All right, folks, the urge to write a songfic has finally overcome the embankments, flooded the town, and carried off a herd of mildly perturbed goats and a Klingon-themed wedding cake. My apologies.
Sadly, the song of choice for this fic is not "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," a Hetalian song if I've ever heard one. Nope, it's "Here Comes the Rain Again" by the Eurythmics, a British synth-pop-rock duo from the 80s. You might know them from the song "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)". At any rate, knowledge of the song is not necessary for the (dubious) enjoyment of this fic, though I would certainly recommend at least skimming through the lyrics. In the third and final chapter of this fic, those lines —written like so— are lines from the song inserted ever-so-dramatically into the text as the characters hear them.
So, here you go, a quasi-angsty, purple-prosed headdesk of a fic. Yaaaay!
England's first memory is of the rain.
He remembers the feeling distinctly: the scent of crushed moss and wet grass filling his nose with subtle sharpness, the sound of the light thuds of drops hitting living leaves slipping gently into his ears, the feeling of those same small impacts on his skin and the slippery-fresh feeling of wet greenery under the newborn skin of his fingers and cheek.
And, finally, when he opened his eyes, the sight of a world of muted greens, grey skies, and refracted light glittering from every fallen drop.
He remembers looking up then, and a raindrop fell directly onto the tip of his nose, startled a giggling gasp out of him. He had taken it to be a greeting from the rain—after all, if there were such things as him, why not sentience there?—and responded, marveling at the sound of his own voice reverberating through the air for the first time.
.
Even in those long-ago days it made him a little quieter, a little calmer, a little more thoughtful. To him rain is and has always been a time of reflection, in dimmed windowpanes and cloudy puddles and the subtle sheen of damp pavement. The world reflected in a drop of water, and him reflecting on the world.
Over the centuries he developed a strange relationship with the showers that so often sweep over him. They dim the sky, block the sun, wash the color out of the world until only dullness remains, and inevitably leave behind acres of clinging muck. Yet the world in perpetual twilight has an uncanny beauty, a subtlety to shades and distinctions that reminds him of the very best teas, and the mud holds the vital fertility that feeds his people, his land, and—by extension—him. It is a necessary evil to life on his islands, but then again if an evil is necessary, is it truly evil anymore? The rain became a part of him—as if it ever wasn't—and now his grumbles are more for show than anything else.
His people feel it too, he knows—it's in the way they spend endless time complaining about a rainy day the way one might complain about a troublesome yet indisputably loveable pet. And when the skies clear and the sun shines bright and hot, they celebrate—but within a few days they begin to feel the slight edginess, the sliver of wrongness, the itch of anxiety that would build until the rain came again to wash it all away. A desert Great Britain would rapidly become a deserted Great Britain.
Rain, rain, go away, they sing, but can't help but add Come again another day.
.
When storms roll in over the Atlantic, he often finds himself on his high coastal cliffs, looking out over the blue-grey waves with their sharp white edges, reflecting the amorphous churning of the steel-grey clouds above.
He faces directly into the arriving storm, delighting in the power he finds there, power not of metal or rock but mere air and water, and needles of rain and sea-spray hit his skin and his land, the roars of sea and sky thrumming over his senses and growling through the bones and the chalk cliffs that were one and the same until the world was just reaction without thought, emotion without consideration, experience and nothing else. It is always within that chaos that he finds his greatest peace of mind.
He wonders then, as the wind blasts through him and rain sends electric thrills under his shivering ribs, what would happen if he simply threw himself into the roiling waves far below. It would by no means kill him or even scratch him if he was smashed against the cliffs—instead he wonders where the ocean currents might carry him, what new discoveries might be found through his spyglass and over the horizon.
In the old days he had done it often enough, letting the winds that filled his sails carry his ship wherever they were wont. The rain had been with him even then, fresh water slicking the salt-rimed deck, stinging exhilaration-wide eyes and lungs drawing deep. In the moments when the wind howled defiantly into his soul and the ship teetered on the crest of a storm-wracked wave, seemingly waiting on the force of a single raindrop to push it one way or another, he'd stand poised at the wheel, knowing that in that breath of time he grasped the calm within the storm.
.
Always the feeling of rain pitter-pattering across his senses, physical and metaphysical, engenders within him the strangest yet most comfortable emotion he has known throughout his long life.
It isn't quite melancholia, but neither is it ebullience—calm yet restless, a vague itch at the back of his mind, ever present, never intruding.
Wistfulness, he calls it, though he knows it isn't quite the right word. But if he remembers correctly, wist had meant 'intent, attentive; quiet, silent' and in that, at least, the word is right. It feels…fitting. To be full of silent intent, full of a patient purposefulness. Yes. An intent that, unfortunately, seems to be silent as to the identity of its target.
