A/N: Dedication of this chapter goes out to Vine8Ky for being the first of any response to this fic. Thank you for taking the time, unlike the other thirty people, just to Favourite! It means a lot to me! And also, to PandaTeaLovers for being the first to review! Keep up the Prussia-esqueness, Panda-chans!

Okay, about the chapter…. Bear with me. I myself found it to be poorly written, but I'm still trying to get the feel of the characters. I think I'm a pretty good writer, but it takes me a little while to get warmed up. If I suck, tell me honestly. If you want to review just to hate on it, go ahead. I love my feedback. Positive reviews are splendid, criticism and advice are even better, flames are also appreciated as I may use them to both heat my house and roast marshmallows.


The Scent of Water

Chapter One

"I'm just getting sick and tired of having to spend every weekend travelling."

Really, it wasn't fair of his parents to be splitting him up like this, spending one week at his mother's place, and one week at his father's. Ever since the two had sat him down the one time Arthur had decided to accompany him to Yao's place, everything had made a little more sense to him — why Arthur insisted that he called him Daddy instead of England, and why Yao was so over-protective of him. It had all come pouring out around his fourteenth birthday, and relationships between the two had been strained like this ever since. The ridiculous part was that Li was turning eighteen in three weeks and neither of his parents seemed to care about anything other than fighting over whose house the party would be held at this year. Honestly, Li didn't want a party for his birthday. He wanted to sit down with his parents and Iceland with a few home-cooked dishes and a cake made by Iceland's older brother, Finland, and just… talk. Have fun. Stoic as he might have seemed to them, Li's mind was awake and very much active, and he knew what he wanted.

"Why don't you just tell them?"

"I did."

Emil Steilsson sighed heavily and leaned back on the couch in the horribly bright living room. It wasn't like Emil wasn't the best person to talk to when you were dealing with people ignoring you… it was just that he probably wasn't the best person to talk to, period. His simple solution was to get them drunk and leave them at the bar. Unfortunately, Li had rejected that idea because he really hated seeing his father drunk more than anything, and he knew that it would probably take half the bar before his mother even showed signs of how tipsy he actually was. It wasn't worth the time or effort. At this point, both were at a loss, and the only thing that could currently be done about it was their homework. Emil was often invited over for 'tutoring', especially when Arthur wasn't home, to give the two an excuse to hang out. It wasn't like Emil couldn't do the work himself, it was just that it did get lonely all by himself in the house across the street from England's place. Li couldn't imagine what it must be like having to take a boat to get to and from the bus stop every morning, but he was well aware that it kept Emil from school when the conditions weren't suitable for boating, and in the winter when the water was frozen solid enough there were other means of transportation.

"And what did they do?"

"The same thing as always." Yes, Li couldn't forget that evening — just one of many — when he'd felt it was time to confront his separated parents about his feelings of their abuse of him. Not abuse…. No, but they were still fighting over him, pulling him like taffy and then snapping him back together, twisting, and repeating. It was hard for him to express these things — after years of being emotionally worn like this, it was safe to say that he'd just stopped caring — but if one strained to understand, it was still there. Emotion. He was laden with it, heavily at that. The heaviest of those, once, were love and guilt. Love, because no matter how they treated him, like he was some kind of an object they were still his parents after all…. And then guilt… because the way Arthur and Yao both told the story, it was his fault that any of this was even going on. Sometimes he wished he'd never been conceived, but that, technically was Arthur's fault. Even Arthur admitted that he'd made a mistake and that… that hurt. That was a kind of pain that was only fixed by his mother's soft words — "Evenstill,I'llalwaysloveyou." And… it was nicer to hear it in his mother's smooth native tongue, a language he'd picked up quickly despite how Yao was always complaining that he might never learn properly at his age. It came natural, Li spoke his Mandarin fluently, and Yao laughed at himself because he had no idea what he had been so worried about…. Then he never spoke of it again just to cover the fact that his empty heartache had been there in the first place.

"Why don't you just—"

"Getting them drunk and dumping them at the bar isn't going to work, Iceland." It was probably the third time that night that Li had defeated that plan before the Icelandic could present it again, and to pass the time watching Emil handwriting his math homework, Li drew pictures of nude women on the margin of his own assignment. He knew he shouldn't… it was wrong, but…. It was just kind of something that happened, and he couldn't do anything about it… maybe.

