Yay! It's Halloween! Once I've posted this, I going to finish decorating for tonight but for now here's the little Halloween story I promised and it's based on an actual story and even has a song about it. Enjoy!
I don't own Hetalia!
Please Take Me Home!
It was not raining yet but Matthias reckoned it was not far off, looking at the thick clouds gathered in the night sky as he drove down the dark, lonely lane, the head-lights illuminating the road ahead. Matthias had been driving for an hour, it was nearly midnight and he still had a way to go. This lane seemed never ending and he wanted to reach home before the rain started.
A small figure came into the light, he saw it was a young boy about twelve years old, shivering in the night. Matthias wondered what the kid was doing out alone on a night like this but he could not leave him there.
Matthias stopped and got out, going over to the boy and knelt down in front of him as the kid stared at the spiky-haired, blue eyed Dane. The boy had messy blonde hair and blue eyes, topped with big eyebrows.
"What are you doing out here, kid?" Matthias asked. The boy just shivered and Matthias took his jacket off and put it around the boy's shoulders. The boy wrapped it around him, absorbing the heat it held from Matthias's body.
"What your name, kid?" Matthias asked.
"Peter!" the boy replied with a British accent. "Please! Take me home?" Matthias wondered how far taking this boy home would take him out of his way but he could not leave the kid alone in the dark.
"Sure, Peter," he replied, seeing no choice but grant the boy's request. "Come on!" He guided Peter to his car and opened the rear door. Peter jumped into the back seat and Matthias fastened the seatbelt over him. There was a blanket on the seat next to Peter and he pulled it over him.
'Kid must be really cold!' Matthias thought as he shut the door and got into the driver's seat. He turned the ignition and turned up the heater for the boy then pulled out into the road and resumed his journey. He drove until he finally reached a turn off and called over his shoulder to the boy.
"Which way's home, kid?" he asked. The boy pointed up the turning.
"That way," he replied and Matthias turned his car into the turning and found himself on another long lane. After a minute of driving, Matthias broke the silence.
"So what were you doing out here on your own?" he asked. He wondered what kind of parents would let their child wander around the countryside at this time of night.
"Trying to get home!" Peter replied. "I just want to go home!" Getting conversation from this kid was like trying to get blood from a stone.
"Where were you coming from?"
"Uncle Lukas was taking me home!" Peter replied.
"Why didn't he take you all the way home?" It was not making a lot of sense to Matthias for this Uncle Lukas to dump his nephew on a deserted lane in the middle of the night. He might have a few things to say to Uncle Lukas.
"Don't know," the boy muttered. "Just disappeared!" Matthias's hands tightened on the steering wheel in anger. Poor boy!
"Don't worry, Peter," Matthias promised. "I'll get you home!" Matthias saw the boy give a timid smile in his rear view mirror. They reached a crossroads and Peter pointed to the left turning. They began to see houses but Peter gave no indication that any of them were his house so Matthias drove on. Peter told him to turn on to another road and they drove on a little longer.
"Here!" Peter suddenly said as they approached a fairly decent sized house with a porch that had a ramp. The light that was lit above it indicated that the occupants were still up. Matthias pulled into the drive in front and stopped the engine. He got out and opened the rear door for Peter to get out.
The seatbelt was still locked in with the blanket and Matthias's jacket tangled up in it but Peter had vanished. Matthias looked to see if the boy was hiding in the foot-well but Peter was nowhere to be seen. Matthias looked around the outside of the car to see if the boy had gotten out on his own.
"You won't find him!"
The soft spoken voice had a Finnish accent and tinged with a hint of sadness and Matthias turned toward the porch to see a smallish man with blonde hair and amethyst eyes looking back at him.
"You're looking for Peter, aren't you?" the Finnish man asked. Matthias nodded and the man turned to his front door.
