Genre: Angst, drama
Rating: K+
Warnings: Borderline/mild cursing; slight suicidal themes
Characters: Northern Ireland/Jamie; England/Arthur makes a tiny cameo appearance, if you could even call it that.
Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia—simple as that. I do, however, own this particular version of Northern Ireland, as well as the story itself.
Lame title is lame. I should probably be working on some of the thousands of nagging ideas in my head instead of reviving old unpublished one-shots. Oh, well.
Synopsis: …drowning: v; being caught in senseless suspension and lack of sanity… Northern Ireland contemplates a few of life's mysteries while he drowns.
—Theories of a Drowning Madman—
Too often, he's seen people taking for granted the breaths they have. To them, the intake of oxygen is just a happening. They can't control their need for it, but they can control—to an extent—the ways in which they acquire it.
So he decides to cut his supply off completely. Just for a little while, to…you know…see what it's like…
Drowning hurts, as he expected. Lots of people had him believing that the primary hurt is emotional, that the primary thought is for the loved ones you're leaving behind, or some other equally fake bull.
That's not how it winds up working, though. When left under long enough, he finds that the hurt is physical and mental. The hurt is in his lungs, where the much-needed air isn't getting. The hurt is in his throat, where the fear is building into a lump. The hurt is in his heart, whose beating turns frantic in an attempt to pump absent oxygen through his bloodstream.
The worry for his loved ones is buried in the very back of his mind, under piles and piles of panic. That longing for family and friends breaks through and rears its ugly head in his conscious thoughts maybe two times total, and for only milliseconds each. No, for the most part, his train of hopelessly muddled thoughts is stuck somewhere along the junction of Holy shite, I've got to get the feck out of here now! and terrified, half-formed methods for how exactly he plans to do that. There's a fear of a feral, self-preserving nature there, the likes of which have never been known to him before.
Eventually, he's forced to give in. He gasps in desperation with the senseless hope that he'll get O2 instead of H2O. He's wrong, as he knew he would be, and the water rushes in and shoves itself into his respiratory system, adds pressure to his already choked-off senses.
Tears sting at his eyes, but he wonders what difference they could possibly make. Those tiny little drops of noticeably warm water springing forth—they can't mean anything in this vast ocean, just like his lost life won't mean anything in the grand scheme of things. He's left no name for himself, done nothing of any great importance. After a while, those who know him will forget and move on, barely hindered by his absence, if not liberated by it. And that is when he'll die: when no one's willing to remember the once-thriving colony who fought through even the thickest of battles against brothers and himself but died in an accident so trivial as drowning.
Then his mind is back on the current situation, and his limbs hurt from the struggle to resurface—'re-,' as if he's done it before. It doesn't feel like he's done it before. Then again, how else would he know to miss the action of breaking through the water's surface? His ribcage practically rings with the same devastation that's clawing at his sluggish yet somehow simultaneously frantic mind. His nose and throat and lungs are raw from the flooding of seawater that should never rightfully fill those cavities. His eyes burn with the useless tears and the ruthless salt. His inner ears throb from the pressure of the water he's submerged in with no escape.
How can water burn like fire?
His mind struggles to continue coherently as he winds up sucking in more water during his pathetic attempt to cough up that which he's already inhaled. While doing this, he slowly starts to drive himself insane, the word 'water' popping up in his mind more frequently than he'd ever thought possible for a sane person, not allowing for his desperately sought escape. But wait—he's being driven insane, so he's not sane, so 'water' popping up more than normal is normal…
And then 'insane' and 'sane' repeat themselves over and over, taunting him with all he's got and all he's lost, and he's ticked at himself for letting this happen, and he wants out of this hellish nightmare…
There is no out. He's drowning, and there is no one there to save his sorry arse. Not this time. Not right now. Now he's all alone. He is drowning and losing his mind and not being saved, and nothing is responding correctly to the fraught signals being sent from his brain and down his spinal cord and along his frayed nerves…!
But why worry? None of it will make a difference soon. With that silly little thought in his pretty little head—or maybe it's the thought that's pretty while his head is the silly one, depending on which way you look at it—he starts to wish for the end. He wishes for the pain to stop, for that warm—or cold?—blanket of black to encompass his mind and still his heart.
But it doesn't end. It doesn't stop. There is no black. Not when he wants it to be there.
Not when it should be there.
Out of nowhere—or maybe it's just deep, deep in his lost mind—he swears that he feels someone's grip on him. He shoves that ridiculous idea out once he realises its intentions, though. The touch isn't real; it's not true. No one's there to save him—so stop trying to fool yourself, or you're going to wind up falling for it, and then just think about the disappointment you're setting yourself up for…
The touch remains. It feels strangely warm because he's so unwittingly frozen, and the heat seeps past his skin and into his flesh, down to his very bones.
