Disclaimer: Axis Powers Hetalia belongs to Himaruya Hidekaz
Author's Note: It's not something intended to be strictly literal, but I wanted to play with something atmospheric and fairytale. So once again I'm toying with the vagueness left by the idea that the Holy Roman Empire basically ceased to function in anything other than name after the Thirty Years' War in 1648, although it wasn't officially dissolved until 1806, which leaves a gap of unaccounted-for time where Holy Roman Empire seems to simply disappear. It also leaves aggravating questions like: Where? Why? How does Prussia apparently end up raising a Germany who has no childhood? And then when I stumbled upon the "king in the mountain" legend associated with Frederick Barbarossa, I could not resist playing with the theme and reinterpreting it for my ends. If it's good enough for Holy Roman Empire's boss, it's good enough to be used for him.
Under the Mountain
Deep in the heart of the Kyffhäuser hills, Red-beard calls for the boy and asks him, do the ravens continue flying yet? And the boy climbs from the chamber and peeks at the glimpse of the sky of the world above. But the black wings wheel across the backdrop and the harsh cries fall against his ears, so he calls back to the emperor, the ravens circle the mountain still.
And so they do not climb up from the darkness, and there they wait still.
–
Where he is, it is dark, and this is the only thing he knows with certainty.
It is dark, because there is no light. Maybe just a single pinprick that worms its way down through the tunnels and passages and cracks that drop between the open air and the chamber below. But it doesn't shine to illuminate the space around him, and perhaps he half imagines it, this glimpse of sun that can find him still.
It is a darkness as psychological as it is physical. The air is cloying and warm, insulated within the earth and stale, for the oxygen diffuses slowly between the outside and the in. It presses close and dense with the weight of the entire mountain above, the sides of the hills all around. It wraps around him like a heavy blanket, snug around his feet and his arms and his chest and his face; it doesn't suffocate him, so long as he refrains from breathing too deeply; it doesn't smother him in an opaque cocoon.
He needs no light.
There is no need to see here. His mind is already too filled with pictures, images that he wishes were as blind as his eyes. There is no need to look for more in the world below. His seeking fingers paint maps enough on his own body; they've no need to explore the chamber for more. In the darkness he can trace the scars that vanish into invisibility here under the mountain, that his clothes hid from the open air in the world above. The name of each division trembles on his tongue, but the summons is no stronger than a cobweb that drifts apart at the touch, and at each touch he disintegrates with it.
On his skin he can count three hundred or more trails of fire that have dulled to embers, and he is the ashes. The pain does not throb as sharply as it once did. This is a blessing, but not a relief.
–
Sometimes, when the conditions are right, the atmosphere shifts. A cool draft mingles from the world above, a whisper of a breeze against his ear. If he holds his breath and strains to listen, he can hear the caws of the circling ravens flying above the hills.
He can see them in the black inside his mind. In the black inside his mind, unlike the darkness of the chamber, there is a sky. There are fields, there are flags, there is the flash of metal, there is blood, there are dead men, and there are the ever-circling ravens. There are many other scenes in the black as well—the farms, the towns, the laughing men—for it isn't as though it lasted for three decades straight with no respite. But where war settles in, ravens gather an unaccounted battalion.
He hears the ravens flying over the hills, and he does not know if the ravens follow war or if a war follows the ravens. But he has no more desire for war.
He desires sleep.
He may be sleeping already. He sits in the darkness and his feet do not move from the floor of stone below him; his hands rest across his stomach and do not stir. His body, perhaps, has become one with the rock that pillows it. His eyes rest heavy-lidded and half-open; but with the darkness pressed up against them like a second set of eyelids, need they be shut at all for sleep to steal his mind?
He dreams of the world above. Or the world above is the passing dream of this child sleeping timelessly beneath the hills.
Above there is a house, filled with light and air and voices and music and flowers. There is the man whose shoulders bear the weight of responsibility for the house, and the woman who has made her peace with peaceful days, and the girl who sweeps the floors. There is the boy who wears his first pair of breeches far too late. The house grows empty one by one.
–
The hills are strange places, in their hearts and in their bellies.
After so long unstirring in the darkness, he remembers the landscape like a tale told of someone else, one with no significance for him. The words that changed perceptions, that ripped him apart before the news arrived late behind. The ravens that circled overhead with harsh cries. The stinging weeds, the bushes that scratched exposed skin and caught to tear clothes. The break in the earth, like a warren, like a winter den; if one crawl-distance into safety was good, then two were better; and probing fingers always found a new passage that led deeper into the hills, into the darkness, away from the ravens, away from the war.
When he first tumbled into the chamber, a strange hollow wide enough for him to stand and walk, he thought only to press farther and force his questing hands into the next squeeze-space. But as his fingers prised every inch and crack of the walls without any purchase, they also remarked that the room seemed built for him. Here, they said to his darkened eyes, mysterious forces have worn the earth into the very shape of a child-sized throne. He placed himself there, to test the theory, and found that it fit him like the chairs he used to sit in, somewhere in the house above.
So he sat, for just a moment, since he was so tired of the war, so tired of the loss, until it would be time to return to triumph again.
He is sitting on his seat of stone still.
–
The cool air brushes against his ear, and in the darkness his neck and shoulders tense with the effort of straining to listen for the cawing of the ravens from the world above. But he cannot hear.