"You could dig a hole and throw them in it, then toss them some rope and tell them to make a ladder." Emil shrugged, his eyes never lifting from the paper. Obviously, when it came to teamwork exercises and partnership activities, Iceland was completely clueless. But who could blame him, really? Li actually found it kind of cute, though he'd never admit it, and even still who was going to see it in those endless dark pits of eyes? It made him feel safe, in a way. Still, he shook his head to see what else his homework buddy could come up with.

Of course, this left a long silence, because good ideas for bringing together two nations are few and far between coming from a country who'd rather be isolated from just about everything that he could get away with. Even now, he had only come over because Hong Kong had promised that his father was out and probably wouldn't be back until after midnight, considering that tonight was pub night with the guys, and they were all going to do the same thing they did on every pub night…. That is, get in as soon as the pubs opened, drink until their liver threatened suicide, throw up on the way to the next pub, and repeat until one in the morning when the pubs closed and they were all forced to go their separate ways, finding their own ways home. More often than not Arthur was able to call a cab, but he had his days where he just stumbled home in the darkness whether it was because he'd lost his cell, forgotten it, or was just too damn drunk to hail a cab. These were the nights that Li would stay up and wait, just in case something happened, especially in the winter. He didn't need his father getting sick or frost-bitten or something else that was terribly tragic and he'd have to express his sympathy laden with sarcasm. It was his own fault, and he needed to pay the price. Yao was a different story. He didn't leave the house to drink, and he didn't often invite friends over to party, though occasionally he was joined by some of the other Asian nations. It was usually quiet unless South Korea was there, and even if he wasn't Thailand almost always halfway made up for it. And when he was lucky enough, his older brother brought things home from Portugal, which was nice because Li didn't often get the chance to travel very far. He'd gone with Iceland to meet some of his family once, but that was it. The worst part was that Denmark and Norway's car had broken down so the two had to have England drive them. Luckily his driving wasn't as bad as his cooking, and for once in his life he was happy that his father wasn't Italy. Would he trade sane driving for delicious food? Not on his life.

"Write them letters."

The statement came out of nowhere, and took Li by surprise. "What?"

"Write them letters, Hong Kong. They can't ignore what they have to read. It's why books are more effective than speeches. It's why you're more likely to understand a story if you read it yourself than if you have it read to you. Besides the obvious fact that that's just lazy, wouldn't you assume that it's easier to ignore someone when they're talking to you than if they're writing down what they're expressing?" Once again, Emil shrugged, but this time he looked up and caught Li's eyes. The logic Iceland had given really couldn't be denied, and so without protest two sheets of lined paper were pulled from Hong Kong's binder, and he rested his pen on the first line. And he drew a blank. What do you say to someone when you want to tell them something without hurting their feelings? After another long silence, his pen was finally dusting over the page, sculpting out something, but they weren't his feelings. He was staring down at the page, but there was an absent part of him that didn't realize what he was doing until the damage had already been dealt. And Emil, satisfied with himself, went back to his homework until he noticed the irregular strokes of his friend's pen and looked up. "What are you drawing? I want to see." The silverette leaned over to look at the page and slowly wished he hadn't. His cheeks stained pink, he shot Li a look that caught the Asian's attention, and quietly added, "You're doing it again."

Unfortunately, they had been the last two sheets of lined paper in the book, so like it or not, someone was getting a nude model in the background of their letter. Yao was definitely the safer choice, and so… like an arrow shot from a bow, words written down and sent by express mail to your mother can never be unwritten.

Beginning with the respective parent, Li wrote each letter the exact same so as not to single anyone out and he tried to put everything in him into words. He failed miserably, however, and ended up only writing half a page to them, to the general tune of what appeared to be air sickness and something about long nights at the pub… and if you twisted it sideways and kind of read it that way, you might have seen him trying to express his love, but that wasn't how he had intended it to turn out. Still deciding to send the letters before he changed his mind, Li also included a request for a family meeting, no matter how stupid it sounded to either of them. And though he was dreading it, he knew it was probably for the best. It cleared his mind so that he could focus on Hamlet, anyway. It wouldn't be long before he bored of Shakespeare and Emil bored of calculus, and the two ended up being bored together, getting into the secret coffee stash hidden for the monster hangovers of Arthur's that just couldn't be fixed by anything else. And when they finished half a jar out of boredom, they watched some dry British comedy, raided the scone jar, turned down the lights, and realized that the two of them couldn't lay on the couch together without the two of them being a little close for comfort. Awkward? Definitely.

But they could live with that.