June, 1919.
"Have a smoke," New Zealand says, and she shoves the packet into Australia's hand, limp at his side. After a moment he obliges, eager to breathe in something a little less fatal than what the trenches had to offer. But it's peculiar. Neither he nor her have ever been smokers.
"Cheers."
"Better?" she asks him.
"A bit, yeah."
"I'm glad." She's speaking to the green expanse of the park, sunny and desolate. Versailles, the Hall of Mirrors, and the crowds are all far from here, sufficiently far that it's all nearly forgettable. The peace treaty has sucked people up from the streets and whisked them off, draining them away, leaving the alleys and avenues of Paris – her veins – almost empty. There are a handful of others milling about the park, but not enough to distract. New Zealand taps some of the ash from the end of her cigarette into the fountain they're standing beside. Catching Australia's look, she smiles. "France won't mind."
"He minds everything. I can't blame him, can I? Paris escaped unscathed and here we are polluting it." Rolling her eyes, New Zealand yanks him to her side and they proceed on, arm in arm, simply putting one foot before the other and going wherever their train of thought leads. They handle their cigarettes awkwardly, as both are forced to rely on their non-dominant hand, looking 'very new world', as New Zealand puts it. She combs a hand forcefully through her curls - through split, and burnt, ends.
"What's on your mind?"
"Far too much," she says.
"Had a gutful of the war, eh?"
"Yeah," she sighs, then, screwing her eyes shut: "Oh, God."
"What is it?" he asks.
New Zealand throws him a look, slightly panicked, and they both stop where they are. She cocks her head to the side, as though it's somehow possible to participate in the jostling of the throng from afar, to hear the commotion of Versailles from here, the meticulous placement of signatures. "I think they've signed it. That's it."
"We should be in there," Australia offers, recognising and accepting instantly that he doesn't truly mean it. "Can't say I'm looking forward to getting a talking to later."
"No. No, I want to be here," says his sister, gripping his arm tighter, holding him closer. The height difference between them, attributable to a combination of several decades of gold rushes throughout the states, frequent and bountiful trade, and Melbourne's allure, is made all the more obvious when he has to uncomfortably incline his head downwards to hear her say, "It wasn't our war." The words hover between them. The same declaration has found its place all across the known world - in Sydney, in Dunedin, at the Dardanelles, at dinner parties and in empty rooms.
"I know," he tells her, stretching back to his full height, taking a drag and releasing it gradually. "How'd we even get here in the first place? Just a couple of bloody kids, right?"
"Kids with guns?"
"Yeah. And this—" He gestures out at Paris, but his intention extends much further. "Is this what we were trying to protect? I've been thinking—"
"Maybe," she cuts him off, louder than he is, attempting in her own way to divert the course his words have marked out. "I know I would've given my time to the widows, if that was how things were going to be. I never want to see this place again."
"Me neither."
"Especially not now that I'll always think of it like this. Ludwig's writhing, somewhere in there. It's so strange. He's one of the youngest – more than both of us. And already—"
Australia shudders. "France will be singing."
They continue their thoughtless pacing, an uneasy quiet that could almost be mistaken for something more placid, more content. Australia shatters it.
"But… we're not that young, are we? It just seems that way. It's just experience."
He adjusts his tie absently, flexes his left hand, nearly drops what he's holding. His limbs are still stiff as ever; in his more pitiful moments, they feel cold and gangrenous, torn to shreds by barbed wire, held together by gauze and leather and willful ignorance of his own plight.
"Managing to skip several hundred years of nonsense is nothing to be ashamed of."
"Maybe all that nonsense prepared them, though. That is, everyone but Germany, if Prussia didn't spill all. Maybe things don't look so bad after you've seen all of that."
"Don't do this. Don't pretend there was any way out. It's not worth the time," New Zealand responds, and her words sound clipped, unkind, because they have to be. "Come off it."
"What are we, compared to that?" Australia says, regardless, in a bid to tie off whatever he's started. New Zealand lets him go.
"For Christ's sake, you're doing my head in! They didn't win at Waterloo with machine guns! I doubt any of them knew what to expect, no more than we did. It wouldn't make me feel any better, anyway. Who gives a shit what they've seen? This is different. It was always going to be different."
"Machine guns wouldn't have been fair," Australia murmurs, and he skims his nails down the side of his face. "No, it wouldn't've been. But they had cannons, Zee. Not so different from a shell. Shouldn't that have helped? Prepared them?"
"It still isn't the same," New Zealand says, with mounting agitation, although Australia gathers - later, if not then - that it isn't just for him. "Everything's fair, in our time, because everyone's dead. Isn't that right? If a German was going to throw a shell at our trench in Ypres and they knew they'd wipe us all out in one go, it wouldn't matter how many Germans went with it. They wouldn't give it a second thought. And you seriously want to pretend that anyone knew what was coming?"
"Jesus, you're bitter. You're worse than me."
"I'm angry; there's a difference."
He smiles at her, unable to help it, appreciative as well as stirred. She's right, of course. She almost always is; somehow, in the end, he finds himself believing he's been the unreasonable contributor. And for the time being, the sun's behind him, they have each other, and the guns have stopped. That's more than they've had in years.
Yet, there's so much more than that, lurking - consequences which neither of them can erase. The corner of his mouth twists and turns the expression into a grimace, into something far uglier. "You deserved more than this fucking war. I'm sorry."
