So, this is my try at a fic based off a song. I've just listened to Imagine (The Beatles) about six times in a row, so let's see.
Earlier I was told it was bad to put the lyrics in, but I think that was because I forgot to say I didn't own the song. :P I've read other fics with lyrics in them. But since then I've made an edit so hopefully it'll work out. If not, well...I'll just take the lyrics out entirely and fix the discrepancies. *crosses fingers*
I don't own Hetalia. Also I don't own The Beatles [John Lennon included in bundle deal at all-new prices!] and the song Imagine.
Review! :D
In a room, dusty and faded, walls tumbling down, there is an old record player. The kind with the needle and the old horn that pokes out the top like a wilted flower rusted with time and disuse. There is a dented and battered record. A relic from a past time, an elderly slip of vinyl in an elderly machine that nobody knows how to run anymore.
The record is completely immobile.
The world is a tired place. Exhausted. Worn out. The worth has been pulled up and drained dry. The nations as well, shadows of their former selves. Like ghosts, chalky and pale. They're tired. They want to sleep, forever and ever, but they can't, because nations are forced to exist, as long as there are people. But they can still dream, chin perched on one hand, staring absentmindedly out the window, of what would happen if they were one of the dried-up people still living. What they would do. Grow, play in the white ashes of what used to be buildings and trees, age, be schooled.
Fall in love. Raise a family, with children. No grandchildren, because people didn't live long enough anymore.
Die.
A sudden wind kicks up, a warm, soothing breeze. The record makes a few idle loops, and then the wind dies down as suddenly as it came.
The record has not lost its momentum, though, and rather than slowing down, it speeds up. The needle dips to a well-worn groove.
There is a staticky skipping sound, a clopping screech, and music pours out, thick as molasses, sweet as honey.
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Russia remembers when the sky used to be blue, before the smoke rose up from the factories and burnings and wreathed the world in a blanket that was soft and gray. Without real sunlight, the rest of the world is gray as well. Now it is too warm for the cold, muted beauty that snow - his precious Winter - used to bring. All that falls from the now sky is ashes. Forever raining ashes. A shin-deep ocean, swirling softly around his legs in the near-soundless world that remains.
He misses his sisters. He misses the Baltics. There weren't many people left in them, and they just paled as if the color was being sucked out of them. Losing sustenance, fading away like a specter, dandelion puffs in the wind. One by one, losing the ability to walk, to talk, collapsing, and smiling faintly as the last person in their country died, dried up. One by one, dissolving into dust and sunlight and the ever-present ashes.
He is tired, but his tech is perfect, and they need it to achieve peace. He will help them, because beyond all the petty squabbles and wars and the second catastrophe that was his fault and only his, they are friends. Or if they are not friends, they are all, at least, alike.
The record player continues to spin out tinny music, painting a picture of another era entirely.
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
France wishes he could. He's aged in every way but physically, and he misses the times when he still was young, and immature, and there was still color in the world. There was catastrophe compounded upon catastrophe until the waters of the Atlantic were sullied and gray and poisonous, and he sickened from the contamination. He is no longer the happy, flirtatious youth he had been. He misses the time when he could walk about freely, before the venin of the ocean crawled up the Seine and into his legs. And, embarrassingly enough, the Eiffel Tower. Rendered sterile. That is a secret from everyone else, the fragile nations that are left. His greatest pride is nothing more than a rusting, tilting tower in bad need of a repair, but it is already too late to fix it. It is too late for everything, but it must be fixed. He needs a solution. He is so tired, and he wants his peace, he wants to leave himself behind.
The next few words are lost in a garbled burst of sound, and the record slows again, only to recover its normal speed as the next verse began.
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
China is the only passenger on the World-Wide hyper-subway, headed to their last, very last meeting. The eight nations that remained, in one place together for the first time in years.
They had to end this. This was not a life. This was a dream, a nightmare born not of fear, but of sameness. A routine carved in stone, if there is any stone left that isn't perforated with pockmarks from acid rain. The Great Wall was a joke, not so great anymore; centuries of rebels and the ashy acid eating away at the foundations laid in blood. It had hurt, but now there is nothing left for him. His land, his people, small and stunted and short, battered and sturdy.
