A/N: This barely made it past 1000 words. Yeah, like I said on my DA, I owe the inspiration to Secret Lovers by Atlantic Starr. And, now, this gift fic is complete after 5 or 6 months!
Hetalia © Hidekaz Himaruya
Secret Lovers ©Atlantic Starr
Pairings: Canada/Ukraine, Canada/Prussia (Prussia/Canada/Ukraine love triangle), attempted!Germany/America, Prussia/male
He knew that this would be in vain—the attempt to meet in secret, the attempt to be together when they thought no one was looking. It came crashing down, and now he had to deal with the consequences of his actions.
If he hadn't met him on that day, maybe it would have been easier to stay away from him—to stay away from the mess he would create.
He was always compared to his brother—he knew that—but he never expected someone to so obsessed that they would take to stalking him even though he wasn't the person that they wanted. If it hadn't been for that guy, he was almost certain he would've been jumped at the next corner.
"Thank-thank you," he managed to say before the stranger left him alone with an unconscious body. He did what any practical person with no alibi did—he left before the police made their way over there.
Matthew found that the stranger who saved him was attending his school, and that he rarely came. He managed to get his name—Gilbert Beilschmidt—from his brother, who somehow knew everyone. It should have shocked him (at least a little), but he was still trying to get over the shock that his brother remembered him.
He thought that his encounter with Gilbert meant nothing, and that life would return to normal—meaning that no one would notice him, and he could fade into the background. It didn't work out that way. After a week of no contact, he bumped into Gilbert.
He didn't know what to expect, but the reaction that Gilbert had was not one of them. He just glared at Matthew, and continued to walk towards the classroom—he was expecting to either get punched or to be ignored completely.
Matthew didn't know for certain how it started—though he suspected that the first meeting had something to do with it—but he got more and more fascinated by him. He would spend hours talking to him if he could (he'd take any time he could get), and then the other would reply with a response that somehow answered the question while stating how awesome he was.
Then, he asked out Yekaterina (Katyusha) Braginskaya—partially because he was forced to and partially because he liked her. To his pleasant surprise, she said yes to him. The only downside was that Ivan kept creepily staring at him.
The first few weeks with her were the best of his life, almost dream-like, but things suddenly changed to an all too familiar nightmare.
The day Gilbert talked to him, he dropped a bombshell. He told Matthew that he was with someone, someone he hadn't met before. It wasn't something that he expected, and could only stare in shock as Gilbert started to talk extensively about his relationship with the mysterious person.
"I have to go." Before Matthew knew it, he was running away from the one of the few people who liked him for him and not for his brother.
He avoided Beilschmidt for as long as he could—which constituted of the next few weeks—but Gilbert found him (he always does).
It all went downhill from there. There were times he would stay with Gilbert for hours, listening to the stories that he said were his daily life, or trying to get him to tell who his girlfriend was. It only got him to reveal that his brother was trying to get his sister to date him.
'Just because Francis bet that he couldn't get Louise to date him—not that I'll tell Gilbert.'He thought as Gilbert started to comment on his brother's stupidity. He felt as if he should be defending his brother, but found that he couldn't do anything as his brother made it hard to defend his idiotic reactions.
One day, Gilbert told him something else that made him stop. "I broke up with him."
Matthew could only process one thing—the word him. "Him?"
Gilbert nodded, as if confirming that he was dating a male, someone of the same gender as him.
"So, you're gay, eh?" Matthew asked. He didn't know why, but he felt that he always knew that secret. It should've bothered him since he was raised in a strict Christian family, but he didn't care that his friend was gay. "It's okay, I guess."
He accepted his friend, never thinking of the consequences that would follow. He found himself being drawn by Gilbert, he found that he could only think of him—even when he was with his girlfriend—and he found that he could only think straight whenever he was near the other.
He felt horrible about those developments, but he couldn't help those feelings. 'If we could choose who to love, there would be no need for tears. If we could choose how we feel about people, there would be no reason for those feelings of guilt—there would be no reason for people to cheat on each other. That's what makes a human, that's what makes us unique and special.'
Whenever he told himself that—those words that was once spoken by his father—the feeling of guilt would lessen, but not completely disappear. Try as he might, he couldn't help but feel that he didn't belong with Katyusha, for he felt that there was someone better than him, someone that wouldn't betray her feelings of love.
It was because of those feelings that he ended things before he could get in too deep—hurt her more than he already did. She seemed to understand, but he would never really know.
He honestly loved her, but there was no competition between choosing her or Gilbert. He just needed to tell Gilbert how he felt about him.
If his family wasn't so religious, wasn't such a homosexual, he wouldn't have to deal with the anger every day. If it wasn't for their anger, he would've been happier in life.
Now, he was somewhere new, trying to create a better life for himself and Gil.