Warnings for: Major Character Death, Mental Instability/Depression, Attempted Rape, Superhero AU, Mentions of Attempted Suicide, Graphic Descriptions of Blood and A Fucked Up POV/Narrative Structure, some IRL Parallels.

000

This is how Alfred F. Jones' first 'Talk' happens:

The second Talk, the one about sex, had happened when Alfred was thirteen and his mother had set him and Matt down on her lap and told them where babies came from, why condoms were important and how not every girl on birth control was doing it to avoid getting pregnant. That day was also the day he learned that not all people in love were happy there, and not all people in love protected their partners. That was the day he and Matthew sat up straight and pinky swore they would never ever hurt anyone they fell in love with, and just as importantly, they would do their absolute best to take care of anyone whose person in love with them was hurting them.

The first Talk happened when Alfred was nine.

Alfred and Matthew had been doing their homework in front of the television. Matthew was doing their homework for reading and history while Alfred worked on their math and science. Once they were both done, they swapped papers, and Alfred would paraphrase Matthew while Matthew copied Alfred's answers. It made homework go twice as fast, even though every few minutes they would glance up at the television after hearing cue words like 'tragedy' 'vigilante' 'murder' or 'puppies and kittens.'

The need for the Talk came around when Alfred happened to glance up after the words 'give a demonstration' came out of the television. Alfred looked up just in time to see the man on the screen pinch the nose in the middle of his face and drag it horizontally until it rested beside where his ear should have been— but his ear was on his forehead, instead.

Their mother came quickly when he shrieked. She turned of the television and gathered Alfred and Matthew up in her arms, shushed them both and promised hot chocolate.

"There's nothing wrong," she promised. "Some people are just a little different, that's all. Some people can do things that other people can't. We've all got to live together though. There's no reason to be scared. They're not anymore likely to hurt you than anything else you meet."

000

This is how it goes:

By the time he's seven years old, all of Alfred's permanent teeth have grown in, and Matthew's have not. Alfred is so proud of it that he resolves to smile every single day, but Matthew cries because he wants his teeth too. Alfred apologizes and only starts smiling again once all of Matthew's permanent teeth have grown in as well.

Alfred is fourteen now, and it has been three years since his first Talk. He had yet to meet a metahuman. Metahumans kept their powers secret if they can, or so he'd heard. The closest he'd come was a girl with freckles who could wiggle her ears. She had stolen Matthew's first kiss behind the acorn tree.

For the last three years, his parents had been through a long and tedious divorce. It settled with Alfred and Matthew placed firmly in their mother's care at age twelve.

For the last six months Alfred had been in eighth grade with a B-average, enduring two months of being preached to about how he should start to think about college early courtesy of his technology teacher, who insisted on teaching them all how to type despite clearly being able to already.

For the last three weeks after turning fourteen, Alfred had been visiting the ice cream parlor during his summer afternoons, squished firmly between his twin and the quiet boy they'd met sighing dejectedly and rolling his eyes in the back of the computer lab.

Kiku was a small Japanese boy who fidgeted when he thought no one was looking. He played video games and questioned the nutritional content of the ice cream at the parlor each time they went, but quieted quickly when Alfred told him not to worry about it.

Alfred had been doing exactly that— saying, "God, Kicks, you're such a fart sometimes. It's ice cream, a cone every now and then isn't gonna kill you," while walking backwards across the road with an eyebrow cocked and cocky behind his glasses, grinning and showing off all his teeth— when the car came.

He heard the horn and stopped only to turn his head and freeze as he saw the oncoming metal beast. He heard Matthew scream his name.

He woke up staring at a while ceiling, thinking, there's no way I made it to heaven and learning later that no, he hadn't made it to heaven. He was in a hospital. Aside from the tightly bandaged burns on his arms and chest, he was unharmed. He was a miracle.

He was alive and Matthew was not.

000

His mother ran through the halls with her hands on her cheeks and swallowed airless gulps of atmosphere. She made the noises, but she did not cry and she did not sleep. She sat in the chair beside his hospital bed and watched a vigil all night long.

His father came in around midnight. Alfred hadn't seen him for years, but still recognized the heavy footsteps in the front hall. He wants to go to the bathroom and hide all night long, but instead he lets the old man hug him, because his legs are too numb to support the rest of his body.

