A/N: Waah heck what did I do. Took Emigrate and Rammstein and Hetalia and smashed them all together, that's what. Disastrously. Apologies. Ah, well.

This is still technically a work in progress, but enjoy nevertheless.

Don't Let Me Drown

***A Small And Very Unfortunate Fact Of Life***

Tea and beer do not go together.

Tea is disgusting cold, beer is disgusting warm.

Shame.

***[REDACTED]***

It's not that Germany is really that socially awkward to everyone. He does meetings just fine, for example; it would be a little troublesome if he couldn't, and he can hold his own in any debate or argument. He's a nation in his own right, after all, and he has few qualms proving to the rest of the lot that he is also, in fact, quite frequently right.

That was an advantage of living and breathing work. He'd always liked mechanical things.

Non-work life, however, is a very different matter, and different does not mean good.

It's not the kind of crisis that gives sparks to hysterics and crying jags and slumping over the sadder halves of coffee cups or liquor bottles at every hour of the day and night as if they were the same mess (which they were), with the same dull phrase reverberating through a headbanging migraine: oh god this is so fucked up. Nothing so cataclysmic. Rather, it's comparable to the withering away of an apple, the skin shrivelling and puckering and the flesh souring and wasting away, ugly and repulsive and silent. It's also very easy to ignore.

It's neglectful, but it's not as if it's his fault, and it's not as if world matters don't take precedence over his catching a highly irresponsible break. He's a nation; responsibility is his prerogative. Responsible as he is, humans make and have made the bulk of him, and therefore he cannot help but be given to their fallibilities, and notice that

(Prussia ignores him.)

Or he ignores Prussia, he's not quite sure which way round it is anymore. In between the hectic flurry of juggling and resuscitating and balancing, he has no time for someone who isn't a nation frantically doing just the same. For a while Prussia had trailed him wherever he went round the house like an obstinate shadow, from the kitchen to the bedroom to the study, yammering loudly and generally getting in the way.

At first he'd thought it was just Prussia being obnoxious, something he could really do without, but when he'd finally whirled round to bark in his face to just lay it off already, he'd found a pair of red eyes staring right back at him, bitter and savage and with a rage that might just have been fuelled by hurt so intense that he'd almost backed up. They're eyes he knows well, and they've shot him with glares more than this once, but rarely never (talk about that time) as if he hated him.

It disturbs him that they're no longer so familiar.

Prussia, militaristic as he is, had sensed his faltering, and seized his opportunity to strike.

"I remember the old times, you know. When you were younger."

(When he told him stories he'd eagerly lapped up, or when he'd told him stories of the street that he didn't want to hear? When Prussia was busy and yet always had time to give to him, or when he was busy and Prussia had taken him?)

Prussia, it seems, still knows him best, even if he, it seems, no longer knows Prussia.

(It wasn't so long ago that that sentence would have been a palindrome.)

He's sorry.

(Prussia knew, of course he did. The creed he wore, stiff with pride (arrogance) on his sleeve, melted away in his presence alone, petering down to pitiful justifications, turning him into a child who thought he understood. And how he hated it, he hated how he knew he was right but Prussia could twist it into such wrongness. How he made the story (like the stories that he used to tell) blur so that he was the deluded youngling; forcing frustration onto him then making him feel unreasonable for it, and Prussia so much the better by comparison.

He's always been a child with Prussia.

But he's not a child any more. Despite Prussia's low little tricks, all smoke attacks and stinging sand, he would come round in due time. It wasn't going to be an easy ride but that's what would make it worth it, the look in Prussia's eyes when he finally opens them and sees. Sees what (that) Germany has showed him (up) for once, sees that Germany had been all this while, even now, and it wouldn't be too late for redemption.

But.

He can't look into Prussia's eyes.

He can't look at Prussia.

But.

He's told to.

(Ordered. He exists to take orders.)

In a tone of pure scorn, and there's no sympathy at all.

(He doesn't need pity.)

