This is a different take on this fic. Instead of a dissolved nation simply losing his status as an immortal and an icon/embodiment, he also loses any memories he has from being a nation. This fic takes on a different path - this time from America's perspective - as he falls for the human who was once Russia, who has no recollection of his previous lifetime or ever having met America. Warnings for gore and violence, because I do so love writing crazy!America; also sexual scenes. Slight hints of FRussia. Also lots of France, brief appearance by England, and some FrUk hints.
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It was at the dawn of the new millennium when America discovered how much the latter part of the twentieth century had changed him. At first - and you couldn't blame him even as he tore off his glasses and washed his face with lukewarm water - he thought he'd had one too many to drink, because in the fields of barley that was America's hair, a plague was spreading.
And that plague began with a single grey hair.
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Deuteranopia: Color-blindness resulting from insensitivity to green light, causing confusion of greens,reds, and yellows.
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Visions danced over Ivan's eyes. Black ones, white ones, snow, then darkness - shadows. Lights flickered somewhere in the distance, then a pair of eyes. Blue ones, bright as a sky Ivan hadn't seen since winter arrived in Moscow. Then beyond the skies came the sun, or was it wheat fields? Maybe sunflower petals, but too narrow to be.
Something bright slipped into vision: several tiny suns spotted across his vision like stars in daylight. Yet none of the suns brought him warmth. He was cold, so much so that it was a wonder why he could still move while feeling more akin to a block of ice. The wind howled in the distance, bit at his ears and slipped their secrets in.
He silently wondered how much time passed while clocks ticked in the distant parts of his mind. Maybe his heartbeat, he hoped.
The sunspots dissipated and made way for flares on glass windows, blue skies of worry watching him, wheat fields of golden blonde hair framing a face; blue eyes like skies ready to storm and rain thunderstorms down on the snowy fields of Ivan's face. Eyelashes fluttered, purple eyes perviously hidden behind white eyelids fixed on the face looming over him as if he could see through it. "Alfred?"
"Non, mon chou,"
Life sprang so suddenly back into Ivan's eyes that it seemed as if the other's words were a defibrillator that shocked his heart back into life. His hands shot up, catching the bends of the other's jaw and holding him there. Ivan almost wanted to keep his eyes closed where blackness reigned, where there was no snow, no whiteness, (white. Hospitals are white-) and too dark for redness to bleed into his irises. "Francis..." he murmured, eyes fixing on the man's face.
The Parisian responded with a smile, stroking his thumb along the Russian's jaw. "Oui. Were you dreaming?"
"Nightmare."
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It took Francis only two years to find Ivan. Even if he held Paris above all cities of the world, there was something he cherished about Moscow as he painted his fingernails over the wrought iron fences. It was the city he could never conquer - never have, never own - a city more red at sundown than the blazes he remembered rupturing the city centuries earlier. His fingertips, warmed from the knit gloves he removed seconds before, melted the snow caught on his fingerprints and brought the remaining flakes to his lips to dissolve them on his tongue. He loved this city, and somewhere deep down, he still craved it, desired it, and took it upon himself to protect it.
He knew that without Ivan - without Russia - the mighty city would fall prey to greedy hands, crumble, fly the wrong flags over Red Square like a victory when the people of Moscow wore faces more scornful than the weather blowing in from the east.
The nation curled his hands around the iron bars of the fence like a prison, gazing out into the streets where the snow had layered over the tracks left by tires. The wind erased footprints left by the Muscovite people, as if left by ghosts long gone like the shadows left at Chernobyl. As his eyes focused past the blur behind his makeshift prison, his eyes fixated on a rather familiar-looking fabric in the wind. Like a beacon, pale in color, but a bruise to the impossible whiteness of the city, Francis found himself acting without thought (a talent of his), and seized the tail end of the man's scarf. When the figure turned, Francis was met with a pair of eyes he knew were rarer than a heatwave in Russian winter-
-wide and afraid. Even now, even though his beloved country is no more and has forgotten and forsaken him, he still embodies the emotions of his people.Fear. Wariness, as if the very wind would tear through their skin like bullets and spill their blood into the snow.
Even now, he would flinch as if Francis's fingers had intended harm, had intended any emotion but comfort. Ivan was a fully-grown child of trauma, scarred by wars and violence he could again never remember or fathom, but relived in them nightmares plagued with blue eyes, blond hair, and bombs that could disintegrate whole cities in minutes.
And even after decades of reckless abandon by his own memories, Francis found that even he was too afraid to touch him for fear that he would turn to dust, and then his cities would follow suit.