People swarm their house, brining food and chatting and trying to keep them all distracted from thinking about what had happened. They go to the funeral and they can't open the casket. Kiku's family comes by and gives their condolences. Kiku is unharmed, physically, but when he and Alfred stand close together Kiku whispers in the faintest voice, "the car hit you two head-on. There were bits all down the street. How are you alive?"

Alfred has nothing to say, so they do not speak again.

The casket is buried without ever being opened. It's indecent, his father says. To open it. It's indecent. No one wants to see that.

The charge is vehicular manslaughter, taken as a misdemeanor because the driver tried to yield, failed to swerve, failed to slam on his brakes fast enough. It was an automatic, not a stick, and he was going exactly the speed limit.

Alfred looked the term up a legal dictionary once the days stop blurring together and he could feel the ache in his stomach well enough to want eat again, though his fingers still shook as he turned the pages. He took a shower and paused as he looked in the mirror, seeing the dark circles under his eyes and the jagged ribs sticking out of his side in sharp clarity for the very first time.

One year feels like an extremely short time to rot in jail.

000

One year passes in a blur.

Alfred and Kiku do not talk for the rest of summer, and once classes resume, they still avoid each other. Instead, Kiku sometimes shoots him wary looks out of the corner of his dark, slanted eyes and shrinks away whenver they get too close, as though fearing he might be bitten. Kiku transfers to another school over winter break.

It's hard to tell when spring comes, but it is spring. Sometimes, events happen which make one day stick out from the others. A girl in his class asking if he and Jean are siblings— that hurt. No one had come and explained the situation to her, and that hurt even more, because Alfred knew there was an announcement at school. Someone must have paid attention. The people who had known him and Matthew certainly had to know. He just couldn't seem to find them. On the rare occasions he mentioned Matt, he couldn't bring himself to do it by name, and he soon stopped trying to bring Matthew up at all. Every time he was mentioned, Alfred was greeted with a, "Who?" and it hurt so much he went to the bathroom and puked his way out of the rest of his classes.

He helps his mother slice tomatoes for dinner one evening, slips and by all means should have cut off a finger. There isn't a scratch. Not even when he begins intentionally trying to jam the knife into the back of his hand, trying in vain to get cuts like he could when he was little and scraped his knees on the playground. The knife bends.

He goes to the toolchest hidden in the back of a cabinet picks up a hammer. He returns without a single swollen finger, both his kneecaps intact, and a twist in his stomach when he remembers the police admiring the damage done to the Matt-killing car, and how no one could quite figure out what had totaled it.

000

It goes on until summer, and summer is oddly just as unbearable as school was because there's no one around. Their house is big and empty, all of Matthew's things have been stuffed in a closet where no one has to look at them and remember.

Their mother has finally been able to cry with tears. She does it at night, often, just loudly enough that Alfred can hear the faint echoes of it in his bedroom where he stares up at the ceiling, unable to close his eyes for fear of dreaming about two-headed cats and roadsigns with rude words, and misty mountaintops where he finds cellphones that let him hear Matthew's voice for just a few seconds before the connection breaks and all he can hear is static.

000

They're driving late at night, coming home from one of his mother's friend's houses in the country. They're going the speed limit but not really looking at the road. It's not familiar until it's an accident.

The deer hits the windshield like a cannonball bursting through the wooden walls of a medieval fortress, except the falling splinters are shards of grass and the whole world spins into a tree. His mother screams and unbuckles her seatbelt, bursting out of the car while Alfred sits, in frozen in the back seat. The bleeding bucking kicking beast is twice his size and he can't stop staring. Its eye is bleeding, bright red and enraged, like a hell bringer. Its legs thrash and its hoof smashes straight through the window, shattering it with a blow strong enough to crack a skull.

In a moment the door is ripped away from his side and he's jerked out of the car by his collar. The seatbelt snags his leg and twists his foot and his mother's voice is shrill and overpowering in his ears. She holds him in her arms and pulls him away from the car, its headlights still flickering in the dark, illuminating shining shards of glass.

Four hunters in neon orange vests run out of the wood, breathing hard and gripping their rifles. They began to shout at the sight of the deer, turn to Alfred and his mother, yelling something he can't seem to understand (Is anyone hurt? We could hear all the way from the fence!) over the blood rushing through his ears. His mother shakes her head.

