But how is she to define malice?
It is not so difficult as it should be.
It lies just on the edge of affection, in the occasional crimson shard in a glass of burgundy wine. It seeps into her skin by the cracks of her teeth and the hard skin around her nails. It is as familiar to her as the man who accompanies it, the man who flickers into her mind and peels his gloves off with his teeth.
"You ready, Elizaveta?" he mouths, while she clutches at the ghost of a wound.
"Hungary," gasps her husband's voice, and she straightens, pulling her mind from mist and turning, laying her hand strong against his chest, just above his heart. It stutters, and she pushes harder, trying to force the hurt from him. There is no time for pain. There is no time for anything, because already, the door chimes.
They measure the count of their breaths.
"Yes," Roderich, her Roderich, he pushes back his hair and nods for her to fetch the door.
She opens it before she is ready.
"I've come to honor our alliance," Prussia greets. He has an arm slung around an uncomfortably familiar boy, smaller than he should be, and ragged at the edges. Hungary sets her arm strong across the frame, denies them entry.
"You've come to start a war," she corrects, because the Hapsburgs are dead.
"Don't look at me like that, we're on the same side," Prussia's hand rakes through the boy's hair as he says this, and he glances down with something too fierce to be called affection. The boy's head nods with the movement, though his expression could almost be flat. Flat, if not for the hungry burn of his gaze and the stern cut of his cheekbones. She can see, then, that there is something lost of the boy she had once known.
Austria's hand pushes at her shoulder, pushes her from the door and to the side. She hangs on to the frame and glares at the lot of them.
"Did you shoot them?" Austria asks, or perhaps he shouts. "Was it one of yours?"
Prussia doesn't look away for a long time, and when he does, it is a deliberately slow, sly shift of the eyes. The boy at his side does not seem capable of blinking. The both of them stare at Hungary for a moment, and then Prussia murmurs, "Who can say? It is difficult to keep track."
Austria's fingers cut into her shoulder.
She looks at him, hard, until Prussia rolls his eyes, "God, lighten up. It was some Serbian, alright? So, we've got to crush them. We've got to crush everyone. Or they'll get us first."
Running out of allies.
Roderich shuts himself in his rooms and plays for three days straight, running without sleep. The sound of it beats against the walls until Hungary herself is so on edge that she cannot help but destroy every particle of dust or disorder. It is better that way, and the buttons on her uniform shine as glossy as Prussia's. Their borders are overlapping, merging somehow, and he is almost always at the house she and Austria share.
"I've been thinking," Prussia drags his hand down the coffee table, leaving a fine white line down the varnish. It grates at Hungary, that line and the sound rolling from under Austria's door. "About tanks."
Hungary unwinds her ankles and throws one leg over the other, crossed at the knees. "So, tanks. So, set them on fire while you're at it. It's your front, Prussia, not mine."
"This is your war, Elizaveta."
"My war?" Hungary laughs violently, "My war? Then why is it you're here? Why is it that you have weapons and men stockpiled at ready for an invasion? Why you stormed Belgium? Why is that, might I ask? Because I find it difficult to understand why you should be so eager to fight a war on both sides."
But the question is an obvious one, and Prussia's insolent smile agrees. Her cup feels breakable, and she cradles it tightly, testing the application of pressure.
"I'm here because your darling husband can't get anyone's land without fucking them for it."
Hungary closes her eyes for a moment, then moves around the coffee table and throws a leg over Prussia's waist, sets her hands against his shoulders and shoves him backwards into the uncomfortable chair. His eyes widen before he can catch himself. It makes her feel suddenly powerful.
"I'm married," she reminds him. His lips part, and then ease shut again, tight at the corners.
"You aren't acting like it," he mutters, and she is certain that she has not imagined the touch of bitterness there.
"Oh, you've won," Hungary agrees, "We shall go to war, and you shall have your chance to snatch up Europe. But I know fighting as well as you do, and I will know if you dare to compromise us. Don't think that at the end of this, you'll be able to take us too."
"C'mon, Elizaveta— "
"Don't call me that," she interrupts, and fumbles as she climbs off of him. Catching his eye, she tries to say something cutting, and fails. "You shouldn't—just don't."
Prussia's head falls to the side and he studies her for a moment, then laughs with all the delight of a boy, "He's not doing it for you, is he?"
It is done, then.
The both of them are very thin, on the property line, the border lands. Her husband—and won't he always be her husband? can they really take that from her?— shut up in his cage, and she in hers.
"My—" Roderich begins to say something, he stops, he tries to begin again and simply gives up.
"Yes," she agrees, and there is nothing left to say between them. Everything has been exhausted by the drawn borders and the libraries of paperwork, and the papers of union they'd needed burned, and so...and so there is nothing left for them to do with one another.
Neither of them move, but the distance between them grows, until she finds herself staring at the place where Roderich used to be, but wasn't anymore.
Not anymore.