Hey there! So this is a brief one shot crossing the universes of Hetalia and the wonderful and absolutely immaculate film Taxi Driver, directed by none other than the one-and-only Martin Scorsese in 1976. The film itself stars Robert De Niro as the eponymous taxi driver, who is a bit mentally unstable since his return from the war in Vietnam; if you haven't seen this film, go watch it now. This story will actually make a lot more sense and I wouldn't have spoiled so much of it for you, although you can read it without knowing what's going on. Plus, it's a classic. You know the lines, "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?" Yeah, they come from this movie.
I've been kinda itching to write this now since I re-watched Taxi Driver this past weekend and reaffirmed my love for it; the outcome of the story was supposed to be a little different then what it actually ended up becoming, but I'm still happy with it.
The title comes from a line directly quoted by the main character in the movie, which has a lot of vulgar language, just for quick warning:
"Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up."
Bless you, Paul Schrader, you absolute genius.
Disclaimer: None of this belongs to me at all. The material, characters, and universe in Taxi Driver belong to their creators, as do the material, characters, and universe in Hetalia. I own nothing, nor do I try to take any credit for it. Also, I'm evidently not getting paid to write this, so there's that.
Thanks, and enjoy the ride.
-M. Rykov
New York City, 1976
The streets reek of depression; the very air is stale with the vulgarity of the dark world, of the rats and the poison that spill into the streets from strip clubs and sports bars like sewage into the empty ocean.
The man, the man driving the taxi cab, had been sitting by the decrepit corner store for the past half hour, his cab surprisingly empty despite the bright light that indicated he was for hire. Alfred had seen him a few times before, cruising around the streets, picking up all sorts of characters that happened to stumble into the back of his cab.
He didn't know his name, but he knew something was wrong about him. Alfred had seen this with many of the people on the blackened boulevards of New York City—there were those outward folks that yelled to themselves, those that wore their grotesquely dismembered psyche like a proud badge—then there were those like the taxi driver. The special ones.
There was a sick glimmer to their movements, a flash of something monstrous lurking beneath the swagger of a man driving a taxi, a woman smoking her cigarette, a cashier on his break for too long. It was something Alfred had never gotten used to, a phenomenon that showed itself only in the murky smoke-riddled nights, taking full flight when the blinding lights of New York turned the night into a cherry burlesque day.
The man in the taxi leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He was a dark-haired man, thick and shocking against a weary face. Alfred decided he needed to get home, and he would not be walking.
"Excuse me, sir…?"
The taxi driver blinked tiredly up at him, already nodding for Alfred to get into the back seat. Alfred told him the address and the man nodded, pulling down the lever as the numbers began to record the fare. The streets dipped and swayed beneath them, the bright flashes of yellow and neon blue gliding across the watered down windows.
"Is it hard doing this?" Alfred said, watching the man through the review mirror as his large dark eyes glanced to the back seat.
"Hm?"
"Is it hard? Being a driver?"
The taxi driver shrugged. "Never really thought about it." That strange shadow suddenly dawned across his worn features, the one Alfred had seen drive men to kill. "The hard part is seeing all this."
Alfred furrowed his brow. "Seeing what?"
"Everything." The man gestured around the street as he stopped at a red light. "Look at that." He was pointing off to two young girls—probably about fifteen or fourteen, neither one of them above eighteen. They were dressed in that horrible faux-classic elegance, a sick imitation of the women of uptown New York, their shirts sheer and revealing, their shorts hugging to their hips in the most provocative manner.
Alfred knew who they were, what they did. "What about them?"
The taxi driver shook his head disdainfully. "They need to be washed off this street. They don't belong here." He blinked hard, his eyes widening with exhaustion. "They should be at home; going out with boys and listening to trashy pop songs. Not here, crawling around in the middle of the night like little insects trying to sell themselves for their next paycheck. It's sick. Fucking sick."
Alfred could only agree. It hurt him to see the roughened designs of life, how it seemed to press young girls into the street to act as dolls for men who wouldn't think twice about them ever again.
"I know, sir." Alfred sighed and adjusted his glasses. "I know what you mean."
The man looked back to him as the light turned green. He had large, intense eyes under a dark, settled brow. "You going to school, kid?"
Alfred didn't have it in him to explain that he wasn't human, that while this man would spend the rest of his withering days driving taxis Alfred would remain the same for centuries to come. The taxi driver wouldn't believe him anyway.
