Notes: I don't own Hetalia, and short fic is damn short.
See them all, the little children. Laughing and fighting and hating and loving. Pushing each other away while clinging together. Puppets trying to show each other, to prove to themselves – Look, see? They seem to ask, I'm still alive. I'm still human.
They're so old, those children. It was long ago, oh so long ago when they had families. When they were chosen. When they were taken away, tied to the land and its people by a ritual older than time itself. Suffering and alone with the thoughts of a million people echoing through their minds. Feeling the burning of wildfires, the tearing or earthquakes, the empty hunger of famine seared into their flesh – the result of disasters in the land, in their land. Remaining young, while those around them grew up, grew old, grew weak and died. In their loneliness (no family, no friends – the only humans allowed to talk to them are their leaders, nobody else can know of their existence) they forge their own bonds with the others of their kind. Brother, sister, son, father, friend, lover…
They suffer so much. As living avatars of the nations, they are subject to the emotions of their people and the whims of their leaders. They all know the pain of being forced to act against their own desires. Being used as the assassins of their bosses when the will of the people decides that it must be so ("I am sorry, Anya… so sorry… Forgive me…"). Being sent off on impossible quests so they're out of the way when a leader decides to turn against the population ("Ja, mein Führer."). Sometimes it would be even worse. None of the nations had seen North Korea since very soon after the division. They no longer bother to add the "South" to the other when addressing him, and speak of North as if he were dead.
They live so long. Not a single one of them has died from old age. Remember the Holy Roman Empire, kept forever young by a divided people and finally killed in the wars that tore him apart from within. Remember the Native nations of the Americas – crushed into nonexistence by the colonizers to be succeeded by ones deemed more appropriate by the invaders. Remember Yugoslavia, torn apart in infancy by those whom he was supposed to replace.
See them all, the little children. It's a wonder that so few of them have gone mad.
