Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia.

1968

"It does the scaring me just thinking about it," whispered Toris. The brunette held his friend's hand tightly in his as he stared at the stain on their white carpet. Licking his lips he rose his green eyes to meet his guest's blue, "You're going to think that we're crazy after hearing us telling you about it."

Feliks laced their fingers and squeezed, his own green eyes hardening as he regarded the duo across from them, "Like, you better not say we're crazy or anything. Cause we totally aren't."

"We won't." Alfred pulled out his recorder and sat in on the coffee table. Sparing a glance over to the doll, he watched it's eyes stare back blankly. At least, they looked blank. He knew that that's what it wanted them to think. That it was just a sweet porcelain doll despite the break in its milky blue glass eye and the claw like cracks on her blushing dimpled cheeks. Her white dress tattered and dirty from the years had specks of brown crust on the hem and her shoes were muddy. Tiny hands were resting softly at her sides, the fingers stained red at the tips.

A hand rubbed Alfred's back drawing his attention away from the doll. Arthur gave him a small smile, "Don't look at her, love. She's not very happy at the moment." The Brit gave the doll a side glance as he took a sip from his tea. Unlike the others in the room, he could see right through Annabelle. He could see that her face was not the terrifyingly sweet thing everyone else saw. True, she was still smiling, stained teeth bared as red lips stretched widely over them, but her eyes…It was all in the eyes. They were staring at him and Alfred with hatred.

Nodding, Alfred turned the recorder on, "Right. Now could you please tell us what happened from the start."

Feliks sighed, "Well, like, it started out small. Legs were positioned differently than how we left it, head turned, like, up instead of down."

"And then we found her in a completely different room," added Toris, "like she was moving around all by herself!"

"You didn't think that maybe someone was playing a trick on you," asked Alfred.

Feliks shook his head, "Well, we thought that but, like, we never gave the key to apartment to anyone else."

"And we never found evidence of an intrusion, either," said Toris. He felt a shiver down his spine and looked to the chair where Annabelle was sitting. She had fallen to the side and was facing him, her smile a little tighter. The man yelped and buried his face into his friend's shoulder, "Fe, it's scaring me!"

"Like, I know, Tor-Tor." Feliks patted his brown hair and looked back to Arthur and Alfred, "After that we knew it was possessed. Like, it had to be, right? So we contacted a medium."

Mumbling though the blondes shirt, Toris said, "She told us that a seven year old girl had died in our apartment. Her name was Annabelle Higgins, hence why we started to call her Annabelle."

"The medium, like, told us that she was lonely and stuff. So that was why she had started to play with my doll. All she wanted was to be friends and live with us…"

"We're nurses and we like helping people so…we gave her permission to inhabit the doll."

Arthur and Alfred sat up straighter and exchanged glances. The latter shook his head, "Wait, you did what?"

"We thought she was nice," snapped Feliks, "Like Toris said, we're nurses and we couldn't bear letting a little ghost girl be sad and lonely. So we gave her permission to get inside the doll so she could live with us."

Toris sat back up and sighed, "But then things started getting the weird."

The two nurses stumbled out of the elevator in a fit of giggles and walked towards their apartment. Feliks tripped on a tear on the hallway's carpet and fell into Toris' chest. Reaching up, he wrapped his arms around his friend's shoulders and pressed his face against his baby blue scrubs, "Like, you're so hard, Tor-Tor but you don't look it."

Toris' face lit up, "Don't say it like that, Fe! People could get the wrong idea…"

"Psh, as if." Smirking, Feliks glanced around and stood up on his tip toes to kiss Toris on the cheek, "You did good today, Tor. I'm sure Dr. Hernandez will totes give you that raise."

Reaching into his pocket, the Lithuanian smiled, "I hope so, Fe. Maybe then we could move out of this dreadful place. Maybe somewhere where you could be free to wear those skirts you like so much."

Feliks hummed and opened their door for them. All of sudden the hairs at the back of his neck stood on end. A strange tremor ran down his back, like a cold finger nail was tracing every bone along his spine. He glanced down and saw a page from his diary. Toris picked it up before he got a chance and read it, blushing at the words.

"Like…I hope to god, that doesn't say what I think it says…"

"Fe, you—you love me?"

"Shut up, Tor." He plucked the diary page from his friend's hand and turned it around. On the back in red childish handwriting were the words 'miss me?' He showed it to Toris but the Lithuanian was staring straight ahead with wide eyes. "Toris?"

Licking his lips, Toris cupped Feliks' face and forced it in the direction he was starring. Annabelle was sitting in the middle of the hallway, the moon light shining on her grinning face. Toris looped his arm through Feliks' and gently tugged him inside, taking slow steps down the hallway. He whispered to his friend as they got closer to her, "Didn't we leave her in the spare room, Fe?"

"Yeah." But truth be told Feliks didn't give a damn about the doll moving. He was more concerned about the fact that she had a small pile of red broken crayons by her hand. Her red stained hand. The sound of electricity short circuiting behind him, made the blonde glance over his shoulder and into his room. The chills came back tenfold at the sight. "Like, holy shit!"

Toris' mouth dropped, a hand reaching out to brace himself on the door frame as he looked into Feliks' room as well. The lamp was on the floor, flickering on and off, shedding light on the destruction around the room. The walls were covered with harsh red lines as if someone had taken a red crayon and ran around in a temper tantrum. Clothes were clinging onto every available surface in hopes that they wouldn't have met the floor where their brethren suffered a worse fate.

