In the middle of the night, Alfred crashes—hard. He couldn't save his Matthew and that's what makes him the most despicable human being on Earth. He slinks downstairs, turns on the stovetop and lays his hands down on them.

He bites his lips (his skin does not break no matter how hard he bites) and hopes the new burns will just be thought of as more damage done by the man's lighter—Ken. His name was Ken.

Alfred holds his hands up in front of himself, gasping and panting until he can reach the bathroom and turn on the sink with his burnt fingers. Holding his hands under the water, he at least feels a little less like a fucker and a little more like an atoner.

As he stumbles back up the stairs, clutching his hands to his chest and whimpering, he realizes that he hasn't felt numb all night.

He waits for the swoop of lethargy. It arrives the following morning once his hands have been bandaged and he's gone through the appropriate motions to content his mother that really, he's fine, he just wants to be in bed for a few more hours.

Around midday, he decides he might as well do his gratefulness entry to keep Mr. Bonnefoy happy, but when he turns to the last page he wrote on—

I SAVED THEIR SIBLING
THEY'RE BOTH OKAY BECAUSE OF ME
I SAVED SOMEONE'S MATTHEW!

—he…

…

…

(he writes, in the tiniest letters he can, I saved someone's Matthew last night and for a little while longer, Alfred is at peace.)

000

He remembers the police questioning him and not much else. He's not called back to the station. He is called into court, once, briefly, to give a testimony. What was Lily wearing? Was she leading Ken on? What were they doing previously?

Alfred says he doesn't know, he didn't think so. He just heard 'stop' and decided to interfere when it didn't look like Ken would, because 'no' means 'no.' That's what he says. It sounds so much cooler than he feels. He sound suave, secure guy. Like some kind of vigilante hero who just goes around punishing criminals wherever they may be and turning them in to the cops with no regard for his own personal safety.

He is not that. Sometimes he finds himself imagining being a brave, cool, strong hero. When he remembers that he isn't, he lies down on the couch for hours trying to figure out why he could save Lily but not his own brother.

He gets a Lord of the Rings movie for his—and Matthew's— birthday. Birthdays are hard.

Birthdays are really hard.

He smiles at his cousin Alejandro and says 'thank you', even though he's never read any of the Lord of the Rings books, it was Matt that did, but people got them mixed up all the time. He tries to ignore any lingering sting. Still, it's three hours of mind-numbing escape, even though he pauses it every ten minutes to get up and pace. At one point, he spends half an hour in the bathroom splashing himself with icy water. Alfred watches the movie as well as he can, even though it's impossible to really enjoy.

You wish now that our places had been exchanged. That I had died and Boromir had lived.

Yes. I wish that.

000

It's sudden and a little unexpected, but Alfred has a run-in with Siddhartha Gautama in his history textbook one night while reading up on colonialism. It gets some crazy ideas in his head about enlightenment and the spirit world and his human-ness here on earth. There aren't any Buddhist temples around though, so Alfred starts going to church instead.

He has no idea what denomination it is, but it's something in Christianity. He doesn't know much about the different sorts of Christianity, but he knows Francis Bonenfoy, the metahuman from the hospital, is Catholic. He knows the lady at the icecream shop Alfred doesn't go to anymore had a large beaded cross hanging around her neck and occasionally spoke in tongues. His government teacher has a philosophy degree, is Atheist, and stresses that according to Pascal, being Agnostic and being Atheistic are the same thing, at which point everyone stops listening. Alfred's mother is some sort of Protestant-turned-Agnostic, his father was raised Old Order Mennonite, and that's the extent of his knowledge.

The church is small and made of white stone. The bell tower doesn't have a bell in it. He decides it's denomination-less when he realizes he doesn't want to admit he doesn't know exactly what denomination he is, either. Alfred sits through the sermons politely each Sunday, and sometimes he even agrees with what's being said. He buys a little iron cross necklace which he wears under his tee-shirts and coats. He isn't entirely sure about Heaven and Hell, much less Purgatory, which he's never really heard much about, but he decides to draw butterflies on his hand and pretend the one that looks most like a bird is Matthew. Matthew, like a ghost, like an angel, watching him throughout the day.

