He was alone, and it was cold. The circumstances didn't really sound very unusual for Ivan Zimayevich, the personification of Russia, and in actuality, he had been alone in the cold more often than anything else.

That midwinter still felt different. He had no fear of anyone hunting him; there was no blood on the now. There were no manic blonds calling out for their "вялікі брат," searching for him across the fairytale forests his land was known for.

His sister was gone.

If anyone had asked Ivan what he would do if Nataliya gave up on him before, he'd have told them, without hesitation, that he would celebrate. And when she'd first come and told him that she was done, finished, through with wasting her time and energy on someone who would never love her back, he had. He had headed down into his cellar, forgoing his usual hidden passages in favor of the actual entrance, and produced four bottles of his favorite vodka. The event, and quite possibly the effects of four liters of 100-proof alcohol, had left him feeling so generous that he'd waived everyone's debts to him for the month, along with Yekaterina's for the rest of the year.

Naturally, his boss had been more than just a little bit displeased with the "festivities" - the resulting lecture marked the first time Ivan had ever actually been called "irresponsible" - but the joy he had felt at finally being free of the psychopath who had seemed so bent on marrying him that she'd have killed him if she had to had far out-shined the cold he'd earned.

The euphoria carried on through the spring, well past the summer, and into fall. It wasn't actually until the scenery was bleak and lifeless again around him nearly half a decade after the Belarusian had bid him farewell that he realized that he was now, possibly for the first time, truly alone.

Everyone had stopped coming by once he started to balance out again. Nobody was fighting him. Nobody was controlling him. Nobody was out across the miles dreaming of him to come and save her.

Nobody anywhere cared what happened to him; there wasn't a soul in the world thinking of Ivan Braginsky.

That was when he'd started to break things. He'd slammed down enough vodka to keep him warm even without his standard coat and scarf and started to rage around his house. Its emptiness was mocking him, he'd shouted at it. And he was the goddamned Russian Federation. He wasn't anyone to be mocking.

The house, oddly enough, remained silent. It made no response to his assertions, and it didn't even so much as whimper as he ripped down curtains, smashed furniture, pulled doors and cabinets from walls now nearly perforated.

By the time Ivan calmed down, his once remarkable house, still very well-kept from the time the Baltics had spent there, looked more a more appropriate scene for a massacre than a holiday party, and the surrounding taiga hadn't fared much better. The farther trees had only been spared the violent destruction of their fellows closer to the man's home after the blood loss from so many tears in his flesh caused by the wounds he'd inflicted on his environment had lulled him into a momentary silence before leaving his completely unconscious and seeping his life's blood onto the thin layer of snow.

He hadn't woken up until a few days later, blue and frozen to the ground. "If only this were the first time this happened," he muttered to himself, managing somehow to pry himself off and make his way inside.

Despite the wreckage littering the home he'd once been so proud of, Ivan moved throughout his domain as calmly as he did any other day, picking his way easily through the debris and to his bathroom. The steam from the water running into his bath started to thaw the blood matting his clothes to his skin, and once the congealed fluids melted to something he could manage, the blond peeled off his tattered clothes slowly, making a small effort to avoid tearing his pale skin any further.

–

The water did him good, and getting clean again gave Ivan some time to think.

Why had he spent so much time hiding from his sister in the first place? 'Surely that's not so hard. It hasn't been long enough that I've forgotten how terrifying Natasha was,' he mused, sinking lower into the now dingy water. Surely, though, she hadn't been all bad. 'Of course not. She meant well, after all..'

"Big brother, I'd do anything for you," she chimed. "Anything to make you happy. Я люблю табе."

Nataliya had been bandaging him when she'd told him that the first time; it had been after he'd come back from the front in the Great War. She'd taken care of him at every chance, sneaked away from everyone else just to make sure that he was tended to.

She had been the only one who didn't run from him when he'd finally started to lose it, when the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and everyone else had finally driven him mad with their civil war. 'Of course, everyone else already believed me to be a lunatic, a backwards freak...' She'd stepped in, started manipulating some of the groups from the sidelines. Saved him from the infighting dragging on and making him completely lose himself.

