Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia.
Warnings: Slash, AU, swearing, sub-par writing, wonky plots, appallingly slow updates, abuse of italics, mockery of generic fantasy elements, poor naming skills, made up creatures, and general insanity.
I don't know what I'm doing.
Unbeta'd.
[Chapter 3]
Two weeks after Feliciano's rescue, or kidnapping if you believed the story Gilbert had managed to concoct, Ludwig went to check in on him and found the room empty. For one brief moment he surrendered to the delusion that his guest had manned up and executed some form of escape attempt. It wasn't entirely unbelievable. The messenger they'd sent to deliver the news of Feliciano's kidnapping-but-not-really had returned the evening before with tidings that Volga was willing to enter hostage negotiations and had delivered to Ludwig a very flowery letter from some Volgan or another about why he should not kill Feliciano, assuming he had not done so already.
It was not a stretch to imagine that Feliciano had heard of this and chosen to flee while his country's attention was fixed in his direction, thereby increasing the odds that he'd be found and rescued.
Then Ludwig remembered it was Feliciano they were talking about. All evidence was to the contrary.
Feliciano had spent his first week of captivity alternating between scared out of his mind and depressed. Ludwig hadn't been comfortable with this, but hadn't done anything about it until Elizabeta had given him an earful. After that, Ludwig had visited and made sure that Feliciano understood that nothing bad was going to happen to him. He'd made arrangements to make Feliciano more comfortable. The room was transformed into something more closely resembling Volgan design, the cooks were given orders to try and make the food more palatable, and Feliciano was given permission to leave his room explore certain areas of the palace provided he had a guard with him at all times.
Ludwig had been a bit nervous about that last one, fearing that allowing Feliciano to leave his room might somehow be encouraging him to escape. He'd had guards posted at key intersections should Feliciano somehow escape the watchful eye of his assigned escort. But so far, without fail, Feliciano had returned to his rooms after his had finished exploring.
Every time.
Any self-respecting person of his country would have tried to escape five times over by this point. But Feliciano hadn't tried even once. In fact, Feliciano had seemed so stupidly docile that Ludwig couldn't help but think he was up to something. He'd tried to interrogate Feliciano about this, but that approach had only led to tears. And Ludwig's attempts to stop these tears had led Feliciano to the mistaken belief that Ludwig was trying to befriend him.
Which Ludwig wasn't. No matter what Elizabeta said.
The Black King didn't have friends. He had acquaintances. Which Feliciano was rapidly becoming. So what?
Ludwig heaved a sigh and shut the door, heading to the nearest guard to ascertain in what direction Feliciano might have gone. He received a rigid salute when he approached, the guardsman eyeing him nervously.
"Your Majesty! How might I be of service?"
"Did you happen to see which way Feliciano went?"
"Yes, My Lord. I believe he was headed to the kitchens."
Ludwig's gaze snapped to the man so fast the guardsman actually flinched. "What did you say?"
"S-Sir?" stuttered the guardsman, starting to perspire.
"Repeat what you just said. That's an order."
"I-I think he went to the kitchens?" the guard whimpered.
Ludwig snarled and dashed away, headed towards the kitchens. Feliciano had not been given permission to go there. His guard should not have allowed it. But Ludwig was beginning to see that this had been Feliciano's plan all along. He had played dumb, gotten Ludwig's guard down, and befriended a guard so that he could make it to the kitchens. Ludwig began running down several flights of steps. He had to admit, he didn't know what Feliciano was planning to do. The kitchens and the route to them provided no easy means of escape.
Whatever he was planning was obviously cunning. Ludwig decided to call for backup, tearing the whistle he wore on his belt from its cord and giving three sharp blasts. He could hear no sound, but his Fell Mastiffs could.
By the time he was on the same level as the kitchens, there were three canines loping cheerfully behind him.
He made it to the kitchen door and kicked it open, expecting to find carnage and chaos.
Instead he found Feliciano stirring a bubbling pot of something while three cooks looked on and Feliciano's guard slurped something happily in the corner. They all turned at the sound of the door. The palace employees froze in horror; the guard still had a fork of noodles positioned halfway to his mouth.
Feliciano smiled.
"Ve! Hello Ludwig! We're making pasta!"
