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Pulling the scarf up to covered his nose and mouth, Russia considered the church in front of him, the golden domes that had once given him such comfort and now made his skin itch.
“Why do you keep coming here, if it makes you uncomfortable?” Prussia asked, hands shoved deep into his pockets.
“Because I remember it,” Russia said, watching the worshippers leave, talking to each other behind hands covered in gloves. “I could still recite the whole service you know.”
Kicking the snow with one boot, Prussia tilted his head up to look at him. “I bet you do. It was, what, centuries before you stopped going?”
Russia grunted, not meeting the other’s gaze. “Yes,” he said. “Many centuries.”
“I used to like going to church,” Prussia remarked, tilting his head back. Russia didn’t ask him why he stopped, or even why he had once enjoyed it. He could still remember Prussia in his templar armor, head cocked back like he understood the land of Russia, like he could conquer it and still walk away as strong as he had ever been. “So are we going to the museum or what?”
“I suppose so,” Russia said after a beat, wavering.
“You haven’t been back since they died, have you?” Prussia asked, eyes too knowing.
“Have you been back to the forests of Poland or Auschwitz yet?” Russia shot back and Prussia tensed, shoulders stiff.
“That’s different,” he said, tone as formal and stiff as his posture. “I wasn’t really—Not in Auschwitz anyway, too busy fighting you at that point, remember? Or being smacked around by my boss. I wasn’t good for much to him, except leading battles. I was always good at that.”
“Do you think Germany or Poland has a scar from that?” Russia asked, not commenting on the battles they had fought in that war, desperate bloody clashes and he could sometimes remember Prussia standing outside Stalingrad with his face and clothes splattered in blood and it still made something sick and filled with rage curl in his chest. “Or both?” he asked, chirping and smiling. With his eyes closed he didn’t have to look at Prussia’s expression. “Do you and Austria have one too?”
Prussia looked away as they walked, shoulders hunching over more. “Don’t know. Bet Germany and Poland at least. Never noticed if I had one before all my scars disappeared.”
Russia startled, looking over with wide eyes. “Eh? All of them?”
Rubbing the skin over his heart, Prussia paused. “Almost all of them. One’s left from…” he stopped and shrugged, shoving his hand back in his pocket. “No people left, remember?”
Russia nodded, not daring to look at him again. “You have Germany’s people.”
“It’s not the same,” Prussia muttered. “Sides, I don’t want to pick up all his scars. Or any of them really.”
“No,” Russia agreed, rubbing a hand over his own heart and Prussia glanced over.
“How is that doing anyway?”
Russia left his hand there, resisting his urge to drop it. “It hasn’t fallen out in a while. I’ve felt it shaking a few times, though, like it’s been considering it. The skin’s pretty bad though, all messed up and puffy and achy.”
There was silence for a moment, Prussia kicking at the snow again. “I’m glad it’s staying in now.”
“Yeah,” Russia said, looking away because healing felt like it was more painful. When his heart had been falling out, it hadn’t hurt all that much. Now his skin ached all the time, trying to cage the bloody beating thing back in.
They stopped in front of the Hermitage. “You don’t have to come in,” Prussia said after a beat. “I mean, if you don’t want to. With me.”
“No,” Russia said and tried to continue in his usual chipper manner. “You came all this way to actually visit me, I’m hardly abandoning you now. Besides, it’s probably time anyway.”
Prussia considered him before nodding. They made their way past the crowds looking at the façade and through the ticket booth. “How’s your new boss?” Prussia asked, picking up a guide in German.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Russia said, looking at his feet.
“But not as bad as—”
“No,” Russia said quickly and Prussia nodded, flipping through the guide until he found what he wanted. “Do you go to all the others, looking for art of your lost past?” he asked curiously, watching Prussia’s head bent over the guide.
“No,” Prussia said. “Just you. I mean, I wouldn’t go to like, Austria or France. And West doesn’t like it anymore. Art from before hurts him, and art from after is just a thousand times worse.” He paused a moment, swallowing audibly. “I mean, sometimes I go anyway. To the places we have. There’s this… really hilarious new museum about the DDR. You can sit in a Trabant and everything.” Russia barely managed to keep smiling and now wince.“But… as I said, West doesn’t like it. He can sorta handle the DDR one but that makes him sad. And anything with the war…”
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Russia asked, following the other as he started to stride off.
