A/N: Yes, this is Hungary.
She would not feel nervous, standing at the edge of a stair. She is a fighter – poised, balanced, and most importantly, brave. In the light of noon, she could hang her toes from the edge of any drop without hesitation.
But this is no stair.
The drop is twenty feet or more, perhaps thirty. It feels like ten million. Below her stretches watery blackness, the surface of which only faintly reflects the waning moon. She knows it is her beautiful blue Danube, but tonight it looks like a tar pit ready to swallow her whole. It writhes. Her feet inch away from the edge, nervous in their sensible flats.
She would not be afraid, in the light of noon. She is as brave as the toughest man – she's had to be. That is why Austria loved her so much, after all – for her beauty and strength and wily refusal. In the end, it was the reason they could not maintain peace. So she is brave and steadfast and a little bit reckless – not one to be afraid of such an inconsequential thing like a height.
Tonight is no ordinary night.
There are twenty guns at her back, ready to shoot the minute their captain gives the call.
She stands here with the men, women, and children who are only half her people, snatched from the ghetto in the middle of the night like a perverted Pied Piper tale. She hates the ghetto – that part of her heart's city which is incongruous, which pulses with an unanswered question and makes her walk a little more quickly as she passes the gates, but she has to stand here with its inhabitants anyway. She thinks she might hate them. They are tearing her apart from the inside.
But they are hers, just as the deathly black river below her is hers, just as the gunman whose barrel presses into her back is hers, and just as the night which swallows screams and cries is undeniably hers.
If only Prussia had not been so headstrong. If only she and Austria had been able to stop arguing. If only Austria had been able to get off that damned piano bench long enough to see what was happening to his family. If only her presence had been enough.
She will not apologize or beg forgiveness. And she will never, never speak German again.
One twitchy-fingered gunman gets ahead of his colleagues. The bullet barely misses her, striking the man to her left squarely in the back of the neck. At such close range, the force of impact is enough to lift him bodily off the ground like some rag-clad angel, and throw him over the edge into the depths of the Danube below. It seems the night has eaten the sound of the shot. There will be no civilian rescue tonight.
She looks down at an angle, and sees no sign save for a minute black splatter that the man ever existed. She knows him of course – how could she not? He is Mr. Schey, a banker with a wife and two children. She sees them now – a little way down the line, 8-year-old János clings to his mother's arm. The militia will soon separate them, for they are next. They are all next.
She has only seconds to make her decision. She will not die like this, in a petty battle between factions, forgotten at the bottom of her own precious river in her beautiful Budapest. She will have to time it exactly. She will have to trust the gunmen. She hears the captain shout, swears she can feel the ground tremble, and pushes her knees and ankles straight.
She throws herself into the abyss.
She falls with the fallen, hits the water fighting not to scream, and bobs to the surface among a mass of cadavers. She thinks she might be one of them. Their faces are frozen in horrific sorrow, expressions that look all too natural on them. But she is alive, horribly alive, with a tiny fire that cannot be extinguished though she almost wants it to be. She pushes through the bodies, apologizing with every swish of hand against waterlogged fabric.
She might as well be one of them.
Forty years later, as she and Russia build the monument, she still does not know if it was her fault. She builds a pair of sensible flats and signs them, in minute letters on the heel, Héderváry.
This is based on a night in Budapest in 1944 when the Arrow Cross went into the ghetto and took at least fifty people to the banks of the Danube and shot them right into the river. There is a memorial that can be seen here [/r/qzjiw4/7 , picture is mine], which is comprised of sixty pairs of iron shoes stretching along the banks of the river. This represents the fact that the Arrow Cross had them take off their shoes because they could be re-sold.
This was all done in the dead of night, and the only reason we know about it is because some brave souls jumped right before they were shot and survived. They had to do it right as the shots sounded, or else risk the Arrow Cross going after them to finish them off. The memorial is fairly recent and contains plaques in Hungarian, Russian, Hebrew, and English.