She throws her head back; her eyes are glinting. "I'm not your responsibility. I threw myself into this knowing exactly how it was going to end." Turning aside, she goes back a few paces to stub her cigarette on the rim of a nearby fountain.
"Why does it have to hurt so fucking much?" Australia's saying. "Weren't we promised? Things were meant to be alright."
"We're young," she replies. "I can only imagine it gets easier. As time goes on..."
"Some kind of fucking baptism," Australia spits out, momentarily overcome at the sight of her. He's so lucky she's alive, so lucky they're both intact, that they both managed to crawl their way through the years of empty evenings and full days, monotonous dawns and restless nights.
It doesn't matter to him if it's been done before, if someone else has cleaved the path. This is their suffering. Their trial. Their execution.
"I know this isn't the end. I don't know how I ever agreed. The shit I've seen, here and at home – I can't keep on. I can't. There's nothing I can do."
"We must." They both hear how strained it is; Zee makes no effort to act otherwise. She's made herself known. They both have; there's no backing down, only a begrudging tolerance of the past. "There's no other choice." After a moment, she adds: "It's not just England. Not anymore. The problem's much bigger than him, you know."
"I know. I've given up pretending it's all him. I couldn't be fucked."
"What do you mean?"
"It doesn't work anymore."
His fury just as easily touches her as it does him, and she's livid for just as long - has been, for just as long. Not only now, but always. But it doesn't necessarily make things easier to bear. "I feel like they must have warned us. Perhaps, in their own way."
"You reckon? And just how were we meant to prepare?"
There's no good answer to that – nothing that could possibly satisfy. But New Zealand does answer, indirectly, and her voice seems to come from somewhere else entirely, like she's speaking to him from Tāmaki, from Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara, from somewhere that is hers, that the war hasn't cut to pieces. It comes from maybe not her lips, but God's. "Someone else commits the sins," she says, softly, "and you're the one at the altar begging for mercy."
"They took it. They took everything. We're grown-ups, now, Zee, so why does it still seem the same? I thought eighty, ninety years would change it all, but look where we are. Trade a prison for a trench; trade a flogging for the firing squad." He drops his cigarette, now apathetic. "What's the bloody point?" Australia reaches out for his sister's hand and traces around each finger with his thumb as he goes on, garbled, teary.
"There's different kinds of pain. There's the type you feel when you're behind the lines, and there's the type you carry with you. It could've been different. Don't you think it could've been different?"
"Jack—"
"Somewhere else, just you and me. No Pākehā, no ships, no dirty convicts and big ugly gaols. We might've had parents. None of this would be us." His eyes search her for approval, imploring her for understanding.
"I know. I know. But I'm too tired to dwell on it."
"I don't want it."
"I know." She reaches out and they hold each other where they stand. He breathes out her name – Aotearoa – and she lets him rest his head on her shoulder. Aotearoa, he says again, and she laughs.
"It doesn't matter how old our bodies are, or what we look like. I swear we've lived a million years longer than any of them in there."
"Be a lot easier if I felt like it, too."
"Come on," she says, and he raises his head, and she collects herself, composes herself. "We'll be alright. Everything will be alright."
"You have to forgive me, first," he says, itching distractedly at the adhesive tape over his nose (his only injury, in fact, that he can't attribute to the war in the strict sense; he can thank a low doorframe for this one).
"For what?"
"Putting you in harm's way. Letting you see what you saw."
"No. You should be asking my forgiveness for letting you think I didn't want to put myself on the line. Do you have any idea how much worse I'd feel at home?"
Sheepish, his hand extends to feel the old scar across her forehead, a valley of puckered skin, pink and exposed and human. Old bullet wounds throb to make themselves known. What's the point of being a nation, he thinks, if your flesh can't just spit the bullets out again? Pain is a burden he shouldn't have to bear. That neither of them should.
"I'm bloody useless, aren't I? Look at me whinging," Australia says, then, lowering his hand. He pulls out the packet of smokes that New Zealand handed him earlier, stashed in his pocket in the interim. He wriggles one free and offers the rest to her, but she refuses.
"I had enough to last me twenty lifetimes at Gallipoli, thanks."
"Then what was all that before, mate?"
"Nothing at all," she says, laughing under her breath, eyeing him as he thoughtlessly rolls the cigarette between his fingers. "Look at me," she says suddenly, pointedly, and he focuses on her. "We're allowed to resent the world. We all are - every goddamn one of us that's had to sit through this shitstorm and call it war. You don't have to let it go, Australia. You don't have to."
Then, he's wretched all over again, looking wan and sick. Bloodshed's not a foreign concept, but the stain of a world war will linger. They have suffered alone before; now, they suffer as a part of a much greater whole, mourning the state of the world.
"This isn't like me," Australia says. "I'm not enjoying it, you know. Fucking hate feeling sorry for myself."
"There's worse things to be."
"Like what?"
"Soldiers. Puppets. Your country is yours, now. Don't forget that. We can go home. Come back with me, if you don't want to be alone just yet."
"We'll see. No doubt they'll be wanting me for something. Still…"
"What?"
"Wish they could've ended the war a bit bloody sooner. I've been dying for a decent roast."
"God, Jack. Let's leave it there." She snatches the cigarette out of his fingers and tosses it into the garden.
"Hey!"
"You weren't even smoking it. Come on." She takes his arm again. "We'd better go and meet them."
The abandoned cigarette attracts one last mournful look, and then, they leave together.