Title: The Show Must Go On
Fandom: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Author: Me, or it was the last time I checked.
Genre: romance, AU, background-slash, angst, x-over
Pairing(s): US/fem!UK, Can/fem!Pru, GerTalia, LietPol, Bela-Rus, GiriPan, HunAus, Spamano, SuFin and some others maybe
Rating: T
Warnings: Genderbent!England, Genderbent!Prussia, AU, language, sexual references, alcohol/drugs, background-slash, abuse, angst, character-mutilation and background character death
Summary: The year is 1923, and Alfred F. Jones has been sent to Paris, France, in order to bring some much needed revenue back into the country by writing a play for the Moulin Rouge. There's just one problem. No one told him it was a cabaret. US/fem!UK
A/N: There will be no actual singing, but there will be mentions of it. But anyway, what is this? Another project? Well, yes, that it is. Also, my notes are going to make me sound really disrespectful at times. I'm not being disrespectful, I'm just saying it how I see it; as war. ONWARDS. Notes at the end. Enjoy, my lovelies!
Enter Stage Left; Alfred.
At first glance, France was a wreck. But as a writer, it was Alfred Franklin Jones' duty to see the beauty in the abstract, to find desolation's white rabbit and follow it into the wonderland that lay hidden in the cracks. It didn't take him long to find said beauty and even less to find the white rabbit. There was simplicity in the mostly-repaired buildings, pleasure in the ease of movement; workmen and ladies going about their business, children playing inventive, elaborate fames of make-believe with toys made from the remnants of carnage. Alfred was reminded of an old wooden crate now rotting in an equally rotten tree-house in one of the old oaks in the fields backing his parents' home in Kansas, reminded of a time spent in that crate and running through fields of wheat taller than he was, imagining he was in space, wandering amongst the stars and the angels to be found there.
The white rabbit came in the form of a young workman, close to Alfred's age as best he gathered from the man's physical appearance, putting him in his early twenties, though where Alfred was made of lean muscle, this other man had been graced with the shoulders and arms of a man who spent a lifetime in hard labour. He also had a good inch on Alfred's six-feet, but the pleasant smile on his face belied any danger present in him. It was a small blessing to see what appeared to be kindness beneath the dust and grease on his skin and overalls.
"Hello, excuse me," Alfred began, extending a hand to stop the workman, but not close enough to touch. "I'm wondering if you can help." He spoke in flawless French because hey, this was Paris, what else was he going to speak?
"If I can," the workman replied, and there was something in his accent that Alfred couldn't place.
"I'm looking for the Moulin Rouge," Alfred began. "I've been wandering around for a good hour now, you see, but I haven't been able to find it."
The workman looked at him, and then said, in plain English, "What are you looking for?" The pleasant smile had turned into something defensive, even a little worried.
"The Moulin Rouge," Alfred replied, also in English, frowning a little himself. His French can't have been that bad, surely!
"Uh-huh, and, uh, why are you looking for it?"
It felt like there was something Alfred was missing, but instead of worrying about it, he puffed up in pride. "I'm a writer! I was sent here by my boss to write a story for the Moulin Rouge, you see, to help the proprietor of the establishment bring in revenue."
Something about it must have been an inside joke Alfred wasn't privy to, because the workman doubled over in laughter like he might never laugh again. "Proprietor of the establishment?" he gasped. "That's how Francis introduced himself? Oh Christ, that's good. That's so good."
Personally, Alfred didn't get it, Francis had seemed like an alright sort when his boss had spoken of him, and when Alfred had read through letters and transcripts of telephone calls. But then again, the French were a whole other world. On that note…
"You're not from France, are you?" he asked, still trying to place the accent.
Finally curbing his laughter into a small grin that threatened more laughter, the taller man shook his head. "Nah," he agreed. "Canada."
That was the accent, then. "What part?" Alfred asked then, unable to resist.
"A farm," the other replied with a little flash in the lavender of his eyes. "Saskatchewan," he added. "On the border of Alberta. At least, it was when I when I left. Haven't seen home in a good seven years, they might have sold up."
"You were posted out here?" Incredulity seemed the most idiotic of reactions, but Alfred had never been one to see the obvious, preferring to work in the obscure, the little details rather than the big picture.
