Mother Courage (Axis Powers Hetalia, Lithuania, Prussia) [1]
Oh god I am exhausted. Finally, though. FINALLY. Have been poking at this thing for long enough, lord knows.
This is probably the longest oneshot I've written in, uh...ever. It's also kind of an experiment for me, as the narrative is a lot less snapshot-ish and a lot more continuous (which is partially because Lithuania isn't a collection of scenes, he's a story).
I think I'm proud of this one. I hope other people enjoy it, too. ♥
also: neither the most depressing nor the most pretentious thing I have written! For this fandom, even!
Title: Mother Courage
Author: puella_nerdii
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: Lithuania, Prussia, Poland; Russia, in absentia
Rating: R, for adult themes, mostly due to the --
Timestamp: 1941-1944, during the German occupation of Lithuania.
Summary: Sometimes, living is enough of a victory. Lithuania, Prussia, and resistance.
Lithuania tweaks the knobs on the old wireless set, adjusts the antennae. Stretches of static and the occasional droning beep whine through the speakers. He frowns, settles the wireless on his lap (and minds the arm that’s in a sling), and brings his ear closer to the dented wire mesh; this isn’t right, he’s fairly certain that this is the right frequency, the one German broadcasters use, one the Lithuanian Activist Front told him to monitor today. Maybe the signal’s too weak, or his wireless is too worn to receive it, or the needle’s pointing between stations and not on them, that’s possible, too, the cracks in the screen and the grime smeared on it do make it hard for him to do any kind of fine-tuning.
His forearm throbs: dull, steady, like a background headache. Lithuania grits his teeth against the pain and keeps fiddling with the battered knob on the left, the one whose ridges have worn away with time and use. This would be easier if he had both of his hands-but it could be worse, he reminds himself. That’s his litany these days; he seems to say it more often than his prayers. It could be worse. Russia could have broken his arm instead of sprained it. Russia could have sprained his right arm instead of his left, and then he wouldn’t be able to do much of anything.
And there are still things he can do, he reminds himself, shaking the wireless gently. There’s something coming through-no, not through the radio, in the distance. Shouts, shots, the roar of tanks-
Lithuania springs to his feet, grunts as the wireless tumbles from his lap. He hopes he didn’t break it, it’s the only one he managed to conceal from Russia for this long, the only one that isn’t stuck on Soviet stations. Never mind that; he shoves the toe of his boot under the loose floorboard next to him, wriggles the wood free and pulls out the rifle he’s stored beneath. It’s as old and battered as everything else he owns now, but he doesn’t have anything else. He props it over his left shoulder, remembers, no, he can’t do that with his arm like this, shouts when the butt of the rifle smacks his sprain. Lithuania hits the floor, his knees smacking down, tenses from the jolt of pain and the realization. He shouted. He shouted. He claps his hand over his mouth before he hears another rattle of machine-gun fire and remembers. No. They won’t hear him over that, or so he prays. (Has anyone ever heard him, when he cries?-No, he mustn’t allow himself to think like that. He won’t. It’s-it’s unbecoming.)
He’s falling back on instinct. He can’t do that now. He has to think. Besides, this isn’t the kind of war that’s hardwired into him.
Lithuania’s knee topples the wireless over, and it spits out a message, finally, in his own tongue: l-Germans crossing the Nemunas, and the Red Army retreats before them. We will drive them out; we will reclaim our country; we will take back what is ours! Atstatoma Laisva Lietuva!”
He breathes shallowly. Germany’s declared war on Russia. The revolt’s starting, and from the sounds of it, the Lithuanian Activist Front is engaging the Red Army not too far from here.
Russia’s leaving. It’s going to end soon.
He shouts, but it’s a whoop this time, something like his old war cry as he tears down the steps, rifle in hand, and throws open the front door of the house in Aleksotas. He can smell the Nemunas from here, hear how the grinding of the tanks mostly drowns out the sloshing of the river. They’re advancing towards the Aleksotas Bridge, tearing up the road and stretches of grass, scattering clouds of grit into his eyes, mowing over the ragged retreating lines of the Red Army. Germany’s men-no, Prussia’s men, more likely-are barking orders, hefting their rifles to shoot retreating Red Army soldiers in the back, firing their tanks at clusters of Russia’s men before they can scramble across the bridge or set explosives on it. Explosives again, as though they haven’t destroyed enough of Kaunas and Vilnius and all the rest of him…he doesn’t cheer when Prussia’s men stop some of the Red Army soldiers crawling down the supports by peppering them with machine-gun fire, but at least the soldiers are splashing down into the water instead of chunks of his bridge. And Lithuania’s partisans rise out of the riverbanks and pour out of the shells of barns and squat houses with half-sodden shotguns and long knives, putting an end to any of Russia’s soldiers who missed the retreat and are trying to catch up with their comrades.
The word makes him want to spit. He doesn’t, but he does crouch behind a crumbling wall, all that’s left of where a house once stood, and balances his rifle on top, levels it at…
…at Russia’s men. He should fire at them. He’ll worry about Prussia later; he wants Russia out now. If he can keep his rifle steady enough to drive him off, at any rate. Doing this with one hand is next to impossible, and the barrel wobbles and shifts every time Lithuania thinks he has a shot. He thinks his men have started to sing, but the sound’s drowned in the rattle of the Panzers. Dust thickens the air, and breathing is more like choking.
“Hey!” Someone’s voice cuts through the din. “Hey, Lithuania!”
He looks up, wiping some of the water from his eyes.
Prussia’s head pokes out of a tank parked not a meter from where Lithuania’s crouching. He grins, shouts “That’s almost their garrison! Come on, men, let’s see how red the Bolsheviks are!” to his men, and the tank in the lead complies, backing over a few fallen Russians. The snap of breaking bone cracks through the air like a gunshot, and Lithuania flinches.
“Not bad, not bad,” Prussia says. “I think we’ll get what, seventy kilometers into Russia’s territory before the day’s out? Eighty?”
“My territory,” Lithuania says, and works to unclench his jaw. “You mean my territory.”
“’Course I do.” Prussia isn’t really looking at him; he’s got his gaze trained on Kaunas in the distance, and Lithuania can almost see him calculate how many troops he can allocate to take the capital, how many he needs to keep by him to push through to Russia. To push through him to Russia. His arm aches. “Hope he hasn’t blown up too many bridges on the retreat, those things are a bitch to rebuild and we’ve still got to get across the Düna in the north.” He claps his hands together, rubs them, and the leather of his gloves squeaks. “Well, men, we’ve caught Russia with his ass hanging out. Hell, at this rate we’ll be rolling into Leningrad before the month’s out.”
Lithuania still thinks he prefers the old name. He swallows. “I’ve declared independence, you know,” he says, wills his voice to stay steady no matter how much the pain in his arm is mounting, spreading. “I’m setting up a provisional government in Kaunas.”
Prussia snorts. “You and what army?”
It’s a different kind of ache. Lithuania looks down.
“Thought so. Russia made you disband it, didn’t he? Asshole. He could’ve been a man about it and faced you on the battlefield.” He laughs. “Man, those were the days, huh? Hey, remember Tannenberg? The old one, I mean,” he clarifies. “Back when I was a Teutonic Knight and you and Poland were like that-”
“Don’t,” Lithuania says, “bring up Poland right now. Please.”
Prussia holds his hands up, but Lithuania doesn’t mistake it for a gesture of surrender. “Okay. Fine. My lips are sealed. Pretty day, huh?”
Lithuania sees shredded dirt and grass, grey clouds heavy in the sky, blood thickening the dust, and says nothing.
“Tell you what,” Prussia continues, “I’ll help you kick whatever’s left of Russia out of your house, okay? I think we both want that. I know you don’t want him back-”
“Anything but that,” he says, and claps his hand over his mouth. He hadn’t expected that much-vehemence.
