Long story short, I thought of this idea about two months ago when I first started getting into Hetalia, but sort of put it on the back burner. Today, I was listening to "American Pie" and realized, holy fuck, the Day the Music Died is today. So I tried to bust this out super quick so I could get it in before midnight, so its probably fucking horrible. But I will come back and edit it, once I'm done with my midterm tomorrow (coincidentally, a midterm for my Rock N Roll class).
There definitely needs to be some more cultural type Hetalia art/fiction out there, because its absolutely fun to play around with and its pretty much undiscovered territory at this point. (i really want to write 70s punk arthur and grunge america to :D)
I'll admit to not knowing a hell of a lot about Buddy Holly, I find my specialty to be more 60s-70s era rock, but still, he was a major influence on the likes of Bob Dylan, the Beatles and many more…and I feel like he's a little forgotten among some of the younger generations.
I apologize terribly for making America so incredibly OOC and angsty and blahhh and whatnot. Please forgive me, I'll try and fix that when I have time. D:
I've pretty much listened to American Pie constantly for the past few hours while writing this. I suggest reading this: / to become more attuned with what the song means: 'cause its truly a fascinating interpretation and explanation of the counterculture movements of the 1960s and might make this fic make more sense...maybe. Its a good read anyway.
Basically:
The King: Elvis
The Queen: Elizabeth II
The Jester: Bob Dylan
The quartet/marching band: The Beatles
The girl who sang the blues: Janis Joplin
Satan laughing with delight: Mick Jagger
The father, son and the holy ghost: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper
/End long author notes/
The Day the Music Died
A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they'd be happy for a while.
"Hey, Al, you wear those glasses all the time?"
Alfred smiled and rested a finger onto the rim of his glasses.
" I can't really take em off. They're, well, kind of a part of me, I suppose." He shrugged sheepishly. The other chuckled at him.
"Like you should talk," Alfred laughed, leaning his head back against the gentle cold of the window, "Those of yours are pretty much a part of you too, huh?" He pointed towards the thick, black rims that settled on the other's nose.
"True," the young man mused "Though I suppose if I take 'em off, a whole state won't fall into the ocean."
"Well-I'm not so sure that would happen, Bud."
But february made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn't take one more step.
"Y-yeah?" He chuckled, plucking absentmindedly
It was new, it was fascinated-he felt excited. After years and years of emulated European forms and traditions when it came to music, his style was finally blossoming into something that felt distinctly his, distinctly unlike anything that had come before. Something new.
He thought it was strange-no matter how many centuries old he was, he could always, always identify with the younger generations. It just seemed to resonated with him, the promise of something new, because it would be this group of kids that would eventually grow up, and be his future-it was always exciting. I mean-technically it wasn't new, more of a mashup between of a million different things-but still, it made a buzz of excitement surge up his spine. Of all the leaps of spurred growth and innovation that had followed in the years after the War, this was the one that Alfred found himself taking the most pride in.
He didn't try to mask his admiration as he looked over to the man next to him, the guy who was so young, even if he looked physically older than him. The other man, catching his glazed look, leaned over and casually flicked the nation on the forehead.
"You still there, Al?"
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.
The moment he woke up that morning he felt a strange, prickling pain that started small but soon radiated throughout his body until it stung in nerves and burned into his muscles. The pain wasn't that bad, more of a annoyance, and yet it made him nervous, a sick, anxious feeling creeping up his spine. He felt jolts of fear as he wondered what had happened. It wasn't a war, or an attack; it wasn't the blistering of atomic injury-
There was a heaviness that seemed to permeate every part of his body, an uneasy and painful sadness.
Did you write the book of love,
And do you have faith in God above,
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock 'n roll,
Can music save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?
He didn't exactly know what was going on, but the pain in the stillness of his body urged him to get up and move around. Sliding uncomfortably out of bed, he tried to push himself onto his feet, only to find the the prickly numbness had permeated the soles of his feet. Frustrated, he clenched his teeth, pulling himself up using his bedpost and steadying himself against the wall, trying to force some feeling into his legs. Eventually, he could feel the sensation regain itself, and he was able to move away from the wall and stumble out the door and down the stairs.
The pain turned to an aggravating locking and stiffening of muscle as he descended the stairs, and by the time he stepped
He opened the door, instantly hit with a wave of frigid February air that ate through his thin blue pajamas. Clutching his arms around his chest, he leaned heavily on the doorframe and let out a pale white sigh. The newspaper sat, wet in the condensation of the morning. He almost didn't pick it up, sick of hearing about the latest advancement of Soviet space programs, or that another one of his friends or coworkers had been blacklisted and painted red-even if, thankfully, such practices were in decline, he didn't like to think that any of his friends would be willing to betray him like that- but the headline caught his eye and sent a shiver through his spine.
He thought he must have misread, so he leaned down.
His stiffened legs finally lost all feeling, giving out and sending his sliding to porch with an audible thud.
Well, I know that you're in love with him
`cause I saw you dancin' in the gym.
You both kicked off your shoes.
Man, I dig those rhythm and blues.
