Changement

Part 12

The nations were all incredibly confused.

Not that this was entirely a new situation. Things tended to happen here which could not be explained through any logical terms. For example, there had been the time when Japan had run into the meeting room late, apologizing about how he'd been at an anime convention and had lost track of time. Which wasn't entirely out of the ordinary. The fact that he was wearing a pink and white school girl's uniform complete with glasses and long-haired pink wig was.

Or there was the time when they'd been in the middle of a meeting and a random disco ball suddenly dropped out of the ceiling. And ABBA started blasting from the speakers.

Or there was the pink incident, but they preferred not to talk about that one.

Let's just say that Poland and Prussia had been the only ones pleased when that happened.

Anyway, so they were confused. Confused, perplexed, and just generally wondering what the hell was going on.

Because Germany was late.

Now, if it was anyone else, nobody would be concerned. Even England, who was almost as anal about getting to meetings on time as Germany was, had been late a couple of times. Usually when he'd spent the night before getting wasted and had woken up with a monster hangover.

But Germany was never late.

The world could be ending and Germany would still be here, exactly seven minutes early, sitting in his seat and waiting for everyone else to straggle in.

To say that the rest of the nations were slightly nervous would be a massive understatement.

"Ve~ where's Doitsu?" Of course Italy was the first one to actually say what was on everyone else's mind. He kept glancing toward the empty chair beside his, as if expecting Germany to suddenly materialize out of nowhere. He looked uncharacteristically saddened by the fact that he didn't; even his curl was drooping in depression as he searched everyone else's expressions, hoping that one of them might be able to answer him.

"This is very strange," Japan finally added, joining Italy in glancing around the table in hope of receiving any sort of explanation from someone else. "Do you know where he is, Austria-san?" he questioned. "You live right near him…"

Austria pushed his glasses up slightly as he leaned on the table, his own expression extremely confused. "No, he never mentioned to me that he would be late to this meeting."

"What do you think, America-san?" Japan questioned, turning to their self-proclaimed leader for any advice on how they should react to this odd absence.

He, however, hadn't even been paying any attention to Germany's strange disappearance and was instead staring at the other empty seat at the table, right between France and England. He was a little surprised to have never noticed it before. You'd think that Canada would have gotten punched or kicked or otherwise beaten up one of these times if he was sitting right between those two.

"Mattie isn't here either!"

The rest of the nations chorused together almost simultaneously "Who?"

"Canada! My brother!" America exclaimed, pointing toward the empty seat—conveniently ignoring the fact that he usually forgot about his brother too. France and England both turned to stare at the seat as if they'd never noticed it before. Which they hadn't.

Japan wasn't really enjoying the fact that he was apparently the new leader, since Germany wasn't here and America seemed to be too distracted to take charge for whatever reason. Still, something needed to get done.

"Um, should we go look for them?" he questioned after a moment, turning toward England in hope that he would pity him and take over.

England, however, was too busy attempting to figure out when this random chair had suddenly appeared to notice the rather desperate expression. Maybe it was cursed… Maybe it could be used to replace Busby's Chair, which was definitely looking the worse for wear after its encounters with Russia.

Spain suddenly spoke up, as he leaned forward on the table and grinned disarmingly toward Japan. "I don't think so. I'm sure they'll show up soon, after all. Who knows? Maybe there was bad traffic and they're both stuck in it."

The other nations thought about that. It would explain why both of them were late. Although traffic had been fine for all of them… However, it was definitely possible. There was another chorus of agreements to this.

"I think we should go on a search and rescue mission for Mattie," America interrupted, crossing his arms over his chest and sending everyone else a rather bad-tempered scowl that surprised most of them into silence.

"Al, don't be a git," England replied, finally turning his attention from the chair, making a mental note to check on it later to see if it had any magical properties besides the ability to disappear.

America opened his mouth to retort, but was interrupted by the sudden sound of the meeting door being thrown open and banging against the wall behind it… And a much too familiar voice suddenly shouted out "Do not fear! The awesomeness has arrived!!"

Immediately every single eye turned toward the door, shock passing over each of their expressions as they stared at the latecomers.

Germany was standing in the hallway, looking absolutely miserable, his hair mussed, his eyes bloodshot, his outfit looking as if he'd just thrown it on haphazardly. And in front of him was, of course, Prussia.

