If Gravity Pulled You Up
Author's Notes:
This was originally 'Does Gravity Discriminate?', a piece I wrote for a Christmas fan book that seemed to have been cancelled. It is a strange piece, written in a style that I have never attempted before. There are two parallel story lines, one rather allegorical and the other being grounded in reality. As a Christmas fic, you may find it too depressing, but this was written with the recent economic depression in mind. I hope you will find some enjoyment in reading this, despite its flaws.
Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia.
Soundtrack:
I have got a few options this time. For a mellower mood, I would suggest 'Stumbleine' by Smashing Pumpkins. If it is melodrama you are searching in this sea of angst, go for 'Tears of an Angel' by RyanDan. (Personally, I alternated between those two songs and 'Hallelujah' by Il Divo while writing this.)
XXX
He was the world's Golden Boy, and he was flying.
He had been flying ever since he was born, speeding through virgin air on the wings of his bald eagle, carried by the wind on the ripples of his high-flying, sky-waving Star-Spangled Banner, heart-stopping in his bravery and suicidal in the cockpit of his bomber plane, atmosphere-surpassing in a NASA rocket. In the still, black sky of the moon, he was there, in the limp folds of his flag. He was the moon's Golden Boy. The solar system's. The universe's.
The stars were jaded diamond dust, flash frozen on black velvet. He admired them for a while through the porthole window of the rocket, feeling like a creature of the ocean looking out of an aquarium at theory world outside. He took his time gazing at the stars. Then he dislodged himself from the steely wall and floated off.
Gravity unbound, he drifted into the cockpit room.
There was another creature inhabiting the cockpit room. He blinked. Like him, it was dressed in the white bulk of an astronaut's suit. However, it had a curious helmet on, the bulbous metal cage worn by underwater explorers of the past with its porthole-shaped viewing window.
There was nothing of the weightlessness he experienced and enjoyed in the way the creature moved. When it turned to face him, it moved its arms and legs as if it was underwater.
The eyes staring at him through the tiny viewing pane were as green as algae. He blinked again, this time in recognition. The creature was a man, and the man was a man he had known all his life.
"Arthur," he moved his lips soundlessly. There was supposed to be no gravity anywhere in the rocket, but, in the cockpit room, he felt a natural pull towards Arthur. His whole mass was moving towards Arthur. His whole being and his whole will.
"Arthur."
He reached Arthur and pulled the man into his arms. The algae eyes were observing. The pinkish lips were gently stretched in a muted smile. From outside, Arthur appeared watery, as if he was submerged. He tried to wipe the viewing window with his hand, but the smile, the ribbon-like smile that wavered and undulated like flesh viewed through the viscosity of water, remained as it was: wavering, undulating.
Limp and yielding in his embrace, he thought that Arthur also felt like a watery creature. He had the notion that, were he to let Arthur slip away from his grip, the man would swim away. But he did not let go, and Arthur remained motionless, looking at him, unblinking.
"Arthur," he mouthed for the third time. Initially, no response came; the universe held its pose as if flash frozen. Several heartbeats passed and the world remained unchanged. Then weight, the weight of reality, crashed onto their shoulders, like mountains, like waking into a parched world after a dream of cool waters.
Gravity returned.
There was no pain as he fell back down not to Earth, but to the cold floor of the rocket. He thought it was because his back was cushioned by his suit. His arms stayed around Arthur even then, and Arthur stayed in his arms. His green eyes were watery, watery and unblinking.
Watching the eyes and the fragile ribbon of the smile, he cautiously rolled Arthur off his chest and laid him gently on his side. With the return of the weight of all that existed, Arthur felt as heavy as an ocean. It alarmed him. He looked at his hands, trying to find his lost strength in his palms, as if superpower was something that could be misplaced.
The underwater explorer's helmet gave out not only a hiss, but also a faint cloud of mist. It popped off the suit, like an ancient lock opening by magic, or a head being severed from the body. Water gushed out; its copious amount reminded him of an aquarium being cracked open.
Gravity bound, no longer suspended in the amniotic protection of water, Arthur's head came to rest on the brass wall of the hollow helmet with a thunk. Some water remained in the helmet, and he could only see Arthur's left eye, floating barely above the water surface on his pale, water-pruned face. It was as green as tangles of beached seaweed. The pallid crescent of the smile was cleaved in half by the silvery water. All these he viewed through the small porthole-shaped window, which was dotted with water droplets, like a window after a London shower.
He scrambled to his feet. He took a long time doing so, for his astronaut suit, wet and white and bulky, dragged him down. His boots made a heavy sloshing sound as they treaded across the flooded floor.