“So I’ll get him good. This is how a war should go, I’m telling you.” Prussia puts his fingers in his mouth and lets out a piercing whistle; the tanks grind, and his men march to form columns behind him, pointed at the Aleksotas Bridge. “He doesn’t have any idea what to do, does he? None of ‘em do. All right, men, we’re moving out. Last one to Raisenai’s a rotten egg!”
The tanks rumble and roar to life, grinding over bone and stone. Prussia calls over his shoulder, “It’d be nice if you gave me a hand.”
Lithuania doesn’t bother to ask what the benefit for him is if he does.
***
He broadcasts his national anthem over the radio the next day, at nine-twenty-eight in the morning. “Free Lithuania is being restored,” he announces, and the members of the Lithuanian Activist Front in the studio with him clap each other on the back, exchange strained smiles. “The Red Army is in retreat, and a Provisional Government has risen to take its place-an administration of Lithuanian citizens, dedicated to Lithuanian interests.”
He says nothing of Prussia’s push towards Jonava. Kaunas was a fortress city once, he remembers. How many invasions did its walls withstand? He looks out the window at the crumbling brick structures and black streaks left by Prussia’s bombing runs and feels his stomach twist. He swallows that down and reads on: “I ask for people to guard public and private property, for factory and government workers to organize the defense of their institutions, and for the public to hold on to the documents and properties that are rightfully theirs and to return to the jobs they held before the Soviet invasion, so we can again become the proud nation we were then.”
Lithuania rises from his chair-several men in the room rush to help him, since his arm makes it more difficult for him to do that for his own-and lets a spokesman for the Front read off the names of the provisional government members. He crosses to the window, presses his ear to the glass, and listens for the rumble of tanks.
They don’t arrive until the next day. They roll through the city in parade formation, and the ring of boot-heels on stone fills Lithuania’s ears when he tries to sleep. He gives up the effort soon after and stares at the cracks spiderwebbing across his ceiling. Pockets of resistance to the provisional government are springing up around Vilnius, if not in it, and there’s nothing he can do to placate them. One Lithuania, says the Activist Front, Lithuania for Lithuanians, but his people aren’t one any more than he was one with Russia, and his people are tearing pieces of him away; it isn’t enough that Russia’s still holding God knows how much of him hostage in Siberia, it isn’t enough that Prussia’s ripping through Lithuania’s land as he breaks Russia’s lines, now his own people-
“Stop it,” he tells himself sternly. He’s not young; he knows better than this, or he ought to. Lithuania kneels on the bare floor, balls his good hand into a fist and rests his forehead on it, and prays not in words but in images, pictures of his rivers and forests and churches and walls. “Keep them strong,” he finishes. “Please.”
Prussia knocks on his door the following night.
“Gotta hand it to your people,” he says, “they don’t waste time. Just give ‘em a few suggestions, and bam, they’re doing your work for you. You know, I might have to rethink my opinion on what to do with you guys.”
Lithuania squeezes his eyes shut, but can’t keep them that way. “That isn’t your place to decide. I have self-rule now.”
“Right, right, I know. Okay then, I’m not telling you what to do,” he says, but Lithuania hears the snorting laughter in his voice. “I’m just saying-”
Prussia glances outside and says something like “huh,” his eyes glittering, his tongue darting out over the corner of his mouth. Lithuania presses his lips together, remains silent. Glass shatters, gunfire rattles, screams are cut off as violently as they began. Lithuania watches flames lick at the corners of his vision and crawl towards the center of the street. He steadies his good hand on the wall. He needs curtains, thick blackout curtains, but Russia shot out the windows of this house months ago and Lithuania never got around to replacing them…
“I’m just saying, I think your people have a pretty good grasp on the way things are going. Remember what I said, about how nice it would be if you gave me a hand? I’ve gotta throw everything into attacking Russia, I want things to go smoothly here. Don’t want to worry about too many fronts at once, you know?”
“I know.” Lithuania swallows and turns aside. “I think it would be best if I stayed inside. I’m afraid my arm hasn’t recovered fully yet, and I don’t want to do anything that might damage it further.” He sounds like he’s reading off a prepared statement. Maybe he is. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Prussia shrugs, listens to the cries of next! out the door. “Your call. This isn’t really my jurisdiction, anyway. I just thought you might want to know. So I thought I’d pass the news on. So you could do whatever.”
“I know what they’re doing.” Breathing-breathing is like sucking in air through a thin tube right now, and the effort cramps his chest. “My people are doing what they think is best.”
“You said you wanted Russia gone. All traces of him.” Prussia lounges against the doorframe, silhouetted by the flickering light of flames creeping closer.
“I did. I do.” God, why is gunfire so loud?
Prussia raises his eyebrows, as if to say well? “You don’t want to keep traitors around so they can backstab you again. That’s just common sense. Come on, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten everything-”
“Prussia, please leave. Now. I gave you my answer.”
“Some answer.” Prussia steps out of the doorway, into the fire and carnage of the street. They seem to be done now. The only things on fire are the ones that were supposed to burn. “You know, maybe if you took things into your own hands once in a while, you wouldn’t be-”
Lithuania slams the door shut in his face with his good hand and leans against it, shaking, willing his knees to hold up. The echo of Prussia’s boots doesn’t fade the way it should; it’s subsumed into the sounds of others leaving, returning to their homes, shutting their windows and locking their doors. He clutches his stomach and wishes desperately that he’d eaten more today, so he could throw up. Something to purge all this.
***
The provisional government resigns on August fifth. There’s no point to it anymore; Lithuania’s still scrambling to reorganize after Russia dismantled all his institutions, and he can’t very well pull himself back together with Prussia taking control of his industries and leaning on his press and letting the SS police his streets. Oh, he’s heard talk of a civil administration coming into place, but he’s not sure if he’d call this government civil.
“You’ve given Slovakia more freedom than this,” he says, when Prussia throws a sheaf of papers at him: orders and instructions on how to fold the old State Security Department into the new administration. The Lithuanian Security Police, they’ll be called, as though that conceals who really employs them. His hands are shaking; he drops them to his sides, breathes in slowly. There’s-there has to be a chance that he can still salvage this peacefully. There’s no other way he can salvage the situation, really, especially not with his forces crippled this way.
Prussia shrugs, rolling his shoulders back. “Let’s see how you do with what we give you, okay?”
“It isn’t okay-”
“Tough.” He stands, and the black line of his uniform gleams in the afternoon sun. Lithuania looks down. It’s easier to. “We’ve almost got Russia where we want him, we can’t afford to fuck up right now. So we’re sticking with what works. This works.”
“Slovakia worked-”
“Slovakia didn’t spend the past two years sucking Russia off, jesus, Lithuania. You want my trust? You want more freedom? Earn it. Show me you’ve driven the goddamn Reds out, ‘cause I keep getting reports that they’re making life hell for my men. I can’t let that shit happen right now. You got it?”
Lithuania slams the clipboard down on his desk, hard enough that its legs wobble and the one shorter than all the others nearly gets another chunk of wood chipped off. He can barely hear the sound, his heart’s hammering too loudly in his ears. “You process all this, then,” he chokes out through the horrible tightness gripping his throat, “it’s your government, not mine-”
Prussia seizes his wrist; Lithuania tries to wrest it free but it’s his bad arm, the one Russia sprained, and Prussia’s fingers close around him like a vice. “Jesus fucking christ, Lithuania, will you listen? Can we just get through this administrative shit so I can get back to the front?” He sighs, though it sounds more like a growl. “I want to trust you, okay? I want to let your people handle most of this stuff so I can send mine where I really need them. But I can’t do that unless I know you’re not gonna spaz on me. You listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Good. So here’s how it’s gonna work. I’ll make some of your old provisional government guys General Advisers. They’ll head up shit once we’ve got your place working again. Sound good?”