He cannot measure time in the darkness beneath the hills. But there has been, for a while now, a voice that whispers in his body. It resounds inside his bones, the way the blood pounds inside his ears, and he is drowning in it. The voice has no words, but like the music in the house above from days gone by, the images thrum in his chest all the same. The sound presses against his mind like a headache, like a buzzing in his ears, but while he knows the noise is there he cannot say what it sounds like.
It is a half-remembered call, a name he can't quite pin down to form between his teeth and tongue and lips. It is a rousing cry that stirs his legs, heavy as lead though they are, sure as he was that his boots had calcified and grown into the floor ages ago.
The draft has come and gone, come and gone, but all he can hear is the voice like singing. The ravens, he thinks, have they fled the mountain? Or is the voice merely louder than their unwelcome calls?
–
It is harder to crawl up again than it was to crawl down, like an animal going to earth.
Stuck in a tight bend, catching his ragged breath while the mountain holds him close, he stops his wriggling and listens for the ravens. Although he pulls himself closer and closer to the surface where they once flew, he has not heard a single caw since before he left the chamber.
Has the war gone into hibernation once more?
He lumbers like a bear in spring himself, pushing his nose back the way he came, turning his face to fresher air instead of letting his timid hands lead him into the heart of the hills. But unlike the bear he has not thinned throughout his winter, because he does not remember catching in the tunnels on his way down, unable to move forward. The stone embrace doesn't bother the back of his head, so used to resting against the back of his chair in the chamber, but the rough walls scrape his forehead and cheeks as he gathers his strength for the next effort.
Perhaps the difference is that fear and heartsickness drove him then. But the voice, and the absence of the ravens, draws him now.
He twists again, all undulating shoulders and booted feet that strain for purchase to shove himself just the merest breadth forward. Always, he keeps crawling in the heart of the hills until he is free.
–
His fingers scrabble against rock and lose their skin, their callouses, as he pulls himself hand over hand. His fingers scrabble among grass and tear loose weeds by the handful as he tries to drag himself blindly from the earth.
He is not human. No human could sleep so long beneath the hills and return barely grown.
But his eyes shy from the sun nonetheless, painfully narrowed and obscured with tears as he buries his face among the overgrowth. They burn until the gathering tears finally overflow and slide down his stinging cheeks one by one, and he stops trying to wipe them away in vain. The grasses dip and bob against him, and he can feel the cool air in the prickling of the damp streaks on his face.
He cannot look up to watch for the black wings of ravens against the sky above the hills, so instead he listens to the weak breeze.
The leaves of the grass rustle against each other. A flurry of fluttering wings darts up and draws near. Closer to his face than he expected, a clear peeping suddenly sounds. His shoulders jerk and his heart clenches in panicked spasms, even though he knows it not to be the cawing of the ravens. Then his blind fingers stretch out towards the source like snakes wriggling through the grass. He catches a glimpse of washed-out color among the welling tears. And then his hat falls forward over his eyes, and he is back in the darkness under the hills once more.
–
Grasses swish against tall boots making their way higher.
Prussia could catch the bird easily—nothing is a challenge for him, after all—if he didn't think it cute to watch the creature flutter ahead like a golden standard advancing in the distance. It chirrups twice, three times, as he mounts the swelling crest of the hillside, the bird waiting patiently perched among a particularly thick clump of growth.
He makes an easy stride seem quick with his long legs. "Hey, little guy," he calls. "What've you found?"
And he shivers a little, looking down on the form, even though nothing in this world intimidates or frightens him, because what have they stumbled upon indeed.
Prussia kneels to scoop the bird from its roost on the dark fabric of a hat. Then, with a grip as gentle as his fingers cradle the fledgling, he tilts the hat farther back to reveal a small head of golden hair and a face that thankfully—he sighs in relief that has nothing to do with the reassurance of fears—does not resemble an abandoned corpse. He raises the boy's chin to better see his features—his eyes screw tighter shut, for they cannot stand to be turned towards the sky where the sun rides—and Prussia thumbs the new rush of tears from the scratched and muddy cheeks.
The boy looks as though he's been lost among the hills for days. Though the truth is far longer.
His eyes are hopelessly clouded now, and he can't make out Prussia's pale face or his dark uniform. But his ears are clearing, for he can hear with great clarity the air stirring the grasses, the insects hiding from the songbirds that call to one another, and Prussia who says, "Well. Come on, then."
Prussia settles the bird atop his own hat, and then gathers the boy into his arms, holding him against his chest. He stands, bounces a little to shift the boy into a better position, and then thinks to turn the boy's head so that his eyes are sheltered from the sun, his face tucked against Prussia's neck.
"Who are you?" he asks as he turns to descend the slope the way he came. Although Prussia, being who he is, can guess. They are the whispered rumors that fly faster than the grain of truth. They are the walking oracles that herald the coming action. They are the faith that precedes the miracle.
The boy stirs, his face sticky with tears and gluing itself to Prussia's bare skin. His ears are clear now, but the voice is still humming in his chest. The call buzzes on his lips, vibrates in his tongue and teeth that feel somehow strange in his own mouth. It elicits a sound in him, like the plucking of a harp's strings, and that resonance finally leaves him now:
"Germany."
–
Windswift