I don't own Hetalia. What a shame.


Snow drifted softly down outside the window, the room on the other side of the glass illuminated by the last rays of sun, and the whitish blue light of a laptop.

There were a few posters on the walls. On one of them, signatures covered the maple leaf logos on each player's team kit. On another, a polar bear wandering through the frozen wilderness.

The bed was placed against the wall underneath the polar bear poster. Canada was sat on it, Kumajirou curled up beside him. He smiled to himself at the sleeping ball of fur, before turning his attention back to the screen, scrolling down the webpage.

Currently, he was flicking through a discussion forum. He wasn't going to make any posts, he had discovered the hard way in the past that people didn't pay attention to him on the internet as well as in the flesh. But still he scrolled through the countless posts, just happy to glean a small insight into the lives of regular people.

One thread caught his eye in the list. "The same people through history? Immortal? Family resemblance?" it asked. Canada chuckled quietly; this kind of conspiracy theory thread reminded him of his brother somewhat.

He clicked on it out of curiosity. The first post was pretty much expected: a sensationalist and poorly written wall of text. Skimming over it, he reached a collection of images. Most were photos of crowds, with a person picked out and circled. He skimmed over a few of the images before scrolling back up to the top picture.

He zoomed in on the small figure circled in a large company of soldiers, taken, according to the caption, during the Vietnam war.

He recognised him instantly. It was America.

Canada's eyes widened. It was him, without a doubt, down to that distinctive hair curl.

Starting to panic, he scrolled down to the next image. This one was said to have been taken during World War One. Sure enough, out of a group of soldiers, his brother had been circled out.

The third image, taken during World War Two, away from the front line, circled out three people. His brother was one of them again, but this time England and France had been circledas well, stood to either side of him.

Canada closed the laptop. The sun had set now, and the sudden lack of light left him in the dark.

His mind was racing. The first rule of being a nation was that your very existence and nature was need to know information. This was for countless reasons: their own safety was the first and foremost. If someone got it into their head that they were immortal, and managed to track them down, they'd be in grave danger. And yet, his brother, England, France, and possibly many more of them, had been all been picked out of crowds, their inevitable ghosts linked together in a way they had hoped to god wouldn't happen.

Reopening the laptop, he skimmed through some more of the images. Each picked out a nation, with many of the major nations appearing a number of times.

He was reaching the last few of the sizable number of them when Kumajirou stirred. The bear stretched, yawned and opened his eyes before sleepily looking up at Canada.

"Who are you?" came the inevitable question.

Canada sighed for a moment before giving his usual, well practiced response. "I'm Canada, your owner."

The bear lazily blinked, seemingly processing this information, before turning to the laptop screen and the image currently displayed on it. "Who's that?" he asked, delicately pointing to the focus of the image with a claw.

Canada turned back to the screen. "That's... Hungary, I think." This photo had supposedly been taken during the Hungarian Uprising during the cold war, where Hungary had tried to loosen Russia's grip on her country. Here, she was running through a street while clutching a gun, hair tangled, and with dirt and blood streaked across her face.

This was serious. This wasn't some list buried in a remote corner of the internet either, long since forgotten about, the list was recent, and other users were adding their own images to the list. One such user had dug out an illustration of the coronation of James the First of England, two people with a strong resemblance to England and Scotland picked out of the collection of those depicted with the monarch. This image in particular was gathering a lot of attention, simply because it seemed to push back the "first sighting" by more than a hundred years.

He couldn't do nothing. But, he knew he would get absolutely nowhere by himself. He hovered over his mobile for a moment.

He picked it up, dialing his brother's number. It ringed for what seemed forever, before cutting to the automated response. Canada muttered under his breath, cursing his luck. Anyone else he could call would either be asleep or busy. Email? Ugh, it would probably end up in the junk mail folder knowing his luck and get forgotten.

Hang on. There was a G8 meeting in a couple of days...

He started collecting the images, saving them and printing them out wirelessly. Kumajirou watched intently, aware that something was deeply troubling his owner.

Canada just hoped that they weren't too late to stop the flood.


Eep, first chapter done! It came out shorter than expected, but the next one should be longer. I hope you like it so far, this is the first story I've succeeded in forcing myself to start writing. :P

This plotline was originally going to be just one part of a ridiculously long story, but I realised it would simply be too long, both to write and read, so I adapting some of the sub plots into separate stories. This is still going to be long, if all goes to plan. ;)