There's a little table near the back of the church. It's shaped sort of like the bleachers at football games, each ridge a little minitable where things can be set. They use it for candles.

There are three types of candles, two little ones and one big one. The little ones come in blue and red holders, the big ones come in green. A little candle is one dollar, a big green one is two dollars, and all the funds go to a charity Alfred thinks he's heard of before. It goes to the kids in Haiti, the ones still trying to rebuild after the earthquake. Every Sunday after a service he can only sort-of listen to, he approaches the back table, pays a dollar for a little red candle, sets it on the bleacher-table, and lights it up.

This is Matthew's candle he thinks, as long as I've got this, he's still sort of with me.

He still writes Francis' lists. On Sundays, only on Sundays, he writes two things instead of just one. Sometimes he writes, I'm glad for chocolate bars, or songbirds or people left me alone today or people paid attention to me today. Then he writes, and candles for Matthew.

000

Oh, God, the good days are still so long.

000

One Saturday afternoon it's a relatively slow news day. It's especially obvious because the newest assault-by-metahuman story is on every single one of the channels.

—has declined to comment. The metahuman's family claims that he believed Beilshmidt was trying to break in. The 'retaliation' resulted in a case of minor frostbite, which will fortunately not cost Beilschmidt any of his limbs. Mr. Beilschmidt says that while his charge's actions were poor, he does not believe such violent response was necessary, though he doesn't plan to press charges due to—

There's nothing to do but watch news and read comic books about people with lots of money putting on pjs and fighting crime on the streets using secret identities. As he watches news and reads the comics, an egg quietly hatches in the back of his mind and another idea is born.

000

He needs a mask, first of all. A mask and something to hide his hair, not only to avoid recognition, but also because when people pulled his hair it hurt.

Alfred gets a mask at a costume store. He's read Watchmen, all of it, and knows to not get the type with a band. Instead he buys the stage-type gummy glue stuff, which adheres the thing to his face, so he won't be blinded by the mask being tugged only partway off if someone gives it a tug. He invests in colored contacts which turn his eyes orange, so he doesn't have to worry about being blind without his glasses.

He chooses a red hoodie and ripped up jeans for the rest of his outfit. He pulls the hoodie's band as tightly as he can and ties it so the hood doesn't slip off his head. Red, because of Matthew's candles and Matthew's favorite color, and Matthew's random quip when they were twelve about how the Red Coats wore their red coats so no one could tell if they were injured or not. Mostly though, he chooses it because Matt.

He doesn't think of a code name. That was the media's job. He doesn't think of how stupid the idea of being a vigilante is, because even just thinking about it gives him a little jolt, and that little jolt is more powerful than anything he's felt after so long. The jolt brings him back to the night with Lily and her brother and the euphoria he felt when he realized I saved someone's Matthew.

He doesn't question if it's wrong to do what might be called 'charitable acts' if he does them for his own selfish reasons. He doesn't question it because even if it's for the wrong reason, he's trying to help, and if he doesn't try to help then maybe no one will.

He can't let himself be helpless again.

000

The first time, he's out late and prowling the streets of the city it's December and he's trying to get the leaden weight out of his stomach. It's sort of working. The more he walks the better he feels, and the walking and the looking and the watching are taking his mind off things.

He peeks into alleys and down the backstreets and into the dirtier, scarier parts of town. There are people who look terrifying, covered in barbed-wire-and-teardrop tattoos, ragged, with their eyes sunk deep into their skulls. They aren't doing anything though, so Alfred turns and walks away after a while. He meets one or two people who he thinks might be drug dealers, but he doesn't actually see them deal anything and he might've had one or two trysts with marijuana when Matt was still around, so he doesn't want to harry on anyone for anything less than crack. He walks back onto the other streets, hides among the few people still bustling along at night (It's a small city,he thinks Of course there isn't going to be something going on in the back allies every single night. Stupid. ) and tries to hide his face and mask in shadow while embarrassment creeps up his spine.

