Well, you know, this one was quite fun to write.
"Toris? Eduard?"
Russia walked through the house, no reply to him was heard.
"Raivis?"
Nothing.
"Toris? Eduard? Raivis!" Ivan's voice trembled as the last few seconds of realisation set in.
"No…" He whispered, hot, salty tears trickling slowly down his face. Walking slowly back into the sitting room, he noticed a piece of paper sitting on the table. Picking it up, he saw it was a letter, and began to read.
Ivan,
You could think they're missing. Perhaps you've come to the conclusion that they've been kidnapped. Or maybe you think that they're just out, and forgot to leave a note, but that would be foolish, and above all other things you are not a fool.
Truth is Ivan, they're with me now. They took the chance while you were out to call me and I did what a good hero does and rescued the victims from the bad guy. So don't come looking for them, whatever you do. Your precious little Baltics are safe with me, don't worry.
Your old buddy,
Alfred.
Stumbling, Ivan put the letter on the table, and closed his eyes, sadness filling him up.
I'm all alone…
Then, carefully, he walked over to the couch, and drank himself to sleep.
His dreams were fragmented, distorted, he could not make anything out, until it shifted, and he saw a woman.
She had pale blue eyes, and light, ash brown hair that cascaded in waves around her shoulders. She was sitting on a throne, and singing with a voice that enchanted Russia, and when she sang, he saw that tears flowed unstoppable down her pale cheeks, and he had never seen such sadness.
Only felt it.
When he woke, Russia had a headache so intense that he thought for a second he had been shot. Feeling his head, eyes shut to the blinding morning light, he realised, with irony, that it was the worst hangover he had ever had.
Then, eyes adjusting to a room littered with empty bottles, Ivan devastatingly remembered why he had decided to blow the competition out of the Drink-to-Death contest. He sat for a while, nothing else to do, no-one to breathe for, and let a stream of tears fall from his chin and accumulate in a small puddle around his feet.
Slowly, fragments of his dream came back to him, the curious woman on a throne sticking in his mind. Ivan tried to remember the song she had sung.
Ch-Choose…something about a choice…
He found the more he grasped at the memory, the more it slipped away, and soon he had completely lost all sense of it.
Over the next few weeks he stayed in his house.
Calls were made frequently to his phone, but he would numbly look at the ringing object, close his eyes, and slowly turn away, pushing all thoughts of being cared for to the dark depths of his mind, where memories of his broken childhood would occasionally crawl out, and Ivan, traumatised, would stare until there was one flash of reality, he would grip hold, and, like a drowned man, resurface.
Alone, Ivan used time only to drink away his fading sanity, until the only thing he could fix on was the woman who would haunt his dreams.
I didn't think I would end this chapter here, but hey, I didn't anticipate the ending of the Woman in Black to be quite as scary as everyone said. XD
Review?
...and flames will be used to stoke your funeral pyre.