The first time around, it had not been easy. They were slipping off the course England prepared. In the fog of war and battles, both had been captured not by accident but by design. Inside the chaos was the cold calculation that would haunt them for years to come.

Alfred had been better off than her, initially. When the British came, she had been captured quickly and efficiently. It almost seemed to Alfred that his sister was in the wrong place at the wrong time but he knew better. He was was almost a hundred now, mentally, and just approaching thirteen physically. Emily looked two years older even if they were the same age, down to the minute. She was gone in an instant. Alfred couldn't save her. He went off to war. He could feel her, terrified and wishing for an end, any end. For a long time, Emily had been the one to suffer.

Then New York happened. Trapped with hundreds of other soldiers in the hull of a warship, Alfred realized that maybe, this wasn't about revolution. Maybe this was about England showing them why he would always be in control. Maybe War-England (this was not the England that raised him) was a jerk. They were separated by hundreds of miles and equally suffering. It was nice to be equal.

Of course, the despair didn't last and neither did the war. Alfred faced War-Arthur (so different from the one who raised him, damn that mad King George) alone. Emily was found and freed and sent back to her home with Alfred. Awkwardly, she waited for him to return with victory in hand and bruises in tow. The second he saw her, Alfred - fifteen now, physically, with tired eyes and bruises of his own - began to run, crashing into her at the base of the stairs and holding her as they walked to the infirmary. Neither was really supposed to be walking. Neither really cared. Soon enough, they were curled up together, sharing the bed like they were little kids again. (It was not the time for false modesty. It was sure as hell not the time for separation.)

"What happened to you?" Emily asked, tracing a black eye so dark it looked like a tattoo. "Alfie, my little Alfie…" Alfred snorted.

"Emmy, we're the same age. You're worse, by the way," Alfred muttered into Emily's ear. "You were gone. Not kidnapped, not missing, just… gone. I couldn't sense you. At all. And then… the pain." The pain had been terrible, biting day after day as her panic surged. Emily closed and shook her eyes.

"They came at night," Emily began slowly after a long silence. "I was so, so scared. I couldn't feel you. First, they locked me in a coffin. Unburied, thankfully. Then, I guess they decided they needed more. He, he… let the men do whatever they wanted to me as long as it hurt." Emily shuddered. Alfred held her tighter, murmuring soft words in her hair. "When they'd made their mess and went home to get clean, the door was locked. I was trapped. I was so scared, Al. So scared." Al nodded, rubbing her back in soothing circles. "I couldn't feel you. Where were you?"

"New York," Alfred replied.

"During the siege?"

"And after." Alfred winced. "When you disappeared, I became a soldier. I didn't get out of harm's way. I was stuck in one of the big ships in the harbor. There was a little ladder down at the end of my hall. No one knew where the ladder went, only that anyone who went down didn't come back. I learned the hard way." Alfred took a deep breath. "Torture chamber. They made a torture chamber to get us to talk. I went down there five times. I wasn't even afraid for me, after the first time. I can't die. I was scared I'd lost what I loved the most."

"Alfie…"

"It wasn't funny, Em. I thought you were dead or worse. You wouldn't be unique in dying. I would've been alone."

"Alfie, you're not alone in anything."

Somehow, they survived. Together. They only ever survived together. 1812 wasn't as bad as it could've been, even as the burns crawled up their backs and their breaths drew short. They weren't alone in anything. They wouldn't have been unique in were Alfred and Emily, teenagers during the Revolution and teenagers during the War of 1812. They were still the only friends they needed. When nights were bad, they still shared beds like little kids.

The scars that marked their bodies were silver and gold now. They were healing. Slowly. Neither was willing to explain just how slowly they were healing, but they had lifetimes to get better.

At least, Emily thought with a bitter voice, Alfred's not at war this time. Madison had thought it a stupid idea and somehow (how exactly, Emily had no idea) convinced Alfred it was a bad idea. Alfred, in lieu of risking capture and impressment (if that happened, Emily was unsure if she'd ever get him back), was going stir-crazy. She could tell he was tired, both of war and of waiting. All Alfred wanted was to go split War-England's (this was not Father-England's doing) schemes and give bruises out like gifts.

To be true, Emily felt the urge for blood. She felt like she was constantly wearing a necklace. Her necklace was a rope and she couldn't untie it. The twins were never done with killing time.

