Note : This was a gift for a friend of mine on Valentine's Day. It didn't come out quite the way I wanted it, to be perfectly honest, but I hope you'll be able to take some enjoyment out of it all the same. Also, Hetalia doesn't belong to me.

The Nature of Summer

Austria woke up a little earlier than he used to that night, to the cold of the bunker and the whistling noise that deafening silence sometimes made. As always, he got dressed, fingers moving automatically even in the pitch black darkness, and left. His footsteps echoed as loudly on the concrete as if the military-issued boots he had been given were wooden shoes of old, and as the echoes followed him he was glad that the priorities given to his lodgings and personal effects had never been the best. On nights like this, being kept like a treasure at the heart of the labyrinth would have driven him mad.

It didn't take him long to find the outside world, as if the ground beneath his feet itself was ushering him out. Ironic, considering his habits in bygone days in the place that was his heart, where he would lose his ways for days and days and never figure out where he was. Perhaps there was a meaning to it. Perhaps it said something about destinies, about bloodlines, about what he wanted and what everyone wanted, about the things that the Alps sometimes echoed. Perhaps there was a meaning to everything. But he didn't want to think about such things. He had no time left in him to think now, no time, no quaint coffee shops in Viennese streets, no orchestras that played from dusk to midnight, no meadows that spanned valleys and valleys as far as the eye could see.

The guards said nothing to him when he opened the thick steel doors and walked into the world outside. Perhaps they were used to it. Perhaps they did not notice. Perhaps they, too, did not want to think about such things.

Outside was dust. Grey concrete dust on everything, the ground, the sky, falling like snow onto his pristine boots. Even the moon herself was grey, as if she, too, was coated in the dust, and everything was either the grey of the bleached night colors, the grey of dust, or the black of the sky. Everything except the glow on the horizon, which he had came here to watch. The grey bit into his hands as he climbed one of the fallen buildings, rough concrete scraping his arms and bits of exposed steel jabbing his ribs. Aside from the scuffling of his feet and the sound of a million people breathing, everything was quiet.

By the time he had reached the crumbling, precarious top, Austria almost didn't notice that somebody was already there. That person was grey, too, like everything else. But unlike everything else, he had always been silver and grey.

"Prussia," he intoned, quietly. It was one of those secret words that were not supposed to exist anymore, for them.

His old enemy turned to him slowly, lips curved up in a crooked smile. He looked as if he had expected both of them to be here all along.

"Austria," he said, patting the dusty ground next to him in the machine gun nest. "Why don't you have a seat?"

His name. That, too, was one of those secret words that weren't supposed to exist anymore. And yet, he supposed, it had never been gone between them. Their secret.

Austria sat down as invited. The sandbags stank as they always did, and the ground was cold. The stars glowed dimly against the light of the grey moon. In the distance, the horizon glowed and the artillery boomed and the guns made their rat-tat-tat. Next to him, his enemy breathed.

Under the grey sky and the falling concrete dust, he always felt like he hadn't for so long. In the trenches and the fields and the hospitals full of sick dying men it wasn't like this, in the worst parts of the last war, and today is far from the last part of this one. Still, he thought this was what it must have been like, on wars he never attended, long days he only heard of in letters that his masters signed, what it must have been like to be on the walls of Jerusalem and Constantinople, waiting for the last day to come. Sitting side by side in a machine gun nest with an old enemy under the concrete dust made him feel like an aging warrior. He couldn't tell if that was good or bad. They weren't fighting, it had been a long, long time since they truly fought, more watchers than anything else now. And still there was a sense, a sense that he knew he ought to remember.

"The boy is good, you know," he said. He didn't say if he was talking about the boy sleeping at the heart of the labyrinth, or the boy farther away beyond the night-glow. The boy who tried to become a new world, and the boy who did.

The enemy snorted. "You bet he is. Who do you think taught him everything he knows about war, anyway?"

He didn't say which boy, either, and both of them fell quiet again. The handguns they never thought to fire were long out of bullets. The only corpses lying around them was air. Austria's chest roiled with ashes. Somewhere in it still lay the song of nightingales used to days of music and nights of dances, tasting like the last drop of water in a Saharan canteen.

