Hello everyone! I'm on a roll gosh - here's Chapter 14! Thank you all so much for staying with me, I hope you like this chapter 3

Also, I just wanted to clarify something mentioned by user Zonnenkreeger in the reviews section! This is something that our fandom might have heard of before, so I just thought it'd be great to mention things here. Firstly, thank you for leaving a review! Reviews motivate me to write more, and your review was actually the first that I received after uploaded Chapter 13, my latest chapter before this one. :) (Thank you sooo much to everyone else who reviewed too 3)

Secondly, I do respect that you think Spamano to be paedophilic - it is an opinion that some people in the fandom do share, and I understand that you have your own opinion too. However, I just wanted to say that I, personally, feel that Hetalia's characters are after all countries and age is rather ambiguous at times, in the sense that one character can grow to be the same age as another in a certain period of time. I understand that you might see Romano as being once a child under Spain's care, but I want to bring up the point that that in present day, they are both adults. Do remember that Roma did kind of accept Spain's proposal - albeit with three meals and naps per day! x'D So yes, this is my perspective, and in my story both of them are adults. I am not writing a story with anyone f**king anyone (I wish my smut skills were great but nah), and neither do I support paedophilia.

I am absolutely alright if you still feel that my opinion is wrong, but I hope you will respect my opinion as I am respecting yours. Lastly, thank you once again for reading my fic (I saw that you reviewed at Chapter 10, so I'm assuming you read 10 chapters of my story and that makes me really honoured) and taking the time to leave a review! :)

Anyway! This chapter is when Lovino finds out about Antonio's past. Hope you all enjoy reading!

Lovino's waiting at the bottom of Antonio's apartment, phone to his ears and eyes trained onto Antonio's window. In the night, his bedroom light stands out especially bright, accentuated by the fact that he is late for their supposed second date.

The dial tone is a constant ringing in Lovino's ear, as he taps his foot impatiently and decides whether he should march upstairs to confirm whether Antonio is actually at home or he has actually somehow forgotten to switch off his bedroom lights before going out.

They were supposed to meet outside Antonio's apartment, but fifteen minutes of not seeing his perky Spaniard made Lovino begin to worry for Antonio – and worse, whether the latter had decided that he was no longer interested in dating him.

That wouldn't be the first time someone left him, of course.

Lovino consciously recalls the friends who, for some reason, simply decided that he wasn't good enough for them and left to join other people. He even remembers walking into kindergarten with Feliciano's small hand in his, marveling at the fact that they were going to be part of the large group of kids running around the building. He'd been excited, but bubbly and likeable Feliciano got all the friends. The quieter one of the brothers, Lovino was more reserved and to his classmates, "strange and anti-social".

There was this boy, though. Lovino can't remember his name, but he knows that someone did bother talking to him and even made efforts to get to know him. Yet, just as Lovino expected his luck would be, the boy moved away and left behind only a blurry memory of blond hair and vague dreams of living amongst the stars.

But heck, Lovino isn't going to go through another one of his existential crises again – somewhere along the way he already decided to be satisfied with all that he has. With that thought, he makes the decision to pay Antonio a visit and stuffs his phone back into his pocket.

The dumb bastard finally picks up his phone, Lovino scoffs to himself as the dial tone finally changes into the strangely soft voice of Antonio.

"Lovi?"

"I'm outside your apartment. Open up."

"Ah, give me a moment…"

Ten minutes later, the front door finally pulls open to reveal a very tired-looking Spaniard. Lovino is shocked by how pallid his face is, and how the smile he is wearing doesn't even carry its usual cheery warmth.

"You look like shit."

Antonio has the gall to chuckle, but he tugs on the sleeves of his sweater nervously. Lovino isn't convinced, so he declares that he wants to enter and Antonio makes way for him.

"I haven't had the time to clear up some things, so my house might be a bit messy."