And he does, he clenches his fists so hard he feels his nails dig into his palms, and he relishes the burn, just as the burn of shame crosses his cheeks as he lifts his gaze further and further up, hating and hating.

And Prussia is standing there, all flawless pale edges and dark blue uniform.

And Prussia is mocking him.

Dislike burns cold in those red eyes

(that have seen too much of him)

Dislike and distaste and disgust, and all so condescending. Prussia doesn't move, so it's Germany who stumbles to him, breath caught in a burning throat. He feels as if he might cry, for no insanely good goddamned conceivable reason, he feels as if he might break to the impulse and shake like a scared child, tremble for mercy like a beaten dog and if only Prussia would spare him for just a moment, because he's certain that's all he needs to get his forces back together, but Prussia has the pounding of war-drums in his heart and of course he knows it too.

He stands before Prussia like a chastised child; he stands before Prussia like a sacrifice.

Prussia inspects him a few agonising minutes longer, then reaches his hands out in mock tenderness, cupping them around Germany's clenching jaw, his fingers curling up to the thin skin behind his ears. And he continues to survey him like that, the curve of a smile that might have been a lover's flicking about his lips like silver off a switchblade. Germany knows better, and he's frozen by the cruelty and repulsion.

"Stop it." He hates how his voice catches, dry and without authority.

Grim amusement flickers into the mix, and before he's anywhere near ready, before he knows it, before he can react, Prussia's closed the gap between them and –

–his lips are only slightly cooler than his own but they feel so very cold, and his mouth burns.

"No," Prussia grinds against his teeth, clamped tightly shut in a useless attempt at defiance, breathlessly vindictive and pressing hard enough to bruise, bringing Germany closer with the very tips of his fingernails, and forcing the words into his mouth: "you stop it."

He can't.

He can't do anything as Prussia bites his lip hard enough to draw blood (but it doesn't, it only aches hotly and he wants to run his tongue over it but doesn't), as Prussia drags his nails across his skin as he moves one hand to the back of his neck, hard and controlling and unbearably possessive, as Prussia jerks at his collar and throws something to the floor with a click with the other.

"Stop it," he tries again, without much conviction and without any struggle (and he hates himself for it). Prussia pays him no heed at all this time round, navigating his back to the wall and his uniform off his back with an eerie single-mindedness.

He doesn't want to feel Prussia's fingers leaving icy-searing trails on his skin, nor does he want to feel the hard circles of the buttons down the front of his uniform pressing much too close. Comfort, though, they'd departed a while back.

"I forget," Prussia hisses, teeth scraping his neck at every word, and Germany fancies the small, hot trickle to be poison, "that you no longer approve, do you?"

Germany turns his face as far away as he can, until his cheek touches the wall, and stares blankly on ahead. White plaster and a right angle where the walls join.

Prussia will come round.)

(That

Never

Happened.)

He's sorry for it, truly, but sacrifices have to be made. And Prussia is militaristic at heart, so he knows when he's lost his battle. He taps away at electronic devices as if they charged him and not the other way round, and is away from the house for what seems like seven days a week, crashing on the couches of the human friends he now spends so much time with.

At least he's not bothering Germany.

(You mean, at least you won't have to face his accusations.)

So, Prussia's a goner. Japan has little to do with him either, and has not dropped so much as a hello on a non-work basis, and the same goes for Italy.

(That's a shame. But somehow he doesn't think their greetings got lost in the mail.)

It matters a little less now that he has China to divert his attention, China and their odd routine of picking out from the depths of their memories coffee shops in the different countries they travelled to to attend different meetings, and a few times they'd spent the best part of the afternoon hunting a specific one down before one of them had suddenly laughed and said that actually, they'd remembered the name wrong, or this wasn't the right country after all.

(He doesn't speak much around China, and he doesn't laugh very loudly, either.)