“Once you’ve gotten my place working.” Lithuania takes a deep breath, wills his nerves to stop fraying, his hands to stop shaking. It’s to be persuasion now? Fine. There’s more than one way to win a fight, after all. “It would be easier to do that if you gave me back my industries-”
“Can’t do that, I need ‘em.” Prussia lets go of his wrist at last, smirks. “You can have your farms back, though, deal? You’re welcome,” he adds.
Lithuania grits his teeth. “Thank you.”
“So we’re cool?”
“I suppose.”
“Well,” Prussia says brightly, “that wasn’t so bad, was it? I mean, could’ve been worse, could’ve been the Peace of Thorn. Man. Five tons of silver a year? I know, I know, it was half a millennium ago, but fuck, you and Poland almost bankrupted me.”
Lithuania looks around the office, takes in the ramshackle chairs and lopsided desks and windows with half the glass missing and cracks crawling up the walls and wonders what he wouldn’t do for five tons of silver now. But they don’t even use silver for currency anymore, do they? How much would thirty pieces be worth now?
He turns that one over in his head as he walks home through the streets of Kaunas, past boarded-up shops and factories belching smoke and buildings with pieces of their windows and walls torn away. He’d rather not linger after dark, and it hurts to think that, hurts to worry about what might be occupying his streets when the blackout shades are drawn and the streetlamps snuffed. He misses the days when his people stopped him in the street and told him about their businesses, their families, their plans; he misses dark rye bread and Barščiai soup with buttermilk and mushrooms and spurgos filled with preserves; he misses mass on Sundays in the old cathedrals; he misses his language. They are carving pieces of him away, bit by bit by bit, and soon there won’t be anything left to stop them with. No, no, he tries to tell himself, he can’t get mired down in these kinds of thoughts, but they cling to him as he walks, dog his steps and insinuate horrible things into his ears about what he can afford to lose, what he might have to give up, what parts of him might be better off numb or gone. He walks up the stairs to his flat, skips the third because the step’s half-rotted and coated with black slime, and bolts the door behind him, his fingers trembling. He should fix the hinges soon, there’s no point in having a door with the best locks he can get his hands on and half-rusted hinges…
This isn’t working, he isn’t working, and the prayers Lithuania offers feel so feeble. If thy hand offendeth thee, he remembers, but no, his hand isn’t the problem, his people aren’t the problem. He can still believe that. He has to.
And in the months to come, he tells himself it’s-it’s not his people he’s-it’s Russia. He’s getting rid of Russia, purging himself of what Russia tried to do to him and cleaning the red out of his house now, forever. That’s all. That’s all.
It feels-
It feels as though he’s slicing layers of his skin away, chipping at his fingers and toes and whittling pieces of himself down to stubs. Lithuania looks at himself in the cracked tin plate he uses for a mirror, sees the flesh around his eyes sag, his skin tint gray, his hair thin and lose its luster. It’s the executions, he knows, and the thought makes him pitch forward and clutch the basin of the sink. No, the word’s too stark, so he rephrases that in his head: it’s the cost of this solution, this way of putting him past Russia’s influence. It hurts, but…
The next time he retches and coughs, there’s blood in it. He stares at the red streak across his palm for a long time, long enough that the clamor on the streets dies back down again by the time he looks up.
He doesn’t bring it up in confession. There aren’t words for this.
Lithuania throws himself into his work to dull the hurt, makes sure his people receive the stamps for food and cloth that they need, roots through half-burned archives to find the documentation Prussia’s men want, does shifts at the factory until the smoke burns his eyes and his mouth tastes like metal. He doesn’t sleep much when he goes home; he curls up in an old rickety chair next to his battered oak desk and pores through the orders issued by the Reichskommissariat and rubberstamped by the General Advisers, the new rations and regulations and curfews. When he finally slips off to sleep, the exhaustion’s almost enough to overwhelm everything else. Almost.
Prussia comes by occasionally to check up on him and deliver news about the front. “We got Kiev!” he crows at the end of September, clapping Lithuania on the back and nearly making him drop his coffee. It isn’t very good coffee, the rations won’t permit that, but he worked so hard for the tokens he needed to buy it. Prussia, of course, doesn’t even notice, and continues to strut around the office like some sort of great bird. “Russia’s all out of reserves now-we’ve just got to push into the interior, and Moscow’s gonna be ours by Christmas.”
“Christmas,” Lithuania echoes, but says nothing on the matter, just keeps his head down and keeps working. If Prussia doesn’t know what Russian Christmases are like, then that’s his intelligence failure, not Lithuania’s. No need to correct him; he has other things to put his energy towards, and he only has so much of that to go around. Does Prussia ever feel that weight in his bones, as though they’re turning to lead? No, if he did, he wouldn’t move so sharply or strut so much.
He sees Prussia two months or so later, fuming. Prussia slams the door to Lithuania’s office open-Lithuania winces as a gust of cold air follows him-and shouts at everyone to clear the hall, grabs Lithuania’s chair away from him when he rises from it, sits down and sprawls out in the seat he’s stolen, glaring. “Fucking Russia, fucking fifty degrees below freezing-had to heat the tanks for hours before they’d roll forward a meter, christ-for the love of god, man, do you have anything to drink?”
“It’s rationed,” Lithuania replies.
“I don’t give a fuck!” He twists in his seat, hollers into the hallway: “A hundred twenty-five points’ worth of cigarettes to the first person who gets me booze!”
The commotion outside becomes worse than it usually is.
“That oughtta do it.” Prussia glares at Lithuania. “Well?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“How about gee, that’s horrible? Or even are you okay? I almost lost half the fingers on my left hand, you could pretend to look a little sorry.”
“Yes, well.” Lithuania sets his pen down slowly. “You didn’t lose them.” It’s uncharitable, he knows, but the winter hasn’t been kind here, either, and he keeps finding new faults in his buildings to seal so the wind won’t seep in, new cracks to patch up and not nearly enough material to do the patching with. He blows on his fingertips to restore some of the feeling to them.
“Haven’t lost anything,” Prussia snaps.
“I wasn’t implying that you had.”
“We’ve still got Leningrad surrounded, we’ve got plenty of his land-”
You’re including me in that, aren’t you? Lithuania thinks, and picks his pen back up, grips it tight enough to snap it in half.
“-he can’t hold out forever. Next year, he’s ours. You just listen to me. He’s ours.”
***
The next year comes, and Prussia boasts of his offensives, of how he’s driving into the Caucasus and crossing the Don and the Volga. “And then I’ll be right in Stalingrad, let’s see how he likes that, huh?” Prussia paces around the room, punches his palm in time to the tune he’s whistling. Even when he pauses to lean on the edge of Lithuania’s desk, he’s not still; his fingers tap, his leg jiggles. “Stalingrad’s gonna cave just like Paris did.” Prussia doesn’t grin so much as he bares his teeth, Lithuania thinks. “Those were great years. Great years. Kicking Austria’s and France’s sorry asses, showing my little brother off to the world…heh, will you look at him now?”
“I think we’re all looking at him.”
“Damn right you all are. I’m telling you, it’s his time.”
“Not yours?” Lithuania asks.
Prussia’s fingers halt in mid-tap.
“Well, I’m the one who built him up, aren’t I?” he says. “So everything awesome that he does is because of something awesome I did. You know?”
His boss is Austrian, not Prussian, Lithuania doesn’t say. He has to pick his disputes now, even more carefully than before. Prussia keeps demanding more: more munitions, more food, more cloth, and the lands Russia didn’t burn during his retreat are withering now from all the use Prussia’s putting them to, from how he’s wringing them dry. It’s summer, but Lithuania’s hands are chapped and raw, and the heat from the factory furnaces sears new blisters onto his skin every day. He picks at one scabbing below his wrist, frowns.
“Anyway, after this is over, who knows, I might up cigarette rations or something. To celebrate. Fuck, I miss smoking.”
