Hello Everyone, this is another sad PruHun fic. I guess technically it isn't romance, but feel free to use your shipping lenses. Please Please Review.
Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia.
Every month I came to the meetings. I sat with my friends, Natalya, Katushya, Xiao Mai (Taiwan), and Erika (Lichtenstein), all the girls sat together. We were, we thought, the calm within the chaos. I was happy, on a little cloud of contentment and security. I was never cruel, except to the people I knew well. I was friendly to most and civil to all but one. He was my oldest friend; obnoxious, loud, and perverted. I ignored him when I could and dealt with him when I could not. I had made my choice a long time ago. Austria was where my devotion would stay. Even if he had never loved me, I loved him as a sister. It was my responsibility to protect him, mainly from Gilbert.
Gilbert, he reminded me of a bird, the way he always looked like he was about to take off, so fragile but with so much life. His white hair and red eyes gave him a strange appearance, and his waxy skin made him look so breakable. He was loud, crass, and ignorant, we yelled at him and rebuked him, we made fun of him, and even taunted him about his lack of status as a country. He was out of place among us. What we didn't realize was what he really needed. He craved love, attention, and kindness. He didn't know how to ask. He had grown up in a military world, men had surrounded him since birth. The male ego and arrogance had forever pervaded his being.
He had once been great, had a military that surpassed all others in Europe. Until his own brother had destroyed him one fateful day when Königreich von Preußen had ceased to be. No one knew why he lingered. In all honesty he should have passed long ago. Perhaps if we had paid him any attention at all, if someone had cared to go deeper we would have seen the fierce protectiveness over his destroyer, the love for his friends, and the true and beautiful love towards me.
One day I was walking in the woods in Austria, there was a an old abandoned greenhouse in the forest. It was overgrown, and beautiful, the remnants of an mansion that had been demolished for developments. The meeting was in Austria, and our hotel was only a half mile away. The mansion was where I had lived with Austria for much of our marriage. Whenever I came back, I always went to my favorite spot in the greenhouse.
I stepped in through the rusty iron door and with a start I saw Gilbert. I almost began to yell at him, why was he here and how did he even know this place had even existed? But before I had gotten two words out, he started violently and hurriedly put his hands behind his back. But the damage was done, I stared at him. He shrunk away as if my gaze was both fire and ice. There was blood all over his arms and the scars of other wounds littering his arms. I looked up to meet his red eyes with my green ones. He had stayed silent through the whole thing, as if he wanted someone to discover him, but when I looked up into his eyes my heart broke. I saw such despair and crushing loneliness that the weight of it all made me want to fall to my knees. I felt such deep guilt, I who was supposed to be his friend had not even realized what he was doing to himself and how he felt. His normally piercing and alive red eyes were dull and unfocused, not paying me any attention or heeding my sorrow. I let a single solitary tear fall from my eye, and he came rushing back. With an almost starved look he brushed my tear away, letting it drip into the tangle of brown hair over my shoulder. Suddenly I embraced him, not speaking a word, for I knew that words were too light a thing to give in this situation. His thin frame tensed like a taut rope and then relaxed slowly, sinking to the ground, me with him. We sat like that for an age as the birds sang and the trees rustled with the ghosts of winds. His breathing evened as he drifted off to sleep. I slowly moved his head to my lap, taking in the face I had never really cared about. His cheekbones were sharp almost too sharp, and he had pale delicate skin, his white hair had an almost silver quality to it, it was messy and barely combed. He truly look fragile, thin as a young tree and as insubstantial as mist on a rainy day. I brushed aside a stray silver hair as a light breeze whispered through the ruin.
I looked around. The frame of the old building was like a skeleton, the corpse of a happier time. And suddenly, I remembered. It had been directly before the beginning of the first world war. I had been sitting in here drinking tea and watching the sunset. All was peaceful until I heard a knock. Outside the door was an exhausted Gilbert. He had nearly fainted on the doorstep. It had been the first time I had seen him in decades. I had been shocked, he was so thin, he looked nearly starved. It was only later that I realized it was because of Germany. All his strength was leaving him and going to his brother. He had collapsed into my arms and rasped out that I should leave that "bastard Austria". I had been disgusted and dropped him. His reaction had almost made me regret it. He stayed like that laying on the floor for a moment, then finally clenching his fists and using whatever strength he had left he hauled himself to his feet. "Lizzie" he had said "you have to get out...something...something bad is coming, you could get hurt." I had stared at him, he had stared back until finally he had turned and left without another word. It was only a few weeks later that the archduke of Austria had been killed. Once the war began, we were on the same side. I saw Gilbert, but he was a soldier, all traces of weakness we gone but his unnatural thinness. This place, this skeleton had been the last time she had seen him in direct pain other than when he was with Russia. This place held an echo of his true self.
The dying sunlight of an evening danced among the trees, and the last of the birds settled down for the night. We stayed, sitting, sleeping among the graveyard of a day, content.