And tired. A bone-deep setting that dragged movements surer than any weight. They are tired of the white sky, the gray ashes, the Yellow River turned to a marsh. They wanted not to die, but sleep, eternally and peacefully. Reflected on him. China is old, old when the other nations were there, and lives and friends are made and lost in a blink, and he exists outside of time and anyone else.
He is tired of it. No more pain for anyone, the guilt he could feel for all the wars. The wars that had affected everyone and brought about the first catastrophe, and though the others denied it, it was his fault.
The smooth sound of the voice preserved in the black vinyl croons,
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
Sleep in eternal peace. Peace is what is beyond the fringes of colors if Japan squeezes his eyes shut hard enough, glowing penumbras that shift and beckon, and he is tired...There were the old days, seeming golden, when he hid in his house, an introvert to the last, wrapped in a blanket in a dark room, with a cat purring in his arms. He wishes he still had a cat. He wishes he still had a house. All that is left of him is a tattered old scrap of a nation, islands nearly flooded, the remaining hundred-or-so of his people scattered through the high points, camping on top of temples or mountain tops. This must stop. This must stop. This must stop. He cannot go on. This is nothing. This is war. This is a streak of gray in a canvas streaked with gray. Of nothing. This is it, the end. He needs to go. He cannot leave. The water is too acidic, too salty, would suck him dry.
Japan longs for peace. The groups he has are only human, yes, but they tear their country -him- apart. The rival families war with each other, sneaking up in chemical-coated boats that add to his sickness, and attack all out. One speck of land is not enough, they must have more. Peace is but a dream. A beautiful dream, an imagination he cannot conceive of.
He helped them. As the floods rose, the others came asking to him, and he donated his tech. Japan gave it all for his precious chance at peace, yet he was so tired. And they would leave him behind. He would go. He had to go. This was his life, his very own life he held in his scarred and blistered hands. He had to go. He had to. He would, if he had to steal a boat and row himself.
He would go. There was a boat, bobbing gently along the bare, petrified tree he lay limply in. He had to go. It was a motorboat, with the typical windshield and nitro gas that could send the water flying in an evaporated streak behind him. There was a key. There was nitro.
He is going.
The record reached the chorus, bounced a few times in the socket, and then sang out,
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Germany is in his privatized jet. His destination, the meeting location, is Antarctica, or what remained of her anyway. Never one for many people, she'd gone and given her life to them, freezing as long as possible as her borders shrank until only a two-hundred-meter radius stone platform remained of her, and her nation-self just withered away.
At least she still had snow then. All that is there is now are ashes.
He remembers his brother, one of the first to go, though he had already been long past his time. Prussia...the word is a caress, an affectionate glance of a transparent hand, belonging more to a ghost than a nation. Germany is numb to it. He tells himself that. He has cried so many tears over the centuries, and there is nothing left. He thought he had effectively pushed his brother and Austria, and Hungary, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein to the back of his mind and locked them away, hidden them from sight. He has called on their memories several times throughout the years, to keep pushing on for the project they spent their vigor on. He is so tired.
The Final Solution. With a grimace he remembers the same term used by his old, hated boss in the second world war, used as a paltry explanation, an excuse to rend and tear the lives of so many people. The memory still burns, bitter as aloes.
Not for the first time Germany wishes for beer. The taste and the aftertaste and the overall effect of it, the golden sheen, like light through beech leaves, the thick froth at the top. How he'd taken it for granted. All that is left in the shell of a world is ashy, poisonous water. His throat burns, and his eyes burn, and his old friends fill his mind, and the acidic tear that emerges burns like fire, but not a match to the inferno inside him.
He remembers his friends, winking out. Piff. Poof. One last sonata for you, Germany, before I go...and that was the last music he'd heard. The Moonlight Sonata, a repeating reel, faded out like an ancient film reel.
He wonders if they'd approve of the Final Solution.
He is so tired.
The voice moves on to the third verse, and the music, deafeningly soft, spills out of the brass flower.