"I wonder how she's doing," mumbled the enemy.

"I don't know," he answered, and the nightingales fell silent. There was only one 'she' that they would speak of. How he wished he knew. The only heart he knew was his, and his burned days ago, lovely Vienna with all its quaint cafes and birdsongs. He had no way of knowing Budapest. The question made him miserable, and the only thing more terrible than not knowing was how the enemy looked even more wretched than himself. There was no hiding behind refuges made of centuries-old enmities, between here and safety lay the fact that he and the enemy made two miserable men.

For a brief moment, he thought about asking the enemy the same question, then stopping himself. He had wondered about the same thing so many nights before. How big was the gash Koenigsburg must have torn in his chest? How long did it burn?

They did not ask about the boy at the heart of the labyrinth, however, because they were looking at his heart, and his heart was dust. Dust, and guilt, and helplessness, embers that would simmer long after the fire at the edge of the sky was all but a distant memory to the citizens who created him.

They did not talk about the person at the heart of the glow in the sky. They did not need to.

"Cities are like phoenixes," Austria murmured. "Sometimes they need fire to stay alive. When one dies, another consumes the ashes and takes wing."

The enemy raised his eyebrow.

"Which city do you mean?"

"I don't know." He closed his eyes. "Perhaps all of them."

The enemy sighed.

Then, looking up in the sky at the sullen moon, he said, "I wonder if there's a piano somewhere in all these ruins."

Austria gave him a curious look. "Maybe there is. It's probably long broken. Why?"

"Why?" The enemy snorted again. "Great question, Priss. Why did you insist on plastering yourself to one and playing music on it for all these centuries?"

This wasn't the first time he had been asked this question. By friends, by family, by masters whose names had long been forgotten. By Elizaveta. By Spain. By Italy. By this very man himself, long, long ago. It wasn't until this very moment that he realized he had never been able to give them a proper answer.

I sing this song to remember summer, someone once said.

Who was it? He couldn't remember. It was all so far away and long ago.

He looked away.

"There's no reason," he said, finally. Something in him felt like it was coming to an end at last, then, something so old that he didn't want to look at it anymore. "Perhaps there has never been."

Instead of laughing at him like he expected, the enemy gave him a tired smile.

"Good. I don't have one either," he said.

Austria blinked. "Then why did you ask?"

"Because machine guns are mortar shells are getting boring," said the enemy, looking at the sky. "And if I have to hear something boring, I'd rather it be a Mozart or two."

He stared at the enemy in surprise. The enemy was gaunt and haggard, as they all were, but there was something soft in his face, something gentle and sad and happy and ancient and young all at once, and for the first time in many years, the enemy looked less like the enemy. Instead, he once again held glimmers that were like who he used to be before he was nameless and Austria was Ostmark. Like who he used to be when they fought tooth and claw for land and the glory of their masters. Like who he used to be when he wore the clothes of the priest and the arms of the knight. Like who he used to be long, long ago.

Perhaps realizing that Austria was staring at him, Prussia lowered his gaze from the sky and looked back, his eyes curious, the fire in them dimmer than they ever were. Austria flinched, then turned away.

"Stop looking at me."

"All right."

Prussia nodded, and turned away.

Silence passed between them for a while, as the sirens called and the glow in the sky grew brighter and brighter. Austria clutched at the dust under his hands.

"My fingers,"

"What about them?" Prussia asked immediately, as if he had been waiting to do so all along.

"They're numb," Austria said, slowly, with difficulty. "It's just like after the first war. My hands are numb. It's a miracle I can still pull triggers."

"Maybe they are," Prussia nodded. "What's your point?"

"The point is, I can't play you a song." He gritted his teeth. That much was obvious, surely. Prussia had been there at the end of the first war, with him in the wheelchair, watching all the nightingales singing. "I can't play anyone anything. I'm not sure when I'll be able to. I'm not sure if I can."

To his surprise, Prussia chuckled.

"What use are you, then, Priss? That's all you're really good for."

"Not much," he mumbled, sullenly.

"Good," the silver-haired man breathed. "That makes two of us."