“Yeah,” Prussia said, stopping in front of a painting of the first Tannenberg. “But I don’t feel it as keenly, I guess. I wasn’t as involved with the camps.”
“What about the forests?” Russia asked, already knowing the answer and only saying it to be cruel.
“Yeah,” Prussia said, his eyes going distant. “I saw those.” He abruptly turned and moved on, Russia still trailing behind him, trying not to look around too much. “Look,” Prussia said quickly, still walking. “I still feel it. I know what happened, what we did. But I’m older, there have been other, lesser horrors built up. I was a fucking pawn told to fight so I fought. I survived. I shouldn’t have, but I did. But I wasn’t involved, not like West was. He was the golden poster boy of it all. I was the albino that was too odd and… they would have killed me if I was mortal. If not for being wrong then the July plot by the military would have done it. We just handle it differently.”
Russia paused, watching him move and not smiling anymore. “You’ve never talked to me about this before,” he said. Not even when Prussia had lived under his heavy hand, the days they spent in the same office because sometimes he didn’t trust Prussia out of his sight, or the long days when they had to wait to hear from America about how likely they were to be going to nuclear war.
Prussia shrugged. “It was different before.”
They stopped in front of another painting. “So you really have no scars from then?” Russia asked.
“No, I told you. Not since the dissolution,” Prussia said, and paused before pulling off the thick leather bracelet he wore that had been hidden by his coat earlier. He hesitated again before holding the inside of his wrist toward Russia, who took hold of it, pulling it closer.
Stark against his white skin it looked like he had tattooed a section of train tracks until Russia realized the lines were made up of words. Concentration camps, death camps, forests were entire populations had been buried. Russia pressed his thumb down hard when he found Stalingrad right over one of Prussia’s veins.
After a moment he realized Prussia had stopped breathing, staring at him.
“So you still have tattoos,” Russia managed finally, still pressing down hard.
“Those are different from scars,” Prussia managed and his voice didn’t sound right. “They’re what matter to us, not our people. It’s mine. Of course I still have it.”
Russia started to pull him closer and Prussia yanked away, almost breaking his grip.
“Let go.”
“I don’t want to,” Russia said, cocking his head and smiling and Prussia made a frustrated, angry sound low in his throat.
“Let fucking go, Russia.”
Squeezing again, Russia finally let go. “Do you have other tattoos?”
“Of course,” Prussia said, burying his nose in the guide again and evening out his breathing. After a moment, he snapped the bracelet back on, not looking at Russia. “Don’t you?”
“It,” Russia said and Prussia looked up again. “I never—the scars are enough. I don’t want other—” Except that was actually a lie. He had only one tattoo but it was layers upon layers of it now and it wasn’t the same as the ones he sometimes saw other nations with, small, isolated looking ink. Prussia’s with the sprawl of tiny words contained in his wrist was the closest he had ever seen.
Prussia stared at him and Russia looked abruptly away, pulling his scarf up over his chin again. “Oh,” Prussia said quietly.
“What else do you have?” Russia asked, forcing his hand back down and tilting his head again.
“The wall,” Prussia answered, sounding like he was unsure about it. “Fritz. The order. I thought about battles to replace the scars but it felt like too much effort, to keep all those memories alive without any people to back it up.”
“The wall,” Russia repeated and Prussia looked away again, striding to another room.
“Do you have scars from the Revolution?” he asked, obviously digging back at Russia’s wounds after revealing so much about himself. Which was less fair, considering where they were standing.
Russia realized with a sickening lurch how long it had been since he touched Prussia, since Prussia would have known what his scars were when they were lovers. “Yes,” he said. “My heart, for one, but it’s so buried in... There’s another,” he twitched. “Where the bullet killed Nicolas. I’m not sure how even my body could pick out the one—the actual one but—there’s a bullet wound there.” He had felt it, gagging and trying not to fall over, watching jewels spill out of skirts and the family he had watched grow fall over and lay still.
Prussia stopped in the doorway, turning to look at him with shadowed eyes. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”
“It was time,” Russia repeated and it felt far more hollow than it had earlier.
Prussia’s fingers twitched but he nodded, stepping into the next room and Russia stopped because it was the ballroom and he wanted to turn and walk back out. “I remember,” Prussia said, hesitantly. “This room.”
“We used to dance in it,” Russia said and Prussia nodded, tilting his head back to look at the chandeliers. “Do you go to the palaces back home?” he asked, wondering if other nations didn’t mind the old places where they had once lived. Turkey he knew tended not to, and countries like England and Denmark still had their royal families so their palaces didn’t ring empty and silent. But Prussia’s royalty had never been murdered in front of him, they had simply left in exile. They were still alive somewhere.
