Hetalia and its characters belong to Hidekaz Himaruya. Reviews are appreciated. :)
Alfred had known that the plan would fail the second Brigadier General Ledlie had been chosen to lead the assault (1). Even now, days after the battle, days after the sting of gunpowder burning in the air, days after the ragged screams and miserable cries of dying men—his men, his blood—he couldn't help but think that if he had said something, there wouldn't have been so many graves to fill after the attack, so many beds that would remain empty for soldiers that would never return home. It had been long into the war, but Alfred would never comprehend or accept the fact that he was the most powerful man in this nation, but he was powerless in watching more and more young boys die for a cause that they couldn't even explain.
"What're you thinking about?" a soft voice asked.
Alfred jumped and knocked his gun down with a loud clatter and then flushed in embarrassment. Too many days of this damn siege at Petersburg, too many agonizing seconds and minutes and hours of waiting for the Rebs to start firing. It had been quiet for too long, and God, if Alfred knew anything about the Rebs, it was that they hated sitting still.
"Easy." The figure leaned down, features slowly melting into something recognizable in the dim firelight. William.
"I thought you were on watch," Alfred said.
"Quiet night, so they let a few of us off to rest." Will grinned. "It was Brown's fault, mainly. Fell asleep right on his feet and nearly broke his neck against a crate. If he hadn't gone up and done that, I would still be there." He sat down with a soft hiss. "I'm just tired," Will said quickly, noticing Alfred's concerned look.
"We're all tired," Alfred said, more to himself than anyone. The men were tired. The generals were tired. But Lincoln was tired most of all, of this war that Buchanan should have stopped after South Carolina first seceded; of the people tugging at his sleeves, demanding or begging to dedicate the war to some cause this or some cause that, when in the end, those were the people who weren't out here, in the dirt and the muck. Those were the people who didn't know that what they wanted was to push more children out into the grass fields and rock passes to be shot like rabbits.
"Damn right, we are," Will sighed.
"Your wounds acting up again?" Alfred studied Will, tried to imagine the stitches across his chest, the bandages around his arm and leg. Tried to imagine what it was like to be fragile. Stopped, because he would never understand.
Will shrugged. "Like usual. What about you?"
"Healthy as a horse," Alfred joked.
"You always seem like that," Will said lowly. "Healthy."
"I'm young." Alfred couldn't meet Will's eyes, because Will would know that he was lying, Will would know there was something different about him, and if Will figured out his secret, then Alfred would be back in Washington, trapped in the White House like a rare beast, to be groomed, petted, but never let outside. It was a strange irony, to be the Personification of the nation but to be kept as far as possible from the nation itself.
Will didn't probe further, let instead the silence that settled overhead define his curiosity. Alfred imagined invisible fingers groping the air above his head, trying to find purchase but failing.
"Do you think the war will be over soon?" Will said in a hush of breath, almost as an afterthought, but Alfred knew better.
He shrugged, because, what did he know? He was the Personification of America—no, no, the Union, because the Confederates weren't his anymore—but he was as helpless and blind as the rest of the lot surrounding him. What would happen tomorrow? Two days from now? A month? A year? Would the Union be dead? Or would the Confederates have fallen? Or would they both have collapsed under foreign nations, Arthur, Francis, even Ivan? God, God, Alfred didn't know anything!
"You know, sometimes I think about what it was like before this whole war up and started itself." Will leaned back, tilted his head to the night sky. "My wife, my kids. That's what keeps me going. Their faces when I come home in my uniform."
Alfred tried to say some words of encouragement, but the letters stuck in his throat like briars. How did he know that Will would make it back to his family in one piece or even at all? How did he know that he wouldn't join the others in the mass graves, to rot and to wither in the earth with nothing to mark his death but a solemn print in the newspaper?
"Someone once told me that that kind of thinking would get me killed," he continued, as if there were no silence, as if there were still hope. "But, if I don't think that, I would go mad." He turned to Alfred, his bright eyes shining in the darkness. "You have anyone back home?"
"Arthur." The name slipped out before Alfred could even catch himself, and he was grateful that in the darkness, Will couldn't see his red face. Arthur? Arthur? As if Arthur cared! In fact, right now, he was sitting with the Confederate leaders, an ambassador from England, chatting them up about treaties while funneling guns and ships to their ports! Hah! Arthur caring if Alfred was lost in this Godforsaken war. Maybe a century ago, before the Revolution, but not now. Especially since Arthur had him now, the traitor, to keep him company.
