Title: Our Little Homestead
Summary: Erik would appreciate a clue about his origins, but no one's given him any. He suspects no one will, either.
Pairings: Hinted Sweden/Finland
Disclaimer: Axis Powers Hetalia is the copyright of Hidekaz Himaruya. Views of the characters may not necessarily reflect views of the writer.
Notes: Connected to the 2084 verse, which can be viewed through my account in FictionPress.
Erik does not know his real name.
Erik does not know where he came from.
Erik would appreciate a clue about his origins, but no one's ever given him any. He suspects no one will, either.
He lives with a big man in an old war bunker in Reykjavik. The big man cooks, cleans, and finds things to repair the broken windowpanes with, but rarely talks. Erik calls him Sví; sometimes he responds, and sometimes he doesn't.
Erik remembers the night Sví returned from scavenging with enough vodka to loosen his tongue. Sví talks late into the night, eyes flickering with blue phantom fire, and even though Erik can only understand one word in five, that's enough. He has learned more about Sví in one night than he has in the past year.
He now knows that Sví has (had?) a wife, a boy, and a dog named 'Hanatamago.' He dreams of it at night, a stranger's family life. The usual dream is this:
In the morning, Sví wakes up first to feed Hanatamago, who in turn wakes Sví's wife, who is small and cheerful in his dream. Sví's wife makes breakfast despite protests to the 'wife' label, and their boy comes into the kitchen sooner or later. Their boy is rambunctious and egoistical, but likeable, and bears no resemblance to either of them. Erik supposes this is because of the boy's thick eyebrows, which are set into his face like a pair of furry golden caterpillars.
One time, Sví is smiling in the dream although Erik has never seen him smile, and Erik wakes up with the notion of Sví smiling. He cannot remember what it's like to see Sví smile, but there's the thought. Maybe he can make Sví smile, just to change the routine a little.
Erik thinks this, and writes it in the margins of an album with old pictures of him and Sví and a little puffin wearing a bowtie so he won't forget.
Oh, and he knows the puffin's name: Mr. Puffin. It's not very imaginative, but he supposes that anyone with a pet puffin would be smart enough to know that. He likes puffins very much himself, as much as he likes the white ribbon tied in a neat butterfly noose around his neck that Sví says is a gift from someone, or as much as he must like Sví.
He says that to Sví when they go scavenging together for food and things that might be useful, and Sví grunts in reply. Sví usually looks like a monster in their small enclosed space with his stiff-shouldered blue jacket and rimless glasses, but in the shadow-protected ruins of Reykjavik he looks just like Erik, small and forlorn. Erik notes this with a hint of pride and sadness, and gets to work.
He does not manage to make Sví smile. Several times Sví grunts, and one time his eyes light up in the discovery of an intact box of nails and several wooden planks, but he never smiles. Perhaps trying to make Sví smile amidst this destruction is cruel. For all Erik knows, Sví could be from around here.
When they head back, picking through the blast rubble strewn on the formerly paved streets, Erik asks about the bottle of vodka tucked under Sví's arm and, for a brief second, Sví smiles. It's small but happy, and disappears as abruptly as it came as Sví turns around and asks him how he's feeling. Erik feels as he usually does, awful but okay. He tells Sví that.
Sví grunts, disbelieving as Erik likes to think; his arm is swung over Sví's shoulders and his legs swept over a solid arm, their finds deposited on his stomach. Carefully, Sví picks a path through the metal wiring precariously suspended like delicate lace over their heads and under their feet. His nails dig into Erik's arms and Erik returns the courtesy, letting go only when Sví stops to let him down and push the old door open to reveal strangers in the old war bunker in Reykjavik where he lived alone with the big man maybe-called Sví.
"Hej," the strange hairclip-wearing man says from his position near the perpetually cracked windowpanes. Sví doesn't say anything, but looks at the Hairclip Man's companion, a short little boy with a cherubic face and fingers that seem fussy. Erik can briefly see them in another time and place, but the image is gone before he can grasp it. He looks up and sees Hairclip Man staring at him directly, with those odd unfocused eyes.
Sví says, protectively and yet not quite, "'S name's Erik."
"Ah," Hairclip Man just replies, and stands there, staring at him.
"T'bed with y'," Sví says to Erik maybe firmly and maybe not. It's strange and unlike anything Sví's said before, but he complies because Hairclip Man is surprisingly disturbing. He exits the room hastily despite his limp and dead leg, and locks the door securely behind him.
He changes into his pajamas as usual, imagining the scene outside. Sweden would have had them sit down on the tattered sofa to offer them tea and biscuits before he let them talk. He would place the bottle of vodka with its gold seal on the table and Finland would glance at it shyly, then again with a wistful tilt of his mouth. Sweden would relent and they would start drinking except his brother would bow out, and his brother would end up being the only one talking. He was always like that, the only person in their group like that, his brother, Nor—
"We lost Denmark," he can hear Hairclip Man saying outside, loudly and dully.
"Hn," Sví replies, a thudding monotone in Erik's head. "Never liked him."
"I feel a bit bad," it's the cherub-faced boy with fussy fingers, even though Erik has never heard him speak before. The tone is a bit off, more of a hardened soldier's bark than a civilized man's speech, but it's familiar. "Denmark was very valiant."
Me too, a small voice in his head says. Erik turns over and closes his eyes against his damply rotting pillowcase, willing himself to sleep.
Dreary translucent daylight enters through the cheery yellow curtains, painting Erik a sickly yellow as he slips out of his nightshirt, feeling the softly smarting fabric of cotton through skin too thin and bruised to be of much use anymore. He fingers the buttons on his linen shirt as he lies inert, then imagines how his hair must look. It would be blond, maybe, or it would just be translucent yellow just like him dipped in curtain dipped in light.
Slowly fumbling with the buttons, first on his shirt, then on his boots, he dresses himself with slow reluctance. His mind is cloudy and sluggish, his actions clumsy as if submerged in glue. Then he picks up the gift and drapes it across his neck, his fingers smarting too much to tie it properly.
Erik limps out of the scant privacy of his room to see the bottle drained of the liquid gunpowder, seal broken. Hairclip Man looks up from a newspaper long out of print, a little puffin with a bowtie on his knee.
"Good morning."
"Hej, Noregur," Iceland says.
And Erik's world crumbles around him into beautiful, safe lies.
Fin