“Sometimes,” Prussia said, pretending to look at the paintings. “But it can be weird too. At Charlottenburg they have a whole exhibit about the silver and porcelain plates, you know? I used to eat off those plates. I broke some of those plates.”
“I remember,” Russia said, and Prussia’s eyes flickered up to him before he shook his head.
“That was your fault anyway,” he muttered.
“Yes,” Russia agreed easily, because he had been watching Prussia across the table, lingering over his food and watching Prussia’s mouth the whole night. Eventually Prussia had noticed, eyes widening because not so long ago they had been fighting and now Russia was looking at him like a different kind of prey. Russia had smiled and somehow Prussia had managed to shatter the plate, the king looking at him in alarm. “That was the palace with the mirrored ballroom, the round one?”
Prussia nodded, staring blankly in front of him. “Overlooking the gardens. They restored it to look like that.”
“I always thought it was beautiful,” Russia said and Prussia snorted, because it had never come close to the sheer opulence of Imperial Russia.
“No, I think you thought I was beautiful,” Prussia said and came up short, slowly looking back at where Russia was staring at him. “And that just bled through to the room.”
“We danced there too,” Russia said and their monarchs had approved of the nations so obviously getting along, either ignoring the heated nature of the dance or choosing to allow it was a quirk of inter-nation relationships. “You were beautiful, with the lights and the mirrors.”
“Thought I was invincible then,” Prussia said, mouth quirked into a wry smile and his eyes sliding away. “Probably obscured some things.”
“You’re still beautiful,” Russia said and Prussia sprang away, walking quickly across the room. Russia darted forward, quick for his bulk and grabbed Prussia’s wrist, thumb pressing down hard again as it slid under the leather bracelet.
“Jesus fucking Christ, don’t,” Prussia hissed, trying to pull away.
“Dance with me,” Russia said.
“What?” Prussia managed, staring at him in shock. “Are you—you’re not serious.”
“Here, like we used to,” Russia said, pulling him closer and then letting go, Prussia snatching his hand back to hold it protectively against his chest.
“It’s not like it used to be,” he said. “We’re not—we’re not in the seventeen or even the eighteen hundreds anymore. Besides,” he looked around. The room wasn’t particularly full but they would certainly draw attention to themselves.
“I don’t care,” Russia said. “I miss—”
“You’re not going to get everything back with just a dance,” Prussia snapped and Russia pulled him closer again, this time by the shoulders and avoiding his wrist. “Not what it felt like then, not me, not anything—”
“It’s just a dance,” Russia said, holding out his hands. “Even without other people, you still remember the court dances, don’t you?”
“It’s easier with other people,” Prussia said but after a moment accepted Russia’s hands. “A waltz would be better. For just us.”
“Alright,” Russia said, because this was easier, pushing Prussia back and feeling his resistance before he flowed into the steps, always in complete control of his body. Russia had liked to push him, see how far he had to go for Prussia to fall apart. He had never figured it out in bed. He had seen Prussia finally collapse and break on the road to Berlin, too exhausted to keep running and fighting.
As they moved, Prussia started to hum and Russia recognized the song, sweeping Prussia around the room. The chandeliers were still there, and if they were in the wrong clothes and there were different paintings on the wall, and people watching them than that didn’t matter so much as watching Prussia and seeing the light reflected off the walls around them. Electric lights just didn’t highlight Prussia’s hair in the right way.
“I missed—”
“Please don’t,” Prussia cut him off. “That’s not enough, it doesn’t matter anymore. Too much—”
“Why has it been too much?” Russia asked, tugging him closer than the dance really allowed for and they were certainly getting the wrong looks now. Few people stepped across the middle of the room so they weren’t really in anyone’s way but it was suspicious, especially when Prussia looked away, refusing to meet his eyes. “Of all the nations, others have survived worse.”
“Not always together,” Prussia said, still keeping rhythm. “And frankly we were together enough for long enough—”
“But we weren’t together then,” Russia said because it had been getting everything he wanted to have Prussia under his control with none of what he had actually wanted. He never was able to touch him, never had Prussia look at him with warmth or laugh. It had been depressingly easy to let him go when the whole bloc crumbled.
“Stop it,” Prussia snapped, old military command edging into his voice. “I’ve been asked to give more than I can by enough people.”