Ludwig made a disgruntled noise, but relaxed out of his battle stance. This wasn't about escaping. This was about pasta. Again.
Ludwig had made the assumption that pasta was just noodles, only different. He couldn't have been more incorrect. For Feliciano, pasta wasn't a food. Pasta was a way of life. He'd put much time and effort into trying to help the palace cooks divine the proper means of preparing this food to no avail, so he'd apparently made a visit to show them first hand.
Ludwig's Fell Mastiffs whined in confusion, looking up at him for orders. Ludwig decided it was time to find out what was going on here. But first he needed to correct a glaring breach of etiquette.
"How many times have I told you to address me by my title?"
"But we're friends. Friends call each other by their names." Feliciano hesitated. "We are friends, right?"
He looked tearful, so Ludwig just made a grunting noise that under no circumstances meant yes. Feliciano just happened to interpret it that way. And Ludwig was far too busy doing kingly things like berating the guard to bother correcting him.
"You!" he snapped at the guard and then gestured to Feliciano "What is he doing here?"
"Well, you'd given orders to the cooks to make the kind of food he likes. They haven't been having much success, and I thought-"
"That's your problem. You thought. I pay you to follow orders, not make them up yourself. You are dismissed. Report back to your post tomorrow and be glad I don't punish you for this."
The guard slunk off without a sound, obviously disbelieving that he wasn't going to be whipped for this and not willing to press his luck by disappointing the Black King further. Ludwig sent the cooks away with a bark of "Back to Work!" and approached Feliciano. He still looked cheerful, if a bit confused.
"Ve? Why is everybody in trouble?"
"They are in trouble because they disobeyed my orders. And stop looking so happy! You're in trouble too!"
"Why am I in-"
"You deliberately disobeyed my order that you be confined to specific areas of the palace. The kitchens were off limits, and you chose to go there anyway. Therefore, I am taking away your privilege to leave your room for the rest of the day. I will escort you back." Ludwig announced, with every expectation of being obeyed.
"May I take my pasta with me?" Feliciano asked softly.
"Fine." Ludwig conceded "Since you went through the trouble of making it yourself, you may eat it. Come. I will take you to the dining hall."
Feliciano hesitated.
Feliciano had been to the Dining Hall during an informal tour he'd been given by one of the more cheerful guards Ludwig had assigned. Feliciano hadn't liked the gloomy atmosphere and the stuffed heads of various creatures that had been mounted on the wall had disturbed him. In fact, he'd been so frightened by some of them that the guard had had to call off the tour and promise him pasta just to get him to calm down. Feliciano's expression indicated that he didn't have any intentions of going back there any time soon.
"Or maybe we could just go outside." Ludwig amended.
Feliciano's smile made the decision for him.
Ludwig took Feliciano to the Healer's Terrace where various medicinal plants were grown and looked after. It wasn't a flower garden and nothing was in bloom, but everything was green and the air smelt crisp and alive.
Feliciano broke into a smile when they arrived and skipped off into the isles lined with foliage, Berlitz hot on his heels.
Ludwig, Aster, and Blackie followed at a more leisurely pace. They padded softly passed leafy things whose purpose Ludwig could not begin to fathom and eventually found Feliciano and Berlitz settled under some sort of stunted tree.
"Ve! Ludwig! Come sit with us!" Feliciano raised his arm above his head and raised it in a frantic and ridiculous fashion as he said this. Ludwig was beginning to wonder if maybe Feliciano had some sort of trouble controlling his limbs.
Aster and Blackie sat down in the dirt with Berlitz and the foreigner. Ludwig spent a moment checking for the signs the healers posted if nearby plants could be harmful to those who did not know how to properly handle them. There were quite a lot of those types of plants in the Wastes. But there didn't seem to be any signs nearby, so Ludwig sat carefully in the stone isle and watched Feliciano attempt to feed the Fell Mastiffs his strange noodles.
He was proud to note that his companions refused to sample the strange dish. Blackie had looked very interested, though.
"Ve, Ludwig?" Feliciano called.
Ludwig gave him his attention. "Yes? What is it?"
"Well, I was just wondering, why do you wear armor all the time? Is it parade dress?" He pointed to Ludwig's attire as he asked this.
Ludwig had to look down to confirm that he was indeed wearing armor. He'd just gotten so used to it over the years that he sometimes forgot he was wearing it.