The workman – the soldier – nodded. "I was. I followed a British regiment for a while with what remained of my squad after Ypres and the Somme, but we went to Vimy Ridge."
Alfred had heard stories of Ypres and the use of poison gas rendering the British and French troops obsolete, leaving the Canadians to hold the line, heard stories of the Somme and of the casualties, heard stories of Vimy Ridge and he wondered if that three-day battle was the source of the shadows in his eyes.
"But you," the other continued. "You served as well. Cantigny?"
Startled, Alfred nodded. "How did you know?"
"You've got a farm-boy feel to you," the Canadian shrugged. "You can dress it up in New Yorker finery all you like, but it doesn't change who you are deep down. Most of the lads I met from Cantigny were farm-boys." He stuck a hand between them. "Matthew Williams."
Taking it without a moment's hesitation, Alfred gave his own name. There were calluses on Matthew's palm, strength in the long fingers.
"Well," Matthew said, "You caught me at a good time. I'll take you to the Moulin Rouge."
"You will?"
Matthew nodded, and gestured for Alfred to follow him as he set off down a cobbled street. "I just got off shift, actually, from working on the 'Line. I was going to clean up and head over myself. I owe… someone a visit."
Alfred found himself nodding along, but not really listening to what Matthew was saying until the Canadian had to yank him out of the way of a passing troop of soldiers.
"What are they up to?" Matthew murmured, stepping back into the street to watch them march off. "Occupation of the Ruhr ended months ago, and that's the only time I've ever seen them since the War."
"I didn't hear about that," Alfred admitted as they carried on.
Matthew snorted with amusement. "That's not a surprise. God, the noise they made in the 'Mill over it, Gwen especially. I told Francis to keep the news out of there, but did he listen? No. So Gwen stomped off to his office and told him what she thought of it all, but he wasn't having it." At which point Alfred returned to ignoring him, preferring instead to watch him grow more and more irate with a stray curl that refused to lie flat with the rest of his hair and wax mental poetic over the lines of the muscles in Matthew's shoulders, the set of a chiselled jaw, the messy ponytail of equally messy blond hair that wandered the tightrope of ginger and copper. There was stubble on the concave arch of that jaw, and Alfred scratched idly at his own, refusing to admit to feeling a little less male and a lot more insecure next to this paragon of masculinity walking alongside him.
Seemingly not content with making Alfred feel like the scrawny nineteen-year-old boy lying in a hospital bed recovering from his battle scars with some of the prettiest girls he'd ever seen fawning all over him when all he really wanted was his mother and the fields of gold that he'd once been, Matthew paused next to a pair of wrought iron gates and spread his hands.
"There you go, Alfred," he said. "The Moulin Rouge."
Its namesake stood to one side of the main building, the tattered sails turning lazily in the October breeze, the red paint as peeling as that of the rest of the complex. A large, elaborate sign hung over equally large, equally elaborate double doors. Though the outside was quiet, an odd sense of peace washing over him even as the shock settled in, the inside was bustling with activity; music and singing, shouting and laughter, the bustle of machinery and manual labour. There was no denying what the Moulin Rouge's purpose was.
"Oh my God," Alfred gaped, jaw slack. "You have got to be joking."
"Nope," Matthew replied, turning to lean against the gates, a filthy little grin spread across his face as he popped the 'P' and watched Alfred's jaw fall slacker. "Welcome to the Moulin Rouge, Alfred F. Jones. You're in the employ of a cabaret."
Alfred made a vague noise that might have been an attempt at a word, or, more likely, his dying gurgle, but Matthew took it for what it was – a noise of shock – and laughed some more.
"Come on," he said, finally taking Alfred's suitcase from him and pushing one of the gates open. "Let's go to Francis."
He was being furtive, Alfred realised, as they slunk through another empty corridor. Vaguely, he noted that each corridor was in progressively better condition, but he was more interested in who Matthew was avoiding.
When he asked, Matthew told him to shut his face. "I'm filthy," he added, shouldering a door open. "And she's nearly always in white. If I get her clothes dirty, I'll have Timo and Kat – not to mention Erzsébet – on my ass until they get the next load of cloth."
'She' made an appearance a few moments later, by way of gratuitous shouting.