He supposed he owed her much better treatment than he gave he for that alone.

"Big brother, let's get married, married, married..."

Of course, that didn't mean that he wasn't still justified in his decisions. Nobody in their right mind wanted to marry their baby sister.

It wasn't that he didn't love her; he just.. "There's someone else, isn't there? ISN'T THERE?" ..wasn't sure he could handle her all the time. 'Just because I love her doesn't mean I love her in the way she wants me to, and that's never been good enough for her..'

"Be- Natal- Natasha, I do love you," he'd tried admitting.

"Then why won't you marry me?" Nataliya had demanded of him. Had she? Was he even remembering his own life as it was, or just as was easiest for him to understand, to accept?

Ivan thought for a few moments, pulling the drain from the tub. The water was ice cold by then, and rust brown. What had helped him earlier was not only distressing him more.

What had actually happened?

"Then why won't you marry me?" she'd questioned, blinking back the tears in her eyes. "Vanechka? Have I not been good enough for you?"

He'd turned around then, not because he was afraid of the look in her eyes. He'd turned because she had been sniffling, because she hadn't been quite good enough, and a tear had rolled down her face. "No. It's just wrong, сестра. Those aren't the kinds of things people are meant to be doing with their family; surely you understand?" His voice had been shaking, he remembered.

A sigh from behind him, rustling of cloth. "Не, я не разумею. Не понимаю. It's not as though other siblings haven't come together, that.." She'd paused for a moment. He remembered her sounding much angrier than she actually had when she spoke again. "But if you say it's improper, brother, than I'll just have to try to convince you. Another time."

She'd left him alone after that. He'd considered it a break, a nice intermission from the terror until she came to see him again a few weeks later.

"What in the hell did she ever even see in me?" Ivan murmured to his reflection, rubbing the coarse towel over himself. He didn't even seem to notice the wounds it reopened, didn't make any note of the new tears it created in his skin.

He only noticed that he was red when he stepped back to consider himself in the mirror, trying to make sense of psychosis. The color struck him funny; America's insults for him would have some truth for once, had the youngling been there. It was everywhere.

Everywhere. Blood was welling from a scrape covering half of his face; pouring from a colorful gash at his shoulder; dripping down his chest and abdomen from scrapes, cuts, and splinters; running along his legs and arms from more rips and tears in his skin than he was sure he could count; pooling under his skin in giant, blooming bruises covering more of himself than he could actually see.

The blue struck him next. Spreading splotches of it colored the skin with blood lurking only underneath it, and any clean stretches were still tinted from the time he'd spent lying in the snow.

The shock hair atop him, miraculously still free of blood from its washing, stuck out as more white than ever, shadowed only by the flecks of violet threatened by the crimson dripping down his forehead. Ivan giggled as he blinked in time to prevent blood from mixing with tears. "If I made any sense, I could hang myself as a flag outside.."

Then his purpose overtook him again, and the Russian frowned. All he saw of himself was a lonely, likely dying, psychopath. Where was the strength or the purpose his people claimed of their motherland? Who in the hell possessed the beauty foreigners fawned over in his forests, in his buildings; the grace his sister accused him of?

It certainly wasn't him.

–

There was blood dripping onto Nataliya Arlovskaya's front porch, and the passersby were attempting to decide if the man upon her stoop needed attention more from an ambulance or a police car. After all, he was alone, and it was cold. The obvious wounds and intimidating stature only served to increase their suspicions that anyone lurking about outside, still, in such harsh weather as what they knew of winter could only have ill intentions.

Thankfully for them, they were spared the pain of choosing when the plain black door opened despite his failure to so much as ring the doorbell. "Ivan," she observed blankly.

"Natashen'ka," he responded almost reverently. "Мне вельмі шкада. Я вельмі, вельмі шкада. Could you ever forgive me? I was so wrong.. So wrong, сестренка." He stared at her pleadingly, eyes begging her to simply remember and understand all of the details he just couldn't manage to say.

