The Last Romanov (Under Editing)

Insanity

Anastasia was being watched.

She could feel it: those eyes digging into the back of her head. At first, she tried to convince herself that it was just the security monitors she'd installed around the palace: she'd heard a few men grumble about having every move watched, feeling like they had to look over their shoulders before they so much as light up in the palace. That had pleased her, at first. Until she realized that she was the only one that still felt it. And when she realized that the palace wasn't the only place she felt it.

Anastasia tried to ignore that eerie feeling as she walked back to her rooms from the chapel, through the newly renovated wings. She should've been inspecting the halls, making sure the newly completed restorations were up to par. But, she only gave the repairs a passing scrutiny: instead, she just focused on keeping her eyes forward, doing what she could to give the appearance of nothing being wrong.

It's nothing she thought stubbornly. You're just paranoid, is all.

"You shouldn't dismiss your fears so quickly, Nastya."

Anastasia stopped at the sound of Rasputin's voice, but she didn't allow herself to turn to look down the other end of the hallway, where the voice had come from.

"You're not here," she said out loud. She prayed that nobody could hear her. "You're not there: you're just a figment of my imagination."

"A figment of your imagination?"

Anastasia felt cold hands on her shoulders, like ice. Or, like death.

She gasped, turning over her shoulder.

Rasputin was standing there, a gentle, serpentine smile on his face. He looked different from the other times she saw him. His clothes were ragged, his hair stringy and unkempt. That wasn't much different from his normal self, though: the hermit never thought much about personal hygiene, even when he was in the presence of the Czar and the Czarina. What was different, though, was the bullet hole, right in the center of his forehead. Right where the murderer's fatal bullet had landed.

Anastasia took a step back, horrified.

"I'm real, Nastya," he said gently. "As real as you are."

She wanted to run. She wanted nothing more than to turn tail, run as fast as she could, and never look back. But, she couldn't. Fear had her rooted to her spot.

Rasputin looked down at her stomach, frowning in concerned. "Nastya, are you alright?"

Anastasia blinked furiously, praying that she would close her eyes and he would be gone. It didn't work.

"What?" It was all she could manage to say.

He pointed down at her stomach. "Nastya, you're bleeding."

Trembling, she looked down.

Bullet wounds. Five in her stomach, too many to count on her left arm. The one the doctors had been forced to amputate. All of them lined up with a wound suffered on that awful night in Yekaterinberg. In that smock-filled room of horrors, surrounded by the bodies of her family.

Anastasia stumbled back, her entire body shaking uncontrollably. It's not real, she kept telling herself. It's not real, it's not real, it's not real!

But... how could something so lifelike not be real?

"Let me help you, Nastya-"

"Don't touch me!"

She turned and began running.

Her mind was taken back to that night, after she'd allowed the soldiers to bury her in the same grave as Alexei. She'd dug herself back of the grave, every part of her hurting, her arm in ribbons. Like that awful night, Anastasia wasn't sure where she was running to, or what she was going to do when she got there: she just ran. She knew that she needed to get out of there. Nothing else mattered: not the guards who asked if everything was alright, not the knowledge that gnawed at the back of her mind that told her that there wasn't anything to run from.