If Love is a Key
Author's Note:
For Senta Viveca's birthday. Happy birthday! Here goes a simple wish for you: may you always find hope in the darkest places, where all men are blind men and hope is an unlit lantern.
Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia.
Soundtrack: 'Vanilla Twilight' by Owl City.
On a rainy winter's night, Alfred Jones woke up from his nap and discovered a radio under the bed, hiding in the dark and dust, safely tucked away behind a wooden leg.
He contemplated it. Dinner was not until half an hour, and the old thing was a comforting weight in his palm, its grime already inking tracks on his skin. It stared at him forlornly. He stared back equally.
Light on the wings of sleep, he unearthed his set of tools from the duffel bag. There were works in progress cluttering the scuffed desk at the far corner of the room: wires and circuits and metal parts like scattered thoughts among broken spines of Shakespeare and Rushdie. Several fragments he took; the rest he regarded with a cursory sweep and abandoned.
Half an hour later, the eldest of the Kirkland brothers poked his head into the room, Benson & Hedges trailing from the corner of his mouth. "Dinner's ready," he grunted. Alfred waved him away and continued to chew on his unlit Pall Mall.
It took him another half an hour before he finally screwed the lid back onto the radio. Ian was in the middle of lighting another Benson. He nodded when he saw Alfred at the bottom of the stairs, hands dirty and fingers wire-dented, but not a single man spoke.
Dinner was cold.
A raid through Arthur's drawers yielded a particularly weather-worn mp3 player. Alfred plugged in his earphones and was not prepared to face the blast of the Sex Pistols.
He hooked an earphone on his collar, stretched across the bed, and switched on the radio.
The storm clouds howled. A lightning sizzled through the atmosphere in an explosion of bluish white, as if someone had shaken up the lighting fixture of the Earth. The auburn rust on the radio's antenna gleamed red gold.
The radio's first crackles of life were drowned by the rolls of thunder. Then, when the bone-deep rumbles gave way to heartbeat pulsations, the words came to him, bright yet raspy, as if they had to travel through time to touch him.
"…working on something. He is always working on something. Wonder if that's how he's coping. Hasn't seen him shed a single tear. Instead, he vomited circuit boards and copper wires…"
Ripping the bud off his ear, he slapped the radio off and clambered out of the room. The bedroom door creaked horribly. He left it open and leaned against the railing, peering at the living room downstairs.
Curled on the sofa and gazing at the muted telly was Ian. An ashtray lay smoking on the coffee table. He turned and looked up, straight into Alfred's eyes.
"Say, Ian," Alfred said, hesitating, "did you say anything just now?"
Ian gestured at the telly. "All silent here, lad." He kept his gaze on Alfred. "The thunder, prolly?"
"Yeah," Alfred stuttered a chuckle, "the thunder, perhaps."
He closed and locked the door behind him.
He retrieved the radio and sat down on Arthur's old bed with Arthur's old radio in his lap.
Through the static, Ian's voice continued in its quiet, sombre monologue, "…lover boy's losing his marbles. I wonder how long it will take for me to lose mine. Art, you little piece of shit. Why do I have to mop up your mess for you…"
He changed the station.
"What should I do with the leftovers?" fretted Mrs Hudson, the landlady in the flat below. "Boys upstairs don't want 'em. Suppose I can take them…, but it's not my baby brother's funeral. Suppose it isn't right?"
He changed the station, tracing the antenna's rust.
A young girl cried out; she could not have been more than ten. "Stop this, stop this, stop this, Daddy, stoooooo…"
He changed the station.
A young man, perhaps in his late teens: "…hate this. Fucking hate this. Why do I have to learn about toluene in the first place? Stupid school with stupid teachers with stupid expect…"
"I miss him," a woman's plaintive voice claimed, "so badly that I think I'm beginning to hate him."
"Milk, eggs, Pinn's, digestives — what is it that I'm forgetting? Can't be the cafergot. Bleach? Carrots?"
"Mirrors on the ceiling/pink champagne on ice/we are all just prisoners here/of our own device."
"…"
"Really — he will die if I'm not by his side. He'll — rot away, save for his brain. Anything for his brain. Body's just transport. He said breathing's boring, Jesus…"
He had to have returned to the original wavelength, because Ian's thoughts cleaved through the silence like barely concealed pain. "Arthur Kirkland," his brain murmured, quiet and reflective. "I wonder if you are out there."
"That's what I'm trying to find out," Alfred replied, turning the radio off.
Alfred did not believe in the afterlife.
(This was despite his stint with Buddhism during his teens. Arthur had punk and hair dye; Alfred had Zen and haiku.)
He turned the antenna of the radio to the past, looping it through the fabric of space and time. Instead, the radio kept picking up his present thoughts: "Residual thoughts. If thoughts are energy, then Arthur's bedroom should be saturated. Am I a contamination? Arthur? Arthur. Arthur. Arthur. ArthurArthurArthurArthur…."