Who looked like his normal self, albeit even more excited and energized than usual. He immediately walked in, slamming the door right in his brother's face, before proceeding to greet almost every single country sitting around the table (except Russia and a now homicidal-appearing America).

"Hey, Feli!" he exclaimed, dropping down in the spot beside Italy usually reserved for Germany, leaning over to ruffle the younger nation's hair. "How's my favourite little Italian doing?" He flashed a wide grin at Romano, who just rolled his eyes in response.

"Ve~ why is Prussia-nii here?" Italy asked, incredibly confused. And poor Doitsu had looked so awful. "What's wrong with Doitsu?"

Said 'Doitsu' suddenly appeared behind his brother and proceeded to grab his chair and lift it up, sending Prussia falling straight to the floor. Germany sighed in exasperation, taking his seat and rubbing at his forehead in an attempt to ward off the migraine that had been plaguing him since his boss's phone call. "My boss called me last night and told me that I needed to bring bruder with me."

"I knew that he'd eventually see that I was too awesome to leave out!" Prussia exclaimed from the floor, proceeding to jump up as if he hadn't just been dumped from his stolen chair by his brother.

Germany groaned as his head dropped onto the table. Italy started to rub at his back in a soothing fashion. "And he would not go to sleep last night. He kept bursting into my room and playing the electric guitar in the living room and playing his video games at full volume… I only got about five minutes of sleep the entire night…"

"The awesome Prussia is too awesome to sleep!!" Prussia replied.

"And then I was so exhausted this morning that I didn't dare attempt to drive myself…"

"So the awesome me did it!!"

"Ve~ poor Doitsu is sleepy," Italy cooed, wrapping his arms around the much bigger man. Most of the other nations were eyeing Prussia, trying to imagine what it would be like to be in a car being driven by the albino.

It was a terrifying concept.

"Hey, where's Mattie?" Prussia suddenly questioned in the next minute, eyes passing over the room's occupants and finding one person missing.

Japan was about to open his mouth to reply when the doors were again thrown open. The poor wall behind them was going to be covered in dents by the end of the day.

"Hey, sorry I'm late, everybody!"

Immediately every single eye in the room widened and every jaw dropped in shock. If you excluded Spain, who just looked pleased with himself, and Romano, who was flashing Spain a dirty look.

America looked particularly horrified. "Mattie! What are you wearing?!"

While Prussia was speechless.

Probably for the first time in his entire existence.

A/N: Mwahaha, another evil cliffhanger of DOOM!

Okay, so just to tell you guys, so I enjoyed writing the last chapter so much that I've decided that probably my next story once The Talk is done is going to be a mafia!Romano adventure fic... With Alcide and various other mafia people in it. Since apparently (at least the people who reviewed) seemed to like him.

Just as a little bonus…who can guess who Kiku was cosplaying as in the second paragraph?

All right now, so let's prepare for an epically long note of epic longness.

Ok, so after reading a review from one of you darlings telling me that you've been printing out my stories, I realized that I haven't actually printed any of mine out yet (due to the fact that I haven't had a printer for almost a whole year *cries*) so I decided that this summer, my goal is to go through all of my fanfics, edit them (*cries* I hate editing), print them out, and put them into special binders so I have them all nice and prettily in one place.

So, what this has to do with you… I thought that I'd just put this out there in case anyone was interested. If anyone would like to draw anything for me to include in the binding, that would be really cool. What would be nice would be covers for any stories, insert art for any specific chapter for any story, or other things like that. I won't even be getting back to printer civilization until after May 5th, so it wouldn't need to be done anytime soon… Knowing how slow I am at editing, it probably won't even be til like June that I can actually start working on the binding… (Gah, I hate editing…especially language editing…If anybody wants to help me with that, either, I wouldn't be adverse to assistance there…)

Okay, so yeah. Just thought I'd put that out there :) Anyway, if people actually are interested, I figure that I'll put up the info on my profile about which stories are covered/which ones are open. Any story (including oneshots), one for the whole TMAMT series, and one for all the gen!flipped universe stories (now I really need a title) would be available to be drawn/designed. Please message me if you're interested and I can give more specific details about what info I'd want on them (titles, series name, etc. Pictures are up to the artist.)

I'd particularly love it if people would cover (haha pun) the non-TMAMT ones, since it's hard to find pictures of especially the gen!flipped couples, so I'm not able to do much myself with those. Insert art for the TMAMT ones would be really awesome, just the covers I'll probably do myself since I love designing covers ;D