Half of his face, the part that had been submerged in the flood, was wet. He felt the moisture beading on his fingertips, and it was only after he opened his eyes that he realised it came from his tears.
XXX
The tears were frozen on his face. They clung to his skin and stung it. He rubbed his hands together, the palms dry from the cold, before placing them on his cheeks to thaw the tears.
When they did melt, they ran like rivers.
He had to roll onto all fours before he could get up, pushing his snow-logged mass upright with the help of his knees and arms. He was young, but he had had his share of rough patches. When he finally stood up, spine protesting and muscles screaming, he realised that he had never felt this weary, this worn out, since forever.
Above his head, a bird gave out a heart-stopping caw. He raised his eyes in time to catch its fleeting silhouette, stark black against the greyish white of the winter-infused sky, shadowy like a vulture's. The last imagery forced him to avert his gaze, and he looked down instead, at the jagged crust of snow under his boots.
A drop of red, ruby red, as scarlet as life, landed with a splat on the cold whiteness.
He touched his index finger to his left nostril. A warm wetness seeped into his skin. He nearly laughed out loud-he had been knocked out, half-buried in the snow for hours (Two? Three? He could no longer tell one thing from another; the passing of time was only one among many, many examples.) and still his blood stayed so warm-but quickly stemmed it when he started to choke on his own blood.
The metallic taste of it went straight to his head. Feeling slightly dizzy, he carefully bent his legs at the knees and forced his body to sit on the trunk of the pine tree.
He only noticed the monstrosity of the tree, the sheer size of it, as he swung his leg to straddle its girth. Abandoning his bleeding nose, he ran his hands over the wood's veins in wonder and fascination. He stayed there for a while, staring the bulk of the giant he had conquered, feeling his blood trickle down his nose to freeze on his upper lip. All along, he never stopped admiring.
XXX
There came a time when Arthur finally deemed him old enough to be taken out as a drinking partner. It should not have been too long ago; however, as he recalled the past, the war times, and Arthur's hesitant, cornered gaze as he mumbled, "Would you care for a drink, America?" Such was Arthur's resolve that he dared keep the eye contact between them, and he could sense the years and decades and generations of hurt in Arthur's eyes and feel sufficiently moved to give his previous caretaker a slightly crooked smile and an easy,
"All right."
Arthur was a melancholic drinker but it was somewhat befitting; the mood of the globe was heavy with impending war and he drowned his sorrows in Arthur's sorrows, listening to the quiet gurgle the man's throat emitted whenever he took a long gulp of his drink. It was like a listening to the sounds of a dream stream: faint and one had to strain to catch the minutiae of its flow to allow oneself to be soothed by it.
He had to carry Arthur back home that night, and as he stumbled from the illumination of one streetlamp to the next, a funny thought that he would remember for the rest of his never-ending life crossed his mind.
"Did you wait this long to ask me out for a drink to make sure that I could carry you back home?"
The question fell onto the yellow-lighted asphalt and bounced its way into silence. On his back, slim hands gripped his shoulders in a drunken burst of strength.
XXX
Running a hand through the chilled locks of his hair, and conveniently forgetting the blood on his fingers, he cast a furtive look on the tree below him and sighed,
"What if I can't bring you home?"
That, he realised, was what a scary thought was all about.
XXX
He was examining the tree, ensuring that its branches remained all right, that nothing had broken off too badly so as to ruin its appearance. It was a handsome tree, and he mentally congratulated himself for having chosen it. He chose it with a great sacrifice: when he finally managed to uproot it from its resting place, its weight, aided by his momentum, toppled him onto his back, and if he had not had the thought to roll aside, it would have crashed onto him mercilessly, prickly pine needles spearing him in the eyes, in the flesh, in the soft parts of his body, its weight unyielding on his bones.
Would he have broken?
A bird somewhere above his head gave out a shriek, and suddenly the world vibrated. He had a brief moment of panic (Earthquake? His mind finally breaking down?) before he stuck one bloody hand into the pocket of his jacket and extracted his mobile phone.
"Hey," the quiet voice spoke into his ear, made ghostly and faint by the terrible transmission. He had to strain his ears to catch the words. "Are you all right?"
"Arthur," he wanted to say, but he swallowed the name and instead spoke out loud. "Yeah. All right."
It had to be the transmission. A mechanical echo of his voice followed soon.
"Yeah. All right."
XXX
"Look at your hands," Arthur prompted him, and he wondered at how the man sounded so far away. One of them might as well have been at the end of the world. The question was: which one of them was there? "Look at your palms."