"What the hell are you doing?" Ian asked, having slipped into the room unnoticed. Alfred dropped the radio when he realised that it was not Ian's thought he was hearing.
"Nothing," he said, eyes glazed and mouth a thin, bloodless line.
One morning, he woke up to a purpling horizon, at the edge of the drawing curtain of the night. He took out his voice recorder and began to talk to it, as he used to talk to Arthur.
"Suppose I turn towards other dimensions," he suggested. No reply was offered. He saw, behind his eyelids, Arthur straddling the chair before him, brow creased in concentration and eyes quietly encouraging. "Perhaps afterlife does exist. In another dimension altogether."
Arthur pursed his lips. Alfred's own mind supplied the argument: "Religion is not your expertise."
He fingered the pause button of the recorder. "You're right," he chuckled, and switched it off.
He pushed the window wide open and climbed onto the ledge. There he sat, folded in a rectangle, and watched as the colours of morning rose across the sky, the pinks and yellows and blues of the caressing breeze.
Sometime approaching midday, he turned the radio to a random channel and let an A Level student's thoughts wash over him.
"Physics," he breathed, watching as the terminologies reawaken on his mind's screen, words of Pall Mall smoke written on a cool blue sky. "Schrödinger's cat — of course."
He was halfway across the floor when the photograph caught his eye, glossy under the morning sky. The immortalised Afghan sunrise was gold in Arthur and Alfred's eyes. Their dog tags might have been silver mirrors.
Tracing the outline of Arthur's helmet, his mind raced ahead of his heart: other dimensions, other possibilities, existences that had not been extinguished, existences that might have been. He was hungry for all of them, as long as they contained Arthur.
He unrolled his pouch of tools on Arthur's desk, pushing Capote and Goethe out of the way.
Arthur had a telly for days when he and Ian did not get along. It was a tiny box of a telly, but it would do.
Alfred got to work.
Rhys and Colm dropped by not three days later. Alfred looked up from his hands of grease and wires and smiled at the brothers.
They stopped short of hello and disappeared without goodbye.
He asked Ian to join him in one particularly bright afternoon. They had beer and Alfred sorted out several kinks in the wiring. Then they settled down on the floor beneath the window, the remote between them.
"By George, lover boy," Ian whistled, "you're one mad genius."
Alfred's smile was crooked. "I used to be a genius," he said, almost nonchalantly. "Then I lost him."
"You're not the only one who went bonkers with the loss." The screen flickered to life, and hot orange dunes surfaced. They could almost hear the sound of baking sand. "You know this won't bring him back to life, right?"
Arthur appeared as a dot in the distance.
"I've tried plenty of permutations," Alfred said, squinting at the speck of shadow. "Finally settled on isolating his wave-function."
Ian snuffed his Benson on the linoleum. "Golly," he rasped, eyes wide. "What is that?"
It was a fish, as far removed as a fish might be: a fat ugly fish with fishbowl lenses for eyes and sandblasted scales the size of dinner plates. Its gills were void slits on its sides. It swam through the air, a foot or so above the ground. It had spikes instead of fins.
Riding a ridge between two upper ridges was the nut-brown figure of Arthur Kirkland. He was as thin as the naked sword strapped to his side. His eyes were too painfully green between his turban and lower mask. He was a desiccated hunter of the desert, suspicious of any vital signs besides his and his ride.
"Golly," Ian repeated, and promptly broke into tears.
Fish-riding Arthur did not last long. There was a skirmish with a four-headed lizard that could coil around a single block of real estate, and Alfred turned on the telly in time to see the second head ripping through the scales of Arthur's fish, before the last head fixed a yellow eye on Arthur and devoured him whole.
Ian was entering the radius of the mindreading radio's coverage. "…hope Alfred likes Chinese. Wonder what he's doing now. Arthur? Arthur, most probably…" The front door creaked open.
Quietly, Alfred changed the channel —
— to a mermaid with a turquoise tail and clumpy blond hair in the deep blue sea…
They had grown up together in the rough shrubbery of the hillside. Alfred was the chief's son; Arthur was the runt of a hunter's litter. Then Alfred turned twelve and Arthur was chosen as the blood sacrifice. Alfred cut off his neck with an ivory blade and drank from the fountain of his arteries, the sprays and bubbles of his life.
(Pacing around the room, Alfred murmured to the voice recorder: "To transcend the barriers of the reality in which one exists is not an entire impossibility. There are, of course, certain measures….")
There was a channel very much like what Alfred remembered. They met in the army, under the drumbeat of Afghan heat. In that Afghanistan, however, someone rigged their Humvee and they crumpled into liquid flesh and a fog of bones before they could say as much as, "Hiya, Arthur! I'm Alfred Jones."
(His reflection — naked and glistening wet from the hot shower — was cool to the touch. "It's all just transport," he said out loud, borrowing the phrase from the mindreading radio. The mirror fogged up with the vapours of his exhalation.)
Once he saw a child who could have been himself, two decades ago, limp and broken and mangled in the jaws of a dragon. The dragon's eyes were emerald, its wings buttery gold.
("I need to shave my hair," he told the recorder, and promptly did so.)
And then there were worlds where they never met, where they had bypassed one another without touching. He smoked Pall Mall and watched Arthur live and die: in lonesome, in love, in a broken heart, in the company of his family, in the company of strangers, and in the company of a Colt revolver, the Russian wheels of Fate turning and clamping on his temples.
(His golden tresses fell like the winter rain: smooth and wet, like sheets of silk. Lying next to the sink was an electrode cap. A cable snaked its way down from the apex of the cap to the radio, and from the radio it continued into the workings of the telly. His new umbilical cord would not beat with blood, but with memories and possibilities.)
And then, and then — there were channels where they were happy and laughing and in love and together, forever.
Four months and seven days after the funeral of Arthur Kirkland, four months and seven days of housing Alfred Jones in Arthur's room, Ian Kirkland entered the room with beer and cigarettes in hand.
On the floor, beneath the open window, was Alfred's sleeping figure, curled in the unspooling hues of sunset, a pool of light that might have recalled blood.
There was hair on the cold tiles of the bathroom, and an electrode cap on Alfred's smooth head. The telly was on. So was the radio.
The radio —
— the radio spoke in Alfred's voice.
"—it fuckin' succeeded," the radio breathed out in exhilaration. "It fucking worked. ArthurArthurArthurArthur."
On the telly, Arthur swung his rifle across his shoulders, laughing and squinting under the brightness of the sky. Alfred grinned at the camera, wherever or whatever the camera actually was, the puncture wound in the cosmic fabric, and gripped Arthur close.
Because otherwise he might have fainted where he was standing, Ian let his legs buckle beneath him and sat down to watch, beer and cigarettes in hand.
— it fucking succeeded. Can't believe it fucking worked. Arthur. Arthur. Arthur.
He smells like sand and sun, like gunmetal. He quotes Shakespeare to raise the morale of the troops. No variation there. Arthur is Arthur.
We are like two conflicting variables. We are not supposed to meet. When we do, we destroy each other. Electron and positron.
Telly's on. Radio's tethered. Ian, are you watching this?
Perhaps he is watching this. I don't intend to bring Arthur back, no, but God, this is good.
Perhaps this time Arthur won't die.
Perhaps —
They were under fire. Bullets flew across the dunes.
Ian burnt his finger on his cigarette.
A ball of lead went through the shoulder of a stocky captain. "John!" Arthur screamed, and he was about to dash into open fire when Alfred caught him by the straps and collar and gun and whatever he could get his hands on, hanging for dear life.
The radio quietly said, "John will live."
On the telly, Alfred kept his hands securely around Arthur's neck, pulling him down under the shadow of a sand dune. His eyes were luminous and a shade of manic blue. "Listen!" He shook Arthur's collar. "I calculated the trajectory of the bullet. John's hurt, badly, but he'll live. We have to get to him."
Through the volley of gunfire, Arthur shouted, "And how."
"I have always been a smart-ass," the radio muttered, as if under its breath. "Considering the angle of the shots and the available line of fire…"
"…you should be find as long as you don't get up from all fours," Alfred finished, discarding his guns at Arthur's feet.
Arthur looked dubious. "I should go," he declared. "I'm shorter than you."
"This was where I told him yes," the radio informed.
"This is where I tell you, fuck hell no," grunted Alfred, already dropping to his hands and knees.
A stray bullet bored through his neck not half a minute later.
It hurt like hell; it hurt like fuck. He stretched an arm towards the wide-eyed Arthur, safely under cover. "Be brave, soldier," he grinned through a mouthful of blood. The sun was in his eyes. He wondered what would come after death. There were other bodies to occupy, other possibilities to visit, other Arthur's hearts to win. He was selfish, he was greedy, and he wanted them all, all in his arms. At Arthur's tears, his gaze softened, and he whispered, "It's only death."
Four months and seven days after Alfred Jones' funeral, Arthur lay beneath the window in his old room in his brother's apartment, curled in a pool of darkening sky.
Four months and seven days after Arthur Kirkland's funeral, Alfred lay beneath the window in Arthur's room, curled in a pool of star-studded night sky. An electrode cap hummed gently against his scalp. The telly was on; the radio was on. Ian Kirkland wept so bitterly that he had to retch into the toilet bowl, with gold tresses scattered beneath his knees.
Alfred dreamt of traversing the universe.
Incoherent story is incoherent. Random Sherlock BBC references are random. Ian is Scotland, Rhys is Wales, and Colm is Northern Ireland. Senta, I hope it entertained you, at the very least. Have a happy birthday, my dear fellow, and believe me to be,
Very sincerely yours,
Ilsa Heine.