Kie, Kievan Rus; 1169
The girl is bleeding again, and this time she knows why. Her home is as battered and ravaged as her people. Women scream in the corners and husbands moan in defeat or choke on their own blood.
Children hide, if they can, if they are like her.
She knows why, or thinks she does. It is not because her brother hates her, though she would like to believe that. If it was so, she could march up to him and grip his shoulders with her tiny bloody fists and scold him until he cried.
(He cried very easily back then.)
It is because of things neither she nor he can control. It is because a scary, angry man with a lust for greatness that is only human wants to make sure he is still strong. He is a man who is too big and far away to shake and lecture. And, if his strange men with their swords and loud, mean voices are anything to judge him by, he is very, very scary.
A man dies right next to her hiding place. She hears the shred of flesh and the grate of sword on bone and his long, sad moan. He thuds to the ground and blood oozes into the soil. His murderer is disguised as a valiant soldier, and the killer pauses, so close she can taste his bloodlust in the air. She gulps down a thousand sobs, moves her hands from her ears to her mouth to stifle the cries, and winces at the full onslaught of the sound of her city's painfully slow demise.
The chilling sense of venom is gone, or at least not as strong, and she relaxes for a moment.
"You."
The hiss is punctuated by a shaking hand plunging through the small hole in her cover and grasping her ankle. She can't help it - she shrieks, a high short sound. Then she looks.
The hand belongs to the dead man, or, more accurately, the very-close-to-being-dead man. His face is gaunt, but seems that it would have been healthy if not for the pain and pallor of being very close to being dead. She trembles, speechless in horror as he grins. His teeth are yellowed with age, and his bloody spit up has turned them orange.
"You can't die, little one," the man gurgles through crimson. "Only God knows what will happen if you do..."
He hacks and coughs before smiling again and putting a finger to his cracked lips.
"Shh," He tells her, and she has never screamed since.
Author's Note: What homework where? I don't know what you're talking about.
I'm doing a research project on the Kievan Rus for this precise reason: to find interesting things in history and grin as I think about Hetalia (and not the paper.)
Andrei Bogoliubsky, forerunner to the future princes of Moscow, sacked Kiev in 1169 after conquering it to make sure he kept it under his control. It never totally recovered.
This was during the decline of Kiev, where there was lots infighting and political instabilities and Prussia being a douche. (And in two-hundred years the Golden Horde comes and burns it to the ground. It's times like this I just want to give Eastern Europe a big hug.)
Short story is short.