He suddenly felt a warmth on his shoulders, and Austria realized that it was Prussia's arm, that they had, somehow, without noticing, moved closer to each other, that his head was almost on Prussia's shoulders, that Prussia had draped his arm over him like some sort of assurance. He felt his breath catch for the first time in perhaps years, but it was a gesture closer to contented despair than affection, more that of two men lost in the woods in winter, like a drowning man holding on to the peace of death.

He didn't move, and neither did Prussia.

"That's not what you said, though," Prussia murmured, and Austria's eyebrows knitted together quizzically.

"What on earth are you even talking about?"

"We were talking about music, idiot," he said. "There's a reason. You said so."

"I don't-"

"You did," Prussia insisted. Then he cast his eyes downward and asked, in a quiet voice, "Can you sing, Austria?"

Austria tensed in surprise. Sing? He did not sing. He played the piano, sometimes the violin, and even if he could and did, it was not a question for a time like this. He could still remember the dazzling operas, the nightingales, the Sunday mornings where the churches would rise in song.

"I don't mean burst into an opera or something like that," Prussia amended quickly, apparently noticing Austria's discomfort. His voice was even quieter than before, small and uncertain in a way that he had never heard from Prussia before. "Just...a song. A ditty. Anything. It doesn't even have to have words. Hum something. Just anything is fine."

Austria tilted his head, and did not notice that his voice, too, was strained.

"Why?"

"I told you. Mortar shells and flak are boring. If I'm going to be bored to death, I'd rather do it my own way."

"Prussia- - -"

A hand squeezed his shoulder, and Prussia's voice was hoarse.

"There isn't a reason," he said. "Please."

Austria's breath caught and he tried to shake his head, but perhaps because the hand on his shoulder was warm and the moon was cold and grey and the lights on the horizon were as bright as the night sky was dark, he instead inhaled, and closed his eyes. And then, against all reason, he began to hum a tune.

It was one of those cheap tunes that you'd hear on the radio, one that played to help the citizens pretend that the Fatherland was all right and the war was progressing on schedule, one that got stuck in your head and you find yourself remembering it despite the bile rising in your throat. It was barely compatible with his voice, oddly off-key and halting despite being correct, it sounded like a tin man trying to wring music out of a tin neck. None of that seemed to matter to Prussia, however, and he kept staring ahead somewhere in the middle distance, in the darkness, his fingers clutching at Austria's shirt as more bombs fell somewhere far away. And somehow, it felt like time had stopped marching in that machine gun nest and turned backwards, backwards, further and further into distant time, even though there was nothing to turn back to.

Perhaps this, too, was what it must have been like to knights sent out to Jerusalem long, long ago, singing herding songs of their motherland to each other as they prepared to sleep and dream of blood. Maybe it was like this. It must have been like this. Yet he could only imagine, and never know.

The song reached its final notes and Prussia's grip on his shirt relaxed, his arm dropping to Austria's waist. Austria felt like he should have something to say to that, but he couldn't think of why, and the song wasn't done. So he kept on going, and Prussia remained quiet and otherwise motionless except for the barely audible sound of his breaths.

When the song finished, Austria turned away and looked into the distance. Singing felt strange, and it was as if there was something roiling in his stomach. Prussia was still gazing downward, somewhere in the darkness below.

He said nothing, and waited for Prussia to break the silence.

"Singing is a silly thing," Prussia said, finally, quietly. "People use silly things to remember. Until lately, I never figured out what for, and why."

"And why is that?"

Prussia looked up, stared at him. At his eyes, even though he wasn't looking straight at Prussia any longer. Austria couldn't help but flinch, but Prussia's hand was on his waist, and Prussia's eyes were tired.

"Because the moon is beautiful, the grass is green, and the sky is blue," he said. "Because soon it'll be summer. Isn't that why it always is?"

Austria didn't know how to answer. Forcing himself to turn back, he realized now that he could see Prussia's eyes very clearly. Clear enough to see the reflected night. The world reflected there were red-tinged grey, and the moon was hollow, the grass were all dead, and the sky was as black as the uniform they sometimes wore. Summer, were it to come, would be a time for flies, and rotting meat, and human ashes filling the air. Perhaps Prussia was mad. Perhaps it was Austria who was mad. If it was not them then it had to be the world, and the world didn't go mad. The world simply turns.