To begin with it was the old consciousness that there were some things age brought that guidebooks couldn't, and China was quite a bit older, and had kept quiet so as not to miss a second, as that was all it took for the brief flashes when China wasn't busy not acting his age to pass. He's always liked to listen and drink in the ebb and flow of a voice, and China, nostalgic as all old people are, wasn't lacking in talkativeness.

( Like Prussia, when he was so much smaller and had sat with him by the fire and Prussia had told him stories. Of himself, mostly, but he'd loved it. There's a certain type of love to be gained from inferiority.)

Unlike Prussia, though, China listens back.

It's for this that Germany says as little as possible, because if he actually thinks about it not many people listen to him. They listen to what he says, and they make a right mountain out of torturing each word to wring out possible (fantastical, fabricated) meanings, else agree or disagree, but it doesn't mean a thing because they are listening for a nation, not him.

(Germany country nation Beilschmidt, are they even different?)

He fears that they aren't, and that he has nothing to say. He wishes he can pull off philosophical, or at least be able to twist together strands of words in the sharp, clever way Prussia sometimes can when the mood strikes him, but now that he is aware of it, all the things he says are horribly mundane: a comment on how good the coffee was, a note that he liked that kind of flower, asking for the bill – none of them in the least part exciting, or even remotely memorable. It's for that reason that he decides: quantity devalues quality, and if he says less, he has less chance of sounding amateur or subpar. The less there is of something, the more valuable – money, diamonds, food – and perverse as it is, that's just how it goes.

The more he says, the less, he fears, China will listen to him.

He wants China to listen.

("You were always taken into things so easily.")

***Wasche Mich Rein***

Water leaves such smells. China has never really paid heed to that fact before, even though he's no stranger to the putrid stench of open drains, the scent of rotting sludge the river sometimes left when the sun blazed daylong, reluctant to leave and eager to return, and all else wilted and shrunk back into the ground in a slime of foul juices beneath it.

When he goes swimming in gaudy public leisure centres, navigating through the milling of parents and their splashing children, he never leaves without the smell of chlorine drying on his skin.

When he trails around the house like some sad, abandoned shadow, he sometimes finds the barely audible thud, thudding of his footsteps taking him to Germany's room. Soon he knows the door as well as he does his own. Better, even: he never pays much attention to the panes of wood when he pushes past it, but he does sweep the dust collecting in the corridors with a dispirited gaze as he does his rounds, hardly blinking at the plaster that peels and the wallpaper that curls with damp, an insidious monster taken root beneath them.

Germany's room is cold; Germany leaves the window open and doesn't close it for the time he is out, as he isn't there to feel it. China sometimes wonders whether he hasn't become so used to the cold that his numbed skin no longer registered it, and he didn't close the window even during the nights when he sleeps here. Then he wonders whether he sleeps here at all.

The room is impersonal, which China knows to be directly down to the lack of time Germany spends here. There is a conspicuous lack of personal effects scattered on the bare writing-desk, the floor, the untouched bed. There is a lack of a warmth of an entirely different kind. China does not come here for sentimentality, the lost lover that keens and pines. (Pathetic.) He comes simply for the hollow, pointless feeling of finding something as empty as he is.

There is the one night that China waits determinedly in the living room for Germany's return. His feet had grown cold, even despite the fire he'd set up behind the grate, the only light source in the room, the swelling, heavy darkness making it seem larger and emptier than ever. The rug he sits on is plaited, red and orange and yellow, and when the flames flicker, they almost seem alive.

There is no book in his hands to amuse himself with, so he stares at his fingers instead, and waits. Patience is not so uncommon a virtue, thinking of it within the bounds of this circumstance, and he steps over eternities as he places yet another ring inside them.

It's a long time until Germany comes back.

Where there had been a touch of timelessness previously, there is now a sense of derealisation, as China is standing, as China is at the door, as the door closes, as China pulls Germany onto the rug and the fire sputters lower. Germany's surprise, or shock, doesn't happen, and perhaps his lips move but he makes no sound, either, and in a way this is very, very fitting.

(And it is wrong and it is right.)

