He doesn't realize it, does he?
Is he aware that that mask is a little transparent?
Does he even have a clue that we all know?
It's been nearly four hundred years now- for most of us, it happened after mere decades, a few of us going on into the centuries.
But him?
He kept that air of bright optimism for so long.
Its only natural that when he fell, it took the greatest toll on himself, his pride, his mind and his people.
If they even noticed.
He was the representative of America, the United States of. Note the use of past tense. He's not at all the youngling colony that he used to be, so chipper and ready to take on the world. He still has that ready for anything mentality, and he loudly boasts it about every single time he's given the chance. But?
Something within him was broken.
Maybe most of them didn't notice, too wrapped up in their own worlds, their domestic interests and neighbor affairs. The Austrian Republic was too busy figuring through decades of debt, Germany too worried over helping Austria, calming the eccentrix Prussian- ex-Prussian? Kalinite? Whatever he went by these days- Gilbert really was an enigma in this day and age. Japan was focused on rebuilding himself and recovering. Russia handling his dramatic changes from the Soviet Union to the modern Russia we know today- if anyone not Russian in the finest can love that oaf.
They were too busy. They didn't have the time, nor reason to look to the most powerful nation on Earth. What problems could he possibly have, they likely reasoned. He's powerful, so much so that even trillions of dollars in debt, he still has nothing to fear from his neighbors, too well-armed and well-trained that he was never going to be one to fall to war, not when fighting one-on-one. No one matched him.
When it came to national pride, no one was better off nor worse than Alfred. His people held an amazing level of pride to be who they were, to hold that Star Spangled Banner high above their heads and sing their praises to their nation, even placing him right alongside God, himself. Alfred had never been quite comfortable with that, but he could hardly stop them. They loved him, they loved him! Maybe that's why he continued to power through every misfortune and blow to his nation that should have ripped him to his knees. He was powerful.
No one could doubt him. Not even those of his people who so vehemently and verbally cast him down. Of all of us, I don't think a single one of us ever dealt with a Nation as diverse and blended and yet starkly contested in its national identity than him. How does he do it, I would often wonder over my afternoon tea, gazing over the shore and surf from my Cornwall summer home. How does he handle such a difficult National mind, and yet still grin as if he were the happiest man on Earth? Who wouldn't be so happy when they were quite literally the most powerful man in the world?
I remember a time when that title was mine. And now, the thing I created, raised and moulded and nurtured from that fateful day in sixteen oh-eight, up until he betrayed everything I did for him, declaring that I was a monster in public, calling me out, blaming me for every atrocity that wasn't even my fault. I was simply following orders- did he not understand then that I was not acting of my will, that I had hardly had my own in centuries?
Ah- whoops, I nearly broke that cup- Better set that down and take a few deep breaths. We certainly don't need another spilling of tea.
In any case, no. He couldn't have. He had been so free, so unbridled to do as he pleased, so far away from the Crown's eye and too distant to heed its will and weigh. He must understand now what I had done and why. I all too well understood him.
What I didn't understand, though, was why he insisted so loudly, so brashly and in such an... American way, for lack of a better term... why did he think he had to pretend to be alright when around us? We were all broken, shattered from the inside out, battered by the conflicting desires and lives of anywhere between a hundred to millions of individual lives, every one of them influential, and yet we still were our own person, in some bastard sense of the word. We defied physics, and yet it took its toll on us. At this point in the game, none of us had the ability to be truly happy.
Perhaps he is simply trying to prove me wrong.
Perhaps in doing so, he is only proving me right.