He checks his watch. It's one in the morning and he's got a math test tomorrow. No big deal, it's math. He'd maybe screw up once or twice and only write down one answer when there should've been two, or put equals when he means about, but shit. It was a math test. He could puke after lunch and be sent home and catch up on his sleep if he wanted and…

Alfred sighs, sticks his hands in his pockets and returns home. He takes off the hoodie and the mask and the contacts, slides them all in the bottom drawer of his dresser, and doesn't touch them again for two months.

000

He finds the aftermath of a beating around ten at night in early March. He isn't wearing his hoodie-and-mask. Maybe if he were he would've been at the alley earlier and done something, but no, he was out buying poster board, emergency coffee rations, and candy bars for a science project due tomorrow that he had procrastinated on until now, having only gotten the motivation to do about an hour prior.

He took a shortcut home because it was cold. He'd turned because he heard someone cough and wow, God, his heart is in his throat and he feels the cross under his tee-shirt and wishes he were really religious so he could pray.

It's a man in the alley. His face is hidden but the faintest, ragged breathing is still audible. His leg is bent an unnatural way and his arms are bare. What must be his jacket is sticking out of the dumpster beside him with its pockets turned out and a rip up the side. There's blood on the ground, and now that Alfred sees it, he can smell it too.

Alfred's hand goes for his cellphone. Then he stops.

I'm already on record, he thinks. I'm on record for beating a guy to shit in defense of another. They'll think I lied the first time. They'll think I did this. I'm gonna be taken in for assault.

He looks for a street sign and reads the name, memorizing it as fast as he can. He dashes to the first payphone he can find, puts a hand over his mouth, and tries to alter his voice without making it sound unnatural. He calls 9-1-1 and says, "Come to Monterray St. right away, hurry. There's a guy in an alley and he's bleeding really badly. I didn't look, but there's blood and he's breathing weird. No, ma'am, I didn't see any weapons. No, ma'am, I don't know who he is. Yes, I'll stay with him."

He hangs up and dashes home, his plastic bags hanging off his arms are swinging dangerously and threatening to rip by the time he reaches the safety of his room. He hopes that the man survives, even though Alfred wasn't there to sit with him. He purposefully avoids the news for several days, just in case a report comes up and he has to wonder whether or not it's his presence or lack of it that kills people.

000

He decides to try the vigilante thing. Just one more time.

It's in March still. Mid March, so he's not the only one still wearing a hoodie. He patrols the streets, revisiting the places he knows he's met bad news on and the places he knows are in the worse part of town.

It's around eleven at night when he sees another hooded figure start running, shoving what looks like a long-strapped purse into a backpack. He glances in and sees a woman and she holds up her hands and says, "He just took everything I have, I swear! I don't have anything else!"

His heart jumps into his throat again. Alfred turns and chases the retreating figure. He wants to shout, 'hey, you! Stop! You!' but he knows he can't and shouldn't. It would just make the mugger run faster and people would hear him and someone might recognize his voice and the secret identity is part of the point.

So Alfred just runs. He runs until his legs start to ache— an inside ache, he can hardly remember the feel of an ache from the outside anymore— and his breathing gets harsh and ragged. Gasping in the cold March air feels like knives in his lungs, even though the rest of him is overheated and being poked by pins and needles from within. The chase was only a few minutes down the sidewalk, but he's already lost sight of the mugger and all he can do is put his hands on his knees and heave.

He heaves and heaves until he actually—without any help from his finger— heaves and pukes on the sidewalk. He empties his stomach completely until it feels like he's emptied out his entire body and he's just a walking shell, making space for a rolling, curling anger that hadn't lived there before.

"Hey, mom?" he asks the next morning after BS'ing his way out of school early again. He'd turned in all his homework first. The teachers all know he fakes, but if he leaves then he's one less student to worry about, so they just shake their heads and mark him down to a C on his reports for lack of class participation.

"Yes?" his mother says. She's reading a book. She'd taken to getting lost in them lately, when she wasn't working or cooking or sleeping or— he didn't really know what his mother did, really. She worked and cooked and slept, and when she wasn't doing that, she read. That's all he knew.

