Alrightly, you see here is the first story of mine to ever be posted on this site. Right now I'm trying to work my way around posting this thing. It's a one shot sort of thing right now but it might grow if anyone shows interest. I'm practicing dialog, reviews would be cool if anyone could drop one by ^^

I've done my best to clear out the typo's and I've read this over about a billion and three times (prime reason why I find it near impossible to finish anything I write). Really I'm just astounded that I was able to stop writing and post something for once. This story is a little bit Hungary/Prussia, and it's in the "adventure" category only because of what it might become if I decided to continue with it. It's rated T, because I'm a teenager (hence the 'T') and I generally write teenager like things. There are a few swear words and heavy allusions to goriness so be forewarned.

Disclaimer: Alas mes chéris, these characters and their cannon story do not belong to me, nor does history. Those things all belong to the amazing: Hidekaz Himaruya (yes even perhaps history, in my opinion).

In the fading gray light, one can only guess what time of day it is. A man sits in a gray walled room. His back is slumped against the gritty plaster surface, shoulders hunched and head hanging between them. He sits cross-legged with his elbows on his knees. His papery, pale white skin is knit together where his fingers are interlaced in front of his face. A face invisible. It's blocked from the quiet room by a hanging mess of tarnished greasy gray hair. Scarlet bloodshot eyes, carrying a hungry and profoundly mad gleam, dart from one pitch black crack in the wall to another. The walls look as if someone's decorated them. Someone's taken finger nails full of coal dust and drawn intricate streaks of lightning over the dull surfaces.

In the little square room the air is thin and so cold Prussia can't feel his limbs. They are stiff with sleep, but he hasn't bothered moving to wake them in some time. He gave up trying to warm himself long ago, there are no blankets, and he sometimes wonders if he can even die from something like cold. The lumpy mattress he sits on is gray like the walls, once a clean white like his hair, and set into a thin rusty iron frame. Those red eyes are now watching the dust swirl in twisters upon the floor. A floor made of planks of a dark red cherry wood. Gilbert's glad for the color, you can't see the stains. He watches the gentle breeze that flows in through the glassless windows play with the gray tufts of matter like a bored kitten.

His eyes lift after moments of observing the light particles. Trying to keep his mind safe from his pursuers, renegade thoughts. It was an eternal silent cat and mouse battle, trying not to think of anything at all. Shimmering rubies just barely visible between strands of gray hair, point to the window. The window is of course set into the wall, a plain rectangle without a frame. It's directly across the room from him. There is one identical other, sitting in the middle of the wall to his right. However, he pay's it no mind.

Prussia can see that his room is perched high above a city quieted by the winter by looking out the window. Gilbert can watch the heart of his captor's kingdom, still and unbeating this time of year. The buildings are made of blue and black stone, carved into intricately shaped architectural monoliths that house apartments. They look to him a sea of dead black spiders, perhaps killed off by the cold. Lying on their backs with their thousands of prickling spindly legs pointing towards the sky.

Somewhere behind locked doors families huddle around blazing fires, sharing a single quilt. He's like a little bird, he thinks, sitting in a silver cage set high above the linoleum floor of his master's house. The man abruptly distracts himself from his thoughts again, suddenly entranced by the rolling clouds overhead. They are yet another shade of ashen gray. The sun is behind them somewhere, but he can't see where. Does not know whether it is setting, rising, or noon. Cracks of blinding whiteness break through the clouds all over the forsaken, birdless sky.

The skeletal figure takes a deep shuttering, rattling breath that sounds something like an inhaled sigh. Prussia's gray button up decomposing dress shirt hangs off him. So do the baggy black cargo pants clothing his legs. He lets his eyes drift shut and he listens instead to the gentle pitter-patter sound of his faintly beating heart. All to try in vain to escape his own insidious consciousness.

Then there is a rapping at the door, and Gilbert hears his heart begin to race. Picking up its pace until it is ramming itself painfully against the inside of his fragile chest.

"Гилберт?" A voice asked innocently from the other side of the door, situated towards the far end of the left wall. The thick oak wood is blemished with cream scratches and dents that match Gilbert's bloody knuckles and fingers.

