Dislcaimer: Hetalia is not mine. Human AU, post- Vietnam War, Jett is APH Australia, Lien is APH Vietnam, and yes, Camille is APH Monaco, i don't know why either. English isn't my first language, but i did my best.
Warnings: Mentions of race, infidelity.
Jett sees her again when it's 1985 and he's years out of his twenties, her face shining out from across the street and the world stop around him the instant their eyes meet. The sky darkens in his mind to a spray of napalm and the exhaust from the passing cars touches his face as the heat of a tropical jungle.
So many years, he thinks and aloud he breathes, "Lien."
He saw her for the first time when he was a nineteen years old, four months in Vietnam and drinking at the bar with the rest of the boys. He'd whistled when she brought the beers and gotten a punch to his nose because, "I'm not a whore"
She was barely a woman, family killed by the bombs, and with intense green eyes and a stinging nose he'd decided to talk to her. It had taken three tries for her to talk back, fifteen more to end up back in her room only to hear her voice just a whisper "Only for my husband".
He just smiled and said, "No worries".
"It's been a while," she says, fourteen years later in English better than he can remember hearing. "We're not married here, I know." Though only after she says it does she actually look down at the golden ring on his left hand. There's a feeling welling up which he tells himself is regret but feels more close to guilt.
He turns when his younger brother yells for him to get back with him, but not before asking "Can I see you again?"
His regiment was withdrawn five months after their wedding, and he left with a kiss and a smile.
"I'll be back," he said against her sweet lips, "I promise."
"If you don't?" she whispered back, he smile and replied.
"Then I'll swim back here"
That was one year before he met the tall, blonde, classy woman he'd eventually go down on one knee before.
He kisses her again, in some room of the closest hotel, pushes her down on sheets and loses himself in the memory of a young soldier's exhaustion and a Vietnamese girl's comfort. He doesn't take off his ring, she hold his hand as they tangle themselves together, the ring around his finger feels like simple cold metal.
Camille is already asleep when he returns.
He claims he's visiting his brother for a few days and spends them in a better room of a better hotel. She's no child on her wedding night anymore, and he turns to her the first evening while she's sat up against the headboard, with a neutral face.
"How many other men have you been with?" he asks, and when he only gets an eye-roll tries again on a different track with, "How did you get the money to come?"
She looks down and says, shyness on her voice "You just asked me the same question twice."
Camille answer the one time he mentioned children to her was, "To be honest, Jett, I never really wanted to bother."
He'd shrugged and said, lying "Me neither."
She doesn't pull out the photo for a time. It's old, poorly lit and bought off a cheap photographer, showing a girl about five years old. He can see East and West in that face, hair long and brown, in a ponytail, with big dark eyes, crooked smile missing two front teeth. The race mix between his parents were so obvious in her cute little face.
"Your daughter," is all Lien says.
He grabs the flimsy photo off her. "Where?"
"Left her with a friend. Keep the picture if you like."
He continues to stare as she walks away.
Every day his wife knows that he kisses her then heads to work, pulls out the lunch she packed for him to eat in big bites, knocks off at five, and comes back home for dinner while some new Show is on the television screen in the dining room. In the Weekends mornings, Lien make the breakfast for Jett, and they past the day together, doing nothing and all at the same time.
His wife likes to remember him when they were naïve and so young, saying promises of love to each other in a little and cheap apartment back in Vietnam. She laughs when he remembered her that he once said that both of them were young enough to be the parents of at least five kids someday. They were themselves just children back then.
The second woman to say 'I do' to him accepts blindly the days when he calls home with his latest excuse.
She never did tell him what it was like for her. He thinks he's lucky she waited, and hopes that one day he will apologize enough. He asks her to run away with him the first time he agrees to meet in her apartment, and it takes a time for him to realize that he never can.
"But we are a family," The Aussie rasps, "us and our girl."
She laughs, utterly cold. "My daughter is dead. She got sick when she was five, and no one would help a half-breed. Would she have died in Australia?"
The cold seems to spread out from her black eyes "I love you, Lien" he says, and at that time it really is true.
"I spent seven years looking up at every ship that came in the harbor. Then seven more thinking of what I'd do to you when I found you."
He swallows, and it hurts. "You came to Australia for this?"
That seems to make her pause. She frowns, and says, "No. I came for something better." He stands with every muscle clenched to iron "But I must say, it's been disappointing."
As fast as she came back into his life, she's gone again. And this time it's him who's left with a shadow and a promise that he realizes too late is empty.
A year later, a woman sits in a hand-decorated room in the Vietnamese harbor surrounded by children not her own. One boy tugs at her sleeve and says "Miss, a ship's coming in!" and she replies, "That's nice" with a soft smile and not a glance out the window.
At the same time, a tall, green-eyed man wakes in a temporary room, and hauls himself up with a careless hand slapped over the divorce papers on his bedside. He pauses when his eyes fall on the photograph that is on a new picture frame, tracing over the pretty, young, toothless face as he mouths the same words he thinks every morning.
If only.
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