"Can I get a membership at the Y? How much does that cost?"

"Why do you want to go?" she asks.

"I think working out more might improve my heath some. I might not puke as much."

He doesn't know if his mother takes that as a bribe or if she genuinely believes it when he comes home claiming to be sick. He doesn't ask her and she doesn't question his frequent visits to the school nurse. She buys him a season membership to the Y and Alfred goes there every day to work out. He tries to eat a few more greens and nuts and a few less chocolate bars, and sometimes he almost feels good.

Much of his time at the Y is spent on the treadmill, seeing how fast he can run for how long. He looks up average run times online and tries to beat them. He starts buying energy bars and granola instead of Hershey's. He joins a Tuesday night kickboxing class with Toris. He stays out late most nights patrolling the streets; sometimes he catches someone, sometimes he doesn't, and sometimes he has to run midway through retribution to dash away from the cop car that just turned the corner. Most nights, he gets home sore and exhausted and he falls into a dreamless sleep. Not every night, though.

One night he dreams of Matthew cradling his head. Just cradling him. Alfred is lying on his back with his arms crossed over his chest, his head is lying in Matthew's lap and Matthew's hands are by his ears, his thumbs rubbing Alfred's cheeks.

They're the same age in the dream, even though Matthew still has their haircut from seventh grade. It's the haircut that got into the yearbook that year and it's the haircut Matthew has on the picture in the hall of the pony rides at a birthday party. This Matthew has round, wire-framed glasses and is still carrying around his little white polar bear teddy. The bear is sitting beside Matthew, animate, as Matt rubs Alfred's scalp and mumbles words too quiet to make out.

Alfred is lying on his back, looking up at Matthew and there are stars in the sky behind them, not buildings. Alfred knows there are stars even though he doesn't look at them, because he's looking at Matthew, and he knows Matthew came down from the stars to come see him. There's an apartment building in those stars. It's made up of dust and time, twinkling space gems and antimatter. Matthew lives there. He has a shower with great pressure and unlimited heat, friends on every hallway, and a receptionist who chews pink bubblegum and speaks in a vague, uninterested drone like the lady who does voice work for Verizon.

Alfred is lying on his back, looking up at Matthew and he says, "Mattie, you're dead," but it's also a question and also a plea and he's also saying I love you I miss you I want you I need your help I can't live without my other half and you fucker at the same time, even though he isn't actually saying any of that.

He doesn't hear Matthew's voice. He's forgotten it, he realizes. The face he stares up at is the one he sees in the mirror each day, but with a shitty haircut from years ago cut and pasted on from a yearbook photo.

Still, he knows it with every ounce of his soul, in every molecule of air in his lungs, and in the very marrow of his bones that it is Matthew who speaks; it is Matthew who says:

"What are you talking about, Alfie? If I were really dead, I couldn't be here right now."

000

He lights a candle for Matthew on Sunday at the little denomination-less church. As many nights a week as he can, he pulls on his red hoodie and mask and trades his glasses for orange contact lenses, and if he sees something wrong he does his best to stop it. He lives and breathes for those Sundays and late nights. They pull him through the last year of high school when he wants nothing more than to rip out the floor tiles and smash all the windows in the building with his bare hands.

He writes two full 'thankfulness' journals, and even though he doesn't call Bonnefoy up anymore, he drops them off at the hospital before stopping buy a staples to buy a new notebook. The journals are wrapped in a brown paper bag and signed 'go buy yourself a coffee or something –A.F.J.' with a twenty dollar bill snuck between the pages.

Stuck in the back of the second journal is a Calvin and Hobbes strip, illegally photocopied and cut out. It's the raccoon one— "in a sad, awful, terrible way, I'm happy I met him. What a stupid world."

Even though he doesn't want people to be sad, he hopes it makes Bonnefoy cry, so he won't be the only one.

He hits senior year and starts applying for colleges, setting his sights on a nearby community one because even though he wants to make more money than he can with a high school degree, he doesn't really know what the wants to do. But everyone's applying, so he does too, and he decides to not really mind the results.

