A/N: Technically this is something of an old fic, one I never did get round to typing, but now that's done enjoy it nevertheless.
Exeunt
Up goes the curtain with a wistful sigh, dust falling from brocade folds that had long lost their lustre and bit by bit the scene is revealed, like the image that gradually appears when a hand keeps wiping at a persistently frosty window.
Rows and rows of tall, imposing bookshelves, sheer, blank blue faces like so many cliffs, just a little too tall, just a little too narrowly spaced, and those unyielding surfaces just a little too pristine – albeit, like the rest of the room, brushed over fine grains of dust, layer upon layer, a silent, accusing testimony of neglect. Even so, they are dauntingly uniform, with no saving blemishes to cling to: no stains of the underside of coffee cups to cast a life ring, no helping hand in the lack of once-sticky fingerprints, rather, they seem all too ready to fall, a tsunami of aconite-blue covers to come crashing down, and the dust would rise, then settle again. Ashes to ashes.
What kind of creature would dwell here? No-one human, surely, the idea of solid flesh and hot magma-red blood so close under the surface would be completely at odds with the room. A ghost, then, or a worn shadow, insubstantial as a faded photograph that had been pushed around in the bottom of drawers for too long, the colour slowly falling away from people's memories. Weary footfalls leaving the barest imprints on the ground. A flickering hologram, like the thin, moist, wrinkled film between the layers of an onion.
As it is, it's no other than Prussia, sauntering casually into view. Or 'The Awesome Prussia', to use his former title. Even if he had been the only one to acknowledge it.
One would look at him and think: what the heck is he doing here. He was too loud, too flashy, too corporeal. Like the boatman across the charcoal-grey waters to the Underworld, or the dark-cloaked Grim Reaper, scythe and all, suddenly sprouting a brilliant and garishly red goatee. 'Out of place' is hardly sufficient a description.
How did he wind up here, of all places? Especially since he shouldn't be anywhere to begin with. What's an overdue library book doing amongst these neat, well turned-out volumes? He's been on the yellow brick road too long, it shouldn't have happened, the bandits were supposed to have detained him, the bronzed club that had felled the British Empire, Sinis and the pine that had shredded the Spanish Empire, and that specialized bed, off with a candle with you, Mongol, Qing, Russian, Ottoman, French Empires…chop-chop-chop, what's it to be, your head or your feet?
Poor Prussia, so faithfully following that narrow ribbon that promised of sunshine and daffodils and gold, as trusting in Rome's masonry and directions as a Pilgrim, cheerfully shouldering his burden and fighting past the lions with the promise of a castle in the sky. Poor Prussia; stupid, stupid Prussia. He should have realised that for all its thorns, there were a great deal too many primroses lining his path. Oh, Prussia, did you really expect to find the Emerald City? You didn't need to work quite so hard to arrive at the Roman Empire, anyone can see him in all his fallen glory, a pile of rubble for all the world to gawk at, to probe and dissect, to judge, to shake their heads and condemn. People in glass houses shouldn't have thrown stones, they say, as if they would have done differently. Then: we've developed more effective weaponry, and our walls are now bulletproof.
Heaven's net is wide, but it's mesh is fine. No-one had thought to tell Prussia that damnit, Hell's net was far wider. And oh, yes, is the mesh not fine. All the better to catch you with, my dear Prussia, no need for the cutesy frock and red-hooded cloak from the dress-up corner, don't you think I know that look? Empire where the sun never sets, for example, all he's got for company now is rain. So really, all those nations had reached the end of the road, after all. And after that, they'd run out of it.
The Wild West Wind had swept him away, as if he were some decaying, disease-ridden thing, like all the rest. Pestilence-stricken multitudes, all those leaves, they had to end up somewhere. And Prussia had created just the place: his own library, those ideas that were already far outstripped, that breath of mould, of decomposition – it's only fair, that you not only die, but provide your successors with your own corpses – even though the room is quite dry.
Ah, dry. Ask Prussia what he wanted most of all, and he wouldn't reply 'power' or 'freedom' or death or even his brother. Beer, he'd say. That's when he remembers his beloved brother, the one for whom he'd risked becoming a living cheese-grater, riddled with bullet holes, to cross into his territory, just to glimpse him, through the grimy windowpanes, hammering away. (No need to call to him, the hunched-over and disgraced figure in the wan yellow light. Quite enough troubles of his own, the candle glared weakly. Off with you.). Or was that another time, all that clock-making? It makes no difference.
Quite right he needs his brother. He's thirsty, after all.