"What do you want Ivan?" Prussia meant to roar, eyes flickering open and shining with a dangerous glint. He only managed to growl in a voice cracked with disuse.

"You have a visitor little GDR." He sang in that sickeningly childish voice he loathed. Prussia raised one eyebrow inquisitively and his head rose from it's drooping. He had never had a visitor before, only Russia ever came knocking. Well… Lithuania had come once, the first night. "I'll just let her in." He said sweetly, sounding like a plastically cheerful character from a children's tv show. In the ensuing silence there was a sharp click as a tiny brass key was turned in the locking mechanism of the door. The door swung inward easily, a few rays of yellow light rushing in to dance across the dark floor from the hall outside. "You have twenty minutes dear." The violet eyed monster seemed to purr. His no doubt ghostly pale, mortifying smiling face hidden from sight out in the hall.

"Thank you sir." An alto, smooth, confidant, and distinctly feminine voice rolled in through the deathly chilly air. The familiar sound made Prussia's heart constrict painfully. His eyes widen in a flash of confusion that quickly transformed into one of glowering.

"You." Prussia spat as a woman with long flowing brown hair floated through the open doorway to face him.

"Me." She replied softly, a grin giving her lips a happy crescent shape. As the door abruptly swished shut behind her and was relocked with another echoing click, she slid her hands into her pant pockets. They were the pockets of a steal blue soviet uniform. Complete with a furry mink hat nesting over her soft hair. "Good evening Mr. Beilsmitch." She greeted him formally with a small curt nod.

"You come here just to taunt me? I'm sure your Vanya is very pleased with you." He snarled through jaws clenched so tightly he thought his teeth might crack.

"As much as I would absolutely love to spend the next twenty minutes patronizing you, Gilbert, I didn't fight my way here just to argue. I came to give you something." She told him. She unzipped her ski jacket, revealing the white cotton shirt underneath. Hungary reached one arm inside and withdrew a black and white stripped blanket that had been carried between her stomach and the coat. It was folded into a neat square.

"Merry Christmas you ungrateful bastard!" Hungary enthusiastically wished, throwing the warm blanket violently toward Prussia. It opened like a parachute canopy above his head. Then, drifted down to burry him in a sea of thick fleece fabric. He said something in reply that Hungary couldn't hear, muffled by the folds of cloth that buried the trapped Prussian.

"What was that? Thank you?" She inquired loudly, raising her hand to cup her ear in emphasis.

After a few moments of wrestling with the blanket latter, in which it was a pulsating surface broken by feeble punches and kicks, he finally managed to find the end of it. Only his head appeared, the rest of his body remaining submerged. He took in a noisy gulp of fresh air as he burst through.

"No! I said, are you trying to suffocate me!" he shouted angrily, hoarse voice crackling like a fire into the open air.

"If it will make you any quieter, but somehow I doubt that. You've been stuck up here alone for years and your still as noisy and annoying as you've ever been!" She said, laughter bubbling up in her chest, feeling like hot cocoa filling her heart in the bracing cold.

"Get away from me you traitorous hag!" Gilbert protested as Hungary advanced towards him from across the room, floorboards creaking dangerously as she went. Once standing over his mattress, she bent down to brush a thick layer of dust off the thin cloth with a cream gloved hand.

"May I sit down? I've come quiet a long way." Hungary inquired gently.

A firm

"No." Was all she got from Prussia, who had pulled the blanket tighter around himself like a protective shell meant to ward off evil. His back was pressed flat against the wall. Sighing, Elizaveta ignored him and promptly sat down, front facing the window across the room as he was. Instead of letting her legs dangle off the edge of the bed Hungary pulled them into a cross legged sitting position. She was made clumsy by her black combat boots. Which were a men's size and a little too big for her. He didn't pull away this time as she backed up against the wall. He only continued to glare. She was close enough to Prussia that the big blanket and her thick coat brushed.

"Alright, so what do we do for fun around here?" Hungary asked sarcastically, putting on an expectant smile and turning to stare at her friend's wary, untrusting face.