"Berwald!" he called. "He did it again!" Where the Finnish man was rather small, the man that came out of the house was anything but. Matthias had some height to him but this man even stood above him. This man was also blonde and had piercing blue eyes behind the glasses he wore, giving him a stern appearance. He looked Matthias up and down and grunted in a Swedish accent.
"Ya bett'r come in!"
When Matthias entered the house, the first thing he noticed was the photographs. Pictures of the couple on the porch, of another blonde man with blue eyes that were fathomless and a curl that sprang from the left with a boy with white-ish blonde hair and violet eyes. And pictures of Peter, smiling. Lots and lots of them!
"Please, sit down," the Finnish man invited and Matthias sat. "My name's Tino, this is my husband, Berwald and this is Lukas!" Matthias turned to see the man who had abandoned his nephew in the road at night and saw it was the man with the curl. He also saw that the man was in a wheelchair!
The Swedish man, Berwald, brought hot coffee in for everyone with cream and sugar for anyone who wanted it. He handed a mug to Matthias who just held it while Lukas wheeled in closer to everyone as they sat down.
"Peter asked you to bring him home, didn't he?" The question from Tino was more like a statement. Berwald looked down and Lukas turned his face away, maintaining a expressionless demeanour.
"What's going on?" a voice said and Matthias saw the young boy with platinum blonde hair and violet eyes from the picture in pyjamas, wander sleepily into the room.
"Nothing, Emil!" Lukas replied. "Go back to bed!" Emil took one look at the stranger in their midst.
"Peter did it again, didn't he!"
"Go back to bed!" Lukas ordered. Emil scratched his head and turned to leave.
"All right!" he huffed. "I'm going, I'm going!" He shut the door behind him and everyone turned back to Matthias.
"What's your name?" Tino asked.
"I'm Matthias!"
"Well, Matthias," Tino replied. "I want to thank you for your kindness. Peter always seems to find the nice ones!" Matthias just looked at him, mystified.
"Peter was our son," Tino explained. "We adopted him from England. He could be a handful but he was a wonderful little boy!"
"Was?" Matthias asked.
"Peter died five years ago to the night," Lukas, who until this point had kept silent, suddenly spoke. "I was bringing him home when we were hit by a drunk driver." He gave a mirthless laugh. "Miles of empty lane and I still managed to get hit by a drunk!"
"P'ter didn't m'ke it," Berwald explained and put his arm around his husband as a tear crawled down. "Luk's surviv'd but he's be'n in a wheelcha'r ev'r since!"
"But then how ….?" Matthias could not finish his question.
"We don't know," Tino replied. "But every year, on this night, someone comes to our door, bringing him home. You're the fifth one to come here with him."
Matthias struggled to take it all in! Could the boy he picked up really have been the spirit of this couple's dead son? Everything Peter had told him about his Uncle Lukas just disappearing made sense. The boy had died and Lukas had survived!
Fat raindrops began to hit the windows as the clouds finally released their burden and the shower became heavy. Matthias sighed. He had hoped to beat the rain but it looked like he would have to drive home in it after all.
"It's late and it's raining," Tino offered. "We have a spare room. You can stay the night!" Matthias was unsure!
"I don't want to put you to any trouble," he replied.
"Please!" the Finn plead. "We would like to repay your kindness and if you left now in the rain and had an accident, I don't think I could live with that!" Matthias realised how these people might worry about that, tonight of all nights so he agreed. Tino went to prepare the spare room while Berwald went to wash up the coffee mugs, leaving Matthias with Lukas.
It was a little awkward for Matthias, considering that he was going to give this man an ear-bending on the treatment of his nephew. He was still trying to get his head around the fact that Peter was actually dead, bringing people to his parent's home every year. Strangely, he did not feel freaked out at the idea that he had met a ghost, Peter had been just too cute and vulnerable to be afraid of.
Matthias turned to look at the other victim of the tragedy. Lukas had not said a word since he revealed Peter's fate and just sat in an emotionless silence. Matthias wondered if the man had always been that way or was it another effect of the crash, like the wheelchair.
