Hey! Depressing shit of the day! Yay! Enjoy! This is rated T for language, drinking, drugs, hinted self-harm, etc. If you are sensitive to any of these things, please, please, please don't read this. This could be potentially triggering to some people, so if you are sensitive to any of these things, do not press forward. If you aren't sensitive to these things, feel free to press on, but for God's sake, if you are sensitive to one or more of these things, do not continue reading this.
Vodka
"Vodka was easier to swallow than the fact that you weren't coming back."
- Unknown
Ivan lay with his head on his desk, sobbing. Various empty vodka bottles lay scattered throughout the room, each one glaring in the light that streamed from the door that was cracked open. Katyusha froze in the doorway as she looked on at the mess. The bottles were everywhere, and in one corner of the room, plenty of broken bottle shards lay. The room reeked of liquor and despair, and Katya was almost certain that she could smell smoke and dried blood coming from somewhere. She quietly stepped into the room but left the door open, tiptoeing over to her younger brother. She had wanted to say goodbye to him before her boss gave her the official order to stay far away from him, but if he was as drunk as the room let on, she might not get the chance.
Was this what he had been up to when they all left the Soviet Union?
Trembling, Katyusha reached forward to lightly touch her brother's shoulder. His body was racked with sobs, as he glanced up at her, before burying his face in his arms again. He couldn't bear to look at her. She felt a tremble of relief pass through her as she realized that although he had been recently drinking, he was not completely drunk. He was sober. Which could be a good or it could be a bad thing.
"Katya... is that really you?" His voice shook, severely muffled by his arms. He shot her another wary glance, then stared back at his arms. "Or... is this just a goddamned dream?"
Katya's voice felt dry as she tried to find the words to express herself. "I-It's me, Ivan. W-W-What did you do?" Her voice warbled as she swallowed the lump in her throat.
"I drank my ass off." Ivan's voice was completely flat now as he leaned back in the once-nice chair and stared up at the ceiling. "I wanted to get drunk. I tried to get drunk. I wanted to get so goddamn drunk that I'd completely forget my name and who I was. I wanted to forget goddamned everything. But of course, when I actually want to get drunk, what happens? I don't get drunk. No matter how much I goddamned drank, I couldn't forget, and I couldn't get drunk." His voice shook with frustration, and he was on the verge of tears. He gestured around the room, vaguely pointing to the direction of a bloodstained knife and empty painkiller bottles on the dresser. "So I resorted to other methods." He sounded tired and sad.
Katya looked at the dresser in utter horror as her gaze went from the empty vodka bottles to the broken bottles in the corner, to the empty pill bottles on the top of the dresser, to the bloodstained knife. So that was where the distinct scent of blood came from. She didn't want to know where the smell of smoke came from. She prayed that it was from the neighbors. She glanced back to her brother, noticing his scarf. There was blood spotted on it, fresh bloodstains smeared in stripes that were staining it, and her heart beat as she realized that he must have used it to mop up the blood before replacing it where it was before.
"W-W-Wh-" Katya was cut off as Ivan interrupted her, his eyes searching hers. She felt a ripple of something go through her; his eyes were so filled with sadness, frustration, despair, sorrow, desolation, and interminable amounts of something other than that. Depression? Not an ounce of anger was in them. Not one ounce. Just those eternal rivers of sorrow and heartache that went on and on and on forever.
"Why?" His voice was completely thick with emotion, yet it sounded so empty. It was the voice of a man who had lost everything that once was important to him. His voice for once reflected just as much emotion as his eyes did, and for once the emotion in his voice and in his eyes matched. The feelings held in his voice and the feelings held in his eyes were normally so wildly different. Normally, his voice said one thing, while his eyes said something completely different, but for the first time in a long time, they perfectly matched and were in perfect sync.
They both reflected a broken heart.
Ivan was broken.
Her little brother was broken.
"Why?" His voice shook as he spoke. "Why are you asking me why? Why did you leave me?"
"M-My boss t-tol-"
"Fuck your boss." Ivan interrupted, his body racked with sadness. "Why did you leave me? Not your country. I'm damn well aware of why your country left me. Why did you leave me? My older sister. You all left me. Bloody hell, even Natalya left me, and you know how she is. How she was. You, Natalya, Lithuania, Lativa, Estonia, GDR, Poland, Moldova, Czech, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, Yugoslavia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Armenia, the Abkhazian SSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Khorezm SSR, the Bukharan SSR, the Karelo-Finnish SSR, goddammit, you all left me. What the fuck did you expect?" Tears were beading up in the corners of his eyes. "What the fuck did you expect?" He repeated himself, the beaded tears starting to fall as he buried his face in his hands again.
Katya retracted her hand, clutching it to her chest, and slowly backed away. She didn't know what to do here. She wasn't sure if there was anything that she could do. Ivan didn't seem to notice and leaned further forward, sobbing. His voice shook as he spoke, repeating himself like a broken record. And in a way, Ivan, her little brother, her friend, was a broken record.
Yes, Ivan certainly was broken.
What did they expect?
A/N: God, this hurt to write. This really, really, really did hurt to write. In case you don't know, Ivan is Russia, Katyusha/Katya is Ukraine, and Natalya is Belarus. Because, to my understanding, countries only really call each other by their first names when they're good friends/family, I decided to have Ivan only call his sisters by their first names and just have him call the rest of the Soviet Union by their nation names. Also, for those of you who don't know, after WWII, Prussia became the GDR, or the German Democratic Republic, which was a Soviet satellite. Also, Czechoslovakia dissolved into Czech and Slovakia in 1993, soon after the Soviet Union fell. I tried to include as many countries that I knew were either a part of the Soviet Union or a satellite of the Soviet Union, I'm sorry if I missed a country or accidentally added one that wasn't either of these things. Please correct me if I made a mistake here, and I'll change it. Anyway, this takes place after the fall of the Soviet Union. I think that's enough said. But yeah. Let the fangirl mourning process proceed! *sobs* On a completely different note, this is the first thing that i've written in a week that didn't completely flop. Yay for it's actual success, unlike some of my other attempts. Hope you liked this and thanks for reading it! Ciao!