He didn't remember much of that day. He remembered his boss trying to call him, he remembered swatting the phone onto the floor and curling up in his bed trying to deal with the still dull but constant discomfort and pain sadness that stifled up his lungs and coiled in his stomach. His fingers touched the rim of his glasses at he attempted to rub at his raw eyes and for the only time in his life he ripped them from his face and hurled them across the room, not hearing the tinkling break of the impact on the floor.
I was a lonely teenage broncin' buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck,
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died.
The pain didn't die away the day after, or the day after. His boss eventually started dragging him to meetings, with members of his cabinet hissing at him through clenched teeth to pull his act together because damn it, he was the United States, he didn't have time to get caught up even though he knew better and he just wanted to run away knowing that they were so wrong, and that it wasn't just bombings and wars and wire tappings and such that defined him, that there was more, that there had to be more-
Now for ten years we've been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin' stone,
But that's not how it used to be.
When the Jester sang for the King and Queen,
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me,
And after that came the decade from hell, naturally. So much tension, so much anger, which only meant more loneliness for him.
To combat this, he went out. He went to movies, he went to bars, he went to concerts. He liked those the best. There was inkling of normality and simplicity in the songs that he heard, and each time there was a bloom of passion hope that echoed in the voices of the singers that he chose to hear. The passion was red hot and burned his eyes and ears and the hope was white and settled bitterly in his chest but there was still passion, and it was still hope, damn it,
Oh, and while the King was looking down,
The Jester stole his thorny crown.
The courtroom was adjourned;
No verdict was returned.
And while Lennon read a book of Marx,
The quartet practiced in the park,
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died.
He found himself hating his own home more than he ever had before as the decade went on.
And what he hated the most was the hatch in his living room that he passed by everyday, nearly invisible to the unwary observer but always nagging in the back of his mind. He knew were the hatch led, deep into the bowels of the Virginian earth, reinforced and dark and lonely, stockpiled with everything that Alfred would ever need, save another human being and a radio.
He was furious at the thought. His boss had forced him to have one installed, for his own protection. It made his teeth grind. Even in the event of a nuclear attack, they figured that he could survive in some way, even if his body was wracked in the pain of his cities burning and his people dying. Then, he assumed they would drag him from the mess of the debris and push him into a suit and force him to ignore the death because it would be for the good of the people, even if he didn't have any people anymore-
Helter skelter in a summer swelter.
The birds flew off with a fallout shelter,
Eight miles high and falling fast.
It landed foul on the grass.
The players tried for a forward pass,
With the Jester on the sidelines in a cast.
He could always feel the heat of the soldiers in his veins. Even if it was the briefest of ticklings, he felt it. It made him feel guilty, every time he cursed the bog of war that he was getting trapped him. He needed to feel free, so eventually he took to driving his car, traveling nowhere with the window down and his blonde hair whipping around and his radio turned up to full volume.
Now the half-time air was sweet perfume
While the sergeants played a marching tune.
We all got up to dance,
Oh, but we never got the chance!
`cause the players tried to take the field;
The marching band refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?
His escapades on the road never lasted long. The moment he got home he would receive an angry call from his boss, who made a fuss about calling him and calling him and how he should take his responsibilities more seriously and stopped acting like a child. He often hung up on him, knowing that it would only serve to bit him the ass in the end, but his stubbornness forcing him into not caring.
Oh, and there we were all in one place,
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again.
So come on: jack be nimble, jack be quick!
Jack flash sat on a candlestick
Cause fire is the devil's only friend.
There were few things that had got him through the pain and anger and fear and paranoia of the past half century. Time and time he thought that he would go past the point of insanity and just want to end it all, his fingers itching for that red button more and more everyday. But somehow he kept his faith, and every time that he withdrew his hand from certain doom he knew it was because he remembered some strains of tune or snatches of lyrics and remembered that there was at least some hope in these younger generations, and that he needed them as much as they relied on him to do what was right.
He remembered an instance during a certain "crisis" that he flopped himself into his bed to catch a precious moment of sleep with the radio turned up to block all the fear and tensions and voice of his bosses and the ringing of phones and threats of a slow death but then he found himself soothed with whatever was playing and drifted off into a teetering sleep void of quarantines and missing planes and invasions and trigger happy commies.
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
He didn't know why it hurt as much as it did that time. It wasn't like he hadn't experience this before. That he had experienced physical and mental pain that was a hundred times worse before. It just seemed so sudden-so wrong. It had been too soon.
And then McLean released his song thirteen years later and brought up a slew of old memories and once again Alfred was back in 1959 and that day became clear and painful to him again. He tried his best to struggle through the next decade or so but the past ten years had left him fragmented and angry, entrenched in war and civil unrest and violence and that song haunted him and bloomed up pictures of stuttering planes and frozen skies and stained mattresses and empty pools like the inward curves of skulls and heroin dreams that joined the fresh images of crooks and oil and embargoes and napalm and fleeing helicopters in his head.
No angel born in hell
Could break that satan's spell.
