WOOHOO NOT STUDYING FOR EXAMS, WOOHOO VAGUE WRITING (abuse of italics)
Ha. Last year about this time, I was on Chapter 13. That's 23 chapters! I'd like to think I've progressed since then.
I consider Russia the most fragile out of the bunch, more so than anyone realizes because he regrets almost his entire life.
Speaking of me, I also tend to edit with half a brain if I even edit at all, so if I make typos, don't hesitate to tell me.
Review! :D
He wasn't sure if he was awake or asleep. Too much had happened, and his periods of consciousness blended with delirious nightmares until they were a lumpy, thoroughly mixed conglomerate.
And what did he have, anyway? His sisters...was that Belarus with the hole in her back? Was that a dream? The world was a fog around him, and he was content to lie in it and forget reality and dreams. Two weights that he had to balance, equally heavy. One lost in a twirling ballet of colors and pain and reluctant, grudging awareness of the world that defined him, and one a mash of everything he'd ever tried to forget, vengeful feelings, hate, delusional mists and shreds of warmth like a spotlight, the fear he thought he'd killed living resurrected. And of course, his all encompassing-loneliness.
He was hated; he was feared for his demeanor and his history, and no matter what he did, he could never truly purge that stain, could he? All he wanted were his friends, an endless field of dancing sunbeam flowers, and were they burning? Were they? Were there smoke-wreathed demons in the blaze? Were there volcanoes burping up igneous bile sprouting, disasters both simple and complex, painful and numb? Was he a murderer, or was he innocent? Was he a face and a name - Russia - or, in the fever dream, was he someone else entirely? Could he be someone else?
There was no escape from the questions, and he spun within the grasp of terrible fantasies.
Suddenly, with all the force of a whale breaching the border between sea and sky, he surfaced, sucking in desperate gasps of reality. The pool of muddled thought shrank away under the onslaught of the tangible world, and he came completely to himself at last.
Broken, battered, maybe a shattered bone in his lower leg? He remembered an alien limb swinging down and a crackle of pain. He remembered trying to rise to protect those he cared about. Were they friends or were they demons? Grinning faces, layered like a Matryoshka.
Don't go back to the world of fire.
And of course, the stings and the old, supposedly healing one on his back.
But worst of all, the burns; the swathes of charred cloth, the red, raw skin, laced with painful blisters. The worst one, the one that bubbled at the edges and was translucent in the center. He felt somewhat like a science display. There were his veins, the over-stressed meat of his muscles, held in place with webs of capillaries and tendons, draped over the humped ridges of bone. Ah, science.
It was numb. He was numb. The area spread from his shoulder to right above his heart, and he thought that if he squinted, he could see the skin jump with each beat. That's how frail he had become. He didn't like to look at his weakness, though he himself was technically a weakness at this point. And I don't understand why, either. Things on Earth have affected me more, and I've been worse. But why does now feel like the end of the world?
Questions, questions, always questions.
On the upside, Russia thought with a wry twist of his lips, at least when the bottle shattered, I didn't feel it.
With mild surprise, he realized he'd named himself again, proving once again that this existence was definitely the real one. I can't stay a nobody in dreamland forever.
Being Russia- the pressures of keeping his boss happy, his people happy, and finding time to try and expand, at least try to make a friend. Too many people depending on him not to give up and die.
But here, even in the thoughts of myself, a madman - I can see there is nowhere else to go. I can take a break, can't I? Use up my allotted vacation time? He would've laughed if he was able. Instead, he sneezed, burns shrieking, and his possibly broken leg complained.
Ah, the pain. You know you enjoy it.
In truth, he didn't, but he didn't have the energy to argue. He merely wiped his eyes with the un-blackened part of his scarf, and the real world started slip-sliding away on bleeding wings. If he closed his eyes, he could almost see them.
The real question was, what perverse deity had appointed him to this position? The stresses of this particular job were too much for a mortal mind, even an immortal one. Why give them emotion, the ability to reason at all? He was a liability to his own land, damaged, unstable. What happened to him reflected on the good of the nation, and he was walking a tight line between madness and death. The chasm was beckoning more and more all the time.