Lovino lets himself fall back into the loveseat in the middle of Antonio's living room. He notices that there is a kitchenette at one end of the living room and a door at the other, presumably leading to the bedroom. The shutting of the front door makes Lovino turn his attention back to his host, who makes his way to the loveseat and exhales when he leans back against the soft cushions.

"I'm sorry I forgot our meeting today. I… I'm not feeling well," Antonio explains, tilting his head so that he's staring straight into Lovino's eyes.

Something's not right. Antonio's eyes are void of that regular spark – the one that always comes accompanied by the crinkles that Lovino secretly finds endearing, and the one that always makes his fingers twitch for a paintbrush and a palette of green.

Yet, Lovino reassures himself that Antonio has probably gotten himself a bad case of the flu, though the latter doesn't appear to be sneezing his nose off and is simply sitting beside him staring into fucking space –

"Antonio."

Antonio hums in response, but his mind still seems to be elsewhere. Lovino clicks his tongue in annoyance and continues, "I really like your wallpaper. It's all… Flowery and shit."

"Me too!"

Lovino smacks Antonio's thigh lightly. "Antonio, look at me. What happened?"

He's about to politely enlighten the other man on the nonexistence of his wallpaper, when Antonio suddenly asks, "Do you really want to be with me?"

"The fuck?"

"I'm serious – I mean, I'm not even that great a guy yet someone like you is interested in me."

"Hey, we haven't even been on our second date yet and you're already getting so insecure. Stop selling yourself short, dammit!"

"I… I have something important to tell you. I don't know if you will leave me after that, but I feel that you need to know this."

Antonio's tone carries more than a hint of anxiety, something that is so uncharacteristic that Lovino, in a moment's impulse, takes the other's hand. He laces their fingers together, feeling Antonio hesitating before adjusting his hand and shifting closer.

"Well, I think it can wait. And you know, this probably sounds cliché as heck but this is the first time someone's fingers have fit j-just right between mine," Lovino says bashfully, squeezing Antonio's fingers and thinking about how he was just wondering about the people who had came and gone in his life. He remembers seeing Antonio at the drugstore and the way he had looked so lost yet so accustomed to what he was doing, and he remembers their shy nudges under the table during their first date.

Antonio laughs, and this time he sounds a bit more alive. "This is going to sound stupid too, but I think that day in the elevator really made me feel like I was falling even more deeply in love with you."

The look on Antonio's face when he had left the elevator that day fades into Lovino's mind, and he remembers blush-stained cheeks and hands clinging to the metal railing in an attempt to prevent himself from quite literally falling.

"Yeah, I think I know that. And fuck yes, I do want to be with you. Don't you dare feed yourself lies that you are not good enough."

Relief flashes across Antonio's face, and all of a sudden he looks a lot more like his usual self. Lovino means every word that he says, and he lets Antonio soak them in; lets Antonio run his thumb over his knuckles and rest his head on his shoulder.

"Bastard, your hair stinks."

Lovino feels the body next to him shake with laughter, and Antonio spews out a soft "I haven't showered at all today."

The Italian calls him a lazy ass, and he manages a tired pout before adjusting his position and laying his head on Lovino's lap.

"Do you normally allow this on second dates?" Antonio mutters, and Lovino is glad that Antonio can't see that his cheeks have turned pink.

"Shut up and get some rest."

Antonio begins to feel his eyelids get heavier, but he feels fingers running through his hair and knows that Lovino has made an exception this time.

One hour later, his eyelids flutter open and the walls of his living room fade back into his field of vision again. He takes a moment to register that he still has his head on Lovino's lap and that his right leg is cramping, before he cranes his neck to see that Lovino himself is snoring lightly. The other man has his head lolled back against the back of the sofa, and under the forgotten lights Antonio sees a sliver of drool from Lovino's lips staining the fabric.

For some strange reason or another, the headache he had been having before is gone and even though a glance to the clock on the wall reveals that it is merely eleven o'clock, Antonio feels like a day has passed. He surreptitiously pushes up his right sleeve and checks to make sure that his plasters are still on. It has become somewhat of a habit – him indulging his inner paranoia of his wounds reopening and soaking blood through his shirt.

