Hello all, to the tenth chapter! I...am kind of apprehensive about posting this. I went back and forth on whether I should rewrite or not, but...I decided that what the hell, what's the worst that could happen? You could all hate it?
Disclaimer: I do not own hetalia, but I own my boys.
"Twenty-two bottles of beer on the wall, twenty-two bottles of beer…"
"Jack, would you kindly shut the hell up with the song?" Alex asked. "How long have we been in the elevator anyway?"
"I think only about seven hours," Alfred said, checking his phone.
"Seven hours?" Nick yelled. "God, service in the UN is total shit!"
"Take one down, pass it around, 21 bottles of beer on the wall!"
"JACK, SHUT UP!" they all yelled, except for England, who was leaning up against Alfred's arm dozing off and cracked open one eye.
"How about you all shut up, I'm trying to get some sleep here!"
"Yeah, the old man needs his beauty rest, guys," Alfred said, snickering. England gave him a look. "Go back to sleep, babe."
"Stupid ungrateful brat…" he murmured, snuggling up closer to Alfred as his breathing evened out.
"Tire him out last night, Alfred?" Nick asked, snickering. Alfred blushed bright red and reached across, smacking Nick in the arm. "Ow!" He then got smacked again by Theo, who shushed him and pointed at England. "Why is everybody hitting me all of a sudden?" he asked himself, but his tone was considerably lower.
"You still have blood in your hair," Jack said quietly. Alfred reached up his free arm to feel at his hair and sighed.
"I also still have the hole. I'll wash it off in a sink or something when we get out of here." Theo rolled his eyes at that.
"Here." He leaned forward and started to clean the cracked, dried blood off of his hair with gentle fingers, avoiding Nantucket. "You look a bit like an idiot with it, anyway."
"I'm sure," he said with a bit of a laugh.
"So what's it like, dying?" Alex asked.
"You would ask that, Alex. It's like losing consciousness, actually. But that could just be me. Because I'm going to wake up from it later. It depends on what you die from, too. This was quick."
"So what's not quick?" Nick asked.
"Well, the first time I actually died-died, was during the French and Indian War, when the French captured me. They tried to execute me by firing squad but they had horrible aim. They finally just decided to use the old method of stabbing me to death with their bayonets." The four of them winced.
"Okay, that sounds very painful. And very horrifying," Jack said, his face wrinkled in disgust.
Alfred shrugged a bit. "It's sort of a fact of life when you're a Nation. You know that some time, you're going to die horribly. It just happens."
"That doesn't mean we have to like it, Alfred," Theo said quietly, still methodically picking dried blood from his hair.
"Like you four have any room to talk. Humans die and they don't come back to life." There was dead silence in the lift. None of them could move, none of them could even breathe. Except for Alfred, who was breathing erratically, avoiding all their eyes.
And of course, the moment Theo had been about to say anything, to address that raw grief that had found its way into Alfred's voice, the elevator chose to shudder back into operation, lights flickering. England jolted awake at the movement.
"Finally," he said in relief. "I wondered if we would be stuck in this cursed lift forever." He turned and looked at Alfred. "So what happened when I was…" he trailed off, looking into Alfred's eyes. "Darling?"
The elevator jolted to a stop and the door pinged open, where France (dressed properly, this time) and Canada stood, looking rather triumphant. "Found you guys, even though it took forever. Everything's safe now, as the UN Police Force finally got here," Canada said. Alfred scrambled up and out of the elevator, trying to push past him but Canada grabbed his wrist. "Al?"
"Let go of me, Matthew, damn it!" he snarled, pulling his wrist easily away from him, and stalked off.
"Mon dieu, what did you do to him?" France asked England, as Canada watched him stalk with a look of pure disbelief. "Finally tell him of your bondage fetish?"
"No, you stupid Frog!" England yelled, going over to him and kicking him hard in the shin. "And anyway, he already knows about that. And I was asleep until the lift started moving."
"He called me 'Matthew!' He only does that when he's really upset." All three Nations turned to look at the four humans standing up in the elevator.
"What did you do to him?" England demanded. The four of them looked at each other, and all as one ran after Alfred.
America tried to tell himself it was all right. But it wasn't working, and wouldn't work until he had seen him all right. The stupid idiot just had to go and get himself shot, didn't he? And make all of them worry to death.
"He's probably fine," Alex said, reading a book. But America knew that he hadn't turned a page for about ten minutes. Jack fidgeted with his glove, twisting it around and then balling it up and smoothing it back out. It was rather hypnotic to watch him do over and over again.
"Yeah, he was still talking when we brought him in. It was only in his shoulder. The nurses should be able to dig it out easily and patch him up. They got him in surprisingly quick." Because America had once again gone and pulled strings, with his hands still dripping with blood. None of the people waiting had any serious injuries; a lot of them were just there to get out of drilling.
"I say we go and shoot a couple of Nazis to get back at them," Nick said, gripping his gun even though they were in the waiting room of a makeshift army hospital.
"Nick…" Alex warned.
"They shot Theo, damn it. Theodore Wilson, one of the greatest, most tolerant men I have ever known. He didn't even sign up for this damn war, they drafted him! He'd probably much rather be at home, contributing towards peace than here, shooting Nazis! And he gets shot for all his troubles. Damn it, this war is crazy."
"Will it ever end? Will we ever be able to go home?" Jack asked. Alex shrugged.
"I don't know. This war…it could go on forever."
"We could all get shot and die between now and then. If not, we'll probably be fighting as old men," Nick said, half joking, but a part of him sounded like he was starting to despair.
