Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia.

Warning: M chapters (adult themes, cursing, nonconsensual sex)

Author's Note: I got the idea for this story after watching The Graduate. The two plots don't really have to do anything with each other; I was trying to aim more for the idea of one unhappy person ruining another person's life, which causes the person with a ruined life to destroy another's, etc. But this time it will all be with FrUK, hinted USUK, a lot of one-sided ScotlandxEngland, in the end some major UKFr and a lot of surprises.

I'd like to add that the letter in the first chapter would have been written three weeks before the real story begins. The letter is only here to tell Arthur's side of the story since you would have not known it otherwise, as the rest will be in Francis', Alys' and Antonio's point of view. It will also be a good thing to read again here and there once and a while as the events written of in the letter are connected with what will happen in the story.

Smile, Darling will probably be wrapped up in a matter of nine tidy chapters. Just thought I'd throw that out there. It's hard to plan out long stories, so I made a short one!

September 18, 2011
A letter to the Lord and Jury of the Crown Court: Case 10830652

Here in my hospital room, I thought that I'd never see the day when this would happen. It was inevitable though. Next week at the hearing, though my voice is half-way back and therefore usable, I know that if my barrister agrees to let me end on such a note as speaking my mind that I won't be able to if I tried. I don't have to look into the future to see that I'll stand up in front of the jury, the prosecutors and judge to only feel the presence of Francis at my side with his breath held and heart beating. Because of this, I give the court this letter, withholding my right to stay in the care of doctors to fully recover. Such a piece of writing would usually be called an address, but that is not what I'm writing. I am not addressing the court. I write a letter to those who it concerns only so that maybe I can finally reveal the ghosts that haunt me.

August 18th 2009, my parents died in a plane crash that was going to the United States. Something happened with it's left wing, sending it down into the ocean. They recovered the plane and all the bodies, but everyone was too dead to bring back to life by the time that the rescue teams came. Since I was only sixteen and not old enough to support myself yet, I was sent to my only other relative that could possibly take me in; My brother, Roy Kirkland. You may remember hearing his name on the news about a year ago, November 7th 2010, when he died. He was murdered. A bastard killed by bastard.

I remember seeing him for the first time in all those years. He opened the door to his shabby house in Hull, Yorkshire, red hair uncombed and a cigarette pushed to the side of his mouth, and with that opened me to my new life. He loved me as much as he eventually hated me.

From the first few months living with Roy, I discovered numbers things about him. First, he effectively bought and sold drugs for profit and used some for himself as well. Second, he got angry easily. A wrong word from someone on the other side of the phone sent him in a state of rage, and when said someone was talking to him face-to-face things went over the line of sole insults. And lastly, he wouldn't stand for me doing anything he did, or 'becoming him', as he put it. Roy insisted that I was to continue going to school, that I was to go to college and after I was ready for the world that I'd move the bloody hell out and find myself a new home, away from the fumes of smoke and existing bad influences in his small house.

However, though he certainly tried to prevent it, one day I agreed to tag along with a few of his acquaintances into town after weeks of persuasion on their part. Hence, into the depths of crime I plunged. From drinking and fighting to making myself bluntly known by those who didn't know me, every night I slowly but surely picked my way up the food chain in Hull. Eventually, instead of being known as Roy's little boy, I was known by the title Kirkland - only those who were close enough to me in the circle of people I kept called me simply by Arthur. I dropped out of school and prowled the streets, letting myself drift day to day heedlessly as I woke up in stranger's houses and got bailed out of prison on numerous occasions by my brother. Ever since I took a turn on what I used to be, my brother and I would get into horrendous fights. He would accuse me of becoming as screwed up and monstrous as he was, and my way of fighting back was doing exactly that. I'd bring women back home during the night, drink and smoke during the day, and despite the nearly daily spats and brawls with Roy, I came to recognize that I was not only high off of the loaded bowl in front of me but off of life in general.

That was, until the punches thrown from Roy swiftly became repeated beatings and sometimes stabs. And with the sudden break to my circuit boards my reign over the streets was over as fast as it came, which let me fall into my own personal hell within the walls of Roy's home. The sense of emotional scarring happened constantly - I was not allowed to go out or my hand would get pressed against a hot stove, or maybe I'd get lucky and stay locked in a suffocating closet for a day. Food was suddenly scarce and rarely served, forcing me to live off of faucet water and whatever else I could get my hands on. This continued for easily over two months before I got my earned myself an escape - Roy had gone somewhere, to the store if I recall, leaving me free to get on my motorcycle and ride off into town. After several events that I can barely remember, it was the next morning and I was lying on a strange bed.

It wasn't like the ones that I would usually wake up in, reeking of sex and smoke. Instead, this one had endless Spanish quilts and two pillars on either side of the headboard. There was faint murmur of something - a television I think - that wafted calmly through the bright walls. Everything was so beautiful and clean, and this scared me - it reminded me too much of my old house in London, where I'd hear my parents laugh in front of a roaring fire and the occasional chatter of family friends that came to visit. It had been so long since I thought about Mother and Father that it shook me. I knew that I had to thank the person that picked up my unconscious self off the street at the time, but I was in such a panic that I instead retreated out the front door where no one could catch me escaping. I managed to get a scrap of paper though, an address of some sort, and stuffed it away in my wallet, without much thought of what my hands had taken. With that, I gave myself up to the onslaught of my brother's rage when I finally got back to the house.