Lithuania misses more than that, but he doesn’t mention that, either. He looks over the papers Prussia wants him to rubber-stamp, chews on the end of a fingernail. This provision limits the amount of bread cards he’s allowed to issue in Vilnius-so more food can go to the front, yes, but Vilnius feels thin these days, hollow, as though the walls and streets are being sucked in and compacted because of what’s flowing out of them. He could put this order at the bottom, he supposes, or pretend it fell between his desk and the wall. Or he could get his hands on a copy of a new bread card, maybe, and make duplicates of that and smuggle them out somehow…
“Lithuania?”
Prussia’s peering at him, expecting an answer to something. “Yes?”
“Aren’t you gonna wish me luck?”
“I don’t know what difference my wishing will make,” he says honestly. It isn’t as though he’s fighting on the front next to Prussia.
Prussia snarls and cuffs him on the temple-it isn’t malicious, not quite, but it stings, and Lithuania claps his hand over his forehead, clenches his jaw to remind himself not to glare. “You could be a little less of an ass, you know. I’m keeping Russia off your back, aren’t I?”
Lithuania looks up at him, then down at his paperwork.
“Fine. Whatever. See you when I get back from Stalingrad. Should be done with that before the summer’s out. October, at the latest.”
But October passes, and Prussia remains on the front. The official papers have little to say about Stalingrad, save for commendations of the bravery of the German army and news of Russian barbarism on the front. Prussia himself sends terse telegrams for supplies: food, matches, warmer clothes. Lithuania hasn’t any idea how he’s supposed to deliver what’s being asked of him-were it up to him, he wouldn’t try to airlift so many supplies into Russia, not with Russia’s men waiting on the ground and mounting anti-aircraft guns, but Prussia isn’t consulting him about strategy, just requisitioning supplies.
Lithuania’s too drained to protest when Prussia starts moving some of his men into the cities, into vacated houses and into ones where families are still trying to scrape out some sort of living. It happens to him, too: it’s an evening in December, though he can’t even recall what the day is anymore, he’s spent most of it in a foundry in Vilnius, pouring molten metal into molds for munitions and his eyes are swelling from the smoke and grit lodged in them still. That’s why he doesn’t see the men in his kitchen at first, or thinks he’s grown so used to seeing soldiers everywhere that he’s imagining them in here now.
“Do you have any more bread?” one of them asks him in German. “The loaf in your pantry has mold on it.”
He rubs his eyes, blinks blearily at them. There are three of them in the group, three with cheeks starting to hollow and uniforms starting to fray at the joints. Who are you? he should ask. What gives you the right to enter my house? But the rifles at their backs and pistols at their sides answer the last question well enough. He sighs. He isn’t even angry at them anymore, he decides, just tired. “I can check in the cellar,” he says, “but I think I’ll have to go shopping tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” the youngest of them says quietly, offering him a cigarette. Lithuania nods once, takes it. He doesn’t take a drag until he’s halfway down the cellar steps; the damp seeps into his bones and chills them, but he almost needs that to shake himself awake. He closes the door behind him, leans against it, and strikes a match-
“This is like really pathetic, Liet.”
-Poland glowers at him from the bottom of the steps. The thin flame makes the shadows around his face seem sharper, hungrier. Lithuania nearly drops the match. “What are you doing here?” he hisses-damn, his hand is shaking now, he can’t get his cigarette to light properly and the flame singes his fingers so he really does drop the match this time, though he tries not to yelp.
“It’s my city as much as it’s-”
“Get out.” The matches start to splinter in his hands; he can’t waste resources like this, he reminds himself, chants it as a mantra to ease the tightness in his fingers, the pain in his chest. Poland isn’t worth this, he thinks. Poland isn’t worth it.
Poland snorts. “God, Liet, you’re not even trying.”
“I’m not trying to do what?” Lithuania snaps, striking the next match hard. The heat in his cheeks flares up the same way. “I suppose you’re right, I could try harder to get you out of Vilnius.”
“Oh my god Liet, Wilno this, Wilno that, if you could just shut up about the Wilno thing for like a second-”
He’s going to waste a second match at this rate. Why does Poland always do this to him? Lithuania glares at the dim shape in the dark. “Never mind that, this is still my house, not yours, and I don’t have to let you stay in it.” He lights his cigarette quickly, before the match burns out, and inhales-it isn’t good, exactly, but it’s better than what he’s been having, and it’s doing a lot more to soothe his nerves than Poland is.
“Well that’s nice,” Poland says, scoffing. “So, like, Prussia can station his men in your house and that’s totally cool, but if I stop by it’s oh no, get out, I don’t want you here.”
“I don’t want you here,” he says.
“Whatcha gonna do, drag me out of the cellar so your German buddies can have a go at me or something?”
Lithuania says, “I just might,” and takes another drag on his cigarette. The glow from the embers shows him a rough outline of Poland-leaning against the wall, something slung across his back-but he can’t make out more than that. Perhaps it’s for the best. He’s not sure what he’d do if he could properly see Poland, but whatever it is, he’s fairly certain he’d have to mention it in confession. He breathes in, breathes out, hates how shaky the sound is. Poland always knows just what to do to rile him and he never has been able to resist goading Lithuania, and Lithuania hates how he rises to the bait. He should know better than that, he should be better than that.
“Sellout.”
Lithuania flinches, drops his cigarette-“What did you call me?”
“You heard me. You’re such a sellout, Liet. You’re all ‘oh, I’m mad at whoever right now, so I’m gonna suck up to whatever guy I think can beat them ‘cause I don’t have the balls to do it myself-’”
“Take that back,” Lithuania says, advancing forward, “take that back now.”
“-you did it with Russia when you were pissed with me and now you’re doing it with Prussia-”
“Poland, stop it!”
“Make me, okay! God, Liet, do something for yourself-”
And something in Lithuania snaps as his fist lashes out and catches Poland on the cheek. His hand glances off and scrapes against the wall before it skids to a halt somewhere near Poland’s head. His knuckles and lungs are burning, shaking. “I am,” he says, lets the fist braced against the wall support most of his weight because God knows his legs aren’t up to the task. “I have to-who else would?” He shakes his head. “England, France-when Germany invaded you, they declared war, but when Russia marched in…he took everything from me, I’d fought so hard to, to rebuild after the war-maybe I didn’t have much, but it was mine, it’s been so long since anything’s been mine, even my own people-even when you and I were together, that-that wasn’t me, really…”
Poland’s breathing sounds heavier in the dark.
“Nobody said anything,” he says. His voice cracks. “Nobody…nobody starts wars over me. I’m there, that’s all. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” he adds, because if he’s saying all this he might as well say the rest, “I never mean-I don’t want to complain, I love my land and-my people, they’re so beautiful and brave and strong…but they’re scared and they’re dying, and-”
He isn’t crying, he notices distantly. Maybe there’s nothing left for him to do that with.
“I can’t save them. I didn’t-I don’t know how much is left of me to save-”
“…hey. Liet.”
“Just-” He shakes his head again and swallows. “Please. Let me finish. It’s all right,” he says, even if it isn’t. “I don’t want more than what I have. I-I want to live. That’s all. And I’m so tired…”
Overhead, chairs scrape along the floor. It’s enough to snap Lithuania out of this.
“Please go,” he says quietly, to the wall.
A little behind him, he hears Poland shifting away, starting to pass him on the steps. “Yeah, okay,” Poland says. “But jeez, don’t sit around in the basement moping all winter, okay? You’re way too frickin’ pale already. It’s gross. You’re gross. So yeah. I’m out. Liet?”
“Hm?”
“You can totally take that loser on.”
Which one? he almost asks, but Poland’s footsteps have faded, and Lithuania isn’t sure where he might be.
There’s a knock on the door, and a curious German soldier peering through the crack. “Have you found anything?” he asks.