Germany doesn't put up a fight as his boots are stripped away and discarded, doesn't protest when China takes his jacket from him, too, and it is gone somewhere in the darkness, doesn't resist when China pulls him close and reaches down with a cold hand and grips his own icy ones.

(This is not like them.)

He is the one who has been outside all this while, his movements the stiff, painful fumble of thawing ice and red-hot needles, but despite this he still feels China's skin, and feels nothing else but his tortuous warming and China, and it makes him shiver nonetheless.

It hurts.

(It hurts so bad, it hurts so good.)

(This is not like them.)

And Germany finally stops fighting.

(This is not like them at all.)

It is then that China feels the sea has washed out some part of Germany, and is continuing to do so, actually truly feels instead of knows or thinks or believes, all useless wispy strands of the intangible, when he realises that Germany has already lost his own (surprisingly warm) scent. A scent that he will forever associate with the weave of sunlight in a small Bavarian coffee shop, stroking the silver curve of a spoon cutting into a slice of moist, crumbly chocolate cake.

The sea has infiltrated Germany, every trickle of his blood and every pore and fibre filled and bitter. Germany has drunk from the sea; he thirsts and thirsts for more, and all the while the salt leaks into him and stays there, in the hollowed-out thing Germany has become. China buries himself into Germany's neck, more predatory than gentle or affectionate or any such flimsiness.

Germany's lungs are full of the sea, and he cannot help breathing it onto China. China doesn't rebuke him for it.

Germany has the sea in him and Germany is in the sea, and he is but a poor drowned thing that China is too late to save. But not too late to have and not too late to try, except this isn't trying. This isn't happening and it is. You cannot deny the moment, you can only argue later that it was a hitch in the time-space continuum that determines the reality of an event, and anomalies stand for nothing and therefore were never there. The moment, however, validates itself.

Germany smells of the sea. China doesn't see him so much as smell and feel him, feel the cool slippery wet sheen of his skin beneath his fingertips, feel his own thrumming hunter's pulse inside his veins, and incredibly, the rush is hot.

Germany…tastes of the sea.

Foreveris a fickle thing, and now that Germany smells of the sea and nothing but the sea, not of sunlight not of warm wooden chairs not of white china plates, China already finds himself forgetting the memory, the light hitting the spoon blanching out the rest of the memory from the edges, a slowly, silently burning photograph.

Beautiful, and agonising.

They'd make a good Pietà.

***WAKE UP!***

Oh. Oh, shit.

***Coffee Is Better Than Coke***

The door of the meeting room opens, and from behind the floodgates surge a great wave of business suits, nations and humans alike, and though they give themselves a perfunctory pat-down, none of them can quite hide the distinctly rumpled just-out-of-Hell's-taster-session look that was recognisable to anyone in the same line of business from a mile away. Ties askew; a few tugs and they're fixed. A tell-tale rim of faint grey on the inside of their collars; they lean their necks back ever so surreptitiously, and walk around with an imaginary neck brace on for the rest of their miserable day. Deep creases on what had short hours ago been perfectly-ironed trousers (an occupational plague); well, nothing to do for it but shuffle along the walls and hope no-one noticed, or more simply do each other the mutual favour of pretending not to. (And what did you expect, the figureheads of the country can hardly be caught grappling at their behinds now, can they?)

Slowly, chatter starts up, most to do with the meeting but a brave (and fed-up) few breaking the tradition and happily discussing lighter affairs, to the reception of admiring looks that were just too tired to give themselves a mud-bath. The swell of conversation reaches the corridor, breaks, and drifts out into different directions.

A slip of seaweed is left, honestly too battered to much care about where everyone else has gone. No, China has his eyes fixed on his prize: the hideously overpriced vending machine just round the corner, a prime example of exploiting the weak doggy when he was already down and panting and thirsty after hours straight of talking and listening and talking if there ever was one. He makes his way over, nevertheless. (Bingo. Another doggy in the sack. Keep 'em rolling, Boss. Hey, don'cha think five euros is too, I dunno, cheap for an 250ml bottle of water?)