Instead of answering, Ludwig asked "What's parade dress?"
"It's like regular armor, only really shiny." Feliciano explained.
"Why would anyone wear shiny armor into combat? It eliminates all stealth options, and only makes you a target for long range fighters. A good crossbowman would pick you off in seconds flat."
"You actually don't wear parade dress for fighting." Feliciano corrected "It's not strong enough to protect you from anything."
"You mean to tell me that, in your country, solider don armor that serves no purpose but to look impressive."
"Ve, I guess so."
Ludwig sat there aghast, mind reeling at the discovery that there could be armor that did not serve a military function. Why would anyone do such a thing? What sort of insane country had Feliciano been living in?
Feliciano giggled at the expression of Ludwig's face.
"You still haven't answered my question." he chirped.
Ludwig blinked away his stupor and tried to come up with an answer. "Well, tradition, I suppose."
The Black King must always be prepared for battle, be it warfare or assassination attempts. The need for constant vigilance had eventually come to mean that the Black King wore armor at all times. Although, the definition of armor had to be stretched if one wanted to include some of the outfits Black Queens had historically been able to get away with. Ludwig himself had sixteen sets of armor for casual wear, five for formal occasions, and a whole store room full of extremely well crafted specimens for actual combat engagements.
Feliciano gave a hum, apparently pleased by the answer, and stuck more pasta into his mouth.
"So does everything in this country have to do with fighting?"
"Basically, yes." Ludwig answered with no hesitation.
Feliciano put his plate down, ignoring Blackie and his hungry sniffs.
"So you don't do anything here if it doesn't involve war? What about cooking? Painting? Dancing? Singing?"
Ludwig took in the look of faint desperation on Feliciano's face and decided that before he returned Feliciano to his room, he'd take him to see Roderich.
Roderich was unique in the Wastes in that he possessed a talent that was even stranger and more useless than Elizabeta's odd tendency towards math.
Roderich was a musician.
Not a player of the war drums or a cheap barroom performer, but an honest to god musician. He'd made into the court because he was talented, but no one else had had any idea what to do with him. Anywhere else in the Wastes, he would have been eaten long ago. Here he flourished, thriving on tidbits of foreign culture and composing waltzes. The waltzes were a point of contention between Ludwig and Roderich. Ludwig would have been fine if the man had just stayed out of his way and composed his music in solitude. But the man insisted on composing waltzes and then spent a great amount of time trying to convince Ludwig to have them played.
But waltzes were not played unless the Black King was having a ball. And the Black King did not host balls unless he wanted to kill off members of the aristocracy in a suitably lavish fashion. That was half the reason members of the Black Guard were required to learn ballroom dances. They had to dance with guests in order to prevent them from escaping and when the time came for the inevitable executions they had to perform them in an elegant manner appropriate to the expensive decor.
The other reason was that the Black Guard found it relaxing, therapeutic, and a good means of self-expression. Dance offs were also a nonviolent means of solving disputes while still keeping an air of competition among the troops. Dancing had become a long established tradition of the Black Guards, and they didn't show signs of giving it up anytime soon.
Everyone else found it hideously embarrassing that their elite troops couldn't just fight to the death like everyone else when arguments arose, but were too scared to tell them to stop.
Mostly they just tried not to think about it.
Roderich was not most people, and found their interest in classical music refreshing. He brought them up every time he and Ludwig argued about the waltzes. Ludwig was quick to point out that the Black Guard was very much an exception, and no one else was in the mood for waltzes.
Had Ludwig been more like his predecessors, Roderich would have been beheaded shortly after arriving at the palace. But Ludwig was not like his predecessors, and Roderich had survived long enough to ingrain himself in palace life and become friendly with a variety of powerful people. He was also the only one who understood what passed for culture in other countries, and had become vitally important to the diplomats. Not that the diplomats needed his input very often. Usually they could just remind other diplomats that this was the Black King's country and say 'or else' and the other diplomats usually fell over themselves in their hurry to back off.