The awkward silence was getting to Matthias and he had to speak.
"What was he like?" he asked. He knew it was a sensitive subject but he wanted to know. Lukas turned and stared at him with a blank look. Matthias felt like he was being condemned for asking and then Lukas sighed.
"He always tried to act like a grown-up but he was just as much a child as any other," he replied. "He loved transformers but Berwald sometimes felt like he watched too much television. He loved water and was always so happy when on a lake or the ocean. I'd taken him boating when we were on our way home and I drove him straight into a crash!" A hint of self-condemnation crept into his voice.
"From what I heard," Matthias commented. "The crash drove straight into you! You're not responsible for a brainless moron who got tanked up and crawled behind the wheel of a car. It's the drunk driver's fault, not yours!"
"I was the sober one!" Lukas snapped back, his emotionless façade cracking. "My wits weren't fogged by alcohol, I should have been able to avoid the crash. I should have been able to keep Peter safe so it's my fault he died. I deserve this wheelchair for what I did!"
Matthias realised that Lukas had been blaming himself since it happened, blaming himself for his nephew's death when he was in no way responsible.
"You can't predict how a drunk driver will behave!" Matthias replied. "A drunk driver can't predict how they'll behave! That why anyone who drinks and drives is an idiot! You didn't kill Peter and you don't deserve what happened to you!" Lukas finally broke and began to sob. He had held his emotions in since the crash, bottling up his feelings about Peter's death and losing his ability to walk. Matthias found himself hugging the distraught man as he cried out five years of grief and self-blame on a stranger's shoulder.
Tino and Berwald were watching from the door, Tino with tears in his eyes and Berwald looking as stern as usual. They had tried for five years to get Lukas to let go of the blame they had never put on Lukas's shoulders. The one ray of light in the whole tragedy was that they had not lost both of them. Losing Peter was devastating enough! The drunk driver was given ten years, too little for the life of a child and the paralysing injury to an innocent man but it had been the mental scars that Lukas had suffered that they had still had to deal with as Lukas continued to blame himself.
Watching Lukas break down was an unpleasant but good thing! Somehow Peter had brought someone to their door who broke through the walls Lukas had erected around himself and he was finally letting it out.
Matthias just let Lukas weep on his shoulder, purging himself of the self-recrimination he had been beating himself up with since the accident. Matthias was not the best for providing comfort for distraught people but he did his best, holding Lukas until the sobs abated and he was hiccuping.
"It sounds like you and Peter were close," Matthias reasoned. "Do you really think he'd want you to blame yourself when it clearly wasn't your fault!" Lukas looked up at Matthias with red rimmed eyes.
"It wasn't your fault!" Matthias reiterated. "Let it go, for the sake of your nephew's memory!" Lukas gave one last sob and then Berwald and Tino came in. Berwald took Lukas to his ground floor room and, when they left, Tino touched Matthias's arm.
"Thank you!" he said, with heartfelt emotion. "We've been trying to make him see he wasn't responsible for years. That's the first emotion he's shown since it happened! We can't thank you enough! Maybe now we can move on!"
"I'd like to visit again if I can," Matthias replied. He wanted to see how this turned out, to see this broken family heal. To see Lukas heal!
Tino smiled and nodded, hopefully for the first time in years!
Outside, Peter stood by Matthias's car, looking at the house that contained his family, smiled and gently faded away.
He was never seen again!
The part about Peter 'trying to act like a grown up' is Sealand trying to be a country. Norway was a little Ooc but, in this story, his lack of emotion was part of the effect of the accident and his emotions came out when he finally broke. This story reflects my opinion that anyone who drinks and drives plays Russian Roulette, not only with their own lives but the lives of anyone else on the road so in a word, Don't!
And after that cautionary note,
Hasta la Pasta!
(Please check out my other Halloween story Crumpet's Halloween Horror! Yes, I did two! Bonus! XD)