I used to be able to hold your hand and tell you everything would be okay.
Prussia stands on a street corner that used to be his and lights a cigarette. It's a bad habit, he knows, and he should kick it but somehow he can't seem to bring himself to care.
The entire city seems sepia-toned to him and, once he stops to think about it, he realizes he doesn't know its name anymore. That should bother him but it doesn't. He takes a long drag on the cigarette and puffs out smoke into the cool November night, watching it with a vaguely interested expression on his face. He wonders how he got here in the first place, he wonders why the streets he once knew so well seem like serpents twisted to form a labyrinth that confine him within the city that once held his broken heart.
These nights are the nights that Prussia doesn't believe in anything anymore. The iron cross around his neck is now a symbol of something he'd rather not be associated with. Once upon a time in a far off land, he fought for his faith, but not anymore. Prussia doesn't fight much at all these days, except for the drunken bar fights he occasionally gets into, and even those tend to end badly. He's getting weaker, or maybe he's always been weak. Maybe the others simply got stronger while he was left behind.
Extinguishing the butt between his fingers, he leaves the cross roads and begins to walk with a strange purpose through the streets he cannot name. He knows he is searching, but for what? Some remnant, perhaps? Some sign that this place used to be his. A sigh, a memory, a tear? Something that says that he was here, that he once belonged. But this place isn't Prussia anymore, this place is Germany. Perhaps it would be better if it had always been that way.
The throngs of night-dwellers part as he passes them, compelled by some sense of foreign dread. This man is lost, a whisper in the back of their minds tells them, This man is lost, and if you follow him you will be lost too. Nations have a strange sense of charisma that draws their people towards them, but he, a dissolved nation, seems to have developed the opposite of that.
He thinks with a twinge of bitter jealousy of his friends. His friends whose names hold meaning beyond a distant, violent history. Spain is still Spain. He has survived wars and he has survived Guernica but he is still real and he still matters. France is still France. He has endured bloody revolutions and invasions but he is still alive, still has the right to pull clean air into his lungs. Germany . . . Germany is still Germany, even though he was not always so. He was once a little boy called the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire is dead, but Germany is not. Germany is still awake. More than his brother is. His brother who should have died on the other side of the wall.
Prussia is not Prussia. He is what you get when you repeat the word enough times so that it looses all meaning and becomes nothing but a guttural utterance. Not a nation, but a name. He had briefly considered merely calling himself Gilbert, his human name, but quickly dismissed the thought. Nations do not call each other by their human names. Those are fake names. To call one by their human name is to make-believe that they experience the same things as humans, feel the same emotions. And while the nations appear human, they are countries. They can love like humans do, they can hurt like humans do, they can break like humans do, but that does not change the fact that they have seen more than any person has. They are stronger than humans and they remember more, too.
Prussia wonders if he is dying. His senses seem to fade as the days trickle by, things he should never forget are being forgotten. His days as a knight grow fuzzy around the edges and he fears they will soon be gone, too. The great wars seem like lucid dreams to him and perhaps all they ever were.
He cannot summon the tears to mourn his deterioration; in fact, his feelings are leaving him, too. He no longer cares that Spain would rather spend time with Romano than him. He no longer cares that France will never forgive him for things he can only half recall. He no longer cares that Germany is not the Holy Roman Empire anymore and never will be again.
But he is lonely. He will always be lonely.
"To each his own," he says, and he almost believes it.
Harsh piano music drifts from an open doorway and Prussia wrinkles his nose. It is not refined music. It is not Beethoven or Chopin or Mozart. It is greasy, filthy music that Prussia doesn't want to hear. He grew up listening to Austria's fragile fingers pluck out notes and this seems wrong to him. Though he's accepted that he, Spain and France are no longer as close as they once were, the fact that Austria doesn't come to visit him anymore pains him in a way it shouldn't.
Austria is an enemy. Hungary is an enemy. Those things that always seemed so sure are now muddled in his brain and he wants to scream because he doesn't know if it's 1648 or 1947. Or maybe it's neither of those, because he's been thrown far from his own time. He doesn't belong in his brother's city. He is friends with Austria. He's in love with Hungary. Or maybe it's the other way around. Or maybe it's neither, because Prussia isn't sure he loves anyone anymore.
People are giving him odd looks as he clutches a flickering gas light and tries to hold back desperate cries. Like an Alzheimer's patient awakening from a trance, he is scared and afraid.
Prussia thinks he is only dreaming. The years since his dissolution have run together like paint to form an ugly blue color he used to wear. The color that used to carry his name but not anymore.
He doesn't find it strange that the lights still work, that he can read the clocks he passes by. He knows he's dreaming, he must be dreaming because otherwise his world has fallen apart a long time ago and no one bothered to tell him.
These abstract ideas fit together well in his mind. They make sense to him. He understands the vague thoughts that tell him surrealist notions that have gone out of fashion years ago. This is what he has always understood, generalizations and bigger thoughts. He's never been good at breaking things down and looking at them piece by piece. That is his brother's job.
To the dreaming nation, everything is nothing and nothing is everything because Carroll-esque nonsense is more agreeable than the cold hard facts he's trying to hard to ignore.
Prussia was dissolved in 1947 on the 25th of February after being deemed the root of Nazism in Law No. 46. It's support of the Nazi regime and . . .
It's the 21st century and Prussia is just now realizing he's lost everything.
It's time to wake up.