"Yes, sir," he decided. "I am."
"What're you studying?"
Alfred thought about it for a moment. "Politics and world affairs."
The driver nodded, an approving smile quirking against his lips. Alfred thought that the man had a rather gentle face when he smiled; he was much less menacing now, but something evilly mischievous still lingered.
"What made you want to do that?"
Alfred shrugged. "Not so sure." At least he wasn't technically lying. The man laughed.
"Not sure, huh? I guess I can get behind that." The laughter died, but the impish grin remained. "We do lots of things without knowing why, I guess."
Alfred nodded, adjusting his glasses again just to give him something to do. "Did you go to school?"
The driver squinted. "Uh, well… Sort of… Some stuff here and there."
So no.
"What did you do before driving taxis?"
The driver glanced out the window, resting his arm on the door and steering the car with a lax hand.
"I was in the war," the man answered gravelly. "A marine. Honorably discharged."
Alfred stirred curiously, impressed. "Wow. Well… Thank you… For, you know, for fighting."
The driver laughed inwardly. "I'm driving a taxi now. It can hardly count for change."
"Still," Alfred insisted. "What you did wasn't easy."
The man nodded, his eyes staring past the rain-washed windshield. "It wasn't." His face darkened again. "But this is what we all come back to in the end. We drudge through the shit and the mud only to come back and drudge through more shit and mud."
Another red light had the car halting to a stop. The man glanced behind his shoulder, facing Alfred with those large, dark eyes, his heavy brow drawn. "Don't stray away from school, kid. Don't. Make a difference in this world. Clean up these streets. Wipe the scum and fuck off these streets, polish them and make them new again. Teach girls to appreciate themselves and guys to stop being such fucking shitheads. Change this world while other fuckers like me are still alive. Because something needs to change." He settled back into his seat and pressed the gas when the light went green. "Someone needs to take fucking this city and flush it all down… These streets need to be washed… There's no God here."
Alfred saw the same driver in the later evening. The sun hadn't gone down yet, but the skies had begun to spin themselves into an amber gold, the deepening blue clashing with the rising reds to create the dusk of yellowing bullion.
The taxi he drove was parked in front of a campaign office of some senator running for president, a giant banner reading Charles Palantine spread out across the entrance, ribbons of red, white, and blue strung along the windows and doors. The driver himself came bursting out of the office in a subdued rage, his head down as he slid into his taxi and stormed off, nearly causing a collision. He made a sharp turn down 63rd and disappeared.
Something had rusted and unchained, and now the darkness that had been burrowing itself in the driver had ruptured. Alfred could feel this city's next headline already.
He saw him again, this time in the broadness of daylight. He was in the seediest part of the city, the dirtiest and most peculiar part.
He had taken in a young girl—really young, younger than the streetwalkers he had pointed out to him some nights ago. Alfred had seen her a couple of times, strutting with her large hats and pretty curled hair. Now, she was dressed like a girl her age, her hair straight and her face natural. She wore the most absurd green sunglasses Alfred had seen, and he could almost hear Arthur muttering "Ridiculous" in his head.
The driver took the girl to a diner. He ordered breakfast for them despite it being one in the afternoon. The driver was talking to her about leaving, about standing against the life she fell into and moving back to where she came from. The girl seemed willing enough, but there was always a catch to these lives. It wasn't easy to escape.
Alfred made sure he was out of sight before they finished.
The next time he saw the driver, he was covered in blood with an empty .44 Magnum in his possession and a shaved head. He had been shot in the arm, the neck, and the side.
Police surrounded the neighborhood, the same neighborhood he had picked the girl up from, and the young girl herself was being taken out of an oblong building with a shock blanket around her shoulders.
According to reports, the taxi driver had shot and killed the young girl's pimp, the bouncer that locked the doors to the brothel house, and a client that the girl had been seeing when the whole thing happened.
The location of the hospital the driver was staying in had been released, and while Alfred wanted to see him, he needed to get to a world meeting in England.
Before any sort of status update on the driver's health could be released, Alfred had caught a flight.
It had been months since the reports. Alfred had heard nothing about the driver. Nothing at all.
