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Russia doesn't sleep.

It's a given fact. Because when he sleeps, it's nowhere near restful. Just something that allows the ghosts to run rampant and his body to take the penance he must pay for his crimes, imagined or real. It gets to the point where he wakes up to blood in his mouth from where he bit through his lip and a voice gone raw from screaming. Sometimes his palms have gouges from his nails and all he can see is the red *red* blood on his hands as he remembers.

They'd whispered in his ears, crooned loving threats in voices he'd known all their lives. His ears ring with screams, the dying rattles of their lungs for air and his skin crawls under the force of hundreds of his children ripping him apart.

They chant his name as they snap his fingers bone by bone - Russia, Russia, our land, our beloved, our murderer, we love you we hate you- and he whimpers the names he can remember to warped and twisted faces, pleads for mercy and a swift death. Their voices chime like church bells, reminding him that he's asking for something they never received.

He feels the blades slip between ribs and dig out his heart, fights the urge to say it falls out on it's own and they had hardly to cut him open. But then he feels hands reach and pull at his intestines and knows his heart was only the first on the list.

Sometimes they leave him to bleed out, guts spilling through broken hands to pool on the floor and spit upon his face. Other times he's strangled with hands stained red with his own blood and he wants to say "See, we bleed the same, we are the same" but it matters little to them.

The worst is when she shows up in a dress of shattered jewels, blood soaking into strawberry hair and plucks out his eyes, giggles and purrs against his skin and he can do little else but sob her name- Nasten'ka, Anastasia, please- into blood-soaked curls as she replies with a voice sweet and dead, "Of course dearest Vanya." She presses a gun to his temple and pulls the trigger; kinder than he ever was.

Russia wakes up to too much blood and the death of many weighing down his shoulders. Sometimes he wishes he'd never wake up.