Gilbert lies on the bed stiffly, trying and failing to make himself relax. Ivan offered him a room with no evil intent behind the gesture whatsoever. He even said so himself, not that that meant much, but he seemed intent on getting Gilbert off his track above all else. Perhaps he had really changed, and Gilbert was safe in this room. However, nothing changes the fact that he sees Ivan looming over him everywhere he looks, telling him he's been a bad boy, that bad boys must be punished, that he is worth absolutely nothing unless he was a good boy.
He isn't even in the clear when he closes his eyes, for then he has visions of being chained to stone walls, of being cut for Ivan's amusement, of being starved and stuffed (but mostly starved) according to the Russian's twisted whims. Then Ivan's hands come, cold yet strangely soft, petting him, stroking him, and holding him when they aren't groping, slapping, or strangling him.
If he makes the mistake of closing his eyes for too long, the worst memories of all come back: the ones of Ivan running him through without a weapon, of being crushed under his massive bulk, of being pinned down while already too weak to resist. Just thinking of that weight pressing down on him makes it hard for him to breathe.
Gilbert growls and grabs his head, curling inward, trying to hide from the offensive flashbacks. Ivan's voice rings in his head as if he were right there, speaking to him, telling him that he had absolutely nothing now that Prussia was gone. He would always argue that he did have something; that he had a country to represent, a house of his own, and people to protect.
Then Ivan would shake his head and oh-so-pleasantly remind him that "his" country was so influenced by Ivan's that it might as well be his territory after all. He would always end by emphasizing that Gilbert was "his." That was uncomfortably true; Ivan had a habit of sticking his pudgy fingers into Gilbert's daily life in ways that made it as miserable as possible, from confiscating the little money he got from the worthless jobs he was forced to work to outright stealing most of his food when he was gone, claiming that he had taken "more than his proper share."
Suddenly, it clicks in Gilbert's head that he has had "nothing" for far longer than he previously considered. When he says he had barely anything in his days as East Germany, he lies to himself (even "barely anything" has the implication of having something). He had absolutely nothing even then. Every aspect of his life was firmly in Ivan's grip. Ivan controlled whether he ate or starved, whether he could get away with really helping his people, and whether he even got to sleep in his own meagerly-furnished home instead of a cell hidden deep in that big bastard's house. His life had been reduced to existing as Ivan's toy, to be used and abused as his "master" desired.
Ivan was the first one to make him feel truly powerless, keeping him bound in chains or draining his resources so that he could do anything he wanted to him, and Gilbert wouldn't be able to resist at all. As much as he kept his pride strong and clung to the idea that he still had a country and the power that came with it, at the end of the day Ivan always had the last word. He could pretend that the abuse meant nothing to him, that nothing could break his spirit, but all of those sessions of being chained to the point of not even being able to make a twitch of movement as Ivan did despicable things to him began to add up after a while.
The emphasis was always on Gilbert's newfound powerlessness, how he was unable to really help his people (he'd tried countless times to get them over than damned Wall, and each time he had suffered for it) or to even protect himself from his controller's twisted "games," various forms of torture. He had to take every malicious thrust, whether it was from a weapon or something else entirely. Eventually, his body weakened from the deprivation and stress and made his attempts to push Ivan away even more useless.
When his body's resolve quit on him, it became difficult to keep his fighting spirit up, even if he still retained enough mental fortitude to hold on to his identity and keep from breaking completely. It wasn't as if he could even pretend to fight back anymore, especially given how weak Ivan made him, his body too tired and thin to heed the commands of the mind that burned inside it. He could do nothing to fight off what strove to keep him down, so he stayed down without a hope of getting back up, whether he wanted to admit it or not. That powerlessness was what eventually broke him, even if the full impact didn't come till years later.
At that moment, Gilbert makes a pivotal decision. Even if Ivan is behaving differently from how he remembers, the risk of him employing a mind game and trying to weaken him mentally or physically is too high. He wants to die with all his strength intact, and he doesn't trust Ivan to not pull any dirty tricks. To stay any longer in this place would be counterproductive, so he'll just go home and think of another plan.
He opens his eyes, ready to leave, only to see the barren ceiling of his dreary little house in East Germany, where he lived when Ivan didn't see fit to punish him by taking him out of it. He is less than pleased to find Ivan standing over him as well. "I see you're back to taking more than your proper share, Gilbert," he says, his voice deceptively pleasant.
Gilbert's eyes go wide with terror. He never thought that he would have to deal with this again. He knows full well what this means: he will be dragged out of his house to that frigid dark cell and chained there till morning, with Ivan calling him a bad, greedy boy every step of the way. It's the same lecture every time: how he can tell when Gilbert has been gorging himself, since he's so skinny that his tummy swells when he eats even a little too much (according to Ivan).
What happens from there depends on Ivan's mood. If Gilbert is lucky, those intrusive hands stay on his stomach, and Ivan stays relatively pleasant. "Ah, you're getting so big!" he would say, and give the Prussian's stomach a not-so-reassuring pat. "At this rate, you'll get just as big as I am." Nonetheless, Gilbert would be released and allowed to go home, his possessions completely untouched.
If he wasn't so lucky, Ivan would bring out the pipe and use corporal punishment instead, beating him and urging him to be a good boy, to not be so greedy, to think of the people that apparently needed the extra share that he gobbled down. That was alright. Gilbert had felt much, much worse than the pipe. On worse days, those hands would travel all over, petting Gilbert like a dog, with no care for where they encroached.
The most terrible days of all were the ones that broke him in the end, when they came running back into his memory like a stampede. Absolutely nothing would be held back. The binds, the lectures, the terrible reminders of just how much control Gilbert was really under, the violation would all be employed to make sure he learned his lesson. To rub salt in the filthy wounds, he would not have a decent meal for at least a week. Ivan would make sure of that, either by making sure large portions of food were removed from his house or by simply keeping Gilbert imprisoned for as long as the lunatic saw fit. Everything happened as the lunatic saw fit, with no deviation from the plan whatsoever.
"You've fattened up quite nicely," Ivan says, starting to pace back and forth a little. "How does that fairy tale go? I believe this is when the witch puts the little boy in the oven, da?"
Gilbert can't hold back his scream of horror. He does not want to be Ivan's toy today. He doesn't want to feel powerless ever again. He runs out of his room as fast as his legs will take him, so fast that he's not even sure that his feet are hitting the ground. He is so consumed with the desire to escape that he fails to realize that not only is Ivan not chasing after him, but that he is racing down the halls of the Russian's house, not his old one in East Germany, which barely had any room to run in at all.
He hits the door and nearly smashes through it to freedom, not looking back for even a second. Ivan isn't going to free him from the "nothing," at least not with some catch, and he isn't able to do it for himself. He's going to retreat for now until something better comes along, till he figures out a way to die uncompromised.
Meanwhile, a very confused Ivan stands outside the guest room he gave Gilbert. He heard Gilbert scream, but his guest is gone without a trace.
I believe I have a call to make.