He looked at them. Matching the veins of the wood, red lines ran across the tender halves of flesh, like a subway map, like a sewage system, like rivers. Frozen rivers of red that was not even ruby red, but the sickening darkness of an overly ripe garnet shade.
"Are they bloody?"
He would have replied, but the sight of his hands had rendered him mute. He moved his head instead.
"America-Alfred, lad," the voice in the phone was dry and humourless, like the bitter snow. "I can't bloody see your nod."
He took some time gathering his voice, bits and scraps and pieces left in his voice box. Arthur, apparently, was content to wait for him in silence, as if he knew his struggle. "Yes," the word finally tumbled out of his lips, hoarse and scratchy like an old LP. "They are."
"Look for your backpack," the voice in the phone continued. Soft. Whisper-like. Ghostly. He had to strain to catch it. "You may have misplaced it, but it should be around still. Look for your backpack."
He went to look for it in the shade of a curved boulder, snow-capped like a miniature of a mountain. He went to look for it in the snow, breaking the white crust and kicking the slush underneath. His boots got wet in the process. He stuck his hands, bloody palms and stained fingers and all, into his tree's collection of pine needles, thanking the cold for numbing his digits.
"Found it," he grunted into the speaker, jerking his backpack out of the needle forest. It was a blue-and-red backpack, an old friend of his. If he could withstand the cold and the pine, then the backpack could withstand them too and even more.
"There is a First Aid Kit inside. Should I leave you alone while you fix your hands? I imagine it will be easier that way."
He could not muster any thought, any words, as he found the First Aid Kit in the backpack. He let the backpack fall back to the ground once he found what he wanted; it fell with a tremendous thud and made a crater in the snow. "How-," he started, but then a fit of coughs passed over him and when it ended, the connection had been severed.
He listened to the mechanical tone of absence for a while, before stuffing his mobile phone back into his pocket and settling to fix his hands. Just the way Arthur wanted him to.
XXX
They had had fights like any other couple. They just had more creativity concerning what they should fight about than other couples. There were fights about fairies, scones, aliens, and horror movies vying for the most creative spot. The most passionate fight would be the one concerning the merits of making love versus the joys of quickies. The chilliest fight, all dry, scathing comments and acrid taste lingering in their mouths, would be the one about the Christmas tree.
"I love you," Alfred spoke in anguish, eyes holding sincerity and longing and love, love, love, and nothing else. He had his hand on the doorknob of the front door of his winter mansion. "It's just...sometimes I think you don't love me back."
"I love you," Arthur replied, wearily but nonetheless coolly, leaning against the wall of the front hall. "It's just that you can't be the world's Golden Boy forever. I wish you would accept that."
"Just because I've been finding strands of white hair lately..."
"Alfred," the cool voice cut in, "do you really think you can be my Golden Boy forever?"
Alfred's eyes turned cooler than snow, than Arthur's voice. "I'll bring back the biggest damn Christmas tree you have ever seen." His tone was harsh, like winter.
As the door slammed, both men thought they could hear the calls of a vulture.
XXX
There were fights that were really fights, fists flailing and mouths cursing and eyes burning. Then there were fights that were not really fights, but the searing heat of Arthur's breath as his air glided over the cooling sweat on Alfred's limbs.
"Love, have you thought of the room arrangement? Would you like me to place Russia and China together in a room?"
Seeing through the utter darkness (The curtains were shut; the moon was not up. No lamp burned.), Alfred reached for Arthur scalp and gently, firmly yanked on the strands of hair there. "They are not coming," he growled.
"What about Japan and Europe? Should we have a frugal Christmas together? Fallen superpowers and empires congregating to celebrate Christmas a la church mice. That could be the theme of your Christmas party this year."
"They are not coming," he breathed on the shell of Arthur's ear, large, bony hands grasping thin shoulders to flip their position over. His eyes, gleaming in the dark above Arthur's face, were like clouded skies, full of premonition-none of them good. "The fallen Wall Street and the ex-empire though, are coming."
XXX
"Look through your backpack again. You should find-"
"Where are you right now?" he interjected, breaths coming up in the form of faint clouds, rising to the sky like helium-filled balloons.
"In the mansion, where you had left me. I do not know the road out of this forest, if you care to remember."
Gazing down at his crudely bandaged hands, he sighed, wincing at the static in the transmission, "In which part if the mansion are you?"
He imagined Arthur perching on top of the red tiles of the mansion's roof, binoculars in hand. The lenses of the binoculars gleamed like an insect's eyes, observing, watching. When Arthur took flight, he would take flight like a vulture, mouth wide open in a cry fit to swallow the sky.
