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hetalia_kink) wrote2012-06-03 02:47 pm
He wakes up mostly upside-down and choking.
His head is pounding, his lungs are burning, and he cannot feel his legs. In his experience, this is a good thing. It means he probably still has them. Even Nations tend to be slowed down by a missing limb.
-Oh God, that's right, Canada stepped on a mine so one of his boys wouldn't, days or weeks or eons ago. England had to drag him back and put him back together, couldn't trust him to a human medic-
The memory of the haggard weariness on England's face makes him groan, finally forces his eyes open. There's the faint sound of gunfire off in the distance, but it would be stranger not to hear gunfire, really. There's a haze in the air, mustard gas and fresh blood steaming in the cold. A lot of it is his.
He cannot remember where he's supposed to be, where his men are, why he went down. The war burns across his body like a fever, sending his thoughts spinning away in glittering fragments that make no sense.
-Prussia, laughing, red eyes and a plumed hat from a hundred, a thousand years ago when they were allies and friends and will they ever be allies again, after this? "France, you make no sense!"-
Eventually, he grows tired of staring up at the overcast, dull gray sky - gray like a rifle barrel before the muzzle flash - and decides to try and sit up. The moment he does, pain lashes along his spine, bites down into his thighs and ankles and oh good he still has his legs after all. It tears a scream from his throat and sends him back down into the mud, sinking into blissful darkness with the thought that now at least he knows why his men left him behind.
His legs are tangled in barbed wire.
-Barbed wire and poison gas and machine guns and trench warfare. It's brutal, disgusting, he hates Germany for inciting this sort of escalation, all this needless death. He never thought he'd miss Roman cavalry and English longbows-
It's awhile before he wakes again, wounds festering rather than healing. He can feel the steady throb of the trenches, lines like lashes across his back. He groans, moving more carefully this time to investigate his situation. He'll have to get out of here sooner or later - he'll live until his last citizen dies, but he's wondering more and more and more lately if his time has finally come - and he'd rather not suffer the indignity of an English rescue.
Then a more chilling thought occurs to him. He could very well be behind enemy lines now, with the way the Germans were pushing forward, and he likes the idea of a "rescue" by Germany or Prussia even less.
It takes him hours, the sky going dark and forcing him to stop with one leg free and his hands torn but no longer bleeding because he has no blood left to give.
With the night, the gunfire stops, though now the moans and screams of the injured and dying are more audible. He wonders idly which lines he's closer to, and whose injured he's hearing, and then decides it doesn't matter.
With the night comes the cold. He can feel his blood freezing to the wire, to the ground, mud turning hard as rock and sharp as glass, crackling every time he moves. It's a long night, with only the corpses for company.
-But not the longest night, no. That came in 1793, or maybe in 1431, or quite possibly in 1349 when everyone was sick with the Plague and they all huddled together in Florence, France and England shoulder to shoulder ignoring their warring states, Bulgaria and Ottoman with Hungary between them but still being civil, all of them playing cards and drinking and pretending they weren't all coughing up blood-
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