Bouquet
Summary: America receives an anonymous bouquet. Mattie knows enough about flowers to explain the message behind it.
Fourteen years earlier-
"All right, let this meeting come to order." England announced, hitting the table to grab everyone's attention, "we haven't got all day."
"Iggy, dude chill. We never get much done anyway!" America laughed, leaning back in his chair.
Germany rolls his eyes, "well if it weren't for people like you this wouldn-"
The lights went out. Just for a split second, then came the lights and the scents of blood and singed hair.
Alfred F. Jones was lying unconscious on the floor of the meeting room, bleeding from the back of his head.
Present day-
Alfred really didn't want to get out of bed. In fact, existing kind of hurt. I mean, it's always like that in the USA, but today was especially bad. Especially the throbbing scars on the back-right side of his head, which were usually covered by his hair. But today they hurt, so he had the hair pinned up.
He wasn't really hungry, and barely touched his eggs. The sun was shining and it was warm outside, but even riding his horse didn't sound fun. Tony knew better than to push him to go outside, or ask any questions.
"Hey, I think the mail-dude left something on the porch." The small alien says, trying to fill the silence.
Al sighs, and pulls himself out of the recliner. The door looks too heavy and imposing, but he yanks it open anyway, to a display of pink, blue and purple.
"Flowers? Huh, I bet it's England, or maybe Italy; he's always thinking up nice stuff like that."
Al picks up the vase and takes it inside. It's a different arrangement than he's seen before, not roses or any other common gift flower. They were arranged in a bulls-eye, in the order of pink carnations, bluebells, and purple hyacinths in the center.
He looks around, but no tag was anywhere on the gift. No clue as to who sent the flowers.
Al grabs out his phone and sends a quick text to Mattie, "Hey, did you see anyone walking around with these flowers? They just appeared on my doorstep with no tag."
Within a few minutes, he received a reply, "No, I've been home all day. But, I did look some stuff up and found out some interesting things about those flowers. The website I found said pink carnations mean, "I will never forget you", bluebells mean "humility", and purple hyacinths mean, "I'm sorry."
Al sits back and puts the phone down on the table. "I'll never forget you", "humility", and "I'm sorry."
It was a very interesting combination of meanings, that's for sure. It seemed almost like an apology. Given that it was anonymous, that made more sense than an "I'm sorry for your loss" type of gift. There'd be other meanings if it were that anyway.
In Alfred's mind that narrowed it down to a few people, but he knew they wouldn't want him to bring it up anyway. And he was more than glad to just keep the vase in his dining room table anyway.
Even the scars hurt a little less when he looked at the flowers.
(A/N: Who sent the flowers? I didn't even think that far. It's up to you guys to figure that out. I just googled "flower meaning apology" and went a few sites down. And yes, I included a few of my America headcannons:
America has a horse, her name is Pepper and she's an appaloosa
America has scars from all major events in his history. I'm sure you know what this one was referring to, but there are a few others. The back of his left leg is covered in burn marks from Pearl Harbor, his wrists and upper arms have long scars from the civil war, and somewhere along the line he partially lost hearing in his right ear. I think that was in one of the world wars.
Whenever there's a huge disaster, if does affect the nation physically, no matter where they are. So often someone will just start bleeding in the middle of a meeting, and have to go clean up. But it's rare for someone to just up and pass out, broken skull and everything.)