"I don't know," he answered truthfully.

Prussia's eyes widened for a moment and he opened his mouth as if to speak, but then seemed to decide against it. Instead, he sighed, in that maddeningly threatical way he always did, and buried his face in Austria's shoulder.

Austria was too surprised, and perhaps too tired, to argue.

"I forgot," Prussia whispered. "You're always whatever you tell yourself to be. And I can only be what I am."

Almost disbelieving his ears, Austria rolled his eyes. Always what he told himself to be? Pot calling the kettle black, indeed, if even that.

"Prussia, what drivel are you talking about? I hardly think this the time to be all vague and cryptic. We're quite past the days of philosophy, you know."

Prussia looked up and made a face. "I'm being utterly serious here."

"If you are, perhaps being a little less vague would prove to be conducive to discussion."

He lowered his eyes. "If you don't get it, Priss, it doesn't matter."

If it doesn't matter, you wouldn't have brought it up, Austria was about to retort, but then changed his mind.

What mattered anymore?

In this world, did anyone really need a reason?

Prussia snorted and then moved away, but his arm was still on Austria's shoulder and he showed no sign of letting go. In another world, Austria would've yelled and batted that arm away, telling the silver-haired nation in no uncertain terms what he thought of this new prank of his. But that other world had long ended, and this one would soon be ending. Dawn had already appeared beyond the edge of the sky to bring all this to a close, coming with fire and brimstone and all the confidence of a New World coming to its prime, and he did not know what that world would bring to him. To them. So he didn't move away, either.

But because it was cold and the night had been so very long, he allowed himself to rest his head on Prussia's shoulder.

Prussia flinched. And in another world perhaps he, too, would've shoved Austria away and drawn his sword and launched into a barrage of taunts and insults in all the langauges he knew. And yet he didn't.

Prussia shouldn't be the one to talk about what he was, he thought. Prussia had always been different from him, powerful, dynamic, rushing forward with a strength of his own instead of one borrowed from allies and names and papers. He became a power in the time it took Austria to lose most of his, simply because he wanted to. He had became everything that Austria was supposed to be and never could, simply because he was, and he decided to.

Prussia had always been different from him. Yet now they were both doing the same things, their hearts were both burning with the same fire, their worlds were covered with the same dust.

What would become of them in the world-that-was-coming? What would change? Would they, somehow, manage to stay the same as before, enemies vying for land and honor and glory in for masters whose lives were like sparks flashing before their eyes?

Nothing stays the same, someone said. That's why we remember.

Austria frowned. He was trying to place that voice, try to figure out who said it, but then Prussia interrupted his train of thought.

"Priss," he said, suddenly sounding whimsical. "What do you say about a world without end? A world without end, a day where the sun never sets, nights filled with wonders the likes of which you've never seen."

"A what?" Austria asked, confused.

What drivel was Prussia getting on about now?

Prussia raised an eyebrow. "Doesn't sound familiar to you at all, huh?"

He began to say no, it didn't, but then something caught at the back of his mind. A world without end. A day where the sun never sets. Surely he had heard something like that, long ago. But he didn't know when, or how.

So he simply shook his head and said, "It's nonsense. A world that never ends doesn't exist."

Prussia whistled, low, against the screech of the artillery far away. "Bold statement, especially coming from you."

"It's true."

"Is it?" The silver-haired man looked at him from the corner of his eye. "That's not what you said."

This idiocy again.

"Prussia," he started. "I don't-"

"Spain told me," Prussia interrupted. "Back then, you said 'yes'."

Austria blinked.

It came back to him, then. Not all of it, not immediately. Memory trickled. A long time ago, back when he was much younger, still trying to figure out what it meant to be Austria. It had been his masters' idea. A coindence in execution, really, but he made use of it all the same. It was a formality. A contract of halfway common ownership, if you will, laid out by their masters and nothing more. And yet Spain had insisted on saying that, because it was in his interests to 'do things right'.

I'll give you a world without end, days where the sun never sets, nights filled with wonders the likes of which you've never seen. Together we will unite Christendom under one sceptre, we will be an empire to rival the glory of Rome.

There was supposed to be nothing more to it than a name, really. Like how so many things in that world was. Still, he remembered the Archduchy of Austria nodding, and he said yes.