Her hand came up to cover his eyes but he still knows when one of the hunters raises his gun and shoots the deer through the head. Alfred doesn't if it was the deer or the sparking, decimated dashboard making the screech of agony he can feel in every inch of his body.

Two of the hunters wrap Alfred and his mother in a blanket from the backseat of their pickup. Those two escort them to the hospital with kind hands and quiet words while the other two hunters dial on their cellphones and speak to men in cars with flashing lights. The nurses taps Alfred's cheek and he does not feel it. He goes along with what they tell him to do. He can't bring himself to resist, even when all he feels like doing is sitting still and occasionally blinking.

He doesn't remember when he winds up back in his bed with his rocketship blanket and the fake glow-in-the-dark stars plastered on his ceiling in patterns he'd painstakingly replicated from the real night sky. He doesn't know when he falls asleep, either. All he knows is that in the morning when he wakes, he doesn't have to go to school. Instead he's fed bland pancakes doused in more maple syrup than he's ever used before. There isn't a scratch on him. His mother, who had a large gash just above her eye and a vicious bruise on her sternum and cheek— she holds him tightly, and he though he knows her arms are around him, he can't feel it.

000

He doesn't know quite what possessed him to do it. Alfred just sits down with a piece of paper and a badly chewed number #2 pencil. This is what he writes:

Things I can do:

Starve myself
Drown
Burn myself to death
Hang myself

Then he stops writing. His mother is calling him downstairs, announcing that it's dinnertime. We're going to a new restaurant that had just opened up, she says. They should have all sorts of good food you like. Mashed potatoes, hot turkey sandwiches, cheeseburgers covered in ketchup, lettuce and pickles, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream on top. To celebrate surviving the car crash, she says.

Alfred shrugs on his coat and glances at the closet where Matthew's stuffed polar bear is locked in.

He stumbles downstairs, locks himself in the electric blue rental car, and is driven away.

000

Things I can do (he writes in a school notebook which serves no other function but to appear useful at its place on his desk in the middle row):

Buy ropes without anyone asking me why, and hide them
Tie a noose right
Almost chicken out at the last moment only to have it fail anyway

I can't get hurt.
I should be dead too.

000

Alfred cries at Toris' birthday party.

Toris is a friend, or at least, they'd known each other since kindergarten. Toris has two little brothers, Eduard and Raivas, and they argue all the time. Petty little arguments: who gets to sit in the front seat when driving to school? Who gets the first scoop of pistachio ice cream? Who really broke the brio set? Who is the most mature? Who gets to hold the remote when they watched television?

It was Toris' fifteenth birthday, the arguments still hadn't stopped, and it was so stupid to get mad at your siblings for such little things that in the final minutes of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, (Eduard and Toris' favorite) Alfred began to cry.

At first, he managed to keep silent, but glasses made hiding tears much more difficult because you had to displace them to rub at your eyes, and people didn't really buy the 'something in my eye' thing when you had two protective glass layers.

So he couldn't quash the crying when it first began. Soon his face grew puffy and red, his breath shortened and his throat constricted.

Alfred stands and walks to the bathroom as steadily as he can. A few people glance at him with concern, but he ignores them and just keeps walking.

He locks the door once he's inside and tries not to scream. He tries to not cry loudly enough to be heard through the door, even though a tiny part of him wishes for nothing but to be heard and for the door to be broken down and someone to run in and wrap their arms around him and stay with him the whole night and cry and understand and—

He doesn't come out of the bathroom until it's late at night and everyone's packing up to go home. No one asks where he's been.

A part of him thinks, That's good. I didn't disturb anyone.

Another part aches.

000

Things I can do:

Cry for two hours straight before I get dehydrated enough to pass out
I can probably dehydrate myself to death
Listen to the same song on loop for three days

000

Things I can do: (he writes a week later)

Pass math
Look for spare change
Buy Toris an icecream, I don't want him to hate me.

000

Things I can do: (he writes an hour later)

Fuck up at birthday parties so much that Toris doesn't want to talk to me
Have panic attacks while trying to cross the street
Cry in school bathroom stalls
Try to drown myself in the toilet, except I keep jerking upwards at the last minute.
Provoke bully into extreme swirly? Too complicated. Must plan again.

000

Things I can do: (a month later)

Get detention for beating up the bully I was trying to provoke into swirly-ing me to death. Need more straight-forward plan.
I don't want to burn to death.
Leave the gas stove on?
OD on sleeping pills.

