if one of these days a crack will end up in my skull and I'll be out of this misery.

But ah, the Gilbert Beilschmidt decades ago wouldn't have been thinking like that, would he.

I always end up in the corner of the room, away from the tall window with four rows of rusted panes because the very thought of snow makes my stomach grow cold now - it is merciless, hard and packed and up until the third pane already, but Russia knows how to keep his house warm, I'll give him that.

The door wails as it moves open, even if only for the smallest bit, and I look up. I make out my visitor through unfocused, uncooperative eyes and feel my lips crack and my teeth bare the slightest bit.

"Ungarn."

She twitches at the sound of her in my own language, thick and guttural especially through the congealed blood in my sinuses and my sandpaper throat. She closes the door behind her softly, and I feel her footsteps through the wooden floor as she makes her way to me. Her weak shadow casts over me through the thin, gray light of Russia's winter mornings. I can barely lift my head to meet her eyes.

"Poroszország," she addresses me, in a quiet that fills this little space in the empty room. Slowly, painfully, she drops to her knees and stares at me, taking in the mottled lavender and red and yellow on my body, like dull watercolors on an old canvas. I raise an eyebrow at her and stare back, my skin pricking unpleasantly. She doesn't have it as bad as I do - and for that I am thankful - the bruises only barely peer through her collar and sleeves. We share the same weary look, the circles under once bright eyes like bruises, our words flattened by weight of the Soviet Union's hands.

"What did you do the last time Russia came in," she hisses, eyeing the gash on my collarbone with a deep scowl.

The chuckle wrenches its way through my larynx, colliding with fluids and coming out in staccato rasps that make me tremble. "I spat. Told him that America would beat his ass, he would get what he deserved for doing this to all of us. And that he was a bastard and scum." I almost winced as the searing pain ghosted once again through the laceration below my neck.

"You're an idiot, Prussia." Her eyes are only the faintest bit sad, darkened with the same disbelief and annoyance they always were when I did things like that.

"Might as well," I snarled.

The silence fell heavily, like a bucket of snow dumped onto a road. I shifted, the cuffs on my arms clinking. My haunches burn as I've been sitting on them for - God, I don't know - and I spread my legs in front of me instead. I can feel the blood pulsing, pounding at my temples like seconds on a clock, ticking away the time we've wasted stewing in this silence. My eyes flit up, through my unkempt fringe and right at her.

If I imagined hard enough...if I went past the layer of abuse the Soviet Union veiled on us...

If I pushed all of this away for now and escaped to centuries ago, peeled back the awful, grey skies as if there was endless, beautiful, familiar bright blue underneath it all; long green grass merely smothered by the cruel snow...

"I want to go back." My voice almost shakes, it's so goddamn pathetic and I hate it, but suddenly the emotion crashed over me like a wave and chokes, more than the Soviet Union and more than the cuffs and my collar and it's too much, too horrible, to terrible- "before all of this, just you and me when we were kids." Back, back, far back to the clean air and warm sun and cool winds, to the rushing brook and sturdy trees. To days where pride and adrenaline coursed through my veins, where I knew the power of being an empire. The days where I did not worry about the war; when I was at the top of the world clanking kegs of alcohol with my knights and singing to the valiant me. The ones where I would meet her by the river, caked in dirt and grinning madly, and we would spar and swim and watch the stars, lulled to sleep by the crickets and the babble of rushing water.

Before her union with Austria, the one that had pushed her to unnecessarily mold herself into something ladylike, unnatural, unlike her, only to end in ruins and agonized, short-lived glances. Before her getting dragged into the Ottoman Empire, when the scars laced her body, veins on the surface of her skin; her strong shoulders sagged with the weight of it.

In between the violent wars of Europe, those years where I knew peace and lived in it, in this brief, faraway, unreachable times.

I want to see Erzébét - the person whose smile annoys me and gives me hope, who fights with me and patches me up, again and again and again, the person, for a moment not the nation - her smile again, white and refreshing against her skin, tanned gold from the sun, see her eyes through the wild mane of hair she never kept tidy. I want the gleam of our sword and the adrenaline coursing from metal to my hands like heat, our young voices carried by the wind.