Lithuania lets his hands drop to his sides and unclench. “Give me time.”
***
.
On to Part Two
This is probably the longest oneshot I've written in, uh...ever. It's also kind of an experiment for me, as the narrative is a lot less snapshot-ish and a lot more continuous (which is partially because Lithuania isn't a collection of scenes, he's a story).
I think I'm proud of this one. I hope other people enjoy it, too. ♥
also: neither the most depressing nor the most pretentious thing I have written! For this fandom, even!
Title: Mother Courage
Author: puella_nerdii
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: Lithuania, Prussia, Poland; Russia, in absentia
Rating: R, for adult themes, mostly due to the --
Timestamp: 1941-1944, during the German occupation of Lithuania.
Summary: Sometimes, living is enough of a victory. Lithuania, Prussia, and resistance.
Lithuania tweaks the knobs on the old wireless set, adjusts the antennae. Stretches of static and the occasional droning beep whine through the speakers. He frowns, settles the wireless on his lap (and minds the arm that’s in a sling), and brings his ear closer to the dented wire mesh; this isn’t right, he’s fairly certain that this is the right frequency, the one German broadcasters use, one the Lithuanian Activist Front told him to monitor today. Maybe the signal’s too weak, or his wireless is too worn to receive it, or the needle’s pointing between stations and not on them, that’s possible, too, the cracks in the screen and the grime smeared on it do make it hard for him to do any kind of fine-tuning.
His forearm throbs: dull, steady, like a background headache. Lithuania grits his teeth against the pain and keeps fiddling with the battered knob on the left, the one whose ridges have worn away with time and use. This would be easier if he had both of his hands-but it could be worse, he reminds himself. That’s his litany these days; he seems to say it more often than his prayers. It could be worse. Russia could have broken his arm instead of sprained it. Russia could have sprained his right arm instead of his left, and then he wouldn’t be able to do much of anything.
And there are still things he can do, he reminds himself, shaking the wireless gently. There’s something coming through-no, not through the radio, in the distance. Shouts, shots, the roar of tanks-
Lithuania springs to his feet, grunts as the wireless tumbles from his lap. He hopes he didn’t break it, it’s the only one he managed to conceal from Russia for this long, the only one that isn’t stuck on Soviet stations. Never mind that; he shoves the toe of his boot under the loose floorboard next to him, wriggles the wood free and pulls out the rifle he’s stored beneath. It’s as old and battered as everything else he owns now, but he doesn’t have anything else. He props it over his left shoulder, remembers, no, he can’t do that with his arm like this, shouts when the butt of the rifle smacks his sprain. Lithuania hits the floor, his knees smacking down, tenses from the jolt of pain and the realization. He shouted. He shouted. He claps his hand over his mouth before he hears another rattle of machine-gun fire and remembers. No. They won’t hear him over that, or so he prays. (Has anyone ever heard him, when he cries?-No, he mustn’t allow himself to think like that. He won’t. It’s-it’s unbecoming.)
He’s falling back on instinct. He can’t do that now. He has to think. Besides, this isn’t the kind of war that’s hardwired into him.
Lithuania’s knee topples the wireless over, and it spits out a message, finally, in his own tongue: l-Germans crossing the Nemunas, and the Red Army retreats before them. We will drive them out; we will reclaim our country; we will take back what is ours! Atstatoma Laisva Lietuva!”
He breathes shallowly. Germany’s declared war on Russia. The revolt’s starting, and from the sounds of it, the Lithuanian Activist Front is engaging the Red Army not too far from here.
Russia’s leaving. It’s going to end soon.
He shouts, but it’s a whoop this time, something like his old war cry as he tears down the steps, rifle in hand, and throws open the front door of the house in Aleksotas. He can smell the Nemunas from here, hear how the grinding of the tanks mostly drowns out the sloshing of the river. They’re advancing towards the Aleksotas Bridge, tearing up the road and stretches of grass, scattering clouds of grit into his eyes, mowing over the ragged retreating lines of the Red Army. Germany’s men-no, Prussia’s men, more likely-are barking orders, hefting their rifles to shoot retreating Red Army soldiers in the back, firing their tanks at clusters of Russia’s men before they can scramble across the bridge or set explosives on it. Explosives again, as though they haven’t destroyed enough of Kaunas and Vilnius and all the rest of him…he doesn’t cheer when Prussia’s men stop some of the Red Army soldiers crawling down the supports by peppering them with machine-gun fire, but at least the soldiers are splashing down into the water instead of chunks of his bridge. And Lithuania’s partisans rise out of the riverbanks and pour out of the shells of barns and squat houses with half-sodden shotguns and long knives, putting an end to any of Russia’s soldiers who missed the retreat and are trying to catch up with their comrades.
The word makes him want to spit. He doesn’t, but he does crouch behind a crumbling wall, all that’s left of where a house once stood, and balances his rifle on top, levels it at…
…at Russia’s men. He should fire at them. He’ll worry about Prussia later; he wants Russia out now. If he can keep his rifle steady enough to drive him off, at any rate. Doing this with one hand is next to impossible, and the barrel wobbles and shifts every time Lithuania thinks he has a shot. He thinks his men have started to sing, but the sound’s drowned in the rattle of the Panzers. Dust thickens the air, and breathing is more like choking.
“Hey!” Someone’s voice cuts through the din. “Hey, Lithuania!”
He looks up, wiping some of the water from his eyes.
Prussia’s head pokes out of a tank parked not a meter from where Lithuania’s crouching. He grins, shouts “That’s almost their garrison! Come on, men, let’s see how red the Bolsheviks are!” to his men, and the tank in the lead complies, backing over a few fallen Russians. The snap of breaking bone cracks through the air like a gunshot, and Lithuania flinches.
“Not bad, not bad,” Prussia says. “I think we’ll get what, seventy kilometers into Russia’s territory before the day’s out? Eighty?”
“My territory,” Lithuania says, and works to unclench his jaw. “You mean my territory.”
“’Course I do.” Prussia isn’t really looking at him; he’s got his gaze trained on Kaunas in the distance, and Lithuania can almost see him calculate how many troops he can allocate to take the capital, how many he needs to keep by him to push through to Russia. To push through him to Russia. His arm aches. “Hope he hasn’t blown up too many bridges on the retreat, those things are a bitch to rebuild and we’ve still got to get across the Düna in the north.” He claps his hands together, rubs them, and the leather of his gloves squeaks. “Well, men, we’ve caught Russia with his ass hanging out. Hell, at this rate we’ll be rolling into Leningrad before the month’s out.”
Lithuania still thinks he prefers the old name. He swallows. “I’ve declared independence, you know,” he says, wills his voice to stay steady no matter how much the pain in his arm is mounting, spreading. “I’m setting up a provisional government in Kaunas.”
Prussia snorts. “You and what army?”
It’s a different kind of ache. Lithuania looks down.
“Thought so. Russia made you disband it, didn’t he? Asshole. He could’ve been a man about it and faced you on the battlefield.” He laughs. “Man, those were the days, huh? Hey, remember Tannenberg? The old one, I mean,” he clarifies. “Back when I was a Teutonic Knight and you and Poland were like that-”
“Don’t,” Lithuania says, “bring up Poland right now. Please.”
Prussia holds his hands up, but Lithuania doesn’t mistake it for a gesture of surrender. “Okay. Fine. My lips are sealed. Pretty day, huh?”
Lithuania sees shredded dirt and grass, grey clouds heavy in the sky, blood thickening the dust, and says nothing.
“Tell you what,” Prussia continues, “I’ll help you kick whatever’s left of Russia out of your house, okay? I think we both want that. I know you don’t want him back-”
“Anything but that,” he says, and claps his hand over his mouth. He hadn’t expected that much-vehemence.