He closed his eyes. When he heard his voice, it was harsher and older than he thought it to be.

"That world," Austria said, "is gone. That was a different time."

"This world will be gone tomorrow, too. And it will be a different time," Prussia said quietly.

He didn't know what to say to that.

"You always changed with the world, Priss. You were a knight, then you told yourself to be an aristocrat, and you just were. You told yourself to be one half of a world, and you were. You told yourself to be an Empire, and that happened. You always changed."

"It's not like you didn't, either. And what does this-"

"I didn't change as much as you did. I don't know if I'm even capable of that," he answered. "Perhaps the country that I am-or was, depending on how you see the situation-has changed a lot. But, I. I can only be what I have always been. And that's not the same as you."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Austria said, truthfully.

"I'm just wondering what you'll become in tomorrow's world," Prussia's answer was quiet.

Something caught at the base of Austria's throat, and he couldn't quite murmur, 'So will you.'

"Was the 'yes' you gave to Spain the same one you gave us in the Anschluss?"

The something at the base of his throat turned into ice that reached all the way to his lungs, and Austria's voice was carefully neutral as he answered. Not as neutral or casual as Prussia's when he made the question, but this conversation was veering off into a labyrinth that he was not sure he should enter.

"It can't be compared, Prussia."

"Yes, it can," Prussia snorted. "Both times, you were offered a new world, and both times you said yes. How can it not be compared?"

Once again, Austria couldn't answer.

He'd never looked at it that way before.

Prussia, too, said nothing for a while. Perhaps he was waiting for Austria's answer. Perhaps he was waiting for something in his own heart, burnt and ashen as it was. If there was any commodity they had in ample supply, however, it was time. He waited. The light at the end of the sky grew brighter, all the same.

When Prussia spoke again, it was in a quiet, subdued voice.

"It didn't last forever, but he did give you a world where the sun didn't set. But we...a Reich to last a thousand years. And look what happens," he gritted his teeth. "Not even a decade, and it's this. Not even a decade...I couldn't even give you a sane government, Priss."

Austria's eyebrow arched disapprovingly. "I certainly didn't expect either of you to give me anything, Prussia."

The silver-haired ex-nation rolled his eyes. "I know. But it's the spirit of the thing. We take something from you, and in return we promise something back. That's how it's done, isn't it? Don't tell me you were all about altruism, you cheapskate."

"You didn't take anything from me." And that was true. Except his name, and perhaps his honor. Whatever that had been worth.

Prussia looked at him, then up at the grey moon above.

"There's nothing but madness here, in the world I gave you," he said. There was a quiet finality to the pitch of his voice, low and resigned, and there was something both amusing and oddly endearing in it. Austria could feel the corners of his lips curving up into a thin, wry smile.

"For that, I myself should be the one to take the blame," he answered, trying to sound soothing.

"Leave a man some dignity with his guilt, geez" Prussia quipped, a little sulkily.

He couldn't even see why he'd be sulking at that answer, of all things, and it was so odd to see that expression on Prussia's face. So odd, so absurd. It was so nonsensical, in fact, that he actually broke out into a little laugh, and he didn't stop until he noticed that Prussia was staring at his face. There was a glimmer of light in his eyes, one neither the red of his pupils or the grey of the moon and dust.

That was also very odd, too, but he had a feeling that it should not be, somehow. It tasted right, more right than this dust, than the smoke in the air, than the sound of howitzers or even the hooves and swords. It tasted like little tiny drops of sunlight in his parched throat.

"I haven't seen you laugh like that in a while," Prussia said. "A very, very long while."

"Really? How long ago was it?"

Had he ever laughed in front of Prussia, actually? Laughter was rare for him even when he was with Hungary, as he recalled.

Austria had thought that to be an innocuous question, but he soon realized that it wasn't when the light in Prussia's eyes suddenly dimmed. It didn't go away completely, but there was a tarnish to it now, a tarnish that belonged to the world they were seeing and yet to somewhere else undefined at the same time.

"It doesn't matter. Tomorrow the world will change, and you'll change with it. And you'll forget. You always do."