Roderich spent most of his time in a room that had been specially constructed for him. It was, without a doubt, the sunniest room in the palace. Quite possibly it was the sunniest room in the Wastes, given that the default setting for much of it seemed to be 'gloom'. Roderich had demanded huge glass windows to let in the light, but had conceded to placing iron bars over them to keep out monsters that happened to be capable of flight. Most of the room was empty, with the exception of a large piano in the center of the room, a small desk, and an odd collection of chairs and stools stacked in one corner. The walls not taken up by windows were covered in paintings. Mostly they were landscapes of other countries, where the scenery was actually worth looking at. Roderich had quite a collection, and what happened to be on display at any given moment was dependent on what sorts of things Roderich felt the need to use as inspiration.
Today the walls seemed to be filled with a mixture of sunny meadows and storm clouds over the open sea. There were open spaces on the walls and canvases stacked in a corner, meaning that Roderich was in the middle of composing something and hadn't yet gotten the feel of it. Ludwig resisted the urge to flee. Roderich was even more insufferable during the creative process than he was after it. Feliciano wandered into the room, ignorant of the possible danger.
"Ve! Ludwig! These paintings are so pretty!" he ran back to Ludwig, grabbed his hand, and pulled him over to a particular painting. "Look, Ludwig! Isn't this one beautiful?"
Ludwig didn't see how this particular sunlit field was any depicted different than the one next to it. Nor did he see why Roderich had chosen to put it up on the wall, seeing as how it was making his stomach do odd summersaults.
"Ludwig, are you ok? Your face is kinda red."
"I'm fine. And stop holding my hand." Ludwig felt justified wrenching his hand out of Feliciano's grasp. The Black King did not hold hands. Even if it felt nice.
There was a loud thud behind them and Ludwig, glad for the distraction, turned to see what it was. Roderich stared back at them from across the room, glasses askew, clothes dusty, and a pile of canvases at his feet.
"Is that him?" Roderich asked. He was brushing dust off his outfit. Roderich's attire was another thing Ludwig found issue with. It was ostentatious and in direct violation of the principles of the Wastes. Things were only bright and colorful here if they were poisonous enough, cunning enough, or powerful enough to be able to get away with broadcasting their position to the world. Roderich was none of these things, but simply overly fond of color. Ludwig felt like the man was practically begging to be eaten with his bright attire.
"Well, is he?" Roderich demanded, storming over.
"Yes. This is Feliciano."
"Wonderful! Why didn't you being him to me sooner?" Roderich admonished, and then began to physically drag Feliciano over to his piano "Come! I must borrow your ears."
Ludwig followed after and watched in amusement as Roderich situated Feliciano on a stool and the fussed over him for a good while before taking a seat at his piano.
"This" he began and pulled out a packet of music sheets with some flourish "is a piece about love. And, well, I'm sure someone with your background will be able to understand the subtle nuances. I won't insult you by attempting to explain."
Roderich settled himself in front of the keyboard and began. His finger brushed softly against the keys of his instrument, and the first strains of melody began to echo through the room. Ludwig felt the air leave his lungs in one long exhalation. He'd forgotten what it was like to hear Roderich play. A glance at Feliciano showed he was similarly spellbound.
Ludwig closed his eyes and lost himself in the music. The notes flowed on and something soft began to bloom in Ludwig's chest. It was moments like this that reminded Ludwig why he let Roderich stay, even if the two of them disagreed on most issues. Roderich had a gift. Something precious. Something that didn't belong in a place like this.
The door blew open, ricocheting off the wall with a loud bang. Roderich jerked, fingers slamming down on keys and creating discordant notes. Ludwig jerked back into full awareness and was met with the sight of the Captain of the Black Guard rushing into the room, crossbow on his back and a sword and belt in his hands.
"Vash!" Roderich was saying and stuffing his music sheets out of sight. "What are you-"
"Your Majesty! Your presence is required at once." Vash held out the sword "The patrols from the dungeons just got back. They report that the traps have been triggered."
Ludwig swore and took the offered weapon.
"Ve? Traps? Like for rats?" Feliciano asked.
"No." Ludwig corrected, strapping on the sword with a look of grim determination. "Not rats. Adventurers."
[End Chapter]
If you expend the effort to make a story outline, it's best if you don't lose it.
*sigh*
I'm so unorganized.
In other news, I'm encountering writer's block when it comes to my USUK story, so you guys get an update while I try to work through it. Heck, you might even get another one if my writer's block continues.
Oh, and while I'm here:
Happy Halloween!
Continue?