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
America is old enough to look back at all the stupid things he'd done, all the things he could have done, everything he could've fixed if he tried. He can not sleep at night - night, a time when an atmospheric fluctuation in the failing ozone caused the thick, corrupted smoke to hug the earth and smother him- for the guilt, for the weight of the could-have-beens that tears holes in him. He is old enough to know better, to regret being so obnoxious and so rude to everyone, when he still had them. His brother. Canada, the one person that had mattered most, the one he had shunted aside for 'later'. Ridiculous. The common sense he'd sat on clearly stated that all the melting ice would drown his brother first. His sweet, innocent brother, who'd never done anything but want to be noticed. America always tried to keep his image fresh in his mind, his brother. Sinking under, weighed down, and America failing to be who he'd always said he was.
Heroes didn't exist. There were no heroes, no villains, just fools. He has come to this conclusion, staring at the rush of the world outside of the window as the ship pulled away. The White House is no longer white. Everything is buried and eaten by the earthquakes that still pain him. The White House is stained with mud, sunken deep, just the ash gray roof remaining, a foot or so.
America is leaving forever. He feels as if he is casting off all the guilt and stupidity of his youth. Hamburgers, soda, vanity, stubbornness, what did it matter now? He is leaving forever. He sees the gray land stretch out as if reaching for him in the gray ocean, and sees the paler gray where the outlying lands are just under the surface. He sees the drowned bulk of Massachusetts, and wants to cry for what is lost. He hasn't had a curl for centuries. He hasn't had to wear glasses for nearly as long. What is the point of wearing glasses if they are soaking wet and smeared with blood and radioactive ash?
China insists that it is his fault and refuses to be comforted. But America spilled the first blood. Disagreements must be put aside, though, in order to leave peacefully, and as friends.
The record slows down and winds to a stop, but the miraculous wind slowly slithers over the record player, nests briefly in the flower, and spurs the reluctant round into a movement again.
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
At one point, he was great. He was an empire. Empires fall, though, and he became just England. It was a fine life, being England. He enjoyed his cooking, and he made sure other people enjoyed it (or at least pretended to), and he was happy. Key word: Was.
Now he's grown taller, thinner, his once-blond hair turned to ash gray like everyone else with pale hair. The color has been bleached out, almost quite literally. It seems the only color left were his eyes, when he sees them in cracked mirrors or acid puddles. He wonders idly what will happen to the people left once peace is in his grrasp. The steamer he's taken blows its horn, and he slowly realizes that he is finally here, where for the first time in ages he will see everyone. He scrambles up, scabbed long limbs unfolding, sloughing off ash and dust as everything decayed around him, and he has to see them again.
He stumbles out, and there they are. They all look so different, thinner, gaunt, pale and bleached and dried up, and older in every way. Colorless but for their eyes, blue and green and brown and gold. Like him. He wants to hug them, to leap forwards and feel their bones in his arms, but that would be unlike him, and he does not, he hangs back shyly. He doesn't know them anymore.
We should go. To the launch. We only have so long before it too decays.
Yes, aru.
I'm very glad to see all of you. You will not believe-
Actually, I might. A hint of a smile in the voice. I am forever alone, and-
So tired.
Yes. So tired, exhausted.
I'm done with the world.
I can't take it.
There are only seven of us. Where is he, aru?
I can't remember.
He casts a wistful look over his shoulder. The missing one was one of his true friends. He doesn't want to achieve peace and be there without his friend.
But he does. Peace is necessary. The thought has kept him alive for the times long after he'd given up, and it will keep him alive until he achieves it.
The chorus reappears, breaching the sedate flow of the music with passionate, melancholy energy.
You, you may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
Italy is possibly the most changed. He used to laugh. He used to run and skip around, pet cats with Greece, get Germany to tie his shoe. He's learned to tie his shoe, and now he can't even meet his old friend in the eye. His eyes are open, and he wants to reconnect, but he can't. He's trapped inside a shell of not-knowing how anyone is anymore. It hurts, but the hurt will no longer be there once there is peace.
There is the doubt in him that no one will face, the insidious doubt of 'What If This Fails?'. They would be abandoned, hurtling silently through infinite blackness as the world freezes behind them.
