Don't own Hetalia/ history

Anastasia

Pat pat pat

She runs on the marble floors.

Pat pat pat

In the great marble arches, the sound of her steps echoes and ricochets off the velvet drapery, the golden foliations along the rim of the great walls. Everything is still and outside it's snowing, but she runs, for her life, her head bursting with cries of pain not her own. And her own.

She doesn't dare scream after him even if, now, he might be the only one left to save her, with his kind words and misplaced smile- That man.

She can't speak to him when everyone lingers in the throne room and he stands alone in the shadows; she can't speak to him in the woods by St. Petersburg, she can't, because she is forbidden to, speak to him when he wanders the imperial palace at night, and everybody thinks she's fallen asleep.

Now she's running on the clock that's ticking counterclockwise, and if she slips on the polished marble, it will be the end. She looks over her shoulder, and the huge doors (regal wood, carved, unliftable) are a threshold to a different world, now. Where soldiers might as well burn silk worms and cross over the border to the far-off lands of the west.

Her head is suddenly flooded by the cries of the unforgiving. Her family, and yes, she's watched it all. Despair and bile and recklessness rise, it's an urge, and she's so scared.

"Ivan!"

That man is called just like the great kings of old. She's screamed her heart out, her voice seems so small, still.

Ivan Ivan Ivan

The echoing betrays her. Behind her, a rumor of voices and boots for snow that shuffle. The door before her opens into the darkness, she knows the figure walking out of it, silent, familiar.

He bows to her. "Your highness."

A trail of tears remains suspended in the air as she runs towards him like he is the only last solution (he is), heavy boots cross the great wooden door (wouldn't she make stakes out of it? Go for their hearts?) It's the melancholy of those who are too close to Siberia thinking for her, it must be.

"…help!"

He likes it because she says it in a fiery way that makes him doubt if she's ordering or begging, he likes her, because he likes contradictions.

He likes chaos. He likes empires about to collapse.

Again, that smile. His arms open just for her, and she tangles herself in a mess of white scarf in the bosom of this familiar stranger that always stayed in the dark side of the rooms, never to be spoken to.

"Help me, Ivan!"

But they, for all that they ignored him, knew his name. Because you cannot wholly ignore those things you fear the most.

"I can help you, yes," he says soothing, his voice unlike anything she could have imagined, and the marble hall is bursting with soldiers of the Great Revolution, the vitreaux smashed to shatters. Weary, bloodied from blood not theirs. Soon to be stripping the imperial palace of riches not theirs. (… not theirs…?)

Ivan, a mysterious person. He smiles at the company of soldiers, unarmed and unimpressed.

"Hand 'er over!"

He shakes his head. "I don't think I will."

"Why you…?"

Nobody knows for certain what is happening, or why their comrade has stopped speaking but the room is turned sticky crimson all of a sudden, and, while the survivors scramble up to their feet, ushering out of the great door like from the malleus maleficarum, some of them are pondering on the abstraction of the color red.

Her face is still buried in his bosom.

"I like you, you can go if you want," he says, so kindly she could be fooled.

She's desolate, clinging to him in a completely unexpected way. But that's because she's alone. "Where would I go now?"

Is he always smiling like that? Either way, she cannot see him when he answers, "The world is a great, wonderful place. If you go South, it stops snowing, too."

She shudders.

"But leave Russia."

A friendly piece of advice, and she doesn't like it at all because she's alone with her trauma and feelings of displacement, and she cannot bear to see war ever again. He might have suggested that she leave Europe, but neither of both can know what the future will bring.

She cannot summon the courage to leave him, so she clings to him tighter, and, beneath the thousands of layers of clothing, there's something like a very thin frame, the inkings of a skeleton.

"Will you be fine… Ivan?"

Isn't he always smiling? She sees him this time.

Maybe the great kings of old were named after him.

A/N It's 8.22 am and I should be off to school. I'm unhealthy. Little oneshot featuring Russia, what do you thiink? Comments verily appreciated. Grammar rules broken on purpose.

Peace to the world, and love to the people =)