Cola, Lucozade, Sprite, water. Cola, Lucozade, Sprite, water. Cola…

"You mean to buy that?"

Surprise lends him the burst of energy he needs to look up, and the very forward accusation prods him a little off-balance, so he has a hand-in-cookie-jar feeling when there is no logical reason that he should.

China had no idea how to greet him after the most unconventional standard he had set: despite rubbing shoulders with him fairly frequently in dismal settings like this, it wasn't something that happened in the outside world, save hfor mass gatherings: celebrations for Halloween or such other festivities was one example, but even then contact never got beyond the token greetings and 'hope-you're-well's. It was a shame, how nations couldn't even spare the time to get to know their fellows properly, despite being the best matches for each other friend-wise, due to the richness of their respective histories and cultures. As well as fact that whilst they had their differences, the playing field would always be more level than with a human, who didn't have the mixed blessing of supposed immortality, for starters, and thus had a completely outlook on life, opting to work themselves like masses of ants in order to gain what they can from it out of necessity rather than choice.

It's quite depressing how, somewhere along the way, nations have taken to overworking like mad, too, only tossing down their yoke when they reach the sanctuary of their hotel – because few of them have the luxury of time to spend in their own homes anymore. But as irony would have it, with the flinging away of their ties and the shrugging off of their jackets, down went all those flimsy inter-work relations, too.

But now was not the time for these laments. Now was the time for Captain Obvious to save the day.

"…Germany?"

Then, after gathering that this was not, perhaps, the best response he could have given, as Germany's silence seems to indicate (it's only later that he realises the other, unaccustomed to impulsiveness, had been feeling a great deal more uncomfortable than he had). Groping for something to save him, the first thing he thinks of is "Oh – you've not left yet?"

Germany gives him a look of pure awkwardness. "I stayed behind. To sort my notes. And straighten out the room."

"That's…" Compulsive bordering neurotic, yes he knows. But as he believes that feet and mouths are at opposite ends of the body for a reason, he doesn't say so.

"It's not worth buying from those," Germany presses on.

China wonders if he should be saying something. Agreeing seems a safe bet, so he nods, but apparently that wasn't what Germany had been looking for.

"Would you like to go for coffee?"

"If – you have time, that is."

"My treat."

China was never one to turn down a free drink.

***Jack, I Promise***

He holds him close, and it's an act of narcissism.

***The Rather Curious Incident Of Germany In The Night-Time***

One evening, when the other is already out, untraceable as a willo-the-wisp of sea mist until he takes it to mind to let the briny wind sweep him back to their doorstep, he picks up his boots from where they stand next to the mat, two stiff sentries waiting to be called to duty, and tugs them on.

They are inhospitable against his bare feet: the rigid folds of thick, untamed leather pinch and rub, hard and unyielding to the thin, delicate skin. It's understandable: he has yet to use them, and so they have yet to be broken in, trodden day in and day out over silty sand and grating rocks alike until some semblance of softness has been trampled into them.

But now that he has them on, he hasn't the least idea what to do with them. He doesn't feel like stepping outside to the pungent tang of unforgiving sea air, he'd rather be safe indoors, protected by a layer of glass and plaster as he leans his head restlessly against the window and watches it whip the sands into wild billows, sweeping the beach to its own merciless pattern sometimes for hours on end. He might make a cup of tea for the other, but then again, the other doesn't appreciate tea, not as he does, with slow, unhurried sips, allowing the fragrance to unfurl fully over his tongue before the next mouthful. And anyway, he doesn't know how long he'll be out, and no-one likes cold tea.

(Meaning, he doesn't know when he'll come back and sometimes he wishes that he won't.)

He doesn't want to go outside. He has no desire to be swallowed by these heaving masses. He's not even dressed for it, wearing clothes for the indoors, where the heater was blissfully working and he wanted to drudge out every second of that rarity.

