Originally written for the Hetalia kink meme prompt "Any - involving nations' flags". It's a pretty short fic, but I'm quite fond of it.
When Japan first saw his flag's design, he thought it had a beautiful simplicity to it. A red circle on a white background, symbolizing the sun that emerged in a brilliance of red and golden light every day without fail. It needed no further colors or symbols to state that his land and people would rise to brilliance as inevitably as the sun rose in the morning.
Nowadays, Japan doesn't see his flag as often as he used to. He understands why, remembering how he had promoted its rising sun as a symbol of how he was destined to conquer the land of the setting sun, but at the same time he wishes that his prideful actions hadn't left the sun painted on his flag with this stigma. He may have indulged in the fantasy of an eternally rising sun during the war, but everyone knows that the sun always sets after rising, just as empires always eventually decline and fall.
He looks down at the rectangle and circle sketched in his notebook and begins drawing another rectangle next to it with stripes and a small cross inside it. It's a flag that he's seen just as often as his own flag, if not more. Its nine stripes stand for the letters in the Greek word for freedom, although Greece has told him that he likes to think they represent the nine Muses of art and literature too. Their calm blue and white colors, taken from the clouds and the sky, would also clash with his red sun if they ever appeared in the sky together.
Then again… Japan's fingers ghost over his red coloring pencil for a moment before picking up a different coloring pencil and beginning to shade in the circle within the left rectangle. The rising sun is not always bright red; it usually appears as amber or burnished gold on the mornings he's able to wake up Greece in time for them to watch the sunrise together. Greece is usually still half-asleep when Japan leads him outside, but he always becomes fully alert when the sun comes into view and occasionally brings up his hand to sweep it back and forth in an imitation of the dawn goddess Eos painting the sky pink, yellow, and orange with her fingers.
Japan runs his fingertips over the orange color he's just filled his sun with. Orange may lack red's associations with courage and passion, but it also lacks the associations with blood and anger and it complements the blue he begins coloring the stripes of the right rectangle with. It reminds him of the warmth of fireplaces' carefully controlled flames and the light of sunsets signaling the start of nights that are not as dark, frightening, or lonely as they were for him when his days were full of red trickling down white uniforms and the noon sun making him sweat as he was worn down a little bit more every day. He used to ignore sunsets until he learned that Greece enjoyed them because they were the ones that made sunrises possible and proved that even if the sun couldn't stay up high in the sky forever, it wouldn't stay low in the sky forever either.
There's still a reddishness in the sun, of course, and he can easily draw his red coloring pencil over it again and again until the orange is lost completely in it, but the blue and white flag juxtaposed with it reminds him that there's something about the nation this flag belongs to that makes him want to blend the serenity of its blue with the red of his own flag. It may not be the same for his official flag which continues to fly alone, but there's no law that forbids him from taking a different route in his personal life.
Reviews and constructive criticism will be welcomed, as always.