a/n. ive always wanted to explore the relationship b/t first people nations and the english in the context of hetalia and so i did and so i have and so here it is. its going to be at least two parts, hopefully three; one more from england's perspective and then one from america's. reviews are nice & make me feel good abt myself ;)

He had been born from her own ocean womb, she had given birth to him there on the sand, she had found him crawling when his skin had glowed fresh like a chestnut and his eyes had been dark like rich new earth and she taken him to her breast and suckled him on her great rivers, her lifesblood. Her love for him had taught her to speak in all of the many tongues of her peoples, tongues that had lived for so long silently in her heart, and she had sung to him the songs of her children and she had wanted to give him everything, all of her rich, endless country, but not like this.

She looked at the blood that poured from her mouth and dripped sluggishly onto the soil, watched as the earth sucked it up like rain after a draught, felt the terror and pain of her children as they screamed and screamed and died, looked up into eyes that were beautiful and blue and so terribly foreign to her and thought, no, not like this.

She was the one who had discovered him; before the pale faced one had come with his envy-green eyes and his sharp, chameleon smile and his God and his guns, she had been his Mother.

Before she found him there among the rocks - as if he had been born from the sea, like she had, like the myths of her many peoples - she had been alone. Her solitude, like her country, was vast and rich and wild. She stretched from horizon to horizon, ocean to ocean, cradled the sun when it set and when it rose. Hundreds of rivers and creeks flowed through her veins, some raging and wild, others placid and still and calm; her great jagged mountains stretched the smooth skin over her spine, mirrored the ridges of each vertebrae; her deserts gave her skin its rich reddish gold color; her endless grasslands fell in long straight tendrils over her shoulders, smooth and silky and black as night. She was tall and regal and elegant, and she was silent; she did not need words when her arms could reach across the world.

It wasn't that she couldn't speak; her mind was abuzz with the many languages of her many people; Cherokee, Iroquois, Apache, Hopi... Endless tongues and she was master of them all. But her silence lay in her solitude. She did not attempt to meet her neighbors; the winter child to the North and the jungle warrior to the South - they respected her borders, and she theirs. She would see them sometimes from the tallest perches she could find; her Evergreens, or her mountaintops, would watch the little boy in the snow, wrapped in furs, or the broad, rippling shoulders of the man standing atop his great pyramids. Yes, sometimes she watched, but that was all and never for long. It was her own land that interested her, and her own peoples, she did not need to look beyond the world encompassed within herself.

Her peoples, whose lives gave her heart its steady rhythm. They were fractured; there were many tribes that lived within her borders, and all of them where her ka'êškóneho. She had lived among them once when she was small, before her first blood (the first blood that had touched her ma¶a, that she had felt seep like a wound from between her legs and she had cried and she had become a woman to the screams of the first who had died violently in her country). She had danced around their fires at night and listened to their stories about a world born from nothingness, born from vast oceans, born from darkness. She had drifted from one tribe to another to learn their individual histories and traditions and she had loved them all.

And her love for them had driven her away deep into her forests and her mountains, because when they warred against each other, her heart would seize with pain and sorrow. She knew now that this was simply the nature of human beings, that all of their wonderful differences inevitably clashed, and they were so simple and so small, and violence came so naturally to them. She supposed it came naturally to everything; she watched mother bears devour their cubs when seasons were bad, and she knew that this world was as vicious as it was beautiful.

They knew her now as their first mother, and so she was, distant but omnipresent. She kept her eye on them, of course, because she loved them still, but from afar. She felt the pain of their wars, and when she did she ran further into herself, into her caves and her forests and her mountains, into her deserts, into her inarable wastelands. She walked from coast to coast, brushing her hands across every rock, learning the rough surfaces of every tree, naming every plant and animal that crossed her path and that lived and died within her bosom. She drifted to sleep listening to the stories of her people, smiling, comforted that they still held her close to their hearts and to their spirits. She flew on the wind, strong, impenetrable, silent, and alone.

She found him newly born up North along her Eastern most coast where the wind stung sharply and the sea churned, a violent, gray unknowable thing that foamed and spat and offered up this strange childling from deep within. He looked at first like any one of her children, dark-skinned with tufts of silky black hair upon his head; but she knew that he was not a mortal child the moment she saw him. His eyes betrayed what his tiny body did not; they were like her eyes, black dark and yet bright like the moon, endless, old.