000

Things I can do:

(he stares at the paper for an hour, got up, leaving it blank, and went to bed. There is nothing he can do.)

000

Things I can do: (he writes on a good day, when Toris finds him crying in the bathroom and wraps his arms around him rather than yelling at him to grow a pair of balls. Toris doesn't yell at anyone though, so perhaps that's why he was so kind. Obligation. Obligation. Didn't want little Alfie in trouble, I'm associated with him now—

But for whatever reason, Toris finds Alfred in the bathroom and hugs him. He shows Alfred the pearly white scars on his arm. "Down the street," Toris calls them, and smiles so gently that it's painful. Somewhere, in the depth of his heart, Alfred still has pain to spare for someone else, and he latches onto it, kissing Toris' arms and crying over him, wiping his snot on sheets of toilet paper. Toris wipes his eyes and holds Alfred's head to his chest, and says, "I know. I know. But it gets better if you just hold on long enough. Just hold on and keep trying. Try to get better. Please?"

He draws butterflies on Alfred's arms and says, "This one is your mother, this one is your brother, this one is me. We all want you to be happy, Alfred. So when you're sad, look at the butterflies, okay?" And Alfred. And Alfred. And for Alfred, happiness is so foreign now and far away. Like the dementors in Harry Potter, it feels as if there's a gray fog over everything and he will never be happy again, how Toris could possibly suggest it is beyond him. Toris never lost a brother. It's different. It's different.

Like Alfred is.

Like his skin, his skin which makes it so fucking hard to hurt himself, is different.)

Things I can do:

Talk to Toris
Call a doctor

000

He calls a metahuman he met at the hospital.

Alfred still isn't on the register, but that might just be because the hospital has a confidentiality policy. He isn't entirely sure he wants to be on the register. There are stories floating around the internet about how metahumans were always the first to get draft notices and the first to get arrested when a little too close to crime scenes, but that could all be just scare tactics. He doesn't know how much he cares anymore. He only cares enough to make the call on his own.

Alfred looks up the hospital's number in the phone book and enquires about the metahuman. He learns again that his name is Francis Bonnefoy and he's doing volunteer work for all the local hospitals in the area. He's on call at all hours. He hasn't got any family to speak of, but many, many friends who pool money to get him a small apartment and enough pocket change to buy groceries and little indulgences, so Bonnefoy is, in fact, on call all hours of the day.

He's a sedative. That's all Alfred remembers. A walking sedative who woke up beside Alfred and made his heart beat slowly even as he first asked, "Where's my brother?" and got the answer, "Oh, dear, I'm so sorry."

"I'm not a therapist," Mr. Bonnefoy says when Alfred calls. The front desk gave him the number easily. Now, he curls on his bed in his room a few days later, listening to the affected voice coming through the phone. "Are you sure you don't want me to recommend you to a professional?"

Alfred grunts a 'no' as a reply. He's been lying down all day. It takes all his energy just to reach the phone. He didn't really feel like talking all that much, which was strange, as he'd very quietly told Mr. Bonnefoy how it was the third time he'd tried to kill himself and been stopped by his powers or some weird sort of cowardice or a sudden burst of insanity, and he didn't want to try even more painful deaths that might work. He didn't even want to get up from his pillows. He wanted to close his eyes, see Matthew again and have it be done with. He'd made the call though, and now he didn't feel like hanging up, either. He just let Mr. Bonnefoy keep on talking, only partly listening to what was said.

"You list things?" Francis says. "That's wonderful. Do you think you can do something for me with your lists, then?"

Alfred grunts a "What?" over the phone.

"Once a day, every day, I want you to list things you're glad you have. It doesn't matter what it is. It can be anything, like the lint in your pockets or the things you own or people you know. And it's okay if you repeat yourself from list-to-list, all right? Don't worry about that. I just want you to do your best and try to write at least one thing down every day. Can you do that?"

"I guess," Alfred says.

"Thank you," says Bonnefoy.

Eventually the conversation dwindles. Bonnefoy tells him to call anytime. That there is no hour of the day he's unavailable. The line dies soon after, and Alfred lays in the silence of his room, listening to the sound of nothing.

000

A man is hit by a train in the subway, scrambling to save his life and screaming for help, and no one helped him. Alfred thinks of bystander syndrome and fear-induced paralysis, and he thinks of the terror of being about to be hit and not being able to do anything, and the certainty of death. He thinks about the people on the platform who watched it, the children who saw their parents do nothing as a man was crushed and no one did anything about it when they could have done everything.