“So I’ll get him good. This is how a war should go, I’m telling you.” Prussia puts his fingers in his mouth and lets out a piercing whistle; the tanks grind, and his men march to form columns behind him, pointed at the Aleksotas Bridge. “He doesn’t have any idea what to do, does he? None of ‘em do. All right, men, we’re moving out. Last one to Raisenai’s a rotten egg!”
The tanks rumble and roar to life, grinding over bone and stone. Prussia calls over his shoulder, “It’d be nice if you gave me a hand.”
Lithuania doesn’t bother to ask what the benefit for him is if he does.
***
He broadcasts his national anthem over the radio the next day, at nine-twenty-eight in the morning. “Free Lithuania is being restored,” he announces, and the members of the Lithuanian Activist Front in the studio with him clap each other on the back, exchange strained smiles. “The Red Army is in retreat, and a Provisional Government has risen to take its place-an administration of Lithuanian citizens, dedicated to Lithuanian interests.”
He says nothing of Prussia’s push towards Jonava. Kaunas was a fortress city once, he remembers. How many invasions did its walls withstand? He looks out the window at the crumbling brick structures and black streaks left by Prussia’s bombing runs and feels his stomach twist. He swallows that down and reads on: “I ask for people to guard public and private property, for factory and government workers to organize the defense of their institutions, and for the public to hold on to the documents and properties that are rightfully theirs and to return to the jobs they held before the Soviet invasion, so we can again become the proud nation we were then.”
Lithuania rises from his chair-several men in the room rush to help him, since his arm makes it more difficult for him to do that for his own-and lets a spokesman for the Front read off the names of the provisional government members. He crosses to the window, presses his ear to the glass, and listens for the rumble of tanks.
They don’t arrive until the next day. They roll through the city in parade formation, and the ring of boot-heels on stone fills Lithuania’s ears when he tries to sleep. He gives up the effort soon after and stares at the cracks spiderwebbing across his ceiling. Pockets of resistance to the provisional government are springing up around Vilnius, if not in it, and there’s nothing he can do to placate them. One Lithuania, says the Activist Front, Lithuania for Lithuanians, but his people aren’t one any more than he was one with Russia, and his people are tearing pieces of him away; it isn’t enough that Russia’s still holding God knows how much of him hostage in Siberia, it isn’t enough that Prussia’s ripping through Lithuania’s land as he breaks Russia’s lines, now his own people-
“Stop it,” he tells himself sternly. He’s not young; he knows better than this, or he ought to. Lithuania kneels on the bare floor, balls his good hand into a fist and rests his forehead on it, and prays not in words but in images, pictures of his rivers and forests and churches and walls. “Keep them strong,” he finishes. “Please.”
Prussia knocks on his door the following night.
“Gotta hand it to your people,” he says, “they don’t waste time. Just give ‘em a few suggestions, and bam, they’re doing your work for you. You know, I might have to rethink my opinion on what to do with you guys.”
Lithuania squeezes his eyes shut, but can’t keep them that way. “That isn’t your place to decide. I have self-rule now.”
“Right, right, I know. Okay then, I’m not telling you what to do,” he says, but Lithuania hears the snorting laughter in his voice. “I’m just saying-”
Prussia glances outside and says something like “huh,” his eyes glittering, his tongue darting out over the corner of his mouth. Lithuania presses his lips together, remains silent. Glass shatters, gunfire rattles, screams are cut off as violently as they began. Lithuania watches flames lick at the corners of his vision and crawl towards the center of the street. He steadies his good hand on the wall. He needs curtains, thick blackout curtains, but Russia shot out the windows of this house months ago and Lithuania never got around to replacing them…
“I’m just saying, I think your people have a pretty good grasp on the way things are going. Remember what I said, about how nice it would be if you gave me a hand? I’ve gotta throw everything into attacking Russia, I want things to go smoothly here. Don’t want to worry about too many fronts at once, you know?”
“I know.” Lithuania swallows and turns aside. “I think it would be best if I stayed inside. I’m afraid my arm hasn’t recovered fully yet, and I don’t want to do anything that might damage it further.” He sounds like he’s reading off a prepared statement. Maybe he is. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Prussia shrugs, listens to the cries of next! out the door. “Your call. This isn’t really my jurisdiction, anyway. I just thought you might want to know. So I thought I’d pass the news on. So you could do whatever.”
“I know what they’re doing.” Breathing-breathing is like sucking in air through a thin tube right now, and the effort cramps his chest. “My people are doing what they think is best.”
“You said you wanted Russia gone. All traces of him.” Prussia lounges against the doorframe, silhouetted by the flickering light of flames creeping closer.
“I did. I do.” God, why is gunfire so loud?
Prussia raises his eyebrows, as if to say well? “You don’t want to keep traitors around so they can backstab you again. That’s just common sense. Come on, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten everything-”
“Prussia, please leave. Now. I gave you my answer.”
“Some answer.” Prussia steps out of the doorway, into the fire and carnage of the street. They seem to be done now. The only things on fire are the ones that were supposed to burn. “You know, maybe if you took things into your own hands once in a while, you wouldn’t be-”
Lithuania slams the door shut in his face with his good hand and leans against it, shaking, willing his knees to hold up. The echo of Prussia’s boots doesn’t fade the way it should; it’s subsumed into the sounds of others leaving, returning to their homes, shutting their windows and locking their doors. He clutches his stomach and wishes desperately that he’d eaten more today, so he could throw up. Something to purge all this.
***
The provisional government resigns on August fifth. There’s no point to it anymore; Lithuania’s still scrambling to reorganize after Russia dismantled all his institutions, and he can’t very well pull himself back together with Prussia taking control of his industries and leaning on his press and letting the SS police his streets. Oh, he’s heard talk of a civil administration coming into place, but he’s not sure if he’d call this government civil.
“You’ve given Slovakia more freedom than this,” he says, when Prussia throws a sheaf of papers at him: orders and instructions on how to fold the old State Security Department into the new administration. The Lithuanian Security Police, they’ll be called, as though that conceals who really employs them. His hands are shaking; he drops them to his sides, breathes in slowly. There’s-there has to be a chance that he can still salvage this peacefully. There’s no other way he can salvage the situation, really, especially not with his forces crippled this way.
Prussia shrugs, rolling his shoulders back. “Let’s see how you do with what we give you, okay?”
“It isn’t okay-”
“Tough.” He stands, and the black line of his uniform gleams in the afternoon sun. Lithuania looks down. It’s easier to. “We’ve almost got Russia where we want him, we can’t afford to fuck up right now. So we’re sticking with what works. This works.”
“Slovakia worked-”
“Slovakia didn’t spend the past two years sucking Russia off, jesus, Lithuania. You want my trust? You want more freedom? Earn it. Show me you’ve driven the goddamn Reds out, ‘cause I keep getting reports that they’re making life hell for my men. I can’t let that shit happen right now. You got it?”
Lithuania slams the clipboard down on his desk, hard enough that its legs wobble and the one shorter than all the others nearly gets another chunk of wood chipped off. He can barely hear the sound, his heart’s hammering too loudly in his ears. “You process all this, then,” he chokes out through the horrible tightness gripping his throat, “it’s your government, not mine-”
Prussia seizes his wrist; Lithuania tries to wrest it free but it’s his bad arm, the one Russia sprained, and Prussia’s fingers close around him like a vice. “Jesus fucking christ, Lithuania, will you listen? Can we just get through this administrative shit so I can get back to the front?” He sighs, though it sounds more like a growl. “I want to trust you, okay? I want to let your people handle most of this stuff so I can send mine where I really need them. But I can’t do that unless I know you’re not gonna spaz on me. You listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“Good. So here’s how it’s gonna work. I’ll make some of your old provisional government guys General Advisers. They’ll head up shit once we’ve got your place working again. Sound good?”