"What on Earth are you accusing me of this time?" Austria asked, narrowing his eyes. They were back in nonsensical territory, and he had been eager to leave it.

But then Prussia smiled at him, the way he never saw Prussia smile before.

"Once upon a time, there was a little boy in a valley deep inside a hundred of other valleys," he began, his voice strangely mocking and gentle at the same time. Austria opened his mouth as if to protest but stopped himself, somehow sensing that this was something Prussia needed to say today, now, and that it was not his place to interrupt.

"The boy was a knight, supposedly. He had the arms, the name, the title, the wars, everything. Guardian of the freaking East, y'know? It's his job to guard the civilized world from barbarians. And he was ridiculously, unbelievably bad at it. Never won a fight in his entire life. Better with a shepherd's staff than he was with a sword. Utterly useless.

"And then there was another boy. This one was a knight, too, but unlike the useless idiot I just talked about, he was actually pretty awesome. Born in the Crusades to oversee his flock and make sure people die on the right side of things. Technically he was fighting for the civilized world that first one was supposed to be guarding, but he never really saw it. Born in the desert, like I said. His buddy knights kept talking about the blue lakes and green mountains and the songs the peasants in their fiefs sang when they were back home, but he never saw any of those. It's all in his head, what his supposed motherland looked like."

Something twinged in Austria's heart and was gone in an instant, and he spoke without thinking.

"Prussia, I..."

Prussia ignored him.

"He had all sorts of ideas. How blue were the blue lakes, actually? How white was snow? How wide were the meadows, how deep were the valleys? What did smoked venison taste like in autumn, when all the leaves were falling? How great were the other knights who guarded that place all his friends longed for? The western border were civilized folk, and the north were enemies they knew well, so the knights that guarded them probably weren't great. But what about the east? The east was the first line of defense against all the crazy horsemen and other heathens. Its guardian had to be awesome, at least awesome as the boy himself. He kept all those ideas in his head when he was attacking Jerusalem, when he wasn't, when he came back. That boy really wanted to meet the guardian of the East, to be honest.

"Life's cruel, though," Prussia chuckled. "When they finally met, the guardian of the East was a total letdown."

Even though much of that age was a blur he could barely remember, Austria knew who the guardian of the East was. Ostarrîchi. Österreich. Him. His. His eyes widened. He certainly didn't remember any sort of meeting like this. When he first met Prussia, he was- - -he was- - -

What was he?

Prussia flashed him a sympathetic glance. "I don't expect you to remember, Priss. I know you don't, anyway."

"But," he stammered. "I-"

"The wimpy boy was watching some sheep when the awesome knight came back from the Crusades," the silver-haired nation continued. "The latter was totally expecting to find him all armored up in the castle practicing some awesome moves with the sword, or something. He was pretty surprised to know that the one he was looking for was out in the hills. And he was even more surprised to find that he was watching sheep and picking flowers, of all things. He thought he was meeting a great knight, not a little girl. And he said as much to the wimp, the first moment he got."

"Well, excuse me, but-"

"And the wimp laughed," Prussia said, his smile wistful. "It was a really strange laugh. The knight had never seen anyone laughing like that before. He'd laughed with his men, sure, and there was nothing especially weird about this one, not in that sense. But there was something in it. Something like a drop of sunlight in his chest, he thought. So he sat down with the wimp and the sheep, because he wanted to see it more, and he wanted to know how the wimp could laugh like that. It really stunk."

The last sentence was said with a smug grin. Austria thought, absently, that he hadn't seen that sort of grin from Prussia for a long time, too.

"The knight was pretty awkward with words for this kind of thing, though, and he didn't end up talking much. He just sat next to the wimp and watch him do his thing with the flowers. Apparently it's to be grounded up into herbs for some priest's eye infection, or something, and he was curious. And then the wimp began singing. Humming. It wasn't something he could remember, out of all the hundreds and hundreds of ditties he'd heard his soldiers sing during the war. When he listened to it, though, he only really noticed then that the mountains in the distance were blue, and that the grass was really green, and there was the smell of summer everywhere. So he asked the wimp what song it was."

Prussia's smile faded, leaving only a strange sadness behind. "And that wimp. He said it was just something he sang to remember summer, that's all."