I don't feel the hot tears cutting through the dried blood on my cheeks and pooling in my collar, not until she wipes them away with her palm, as rough and as cold as mine, and my eyes refocus. As if the stained glass windows of sunlight days shatter and I reel back into the cold reality of the room and its white walls spattered with my own blood. My eyes are failing me, and for a moment all I see is her, stark against the pale walls. Her eyes are the kindest color I have seen in what seems like a lifetime, eyes that aren't as cold and cruel as the Soviet Union's...

Forests. Her eyes are the foliage that shade us from the sun, the leaves on flowers and fruit and the soft grass underneath bare feet. Her eyes are the blur of trees as we run through the woods, tumbling over pebbles and roots, exhilarated and dizzy with the sweet, fresh air. Home. Her eyes are home.

I wipe her tears with my own hands, steadily, purposefully. She breaks, then; comes undone into my hands and sinks lower to the floor and yet she rests her hands on my neck, touch light, her thumbs stroking almost imperceptibly at my jaw.

"I want to, Gilbert, you know I do too. I want this to never have happened, I want to go back to lifetimes before this." She breathes heavily, tears pooling hotly from her eyes like a river rushing in between trees, clear and clean through the dirt and the blood. "But that's the thing. We can't, we won't ever be able to. And all we can hope is to survive this and push forward, and then we can have better days again. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next month, next year. All that counts now is how much willingness we have left to fight for ourselves and believe in better days just in reach."

I feel her pulse as my hands circle her wrists. They're bruised with the faintest of gray, but I feel it; she is alive, she breathes, and her heart beats. And while they may have broken me, stripped me of my name and of my right as a nation, she is alive. Hungary will survive Soviet Rule, and Erzébét will live to see the sun again. And maybe things aren't so bad after all.

"I can't wait for until this is all over."

"I know. But I've waited for other things longer."

"What things?"

You, I want to say, I've been waiting since the thirteenth century. Instead I feel myself smile bitterly, my shoulder shrugging upwards. "Lots of things." I think about wilted flowers and gifts of daggers and bows, broken bottles and shadowed clock faces. I wonder if she remembers those small things - or were they too far back now? - and if the things she's given me mean anything, too. But it was never so strong; not as strongly as mortals loved, for they had such a short time, and we had all the time in the world. It is something calmer, steadier, spanning through decades and seasons and centuries. There was a time I faltered for a bit and then I loved Roderich, too (and maybe I still do, maybe). Love between our kind is strange; the love humans would call complicated we call simple.

She almost smiles. "I hope your waiting will end soon."

I do, too. In my mind's eye, everything is brighter. Smiles. I see them smile and I see the sun, walk down the streets of Berlin carefree and liberated. I hear Roderich's music, clear and gentle; feel sweets melt on my tongue, like pastries on lazy, sweet afternoons. Ludwig smiling, standing strong and proud and happy. Maybe we could go to the woods again; pile into the car with swords we used to slay and claim and dance with steel among trees and by a river, like before, but not quite.

And then we fall into silence again, leaned against the wall. Her little finger hooks around mine. I am able to breathe painlessly again.

Slowly, slowly, as the snow ceases and the sky grows the slightest shade lighter, I close my eyes.

This is only another one. This is merely something that will end up in the books again. Someday I will read those and again, with relief and horror, because it is over. Hope is not gone yet; hope is the sun hidden behind the clouds and one day I will open my eyes to stronger, brighter sunlight and see green instead of white, blue instead of gray.

Someday I will only remember this. And life will go on again.

Strengthen my heart in times of sorrow
Light the way to bright tomorrows

alright so I haven't been very active on ffn anymore, I usually upload stuff on ao3. but I'm really picky about uploading, too, so please don't expect much.

this was written for tumblr user thetailgunner for the Fryingpan Fest New Year Fic Exchange.