Ludwig—1993
You are a being of madness.
You feel it, coursing, thrumming, beating just below the surface. You hide it and you hide it well—behind facades of order and regulation and schedules. The others don't know about the madness, or, if they do, they don't really mention it. But they don't really come closer either, and you try not to think about that.
It's easier this way. You can preoccupy yourself with numbers and cold, solid science and ignore that you are still a subject of fear, of pity, of hate, of intrigue. You don't really understand how any one being can be all of these things, but you have been all of them for so long that you don't really question it anymore. You've spent a half-century rebuilding what a mad boss tore down in ten, trying to recapture the glory that had once captivated the world, trying to atone for leading your people so far astray. There is guilt, so much guilt, because you could have stopped it, stopped it all.
You'd just been so hungry, so very hungry, the emptiness of an entire people gnawing at your cavernous stomach. And you were tired, you were so very worn down, dreaming of a day when your people could be proud of you. You dreamt of a day when you could be something to depend on again, when you could lay victory at the feet of your people. (And you dreamt of a soft smile, of chestnut hair, of an apron, and a broom and a kiss that you are certain never happened and yet did and it makes both your head and heart hurt. You try not to think about that kiss, but it felt so nice to be needed, to feel another heart beating for you.) And you're tired of dreaming. So when he appeared, with a zeal, and a plan, and a fiery passion, you couldn't help but draw closer, warming your dying fingers against the promise of a glorious future. It was the madness that accepted him, that blinded you to the inescapable conclusion, the only logical end.
The worst part of it, the part that still wakes you at night in a cold sweat, is how blind you'd been to it all. Every night, it seems, you dream—not of glory and kisses and victory, but of blood, of bodies, of the devil. And your dream, you see your people, selling their souls to him and receiving apathy in return, and your hands are drenched with their blood, and your mind is filled with their blank eyes, with their rabid minds. And the devil looks like Hitler. And every night, you wake up, drenched and sickened by the memories that you can't let yourself forget. Your people have paid for their madness, and you don't want them to pay anymore, so you take it in—better that they get on with their lives. And it's nice now, this new generation and he sits back and lets them build a world that he never could have imagined—they take power, not with tanks, not with bloodshed, but with science, with engineering, with conscience.
And all the poison that you'd taken in is dying down, retreating from your veins and your synapses for some quiet place to sleep, and you dare to hope that this will be the end of it. And hope feels like a stranger to you after all of this time, but a it is a welcome one and you draw it in, cradling it carefully to your chest to shield it from the lecherous grasp of the madness. You hope. You relish it—this fragile luxury you've rediscovered.
And you hope alone. There is no one—not your brother (a pang, you don't think about him, you don't think about the day the wall fell), not Kiko (who had his atonement, his own recovery, and to be honest, you're pretty sure he blames you for it all on some level), not Feli— (you still can't say his name.)
And you miss him most of all at night. As you wake from your confused and tortured dreams and your hand reaches out and grabs nothing but empty sheets and they seem to taunt you, the dreams and the sheets and the nothing. You can still smell him in those hours, and somehow he always managed to smell like sun and salt air and you were always a bit jealous of that and you ached to pull him closer to claim that smell for yourself. As you wake, you can still feel his callused fingers sliding over your cheek, and your eyes stay closed because you don't want him to know that you actually like how that feels and you like that he's curled around you and maybe he isn't as useless as you thought, and maybe this time you'll have the nerve to finally kiss him— And then your eyes open and you realize that he isn't there, hasn't been there in such a very long time.
You still remember the day he realized it. You still replay the exact moment you saw the fear creep into his eyes as he looked into yours. You remember it because it was the exact moment you realized how far you'd fallen. You remember the day he left. You remember how your hand tightened on his wrist, because, what the hell, you had lost him anyway. And you tugged him closer and it wasn't a kiss because you refuse to call what you did to him that day anything other than what it was, an act of madness. And that madness haunts your dreams too.
And you go about your day as though nothing was wrong, you join your scientists, you let yourself to be drawn into America's inane arguments, you attend meetings and you are allowed to fade into the background and it's nice. And if you still haven't figured out how to quite smile when you catch Feliciano's eye, and if you still haven't figured out what the look he gives you in return, it's okay. And if it isn't happiness, it's more than you deserve.
Because someday, he'll forgive you. You know this with an absolute certainty, though you cannot explain why you are so certain or how you came across this certainty. Some day, he will lose the fear and your madness will be a distant memory and he'll wrap his arms around you and you'll kiss him (and there won't be any other word for it). And you won't wake to nothing and he won't have to steal into your bed trembling and there will be no more nightmares…. For either of you.
And if it isn't happiness, it will be something far far better.
xXx
I feel like the 1990's were an interesting time for Germany as they were finally reunited and began to forge forward as a true country once more, it only seemed right to place Ludwig's narrative at a point in time when the country was caught between the promise of its future and the shame of its past. I hope you enjoy the second part and if there isn't enough of a happy ending I promise there will likely be some super fluffy ficlet that crops up as a result of this-I actually thought about doing an epilogue but I don't know if it would fit with the story. Maybe that'll change, I don't know.