He was fragile, and for that reason Francis had to keep him a secret.
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But it was a secret with a lifespan shorter than the blink of an eye. And Francis had to keep his shut through every crash, thump, and splinter the summer after America plucked his first grey hair and drowned it in the tides of his sink drain.
"How could you keep this from me? How could you not tell me that you knew where he was?" America emptied his mantle of the bamboo Japan brought for him, its precious blue-painted white porcelain shattering by France's feet. He stepped back, careful to avoid cutting up his feet. For he, too, was fragile.
"I thought it would be best," France replied evenly. "For both of you."
"Bullshit!" America barked, a wrathful finger now directed between France's eyes. France lowered his gaze to the folded glasses in his hands. He had the decency to remove them from America's visage before the nation began throwing things. He had not seen America this angry since he'd asked for France's help during the Revolutionary War.
Silence crept over the pair, curtains rolling in the high winds of an apartment fifteen stories up. Paperwork retreated to the kitchen, ushered by the breezes, and France finally deemed it safe enough to remove the distance between he and America. Gently, the older nation adorned America with his glasses once more, catching the dying embers of fury behind the lenses that haunted Ivan's dreams.
"How many times have you slept with him?"
The older nation wet his lips nervously, and the corner of America's mouth twitched into a knowing smile. "You can't keep him. He's not yours to keep. He's mine. I won him, fair and square. I spent over four decades fighting him and I won. He is not yours to claim."
"If you could only 'ear yourself talk, Amerique! You treat 'im like a trophy, but if you could only see 'ow 'e is right now-"
"I've been trying to see him! And it's dicks like you that are keeping me from doing that!"
France let his shoulders go slack, eyes fixating on the curtains washing shadows on the floorboards like waves in the breeze. "At least thirty." He worried away on the side of his cheek.
"What?"
"If I 'ad to guess, I would say I slept with 'im about thirty times-"
As if it were in spite of whatever sensations of acute pleasure the memories brought France, America's fist wrought them with falsities of pain. France was not aware of being hit until after his hands were running over the course texture of his jawline; the pain only hit him when he had opened his mouth in a gesture of slight disbelief. "Amerique-"
The embers of rage in America's eyes had erupted into a forest fire, and France swore to have caught green flames burning somewhere in the blue irises filling with the black smoke of his pupils. Before America could land a second punch, France caught it in his palm, closed his fingers around it, and used America's wasted momentum to back the younger nation against the adjacent wall.
"Ah, but it is funny, because he had almost the same reaction as you before joining me in bed." America grit his teeth, struggled, but with little use against the tight grip France kept on his wrists. "Is that 'ow you intend to threat 'im when you meet, Amerique? If you ask me-" America didn't,thank you "-I think 'e is lucky to be rid of those 'orrible memories. 'e was given the ability to move on, and you still 'ave not. So tell me, what do you plan to do when you see 'im again?"
A sinister grin passed over America's lips. "Fuck his brains out until there's nothing left for him to remember about me."
With a small growl, France tightened his grip until he could feel the palpitation beneath them, then released America's binds, raising his hands and lowering his eyes in surrender.
America threw his arms up in defeat, turning to the east-facing open window and watching the single row of his nation's flag dance tangos in the wind from the adjacent building. "I can't see it anymore. There was a time when I would look out that window, look at those flags - my flags - and know that everything will be better... but I can't see it anymore- red. It's strange... everything looks like... like I'm seeing the world through photos of old Civil War Generals. It's like how everyone now views the past. I can remember Mr. Lincoln's speeches perfectly, but everyone now seems to think that the world back then was just sepia; that color is this new invention that came out with colored TV..."
A pang of pity left a pinch in France's stomach. "'ow long?"
"It was sometime a few months ago," America admitted bitterly. "And now-" he laughed resentfully "-and now I'm finding grey hairs. I can't be getting old already-"
"It is a sign of maturity, mon ami. It means that you are getting wiser."
"My ass," America's voice drowned away in the waters of the fabric of his sleeves as he sank to the floor and buried his face into them. "I've been mature since, like, forever ago. This just isn't fucking fair-!"
"C'est la vie."
America raised his eyes enough to let them burn holes into the bottoms of France's dark denim jeans. He felt pressure in his hair as France stroked his fingers through them, though whether for comfort or apology, America did not have the patience to decipher because he did not want or deserve either. He caught the last few footsteps of France's shoes clicking across the wood floor no matter how silent he tried to keep his walking. "Tell me where he is."
France froze, hand tightening around the doorknob. "The Serbsky Psychiatric Center."