There were tears under his eyelids and holes in his soul. All the emotions he'd thought he'd bested, the ones he'd thought he'd frozen into oblivion, were welling up from dreamland and eroding his precarious perch. They whooshed around him, tangled his feet in fear and hate and hope, hissing you're nothing, nothing, nothing
And really, in the grand scheme of things, what was he? A depressed, possibly psychotic nation who was on a spinning ball of rock the talking monkeys named Earth, which was infinitesimal compared to the sun, which wasn't even a speck compared to Aldebaran, and even that paled before VY Canis Majoris. Yet the expanding universe was infinite, and human range could only stretch so far. Likely there were stars even bigger than that behemoth, and what was Earth- no, who was he in the center of all this, demanding away his loneliness?
Nothing, nothing, nobody. Because that's all there is.
Russia wished he could at least feel snow one more time. Hear and see and taste, beautifully unmarred, pure white expanses stretching into infinity. Cool the burning flesh, the torment of his soul, collapse into silence. It was where he wanted to be, what he wanted more than anything else. To return, go out into a field, and silence himself. The ultimate selfish act.
In this place, beautiful things don't last.
The dream was shot through with fire and destroyed in one fell swoop. In his sanctum, he screamed and reached for the snow, the dissolving, ash-flaked snow that disintegrated out of reach, crisscrossed with brands. Even then he wanted nothing but escape, a mental gun in a mental hand-
Too late, too late, nothing gold can stay, nothing is sacred, nothing will prevail- Hissing, horrible laughter, a snake with wide eyes
He curled in on himself, hands pressed to his eyes painfully, and let out a howl from the depths of his soul. The force of emotion blew away the gossamer strands of fire and the blighted dregs of the dream he'd created, and he sat in darkness.
(crippled, damaged, defective, fractured machine, arrhythmic pulses)
A demolished nation? Broken, certainly.
It wasn't pain - he was way beyond the threshold of it - not self-loathing, something he was used to, but the simple facts that the wonderland beckoning like a siren, always, would die. No matter when or what or anything, it would fail. Violently. Brutally. Thrown from a high cliff and bashed to a bleeding pulp on the rocks below.
Consciousness was a medium for only pain.
And giving up, surrendering, succumbing, he may still grow a dream inside, right? Surrounded by nothing but the questionable solace of his inner sanctum, he could carefully tend to a tiny seed, nurturing it and nourishing it, and never exposing it to the world, and all would be well, right?
Beautiful things don't last.
Am I a beautiful thing? Some people loved the cold icy landscapes, the language, the society, the culture, loved the nation...but not him. Half of them didn't even know who he was, let alone what he represented. And aside from that, he was still here. He lasted throughout the ages, and he was still here... However, the fragile complexity of a mind, the weave of neurons, cells, particles he was boiled down to, surely there was beauty found in there, in the slow subatomic dance.
For some, the hidden beauty inherent in the functions of creatures is captivating. And that too tends to last.
So what am I?
It was nothing that he knew, and not knowing was drifting in a peaceful gray sea, where the wavelets danced gently against a faded beach and he was pulled further and further away.
A mind must be a beautiful thing, to create perceived beautiful places, or just places inside. They won't last either...and what of my mind? Is it lasting? Should I name this gray fog that I hide in? It's in between, isn't it? Nothing gold can stay, but what about gray?
His thoughts were tangled and branching out on the ends, but the weight of the physical world was just a sliver here. In the physical world, there was nothing for him, and he was nothing, nothing, nothing for no one. The thought curved his lips into a smile.
In this place, did he have lips? Was he a tangible form? It seemed at times he was a bundle of neurons and thoughts flying out every which way.
I could stay, couldn't I? Just under the surface of consciousness, where the world is muted and ripples and is inconsequential, and there is no one or nothing to make me into something. A hollow shell, an empty bottle, and float until I sink?
The soothing darkness of the semiconscious mind was shredded, and Russia was almost a newborn in the face of pain and light and the senses he wanted to escape from.
I don't want to be here get meoutof here i'm nobodynothingnoonealliwant ispeaceiwanttobe free goneoutofthisdimensions
The tangled thoughts erupted into a shriek of awareness that he may or may not have voiced, and he felt like he was imploding. To be safe again...
His hand snaked around to the healing sting and nudged the scab. There was pain, but would enough loose his soul from this bond, a fragile bird released from the cage of life? Did he have the nerve?
In a swift move, Russia pulled the scab off, leaving the festering sting to the open air, and on the heels of fire came the cool gray silence of the dark.
Is this right? Have I made a good decision? Am I insane? Is this the right way to be free?
Cimmerian darkness greeted him with open arms.