How wrong was I, thinking that things couldn't have possibly gotten worse when I returned. But things did. "Now that you're as vile as me," he'd stated, glowering at me from the darkly shadowed corners of the living room, the bright flickers of his cigarette ocasionally lighting up his lower face, "you should know how you have to constantly pay for the things you've done." It wasn't the last time I'd heard that exact line. That sentence was one of the tools that Roy used to play with my mind when he finally came to pass. Oh, how he played.

I was standing at front mat, just about to sneer and head to the tight quarters of my bedroom before I found myself slammed against a wall. I'd braced myself, waiting for the lip-busting punch to my face or the bruising kick to my ankle, but instead I felt the musty house air lick at my thighs once the cover that protected them dropped to the floor and bunched about my feet. And so it began. After that, I'm not very sure how long I stayed in his house before I got out, always wretchedly trying to get out through windows, punching holes in the walls to try to break through, even trying to storm the front door when I was desperate enough when I wasn't being beaten or assaulted. But I had already become too weak to fight back. He'd become thinner too. I realized that he cut himself off from the world as well just to accompany me in my forced isolation in the rotting house. Neither of us slept. Neither of us ate. We often got the electricity shut down by the companies from not paying, and it was only when we were threatened on being evicted when Roy slowly picked up the his contacts and deals he'd left behind him to make money once again.

It was during my second escape when I finally freed myself from that prison of a house. I'd went out and gotten myself thoroughly drunk only to wake up in yet another strange house, only this time an hour away from Hull. I was in York then with the things that I needed with me all in a bag that wasn't mine but smelt familiar. In the bag, the photo of my parents that was hidden in my drawers at Roy's house, along with a few other trinkets that I'd gotten in my last years of schooling when my parents were still alive, when all was well. It wasn't until I ended up in this damned hospital when I'd found out who had gone back to Roy's house and gathered my things before sending me off after said-person found me in that alley behind the bar, knocked out cold. But you all already know who it was, so why should names matter at this point? You all also know what happened afterwards, at Francis's house and in his care. But I'll tell you the parts that you don't know.

In a long, grueling process of winning my heart over, Francis slowly picked up the pieces of who I was before I moved to Hull and gave them to me. Me, being the selfish bastard that I was, decided to slap them back on with tape and thumbtacks instead of allowing them to mend back into me with the time that they needed. So when I received that note at the front door that morning from Roy, which said that there was no running away, I was at a loss of what to do. I tracked him to the hotel he was staying at and slowly creaked the door open to see him sitting comfortably on a sofa, eyes mirroring back the image that the telly before him showed. I'd shut the door and I tried to hold myself together, to tell him to go away and that I was a better person now, honestly. But I could see how twisted he looked by then. By his own hand, he'd turned into something more terrible than what I saw hovering above me in the quiet darks of my bedroom. By then he looked tired and broken, almost sad, but I knew better when he locked the door. We fought, and with my softened self I lost quickly, but I didn't give up. We somehow made it to the bathroom, him forcing me into the most uncomfortable corners of wherever we were at as he usually did when he was preparing to strike. But not that time. No, that time I reached for something, anything behind me, and grasped at something firm and sturdy - a long, thin shaving blade. With him so close and the bathroom turning so suddenly hot and pressing, and the dreafully familiar sound of my zipper being slowly pulled down by strange fingers, I lost it.

You know, they never figured out who killed him. He was supposedly killed by someone he didn't provide to, as street rumors said. But I was the bastard that killed him. I first slashed his neck and was pleased in the chaos that I was in when he gurgled, by then already in his own blood. So then again, to his cheek, then to his arms and chest and thighs. I was deranged and mad, uncontrollably lost to the point that when I finally snapped out of it I was at Francis's house. He wasn't home from work yet. I was free to lived a cursed life without anyone knowing what I'd done. I washed myself and my clothes, took the shaving blade that was still firmly grasped in my sticky hand, cleaned it with alcohol and took to attempting the disgusting try at living it through.

Within a week, Roy was back. Go to hell if you don't believe me, but when I was alone I felt his lips brush my ear and heard his voice when I tried to sleep in a bed half-empty. He wrapped his arms around my stomach when I was sitting from behind and pressed me against that terribly cold skin of his, and when I bathed he made my eyes flash red, fooling me time and time again that the water was blood, as sticky and rusty-smelling as his was. Even when Francis held me close as we rested after a long day's toil, I could see a limb behind the barely closed closet doors, still bleeding from fresh gashes. And then where Francis was suppose to be behind me, holding me tight, the warmth would secede to cold and I'd realize that my lover was had already rolled away to the other side of the bed long ago. No, it was Roy who would whisper me into the early hours of the morning that he loved me, in his own little way. He even stays with me here in my hospital room, looking over my shoulder as I write. He now grins and whispers, "don't drag the letter out too long, Darling," and clamps a cold hand over my mouth. I can't speak.

Francis, do you remember that time when I tried to end it all? I did it for you. I told you that I was doing it for you. I can live with Roy, but even now not with myself. Not after what I did to you. You should have left me there to die.

I plea guilty as charged.
Arthur Kirkland