Alfred Jones is drunk.

Its 1945 and he's half done with the final defeat of his enemies. Roosevelt and 400,000 of his soldiers are dead, and more will be dead before morning. That guilt and responsibility he holds for every corpse he's behind him, dead in his name,as he forced his way through Africa, Europe and every goddamned isle in the pacific twists and burns in the writhing pit of snakes that his belly has turned into.

Now he's sprawled there on a hilltop in Bavaria almost finished with his fifth and final bottle of whiskey with the other four tossed around him like they too, are the bodies he's responsible for.

If he looks down, he can see a desolate family farm house destroyed by fire. There is the red hot glow of embers, three months old, still smoldering in their foundations. If he looks down, he will start thinking about it could have been one of his bombs that destroyed that home. He didn't know what that family had done. For all he knew, they might have been one of the German families that smuggled out his downed pilots, not turned them in. This war has doled out its justice to those who didn't deserve it same as it had failed to give justice to those who did.

He wonders if the mother of the destroyed farm house had died when it had been hit. And he hopes that if she is dead and that if she had children, they had no regrets. Vaguely, he wishes he could have made peace with his mother's old ways. He heard her whispers in the back of his head. She had whispered about how his own grand curiosity, his own need for knowledge, his thirst for more, would one day come back and kill him. Instead, it had killed her. His proud, wild, wise mother had faded as her embrace of him had given away to England's. He knows that if England could see him now, drunk and literally on his back, he would say something bitting, hypocritical and vicious. He'd look at the bottles around him and say,

"You really do take after her." His voice and attitude would be brutal, but once upon a time in Alfred's youth, his eyes and manner would be gentle, pitying that America had no idea what to do with himself, young, naive thing that he is. Once upon a time, Arthur had held him high, but held him close, America the favorite of the colonies.

But this war has taken from them all. It had taken what remained of the European aristocracy and culture and dragged it to hell. It had taken the untouched and untainted people and islands of the Pacific and dragged them to the devil's domain and back. It had taken what remained of Russia's sanity. It had taken what remained of France's military vigour. It had taken what precious little of England's gentility remained.

He chose England and turned traitor to his own blood only to betray England in the end.

But he is America, he tells himself. He is the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Home of the Brave... His mother had been brave. His mother had been free. That was why he was on this godforsaken continent in the first place, because freedom needed to be restored. History remembered the battles, but never the blood. His blood, once upon a time, had ran the same as his mother's. Native America had been the embodiment of freedom, travelling from tribe to tribe with her two sons on her back or at her side. Time had passed and he had traded mother for brother, but he remembers her many words for the sky.

The victims of brutalities he cannot comprehend lay at the edges of his mind. Europe is at peace now, Germany in is a soulless husk of a man and it will be a long time before America can see him as ever having a soul. Herr Deutschland was catatonic when Russia presented him and his shadow of a brother before the Allies and Prussia's half delusional, half hysterical and completely desperate cries for mercy on a nation even younger than the American wunderkinder of their kind. But Ludwig had something worse than blood on his hands. He'd had the ashes of millions of people on his hands.

He wondered if they ever had a choice. If he'd ever had a place in the grand scheme of the world. He wondered if the diseases, first European plagues and then alcoholism, that had taken his mother from him were sent by God as punishment or re-

He chokes back a sob and curls up on himself. He is not Ludwig. He still his mother's son, no matter what... He might be divided between what he was and what he is, between his mother's people fading fast and his brother's ever dominant, but he still America. He has a chance. So many dead, and so many still breathing but wishing they weren't. So much he'd lost...

Guilt.

It bled everywhere in him. First, it was for the men he'd lost. Second, it was for the lives he hadn't. Third, it was for being so much sorrow when he had lost so little compared to the rest of his kind.

Guilt.

It turned his veins into whips that flung his limbs out to pound the ground and convulse violently when he tried to pull whatever hated him so much out of his body and send it back to the earth he wanted so desperately to abandon.

Guilt.

The moon glows as he rolls onto his back, almost smiling down at him. The moon is mother for the world. The moon is female, mysterious, dark.

Umpsquoth. Powhatan. His mother's tongue.

Hanhepi-wi. Sioux. His mother's tongue.

Giizis. Ojibwe. His mother's tongue.

Why can't he remember more?

He stares at the webs of fog that span across the corners of his vision, like cobwebs in the storage rooms he hasn't managed to clean out since the Civil War. They spin themselves rivers that flow through the stars like they are nothing. But the stars are the Milky way, they are his mothers words.

Backbone of the sky. Ciowa. His mother's tongue.

A river of stars. Fox. His mother's tongue.

Scattered ashes. Patwin. His mother's tongue.

It feels wrong that "Scattered Ashes" is the name they had for the milky way while Germany is the one whose scattered the ashes of millions. In his own way, Alfred had to. He'd forsaken his roots and his mother had died for his betrayal. But its not the same. He was reaching for something beyond. Sometimes he wonders if he's more human than nation, because he is just like them in their need for more.

The moon glows brighter and he reaches out a hand. His hands are darker than they have been in a long time from the bright Pacific sun but they are pale in the moonlight. His mother's are as well. He clasps a hand made out of moonlight and she's watching him. He knows he's given her so much to be ashamed of, but he hopes there is some ghost of a chance, that she is proud of her sons.

"Someday I'll touch you again." He promises her. It's too late to turn back to the days when they were together, but maybe, just maybe if he continues on this path forward, he will eventually see time as it was for her. For his First Peoples, time was a circle. For him its linear. Maybe if he just keeps going though, it will go back. He will remember his history, but he will move forward. The moon is not so far away.

A/N: I imagine that Alfred does feel some guilt over what he did to his "mother" Native America. Yes, I understand that Native Americans had many, many tribes and languages and cultures but so did Germania and he is a single representation for him and canon. I meant no offense by anything here and I've done my best to keep Alfred in character, though there is only so much a man, (or nation) can take.