It had been awhile since then, a whole slew of new problems have blown up in his face since then. He was stumbling home now, tire after the day's meetings, yawning into the frosty February air. Once inside, he quickly shed his confining suit and shut himself away in his office. He didn't turn on the lights, instead casting his eyes over the gray room, the only room in his home that was bare from piles of clothes and burger wrappers and crinkled comic books and hand held video games tossed away in frustration.
Over the years much of his assorted paraphernalia and memories had been placed into museums to the reverence of the general public. He chuckled to himself in the darkened room. If they only knew what treasures he still had stowed around the house.
Alfred sat at his desk, halfheartedly ruffling his notes from the last world meeting into a messy pile before leaning back into his chair with his feet on the table, his head hanging back and looking up at the black ceiling. It annoyed him that a meeting had to have fallen on this day, a day that Alfred honest to God just wanted to be left alone. He wished he was more like Arthur, who seemed to always be able to drown out painful memories in the malty bliss of alcohol, something that he tended to do every year around the beginning of July, but Alfred couldn't bring himself to.
As much as Alfred hated it, he was finding out more and more that he vice wasn't anything like the others; he had no insatiable taste for alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or food-okay, maybe a little bit for food-but still, there was only one thing that provided him with that sweet, loosening catharsis.
As much as he hated the outcome of it, and what it meant, he felt peace in the raw heat of violence, of war, of boiling blood and blinding explosions. Whenever he wanted to forget the pain, all he wanted was to release the impossible arsenal at his command and watch as the world curled up in a fiery arch as he brought up his flames of Hell to the earth.
He hated, hated to admit it, but in that way was he was like the Soviet Union. He spat as he thought of the name that the man that had once been his ally had taken to calling himself. The Soviet Union. He didn't even sound partially human any more.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite,
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
Tears brimmed in his eyes, and in the company of anyone else he would have blamed them on the dust in the air or his exhaustion, but in the quiet of his own home he let them well up and spill down freely. Sniffing, he removed Texas from the bridge of his nose as he pulled his legs off the desk and settled his chair back down. He set his glasses down on the table-he almost never took them off, sometimes not even when he went to sleep-and smeared a hand across his eyes.
He inhaled deeply and moved his hand to the blurred shape of his one of his desk drawers and opened it. The rest of the drawers in his desk were messy and cluttered and filled with ragged bits of paper-but this one, despite its considerable storage space, was wide and open and very, very hollow looking.
I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news,
But she just smiled and turned away.
His fingers traced along a piece of jewelry that sat on the bottom of the drawer. He bit his lip. It was clunky, made of thick, dusty beads. He gulped down a rock in throat and withdrew his hand from the necklace as if it was white hot. The drawer was sparsely assorted with other items, each with their own individual resting space, seemingly junk to an outsiders view but absolutely cherished treasures to the American man. He knew other drawers were similar, cupboards and cases scattered throughout his home, that contained the innumerable remainders
He recalled a ancient felt fedora tucked away in his cavernous storage room, along with a brilliantly colored headscarf, a broken guitar, countless records, 8 tracks, cassettes, CDs-
I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before,
But the man there said the music wouldn't play.
He pulled the drawer out farther and the dim light of the window flooded its interior and glinted off the square lenses and black frames of a pair of horn rimmed glasses that stood out from years worth of dust that had settled around it and the other objects.
His fingers trembling despite himself, he reached in and gently pulled the glasses out.
He slowly slide them onto his nose, and breathed in a familiar smell that by all means shouldn't have still been there after over 60 or so years.
Sixty-two years. How old would he have been? He did a mental count off. Eighty-four. That was nothing. Nothing compared to his couple centuries. And yet, here he was, still alive, still the one remembering. Like it was with everybody. All of them.
They were forever young now, just like he was.
It hurt more, he didn't know why. It hurt more than when one of his bosses passed, save for maybe a handful. It didn't even hurt as much when they were old, and when he knew and they knew and he had time to say goodbye. But when they just died like that, when he felt liked he'd hardly gotten to know them at all. He always wondered if it had something to do with his age. Maybe he felt it more because he was still physically young, his emotions were more easily rattled because he was technically a teenager, still a baby compared to the rest of the world.
And, naturally, that wasn't the only time that he had felt that pain. He had felt the pain with all of them: the Hendrixes, the Joplins, the Cookes, the Morrisons, all so young, all like him-and he swore to himself each time that he would never, ever, ever forget them.
And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
He tried to put together a fractured prayer for them inside his head but his brain was swimming with too many images and dreams and could have beens as he whipped the glasses from his face and set them as gently as he could on the desk top.
He got up, slowly, painfully, aware of the now familiar locking of his muscles and tightening of his chest as his people looked back in pained remembrance. Although, he noted, it was less than last year. Despite himself, he bit his lip in anger. Every year, the pain was less, the remembrance was less.
He moved stiffly towards the window, pressing his forehead against the cool glass, looking out at the dark blue sky and glowing, half obscured moon, and for once, was able to push piercing ice and falling planes and twisted metal and burning fires out of his memories and instead fell into the beautiful humming of music inside his head.
And the three men I admire most:
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.