Feliks picked up his favorite red skirt and whimpered at the horrid tattered state it found itself. But that wasn't the worse of it. Pictures of him and Toris also littered the floor. The frames were cracked from the fall but also scratched at. Toris picked up a picture of himself and saw that his face had been colored in with red crayon. Words reflected off the broken glass making him glance up. He reached out again to grab Feliks, "L-look." In the same angry lines, the same childish handwriting was the question 'miss me?'

"Oh, you have got to be, like totally, kidding me. Who could even get up the—" The blonde clammed up at the sound of something falling. He and Toris glanced down to see a lone red crayon roll until it stopped at their feet. Jaw clenching Feliks narrowed his eyes, "Fuck this!" He stomped out to the hallway and picked up the retched doll before storming out the apartment.

"Fe! Fe, wait for me," cried Toris as he followed after the angry blonde. They ran down the stairs and out the back door that led to the alley where the tenants collected their garbage for the truck to pick up.

Feliks motioned for him to open the bin, "Open it up for me."

"But—"

"Just do it, Toris. I don't want this stupid thing anywhere near our home." As soon as the Lithuanian lifted the lid, Feliks tossed Annabelle in and threw her crude note after her. The last thing he saw before Toris closed it back up here milky eyes staring back up through her messy copper hair.

Later that night, while the duo slumbered together in Toris' room, they heard knocking at their door. Feliks' shifted out of his friends arms and buried himself under the covers hoping that whoever was outside would just leave. He jumped when the knocks became furious and insistent, narrowly missing Toris' head as he got up.

They exchanged worried glances before pulling on their slippers and walking out into their hallway. Toris whispered, "Did you pay our landlord, Fe?"

"Like, totally," said Feliks with a nod. "And even if I didn't, Ivan would never be a jerk about it. He would just wait till morning like any normal person."

Flicking on the hallway's lights, Toris sighed and peeked through the peep hole on the door, "Fe, there's no one out there. He unlocked the door and poked his head out to look down the corridor, "Nope, not even—" Something crinkled under his foot so he took a step back, face paling. There on the floor was Feliks' diary page that he had tossed in after Annabelle in the trash bin. He stepped back inside and showed it to him.

Bang, bang, bang! More insistent banging knocked Feliks' off his feet in fright though this time it came from the linen closet he'd been leaning against. Heart beating erratically in his chest, Feliks' steeled his nerves and reached out for the door knob.

"Fe…Fe, don't open it," said Toris. Feliks ignored him and twisted the handle before yanking it open.

Shaking his head at the memory, Feliks glared at his now cold tea sitting in front of him next to the recorder on the coffee tables, "We're, like, beyond terrified. My BF and I can't sleep and we're not exactly rich enough to just keep replacing our crap just because that little shit doesn't like me being near, Toris."

"Or alive for that matter," said the brunette. Toris finally looked at the couple in front of him, "Can you help us?"

Alfred grinned, "Of course, dude! We're hero—oof!" He rubbed his belly and sighed, "Right, well, the first thing you need to know is that there is no such thing as Annabelle. I'm afraid to tell ya that but there never was an Annabelle."

"Quite right," said Arthur. He placed his tea cup next to Alfred's soda bottle and met Feliks' eyes, "Ghosts don't possess the power to do things like that. What we here, though, is something that's manipulative and, I'm afraid, inhuman."

"It was a big mistake acknowledging this doll, guys. It was through this doll that the inhuman spirit tricked y'all into giving it permission to infest your lives."

Toris pulled on his sweater's sleeves nervously, "Wh-what is an inhuman spirit?"

"Pretty much it's something that has never walked the earth in human form. In essence, it's demonic."

"So, like the doll was never possessed?" Feliks scooted further down the couch, tugging Toris with him.

Arthur shook his head, "No, mate. The doll was used as a conduit. A vessel, if you will. The only reason it moved around was to give the impression of possession. Demonic spirits don't possess things. They prefer people. And given what you said, Feliks, it wanted to get inside of you."

~A few weeks later~

Annabelle's face distorted on the screen as the film reel came to an end.

Arthur smiled at their assistant, "That's great, Matthew. Could you shut it down for us? Someone get the lights, please."

The lights were quickly flicked back on revealing an auditorium filled with eager students attending their seminar titled Seekers Of The Supernatural. They'd been invited by one of Arthur's old school mate, Vladimir, a fellow clairvoyant and head of the psychology department, to speak at the W. H. University. Alfred stood next to Arthur at the podium, "So we got the church to send a priest over to perform a blessing on the apartment and it's occupants. Anything that was there has since left them alone. Any questions?"

All at once, everyone raised their hands eagerly. Alfred chuckled in amusement and picked on a dark skinned girl with glasses, "Yeah, hun. What's your question?"

"Where's the doll now," she asked.

Arthur hesitated for a moment before answering, "Someplace safe."

Alfred pointed at a rather heavy set young man on the opposite end of the auditorium, "What about you, buddy?"

"What are you guys," he asked, "Like what do people call you?"

"Oh, um...well, we've been called demonologists—that's one name for us. Then there's ghost hunters, paranormal researchers," said Alfred as he counted the names on his fingers, "Um, also—"

"Cooks," offered Arthur with a small smile. Their audience chuckled along with Alfred.

"Yeah, that too. Wackos, and freaks."

Slipping his hand into his husbands, Arthur laced their fingers together, matching wedding bands reflecting as he allowed them to rest on the podium, "But we prefer to be called, Alfred and Arthur Kirkland-Jones."

Since the 1960s, Alfred and Arthur Kirkland-Jones have been known as the world's most renowned paranormal investigators. Arthur is a gifted clairvoyant while Alfred is the only non-ordained Demonologist recognized by the church. Out of the thousands of cases throughout their controversial career, there is one case so malevolent they've kept it locked away until now.

The next chapters are based on a true story.

~ Until Next Time