He feels the familiar pang of guilt streaking through his chest, yet he quickly pulls his sleeve back down as he feels Lovino stir.

"Good morning, Lovi." Antonio smiles and proceeds to get off, reaching out to massage his numb leg. He watches as Lovino opens his eyes and wrinkles his nose, staring at the clock and trying to decipher the numbers with his sleep-ridden brain.

"It's not morning yet," he say simply, before giving a loud yawn and haughtily wiping the drool off his lips. Amber eyes take a few seconds to focus, and suddenly they brighten with the remembrance of their conversation just now.

Antonio takes a deep breath.

"I… Have something to tell you. I went to see a therapist today."

Lovino frowns, but he doesn't say anything after making known the fact that he's listening. Antonio takes that as a cue to continue, so he inhales deeply again to remind himself that his lungs are still functioning and that the tightness in his chest is nothing but a moment's anxiety.

"So, urm. Why did you have to see a therapist?"

"Because Gil and Francis told me to. Well, I have been going through some things lately, and I just kind of needed some form of support."

Lovino's eyes immediately clouds with worry, and Antonio sees him pause - he's chewing on his lip and Antonio knows from experience that he's thinking of what to say. Thinking of how to be as sensitive as possible, maybe even apologise like how Dr Rachel had when she first heard about his gradual spiral into sadness (and that little part of his psychologist self that never quite left sometimes tells him he may be floating somewhere in the vacuum of depression).

"Why?" That's the first word that slips through Lovino's lips, and it hangs in the end air between them both. All of a sudden, Antonio feels more faraway than what being on the other edge of a sofa is supposed to feel like. It strikes him that Lovino is so much more different than he is - he can wear short-sleeved shirts, and a ledge to him, for example, is but a small platform jutting out from a building. Antonio? He's stuck with long sleeves and jeans, and sometimes he wonders if he will ever even be able to understand that penknives are meant for cutting paper, not ripping skin.

He doesn't even know how tensed up he's getting, until Lovino reaches over and closes the distance between them. Thin fingers pry his own away from his wrist, and Antonio can feel the desperation in his own eyes when he looks up and takes another look at the man who has kept him going for the past few weeks.

"What's...What's under there?" Lovino asks, gesturing to Antonio's wrist. He's holding his breath, as if he's stilling himself for some kind of ultimate truth. There is anticipation in those amber eyes of his, yet their usual boldness has somehow transformed into fear and maybe a little pain.

"Do you really want to know?" He tries to sound calm, but all that comes out is a choked whisper.

"Yes. I want to. Fuck, I want to know everything. If I want to be with you… I need to know everything. I can't just live normally when you're secretly drowning in your own shit and not telling me. Things don't work that way. R-Relationships don't work that way."

"Okay," Antonio breathes, and extends his arm. Lovino's fingers grasp the fabric of his sleeve, and bit by bit he rolls it up. The Spaniard tries not to cringe as the first of his scars is revealed, curved and ugly, but Lovino remains unfazed and continues pushing on.

Antonio tries to remember when he made those three scars. Three isn't that many, because Antonio knows that there are entire constellations of those on his thighs. Cutting on the arm is always risky, but occasionally he does it anyway. To indulge himself, he likes to call it.

The sleeve has been pushed up to his elbow, putting the scars under Lovino's scrutiny. Lovino has a poker face on, but Antonio can see a hurricane of emotions stirring beneath his lashes as he lets his fingers skim across the plasters.

"Is this new?" he asks, and Antonio nods. His mind flashes back to when he came back from therapy, throwing his things onto the ground and heading immediately to the bathroom because the cuts he had made at the office had not been enough.

"Okay." Lovino is the one choking on his words this time. "Damn, I knew it was strange you needed so many plasters."

"Lovi?"

"Fucking hell, no one should buy that many plasters at once…" Lovino brings up one hand to wipe his eyes roughly, laughing bitterly. "Maybe I should have told my manager to take away that discount, you know, maybe make them more expensive so shits like you don't g-get them…"

Lovino turns away.