There's no way it's not real anymore.
He's ascending, then, with no force from himself, and the light is increasing while the pressure decreases. A thought comes to his mind about how, maybe, there is no blackness beforehand. Maybe your soul just randomly decides enough is enough and skips out on you, lifts from your body, and drifts up from the Earth and into Heaven—if not Hell—without any sort of warning. Maybe he's about to catch a break.
Who is he kidding? He has no soul. He's too cynical and pessimistic to believe in any of that. He wants to, but he just can't. It's just not in him. And that thought alone scares him as much as death.
The air is cold and bites at his skin, but he thinks nothing of its temperature as the element and himself are re-introduced. The new surroundings bring with them no immediate relief, as he initially has to choke up all of the sharp, shattering water he's retained against his normally lethal will. The gasps between the choking are not as satisfying as he would like, and there's a brief stint of time in which he almost wishes for the return of that never-ending watery grave. Surprisingly, he finds that he'd gotten used to drowning; now he's unstable, and the air that should be comforting actually feels too foreign to be safe. He at least knew what the outcome was going to be while he was down there.
When the water's been forced from his system, he finds himself ever still choking. This time, however, it's because he's sucking the air in too fast, too eagerly. He intends for the next breath to be long and smooth and filling, but his intake wavers in the long-run, and he's coughing roughly again, choking on air that seems intent on killing him even though it should be reviving him. Short, panicked gasps, as he definitely knows so well by now, are not very sustaining.
Finally, he establishes stability, and he relaxes against whatever it is that's keeping him from the water—he doesn't really care what it is. His deprived lungs and the in-the-way lump in his throat and his rampant heart still hurt. His limbs are still heavy, an echo of the strain on his ribcage remains, his nose and throat and lungs are still impossibly sore, his eyes still sting, his ears still ache… But it doesn't matter. None of it matters.
He doesn't give them permission to, but his eyes ease closed anyway, and his mind starts to shut down. Everything is in slow-motion. The world is caught in molasses or something, and it's gumming up the gears in his head. But who cares? It doesn't matter now, right?
He's—dare he think it—safe.
Something rattles him, shakes him roughly, snaps him free of his recuperation—rather rudely, at that. His eyes shoot open to meet those of someone whose name escapes him at the moment. It's on the tip of his tongue: someone he's forever known, someone he could never leave… But he can't remember. The bright emeralds-for-eyes seem to be a clue, but he's still lost. Before he comes up with anything, he's asked in a strange-but-familiar voice why the hell he's so stupid, what he was thinking, what made him jump…
And he has no real answer anymore, though that had been the one piece of information that he'd been able to hold onto. It all seems pretty stupid after having experienced firsthand the effects of his decision, and he has to wonder if his sanity was actually lost sometime before this incident. Hold the phone—holy Hell, he remembers!
He knows that his sanity had been lost before! An inkling of his own mind, not the default, reset one that he's currently stuck in, comes back to him. It's oozing and gathering in a pool at the base of his brain, and he fully realises that he hadn't had any trace of rationality in his being whatsoever even before he'd pulled his stunt! This piece of information that should be depressing is actually like a lifeline to him, and he clings to it as such, not willing to let it go again anytime soon.
"I had to test a theory," croaks forth from his battered larynx then, and while he doesn't want to, his green-eyed British saviour leaves it at that.
For he knows of the madman's folly just as the madman himself does. It just took a bit of drowning (drowning: v; being caught in senseless suspension and lack of sanity) to remind him of its heavy presence.
The odd-eyed, auburn-haired madman's theory? That somehow, near-immortality enables himself and others like him to savour each carnal breath like it's their last, more so than the average mortal. Unnaturally long life—the kind that, just a few centuries back, would've gotten them chased down by an angry mob of townspeople with pitchforks and torches; now it'd get them tested and experimented-on in America—arms them with the tendency to look at life more gratefully than the petty humans do.
—After all, their deaths are brought about in more devastating, painful, disgustingly morbid methods than humans'. Their wars and rebellions rip them apart more thoroughly, toss the remains about the room more carelessly, than any humans' conflicts.
Their alliances and loyalties tie them more closely to each other than human bloodlines could ever dream of—
Theory proven correct until further notice.
Kicked butt, didn't it?
I'm not actually that full of myself, I swear. I annoy my friends with the ruthlessness with which I judge my own work. But hey, they say that you are your worst critic—I'm no exception.
Anyway, please tell me your opinions. I love hearing them more than you will ever know.
"An eye for an eye" as the Golden Rule
Just leaves a room full of blind men
~ A misguided fool
I'm not insane,
But I am a liar.
~ Not me [see previous line]
Good news for people who love bad news
And proof that awesome just got awesome-er:
~ Bleeding heart and artist Captain Coke XP