"Arthur?" Will raised an eyebrow.
"My…father." He stretched the syllables between his teeth like taffy.
"Don't seem to be too fond of him."
If only he knew. "It's been rough."
"That's what I'll never get. Why fathers and sons sometimes don't get along too well." Will tapped his forehead. "I'm not smart up here, but I know well enough that in the end blood sticks by blood, so why the hell do they put on such fronts around each other?" He held up his two hands and mimed bickering people. "'Son, you don't get anything right.' 'Dad, you leave me alone.'" He threw his hands up in exasperation. "Honestly."
"Maybe it's different for you," Alfred snapped. He didn't want to think about what Arthur had been to him…before. Less thinking meant less hurt, and this was no time to get sappy and start wishing for a different future. What mattered now was destroying the traitor and making him howl.
"I'm sorry," Will said quietly.
"No, it's my fault." Alfred rested his head on his knees. "It's just that I'm sick of this war. I don't know how many times I've seen a man get shot in front of me or have his legs blown off by a cannon shot or have his stomach gutted by a bayonet. And—God! I think I'm growing used to it. And what does that make me?"
"People die, Al." Alfred flinched at hearing the nickname, a nickname that he had always reserved for Arthur to use. "But they're dying for a good cause." Will spread his arms. "We're the army of freedom. We're making sure this country is going where it's supposed to go."
"You think that," Alfred scoffed. "But I'll bet half of the people in these trenches don't even know what they're fighting for. Or worse, they think that war is fun."
Will placed a hand on Alfred shoulder and gave him a gentle smile. "But there are people who do know. And they still go in knowing that they might not come out. Remember that."
"It's terrible still. All of it." After a short pause, he murmured, "There's no glory in dying." And he knew. How many times in his existence he had been thrown in the mud or left in the brambles, lifeless, open-eyed, gaping in the winter ice or summer heat, like a sullen fish. And he would wake up, lying in a pool of his own guts, his pants stained with urine, and smelling of the unmistakable stench of a corpse. No, there was no glory in death. Just shame and fear, because he had never gotten used to it, the feeling of his heart stopping and the void clawing him in. Sometimes, he wished that he were human, because then he would only have to die once.
"I'm not talking about glory," Will said, irritated. "I'm talking about doing what's right. I'd be a happy man going to the grave knowing that I was true until the end."
"And your family?" Alfred faced Will, his voice rising. "Your wife? Your kids? What of them? What good will you do them if you're lying still under some dirt because you followed your heart?"
"They understand why I'm here," he replied calmly, although Alfred noticed an edge of his mouth quivering in anger. "And they understand the consequences."
"No! No, they don't! You don't!" Alfred shoved himself closer to Will, so close that he could feel Will's breath on his face. "Let me tell you. You can fool yourselves into thinking that life will go on and people will accept and all of that, but it isn't that easy. You don't get over it so quickly. How can you say that? Do you not know how much they care and how much they will miss you? Do you not understand that when someone close to you dies, it's like you're ripping your own life out? How can you be so…so…selfish!"
Alfred half-expected Will to lash out at him, to slap him so hard that his jaw broke, but instead, Will said, "You lost someone, didn't you?"
"Too many people." Alfred shook his head in resignation. "And it's neither quick nor painless."
"Do we have a problem here, gentlemen?" a gruff voice asked. "I could hear you all the way from there." The officer jerked his thumb back over his shoulder.
"No, Officer Hadley." Will rose, took his hat off in respect. Alfred did the same. "We were just having a disagreement."
"Let's keep that disagreement down then," Hadley grumbled into his beard. "Last thing we need around here is we fighting amongst each other."
"I was actually going to take a walk," Alfred said. His eyes flicked to Will's. "To cool down, sir, if I may?"
Hadley stared at him, his black eyes skewering Alfred through the skin, lashing into his flesh, trying to find some kind of trick. Then, stiffly, he nodded. "You may. Follow me."
"Sir." Alfred slung on his rifle, in a practiced, too smooth motion, but before he left, he threw one last glance at Will. Will met his eyes, challenging, a slow, dark fire kindling in his gaze. But Alfred already knew that there was no contest, because Alfred knew that he was right. Life was nasty, brutish, and short. There was nothing else to say.
Dead was dead after all.
Alfred was finally alone. He wasn't far from the trench—no, he could still see the faint outline of the officer peering over the edge of the ditch—but, at least, he could no longer feel Hadley's hawkish eyes piercing him right through like a pin. Hadley was justified of course; with the war pressing on, desertions were all too many, but Alfred wished that Hadley knew that he was the one person in this nation who would not ever desert the country. What a joke that'd be, if it ever happened.