He had since relocated from his house in uptown New York back to D.C., but the driver had gnawed at him at random bouts of the day. His thin face, his neck doused with blood, his head messily shorn of that thick hair, had haunted him during the foggy days, during the dark nights when the street lights grew bright with the lithe air of a rising twilight. He thought about him every time he saw a taxi, every time he saw a man with a dark army jacket, every time he saw those troubled youths smoking their cigarettes and drinking their beers in the dustier corners of the voluptuous city.
He wondered where he was, how he was. He wondered if he was alive or dead. He had to be dead, there was absolutely no way someone could survive a shot to the neck and still live. The chances were nonexistent, the hope useless.
Alfred hadn't heard about him in the news in months, and since he had been incredibly swamped with work and appointments since the end of their hardships in Vietnam, keeping glued to the TV was something that was utterly impossible.
He couldn't understand why this taxi driver struck him, why it was this man, swimming in his own madness and drowning in his lunacy, stuck with him. Alfred had seen people like him before—he had seen serial killers with a brighter thirst for fury, sociopaths with a colder outlet in life, psychopaths with a grittier clench on the world's flaws. But it was a taxi driver, free and roaming, that had him on hold.
Apparently, the driver hadn't been old at all; according to the early police reports, when authorities still didn't know his name, he was reported to be twenty-six years old.
It saddened Alfred to hear that a person so young had been so cynical, so upset by the mere sight of the nightlife that he felt that there was no hope for any of them. How did this man get up every day to face a world he so clearly hated? How did he find it in him to breathe, to live and be happy, when every squared turn gave him a firing rage? His dissatisfaction was so infectious it made Alfred sick.
"Alfred, why do you always rifle through those newspapers? They're from months ago." Arthur had been to D.C. for a brief meeting, deciding to stop by Alfred's home to help himself to a few days rest before returning to London.
"I'm just trying to find something."
Arthur arched an eyebrow. "What are you looking for?"
Alfred rifled through the clippings like a blind man, reaching out for random pieces and only glancing at them for a moment before putting them down. "I'm trying to look for that man I told you about."
Arthur groaned. "Why are you so obsessed with that man? Bloody hell, Alfred, was a cab driver."
Alfred let out an inattentive noise. "Still, I want to know what happened to him."
"The poor man's probably dead," Arthur answered offhandedly. "Don't dwell on this so much."
The statement had made Alfred look up. "Arthur, how can you say it like that? Like he was nothing?"
Arthur glared icily at him. "Cab. Driver. Need I write an essay to communicate how unimportant your endeavors for this man are?"
Alfred felt his annoyance quickening. "You don't get it, Arthur. He may have been a cab driver, but he was still a person."
"You're joking," Arthur drawled. "The man barged into a brothel and saved one girl by shooting three men. It would've been more impressive if he saved the whole damn lot of those women."
Alfred threw down the newspaper he had been examining. "What is it with all you old world powers, huh? You act like the people in your country are just these worthless little ants that just happen to live in your cities by coincidence. You're all so heartless, it's depressing."
Arthur wasn't moved one bit. Instead, he offered Alfred a sad smile. "Alfred, you'll learn someday why we act the way we do."
Alfred pounded his fist on the table. "I don't want to understand why you act the way you do! I don't want to understand why you like to brush off these people like they're nothing to you! These people exist, Arthur. Whether you like it or not, they exist just like we do—they have stories, they have so much to say that lies beneath the surface and everyone just judges them right off the bat because it's the easiest fucking thing to do!"
Arthur frowned. "Alfred, don't shout—"
"I'll fucking shout if I want to! I have a right to care, Arthur! I have a right to wonder why some things happen to people! This guy, this cab driver that you think was worth nothing, he was a fucking U.S. Marine! He fought for my country in that worthless war in Vietnam, that stupid, stupid war; it may not have been his choice, but he did it. He could've died, but he came back alive, and then what? He hated life, and I felt sorry for him, and now I can't help but think what he was like before—what happens to people that makes them so cynical, Arthur? Why do some people grow out of it and why do some people shave their heads and get hit in the neck at a brothel shoot-out?" He had risen out of his chair and began walking to the door, grabbing his coat. "But I guess you don't care enough to find that out, right?"
Arthur had stood up after him. "Alfred, where—?"
"I'm going for a drive," Alfred snapped curtly. "I'll be back."
Alfred had parked near a vacant lot, cooling himself over by buying a hot coffee at a drive-through. It was bitter, unsweetened by the grounds, but he didn't care. He had some taste, at least.
