Saigon, 1941
It's only in the early morning that France does realize how old he is, sometimes, how tired he feels, and how the bright sun of the dry season and the wet warmth of the rain season has eaten him alive. He shaves, that morning, with a straight razor and a straight face, and a churn in his stomach that feels like swallowing death. He plucks a single grey hair from his head in front of the mirror, too. It's to be expected, in a way. There are serious matters to take care of today.
Vietnam helps him get dressed, not because she cares so much about him, but because she knows how her touch burns his skin sometimes, when he doesn't really understand what's going on with her, what makes her gaze unflinching, all the time, no matter what he does, no matter how many dresses he buys her or how many slaps to her face he gives her. It's maddening, just as dealing with Algeria, Senegal and the others is nowadays. It's because France doesn't really know how to be what he used to be, when things like revolutions, wars and Prussia still mattered to him. Wars do not matter to him nowadays. He loses them anyway.
That afternoon he has tea with Japan in the house he owns in the center of the city. It's the special tea, the dry, heavily perfumed one Vietnam keeps for extraordinary occasions. Maybe it's a way of mocking him. In fact, it most probably is, from the way she bows as she serves them. Japan never seems to flinch as he speaks with carefully chosen English words, and he never seems to blink either, looking so different from what France could only remember as a boy that did not matter next to China's might, centuries ago.
"I believe you've settled matters with Thailand?" Japan says, sipping tea, not eating any of the sweets left on the table.
France doesn't feel like eating either, to be honest. The taste of roasted peanuts, jellied fruits and sesame has grown stale at the same time he realized he would never really get Vietnam to be thankful for whatever he tried to do here.
"I did." He lies. "Maybe we can both come to an understanding concerning the Indochinese Union, then."
There's a hint of what could be a smile to Japan's lips, and he closes his eyes. Somehow, he's delicate enough not to mention Germany. It's intriguing, how Japan works, how unflinching, like steel, he seems sometimes, and how soft like water he might become. It's France that feels alien in these moments, and he shouldn't be, he knows he shouldn't be.
There are more talks, more empty words France knows Vietnam is eavesdropping from the other room, and Japan's terms are harsh, just like Prussia's used to be. Maybe they're Prussia's, in a way. Japan's uniform, whenever France lets his eyes fall upon it, never fails to remind him of someone else, someone who's out there, in Paris, placarding swastikas over the Eiffel Tower and drinking himself silly upon his own glory.
France feels old, feels like his hair is graying and his face tiring, that night, after they've signed the papers and crushed whatever pride he had left from the offensive in the Ardennes. Vietnam can only look at him as he undresses and slips next to her, and there's maybe pity in her face, even though words remain unspoken between the two of them.
He slips next to her, as she prepared the opium, closes his eyes, and hopes whatever this world, his world, has turned into to be destroyed soon.