Prussia merely scoffed at her, swiftly turning his head to glare into the open white space outside his window. Hungary mimicked the movement, trying to figure out what he found so interesting about the white and gray landscape outside. After a few seconds of observing the drab skyline, her red lips parted as she spoke.

"I really missed you." She admitted quietly, bring her right arm around Prussia's frail shoulders. She closed her eyes as she leaned her head against his.

"You never told me why you came." He shot back.

"I already told you, it's Christmas and I got you a present." She replied simply.

"Ja, but why? You also told me you hated me. People that hate each other don't get each other Christmas gifts. Not unless they're rigged to explode." Prussia reasoned coolly.

"I did not!" Hungary yelled, sounding hurt by the notion that she would even consider such a lowly thing as hatred.

"Yes you did." Gilbert insisted, raising both thin silver eyebrows disbelievingly at the fact she didn't appear to recall. "I distinctly remember."

"Did not!" She repeated with twice the fervor.

"Did to!" Prussia barked.

The childish disagreement ended in the two glaring at each other with enough ferocity to make Germany and Austria hastily vanish from the room. As the two friends would have just like old times, had they been present. It didn't help that the pair were close enough that the tips of their noses touched. Prussia was first to break the glare. Pouting like a disgruntled teenager. Hungary hottily turned her own eyes away and loosened her tight grip on his wasted shoulder.

"I said that 'your insufferable and I can't stand to be near you.' Not that I hated you." Elizaveta tried to explain.

"If that's true than you are hugging me now because…?" Prussia questioned teasingly, dragging out the end of his 'because'.

"It's because your awesome idiot. Duh," She grumbled, as if that was the answer to everything. She blew a strand of his hair out of her face in annoyance.

"I see you've finally realized the ultimate truth. How's it feel to be the first to reach the epitome of enlightenment?" He announced like he was a reporter congratulating her on having been crowned queen of the world in that moment.

"Somehow I doubt I'm the first. You know what other earth shattering realization I've come to?"

"What?"

"You really need a bath. You stink." She accused, grinning.

"No shit." He replied, smiling warmly into her shoulder. His taunt muscles and jumble of broken bones, relaxed into her side.

"I suppose Russia won't let you take me out of here so I can get one of those?" Prussia asked even thought he knew it was wishful thinking.

"Not a chance." Hungary's answer was an angry growl brought on by the thought of Ivan.

"Eh, aw well, another ten years without soap can't hurt. Hey..." He chirped good naturedly.

"mmm?" She hummed in reply.

"If you don't despise me than why the betrayal? You told me that if we lost, or if one of us was captured, you wouldn't leave me behind no matter what. And I you, I really meant it too, for once. So… why did you lie to me?" There it was, the question she'd been waiting on him to ask. The atmosphere, which had been beginning to grow easy, was alight with static. He asked it out of the blue, like he didn't really care if he got an answer. As if it didn't really matter to him either way. Hungary detected the tension in his words thought, and immediately knew he was dead serious.

"Your just chuck full of questions today aren't you?" Her voice sounded strained, wary, and careful.

"I spend most of my time trying not to think at all, especially questions. I've had a lot of time to think thought and every once in a while a thought slips through. They've snowballed into a few good sentences over the years." He continued in the same tense, animus, positive tone.

"It wasn't my choice to have you dissolved you know. I'm just along for the ride, my hands are no longer my own and I spend my days trying to keep them from turning on me." She said, tone dropping dangerously dark and steely. He wasn't fazed.

"Elizaveta, stop avoiding my question. I'm not looking for an excuse or half answers, I'm asking why. Don't I deserve at least that? After having me locked away, stripped of everything I am, while you get off scot free at my expense. While you're forgiven and I'm damned to this frozen hellish limbo for the rest of eternity." His voice peeled out into a hateful drawl.

She snorted. Hungary wanted so much to yell that her life wasn't exactly rainbows and sunshine either. She had her fair share of tragedy and persecution too. She had also felt her people being massacred in the streets, starving in their homes. However, she caught herself long before she could open her mouth. She knew better and she was done making mistakes.

