I was talking to The Goliath Beetle after we finished all five of our 50 sentences, and I mentioned that I just really needed a fic with Russia being a sweetie and not a psychopath, as most of this fandom characterizes him. And so we took on another challenge together (because why not?). The terms of this challenge: no more than 2k words, and a one word prompt to follow. My word, in case you didn't guess, is exploration.

Enjoy!

It was 7:32 p.m. and Russia was watching his world change.

All the others had left long ago. Some, Lithuania in particular, were celebrating Christmas in their homes, with nativity sets and midnight Masses and homemade sweets. Russia, on the other hand, wouldn't celebrate Christmas for another week. He put his hands in his pockets and tried to imagine what it would look like inside the great cathedrals: the aisles flanked by the patriarchs for the first time in decades and children bundled up in pews and the stone of the altar sparkling beneath the chandelier lights…

Russia scuffed his boot against the slushy brick of the street. He'd walked far away from the Kremlin to watch the changing of the flags. Perhaps someone would be looking for him inside—Yeltsin, the first boss his people had chosen, or Gorbachev, the man who'd paved the way for this night.

As much as he wanted someone there with him on the lonely street, Russia wasn't ready to go back to the citadel, nor to the river with its crowds watching, waiting. He was too frightened. For someone who adored people and wanted nothing more than friends, he did have a considerable fear of others.

The union was supposed to change that. It was supposed to eradicate the loneliness he'd felt 100 years ago when a thousand of his people lay in pools of blood, abandoned by their loving father, the tsar. It was supposed to give him a friend who could bandage his own wounds as he slowly bled out and turned to a sack of bones during the revolution. It was supposed to stop him from wanting to kill himself.

And did it? Russia wondered as he tucked his hands into his warm coat pockets and braced himself against the siege of the December wind.

He didn't have an answer. Or maybe he simply didn't want to have one.

He'd tried. He'd tried so hard. He'd wanted them to stay: Lithuania and Ukraine and Moldova. They could all have been at home together that night, drinking tea and maybe some of Lithuania's honey spiced vodka, and eating hot cabbage soup and dumplings. And if they'd asked him, if they'd been the slightest bit unhappy with him, Russia could have done all the dishes and all the cleaning and made breakfast for the next morning. He could have scrubbed the stains in the sink and fixed the water pressure in the upstairs shower and done everyone's laundry.

If it would have made them stay. But would it have been enough?

He really didn't have an answer this time.

Some of his people were gathering at a pub on the street corner to celebrate. Russia could hear them laughing, could smell their foaming glasses of beer, could see their smiling faces and their entwined hands. He wondered how they'd all become friends, and in the midst of that questioning, he saw a child Lithuania's flushed face and diamond-dust breath, asking why they couldn't be friends now. Because he wasn't strong enough yet, he'd said. And now, as the Soviet flag sank over the Kremlin, Russia wondered if he'd meant not that he wasn't strong enough yet, but that he wasn't good enough yet.

It was so hard to be good, Russia thought, and so easy to be bad. America called him bad even though in the first years of their icy standoff, he'd awakened with frostbitten toes every morning because more people had been stolen from their homes and sent to Siberia in the night. He'd scolded him like a child for reaching space first.

And maybe Russia wasn't exactly what most people would call "good," and maybe he wasn't even sure what they meant when they threw around disembodied words like "good" and "bad," and maybe he'd only been trying so hard to do the right thing.

He'd thought the right thing had been to keep his friends with him, because he loved them and loving people was good, and because they took care of each other, and getting better when you were hurt was good.

But he'd been wrong, because now the Russian flag was taking the Soviet flag's place like a bird soaring over the city, and he must be a bad person, because everything had fallen apart.

Russia should have been happy. This was what his people had wanted—they were kissing and hugging and singing at the pub now—and it was what he probably wanted deep down, too. Beneath the thick layers of loneliness that these decades of forced companionship had done little to penetrate. And maybe he could be happy, now that people no longer looked at him and said "bad," or "wrong." He could be happy and make friends if people called him "good" again.

He went home. Not to their old house, but to a small apartment in one of the modern high-rise buildings built after the war. He cried for a bit. And then he pulled a piece of paper out of his empty desk and sat down in the small creaky chair, and he wrote a letter to Lithuania that he knew he'd never send.

But maybe the next day, or the next week, or the next month, he'd write a letter that he could send. And then maybe he'd write another letter to Ukraine, and then another to Georgia and one to Armenia.

Maybe he'd find a way to cope. To love. To be good, once and for all.

Russia is such a misunderstood character, and it drives me crazy. He's broken, hurt, not a psychopath. Can he be cruel? Of course. But does he try to make friends and be a good person and do all the right things? Hell yes. He's complicated, not evil.