{Historical Drabble} Grey
War: Franco-Prussian War
Characters: France, Prussia, Germany
POV: Francis
Prussia decides that France must go next. The war in history books will be twenty-seven weeks long, but Francis will remember it as being nine. Nine weeks is all it takes for every part of France's body to feel like lead, to wake up every morning to a pounding headache, an aching chest, re-opened wounds, all it takes for him to run to Paris, his home, his mind, his heart. Prussia travels with him, trailing a Germany who is thin and shocked but honored in a ferocious way that makes Francis never want to look at him again.
The barrage of Paris lasts for eighteen weeks, the rest of the war. Francis lives as an invalid most of the time, a familiar position by now. He is reduced to laying in bed with his mind abuzz, the explosions little more than white noise in the perifial. One day he is walking down the steps to his house when his heart explodes in his chest, pushing at his ribs, sucking smoky air over a parched throat. He falls foreward to lie sideways in the mud, where he watches the citizens open the gates of Paris, heads bowed foreward, limbs shaking, their grey-brown clothes emitting a thin grey smoke into the steel air.
Characters: France, Prussia, Germany
POV: Francis
Prussia decides that France must go next. The war in history books will be twenty-seven weeks long, but Francis will remember it as being nine. Nine weeks is all it takes for every part of France's body to feel like lead, to wake up every morning to a pounding headache, an aching chest, re-opened wounds, all it takes for him to run to Paris, his home, his mind, his heart. Prussia travels with him, trailing a Germany who is thin and shocked but honored in a ferocious way that makes Francis never want to look at him again.
The barrage of Paris lasts for eighteen weeks, the rest of the war. Francis lives as an invalid most of the time, a familiar position by now. He is reduced to laying in bed with his mind abuzz, the explosions little more than white noise in the perifial. One day he is walking down the steps to his house when his heart explodes in his chest, pushing at his ribs, sucking smoky air over a parched throat. He falls foreward to lie sideways in the mud, where he watches the citizens open the gates of Paris, heads bowed foreward, limbs shaking, their grey-brown clothes emitting a thin grey smoke into the steel air.