So he blinks away the drops that trickle into his eyes, filled with the paradox of quiet restlessness and calm invigoration. Though formless it is a peaceable enough determination, so England lets it lie snugly within him until the day it finally reveals itself.
How can he deny it? It is as much a part of him as the rain itself.
.
In recent centuries that itch has pointed—if such a thing can point—across the Atlantic.
The rain falls, and the drops feel like the pricks of remembrance trickling down his spine and into his memories, just as an old song or long-forgotten smell suddenly experienced would tug one's mind toward the indescribable feeling of an earlier time.
His anger, his disavowal, his rebellion, his insurrection; his hatred, his denunciation, his thoughtlessness, his…rejection.
So long ago it seems. So long ago it was.
It had hurt, at first—by all that was holy it had hurt. For years afterward he had averted his gaze from Canada's, turned to stare, stony-faced, at the sickly drizzle falling outside so he wouldn't have to look at those too-familiar features. He'd known Canada's expressions anyway, which would inevitably hold hurt, injured pride, and a subdued anger toward his two brothers for dragging him into their mess. But somehow the worst part was the quiet understanding that underlay it all, the needle-thin knives of pity and acceptance. England hated that understanding, for while his mind knew better, his foolish heart insisted that that expression had no place on America's face.
His colony's—his brother's rejection had hurt like a bullet to the gut, spilling not clean blood but that mixed with bile and stomach acids and all the other nasty bits best left hidden safely inside the body, out of one's sight. He had felt it pool within him, eating away, festering in sickly misery as water dripped down his face and his sprawled cloak soaked in the filth and cold blood of that field.
In the end, though, it had healed, as all wounds must if they do not kill—and he was far from dead. He slowly stitched himself whole again like cloth under his embroidery needle, leaving only a scar and the now-harmless bullet lodged deep within him.
He isn't some sodden sap, to weep and blubber at the first raindrop; he sniffs disdainfully at the very un-English idea. The memory is always there, though, falling from the sky and trickling down his collar, a whisper of a thread weaving faintly through his thoughts.
Now it is an old wound, an old pain, and an old regret, the scar worn familiar and thin with time, just another memory of bad times long past. It aches at times, certainly; a mere creaking echo of the pain that had been. It always seems to blossom around the other's birthday just as other veterans' old war-wounds might ache on long winter nights.
This is immaterial, however, a mere shadow of the tragedy of centuries before, and he is happy to let it remain so, forgotten in day-to-day life and a faint twinge when brought up. Nations who survive long enough learn the futility of wallowing in such ancient grievances; such inevitably, irreparably end up destroying themselves as much as their nemesis when things dissolve into endless war and pointless hate. It's like trying to wrestle in a rosebush—and England has had quite enough of that to last even his lifetime. So England lets the past flow past like rain slipping his windowpane, and presents himself to the present, and does his damndest to ensure he has a future in the future.
.
Sometimes, though, he wishes they two might sit down together and lay to rest whatever thorny beast billows, intangible yet ineffably present, between them. That chimera he always feels stretching him, tugging at his stitches, pulling him in too many directions. It feels like the rain, too, a self-contradictory enigma that is at once his greatest annoyance and best friend.
He wishes he and America might talk about such serious matters for once in their centuries of being unshakeable brothers, unhappy enemies, unwilling allies, and unwitting friends. Yet his hesitance is always there, the imperceptible fear that he'd lose his temper as he inevitably does and America would retreat into his isolationist walls of obfuscating stupidity—and then nothing would be gained and far too much lost. Their easy antagonism is too precious to him, the status quo too good a state, and he finds himself responding in the way he always does, with cutting comments and subtle smiles. And America responds the way he always does, with brash comments and sunshine smiles, and everything feels so…all right…that England continues on peaceably in his role as infuriated ex-brother and America continues on cheerfully in his role as the friendly village idiot.
.
And so the rain falls, and England tilts his head back to let it hit his face squarely, chuckling inwardly at the odd looks he receives from passersby—for indeed, a part of him feels ridiculous too.
And so the rain falls, and England thinks of things that were and then weren't, that might have been and now never would and—perhaps—were never there at all.
And so the rain falls over England, and he looks across the endless grey sea and wonders if the same rain falls there too.
Medical note: In some bow- and gun-inflicted injuries (especially those happening in the less medically-advanced days of yesteryear), it is far better to leave the bullet or arrowhead (or even shrapnel) inside the body than to try to dig it out and worsen the injury. After all, if it's stopped moving, how exactly is it going to hurt you? Teddy Roosevelt, for example, had a bullet lodged in his chest from an assassination attempt in 1912, and kept it harmlessly there until he died in 1919 of an (unrelated) heart attack. I myself have a piece of pencil graphite under the skin of my palm, which got there when my brainwashed classmates tried to murder me in my peaceful desk-sleep.
See you for the next chapter in a few days!