“Once you’ve gotten my place working.” Lithuania takes a deep breath, wills his nerves to stop fraying, his hands to stop shaking. It’s to be persuasion now? Fine. There’s more than one way to win a fight, after all. “It would be easier to do that if you gave me back my industries-”
“Can’t do that, I need ‘em.” Prussia lets go of his wrist at last, smirks. “You can have your farms back, though, deal? You’re welcome,” he adds.
Lithuania grits his teeth. “Thank you.”
“So we’re cool?”
“I suppose.”
“Well,” Prussia says brightly, “that wasn’t so bad, was it? I mean, could’ve been worse, could’ve been the Peace of Thorn. Man. Five tons of silver a year? I know, I know, it was half a millennium ago, but fuck, you and Poland almost bankrupted me.”
Lithuania looks around the office, takes in the ramshackle chairs and lopsided desks and windows with half the glass missing and cracks crawling up the walls and wonders what he wouldn’t do for five tons of silver now. But they don’t even use silver for currency anymore, do they? How much would thirty pieces be worth now?
He turns that one over in his head as he walks home through the streets of Kaunas, past boarded-up shops and factories belching smoke and buildings with pieces of their windows and walls torn away. He’d rather not linger after dark, and it hurts to think that, hurts to worry about what might be occupying his streets when the blackout shades are drawn and the streetlamps snuffed. He misses the days when his people stopped him in the street and told him about their businesses, their families, their plans; he misses dark rye bread and Barščiai soup with buttermilk and mushrooms and spurgos filled with preserves; he misses mass on Sundays in the old cathedrals; he misses his language. They are carving pieces of him away, bit by bit by bit, and soon there won’t be anything left to stop them with. No, no, he tries to tell himself, he can’t get mired down in these kinds of thoughts, but they cling to him as he walks, dog his steps and insinuate horrible things into his ears about what he can afford to lose, what he might have to give up, what parts of him might be better off numb or gone. He walks up the stairs to his flat, skips the third because the step’s half-rotted and coated with black slime, and bolts the door behind him, his fingers trembling. He should fix the hinges soon, there’s no point in having a door with the best locks he can get his hands on and half-rusted hinges…
This isn’t working, he isn’t working, and the prayers Lithuania offers feel so feeble. If thy hand offendeth thee, he remembers, but no, his hand isn’t the problem, his people aren’t the problem. He can still believe that. He has to.
And in the months to come, he tells himself it’s-it’s not his people he’s-it’s Russia. He’s getting rid of Russia, purging himself of what Russia tried to do to him and cleaning the red out of his house now, forever. That’s all. That’s all.
It feels-
It feels as though he’s slicing layers of his skin away, chipping at his fingers and toes and whittling pieces of himself down to stubs. Lithuania looks at himself in the cracked tin plate he uses for a mirror, sees the flesh around his eyes sag, his skin tint gray, his hair thin and lose its luster. It’s the executions, he knows, and the thought makes him pitch forward and clutch the basin of the sink. No, the word’s too stark, so he rephrases that in his head: it’s the cost of this solution, this way of putting him past Russia’s influence. It hurts, but…
The next time he retches and coughs, there’s blood in it. He stares at the red streak across his palm for a long time, long enough that the clamor on the streets dies back down again by the time he looks up.
He doesn’t bring it up in confession. There aren’t words for this.
Lithuania throws himself into his work to dull the hurt, makes sure his people receive the stamps for food and cloth that they need, roots through half-burned archives to find the documentation Prussia’s men want, does shifts at the factory until the smoke burns his eyes and his mouth tastes like metal. He doesn’t sleep much when he goes home; he curls up in an old rickety chair next to his battered oak desk and pores through the orders issued by the Reichskommissariat and rubberstamped by the General Advisers, the new rations and regulations and curfews. When he finally slips off to sleep, the exhaustion’s almost enough to overwhelm everything else. Almost.
Prussia comes by occasionally to check up on him and deliver news about the front. “We got Kiev!” he crows at the end of September, clapping Lithuania on the back and nearly making him drop his coffee. It isn’t very good coffee, the rations won’t permit that, but he worked so hard for the tokens he needed to buy it. Prussia, of course, doesn’t even notice, and continues to strut around the office like some sort of great bird. “Russia’s all out of reserves now-we’ve just got to push into the interior, and Moscow’s gonna be ours by Christmas.”
“Christmas,” Lithuania echoes, but says nothing on the matter, just keeps his head down and keeps working. If Prussia doesn’t know what Russian Christmases are like, then that’s his intelligence failure, not Lithuania’s. No need to correct him; he has other things to put his energy towards, and he only has so much of that to go around. Does Prussia ever feel that weight in his bones, as though they’re turning to lead? No, if he did, he wouldn’t move so sharply or strut so much.
He sees Prussia two months or so later, fuming. Prussia slams the door to Lithuania’s office open-Lithuania winces as a gust of cold air follows him-and shouts at everyone to clear the hall, grabs Lithuania’s chair away from him when he rises from it, sits down and sprawls out in the seat he’s stolen, glaring. “Fucking Russia, fucking fifty degrees below freezing-had to heat the tanks for hours before they’d roll forward a meter, christ-for the love of god, man, do you have anything to drink?”
“It’s rationed,” Lithuania replies.
“I don’t give a fuck!” He twists in his seat, hollers into the hallway: “A hundred twenty-five points’ worth of cigarettes to the first person who gets me booze!”
The commotion outside becomes worse than it usually is.
“That oughtta do it.” Prussia glares at Lithuania. “Well?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“How about gee, that’s horrible? Or even are you okay? I almost lost half the fingers on my left hand, you could pretend to look a little sorry.”
“Yes, well.” Lithuania sets his pen down slowly. “You didn’t lose them.” It’s uncharitable, he knows, but the winter hasn’t been kind here, either, and he keeps finding new faults in his buildings to seal so the wind won’t seep in, new cracks to patch up and not nearly enough material to do the patching with. He blows on his fingertips to restore some of the feeling to them.
“Haven’t lost anything,” Prussia snaps.
“I wasn’t implying that you had.”
“We’ve still got Leningrad surrounded, we’ve got plenty of his land-”
You’re including me in that, aren’t you? Lithuania thinks, and picks his pen back up, grips it tight enough to snap it in half.
“-he can’t hold out forever. Next year, he’s ours. You just listen to me. He’s ours.”
***
The next year comes, and Prussia boasts of his offensives, of how he’s driving into the Caucasus and crossing the Don and the Volga. “And then I’ll be right in Stalingrad, let’s see how he likes that, huh?” Prussia paces around the room, punches his palm in time to the tune he’s whistling. Even when he pauses to lean on the edge of Lithuania’s desk, he’s not still; his fingers tap, his leg jiggles. “Stalingrad’s gonna cave just like Paris did.” Prussia doesn’t grin so much as he bares his teeth, Lithuania thinks. “Those were great years. Great years. Kicking Austria’s and France’s sorry asses, showing my little brother off to the world…heh, will you look at him now?”
“I think we’re all looking at him.”
“Damn right you all are. I’m telling you, it’s his time.”
“Not yours?” Lithuania asks.
Prussia’s fingers halt in mid-tap.
“Well, I’m the one who built him up, aren’t I?” he says. “So everything awesome that he does is because of something awesome I did. You know?”
His boss is Austrian, not Prussian, Lithuania doesn’t say. He has to pick his disputes now, even more carefully than before. Prussia keeps demanding more: more munitions, more food, more cloth, and the lands Russia didn’t burn during his retreat are withering now from all the use Prussia’s putting them to, from how he’s wringing them dry. It’s summer, but Lithuania’s hands are chapped and raw, and the heat from the factory furnaces sears new blisters onto his skin every day. He picks at one scabbing below his wrist, frowns.
“Anyway, after this is over, who knows, I might up cigarette rations or something. To celebrate. Fuck, I miss smoking.”