She watched him crawl from the sea, her feet sunk ankle-deep in the sand, and was overwhelmed with a wave of nauseous inexplicable dread. Like the sages of her people, her eyelids fluttered prophetically; she shuddered with the bone deep knowledge that this child harbored great change, and it set her on edge like nothing else in her long existence had before.

He saw her, his black eyes fixed upon where she stood very still, and his mouth opened silently and he began to crawl towards her; she watched how the sand parted under his little fists and cushioned his knees and felt the sudden bloodthirsty temptation to bash his brains upon the rocks, a feeling tempered only by the urge to flee into her forests. He had been born from her seas and her land rippled around him, familiar, doting, and she could not understand what her instincts felt from the very beginning: that this child's life would be her ruin, that his very existence demanded hers (sacrifice, retribution). She wavered there on the shore, conflicted, watching his slow unsteady approach and trying to decide what was to be done, suppressing this sick foreboding that made her throat tighten and her breath come quick and harsh. She would throw him back into the ocean from whence he'd come, let him drown in the embryonic fluid that had cast him out onto her soil -

But then he let out a cry, a quiet, keening wail and she swore she felt it like the cries of her children and her bloodthirst stuttered uncertainly and then faded into pity and then dismissal. (After all, what was there to be afraid of? What was death to one such as herself? And what could an infant possibly do to her? She could not die. These lands could not perish; they would not sink into the sea or crumble into ash. She was strong.) She forced her limbs to move, to overcome the wary resistance that she could not name, that she steadily shook off with every step. It was just a child, a child of her country - so, then, it was her child.

She took him in her arms and felt his warmth seep into her bones and listened to him hum and coo and his little hands dragged sand through her hair and onto her cheeks where he touched her, fascinated, his eyes wide and full of wonder and love. All thoughts of infanticide evaporated (they would never return, not once, even when the color bleached out of his skin and his teeth turned sharp and he looked at her and said, "heathen") and she held him to her chest and hummed low in her throat, swayed with the breeze that tickled them both. Her initial reaction was quickly forgotten; she breathed in his smell, new; he smelled like her oceans, he smelled like her own. (She should never have wrapped her arms around him; she should have never touched him, because when she did, she loved him, was bewitched and blinded and undone.)

"Born of my flesh," she said, breaking an eon-long silence, and he stole her words with a sloppy infant kiss before she had even heard the sound of her own voice.

"They are your children?"

They sat perched upon a high cliff, looking out over the plains that dominated the middle of her country, far from the seas where he had been born. He had grown into a toddler who could walk on his own feet, who watched the world with rabid curiosity, a curiosity so intense and probing that at times it frightened her. She did not question anymore where he had come from or why he was here or what nation he would grow into. Her love blinded her to any possible danger. She was certain now that his destiny was to inherit her world from her when the time was right; when her children grew strong and many and came together, learned to temper their violence with their passionate loving human hearts. Her heart swelled with pride when she thought about the future she envisioned for him, when she looked at him and thought of the powerful man he would grow into, the feathers she would braid into his long dark hair, the paint he would wear around his eyes.

She nodded her head and carded her long brown fingers through his hair. "Some of them. These are the buffalo hunters, see." She gestured far at the nearby herd. "There are many more, all of them different. Some hunt fish, grow food from the earth." She closed her eyes and felt the sun and her son pressed against her side. "There are many, they are all my children."

He turned his beautiful, terrifying eyes to her and took her hand, jealously gripping it tight. He was a mercurial child, tempestuous at times, but he loved her dearly. (Don't you love me? Your Mother?) "Then what am I?"

She eased him with her smile, slow and lovely and full of warmth. Her arms wrapped around him and brought him up roughly so that he squealed and squirmed and giggled, kicking his naked little feet while she placed loud kisses on his face and bit the shell of his ear gently.

They sobered after a moment of tender tussling, and she smoothed his dark, curly hair and said, "They are my children, but they were not born of my body - " And she took his hand and laid it flat agains the rock beneath them so that he could feel her pulse running through it. "They are born of each other, and that is why they live amongst themselves - "

"Is that why they die?" His expression was very serious. He had seen it, of course he had, had seen all the myriad of ways that human beings could die. He had watched his mother's face twist in pain when the humans warred amongst themselves, when they stole from and murdered and enslaved on another, had seen her sweat at night when a fever would ravish one or two of the tribes; and he had felt it himself too, but never as strongly, as intimately as she did.

She nodded. "Yes. They die. But you…" And she cupped his face and her breath whispered around them, picking up and tousling their long hair together, blowing across the great flatness of the plains. "You are a part of me, born of this land. When you grow up, you will become their father, and they will be your children, and this - " The rock beneath their hands felt warm and alive. "Will be your body."