(Even though he's endured crippling disasters, natural or otherwise, and come out of them not quite fine and less intact than he might once have been, but undeniably alive, whilst this is a mere walk down the beach.

If a drowning person screams for help in the midst of a whirling sandstorm, and there is no-one around to hear him, had he screamed?

Accidents are no-one's fault, honey. There's nothing you could possibly have done.)

So he stands alone in the kitchen, in the first pair of jeans on top of the rapidly diminishing pile of clean clothes and a pyjama top, wearing that stout pair of leather boots that scrape his feet and feels ridiculous.

And his feet hurt, already.

***A Very Frequent Occurrence***

Wake up.

Gaaah.

Perhaps he'll spend the rest of the day in bed.

***Shut Up And Drink Your Coffee***

He darts Germany sideways glances the whole way to the café, wondering what his agenda could possibly be. But if his silent companion has one, he seems to be in no hurry to divulge it, and the possibility seems less and less likely with each passing minute. He strides down the street, wordless, with a look of utmost concentration, and only when the coffee shop is within sight does he notice that China is quite a few paces behind him, and hurrying to catch up. When he does, he's offered an apology, which he brushes off with a vague, reflex smile and a light one-shouldered shrug.

"No." He steps through the door Germany holds open for him, very gently sighs in appreciation and anticipation at the promising aroma of well-brewed coffee. "It's alright."

And so it is.

They find themselves a comfortable-looking table in the corner, and sink into the chairs, each quiet for a moment, enfolded by their own cocoon of relieved gratitude that they allow the atmosphere to wrap around them layer by layer: the soft hum of just-indistinct chatter like the murmur of thick fabric; the slightly yellowed lighting here where they were sitting. A good moment should be savoured, because at the end of an exhausting day coffee tastes so much better than any fine wine.

A waitress comes over and takes their orders, making sure to give them a glare that told them exactly what she thinks of their sitting so far away. He takes a regular café au lait, and Germany, after some consideration, orders a beer.

A glance of amusement.

"Coffee?" The only word he was to utter.

"Oh, yes." China flicks him a smile of his own. "I've become quite Westernized."

Germany didn't say anything after that.

Silence, China thinks, as the first mouthful floods waves of relaxing wakefulness and caffeine through him, is a blessing.

Germany, sipping his beer and looking into its many mellowed lights, seemed to think the same thing.

***I'll Never Let Go***

They turn back the sheets when the sun ducks behind the cliffs in deference to a moon that rarely deigns to show her face, and the next morning they are as clean and grey and flimsy as ever.

Clouds drift aimlessly across the faded morning sky like crumpled tissues, smears of flaking off-white, the resentful offspring of long-abandoned passion and post-coital, hell, post-nuptial letdown.

Lustreless eyes filmed with the previous night's cobwebs glance perfunctorily at the vanity-mirror stood on the desk, patiently and uncomplainingly gathering dust. Nothing to show for the effort: they look the same as they did the morning before and the morning before that and the morning before that, tired eyes and the corners of their mouths pulled down with too many burdens or not enough, the unbearable weariness of inactivity, any sort of constancy becomes monotony over a while and monotony leaks into tedium like the sluggish dripping of water from the tap neither of them have fixed, a dull pleh, pleh on the base of the sink and it goes on and on and on-

It's a rhythm, the disorder is a rhythm, primitive and chaotic. It lurks by the threshold, where boots stamp out at the cusp of dawn and the front door slams with a force that sets it rattling against its frame long after the marching footsteps have faded down the path to the sea, in fearful meekness at its mistreatment or simply just another prisoner in death row clattering the grille in a demand to be heard. It writhes in agony and ecstasy on the counter, the wet, flat sound of scales slapping stone barely audible before the chopping-board spills viscous tangles, a sacrifice to indistinct gods. It thuds with the angry beat of the knife, the blunt edge hitting frown lines into the wood because no-one has sharpened the blade, it buzzes in the flies that are drawn to the stench of the exposed innards, to the promise of ready carrion, it tosses a beat of frustrated discontent into the unresisting pillow at night, every night.

