Since I wasn't human, the plague didn't affect me.
Not physically, at least.
I was forced to watch my people die, to watch friends, siblings, and relatives abandon their neighbours and each other. I even saw a mother leave her sick child on a porch step as she tried to flee the appropriately named "Black Death". I had tried to care for the young thing- but it was too late.
I had fallen into despair. There was nothing I could do, nothing any of us in Europe could do. We were all infected by this, every single one of us. Anytime I would go to visit others- say, Germany or France or Poland- they would all be in the same state as I.
But we survived. We survived, grew stronger, and thrived. After the Black Death came my Empire "on which the sun never sets."
But that's a different story for a different time. I'm here to tell you about how I survived, and how a mere neighbour became an ally, the most valuable I'd ever had.
France, or Francis Bonnefoy as he was called informally, was the kind of person I would NEVER normally spend time with. But that's beside the point.
The point is, even after hundreds of years of bickering, we remained friends. And that friendship pulled me through the Black Death and helped make my country stronger.

I collapsed into an armchair, head heavy with grief and despair. I had just gotten the approximate death toll from a papal official- it was over ten thousand.
ten THOUSAND.
That's a lot of people.
My shoulders shook with sobs, sobs that I'd been holding back for years. I wished I had someone, someone that wasn't afraid to hug a fellow human being. Someone that-
I heard a gasp, and my head shot up.
Francis was standing in my living room, about four feet away from me. He looked a little better off than me, clothes less wrinkled and neater, but his face showed an amount of wear and tear equal to mine. I was surprised it wasn't worse- the plague had hit him first.
I hid my face again, embarrassed that he should see me crying over a mere biological holocaust. That thought made me sob harder, and a whimpering noise escaped my throat as I tried to keep myself still.
I felt arms around me and a head on mine. Francis had perched on the arm of the chair and hugged me.
I picked up my head and looked up at him, and he reached out a hand to brush away my tears. I nodded a thankyou as fresh tears came.
He clicked his tongue and stood, taking my hand and pulling me to my feet. With that done he pulled me into his chest and I wrapped my arms tightly round his torso, sobbing fragments of sentences into his body.
"Not fair," I cried, voice muffled by his clothes. "Innocent people... child abandoned as young as... What did I do wrong? ... Siblings run from..."
"Shhh... it'll be alright." Francis' voice sounded above mine, and that combined with his words and my despair gave me the impression that, for a moment, I was speaking with the Almighty himself.
"Hush," murmured that same voice. I looked up to the speaker and was at once hoisted into his arms, his surprisingly strong arms. I buried my face in his chest and just cried; I just couldn't keep it in anymore, I had to let it out. I must have stained the shirt and made it look worse than it already did, but that didn't matter to him, it seemed.
He held me tightly, lips on my forehead. I looked up when I felt him there, tears falling of their own accord. I opened my mouth to speak-
His lips found mine for half a second, then retreated. Shocked, I stopped crying, eyes wide.
Francis looked down at me. "It's alright," he whispered. "Nothing bad is going to happen anymore."