"What else can I say? You already know I'm a coward. I know I promised to stay with you but… I'm not as strong as you. I don't think anyone is. I wouldn't last five minutes in your boat. I'm hideously selfish and I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive myself. I was afraid. I thought I was strong enough but I wasn't, I was gravely mistaken. Those are the reasons why I accepted the devil's deal, in the end." She admitted her feelings all at once, served in the form of choppy directly to the point sentences. Elizaveta held no truth back from him. Hungary had come in part to set things right between them, and she decided she couldn't let herself avoid him any longer.

Prussia looked at her as if he didn't believe her, like he was sure she had to be lying. It intensified the untrusting look that glazed over his red eyes the entire time they had been speaking. Was the answer really that simple? She was just afraid? He thought. "What did you expect? Some elaborate plan of betrayal on my part? Full of sworn oaths of vengeance against you and your brother for being the bane of my existence for the past millennium?" She inquired, the corners of her mouth turning up in sudden amusement.

"Something like that. It would have made you easier to hate." He conceded, sounding distant but still frustrated. Then there was a heavy pause. "Speaking of him, how is he?" The reappearance of Gilberts voice was tender, longing, and sad. A drastic change from the dripping anger that had colored it a few minutes before.

"I don't know." She sighed sympathetically. "I don't have any information or contact with the world outside Soviet's sphere of influence. No one does. I don't think even the winter demon himself has intel on what's going on beyond the barrier… I'm sorry."

"It's gotten that bad?" He asked, exhaustion seeping into his tone. Bad? She chuckled darkly to herself. This guy doesn't know the half of it. She thought.

"Yeah, they call it the iron curtain. You felt it descending didn't you? You must have. There's a wall splinting your Berlin in two." She stated grimly. Prussia's eyes bulged in their sockets, as if he'd just come to a horrifying realization of some kind.

"So that's what that was…" He muttered under his breath, gazing out the window again with half lidded eyes like it wasn't even there. Peering through the fabric of space and time into a completely different world.

"What did you feel?" Hungary asked, a searing hot bubble of concern and fear clogging the inside of her throat. Get a hold of yourself dammit.

"It felt like someone was ripping me in two, or maybe cleaving me in half. Kind of like being drawn and quartered. There's a scar going down my chest, straight across my heart." His tone was strange. Prussia gestured to the blanket warming his torso with a bony hand. Elizaveta responded by sliding her other arm around him and hugging him closer. She rested her cheek, flushed from the cold, against his. "Don't hold me to tightly, you'll wreck the few ribs that aren't already mangled." He complained.

"Sorry."

"S'alright." "Lizzy?"

"Yes?"

"Merry Christmas… missed you too." Prussia grumbled into the crook of her neck as if hoping she wouldn't hear.

"Elizaveta, it's time to go, we need to get to that meeting with North Korea. It's already late and you know how impatient he gets." The room's occupant and his guest both jumped at the same time, eyes wild. Russia's bubbly childish voice came from the other side of the door. I hadn't even heard him returning from his walk across the building to make the phone call. Hungary thought in shock.

"Yes, I'm coming." Elizaveta called back with a fake smile and brightness. She reluctantly let go of Prussia, pulling away. He slumped on his side against the back wall, giving her a good luck smirk. Hungary crawled on her hands and knees backward across the mattress. She was about to slide off the edge of the bed when she suddenly paused. An expression of remembering something dawned on her face. The shadow of a smile gracing her features, she leaned back towards Prussia. Her lips brushing against the rim his ear as she whispered, just so Russia couldn't hear.

"Prussia… If I'm trapped inside and the door can only be opened from the outside, than who is going to set you free?"

Her mission complete, the lithe girl hopped off the edge of the mattress. She retreated toward the door, just as it was popped opened for her by Russia on the other side. Hungary turned her head to give Gilbert a small goodbye wink before she darted out into the hall and disappeared from his sight. The heavy door, Prussia was suspicious of it being steel reinforced, swung shut behind her with a thunderous thud. His visitor gone, Gilbert Beilsmitch was once again left with only his self-destructive thoughts for company. Those and a few new memories of eyes the color of newborn leaves in spring.