In those and a thousand other infinitesimal sounds, a sickness is brewing.

They can feel it, in the needle-pricks of sweat that tingle sweet anticipation from the nape of their neck to the base of their skull, their own personal barometers that trickle moisture down their backs and whisper with each thud of the boots as they stamp gorges over the damp sand and gritty possession back over the kitchen tiles that a war is coming.

Lovely.

To tear each other up, to finally spew the blind, frenzied hatred that rankle vile and black and bubbling like sores festering on a tongue barred behind teeth after so long. Tight lips, sullen glares. It's always a disappointment when after the first time, with silk sheets and mahogany bedposts and fluted champagne glasses, serenaded by the ocean, the layers strip away so. fast. until there is nothing left but the realisation that there is nothing there, not for them at least, and there is nothing they can give, either.

It's a bit like being jilted, to wake in the morning and find your lover gone and the bed cold. Except it isn't, really, there's a stranger sleeping in it. And try as you might, you can't get to know them. They are much too different and perhaps much too similar, too, which only serves to further pronounce the differences. Two people might both be religious, for example, but if one says the higher power meant this and the other says the higher power meant that one of them is going to end up with a stake behind their back and a log-pile at their feet.

In short, the relations are awful. And with this poor development, what happens to the sex? Nothing, of course. It stays right where it is, meaning to say, not here, away somewhere far removed from this barren stretch of coast where it can rock someone else's boat.

(And tip them out, maybe. One can hope.)

They say that a marriage without sex is hell. They wasted their breath. It goes without saying.

But they're not married.

Whatever.

***overalldiplomacy***

They'd agreed to take separate rooms.

***A Small Note***

Germany likes to go fishing, apparently, and he likes the sea. He says it almost shyly, rolling the handle of his cup back and forth between thumb and forefinger, as if admitting to an embarrassing quirk of himself that he would for all the world much rather prefer to keep buried deep. China can't think why, and he tells him as much. He likes the sea too, he tells him with enough enthusiasm for the both of them, in fact, he loves it. He's had his flavour of playing fisherman, too, with a straw hat with long, sloping sides and a bamboo pole to steer his boat. And wah, the smell! Something quite awful if you weren't used to it. Oh, and there were the times he went with Japan, too, just the two of them…

All he gets for his troubles is a discomfited look in eyes that don't quite meet his.

Germany has very blue eyes.

***Mirror Mirror***

It's dark, and outside the winds moan slightly, as if in pain.

He ignores their suffering.

He has his own.

He casts off the covers, hearing them rustle as they sink to the floor in sleepy protest – and now he'll have to pull them back, later – and for a moment he shivers at the sensation of sharp air passing over previously warm skin that rose to attention in the beginnings of goosebumps, and, obligingly, began the swift process of cooling.

He cannot see, and it never fails to take his breath away, this deprivation of a sense, and how it sends all the rest surging in a sharp incline to make up for it, bringing him to what he feels to be the precipice of sensation, which is a paradox unto itself. He can hear the faint lapping of the sea, susurrations of distant leaves in autumn winds, he can feel the sheets beneath him, every crease and every fold beneath his palm, his thigh, his ankle, the rises and bumps of the threads themselves, all in impossibly sharp relief.

It is, he thinks, theoretically impossible to identify one's own scent: its perpetual presence is inhaled so often that soon enough it will have wormed its way into the habitual, into yet another given that can be ignored. Now, however, he imagines – because in the darkness, darkness that strips him to the core and leaves him keen in anticipation and the thrill of vulnerability, he cannot be sure of anything – that he can discern a touch of what could be jasmine, a note of musk. It's ironical that he can't smell the sea, though, the one thing he can be sure of, on himself; it's everywhere, filling the room with a bitter tang even through the layer of glass and plaster.

He could let the entire night slip by like this, suspended in a single moment of agony until the skies washed the room with pale morning light.

