Title: love comes to town

Author: squingili

Pairing: Arthur Kirkland (England) x Alfred F. Jones (America)

Warnings: Language, non-graphic sex, unhealthy lifestyles, etc.

Summary: Arthur Kirkland has been making his way through the United States (sitting in cars and buses and trains, downing all sorts of alcohol, sleeping in unfamiliar beds, and sleeping with unfamiliar people) for over three years. He's been running from Alfred F. Jones for only one of them. Inspired by the song "When Loves Comes to Town" by U2 and B.B. King

Disclaimer: All copyrighted materials from this work of fanfiction belong to their respective copyright holders. These include, but are not limited to, the characters of Axis Powers Hetalia.

Note: This is less a love story and more a story about moving forward, wherein love may or may not play an important role. Alfred's appearances are minimal, all the way to the end. You have been warned.

i. under a red sunset

The only beginning in this is an explanation:

There are two things that you will know forever: your duffel bag and him. One is physical, the other is there touching the fringes of your mind – but they are one and the same in the end, when the touch becomes a prod at the back of your mind, and the physical is in your hand, filled with clothes and too much money.

When he threatens to become the physical, you chase a train out of town with the ease of years, slipping into a seat next to a blonde with bowed lips and blue eyes. She's got a ring on her finger, and you ask, you always ask, and she will tell you that she is getting married that weekend.

Three days are enough – you stay – for her to get used to the smell of your smokes, and for a heat to curl beneath her skin and grip her and turn her into your arms.

Because she is soon high beneath you, glowing red in the sunset, sweat undoing the soft curls. Because the ceremony will go on in the evening – it is odd, and convenient. Because her eyes are half-lidded, foggy with sated lust, and her white dress on the floor is stained from the dying sun.

In your years of mindless travel, there had been no afterglow in someone else's skin. Just a fever when you're inside, or someone's inside you, heavy and hazy. They're all beautiful like that, when you can't see them for what they are: they don't have lives beyond their bodies, and their bodies are now beneath, astride you.

But if the sex is good, you just might stay.

And you're thinking about it, looking at her. Lie low for a few days: the honeymoon's at a hotel just outside of town, and then she'll settle and burn for you again, for the sin in pleasure. You begin to lean down to her ear and lie – i'll stay however long you like, love. Everything about it is a lie, but she'll fall in love with the words.

And just as your lips touch her skin, your chest burns anew, and it surges along your skin like static until it enters the nerves and he is there inside your mind, driving into town and looking for you, and he's got The Eagles on the radio.

You leave her standing, her yellow curls deflated and her make-up smudged. You catch the first train out until the buildings and the houses are lost from the horizon, lost in the black stars. Much like you: lost at sea, caught under the waves and fading from the eyes of strangers before they ever considered remembering.

In the night, you count your blessings (cash), and figure you have enough to go on for another two months before you'd really have to stop and make a call to your editor to pick up the money that still keeps coming in – when you hauled ass and fell into that first bus from New York to Atlantic City, there had been more. There had been deadlines and red pens; the fame and success that came with your name on a million book covers.

"Kirkland breaks out with a book filled to the brim with the ache for life in these times: a deep desire for movement, heat, and freedom." – The Guardian

"Yet another modern masterpiece from one of the world's best authors: new, refreshing, characters with bottomless personalities – they live the dreams we scarcely dare to consider today." – The New York Times

They are real, and all would envy them. I love them, I covet them: I loathe them. I want to be them. I want to run, hide, to shag, to drink, and to leave you all in the dust and break from this world. –Arthur Kirkland

ii. now that you have my attention

Setting off for nowhere is probably the stupidest thing you've ever done, and you've been doing it for three years. But it is the best you've ever felt – it was away from the grey skies over London, and the rush in the Underground. There was no more sitting behind a desk in the day, working for an accounting firm, and sitting in bed at night, typing into an ancient laptop.

In the words you strung out and dried, there had been people. They had been white-collared or trapped or sad and they had gone on an adventure when there weren't any left to be had in the world, and they had loved someone: they lived.

And you had wanted that so badly it hurt.

Getting published had been enough, for a while. And then you moved to New York.

Wrote some more.