***X***
Prussia was bored, right out of his…mind. Not, that wasn't right, it sounded incomplete, as if it were a chord, and he'd missed out a note. And try as he might, he couldn't find that elusive…what? and so he hadn't, except to begin with. Only during the first few days (or weeks or months or years or maybe just a few hours) of wildly running in circles and…and….
And what? Prussia frowned, cocking his head to one side from his sitting position (half-sprawled on the floor, back slumped against the bottom of a bookshelf, when had he gotten there?), eyes hazing over. Two poisoned chalices. Eye of newt and toe of frog, ha, ha.
He doodled idly in the dust, vaguely aware that somewhere on the edges of his mind, his memories and thoughts and whatnot were nosediving into some dark abyss, or something like that; his eyes glazed a little more, and now he could see, murkily, uncomfortably tangled branches, the colour of turbid water, a month's free cholera for every mouthful. Perhaps these contorted brown shapes groaned their neglect and confinement, perhaps they were the spirits of trees, though they certainly looked nothing like trees, or indeed anything but the embodiment of the completely, utterly and wretchedly tortured. Trees that might once have thrown apples at him, his mind supplied drolly. And a lot of apples had been thrown, be they by trees or not.
Beyond them, half-defined blurs that glowed, like luminescent scraps of lace, as they stepped almost daintily forwards, and hung there. They'd dissolve away if he tried to grab at them, and he'd be left with his hand outstretched, and nothing in his cupped palm but water. They were going anyway, though; despite Prussia's having been here for God knows (or maybe even God's lost count) how long, he has not flipped his lid. Sure, it's only attached by a few gauzy and very dubious strands, but his is (more or less) sane nevertheless, and he is not oblivious. Yes he is forgetting, but at least he knows it.
Just as he knows he should keep to a routine, familiar actions to anchor himself to. And not for the first time – obviously not for the first time – he is tempted to allow himself to be washed away – what was the difference, to be stuck here knowing – not raging, not fuming, just dully knowing – that he was stuck, or to be stuck here (oh the options!) giddily spinning away in La-la land, not caring a single whit. The choice is becoming increasingly difficult, and it's worrying that Prussia is finding it relieving that he's still denying this to himself. But of course, that thought was another proof of his sanity. No, no, he was sane, there was no reason to be questioning it, and no need for proof. (Right? Damn yes it's right!) He's thinking himself to madness (oh really?).
A routine, a routine, but just how he should have established one is beyond him. No way of keeping time, for one thing: Time could be asleep or running a marathon or doing triple-backflips for all the difference it made. (Or it could be offended, and now it was Tea-time forever.) And another: the goddamned silence. Like staring at a blank sheet of paper for decades on end. He may as well be a prisoner under interrogation, left in a soundproofed cell until he snapped and talked.
Started talking to himself, that is. First sign of madness and all that. It would take more than this to have Prussia asking himself to pass those scones, please, and do be a dear and wake the Dormouse, will you? He would be getting more, though, and if he were truthful, right now all he was doing was biting his nails and (he's had an epiphany, he's remembered the word-! It's 'awesome'. Better it'd stayed forgotten, nothing for it to describe in this whole pig-slop of a fiasco) waiting for some white-clad angel with snowy robes and a bright primary-yellow splash of a halo and fluffy little dove's wings (the kind perched grinning rather less-than-beatifically from atop a Christmas tree) to come sailing down and finally let him out of Purgatory – his own damned library, of all places – to finally make him go berserk.
Just you keep on waiting, Rapunzel.
***X***
There are so many of those books, it would have kept him occupied for at least a few days to read them all, but perversely enough he doesn't want to open them. Usually. But today (it's always safe to say 'today': he can never be sure of when 'yesterday' ended, nor the day he's currently in, so he's been in one heck of a long 'today'), all he's been doing is to mope around, lying on his back with his knees up, listlessly scraping at the dust ingrained into the cuff of his worn blue jacket with a ragged fingernail. Back, forth, back, forth, one-two-one-two, and in the end he'd gotten nowhere.
He was tired. Depressed, yes. Angry, certainly, and it was a good thing, as good as they went, anyway. It broke the monotony a little – even a goldfish would bump into the side of his bowl once in a long while. And don't even speak of self-pitying. Happily wallowing like some bloated, trussed-up pig.
Turn his anger into something positive, right. If he could turn it into anything, there'd already be fifty or so empty beer bottles rolling around on the floor.