"Can I kill it with you?" Alfred would sometimes ask as Emily sewed yet another garment or solved yet another equation.

Alfred looked sixteen and Emily looked seventeen and they were fine with it. They picked their battles and, frankly, age wasn't worth picking. They made the most of freedom and of pleasure.

Sometimes, battles chose them. Nothing ever lasted forever. Afterwards, Emily liked to call that Election Day the start of how it all ended. The South and North were connected by a thin rope of common traits you kept on pulling, the rope would break. Lincoln's election was less a pull and more a yank.

The war split them apart, geographically and mentally. Cooped up in another safe house (the one next to the White House this time), they'd devolved to nine and mentally fragmented. On Sundays, Lincoln tended to visit, feeling guilty for what he'd done. He left shortly afterwards, wondering just how he managed to screw up his countries so badly and why they'd lost their minds for their nation. He didn't know that they'd been beginning to deage and descend into madness a long time before he was sworn in and states seceded. Even in Pierce's time, they had spent days dropping glasses just to hear them break. Just as he was about to leave one day, the shrieking girl that could barely be considered Emily grabbed his hand.

"Don't leave!" Alfred cried. "It's easier when you're around. Calmer."

"We'd like it if you stayed," Emily agreed. Lincoln nodded. From then on, he spent far too much time in the little safe house. Alfred and Emily were never alone in anything. They wouldn't have been unique in dying.

Slowly, Alfred and Emily grew up until they were eight and nine, respectively. They were the only friends they'd need. They still shared beds like the little kids they looked like but decidedly weren't. They grew old waiting for the war to end and their sanity to resettle. When it did, Lincoln was dead. Soon after, the twins celebrated their birthday. They were one hundred years old.

It was scary getting old.

That war ended and the two became themselves again: Emily,delicate in every way but one, a princess cut from marble; Alfred, smoother than a storm, the class clown to her beauty queen, and happy even when he smiled out of fear. They weren't alone in anything. They weren't unique in dying not physically, but mentally. A century of wars and fights and betrayal had made them hollow like the bottles they drainedon the worst nights. They stopped kissing the tar on the highway, stopped going places. It was a time of peace and calm before a storm.

"I want them back," Emily would remark some days. "The lives we had." They had laughed until their ribs got tough and cried until they could barely see.

"We let our battles choose us, and this is what happened," Alfred would reply. "We were idiots then."

"They were nice. No lies, no betrayal, no New York or Fort Misery." Alfred would nod slowly, as if in a dream. "I miss them."

World War One came and not even Wilson could stop Alfred from going. Alfred didn't seem to care that he could be captured, again, and they'd have no way of getting him back. When a mysterious flu swept the world, Emily donned her old nurse's cap.

The Arthur of World War One was Father-Arthur, not War-Arthur. The Spanish Flu, while deadly, could never take down a nation. Not permanently, at least. Alfred was shot. Emily fell ill. Neither cared. Secretly they loved it. They didn't want to go free.

Alfred looked seventeen, Emily sixteen. They might have been hollow, but they were brave.

The Roaring Twenties passed like a sweet dream. In 1929, the dream stopped feeling Depression was hard, but easier than some decades. People were starving, but there was no war. Emily and Alfred were thankful for that small mercy that didn't last nearly as long as they had hoped.

World War Two more or less started two years before the US entered. As the talks started, Emily bit her nails as Alfred bit his lip. They didn't enter and Emily and Arthur sighed, feeling that they had dodged a bullet. Of course, standing still as a promise breaks ensures you'd be there when the next one was made. That idealism lasted until exactly December 7, 1940.

Emily and Alfred had felt it before hearing about it, a classically bad sign. Alfred had been the first to fall, toppling down a flight of stairs in their eleventh home and nearly cracking his skull open. Emily followed slightly later, curled up next to her brother. A few hours later, the news broadcasts started declaring that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. that night, war was declared. They were in the ring and coming for blood.

As soon as he could walk, Alfred ran to the nearest recruiting center and joined. He was referred to a new division, the SSR. When she discovered the SSR recruited women, too, Emily soon followed. They weren't alone in anything. They wouldn't have been unique in dying. Glory and gore went hand in hand.