He grasped handfuls of her hair in his small determined fists with sudden fear. "But what about you?"

And she smiled and shrugged because she did not know, and it did not bother her, not anymore. The old, first fear she had felt when she found him on her beaches had been smothered by her great love for him. He pushed their foreheads together and said fiercely, with more power than his little body should have possessed, "I will not let you die! You can never leave me!" (And at the time his ferocity had endeared him to her and she had admired his spirit, strong like her warrior children, strong and loyal and true.)

She took his hands gently from her hair and once again pressed them to the cliffside, trying to impress upon him this most elementary lesson, of the sacred body, of the land. "I will never leave you, cinks." And then she smiled and teased him softly, "But you might leave me, once you grow up big and strong! Leave your old unitsi behind you." And he looked at her with great skepticism and scoffed and settled in her lap.

The wind blew and they watched the buffalo hunters and she rested her chin on the top of his head, content.

Are you leaving me? My son?
You are no Mother of mine.

The Pale ones came.
The Others in their great ships from across the sea. She felt them come, and when they landed on her shores she was there with her son at her side, watching from the tree line, her eyes hard. She felt him moving uneasily beside her, shifting his weight from foot to foot and casting nervous glances up into her stony face. He had never seen her so still. Then he turned his eyes to the white sails on the horizon, and they watched the approach together in silence. She felt old fear, fear she thought had long since died, crawl slowly up her back. She remembered her son emerging from the sea, and he had been so beautiful and she had felt so horrified.

The men rowed their little boats onto the beaches, the great ships anchored farther out. She narrowed her eyes. They came out of the sea, but they were not beautiful, and she felt rage now, not horror. Rage, because she could feel their intentions the second they stepped onto her soil, felt the poison of their foreign ways, their greed, their lust for her, for what she could provide for them, felt the venom seep into the sand under their feet.

"Who are they?" His voice broke the silence of her angry thoughts; she looked down at him, examining his expression from where it peeked out from behind her leg. He was a shy thing around humans, usually, but there was an excited glimmer in his eyes that made her wary.

"I don't know."

They came out from the water.

The man who led them was one of her kind; she recognized him the same way she had recognized the child that day so many years ago. He led his children with confidence, bearing with him a sharpened spear bearing a flag. Red white and blue. He speared the pole into the ground and she didn't have to understand his language to know he was laying claim to her shores, to her. She felt the violation deep in her gut, and it was a disgusting feeling. Her lips curled back over her teeth. The man was short (she could have laughed; he might have barely come up to her collarbone, about eye level with her chest), and he had dusty pale hair, and his eyes were green, green like the snake who devours, ravenous like the wolf. There was a power radiating from him that made her clench her teeth and squeeze the boy's hand, a power she had never encountered before, a power that was different from her vast lands and her tall mountains and her harsh deserts. It was the power of men, of greed, of war. This nation was neck deep in it, in the violence that she had for so long resisted, that she had alienated herself from her children because of.

She remembered her first blood and wondered how it had been for this pale nation; she had a feeling he hadn't fled into the wilderness. She had a feeling he had bathed in it and laughed.

"Who is that?" her son asked in his eager, excited whisper. "That one! That one! He's like us, isn't he?" His fear had abated, shyness corroding under his excitement. "So different..." His dark eyes were wide, captivated by that hideous green. She looked down at him and felt old, old dread. "Look at him, Ina, look. His eyes - " He was utterly bewitched.

"He is not like us."

She turned her back on the beach where the green eyed nation was laughing among his children like he was one of them, grinning huge and predatory as he surveyed his discovery. She pulled gently on her son's hand. "Hao." He hesitated, his eyes fixated on Green Eyes, but she tugged again and he followed her obediently. She was not afraid; she was vast, and she was dense, and she was dangerous. She would leave the pale men to her children to deal with as they pleased, and she would avoid the Other nation entirely, retreating deeper into her country until he and his kind left. She was too great to be threatened by petty foreign nations and their insolence and their flags.

She did not notice how her son's eyes peered persistently over his shoulder, curious, his hand twitching longingly in hers like he wanted to pull away and investigate further (or maybe she did, but she pretended not to, because she did not want to notice).

unitsi - mama in cherokee
cinks - my son, lakota
ina - mother, lakota
ma¶a - earth, dakota
ka'êškóneho - children, cheyenne
hao - come, oneida

if ive made any mistakes w/ the languages pls let me kno c: