Prussia begs him to hear, but the words aren't as sweet as the bruises (and the kisses aren't as kind as the coughing and the regalia doesn't rust quite like his throat).
Prussia shakes off the maudlin past, dispels the Weimar Republic, and curses the visceral spectacle of the Third Reich. If he thinks about words (words like Röhm and Riefenstahl and Kracauer), if his breath swells and hitches to make notches on the ribcage of those letters and sounds, they will be too true and too bright.
When Prussia starts talking, he shuts him up. Easily said and done because Prussia loves too fierce, loves enough for the both of them.
Language and rationalization cannot exist while his boys sell cocaine and his girls sell pleasure.
He does not care for Prussia as much as he does for his boys (they are his soldiers, from Bavaria and Konigsberg and Silesia and Dresden) and his girls (his mass ornament, his Tiller Girls). And Prussia does not care for them at all (only for him). What you live by is what you die by, and the need in Prussia is too much.
He is wax next to Prussia who burns bright and loves, loves, loves so much. He has the thing Prussia loves. He will torch Prussia and scatter his ashes in a bonfire. And Prussia will bring the firewood, all the while cooing, 'Where did you learn that, all that wreckage? Who taught you how to destroy me?'
Prussia bucks tyranny and oozes freedom, is arsenic laced with honey. But he is not his brother's son; he does not like fascism, but he likes chaos less, Prussia's words even less (and at times, something iron in him tells him he likes Prussia least).
He lies next to Prussia in bed, mind dinted by mechanical ease. He is a piston, limbs and hips. Prussia is steel but he is wood, creaking and rotten underneath. He lies, 'You have the thing I love.'
He wears his crown of thorns around his neck, bruises like jewels, burning bright like jade and amber through the night. His pretty dove hands and their ivory cuticles run dry, carving into Prussia like rivets.
And past the fringes of his clouted vision, past the undignified moans (who is making those sounds?), past the semen braided to gold and buried in his scalp, words are hushed into his collar bone, "What we love will ruin us."
The words drip into his pores, settle, and camp inside his bones. He doesn't shake them off, instead, lets them pool in his nooks and crannies. 'No,' he thinks. 'What we hate will ruin us.'
When Prussia kisses him, he knows he tastes his own tomb. There's not much there underneath those delicate fingernails and chapped lips: just bones, dust, and dirt.
In 1934, he is not the country that destroys the world. He does not hate enough.
It takes him five years. By then, he is damn positive he hates enough.