He had spent months trying to find out what happened to the driver, but in it all, he couldn't see why he did it. Why did he waste his time trying to sort through all these newspapers, staining his fingers black with the ink, trying to find out what happened to this man? It was so evident he was dead, yet he still searched for him like a madman. There wasn't anything particularly special about him— Alfred never even knew his name. He was an unlikely hero that had saved a young prostitute from an empty life. There were many men like that in Alfred's lifetime, but none of them had quite stunned him like this.
He had been suspended in a strange limbo of sadness and wonder. A taxi driver is a faceless man; you don't bother talking to the hand that feeds you because there's no point. And sometimes Alfred wondered if he should've left well-enough alone and hailed another taxi, or just simply kept his mouth shut, but the damage was done. He had found the man in the seeping nights and in the blinding day, but never in a true light that made Alfred understand him any better. He was cloaked in sadness, absolutely filthy with despondency, anger, and disgust. It was so potent it made the nights darker, and now Alfred could never quite hail a taxi with the same sense of carelessness again.
He looked at his waiters, his bus drivers, his maids, his cashiers—the ones that are supposed to be faceless servers of their society—and could never help himself from thinking, 'What's your story? Why are you here? What happened to your dreams? Where was your life before this?'"
The gleam of the night lost its mystery, and the nocturnal humans that crawled away from their caves and their sleepless beds lost their allure. They were all sad creatures to him now, all lost without those blasting sounds of war, those flashes of grenades on the fields, and they trudged against the street mindlessly, searching for their sanity, searching for their hope.
It was the march of the last good generation, now tainted and rugged with their burdens. They were all missing children now.
"There's no God here."
And now Alfred couldn't help thinking that he might've been right.
Alfred had thrown the newspapers into the basement. Arthur observed him from afar.
"What happened to the driver?" he asked.
Alfred shrugged. "I don't really think it matters now, do you?"
Arthur sighed tiredly. "Alfred, you know I'm sorry."
"I know, I heard you. I forgave you already."
"Alfred—"
"I know." Alfred grinned at him. "Just drop it, okay?"
Arthur folded his arms and shut his eyes. "You can be such a nuisance sometimes, I hope you know."
Alfred laughed and gave Arthur a brief clap to the shoulder. "Yeah, but you can't resist me."
Arthur rolled his eyes irritably. "I resist the urge to hit you, certainly."
Alfred laughed again, but Arthur caught something melancholy in it. Something had changed within Alfred, and while the stressors of Vietnam had been put behind him, he could tell there was much more to come.
And while Alfred could be a nuisance, he was still a major player in the world's future. He was a new world super power, having taken the title from Arthur for some time now, but still unable to cope with the darkness that came with it. Arthur has had his share of compassion for his people, the psychopaths and the heroes alike, but he distanced himself from it all because if he hadn't, he would be too disturbed to leave his home. It was a lesson Alfred had to learn, and now, he had only grazed the surface.
Arthur couldn't protect Alfred from that darkness; this was much different than the imaginary monsters Alfred had been afraid of as a child. These monsters were living with him, and they were very real. There was no way Arthur could comfort him as an island of a man, no way he could reassure Alfred that people do get better, they do live and tell their tales, they do live on in a balance even if it is a strange one, and they do outgrow their cynicism. The American was a firm believer in happy endings, and while it seemed that the story of the taxi driver was not a happy ending, it wasn't a worthless one either.
Now, in this time of a new dawn and a new night, Arthur could only offer him a smile. May God have mercy on you, Alfred.
Alfred had been throwing away the newspapers when one sheet had managed to sleep free from the bundle. Alfred grumbled to himself and picked it up, taking a slight interest in the comic before beginning to read the rest.
His heart stopped.
There was the driver, a head full of hair and clean shaven. Taxi Driver Known to Recover, printed in small bold lettering. He must've missed it in his searching frenzy. Alfred read on, his chest loosening with every word. He was alive. He actually lived. He had been in a coma for quite a few weeks, but he had woken up and lived. Alfred searched the small article for his name, reading past the miracle of how the young prostitute had returned to school and was now living a healthy life with her parents in Pittsburgh, and finally—finally—found the man's name. The man who had meant to be faceless, the man who had taken away Alfred's hope only to give it back to him.
His name was Travis.