fic: Turkey, Mama Greece, Greece
Hey, guys, it's been a while! I hope to make up for my long absence soon!
Title: Nothing Lasts Forever
Author: me
Warnings: none, really. Sadik being slightly angsty. very short fic :<
Pairings: implied Greece/Ottoman Empire
Rating: PG
Summary: In those days when breathing was a task, and pain seized his entire being, she was always there, a breath from him. "Nothing lasts forever."
She came to him, invariably, when he was ill; when his body hitched in exhaustion, when his very joints groaned from exertion, when each breath was a struggle. In those nights, she came to him, and in such a way there was no telling reality from a degree of separation, those still places where, no matter how you tried, you could never quite discount the fact they might have been real.
As he slept, he could still feel the long, viscous trickle of blood from his scalp to his jaw , the ache and swell of bruises, and the shifting of his bones. And she stood in an archway, with the lead-coloured sky framing her, and the earth far below, and her robes floating about her, caught by the ether, and right before a breath. And with those eyes that mutable color of faith, she looked at him directly, and her voice rang out, sonorous and deep, carrying just above the eddies of the breeze.
“Nothing lasts forever.”
And he would jerk awake, entire body spasming in the effort he conducted to throw his body forward in the dream, so that she wouldn't drop (she couldn't drop), and the name he had since long forgotten dying on his lips. He lay still for several moments, or several eternities, and curled himself around the thin, lanky body of her progeny (it was easy to ignore, in those moment, he was Roma’s progeny as well as hers, despite the brush of his manhood against Sadik’s thigh) and breathed in her scent. In those moments, and in the ones that followed where the boy opened his eyes and seemed to know (but he couldn’t have, even though the boy had been there, and close to death, and had watched him destroy her; no one did), it was easy to believe she was still alive.
And in two hundred years, the dream still persisted. When his entire frame shuddered from a prolonged battle on the banks of the Aegean, his knuckles bloody from battering them repeatedly against the face of what had once been his most cherished possession, and his prayer beads broken (he would later affix them to the pommel of his sword, in order to never forget), he still dreamed of her, in the way that pain and strife only could. And in the nights that followed those hellish, pain riddled days (and other nations lazily had their way with the man they had shit their pants in fear to see when they had been too young to see past their own yards), she came to him with the same words, and the eyes that promised him something he had never been comfortable with.
“It’s not over.” He learned to say. He had learned to say it in the 1400s, when his body was laced with slivers of scarlet mapping over his body from English swords, bleeding from his nose and mouth. He learned to say it when her very son rose against him in the 1600s and walked through the streets, fire licking his heels, and controlling it like a pet bear. He learned to say it when hellfire burst in the air around him just before the turn of the 20thcentury, and his lungs became thick with the knowledge that he was losing everything he’d ever fought for, all in one night, on the Bosphorous.
“It isn’t over.” He had to repeat it over and over to himself before he could really pick himself back up after the first World War, and remind himself of it in the second one. After that, survival was easier, but he fought to remind himself often that they had once been there, weighty and dark, and when, for the first time, he could no longer go back to the Topkapi.
For the first time in nearly sixty years, he awoke from the half dream, with her silk-like skin slipping inches past his fingers, as if the realization of something momentous had passed. He lay still, eyes fixed on the white wall across from his bed and finally thought he knew what she meant. Below his apartment, Istanbul traffic was slowly picking up in the pre-dawn hours. He silently lit a cigarette in the false light, that light that was so very like her eyes, he realized for the first time, and worried his prayer beads thoughtlessly (which had long since broken from the pommel of his sword, and he wore again on his wrist, with a string of very old nazar beads). In the half-silence and the half-light, her voice echoed, no less strongly for all the time ago she had said it, and for a few moments, he couldn’t breathe.
He looked out over the city and wished desperately, while a fine mist of sweat collected in his collarbones, that he wasn’t alone (and that he wasn’t so very naked) when he realized that she had been right.
Nothing did last forever.
-------------------------------------------Notes:
Lots of different references here, so, obviously, this fic could have been longer.
First, in my head, I think Turkey would hate being en dishabille, if only for the fact that, in his younger days, he wore so many clothes at one time.
Mentions of the death of old Hellenistic Greece, his capture of her son, the present Greece.
Also mentioned, the rebellions of the Jannisaries, an army of captured non-Turkish boys, who would light portions of the city aflame until they were granted what they wished. Of course, Greece would have been a Jannisary.
Also, his loss of Greece (what some call the beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire), and then World Wars I and II, and, finally, the present day.
I think Hellenistic Greece would always be there in his head.