"In the front hall, where you had left me. Now, listen to me, lad. Look through your backpack. You'll find a Tupperware. I've packed you some scones. They should last you until morning."
He had forgotten to wear a watch, so he squinted at what skyline was visible through the ramrod trunks of the pine trees. It could not have been past five in the afternoon. "I'll be back before nightfall," he retorted.
Like an echo, or like an answering machine, the voice called back, "They should last you until morning."
XXX
He forced himself to eat one of the scones before getting to work.
It went down like acid.
XXX
Inside his backpack, he did not only find a First Aid Kit and a batch of scones, but also a pair of thick gloves and torchlight.
The protection the gloves provided was more than welcomed. Encased in them, his hands harnessed their newfound strength and eased themselves onto the sides of the pine's trunk. It hurt like hell, but it was a bearable hell.
He tried to lift it above his head, the way he had done it with Arthur's SUV. He thought he heard his spine cracking, so he killed his attempt and lowered the tree back to the ground.
After judging the general direction of where his mansion was, where Arthur was, he began pushing the tree forward. Its needle-like leaves left scratches on the snow, upon which he placed his footing. So he began his long trek home.
His mobile phone vibrated. It was a message from Arthur.
"Turn on the torchlight. Don't get yourself lost in the dark, love."
Chuckling with a hint of mirth-his first since forever, he flicked the torchlight on. It shone sodium yellow in the bluish winter night. "I'm afraid I already am," he whispered. He touched his finger to his left nostril to make sure that no blood was flowing before he continued his way home.
XXX
When the Wall Street crashed, Alfred, too, crashed onto his knees before the toilet bowl and proceeded to flush his bowels clear of its contents.
Had he not been kind in his greater strength? He asked Arthur the question afterwards and the man simply swept his sweaty bangs aside before answering succinctly, "The position of power is meant to be passed on, love. Now, don't you fret."
Easy for him to say. Time had had its share with Arthur's wounds, and had yet to begun with Alfred's. The sudden appearance of white strands of hair inspired fear in him. So did woks and metal pipes.
He wanted to fly.
A vulture gave a heart-stopping caw.
The world shifted, and gravity clamped its grip on his being.
XXX
The scones were finished and the Tupperware licked clean by the time the day broke upon him, faint rays casting a golden sheen on the snow, on the forest, on him. He relished in its invigorating warmth and tore off his gloves with his teeth. He finished the remaining distance with bare hands.
The iron gates of his mansion were wide open, as if to admit not only their owner, but also their owner's kill. He grinned at the sight of them, and split into a big, wide smile of good ol' U.S. Of A. at the sight of the man standing in the middle of his driveway, bundled up in blankets and a thick, old coat, a well-patched souvenir of the past.
"I've told you so," Arthur began, but he dropped the tree and went to him and swung the man into an embrace in a deft movement, all air and ease and flight.
"This feels right," he mumbled into Arthur's cool locks.
"What does?" Arthur sighed, gloved fingers working the straps of the backpack off Alfred's shoulders, letting the burden free fall onto the snow-capped ground.
"Holding you," Alfred replied, and he sounded so much in mourning that Arthur burrowed deeper into his embrace to comfort him and held him tighter than he had ever held the lad before. "Giving you the biggest damn Christmas tree you have ever seen."
"Merry Christmas." The words floated off in clouds of crystalised vapour, rising like balloons, like creatures on wings. "What would you like for Christmas?"
"The ability to carry you home," Alfred replied simply. "I fear the day when you become too heavy for me."
"I'll go on a diet," Arthur muttered, "and pluck all your white hair away. Then we'll wait. Then we'll see."
"If only I could always carry you," he keened, squeezing Arthur's shoulders. "If you could remain the exception-"
XXX
In the rocket ship, half submerged in the shallow water, Arthur's eyes were as dead as algae.
He had never felt as heavy as he was feeling before. His whole mass was dragging him down.
Yielding to its will, he sat down on the wet floor and settled next to Arthur.
He wondered when gravity would come to claim him, and his power to fail him.
XXX
"Alfred, love, my Golden Boy," Arthur whispered, words all gentle and careful not to hurt what had been broken, "gravity does not discriminate."
XXX
By the way, RobinRocks, the wonderful, wonderful author of 'United', 'For Better, For Worse', 'A is For', 'Pater Noster', and many more amazing fics that will simply blow you away (well, they certainly did that to me), also wrote several fics for the same fanbook. Go and check out her contributions, now uploaded on the under the title 'Baby, It's Cold Outside'.
As usual, please read and review! Concrits are especially, especially, begged for.
Signing out,
Ilsa S. H.
Lost Duck Inc.