Thanks to XxFuyukaina-BakaxX, Semetastic, and lilredd3394 for your reviews!
WARNING: THIS CHAPTER DOES CONTAIN ALLUSIONS TO UNDER AGED RAPE.
Characters: (Human Names Used - More May Be Added/Cameo In The Future) America, Canada, Switzerland, Lithuania, Estonia, OC!Historical Figures, OC!Civilians
Rating: M
Warnings: Angst, Drugs, Substance Abuse, Religious Overtones, Child Abuse, Rape, Swearing, Violence, Mentions of Suicide
Disclaimer: Hetalia: Axis Powers © Himaruya Hidekaz, this is a fan created story.
Chapter Eight: Falling Apart
My brother's urgings for me to talk or, in the very least, remove my face from the covers enough to look at him went on into the morning. Past when Eduard begged Al to hush so that he could go to sleep.
He sat on the edge of my bed a few times only for me to kick him off.
I was sick of him taking up my space! I wanted him to go back to sleep and leave me alone, let me rot in my personal Hell. I couldn't face the much worse realities the world had to offer. I had seen and heard and felt too much that night.
My young body was spent. I felt ashamed and disgusting and dirty and rotted. In my mind's eye I was no better than a nasty, gutted brood cow out on the farm; opened wide up for the world to see and for the flies to pester.
Even that would be too full to describe how I felt, though.
I was sick. I wanted to throw up but I knew that if I did that I would see what I had swallowed earlier.
That was something my mind would not be able to withstand.
Al had sat on my bed for what must have been the tenth time. I allowed it.
He attempted to rub my back in tiny circles around my shoulder blades as he whispered to me. It was the sort of thing Mom did when I was sick with fever.
It was also what the second guard—five foot three, medium shoulders, brown hair and green eyes, he was 24, his name was Gene Barker, he was wearing a wedding ring—did when I broke down. Then he smacked me over the head and fucked me into the floor.
I kicked Al so hard off the bed that I heard his forehead meet the wall.
By the time Eduard's alarm went off and our roommates began to get ready for classes, Al had resolved to returning the silent treatment to me. He had also resolved to pulling his desk chair up to the bed and sitting in it. I only knew because the damn starched sheets were thin enough for me to see through them.
Everyone was silent and I would have closed my eyes if I had the brain capacity to.
I was shut down. I merely watched the world move on without me, observing but not partaking as my friends continued on with their daily routines, happy as could be, even if they weren't wearing smiles and kept shooting concerned looks in my direction.
It didn't matter if they weren't happy just then. They would be allowed to be happy soon enough.
I thought you bastards. Why am I having to go through this? Why can't I be getting ready for school?
Eduard asked if I would be going to classes.
"He's sick," Al said with a ferocity that could only be attributed to his lack of sleep. "No. And neither am I."
I wanted to start crying. Leave me the fuck alone, Al!
Toris muttered something that was all but blocked by my sheets. I watched him suspiciously from behind the white lenins and mused at how Eduard gathered his things and went on to breakfast. He kept to himself and his own problems. I never respected him more for that. I also never resented him more for that.
Whatever Toris had said to Al probably had to do with a bathroom break because my brother fidgeted with his boxers and then nodded before patting me on the shoulder.
I tensed.
He had paused to say something to me before I had reacted, but the words never came. He released his hold and went out the door. Toris locked it behind him and I felt my heart sank.
I couldn't handle anymore, I almost began to choke on the sobs that had hidden themselves in my throat when I heard fabric moving in the distance.
Toris took off all his sheets and carried them over to my bed, he lifted the blanket off of me with a gentle ease and frowned. He then began to untuck the edges of my bed.
There was no energy in my body to protest or question him.
He then traded his sheets and such for mine, ignoring my brother's screams and banging on the door. I then watched as Toris, without a word, gathered up the sheets that had once been in my care. It was the first time I realized they were stained a disgusting red.