The only thing he could turn was his head (with all its rusted gears jammed together with sticky, ever-collecting dust) to face those rectangular slabs of wasted paper, each an execution block. They'd brought him here. Yes, pin all the shortcomings on something else, and if it happens to be inanimate, why, so much the better, if that means it cannot argue back.
If none of these books had been made, would there have been another tree in Russia? Could he have hidden under that tree? And if he had, would General Winter have thundered past, would the ice have held, would he have claimed that terrible snow-clapped tundra, and with Russia as his, and no massive stretch of land to fight him, would he have been in time for the ferry down Alph via Kubla Kahn, that sunny ice-dome? He didn't think so.
Inevitable that all he'd got was a small two-person sculling boat. Welcome to Hades!
Scrap this. He was The Awesome Prussia.
So the Awesome Prussia lolled over to his side, and did the most interesting thing he'd done for several decades.
He opened one of his own diaries.
***X***
Today, I was so awesome….I was so awesome….was so awesome….so awesome….awesome….guess what, today I was-
Awesome? Well, if they weren't repetitive. Scratch that, his diaries were 'repetitive' (personified? Well, materialized, anyway), and boring into the mix. Though he'd seemed to have had a lot of fun, if fun was something to be as religiously followed as his meticulous entries, day after day after ostensibly triumphant (oh, and of course awesome) day.
He was pretty sure they (the days of fighting and regrouping and fighting and supposedly winning) hadn't actually run all that successfully as described. Or not described, in some cases, and Prussia assumes that these half-bridged gaps are in fact defeats he'd managed to turn into what could be (at first glance, and to someone very stupid) victories.
Take this one, for example. Russia. He'd gone to Russia (of course he had, forty damn years of being too cold). No; not that time, hadn't he tried (oh, that time, when the awesome Prussia was taking a break, and happened to visit Russia along the way? What a brat the bastard had been, even then.) Didn't he have to go back home too soon because (because Russia was too cold, anyway, it even says it in your diary!).
Prussia can feel the fingerprints of those (not defeats) rising, the oils beneath the skin tugging at the corners of his mind, vying for remembrance.
He ignores it. Maybe it's just to feel like he's got some modicum of choice, however minute.
But mostly because these painstakingly recorded events, fabricated or otherwise, are all he has to go on. He could at least let himself feel that it'd all been worth something; even Prussia needed the solid, unwavering assurance of the bible he'd penned, and not that this is what happens after they fall: nothing. Because it never meant anything to begin with.
It's common knowledge that history is written by the winners. Check: according to Prussia, he's always been the winner. And so, will you look at that, it's history that Prussia's written.
Prussia sits up, and he lets himself feel excited. He may as well. Follow it, follow it, that precious line of thinking, the golden skein out of the labyrinth. Don't tempt Fate just now by thinking of dead ends.
History. And so. So. It has to be written for the survivors, right? And you had to survive to win, right? The only survivor, that's what he was, that's why he was alone, it was all true, all for him, it had to be, if no-one was disputing him…
…right?! Wrong. Scraping rites from mid-air just doesn't work.
Flip the coin, and then you'll see the side that everyone else sees. And believes. That's history, and the minority had better sit tight and watch the shadows. After all, Prussia is neither a winner nor a survivor, and that's right. Or should that be he was?
If he's here, where there's the most of him, in these diaries, then doesn't that mean the true survivors have forgotten, and so he doesn't exist; he never was? And so there is no 'was'. Or 'is'. Is this what happened to the two warriors, one stern, impassive, and the other passionate, is this what happened to the blue-eyed boy who never came home? Are they bound by their own books, only existing through the pages, to be twisted and shaped as the survivors desire, and do they scream? In their nothingness: is the air full of people that never existed? He is one of them; is he one of them?
(Little manikin, who are you to think that you're one of the thousands facing the cave wall, let alone one of the few to find the exit? To realise what all those images were; mere shadows? Who's to say you have a place to think? That's right, you're but the puppet, simply because. Don't stray too close to the fire, little manikin, you'll get burnt.)
It's true, all the world is a stage. (He lets himself fall back to the ground.)
It's just that Prussia never did stage his exit the same way he flaunted all the rest of his life. Just like he never learnt to bow his way out with dignity, to admit defeat. (The dust rises.)
Truly he has created the elixir of life. It's in all of these books (and there are many of those). He calls it ink.
And now there's no-one to watch. (He's still alive. He can't end. Even when there are no more lines for him to say, because just because the play has been discarded, doesn't mean it's finished.)
–Fin—(or not)