The gun bucked in his hand, over and over, until the limb grew numb and he couldn't even feel the recoil anymore. His ears were ringing from the assault and the acrid gun smoke was so thick in the air it was impossible to see through it.
It didn't matter.
He never seemed to know what he was shooting at to begin with. But he always had a feeling, an instinct, that what he was doing was important. Necessary.
Communist
Those furtive lives, on the edge of his consciousness, they served their purpose. The expendables of history.
A sudden unexpected breeze flowed across the waste, pushing aside the curtain of smoke just long enough to see a young face with the spotty complexion of malnourishment and eyes that grew luminous with fright.
Without a word, without even waiting to determine if it was a boy or a girl, he pivoted and pulled.
The gun bucked.
-
America jerked awake with a gasp, hand gripping at the sheets over his heart as it jack-hammered through his chest. The drench of cold sweat made him shiver and he curled into a ball to press the shakes out, though there was nothing he could do to warm the icy mix of fear and guilt clenched in his stomach.
The dream always made him physically sick; made him shake and cry and hide, though he never knew why.
He screwed his eyes shut, willing the dream to be nothing more than a result of too much greasy food and scary movies before bed.
It didn't matter what he did. Even in the darkness he could tell; the metallic tang gave it away. When he opened his eyes the doors were locked and his hands were still bloody.
-
It still scared him after so many years, but America always felt better in the morning. The blood washed away too easily, and the random aches and pain healed too quickly, as if covering over that it ever happened.
He didn't even have to try and fake a smile. He couldn't explain it, but deep down he felt it was right, whatever it was. Dream, nightmare, propaganda or reality. He was thoroughly conditioned by the sound of his own voice to react Pavlovianly to the mere word "Communist" and so having it impressed on his dream meant that whatever happened while he was asleep was justifiable.
He had been exposed to twenty-five years of anti-Communist radiation, the average incubation time necessary to produce a malignancy and it kept clandestinely growing: huge, harmful, hypocritical, reappearing in operation after operation.
Soon the blood wouldn't rinse away so silently.
-
Narroch: Erm, yea. Abstract writing exercise. Pretty much just proving to myself I could write a complete fic in one day, no matter how short. Conceived, planned, and written between the hours 7AM and 7PM.
Pretty much this is about CIA interventions based on rumors of Communism. Really horrific stuff went on that no one seems to know about. America, being the one perpetrating it, simply pushed it into his subconscious as dreams so he wouldn't have to deal with the consequences except on the rare occasions he woke up in the middle of it. It's not really supposed to make sense…
The young person he shot was intended to be a Central American country, but since canon Hetalia is never going to get south of Egypt (excluding Cuba), it will remain nameless and faceless.