Lithuania misses more than that, but he doesn’t mention that, either. He looks over the papers Prussia wants him to rubber-stamp, chews on the end of a fingernail. This provision limits the amount of bread cards he’s allowed to issue in Vilnius-so more food can go to the front, yes, but Vilnius feels thin these days, hollow, as though the walls and streets are being sucked in and compacted because of what’s flowing out of them. He could put this order at the bottom, he supposes, or pretend it fell between his desk and the wall. Or he could get his hands on a copy of a new bread card, maybe, and make duplicates of that and smuggle them out somehow…
“Lithuania?”
Prussia’s peering at him, expecting an answer to something. “Yes?”
“Aren’t you gonna wish me luck?”
“I don’t know what difference my wishing will make,” he says honestly. It isn’t as though he’s fighting on the front next to Prussia.
Prussia snarls and cuffs him on the temple-it isn’t malicious, not quite, but it stings, and Lithuania claps his hand over his forehead, clenches his jaw to remind himself not to glare. “You could be a little less of an ass, you know. I’m keeping Russia off your back, aren’t I?”
Lithuania looks up at him, then down at his paperwork.
“Fine. Whatever. See you when I get back from Stalingrad. Should be done with that before the summer’s out. October, at the latest.”
But October passes, and Prussia remains on the front. The official papers have little to say about Stalingrad, save for commendations of the bravery of the German army and news of Russian barbarism on the front. Prussia himself sends terse telegrams for supplies: food, matches, warmer clothes. Lithuania hasn’t any idea how he’s supposed to deliver what’s being asked of him-were it up to him, he wouldn’t try to airlift so many supplies into Russia, not with Russia’s men waiting on the ground and mounting anti-aircraft guns, but Prussia isn’t consulting him about strategy, just requisitioning supplies.
Lithuania’s too drained to protest when Prussia starts moving some of his men into the cities, into vacated houses and into ones where families are still trying to scrape out some sort of living. It happens to him, too: it’s an evening in December, though he can’t even recall what the day is anymore, he’s spent most of it in a foundry in Vilnius, pouring molten metal into molds for munitions and his eyes are swelling from the smoke and grit lodged in them still. That’s why he doesn’t see the men in his kitchen at first, or thinks he’s grown so used to seeing soldiers everywhere that he’s imagining them in here now.
“Do you have any more bread?” one of them asks him in German. “The loaf in your pantry has mold on it.”
He rubs his eyes, blinks blearily at them. There are three of them in the group, three with cheeks starting to hollow and uniforms starting to fray at the joints. Who are you? he should ask. What gives you the right to enter my house? But the rifles at their backs and pistols at their sides answer the last question well enough. He sighs. He isn’t even angry at them anymore, he decides, just tired. “I can check in the cellar,” he says, “but I think I’ll have to go shopping tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” the youngest of them says quietly, offering him a cigarette. Lithuania nods once, takes it. He doesn’t take a drag until he’s halfway down the cellar steps; the damp seeps into his bones and chills them, but he almost needs that to shake himself awake. He closes the door behind him, leans against it, and strikes a match-
“This is like really pathetic, Liet.”
-Poland glowers at him from the bottom of the steps. The thin flame makes the shadows around his face seem sharper, hungrier. Lithuania nearly drops the match. “What are you doing here?” he hisses-damn, his hand is shaking now, he can’t get his cigarette to light properly and the flame singes his fingers so he really does drop the match this time, though he tries not to yelp.
“It’s my city as much as it’s-”
“Get out.” The matches start to splinter in his hands; he can’t waste resources like this, he reminds himself, chants it as a mantra to ease the tightness in his fingers, the pain in his chest. Poland isn’t worth this, he thinks. Poland isn’t worth it.
Poland snorts. “God, Liet, you’re not even trying.”
“I’m not trying to do what?” Lithuania snaps, striking the next match hard. The heat in his cheeks flares up the same way. “I suppose you’re right, I could try harder to get you out of Vilnius.”
“Oh my god Liet, Wilno this, Wilno that, if you could just shut up about the Wilno thing for like a second-”
He’s going to waste a second match at this rate. Why does Poland always do this to him? Lithuania glares at the dim shape in the dark. “Never mind that, this is still my house, not yours, and I don’t have to let you stay in it.” He lights his cigarette quickly, before the match burns out, and inhales-it isn’t good, exactly, but it’s better than what he’s been having, and it’s doing a lot more to soothe his nerves than Poland is.
“Well that’s nice,” Poland says, scoffing. “So, like, Prussia can station his men in your house and that’s totally cool, but if I stop by it’s oh no, get out, I don’t want you here.”
“I don’t want you here,” he says.
“Whatcha gonna do, drag me out of the cellar so your German buddies can have a go at me or something?”
Lithuania says, “I just might,” and takes another drag on his cigarette. The glow from the embers shows him a rough outline of Poland-leaning against the wall, something slung across his back-but he can’t make out more than that. Perhaps it’s for the best. He’s not sure what he’d do if he could properly see Poland, but whatever it is, he’s fairly certain he’d have to mention it in confession. He breathes in, breathes out, hates how shaky the sound is. Poland always knows just what to do to rile him and he never has been able to resist goading Lithuania, and Lithuania hates how he rises to the bait. He should know better than that, he should be better than that.
“Sellout.”
Lithuania flinches, drops his cigarette-“What did you call me?”
“You heard me. You’re such a sellout, Liet. You’re all ‘oh, I’m mad at whoever right now, so I’m gonna suck up to whatever guy I think can beat them ‘cause I don’t have the balls to do it myself-’”
“Take that back,” Lithuania says, advancing forward, “take that back now.”
“-you did it with Russia when you were pissed with me and now you’re doing it with Prussia-”
“Poland, stop it!”
“Make me, okay! God, Liet, do something for yourself-”
And something in Lithuania snaps as his fist lashes out and catches Poland on the cheek. His hand glances off and scrapes against the wall before it skids to a halt somewhere near Poland’s head. His knuckles and lungs are burning, shaking. “I am,” he says, lets the fist braced against the wall support most of his weight because God knows his legs aren’t up to the task. “I have to-who else would?” He shakes his head. “England, France-when Germany invaded you, they declared war, but when Russia marched in…he took everything from me, I’d fought so hard to, to rebuild after the war-maybe I didn’t have much, but it was mine, it’s been so long since anything’s been mine, even my own people-even when you and I were together, that-that wasn’t me, really…”
Poland’s breathing sounds heavier in the dark.
“Nobody said anything,” he says. His voice cracks. “Nobody…nobody starts wars over me. I’m there, that’s all. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” he adds, because if he’s saying all this he might as well say the rest, “I never mean-I don’t want to complain, I love my land and-my people, they’re so beautiful and brave and strong…but they’re scared and they’re dying, and-”
He isn’t crying, he notices distantly. Maybe there’s nothing left for him to do that with.
“I can’t save them. I didn’t-I don’t know how much is left of me to save-”
“…hey. Liet.”
“Just-” He shakes his head again and swallows. “Please. Let me finish. It’s all right,” he says, even if it isn’t. “I don’t want more than what I have. I-I want to live. That’s all. And I’m so tired…”
Overhead, chairs scrape along the floor. It’s enough to snap Lithuania out of this.
“Please go,” he says quietly, to the wall.
A little behind him, he hears Poland shifting away, starting to pass him on the steps. “Yeah, okay,” Poland says. “But jeez, don’t sit around in the basement moping all winter, okay? You’re way too frickin’ pale already. It’s gross. You’re gross. So yeah. I’m out. Liet?”
“Hm?”
“You can totally take that loser on.”
Which one? he almost asks, but Poland’s footsteps have faded, and Lithuania isn’t sure where he might be.
There’s a knock on the door, and a curious German soldier peering through the crack. “Have you found anything?” he asks.
Lithuania lets his hands drop to his sides and unclench. “Give me time.”
***
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On to Part Two