What he cares for more is that there's a cute guy at the coffee shop. A guy. A man.

Alfred lays in bed thinking about him one night, when suddenly he realizes he's stroking himself off to the thought of the guy's naked body and chest hair and giant cock and oh, oh—that's why he was never interested in girls. It seems profound for some reason. That's why he wasn't interested in girls. Like, holy shit.

He applies for a job at the coffee shop and gives his first blowjob in the backroom during a break. That's also where he receives his first blowjob. They exchange numbers and break up two months later, leaving Alfred sobbing in bed for three days. He ignores the Y and his diet and he goes back to eating ice cream and candy bars, even though the reason they broke up was that Alfred didn't have many nights free because he wanted to go vigilanting, but he couldn't really tell anyone about that so, well, he didn't.

It gets better once he starts going back to working out, eating more greens and nuts again, and doing what it is he lost his boyfriend for. That is, saving Matties.

In January he gets enrolled in community college for the coming fall. It's in a different city. A bigger one. Forty minutes down the road, so even though he loudly declares his hatred of driving, his parents work together for once and buy him a white 1995 Hyundai for graduation. Then they take him out (separately) for pasta, steak and chocolate cake for lunch, dinner and desert respectively. They set aside a piece for Matthew without saying it outright. Alfred eats a pint of pecan ice cream in Matt's honor, but he does it in the safety of his own home. He takes the night off of work and vigilanting, sleeping off his stomach ache instead.

He saves up his tips and pay over the summer and gets another job in the city his college is in. It's called Begininsberg. After he gets another job, again at a coffee shop, he also gets an apartment in Begininsberg, so that once the move is over he'll be independent and won't be obligated to keep the car.

His father comes to help him move out. His mother helps him buy necessities: a couch and pots and pans and bathroom supplies and a book on DIY house maintenance. They stuff it all in the trunk and carefully avoid too much eye contact, either because they're tearing up or awkward, or maybe his parents are still angry with each other. It's hard to tell. Alfred doesn't want to stand between them, so he goes inside and does one last look-around to make sure he hasn't forgotten anything.

Before he leaves his mother's house for the last time, he asks for a picture of Matthew. Just a yearbook picture, maybe. Or a copy of the family photo hanging in the hall they don't really avoid anymore. His mother says yes, of course, oh baby, and gives him the one where Matthew is thirteen and it's their birthday party, both grinning with identical haircuts. The longer Alfred looks at the picture, the more he thinks the little Matthew grinning out at him has wire-rimmed glasses, more defined cheekbones, with a smile just a little more full of pride.

He slides the picture in the last duffle bag. The duffle bag stuffed with a red hoodie and a shitty five-dollar mask, gummy glue and a box of contacts, and a battered, moth-eaten polar bear teddy he took from the hallway closet without permission.

He slings the bag over his shoulder, gives his parents one last goodbye, puts the bag in the backseat of the Hyundai, and waves out the window at his childhood home.

Without really thinking about it and speaking mostly to himself, he mutters, "Let's get out of here, bro."

He almost thinks he hears a voiceless voice respond, "Just start driving, okay, Alfie?"

And Alfred smiles. He checks his mirrors, resolves to go at least ten below the speed limit, and takes a bit out of a granola bar hidden in the glove box. He fidgets with the duffle bag behind his seat until he manages to dig out Matthew's picture. He rolls down the windows, turns up the volume and blasts Born to Run all the way down the highway, Matthew's picture resting on the passenger seat beside him.

000

Today was okay, and so am I.

Calvin and Hobbes, The Dead Raccoon: /2012/05/the-dead-raccoon-but-dont-you-go-anywhere /

I do not own Hetalia, it is property of Hidekaz Himaruya.

If anyone is interested, I have opened commissions on deviantart for both literature and visual art. My username there is the same as it is here. Please drop by if you want to help out, and thank you for everyone who's read this.

The third chapter will take longer. This 2nd one was already written, but the 3rd one is still in the start-up process, but barring major issues arising, it will be finished before mid-May.