I sing this song to remember summer.

"Is that why you..." Austria began, thinking of how Prussia just asked him to sing a few moments before.

Prussia looked down and took Austria's hands into his, his fingers pressing lightly into Austria's wrist.

"No," he said, though his answer didn't sound as if it was directed to Austria at all. "Like I said before, there wasn't a reason."

Austria's fingers clenched, clumsily, stiffly. "I..."

I don't know what to make of this.

His head was a jumble of thoughts. He knew how he was as a child, small and useless and believing so faithfully that he could one day become things that he never was, and never would be. But he didn't know what he was thinking. How he thought. He didn't remember. Did he really meet Prussia, somewhere on the Alps?

He didn't know if it was true, or if his bewilderment was a sign that he wanted it to be true.

"I don't expect anything from you, Priss," Prussia said airily. "That wimp's gone, the moment the world changed. It was a world for haughty nobles instead of simple knights and shepherd, and he's gone with it. And that world's gone, too. And the world after that. And now we're here, in this mad world full of shit that we created."

"Prussia," Austria found the strength to speak normally at last. "I'm sorry."

"I have always been me, you know," he answered, still sounding as if it was meant for someone else. "But I'm just wondering. If you change with the world and this one belong to madmen, does mean we've turned you into a madman, too?"

"You are you," Austria struggled. His mind was swirling with the thought, if it was not them then it had to be the world, and the world didn't go mad. The world simply turns. "And I'm always what I am."

Prussia looked up at him, gave his hands a squeeze. "And that ends tomorrow. Maybe I will, too. It's the first time my world will end."

"You won't. This world isn't yours. It's coincidence. We don't choose our masters."

"I might. I had a part in creating it, it's what inside the hearts that created us that chose them."

"I'll remember."

"Excuse me if I don't trust your memory, Priss. You can't even remember your way back from the nearest cafe."

"Then make sure I do, you jerk!"

Prussia raised an eyebrow at this, then he snorted. "How about we come to an arrangement, then?"

"What sort of arrangement?"

"Not one of worlds and treaties, at least," Prussia shook his head. "I'm capable of learning that much."

"Then what-"

Prussia raised Austria's hands up to his chest and placed it upon his heart. They were countries and their hearts were ashes, but there was something beating and pulsing beneath his clothes all the same.

It was warm.

"I'll give you a beautiful moon, green grass under your feet, blue skies-"

"I believe I have had all these things long before you offered them to me."

"You did," he admitted. "But I'm giving them to you. Whenever you need me to, I'll remind you that that they exist. That the moon is lovely. That the grass is green and soft, that the sky is still bluer than blue. That the Alps turn green and gold in the summer. Whenever you start to forget. Whenever your world is grey and just fucking plain mad." His moved his hands to Austria's shoulders, his grip tightening. "I'll keep reminding you."

Austria stared at him, feeling at once like he has fallen into a bottomless sinkhole, and like he had just been given the dust of a newly-risen star. He felt himself tremble, and when he finally found it in himself to speak, his realized that his voice was hoarse.

"You're wrong," he said, with difficulty. "I'm not like that. I'm not whatever you think I am, and you don't know what you're offering me."

Prussia cracked a crooked smile. "Between you and me, I'd like to think I'm not the one who doesn't know what he's doing. Trust me, I know what I mean."

What do you mean?

"You don't," he whispered, with a desperate kind of finality. He didn't want to hear Prussia's next words, words that seemed to come out of a different world where they were not longtime enemies, where they weren't nations, where nobody has gone mad and no cities had burned. A world with none of the things he had grown to live by, unknown and terrifying. He didn't want to hear, to think, to know what Prussia's asking of himself, of him, of the human ashes and concrete dust and the nightingales that sang after half the world had fallen, he didn't want to-

Prussia slid his arms behind Austria's back, pulling him into a loose embrace, and he realized that he was shaking.

"Back then, I laughed at you and you shoved the flowers you were picking into my nose. Cornflowers. And I've never forgotten," he said. "I'm just asking that you let me do the same thing for you."

"You don't know what you're saying," Austria insisted, choked.

"There's a price for it, though, no way I'm doing this for free," Prussia said, gently stroking his back as if trying to calm a skittish horse. "You'll have to do something for me, too."

