Title: White Sword (3 of 4)
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia/Good Omens
Genre(s): Drama/General
Character(s)|Pairing(s): N. Italy, Pestilence
Rating/Warning(s): PG-13, gruesome imagery
Word Count: 874
Summary: Italy fears white-clad Pestilence, for he knows that is no angel. Crossover of Hetalia with Pratchett's/Gaiman's "Good Omens."
Feliciano has grown up in a world filled with color. The painters use saturated hues in their pictures, brilliant and bold. Flowers bloom in profusion in courtyards of crimson bricks and creamy sandstone, with green-gilt lemons hanging from jade green trees and cypresses standing strong and blue-green. Even white is no longer merely white. It is pearl and cream and ivory and ecru, palest pink and palest gray, the sun washing them with gold or orange or red. Even his memories are tinted in rose and sepia, lovely and soothing soft colors.
Snow is something Feliciano rarely sees. He has heard of it and seen mounds of the compact, cold stuff brought in pomp to the palaces of the wealthy. But he knows nothing of luxuries, nothing of far off lands and cold mountain tops. He does know of the Angel.
The Angel rides in the hours between dusk and true night, during twilight. He is always upon a white horse and his sword glitters at his side like a ray of moonlight. His armor gleams in a manner no enamel can replicate and it is creamy like imported shell. Feliciano can see the intricate details of his armor, all worked out in something lovely and shining and glistening. Rats and spindly legged insects dance and cavort on that beautifully made pieces, looking alive enough to skitter off their enamel and metal world. When the rider draws his sword and strikes, he sends droplets of rubies and pearls and citrine and amethyst flying through the air, lovely and glittering and deadly. But Italy fears those jewels and does not touch them. No one sees those jewels; no one feels the sharp sting of those lovely little pebbles as they strike.
Feliciano knows when the Angel and his sword and gems come, death will follow.
Soon the streets of his beloved land will be lined with the limp forms of the dead, their faces agonized and rotting, their bodies turning livid, royal violet with pustules and boils. People will shudder and die in their sleep if they are lucky, or languish in houses that have become their tombs, with no one to offer them comfort or last rites. More people will die from the desperation and fear of others, burnt in mass pyres and tortured to death in underground cells. But it is not always so.
Many people choose to dance and make merry. They make skeleton masks and toast each other with finest vintages over dishes of roast chickens and almond milk. Laughter rings in scarlet draped houses that have ever burning torches and the air in those places will smell sweet and fragrant and hot. Some of these people too will die and their parties grind into a slow, slow halt in midst of dying flowers and congealing grease. Hungary tries to protect him from that sight but he sees them and he is sad, but not enough to cry.
Feliciano never tries to catch the Angel's eye on those terrible, silent rides. But he has seen the gaze behind the white visor and they are red and yellow and pale blue, like flames, like the eyes of the sick, but so much lovelier. That gaze is dead and sullen and dazed, like the expression of a man in fever. Once, he had caught a whiff of the plague bringer's breath and it had made him ill, so very, very ill, wracked with fever and chills that did not break for a very long time and left him as weak as a kitten.
Time passes and the plague does not come nearly as often or as horribly. They recover and the sight of the purple spotted corpses remains a distant memory. But the Angel comes again and he is merciless. His sword scythes through countries, through people. He does not merely ride but he flies, on wings of white spotted with blood, and the wind from his flight spreads fever and ague. The young, the healthy, die just as easily as the old and the weak, even quicker. They all cough and sputter their lives away as their lungs rot in their chests and they drown in their own fluids. Everyone grows ill and strained, the air punctuated by their hacking coughs and their bodies drip red, red blood.
The last time Feliciano sees the Angel is in 1944.
He no longer wears his armor nor has his white steed. Under it all, under the shining helm and the fluttering cape and the ruby-studded wings, he is a bitter, withered old man. His hands are spotted with age and his eyes are squinty and rheumy. He has nothing but a thin thatch of coarse white hair on his pate and he noisily coughs up phlegm. Pathetic and frail, he only inspires disgust, not fear.
"I am not afraid of you," Italy tells the Angel who has withered to a husk, the terrible white ghost of his childhood that is revealed as nothing more than a filthy sheet hung over a rack and a broom. Pestilence sneers at him with his twisted, gum-less mouth and totters off, muttering something about retirement. Feliciano finds himself pitying him.
He has never understood the appeal of white.
-With the skull masks, Italy refers to the "Danse Macabre," a sentiment that inspired by the Black Death and came in popularity quite a few years afterwards. "Danse Macabre" is an art motif derived from a late-medieval allegory in which people from various social levels, a king, a pope, a servant, a knight, an Emperor, a beautiful woman, are all made equal when they are rendered as skeletons by Death. I also took inspiration and imagery from Boccacio's Decameron, written in 1350, with the book of small novellas in the structure of ten young men and women in a country villa entertaining themselves with stories while they waited out the plague. This book may have in fact inspired Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. I also couldn't resist adding in a bit of Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" as well.
-The Spanish influenza killed millions of people across the globe during WWI (anywhere from 20 to 100 million people or at least one third of the population of Europe). This particular, virulent strain tended to kill those most likely to resist it, that is, young and middle-aged adults. This is likely due to cytokine storms, in which the body's overwhelming immune response to a new pathogenic infection only further deteriorates the health and helps progress the disease. A disturbing symptom of this particular strain was hemorrhaging through various orifices.
-Medically minded readers will realize that 1944 is around the time penicillin was starting to get widely distributed (which is why Pestilence retired himself from the Four, err- Horsepeople of the Apocalypse, according to Good Omens).