The Forties began a new age, and Emily and Alfred welcomed it covered in war paint.

"People are talking," Emily muttered to Alfred as they danced around the lies they told the others. "They're figuring it out."

"Let them talk," Alfred whispered back. "They won't guess."

Actually, several guessed, including fourteen HYDRA agents, Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers, and Bucky Barnes. However, even most of the Commandos were clueless. HYDRA could try to take them but they were the gladiators. Every one of them, down to the last woman and child, was a rager. As the war raged on, they secretly became saviors. Glory and gore went hand in hand; that's why they made headlines.

It took six long years for the war to end. By the time it was over, two had died. (Well, not really, but that realization came far later.) When the treaties were signed and the task ended, they welcomed another new age covered in war paint.

The latter half of the twentieth century passed in a blur of color and music and war. Emily and Alfred grew to both look 18. Both had a million bad habits to kick, starting with smoking. Not sleeping was one. Anxiety was another. Restlessness was especially bad.

Emily became a nurse on and off, but research, not practicing in a hospital. She had seen enough of hospitals one beautiful and death-struck year half a century before. Emily loved the science behind medicine, though, and she was good at it. For one long stretch, she became entrenched in mathematics, taking up the name Margaret Hamilton and hiding behind dyed hair and glasses.

Alfred sometimes taught high school and college, with occasional stints in the military and even one at NASA. Alfred, unlike his sister, never really settled down in one type of work for very long, unable to maintain the patience covers demanded for more than five years.

People talked to the twins but nothing seemed to hit. A Red Scare blacklisted hundreds. McCarthy was impeached. The US fought in Korea. Kennedy was shot. Polio vaccines were developed. The first manned mission to the moon launched. The US fought in Vietnam. Smallpox was eradicated. The Beatles arrived. The Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union collapsed.

All that and more happened under the threat of total destruction. Really, it was a miracle they survived at all. At the end of the nuclear haze, the twins were kind of over getting told to put their hands up in the air and kind of older than they were when they rebelled without a care.

They weren't alone in anything. They weren't unique in nearly dying dozens of times. Sometimes, the twins (just barely legal to everyone else, hundreds in actual years) drank like the world was going to end because it nearly did.

The worst day, if Emily had to pick one, was September 11, 2001. Not only had both Alfred and her collapsed, they had done it in front of England. Despite the century of reconciliation, Emily still didn't trust him. War-England was the one that haunted her dreams, one that scared everyone up to and including Father-England.

Father England, who hasn't seen this happen to them before but has to know that this is what happens when you're attacked, panicked. Emily could see him lunging for a phone, for a kitchen knife, for anything that would make his children (even if they had vehemently denied him being their father from the end of the revolution onwards) stop seizing. Soon afterwards, she followed Alfred into the hazy dominion of injury-induced sleep.

Alfred woke up first. He and Emily had been dumped onto the massive bed in a ground floor bedroom, the one they still shared like little kids on the bad nights. Arthur was sitting in a chair at the end of the bed and desperately trying to stay together. He was obviously failing. As soon as Arthur saw a flash of Alfred's blue eyes, he jumped to his feet and rushed up to Alfred. Alfred was distinctly reminded of a mother hen.

"Alfred! Are you alright? Is Emily alright? You collapsed and I was so worried, and when I turned on the news the twin towers had fallen and I-"

"We're fine, Arthur," Emily muttered, leveraging herself to a sitting position. "New York's just a very important place. Besides, you were worse during the Blitz."

"Was I?"

"You were." Emily and Alfred slowly got out of the bed and stood up. "Besides, we have work tomorrow."

"No. You're ill. Don't keep pushing yourself. You're still too young."

"We're kind of over listening to orders," Alfred snapped back.

Alfred looked nineteen, Emily looked eighteen. The personifications of the US were not alone in anything and not unique in nearly dying. They might be hollow (hollower than the bottles they and Arthur drained that night) but they are brave.

This... lengthy oneshot is to celebrate both the beginning of finals week (therefore, the fifth-to-last day of finals week) and the birthday of someone special who may or may not have escaped this insanity... fandom, I mean fandom. Happy B-day!

If you can name each Lorde Song referenced in this, I will write you a 1,000-ish word ficlet (possibly more) to a prompt of your choosing, provided no sex.