And oh, agony is beautiful.

Much as he longs to, he casts off the temptation (and not without difficulty), and slides off the bed. He doesn't need his sight, it was a subjective thing anyway, all too easily clouded over with sweet-smelling coils of illusory smoke that blurred and distorted his vision until it finally dissipated and he realised he was stumbling far off the path.

This is a pilgrimage he's made many times, and he requires no aids.

And it sounds profoundly less lyrical to say so, but his room is also a small one, so it's not like he can go far wrong anyway. From the bed to the writing-desk, gripping the hard edges of the thick wood with his left hand as he fumbles for the curtains with his right. Unseeing fingers ensnare in fabric, yank it back, and the moonlight looks down at him from beneath the half-lidded gaze of the shutters. Shadow-edged laths of surreal definition, a stolen glance into another, strange, world.

A splinter of moonlight strikes the mirror; he is blinded before it.

He leans his cheek against the glass, revelling in the chill that immediately slices its tendrils beneath it. Between exhalations, he can see flickers of his reflection, before the flush of condensation beads it silver-white again. His shrine has many gods.

He is but one of them.

***It's His Psychosis, Actually***

The sheets are unpleasantly cool when he presses Germany back onto them; he feels the brush of fabric against his thighs and frowns, but it's nothing compared to Germany's full-bodied shudder. Germany draws a long, gasping breath in, and it rattles like the wind against loose windowpanes. In another situation, in another layer of themselves they can summon up and wear like second skins, China might find it heart-rending, this aching emptiness. He might give Germany a look of worry or sympathy, and perhaps even ask him out for coffee.

It was Germany's own fault for neglecting to close the window.

That's alright. China doesn't close windows either.

Germany's very pathos irritates him. His shoulders that huddle inwards, a small, weak, pathetic animal curling up into itself; his neck that arches back, the delicate rings visible in surprisingly sharp definition, how easy to snap even as they shift to accommodate his swallowing; his skin that is pale in the way China's can never be, pale bordering translucent and it's infuriating that Germany looks like he's wasting away, his spirit detaching itself and leaving this impossibly fragile structure behind.

…Looking at Germany…he sees himself, because he sees that they are both the same when all the layers were shed: nothing, really, nothing that wasn't made up of someone else. From their minds down to their looks, they are the ones who have the least privacy because so many millions have thrust their hands into what should rightfully be theirs and private but in the end is covered in the crude fingerprints of their moulding, and it couldn't be any other way.

Germany is so much like himself, and that shouldn't be right. They are his characteristics, Germany has no right to them. It doesn't matter that stripping Germany's emptiness might leave either more emptiness, in which case it would be a futile endeavour, or a soulless vacuum of true destruction. It's his. He has a right to self-pity.

This is his revenge; this is his vice, this is his sin that he draws so mercilessly. It would be easy to say it's Germany, but it's not.

Germany has pale skin that spasms under fine tremors. Germany has wide pale eyes. Germany has pale hair strewn all over the pillow.

It occurs to him that Germany is terrified.

He finds that he doesn't particularly care.

***Wer halt deine Hand?***

"I would hate," China says, licking cream off the side of his spoon, "to be set adrift in an ocean and not know where I was."

Germany doesn't offer an opinion, which China is well used to by now, but he is looking intently at China through the hair that's fallen over his eyes – he needs a haircut, China thinks, it's getting too long for when he doesn't gel it back, and is then promptly amused by the thought – so he takes it as a sign to continue what will probably for most part be a monologue.

"I mean, to look around and see the same thing on all four sides, and have no way of going anywhere, not to mention that there isn't anywhere to go to. That would be as lost as you can get." He shakes his head and takes a gulp of hot drink.

"I'd hate that," he sums up. As if it were a necessary re-iteration.

Germany cradles his cup between his hands, and is silent for a while longer.

"I wouldn't mind it," he murmurs quietly, looking into his cup, "as long as there was someone with me."

***It's Cold.***

Isn't it?