And the eighth one, Japan, is not here. His third friend, not counting his brother. His brother, who'd faded away like a rainbow, or a beautiful dream. The unfamiliar feeling of laughter tickles his throat. His brother? Romano, a beautiful dream? He supposes that everything is beautiful once all the rough edges fade away, and all that's left is a bundle of all the good memories. The laughter turns to a lump in his throat.
He presses his face to the window of the shuttle. There are eight seats in it, and a long bar of windows. All the eyes are sticking on the one seat that isn't filled, an empty, faux-leather covered seat colored cream. It may have been another color, but time in this world they live in has dulled it like the rest. The clock counts down above them. Ten minutes. Ten precious minutes full of hope and the feeling of 'I can't believe this is happening', and the subtle sourness of doubt.
Italy used to never know what was going on. Reading the atmosphere, it was called. He's learned. He's had to.
There he is! Look, aru, he's coming!
Oh, so he is!
Will he make it? It's almost night.
Voices, relieved and excited. Italy looks. There's a gray speck on the gray ocean under the gray sky, and there is a shape slowly becoming distinct as the speck comes closer. It is Japan, but night is falling, and the smog coils closer, waiting to take his life.
Run, thinks Italy. You have to come.
He comes. He makes it. He catapults out of the boat before it bumps up against the rock and sprints up the platform and the ladders to the shuttle, stopping only to yank the lever at the control panel right outside the shuttle. The smoke wafts against his hair, and falls further.
Run! Come on! You can do it! Everyone is at the window, cheering him on, their hearts in their mouth. Peace wouldn't be the same without the most peaceful of them.
And they were so tired.
He sprints in, bends over and puts his hands on his knees from the exertion he was unused to.
I'm glad to be here.
I'm glad you're here too, aru.
Italy succumbs to the urge to hug them, the one that belonged to the old Italy, and it seems to unlock everyone else. They're a hugging mass, almost weeping, but the acid would burn and that would be worse, so they're swallowing their tears and smiling.
The record skipped again, decelerating now that the song was done. It rocks in its cradle, skids off the side and screeches again, before the needle was cajoled into place on the last chorus.
You, you may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one
They sit down tensely, still holding hands in a loose circle. They can't bear to be apart after reunion, and they're beginning to wonder if peace is a bad idea when they still have their friends. But they're tired, so tired, and the memory of the shriveled lands and dried up poison rejuvenates them.
We can't turn back now.
Three. Two. One.
The shuttle vibrates under them, and fire stained pale sends them shooting up to the atmosphere, through the choking smog, and out. It takes minutes. The new-tech is excellent. It works.
Once they're past the orbit of the moon, the darkness cascading around and cradling their shuttle, the cabin fills with gas. Not ones that are poisonous to their lungs, for that would cause pain and hurt the people still left on Earth- would they even still survive anymore?- but one that reacts with a gas found in only space, what the those in the golden years would have called the void. Another thing they did not know, thought they needed to know but when it all boils down to it the one thing they need is peace.
Another countdown marks the time as they sit pensively inside the shuttle.
They are so tired.
A minute until peace. The unattainable goal, right here, right now.
I'm glad you're here.
Thank you, everyone.
да, but none of this would be possible without all of us.
I wonder if I will see Prussia again, I miss him.
Nobody knows what will happen.
It's something new, aru.
Never been done before.
Peace will be an awfully big adventure.
Then the windows fly out, and the void swirls in, and there's a reaction.
The word reaction does not do it justice.
An instant before the breathtakingly beautiful ending, a classically old, beaten-up record player blew itself to smithereens. The elegant flower is silhouetted for a moment, really seeming to be a flower, bobbing in the warm breeze that curls around the brassy, gleaming petals.
Back on Earth, the people look up, seeing a supernova in the smoggy sky. They are so tired, but the tiredness is eased and their sleep is granted, and the tired world that spins under them achieves its peace as well, the land flying outwards and away, and the gray smog uncoiling to be vaporized in the blast, and in the very last instant, there is a stream of that most remarkable of marvels, that wondrous phenomenon that's been missing from their world for millennium. Color.
After the color there is joy.