Austria could feel the muscles of his fingertips tighten. He told himself not to think of Prussia and the Teutonic Order and all the centuries, all the things he had possibly felt and thought, all the answers he may have found. If he didn't know what Prussia meant, he could get away, put an end to all this foolishness, this conversation, this everything. But he knew, and he couldn't help himself.

"Name your price," he said, his voice as tense and strained as a plane's wing ready to snap.

Even without seeing his face, he could feel that Prussia was smiling. He was smiling, then burying his face in the dusty fabric covering Austria's shoulder.

"You stay with me. Don't go when this all ends. Don't change. Stay with me and tell me I'm an idiot. Call me when you get lost. Complain when I eat too much. Yell at me when I pull your hair. Stay with me and...just keep doing all those things." Then his voice softened, his fingers dug into the flesh at Austria's back. "And when I forget...when I forget. Play me those songs on your stupid piano, and remind me that there are worthwhile shit in that thing they call the human heart."

Prussia fell silent. Everything else had fallen silent. There were no bombs, no birdsongs, no buildings creaking and breaking apart. If there was a noise to be had, it was merely the sound of starlight, clouds, and the blood-pumping organs beating within their chests.

Austria didn't know what to say.

Perhaps, once upon a time, there was once a shepherd boy. And once upon a time, perhaps, there was once a knight who wanted to be nothing more than a boy. Perhaps they had met, and perhaps one of them had taught the other about music and songs. He couldn't remember. But even if he did, that was another world, a world long gone. Much like the world of that boy with the two-headed eagle. And the boy who followed him. And the boy who followed him still.

Yet here Prussia was, asking for an eternity out of him.

"And who do you ask this to?" Austria found himself asking. For once, he had no idea what he sounded like.

Prussia looked up. His red eyes were not the red of the crusade, the red of the nation that bore his name, the red of the battles they shared, as friends and enemies. They were younger and older, all at once.

"Both. Either. All of them. Austria, Ostmark, Roderich Edelstein. I don't know what the difference is to you, but it doesn't matter to me." He breathed. "You're what matters to me."

"So what do you say?"

Austria inhaled.

In all the centuries that passed, among everything he didn't remember, among all the things he did. Had there ever been anything in his heart, anything at all, that could give words to this? Words to give Prussia once and for all for what lay between them and what didn't.

The answer was very old. Perhaps as old as the boy who sang to his sheep, annoyed at a sudden interloper in his day's work. Perhaps as old as the cornflowers that he shoved into the interloper's face. Perhaps as old as everything else that was forgotten and buried but never ceased to exist. It had simply lain in some unspoken corner of his mind, surfacing in the piano sonatas he played on stormy days, in letters signed with anger and indignation, in the grey moon that hung in the sky on the night of the world's end. In the comfort of quiet moments in a machine gun nest with an old enemy. In the despair of the warmth from an old friend's hands.

Austria leaned forward and whispered a name into Prussia's ear. An old name, in a form of German so forgotten that not even the universities spoke much of it anymore. A name so old, so unwelcomed, so draped in barbed memories that he was half afraid his tongue wouldn't form the words. But the words indeed came, from somewhere, somewhere in him, deeper than he knew, echoing an old lonely voice that he thought he could no longer hear. Words from a simpler, bloodier world, ringing with storms of hooves and clashing of swords and castles full of princes and kings and oaths and vows. From a time when shepherds sang songs to their flocks across distant mountains under a blue dustless sky.

He could see Prussia's breath catch as the sound lingered in the air, feel Prussia's hand tremble as it dissolved, perhaps into nothingness, perhaps into his heart. So, gently, like the man he never was and never could become, he touched Prussia's silver hair and ran his hand through it, hoping that touch could say the rest of the words, could fill in the silence he could not help but leave behind.

Prussia's eyes narrowed and he chuckled, sending tiny reverbations along Austria's fingers and all the way to his arms, where they disappeared inside the pulse of his bloodstreams. He pressed his forehead to Austria's wrist and whispered something inside his palm, so quietly that neither he nor Austria could possibly make out the words.

The meaning, however, was clear between them, shining as bright as a summer dawn.

.

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