He hears about it while sitting in a restaurant, eating dinner late at night beside his mother and one of her friends. He tries to finish his fried rice but ends up crying instead, quiet little sobs too quiet to really be heard, and his tears splatter on the table and he can't find them anymore. His mother is the first to notice, and she wraps an arm around him and holds him to her side comfortingly.

The other patrons just stare, like they've never seen a person cry before.

Alfred ignores them and thinks to himself, if only I'd been there. If I'd been there, I would have tried to pull him out of the way. Or I'd have at least jumped in front with him, so he wouldn't think he was dying alone with no one caring.

000

Alfred is sixteen when he witnesses his first crime.

It's not a bad street. It's not on bad side of town. It's not even badly lit, it's just a bad situation is all. There are only one or two other people on the street, but it's a residential area and not all of the lights in the windows high above are out yet. The curtains aren't even drawn on some of them. It's a warm summer night, Alfred has two years left of high school (God, I can't make it) and there is a man holding a woman by her wrists, his face so close to hers and pushing up their thighs together.

When Alfred takes his headphones off his ears, he can hear a very faint, "Ken, stop, I told you I don't want to. Stop it." and then, "you owe me, c'mon."

There's temptation. There's almost overwhelming temptation to put his headphones back on, blast the Lincoln Park and forget the sinking feeling in his gut. Let the lady deal with it on her own. It's none of my business. She'll handle it. I probably misunderstood. No skin off my back. Someone else will come.

But when the man begins pushing the lady towards a darker corner of the street where Alfred thinks there might be an alley, all he can think of is that the woman is in a subway tunnel and the man is a train rushing right at her, and there are so many people doing nothing when they could be doing everything.

He turns and marches towards the couple, and when the man pulls out a cigarette lighter it burns Alfred just as much as it would have anyone else, and his hair is pulled out and his eye stings where fingers were jabbed in, but it buys the lady enough time to jerk her wrists away from the man and his handsome face and run, run as fast as she can, and soon the police are showing up and he's arrested for assault until he can prove it was in another's defense and—

And it's all far, far more than worth it when the woman tell him—Lily, her name is Lily.

Lily tells him: "thank you."

That makes it entirely worth it.

Lily tells him: "my brother's going to take care of me for a while. I'll be safe with him."

Alfred asks, "You're going home to your brother?"

She nods, and Alfred doesn't even realize how nervous she must have been until so much later because that's what makes it worth it, above and beyond, wholly, unconditionally worth it.

His eye is still stinging but that is when he brings his hands up to his face and begins to sob and says, "take good care of your brother too, okay?"

She might have said something else, but blood is rushing through his ears and Alfred doesn't take his hands down from his face for a very long time, and when he finally does, Lily isn't there anymore.

She's gone home to her brother. He let a sibling have their sibling.

His heart is twisting in ways he didn't know it could, and it hurts so much and in such a good way he wants to jump and scream and fall on his knees and sob and dig a hole to China and thank God and he wonders what it's like on medication but he's so sure there's no way he would be able to feel so intensely if they had and fuck.

He pulls out his little listing journal and his little black pen and writes in the biggest letters he can.

I SAVED THEIR SIBLING
THEY'RE BOTH OKAY BECAUSE OF ME
I SAVED SOMEONE'S MATTHEW!

000

When his mother comes to embrace him, he can hug back.

When he's released from police custody, he has a few hours of euphoria left until the middle of the night when the high ends, and he crashes back down to earth.

He's saved someone, but it isn't his brother, and Lily could be hit by a truck on the crosswalk tomorrow and it would have all been for nothing.

He could save a thousand Lilys, and Matthew still wouldn't come back.

000

This may be one of the most terrible things I've written in a long time and I apologize profusely for it being the first thing I post after such a long absence. It was a very long day.

I do not own Hetalia, it's property of Hidekaz Himaruya. I just take out my issues on the characters a lot is all.

It's sort of funny. This started out as me being disappointed in the 'superhero' tag in A03. Now I haven't even sent it to my beta because, dang, you don't want this thing showing up in your inbox without warning. Shit evolves fast, doesn't it?

Chapter 2 is written already. It's a good bit happier than this one and will probably be uploaded tomorrow.