"It will not go on forever," America snapped at them. He had just about enough of this. "You guys will go home, and do all sorts of awesome things, and none of you are going to die!" But they were empty words, because he couldn't stop them from dying any more than he could stop the sun from rising or stop the war. And he would live. He would always live.
"But…what about you, Alfred?" Jack asked. America recoiled at bit, just as a nurse came out into the hall.
"You can see him now," she said to them curtly, and walked off. They all forgot about America's shouting and went inside, crowding around the bed.
"Guys," Theo said, in a long suffering voice. "I'm fine."
"He can still give us that tone of voice. That means he's okay!" Jack said with a grin. They crowded around him, asking him questions, but America hung back, looking at the four of them, alive.
He knew that if that bullet had been about an inch down, Theo would have died before they could get him here. It could happen to any of them at any time.
That was the moment when he stopped seeing them alive, and started seeing them dead.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!" America yelled to an empty hallway. It didn't help in the slightest, so he dodged into the nearest bathroom, locking the door behind him. Of all the stupid…
They just had to go and talk about death, didn't they?
He walked over the sink, taking off Texas and setting it on the shelf in front of the mirror, before turning on the faucets and sticking his head under the lukewarm spray to wash the blood from his hair. The water turned pink against the white porcelain of the sink, and America felt like bashing his head against it until he was dead again, so he didn't have to deal with the thoughts for a little while.
He didn't want to think of them dead. He didn't even want to consider it. He had enough graves to visit as it was.
This was the reason why Nations didn't make friends with mortals. America thought he had learned this lesson long ago, but here he was. He grabbed one of the towels and started to rub his hair dry.
The horrible thing was it didn't matter that they were young again, couldn't age, and maybe couldn't even die.
America would always see them dead.
It didn't matter from what, shot in the war, dead from old age, or any one of the nameless horrors that cropped up in his nightmares every so often over the last 70 years. There were so many ways for humans to die… And they all ended at Arlington with a 21 gun salute and a folded up flag.
It was enough to drive him mad. Which was not a very good state for a Nation to be in. All you had to do was look at Russia and everything that he's done to know that. He'd seen Lithuania's scars. He'd told America that he'd been there, the moment that Russia had snapped like a little twig and started firing on his own people.
To be a Nation, you had to be a little bit crazy in respect to normal humans; it was just the way it worked. But there was a line between that and absolutely insane. A lot of Nations flirted with it every now and then, like England when he had been a pirate. Russia had danced across it that Sunday in 1905.
America knew he had come close during the Cold War, when during the Red Scare his own government had decided to blacklist him for his homosexuality, and paranoia had been so widespread it started to affect him in reverse. It was only a matter of time before he snapped. And then Russia had got involved.
He remembered that meeting, when as he had been leaving Russia had grabbed him, pulling him close and whispering in his ear: 'Become one with me, comrade. Let me take you down into madness, where everything is wonderful.'
It was actually because of that one comment he snapped back to his senses. It was probably why he became so much of a hippie in the late sixties and seventies, to offset the fact that he had almost gone crazy because of communism and the Cold War, just like Russia had because of a revolution.
A part of him, actually, was incredibly afraid that he was still on that line, that he'd only managed to delay it for a bit. He'd tried to stay away from the latest War on Terror, spending a lot of time away from D.C. The world did not need him to snap, not from that and not from…this.
And all this started because of four ordinary humans.
America combed his fingers through his hair, making it lie normally, in a nervous gesture. He looked at his reflection, trying to banish the all-consuming fear in his eyes. "The United States of America isn't afraid of anything." Liar, liar! He was afraid to lose them, afraid of going insane, afraid of going insane because of losing them.
And it just wasn't dying. No, now that he thought more about it, what if he finally did something wrong and they rejected him. What the hell would he do then? Break into a million tiny pieces.
He turned away from the mirror, leaning on the sink, putting one hand to his face. He had to stop thinking. America could hear England's voice in his head clearly: 'Alfred, darling, your problem is that you think too much and don't talk about it enough. You draw your own ridiculous conclusions and think that they're the truth. Do me a bloody favor and talk to people, once in a while, without pretending that you're an idiot who doesn't even know where Japan is.'
But he couldn't tell them all this. They wouldn't understand, not really. They were his best friends, but they were also humans. Plus, admitting you were possibly on the brink of insanity is usually a deal breaker in most friendships. And he didn't want to tell them. He was already different enough without having to heap 'possibly insane' on that pile.
There was a knock on the door and America groaned. "Wait a minute," he called, and turned off the water, slipping Texas back onto his face. When he was certain he looked presentable, he went and opened the door. And wished he hadn't, because they were on the other side of the door. He slammed it shut in their faces and locked it. The door knob rattled under his hand as they tried it, only to find it was locked.
"Alfred, Alfred!" He turned his back to the door and sank down to the floor, knees to his chest, pretending he couldn't hear them call his name. Maybe if he did, they would go away and take the fear with them.
Notes: Okay, yes. Not very much in this chapter by way of references. America referenced Arlington Cemetery, where a lot of veterans are buried, the 21 gun salute, where 21 guns are fired off to salute a veteran at their funeral, and a folded up flag, which is the flag that drapes the coffin, which is then folded up in a special way and usually given to the widow or closes family member. *for all the non-US-ers out there* Bloody Sunday is also referenced, as Sunday, January 22, 1905, being the thing that set off the Russian Revolution of 1905. It's also the strip. But you probably knew that. It's my headcanon that America was blacklisted for being a homosexual and went a liiiiiittle crazy during the Red Scare because, I don't know, his government turned on him? And before you start to try to kill me, this will all be resolved next chapter, I promise. My boys are going to have to smack some sense into him, which should be hilariously fun to watch. :)