Days stuck in the dank camp had reminded Alfred of how much he had missed the sense of openness in the wild. Even though he could see the winking lights of Petersburg in the distance, along with the dull yellow light festering in the trenches, there was a feeling of freedom, of being able to stretch his arms without knocking his limbs against another soldier's, of being able to run and loosen muscles cramped from staying locked too long in the same position. Right now, with the stars burning above him, it felt like those nights all too long ago, when the word America had meant nothing to him, when it was just he in the brush and the natives in the forest, when there was no Arthur or Francis or redcoats or bluecoats, or this fort or that fort, no, just he wandering and playing in the woods, doing as he pleased.
But, of course, there were good times too that came with colonization. Clothes that would keep him warm in the winter instead of rough leaves that scratched his skin. A bed where he could rest his head after a long day in the sweltering sun instead of a patch of sodden dirt. And the sense of expanding, maturing, and becoming whole that came with developing as a nation.
Progress.
And then, there was Arthur. Alfred sighed, kicking a stray pebble in his path as he hiked up the hill sloping down toward the trench. Arthur had been nothing but kind to him—at first. Tucked him in after nightmares, cooked him food that somehow had seemed delicious at the time. Perhaps, Arthur had been too possessive of him, too obsessed with raising a child that he couldn't accept that child growing up into a man.
Alfred didn't regret becoming independent. He just wished that events would have played out differently.
He paused at the top of the hill, leaning against a straggly tree that hadn't been blown into bits by artillery fire, and surveyed the sprawl below him. Down there was his country, both sides of it, the Union and the Confederates. His heart, his soul that had divided into two because of a fatal course of circumstances that he could not prevent.
Alfred chuckled mirthlessly. It would have happened eventually. Freedom meant too much to him, to the him that was now the traitor. And that was why they were both here now, waiting for more battles and more graves. Even now, he could feel the shrieks of the wounded in the hospitals and on the fields bubbling in his veins. At the best of times, he could block them out. At the worst of times, he wished that he had never been born.
"Something funny?" An all-too-familiar Southern drawl pierced the air.
Alfred whipped around, his gun pointed at the figure sitting on a rock, leisurely eating a peach.
"Let's be civil, shall we?" The figure faced him with both hands upturned. Unarmed. "I just want to talk."
It would be so easy to shoot him, right now, the traitor, square between the eyes, just as those Confederates had slaughtered the Union soldiers during the Battle of the Crater a few days before. But Alfred placed the rifle against the tree anyways, far enough to not be an immediate threat to him, but close enough to be handy in case things took a nasty turn.
"What do you want, Johnny (2)?" Alfred said slowly, twisting the name into a tight knot.
"As I said, to talk." Johnny gestured at the rock next to him. "Sit down." Even in the night, Alfred could detect the subtle aristocratic air that Johnny wore about him, even though his grey uniform was decidedly dingy. It was in the slight, curved sneer on his lips. It was in the polished buttons on his uniforms. And it was in those sharp blue eyes, a perfect mirror of his own.
Alfred hated it.
"Three years, Johnny, and now you want to talk," Alfred said, sitting on the rock as far apart from his brother as possible without falling off. "What are you trying at this time?"
"This isn't some ploy," he said, smirking. "Besides…" Johnny gave him a cold glare. "I tried talking. I tried for a long time. You never listened." Before Alfred could reply, he continued, "No, you just shushed us down. You threatened us. You berated us. You took violent action (3). But you never stopped to hear what I had to say, what we had to say."
"What? That you thought that some men were more equal than others?" Alfred hissed. "That it was acceptable to let some people toil in bondage under the snap of the whip just because their skin was different? That slavery was all right, because Rome said so, because God said so?"
"This isn't about slavery!" Johnny roared, his hand crushing the peach, juices dripping onto the ground. His eyes flashing like steel, he spat, "I thought that you, of all people, would understand."
"Understand what?" Alfred dug his hands into the rock below him, feeling his fingers crunching through the stone, to prevent himself from digging them into his brother's neck.
"My rights," Johnny said in a whisper, but still just as much tinged with anger. "My rights as a citizen of this country. My rights as a member of this Union."
"You are no longer a part of the Union," Alfred said, clipping each word. "And there is no way in hell I'm ever going to give those rights to you, not until you know how to use them. Don't you understand, John? You're basing this war on an ideal. You're throwing men's lives away for a thought."