Got published.

Signed some books.

Replied to fan mail.

Went home to write.

Stepping into that bus to Atlantic City had merely been an impulse trip – you'd intended to come back the next day. That changed when you finally felt the thrill of falling, of seeing the familiar whip past the windows, forgotten in the dust, you were hooked.

[You did go home. To pack your things. To tell your editor not to expect shit from you for the next few god-knows-how-many weeks. To blackmail your flatmate into staying in the same building until you came back. To say goodbye to your cat.]

You like never having to feed a cat or buying groceries for the week. You like the different people in this country and how their voices and accents differ based on the number of kilometers between them – and they like you back, based on the number of hotel rooms you've played host in.

The hotel you've just set up camp in is shabby, and the town was full of water sewn into the wind: definitely not the worst you've been in. It's all about location, see: you'd be here for just a night, maybe two, and head to a city, for a change in scenery. Besides, right across the street are some seedy clubs that you look into.

Later.

You suppose that you might be tired. You lay down, and you realize that you've felt tired for a while: there's an ache in your legs and a feeling deep in your skull that your brain doesn't know where to sit anymore.

You can't sleep.

In a thousand books, there's a character that lies in bed and stares at the cracks in the ceiling, debating with himself, the possibilities of choices and people streaming through his mind. He'd stay there for forever – an hour, a minute, a day – and he'd decide what to do with himself. He'd decide what he is and who he is and what he wants.

So this is what you do instead.

You take a scalding shower and lean against the tile on the wall, remembering the first bus, and watching the land flash past your window, and the feeling of flight once you had stepped out to Atlantic City and realized that you had absolutely no idea what you were doing there.

You remember the first phone call – two years later.

The man behind the bar had held out the phone to you, and you put it against your ear as the bass of a guitar had thrummed and became the room's entire pulse. There was yelling and singing. It was loud, much too loud, and you shouldn't have heard the voice on the other end.

But you did.

The voice called itself Alfred, and that he and you would fall in love because it was fate. He spoke it like it was the gospel, and he had been there when they had crucified the Lord, held the holy grail and caught the blood.

No question: it is the most terrifying phone call that you have ever received.

He said many things – that any random number you'd call, it would probably reach him. That any dollar bill you'd give to anyone would end up in his hand, sooner or later. That he knows everything and nothing about you: only that you haven't stopped moving since you left New York, but you were lonely, looking for him without knowing it.

He said he was sorry for being absent. Sorry for not being your first kiss or sex or anything. For not even knowing about you for years or reading a single one of your books until just recently, when his brother had sent it to him for their shared birthday.

But now, I'm going to make it up to you, Arthur.

I'm gonna find you.

He said it so earnestly, and you felt something hot poke up your spine and take center stage on your chest: your heart beat fast in your ears, your breath pushed hard past your lips.

You didn't like that.

Not at all.

You informed him of your lifestyle – of the sex and the alcohol – and that you were completely happy with it. Never mind that he was a stranger who knew too much about you and was tripping over himself to find you and make you his.

You hung up.

You wondered why there were so many sick fucks in the world, so many people who believed in property and destiny. How dare that man, that boy, stake a claim on you? What did he know about how you were meant to live? What did he know about the happiness you make out of movement, out of solitude?

He knows nothing, and he isn't worth your time.

You returned to the man you'd been chatting up. The sex later that night had been good. Even now, you shiver at the thought of it, standing now beneath the shower's line of fire.

But when you step out of the bathroom, towel around your waistthe room seems bare, as if you're missing some piece of furniture. And then you wanted to hold something. A cat, maybe. You miss Henry sometimes.

But you don't go out tonight, and you just watch television in your room.

You feel that man moving across the map, and it is in that moment, somewhere between a rerun of Wheel of Fortune and a soap opera, that you know that he hadn't been lying when he said that he was going to love you.

In the buzz of static, you watch persons on the screen, surrounded by people. That is life. Persons are always different from people. A person's face is defined and named, and people stand where you could see, but never know.

The world is full of people, and they are all nameless.

And in the seconds the receiver clashed against its cradle in that club so many months ago, a person had emerged from the anonymity. His name is Alfred.