"Matthew Williams!" The volume alone was enough to make both men cringe, stop, and turn back to face the demon waiting for them. Alfred didn't know the voice, but damn if he didn't recognise the tone. All women knew that tone, and his mother had perfected it twenty-four years ago. "Where do you think you're going? Three weeks you've been gone! Three weeks and four days! Don't think I don't count!"
Whilst Alfred's response was to gape some more, Matthew's was to groan and roll his eyes ceiling-ward. He set Alfred's suitcase down and crossed back along the corridor to where his – what? Sister? Sweetheart? Lover? What was she? Not wife, surely – stood with her hands on her hips, and then it hit him; the girl was German. Normally, Alfred liked to believe himself above such things and not go picking fights where fights weren't due, because German or not, there was no way Alfred would have fought opposite her on the battlefields, but the accent grated on him in a way he never thought possible. To hear it here of all places… A dark part of Alfred took a twisted kind of pleasure in finding a German working as a whore to the French, but the rest of him was too disgusted in himself to really notice. He could almost hear the gun shells in his ears, feel the mud between his toes, taste the blood on his tongue.
Keeping Matthew close enough to claim him as hers whilst at enough of a distance that she didn't run the risk of dirtying the chiffon, lace and cotton scraps she was presumably calling a dress, the German looked at him with a sort of condescension he'd never seen before, but it didn't stop him from returning the look with a filthy one of his own. If she wasn't German, he mused, hating his prejudices but finding himself unable to quell them, she might have been pretty; her hair was so blonde as to be white, pinned and curled delicately, and her eyes were just as delicate, rubies and crimson, blood and fire.
"Now, listen here," she told him abruptly, stomping over to stand toe-to-toe with him, which was all kinds of adorable really, because she barely reached his nose, even in those death-traps disguising themselves as shoes. "I know that look, I've seen it a dozen times before, so I'm going to say this once, and once only. I'm not German, I'm Prussian, and I'm a political refugee because I protested the war. Not for the right reasons, but I protested it all the same. Francis was good enough to take me in, and I owe my life to him. Yes, I'm an albino, so you can quit your staring on that count, and yes, I'm a whore. But no, I don't give a shit on either count so find someone who does before you start mouthing off. Mattie says you're our new writer, which is awesome and all, but you and me? Are we going to have problems working together?"
Alfred opened his mouth to reply, but the gun shells were reverberating around his skull, drowning out her words, the mud between his toes creeping up his legs to ensnare him in the trenches, blood filling his mouth till he could barely breathe for it. He wasn't in the corridor behind the stage of the Moulin Rouge any more, he could smell it, the fetid stench of death and the arid smoke of gunpowder overpowering the perfumes and paints previously stifling the air. It was No Man's Land out there, enemies waiting for him to put a single hair out of line that they might take his head with a single well-aimed rifle round.
"Oh dear," he vaguely heard Matthew say, but it was barely audible over the instructions being bellowed in his ear, the screams of the dying seeping into his skin. "He's one of those. Alright, up we go. Gil, grab his case, would you?"
And he was being moved, carried away from the battle and to somewhere safe, away from the noise, to a place where the prettiest girls fawned over the ugly shapes of shrapnel scarred into his side. Those scars seared, ripples of pain spreading through his body like wildfire, and there were hands on his back, under his knees, the smell of grease and dust and wheat in his nose, and then there was nothing.
++End Chapter++
NOTES::
Prepare yourself for lots of inane and oft-anachronistic literary references; the white rabbit is of course, Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, and the fields in Kansas are, believe it or not, a reference a) to my love of farm-boys and b) a reference to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Be honest, how many of you knew it was a book?
If you're curious as to why Matt's a mountain of muscle, take a look a) at world geography, including a list of countries' sizes, and b) Nanihoo's art on deviantART. It's renewed my love for CanUkr for one thing, but for another, Matt looks gorgeous like that. Also, yes, I am aware I've made the boys taller than they are. Shush.
Fear my knowledge of Canadian geography. My atlas is dated to, like, the 80's. How do I know this? It's still labelled as 'the Soviet Union' and 'West Germany'. Yes. I know, right? Also, once upon a time I was able to pronounce Saskatchewan thanks to Corner Gas, but I promptly forgot it a few days later.
