This has been posted before under a different pen name of mine, but I feel uncomfortable with the original and I'd like to start anew, so here you are. The overture is almost identical; it's perhaps all I like of what I did write.
Warnings: Slash, history, war. Probable angst, sex & promiscuity. Questionable characterization. Historical inaccuracies, poetic license and twisted romance. Allusions to sex, maybe.
Pairings: Might change. Japan / Italy / Germany triangle; relatively minor France / Italy
Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia.
TRINITY
he promised them the world. they'll hold it between them until they break.
Overture
One should either be a work of art or wear a work of art.
- Oscar Wilde
September 1940
Reggia di Caserta, South Italy
The palace seems built of cold, vengeful beauty – of victory won through blood and hate, of spiteful triumph, but this workshop is a portal to a strange, ethereal place far beyond the too human realm of Earth.
The workshop is filled with the scents of light and age; fae dust is scattered in the scarlet sunshine of an early morn filtered through stained glass.
Humming as sweet and melodic as birdsong permeates the atmosphere; cheerfulness has stained the place for evermore, gently beating down the age that eats at these walls.
He watches the artist work, with gentle sweeps of his brush and with a face blank with deep thought, watches the artist paint a beautiful woman to life. Her plump lips are the sweetest shade of red; her lashes are like fans of obsidian, and her hair is shining ebony.
But he does not find that he pays the woman much heed. Beautiful as she might be, there is one single fault with her beauty – the fact that her artist is lovelier than she.
He is a lover of art, and that is true, but he more closely resembles beauty than his own works. How could he not?
He is the very incarnation of loveliness, slender as the stem of the flower and with a head of hair as lovely as the petals; his tresses are smooth, shining, and flowing like liquid amber.
His face is delicate, beautiful: his skin is made of carved of finest porcelain, with brows of amber set carefully in arch above his brown eyes.
He moves like the sea enraged, quick and lithe and all things graceful.
Kiku has lived many lives, as they all have, but he is older than the Western world can fathom. He can tell them through words – thousands war suffering brother blood – and he can paint the scar, the rivulets of blood that leaked from it as he slashed across Yao's chest, sketch the set of his brother's mouth as he screamed.
But it is beyond grasping.
He finds that Feliciano, too, is beyond grasping.
In all his lives, in glorious days and weary wars both, he has never seen a being quite so beautiful.
[ trinity ]
Beauty and folly are old companions.
- Benjamin Franklin
He's a beautiful boy.
He's not a practical boy, but he's a beautiful boy, and in life, he's found that beauty often masks internal flaw.
Even the most practical concede that he is a creature of whimsy and wonder, a nymph, and they lose themselves in the façade of his beauty – and forget how lackadaisical he is beneath.
He likes it that way.
If he was any less dreamy, he have been whored out to war long ago – rugged countenances are taken for lion hearts, and they are beaten till they are scarred, till they are soldiers.
He is the powerhouse of beauty of Europe. He is the artist, he who spreads the contagion of loveliness, the birthplace of caprices.
Beauty ofttimes prevents forcing his hand in wars.
But Ludwig has never followed rules.
Ludwig was once properly dazzled by Feliciano's beauty; the grace of his movement, the loveliness of his smile, the grandeur of his manner. Never had he seen anything as lustrous as Feliciano (no one ever has.)
But as Ludwig has learned, Feliciano is a pretty face - and nothing more. He's almost a trophy wife – beautiful but empty. He cannot whittle away at other nations with his power; he is no Ludwig.
He is cheer, and wonder, and whimsy - but nothing more.
Ludwig wants blood. Ludwig wants steel.
Ludwig wants war.
It's a slap from karma, Feliciano is sure.
Feliciano is not a creature of battlegrounds and blood; he is made of energy and light and a place far beyond human comprehension, where the sun is not allowed to shine.
There is not a drop of blood lust in him.
For anyone else, this is enough. Feliciano knows this because Feliciano has played them all at one time – he has been the kept whore of many nations who loved him dearly, and his mouth has moved into so many different versions of 'I love you' that he hadn't remembered love.
But Ludwig has made him feel again – truly feel – and there is nothing for him in Ludwig's heart of stone but a faded admiration and a muted contempt.
Feliciano sinks to the bottom of consciousness with thoughts heavy with a stone boy.
[ trinity ]
A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.
- George Macdonald
Somewhere in Germany
Night has fallen dark over Germany; shadows linger like slivers of forgotten thoughts, fleeting and ephemeral, things that were once beautiful but are no longer lovely.
They flee from him as he treads with his brisk soldier's gait; they shift to follow him, fall away as if they never were.
He doesn't watch them as they run from him, nor does he feel their fear.
They think he should - and everyone but he knows why.
He cries for war from the deepest sanctum of his heart, and it shows; he was handsome once, with neat hair of sunshine slicked back and firm eyes of noon blue. Once upon a storied time, he was almost human too.
He built himself to become power, to epitomize dignity. He was prideful, shining, strong.
They tore him down.
They ripped him from limb to limb as he cried beneath them, pleading for mercy (in retrospect, he thinks, that was foolish – he should have let them kill him soundlessly) and they only laughed and cut deeper into his too pale flesh.
Some part of him died then – and he was born again, rose amongst the smoldering flames of his own hate (but even he has realised that he has never been the same since.)
He crushes the world beneath his feet and his blood sings out with the sweetness of vengeance and he watches them writhe beneath his bloody boots with vague amusement like a feather in his (stony) heart, and clamps down upon them until even their nerves of steel have shattered and burns their icy hearts until there is not even ash of ash left.
He's glorious now.
As he leaves the fields that he has set ablaze, one of his soldiers cries out that not even they were so cruel. His troops rally around the rebel and protest.
His blood does not boil as he listens; his eyes do not twitch as he shoots thirty three men dead.
His stomach is as calm as an empty sky; no guilt surges through his being as he digs holes and buries them in their German uniforms.
The truth comes to him later, softly and sweetly as an angel.
He still has that same orderly hair, the same eyes – but the lines around his mouth have tightened and his eyes have grown more bloodshot and there is something harder, wilder about his face.
He is not like the stupid, gentle, beautiful Feliciano he keeps at his side, the lovely creature who cannot slit a throat properly, nor hold a gun.
He is anger; he is vengeance; he is war.
He is an animal now.
[ trinity ]
Author's Note: Reviews are, of course, appreciated. It's very likely an update will be made very soon, what with my recently freed time.