"Didn't you do the same with Arthur?" Johnny's voice was as frigid as ice. "You fought against him for a thought too. The same thought I'm fighting for now. My freedom from you."
"It's different."
"How is it different? Back then, weren't you fighting because you needed to be heard and he didn't stop to listen? The same thing I'm fighting for now." Johnny paused. "My rights, Al. That's all I ever asked from you. Trace everything back, and that's the root of it all. Even slavery."
"And I was reasonable," Johnny said. "I was constitutional. Even your beloved Thomas Jefferson, that paragon of freedom, said that I could secede legally from the Union (4). I held conventions, I heard the people's opinions—"
"The people," Alfred laughed. "You mean the rich, white planters sitting on their cozy plantations?"
Johnny ignored him. "Everything was legal. And we, the Confederate States of America, would have continued on happily in coexistence with you, trading with you, but not being a part of you, had you not gone ahead and started this war."
"You started it!" Alfred exploded, and then dropped his voice to a quiet snarl. "You started it all. If you hadn't seceded in the first place, none of this would have happened. So don't pin this blame on me. Don't you even dare."
"My secession was a necessary measure, just as your independence was from England. Have you ever asked your beloved president about Fort Sumter, about the whole truth of it? How he badgered us into a corner to force us to declare war on you (5)? But no." Johnny shook his head, his words dripping with mockery. "No, your beloved Lincoln can do no wrong. No wrong at all."
"Shut up. Shut up, right now."
"No." Johnny smirked. "I don't want to."
A blur of motion, a second too swift even for a blink, and Alfred's fist connected with Johnny's face, sending Johnny wheeling off the rock and mashing into the trunk of the tree. Amidst the cascade of leaves, the two tussled, groping blindly in the darkness, limbs flailing in all directions, trying to find some leverage, some advantage, but they knew each other too well, because they were the same, same heart, same blood, so Alfred gave up and let his brother seize his neck, nails digging into skin, straddling his body, his teeth bared.
Johnny leaned in close, his grip a vice, blood streaming from his swollen jaw onto Alfred's own lips. "I could kill you," he whispered. The trap around Alfred's neck tightened until his vision began to swim. "I could kill you right now. Snap your neck and be done with it."
"Go ahead," Alfred choked out. "Like it matters."
"I know," he said and then released him, leaving Alfred choking and gasping, spluttering like a pathetic fish on the docks of New York harbor.
"You…said…you wanted to…talk." Alfred rubbed at his neck, sure that he would have bruises. The explanation of where they came from was forming in his mind already. I was ambushed by a Reb spy. Grant would not be happy if he found out that Alfred had been with the traitor, having a more or less civil—hah!—conversation. Old "Unconditional Surrender" Grant. It was everything or nothing for him. No feelings, no family bonds—those had to be put aside. He would get the job done. Yes, soon. Soon the Union would be whole again.
"I did." Johnny nodded.
"Was that what you had to say?"
He smiled, a regal, sharp smile, lips pulled into a tight line. "No. You sidetracked me. I—" A strange shadow passed over his eyes, the audacity gone, the fight fleeing from his bones. "Never mind."
"You might as well say it."
"I am sorry," Johnny murmured. "About the Crater. About the conduct of my men."
Alfred laughed harshly. "Thanks, John. That makes everything better."
"It was…a good plan, if insane. If it had been executed properly—I—we—wouldn't have stood a chance."
"Ledlie forgot the ladders," Alfred said. "That drunk. He forgot that we needed to get out of the Crater in order to advance. And then, the other divisions pushed forward, and everything went to hell."
Johnny was no longer there. Alfred was instead seeing the Crater, the tumult, the gore, the ruthless spearing of intestines, the rush of cannon fire pouring down into the Union's own death trap, the scattering of gun shot, and that cruel Rebel yell: "It's like shootin' fish in a barrel!" The Confederates picking off the boys in blue one by one. Bang. Bang. Bang. And Alfred could do nothing but fight against the tide of Confederates leaping into the pit, bayonets flashing in the early morning, as fire rained down from the skies. He had, miraculously, come out in one piece, dodging the gleaming silver that threatened to run him through, ducking behind what shelter he could find as pieces of men, legs and arms and heads, flew in the air, a bloody, thick dust. Grant had told him, later, how many men they had lost, but the numbers didn't matter, only the stewing sense of incompetence and failure.