Russia stopped because without Prussia humming it was too hard to keep his feet on the right steps. “I just want you,” he said, which was a lie. He wanted a lot of other things too, while his nation wanted other things. But for once this was in his grasp. “It’s not the same anymore, is it? We’re not tied by our people’s opinions because you don’t have any,” and Prussia gave a full body wince. “No, isn’t that freeing? We can’t go to war again. They can’t disapprove. Mine can but it’s not like I’m tying myself to a nation, just to you. We can finally be above—”
“I’m part of Germany,” Prussia said. “You could still go to war with him.”
Russia shrugged, sliding a hand around the back of Prussia’s neck and holding him there. “Where’s your tattoo of the wall?”
Prussia tapped his chest, on the right and away from his heart. “Cutting me in half, of course.”
Russia bent down and kissed him, ignoring where they were, or the way Prussia tensed, his back ram-rod straight. Their last kiss had tasted like blood, decades ago, and Russia could remember both blood and war and glittering ballrooms, where Prussia broke plates because of the weight of Russia’s desire. Stilted conversations late into the night because they were all too afraid to go to sleep waiting for the red phone to ring.
When Russia drew back, Prussia was watching him. “I need to think about it,” he said finally. “And don’t do that in public.”
“Worried about me?” Russia asked and Prussia hit him in the chest. He could barely feel the blow.
“Don’t make things harder on yourself, idiot,” Prussia snapped. He swallowed before pulling Russia with him out of the ballroom and not stopping through the next several rooms. “This isn’t why I came here today. Where’s your scar from Stalingrad?” he asked as abruptly at Russia had asked about his tattoo.
“You think I have one?” Russia asked, smiling vacantly again to disguise the rapid fire beating of his heart.
“Yeah, I think you do,” Prussia said.
“Here,” Russia said and brushed the corner of his eye. Prussia frowned before bracing himself with a hand on Russia’s shoulder and leaning up on his toes to look at Russia’s face.
“It’s small,” he said, a dark but small streak tracing the skin outside Russia’s eye and back to his hairline. “Looks like a bullet graze.”
“It was,” Russia said and Prussia rocked back.
“Doesn’t seem like scars like that are usually so small,” Prussia remarked. “Significant graze then?”
“It was from you,” Russia replied and Prussia pulled a face, turning away.
“And you really think we can just,” he held his hands out in front of him, waving them before pursing his lips. “Take up again? With things like that.”
“Yes,” Russia said, smile different than usual. Prussia threw his hands up. Reaching out, Russia caught them and Prussia looked like he wanted to draw away again and this time just run for it. “What did you come here for today, then?” he asked to stall Prussia a moment longer.
“Just,” Prussia deflated. “I just wanted to talk. It’s been a long time, after all. And it seems weird to be so distant from everyone but there’s,” and he winced at what he was about to say. “There’s really no one else beside you I wanted to go to. Or that I could talk about these things with. Can you imagine this sort of conversation with Poland or Austria?” His laugh rang hollow even to Russia who had long since mastered his own creepy variation.
“They don’t know about your tattoo, do they?” Russia asked. “Does Germany?”
Prussia shook his head and Russia reeled him in closer again. “Shut up,” Prussia muttered. “Yes, you’re special, go throw yourself a ball—”
When Russia kissed him again, Prussia tilted his head back into it and shifted up. Russia had forgotten, through the haze of time and revolution and war that Prussia kissed with his entire body, bending it up and his fingers digging into Russia’s shoulders, his hair, and anywhere else Prussia could reach.
“What did I just say?” Prussia asked wryly as he drew back after only a few moments.
“Not to do that in public,” Russia said and grinned, Prussia shaking his head but his hands lingered.
“I need to go,” he said, dropping his hands and turning away.
“I’ll walk you to the train station,” Russia said, following quickly. He had no desire to linger and less to watch Prussia walk away.
“Hotel,” Prussia corrected and Russia blinked at him. “I had a few days off, okay? It’s a long way to come is all…”
Russia stared at him and wanted to kiss him again. “You’ll think about it?” he asked, voice smaller than usual and with no laugh or anger in it.
“Yes,” Prussia said, already shoving his hands in his pockets and walking back toward the exit. “But I’m not going to have an answer for you by tomorrow so don’t bother to give me that look. But I’ll think about it, alright?”
“Alright,” Russia chirped. “Where do you want to go tomorrow?”