The Second Battle of Ypres (April 1915) was a nasty piece of work; the Germans, forced into a concave bend by the British, French and Canadian forces, flung a load of chlorine gas out of their trench into ours. The British and French caved under it and left a four-mile-long hole in the Allied Line. Canada came to the rescue by figuring that if you soaked a rag in urine and held it over your nose and mouth, you weren't affected by the gas. He held the line whilst Britain and France made themselves look like tools.
The Battle of the Somme (1 July – 18th November 1916) was another nasty battle. Lots of shit went down, the British and the Canadian corps that was there suffered their worst losses, and then Canada went around the outside, secured a town, kicked the shit out of the Germans and got back to the main front in time of Vimy Ridge. Or so says Wikipedia, since I'm looking for the Canadian part of the War, and the internet is being horrible to me. Canada did, however, get the most amazing reputation after that; quote from Lloyd George, Britain's then-Prime Minister; "The Canadians played a part of such distinction that thenceforward they were marked out as shock troops; for the remainder of the war they were brought along to head the assault in one great battle after another. Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line they prepared for the worst."
The Battle of Vimy Ridge (9-12 April, 1917) was the first time all four Canadian divisions in the war fought together. They went and kicked all kinds of hell out of the Germans. They suffered a hell of a lot of causalities, but hey, they won, and the Germans didn't even try to get it back. REMEMBER THIS.
The Battle of Cantigny (28 May, 1918) was the first major American offensive of WW1. Realistically, Alfred wouldn't have been there, since it was the best of the American troops already stationed in France – the 1st Division – that were given the orders, but hey-ho.
First anachronism not related to literature; construction of the Maginot Line didn't begin until 1930, and planning didn't begin until 1928. Let's pretend that Matt can time-travel or something, 'kay?
The Occupation of the Ruhr happened in January-August 1923, and consisted of the French and Belgians getting sick of Germany messing them around with reparation payments, so marched their troops into the demilitarised zone and waved their guns around a bit, threatening to shoot everyone if they didn't cough up. The Germans gave them filthy looks and went on a go-slow and eventually the Francophone lot (which the Belgians are, they're half-French, half-German, and ruled, at one point, by the Spanish. GO FIGURE) had to back out. That's an over-simplification of what happened, of course, but that's basically what happened. It's better than my interpretation of Operation Torch.
The literal translation of Moulin Rouge is 'red mill'. Hence Matthew's nickname for it.
Matthew's hair is blatantly the colour of maple syrup. Grade A dark amber, maybe. Or a little lighter. I'm not sure. I don't see him as the same sort of wheat-blond as Alfred. He's darker than that.
Yes, Timo, and yes, Erzsébet. That's the Finnish and Hungarian versions of the names Himaruya gave them. 'Tino' is not a name. The same goes for 'Toris' and 'Taurys'. None of the others – Gwen aside – have changed. 'Elizabeta' is actually Romanian, and is also the reason I refuse to call Fem!UK 'Elizabeth'. It's just too close. I mean, Christ, Feliks and Feliciano are the same name in Polish and Italian. That's the end of the name lecture, please leave the room quietly and tuck your chairs in, which I bet most of you don't do, do you?
I like to think that Gil's the jealous sort. Matthew's too blasé to give a shit.
Don't worry Al, if Gil's accent is anything like it is in the English dub, I don't blame you for hating it. I have no idea what they were thinking when they did it. He sounds more German in the Japanese than he does in the English. I mean, really, in the English dub he sounds French the first time we meet him, and then he sounds like the Fox's Biscuit Panda in the Liechtenstein and her Big Brother arc.
If you worked out that Alfred has PTSD, congratulations. If you didn't… well, now you know.
Right, that's all for this chapter I do believe. So I shall see you next chapter then, my lovelies. I hope you enjoyed and all that, and what's that thing-y that we're supposed to do after reading something so mind-boggingly awesome as this (see Silence, I didn't say it was boring this time. Which it… /shot) OH YES. Review, please? I'm refusing to continue this one without reviews, because I have no idea how it's going down. So I need to know. And all that. ANYWAY ONWARDS. Hope you enjoyed, my lovelies! ++Vince++