"Like Armageddon on Earth…" Johnny said, breaking the memory.
"Fire and brimstone." Alfred held his head in his hands. "I can't stop thinking about it. If I could have done something—"
"There was nothing to do," Johnny cut in, although there was a soft edge of sympathy in his light eyes. "This war, if you haven't figured out already, isn't dictated by us."
"But I'm the Personification. Surely that must mean something. But I just sat in that trench, waiting for that mine to go off, waiting for the battle to start, when I knew that we would have lost."
A pressure on Alfred's shoulder. Alfred looked to see Johnny's hand, gripping with reassurance, set with determination, that it would be all right, that they weren't enemies at that moment, just kin, with the battlefield and bullets left in the creeks and bluffs behind them.
"I'll make sure the prisoners are well-taken care of," Johnny said. "And…I'm sorry about…the black soldiers. It wasn't my decision (6)."
"I understand."
Johnny rose. "I should head back. You too."
Alfred nodded, extended his hand in a too formal gesture, but Johnny shook it anyways, a Southern gentleman until the day he died, and in a quick motion, he pulled Alfred into his chest, then closer into a soft kiss, and Alfred was sorry, sorry that he didn't stop to listen, sorry that tomorrow they would be enemies again fighting until their last breath, sorry about everything.
"You take care," Al," he said and broke the…the embrace? No, not the right word. It didn't matter, not now.
Alfred watched as his other part leaped into the night, back to his trench, back to the war.
That is why, Alfred thought as he looked toward the distance, seeing the Union fires and the Confederates fires, and the blue men and the grey men, and the land separating them, a span too far across to rejoin without force and suffering. I have to win, for his sake (7).
Shaking his head, he headed back.
(1) The Union Army was camped outside Petersburg, Virginia, an important city to the South since it funneled supplies to both Lee's army and Richmond. After weeks of trench warfare, the Union decided to dig a long mineshaft under Confederates lines and plant explosives in the mine. Theoretically, when the mine exploded, a large hole would be opened in Confederate defenses that could give the Union enough of an advantage to defeat the Confederates and seize Petersburg. A division of United States Colored Troops under Brigadier General Edward Ferrero was supposed to lead the assault, but at the last minute, the black troops were replaced by a white division (supposedly because Union officers lacked confidence in the black troops' abilities). Straws were drawn to determine which white division would lead the assault, and Brigadier General Ledlie and his division was chosen. Brigadier General Ledlie (who was rumored to be a drunkard) and his division happened to have one of the worst performance records of that section of the Union Army. The assault would later be known as the Battle of the Crater (the Crater being the pit the explosives made after they detonated).
(2) The Confederates were called Johnny Reb during the Civil War. Billy Yank was the name for the Union.
(3) This is a reference to President Andrew Jackson's actions when South Carolina threatened to secede from the Union in 1832. Jackson raised a 10,000-man army, dispatched naval and military forces, and privately threatened to invade the state and have those who called for secession hanged.
(4) Thomas Jefferson wrote the Kentucky Resolution, which stressed the compact theory of government. The theory explained that the thirteen states had entered into a contract to form the Union, and that the national government was a creation of the states' contract. Therefore, the individual states were the final judges of whether the government's actions were constitutional or not. Jefferson concluded that if the federal government had exceeded its constitutional powers, a state had the right of nullification, or the refusal to accept federal laws if they violated the Constitution. Nullification would be conducted in an entirely democratic manner: for example, a convention would be called to discuss the issue, and if the representatives elected by the people decided that the law was unconstitutional, the law would be nullified. Jefferson even said that secession from the Union was possible if the federal government used force to enforce "unconstitutional" laws, but Madison forced Jefferson to omit that detail from the final version of the Resolution because he thought it was too radical.
(5) The Confederates were slowly starving out Fort Sumter, held by Union soldiers in South Carolina. Lincoln was worried that if he helped Fort Sumter, the border-states would secede or he would provoke a war, but he also needed to keep that Union stronghold. Lincoln then announced that he was sending humanitarian aid to the fort (the aid would not include weaponry). If Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, let Fort Sumter peacefully resupply, he would defer to the North, but if he fired upon the Union ships, he would start a war.
(6) During the Battle of the Crater, the Confederates were rumored to have shouted to capture all the white soldiers and shoot all the black soldiers.
(7) A fear of the Union was that if America did separate into two nations, with the Confederacy gaining legitimacy as a country internationally, foreign powers could take advantage of the break and conquer the two nations while they were weakened.