The air is dead, you think.

You take a breath, and it catches in your throat, stagnant, dull. There is no brightness to this day, no freshness to the breeze. The air is dead.

Or maybe it's just you.

There are birds chirping outside your window, so you get up. You get dressed. The birds are still chirping.

"Hello birds!" you say, and you smile. You make yourself smile and you make yourself call out cheerfully to the birds, even though the birds are the only ones who can hear. Because it is a new day and you are Prussia, and you are still here. You want to live, you do.

Maybe that's the problem.

You are feeling nostalgic today, so you go to where your diaries are kept, in long long neat rows.

Your life looks so very long, lined with words.

You walk to the very end, find your very first diary, because you are feeling nostalgic.

The book you take from the shelf is not the one you wrote centuries ago, your sloppy, childish hand smearing ink across worn vellum, already overwritten almost to the point of unusability. It is a copy of a copy of a copy, printed plainly on reasonably high quality modern paper. You had most of your diaries printed, not so very long ago, in plain, unpersonable bindings. You would have preferred to have copied them in your own hand, familiar, beautiful letters in solid black ink, your heart held between pages. But there was so much that needed recopying, doing it by hand would be impractical.

You might not have enough time.

You could copy this first diary by memory, you have read these words so many times. You read about healing and triumph and dreams of crusading, and you try to recapture a glimpse of it, that wide eyed innocence.

You were so very, very young once.

Your life is sketched out in ink, and you know much of it by heart, returning and returning to tell yourself the story of who you are, to remind yourself of triumphs.

Of course, you never wrote about the bad things. There is so much you never wrote.

There is a theory, you heard once, that photographs are bad for memory. Photos, in their two dimensional stillness, are lies, crystalized to immortality. You remember the pictures, sharp and exact in a way memories never can be, and forget events, sounds, smells, worlds in all their complexity. You create narratives around the photos in your albums, as the true knowledge of what was fades.

Your diaries contain all that you are. There is so much lost between their pages.

You do not write your diary now. You have not written it in years. You have nothing to write.

No, you could write. Your head is swarming with thoughts, more so than it has since you were small.

But your diary has always been about events, triumphs, not thoughts. Your diaries you keep secret, yes, and they are full, in their way, of your hopes and dreams, they are the world seen through your eyes and that is a very private thing. But your thoughts, your ponderings, your fears and theories, you keep safely locked inside your head. You do not let them out into the harsh light of objective reality, to become things outside yourself that exist. You keep them safe, hidden, to grow as you grow, to change as you change.

To be forgotten.

There are other things you could write. You used to write in your diary sometimes, of all the things that happened around you, but that turned quickly into a diary that was all about Germany. That is not what a diary is meant to be.

You could write. It is not as though you have stopped living, stopped doing. You could recount internet victories, or less than well thought out adventures with France and Spain. It is not that such things are too small, too trivial. You used to write about all the small things, once. A century ago, half a century, you would have happily recounted the mild disaster of you and a very drunk France in Brussels. But now it feels like too much effort. You are so very, very tired these days. Even your pen does not obey you sometimes.

Diaries are books you write for yourself for memory.

(And you know that a century from now you will not be here to read of lighthearted victories in the dark times.)

You close your diary and put it back on the shelf. You have a coffee date with Hungary. You are never late.

"How are you, Prussia?" Hungary asks, and there's more weight to it than simple smalltalk, but you disregard that. You give her one of your best smiles.

"I'm awesome!" you say, "How's marital bliss?"

It's an evasion, but she allows it.

"You know we haven't been married for over a century," she says, and you roll your eyes.

"How's life in sin, then?" you say. She laughs.

"Sexy," she says, and you look appropriately disgusted.

Being with Hungary is something like home. She has known you longer than anyone you know, known you since you were children, and she has always been good with people in a way you were always a little in awe of. She sees straight through all of your facades, past all the parts of yourself you keep hidden, to the things even you never look at too closely.

And in return, you like to flatter yourself in thinking you understand her better than anyone else, are the first to be let in on her secrets, are the one for whom she has no need for disguises. You think, now, that that is not quite the truth these days. Austria and Hungary have finally straightened out their relationship, so that they not only love each other, but also know each other, deeply and honestly in a way you cannot touch. You find that you do not begrudge them this.

You say something that brushes at the edges of that effect, as your conversation wanders from personal lives in modern times to old battles and back again.

"What?" Hungary says, "You don't want Austria's every moment to be torment and suffering? Who are you, and what have you done with Prussia?"

And because it is Hungary, you could tell her that you no longer care so much for rivalry with Austria, that you are quite content to be, if not friends with him, then at least friendly adversaries, and that regardless of anything else, you want nothing more than her happiness. Because it is Hungary, you could say all this without feeling as though you were flaying yourself open, to reveal your own beating heart to her. Or at least, you would be willing to do so, and entrust her with your heart. But because it is Hungary, she already knows, and you have no need to say it.

"Oh well," you say, "I guess I've mellowed in my old age."

Hungary looks at you, and it does feel as if you are being flayed. Hungary looks at you, and she bites her lip, and the expression in her eyes is grief.

And oh, that was the wrong thing to say, because there are still things you hide even from her, aren't there.

Age is a strange thing, when it comes to Nations. You live with Germany, who is still so young, at least in your eyes, that it hurts you, and you are friends with America and children on social media, and you spend your afternoons in the park with old people who are a tenth your age or less. But you aren't old, not really. Hungary is older than you are, and so are France and Spain. But then, they aren't old yet, because they aren't dying.

But perhaps even Hungary is not always brave, because she doesn't pursue it, she does not ask, she hides all traces of her concern, sweeps her train of thought aside.

"Wouldn't that be a miracle," she says, and you grin, crooked and devilish (alive, for now).

The conversation wanders on from there, but at the end of it, as you stand to leave, she holds your hand and says, "You know that you can talk to me, right?"

"Of course," you say, wondering what she thought you were doing for the past two hours.

"About anything, " she insists, "And if you ever need me, please call. I'll be there. I'll make time, I promise."

And you… You don't cry, because you don't cry. Crying is not a thing that you do.

"Thank you," you say, and your voice is small.

And then she hugs you.

You don't know the last time someone hugged you.

Or well, you probably do, it was right before that thing in Brussels. You don't remember most of that night too well, but France is an emotional drunk, and you're pretty sure that most of the fiasco that followed resulted from drunk-you's attempt to escape emotional vulnerability.

In any case, this is the first time you've been hugged sober in a very long time. And Hungary gives the best hugs.

Her strong arms wrap around you and she is warm and soft and kind in a way you have never known how to be. Your ribs are pressed tight against her, and you know that she can feel every single one of them through your clothes, and for a moment you are certain that you will turn to dust right there in her arms.

"Thank you, really," you say, when she releases you. And she gives you a sad little smile that tells you that she knows you won't take her up on it, but that she meant every word all the same.

When you are home, you take down your most recent diary, the one with three quarters of the pages still left blank, and write. It hurts more than anything you have ever written, and not only because even your hands betray you these days.

"Dear Diary," you write.

"Hungary hugged me today. It was an awesome hug.
We talked for hours, and I said everything and nothing at the same time, and I think she knows that I am dying, really dying now. She held me tight enough, I think, that we could feel each other's heartbeats, like she was trying to hold on to me forever. I'm sorry. There is so much that I never say. I don't want to die.

Germany, if you're reading this, know that I love you so much. There aren't words for how much. Tell all my friends I love them too."