"I'm so sorry," Toris said to me before throwing them in the laundry bag and opening the door to my brother who fell forward from a botched attempt to ram the door with his shoulder.
"Do you want to take a shower?"
It was noon. I felt like I was buried in my own filth and the filth of the men who never left my wide open vision no matter how blank my mind would get.
I looked to my brother and nodded.
He looked relieved for the first time since this mess had started.
"I can't walk."
It was the first thing I had said since we had parted ways the night before. My voice was torn and scratchy. The simplest of noises that came from it caused tears to well in my eyes. I kept imagining what was done to it and my mouth the night before.
Al stared at me. His jaw and fists tightly clenched.
"What happened?"
That was when I lost all control of myself.
I would say I became a puddle of tears at that point, but I had been that since my head hit the bed at three that morning. The difference was that I had lost my weak front that had hidden it so well.
Alfred had pulled his desk chair across the hall and into the shower stalls.
He had tried to throw my arm around his shoulders and support my weight as I walked myself to the showers, but he and I both found that my legs had no feeling still. My feet lamely curled and twisted beneath my legs without finding footing.
This horrified my twin much more than it did me.
That was how he came to the point that he cradled me in his arms as he carried me to the showers. I asked myself inwardly how long Al had been building up this extra strength, but then I shushed the thought away.
"I'm not taking your clothes off," he told me firmly as he sat me on the chair situated beneath a shower head.
I didn't respond.
He didn't move.
"What are you waiting for, you bastard?" I hissed.
He raised his brows at my statement. I never cussed. Not much. Not to him. Not at him.
"My brother to show up," he snapped. I had to give my brother props. He wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but give him an opening and he'll come up with a fantastic zinger.
We stayed that way, dead locked, for what felt like an eternity before the itching of my skin became too much.
I had to get clean. I had to wash the night away and I just knew that if I could watch the nasty memories wash into the drain like skin flakes then I would be okay. Everything would be okay again.
Ignoring Alfred, I removed my shirt shakily. My muscles protested every turn, every move. By the time my pants were at my ankles, I heard some sort of choking sound.
That was when I looked to see Al red as a beat. His blue eyes were pin pricks in wide, white oceans as he stared at my body. I felt over exposed, gross. I wanted to throw up I was so filled to the brim with unexplainable anxiety.
"What the fuck happened to you!" he demanded, and I realized he was crying.
Biting my lip, I looked at my legs, at my belly and arms. I realized they were purple and black, swollen, dotted with splattered, dry red. I looked like the canvas of a demented artist. It made my chest clench and I couldn't breathe.
Then I cried. Because I realized that the water wasn't going to do much about washing it all away. And that was devastating.
The tenderness my brother took in gracing a wet wash cloth over my battered body was unprecedented.
For as long as I had known Al, which was basically since the womb, he had been nothing but two modes: abrasive and aggressive.
As he helped clean me while I sat there like a blubbering idiot, trapped in my own thoughts, he was utterly silent. That was something else that was completely out of character for him and it was beginning to worry me.
I wanted to push him away. My chest burned with the desire to just kick him with all the little reserved strength I had and tell him to just leave me alone in the shower stall.
But, despite my efforts, I couldn't do it. We were tied by some natural force. In my mind I realized that somehow the furthest possible option from the sick touches of my rapists were the gentle embraces of my only real family.
Grandma Jonesie wasn't around, not that I would feel like I could go to her if she was. Father Antonio had a line at which point it wasn't so much a part of our family as I had always wished he had been.
All I had was Al.
But even though I had stopped kicking him into walls, I felt like I was building some shield between us. It was a small one, but it was a barrier that had never been there before. It worried me. I both needed it and wished to escape it.
When he finished bathing me, his own clothes sticking wetly to his body and probably ruined, Alfred helped dry me and then began to lift me up to stand. Some of my legs' feeling had returned.
"I want you to mark my words," Al said with a hiss not intended for me. "I will find out who did this to you. And I will kill them."
I never responded.