The woman kept her countenance and simply moved aside, ordering her brother to enter. "I really don't need you causing anyone to pay attention to me, and they're already starting to stare," she explained matter-of-factually. "What are you doing here?"

The door was closed, and Ivan's heart opened.

He spent hours rambling, mixing and butchering languages, repeating himself, tripping over words, and somehow, she understood. He'd been afraid, he managed. Afraid that he wouldn't be good enough, that everyone would eternally only find him more and more backwards, that even those out west who would make hypocrites of themselves for criticizing them would have something cutting to say. That he wouldn't manage to protect his sister well enough, that he wouldn't be good enough as her lover – what did he know of communicating or showing affection?

He managed to tell her that she was beautiful. That he loved her, and she was perfect, and nobody in the world could possibly be good enough for her. That she was intelligent, and all kinds of strong, and so caring he couldn't even make sense of what she did because he just didn't deserve it.

She slapped him, eventually, and he fell silent immediately. She spoke clearly, decisively. The words were ones she knew, and she would be damned if the quaver in her voice or the tears stinging in the corners of her eyes would make her look foolish, like all of the other girls.

Her words were that he was stupid, that he should have known much longer ago what he wanted. She told him how he was too late, and she'd already sworn off of him, her back straight and her chin high in the air.

Then she took a few beats to look him over, his more than six feet of height somehow seeming much less than her own, his eyes dull and lit only dimly by desperation at her rejection, his clothes hanging off of him where loneliness and self-loathing had kept him from eating, his skin and fabric stained and splotched with blood both wet and dry, his bruised skin shouting at her. He seemed to have walked to her.

He looked like he'd crawl if he had to, and that didn't seem too far off. "You can't even handle yourself without me, can you?" she asked him, face softening. He didn't answer, and she didn't ask him again.

Instead, the younger took her brother gently by the hand and tugged him along to sit at the edge of her bathtub, where pale fingers plucked gently at his clothes and served to bathe and wrap his wounds. It was the feather-light kisses pressed to each of them before the bandages, though, that finally allowed life to seep back into his features.

The lips pressed to his own and the hand cradling his face brought a light to his eyes that they had never even known. "Я люблю табе, Наташачка."

"Я всегда буду люблю тебя, Ванечка," she promised.

Translations:

вялікі брат (vyaliki brat, Belarusian) – big brother.

Я люблю табе (Ya lyublyu tabye, Belarusian) – I love you.

cестра (syestra, Russian) – sister.

Не, я не разумею. Не понимаю. (Ne, ya ne pazumeyu, Belarusian. Ne ponimayu, Russian) – No, I don't understand. I don't understand.

Мне вельмі шкада. Я вельмі, вельмі шкада. (Mnye vel'mi shkada. Ya vel'mi, vel'mi shkada, Belarusian) – I'm sorry. I'm very, very sorry.

cестренка (syestrenka, Russian) – sis or sissy

Я люблю табе, Наташачка. (Ya lyublyu tabye, Natashachka, Belarusian) – I love you, Natashen'ka.

Я всегда буду люблю тебя, Ванечка. (Ya vcegda budu lyublyu tebya, Vanechka, Russian) – I will always love you, Vanechka.

Notes:

Russia's name is given here as Ivan Zimayevich Braginsky (Иван Зимаевич Брагински). That's first-patronymic-last, logical for a Russian name. (As the patronymic is made by adding a suffix to the father's name, I invented one here using their word for winter.) The rendering of Ivan Zimayevich in the beginning bears a connotation closest to an English speaker referring to him as Mr. Braginsky.

Belarus, Nataliya (Наталия, the Ukrainian and Russian spelling of the name, which I used to keep her distanced from Russia alone), also refers to him as Vanechka (Ванечка), a more affectionate diminutive than the commonly used Vanya (Ваня). Similarly, his use of Natasha (Наташа) may indicate that he views her as a child, while the shift to Natashen'ka (Наташенька) is affectionate.