But I knew I couldn't let that happen. There were too many of them. They were too strong. They were the fucking security guards. Al was just going to get himself hurt.
It was an option I swore to myself I would never allow happen.
The day after was Saturday. Al brought me pancakes from the kitchen. He had even snuck a bottle of syrup up in his pocket so I could dress them myself.
I wasn't hungry, though.
He sat it down on the table with the untouched stake from the night before.
Al then laid out on the floor by my bed and took a nap. It was where he had slept last night.
"If he's too sick to go to classes or service then it's time to get a doctor," Eduard told Al after my brother informed him we wouldn't be going to mass.
"He doesn't want one," Al said simply. "We've never gone to one before. Why start now?"
Toris stared at me as I sat on the bed. I hated whatever look he was giving me. I wasn't stupid. I realized, with quite some horror, that the look he gave me was empathetic.
It was no longer a mystery to me what had exactly happened to Toris all those many weeks before.
My only question was why what happened beyond the beatings had been kept so secret.
"If you don't tell me who did it, I'll find out," Al said firmly as he prepared to skip classes for the second time on my behalf. "And when I find out, I'll make them hurt so bad they'll wish I would kill them."
"No, you won't," I said firmly as I finally ate some bacon.
"They can't hurt you without me being the consequence," Al said.
Then he said what he had been wanting to say since that Friday.
"I am so sorry, Mattie," he sobbed as he buried his face into his hands. "I promised I wouldn't let you get hurt. I promised you. I promised Grandma Jonesie. I promised Dad."
There was a desire in the pit of my stomach to reach out and tell him it wasn't his fault. To tell him what really happened.
But I couldn't tell him it wasn't his fault because my mind was still searching for it to be someone's fault and he kept making himself available for blame.
I also couldn't tell him because I couldn't put into words what had happened.
"Maybe you should write a journal," he suggested after Vash had chewed us out for an hour about skipping classes. "Make you feel better. Say! Have you written Grandma Jonesie and Father Antonio? I mean, not about those bastards beating you up. I mean just writing them. It always makes you feel better."
The concept was nice. The thought of doing it made me just about lose what I had passed as my breakfast.
"Okay, okay," Al said gently. "Well, we do have to write them soon. They'll get worried if we don't."
I stared at him.
He eventually caught on and shook his head. "I'm not any good at writing."
That was when he started writing our letters to Grandma Jonesie and Father Antonio. I never wrote either of them again.
Al pointed at a spot on my shoulder as we got dressed one morning.
"That one's still black," he said with a tinge of anger in his eyes.
I wasn't able to control my mind. It suddenly sped away to the memory of being pinned beneath the fat, flabby weight of the head guard. Of how his elastic cheeks flopped around on my skin as he tore into my body. And then I remembered the sensation of his fish lips curling around on my shoulder blade. How he sucked my skin and slobbered and licked it like it belonged to him. I remembered wanting to just die because I was no longer Matthew Jones but an extension of this disgusting, piggish man.
Al caught me as I nearly fell over my own feet. He never pointed out any of my injuries again. He just glared at anyone or any thing that dared to look my way with anything but the upmost, friendliest concern.
Years later we were at a bar in Quebec City, Al being pissy about how he didn't know French.
I asked him, because I was drunk and so was he, why he never told anybody that he thought I had been beat up by the mysterious 'bullies.'
He punched me so hard I thought he knocked a tooth out. After some apologies from both sides he answered me.
"I didn't know what the fuck happened to you," he said lowly. "I couldn't tell anyone if I didn't know anything. I can definitely tell you I never thought it was that."
We never did get any better at discussing the things that happened in St. Francis.
A note about the security guards: I did not want to put any of the characters (who I all love) in this position and so I did 'cheat' and have instead based these characters on some of the less famous historical "villains" in the world. The main guard is the one from the Prologue, and yes there will be much more of him in the future, I'm loathed to say. Again, this does have a purpose. Please keep in mind the time period because it does explain how so much of these horrendous acts go largely unrecognized.
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