"I don't know how to react. Fuck. I'm such a horrible person. I couldn't even see that something was wrong. And heck, you even hurt yourself today and I wasn't even there!"

"Lovi, it isn't your fault. You didn't know. I was the one who failed to let you know earlier on… I'm sorry."

Antonio looks up from his lap, and for the first time he doesn't see Lovino's eyes. The only thing is sees is the back of Lovino's head, as the other man brings up both hands to wipe his face. His frame is shaking slightly, and at that moment Antonio feels like the worst person on earth, because what kind of person makes his boyfriend cry on the night of their supposed second date?

"Why?" Lovino breaks the silence for the second time in the night, and Antonio decides to tell him everything.

He tells him about his first job, of how he was put in charge of helping depressed teenagers, and how initially everything was perfect because his clients always got better. He got his thank you cards and even a promotion, which was when he met Emma.

He started to get assigned the more "challenging" clients, as phrased by Sadiq, and for the first time he saw people leave and never come back again. It was normal for people to change psychologists or even decide that therapy wasn't working out for them, yet Antonio was someone who took every decision to leave personally. Sure, he did manage to help some of them, but he just couldn't shake off the feeling that the people he had failed to help never got better. And that was because he wasn't good enough.

Antonio tells Lovino about Emma, the woman he was assigned to be partners with when he was selected to lead the various support groups. He tells him about how Emma became one of his closest confidantes, and how she could even set the most stubborn of clients on the road to recovery. There was this particular client, a Russian who was a bit too old to be in the support group but somehow got placed in there anyway. He terrified everyone but took a liking to Emma, and with her and Antonio's help, managed to head towards recovery. Antonio had been on good terms with him, but it was mainly Emma who helped him regain hope again despite years of childhood abuse.

Throughout everything, Lovino listens attentively, frowning every now and then but never diverting his attention. When Antonio gets to Emma's suicide and begins to heave, Lovino takes his hand again and traces patterns over and over onto his palm. He draws circles and curves, and Antonio slowly lets out detail by detail – how no one had expected it, how Emma began giving out her things and how their boss came in the next day and told them that she had been found hanging in her bedroom by her brother.

That day was the moment everything finally broke apart for Antonio. He had lost his best friend without even knowing why, yet the first thing he had done was to begin blaming himself for not making more of an effort to check that Emma was really okay. No one had expected her to be suicidal though, because she had been quite literally the sunshine amongst the colleagues.

Antonio confesses that he doesn't know why Emma decided to take her own life, and he only knows that he avoided Abel, Emma's brother, when he tried to meet up with him. When Lovino asks him for the reason, the only reasonable thing that he manages to come up with is that he had lacked the courage to face reality then. He had even skipped Emma's funeral – choosing instead to hide himself away and blame himself over and over again.

"I hated myself," Antonio finally says, "And now I still think I do."

"I hated myself because I couldn't do anything about it. Because by the time I knew that she wasn't happy, she was already gone. She had always been the person I chose to confide in, and when I got stressed she would always be there for me. I just… I was so selfish! I never asked her if she was doing alright too. I-" Antonio feels something wet trickle down his cheek, "It was my fault."

"But the thing is, you never know if it really was your fault. I bet other people well, blamed themselves too – did you try talking to your colleagues about it?"

Antonio shakes his head, explaining that he decided to resign from his job soon after Emma's death.

"Bastard, you ought to have given yourself a chance back then," Lovino suggests, and Antonio manages a breathy laugh.

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I should have made an effort to understand why Emma did what she did.

He snatches the tissue box from the coffee table and wipes his face hastily, sniffling and trying to send Lovino one of his reassuring smiles.

Lovino pinches him, calling him stupid for trying to smile at such a time, yet he looks visibly more relieved at hearing Antonio finally let his issues out.

The Spaniard himself feels a bit lighter at having finally told Lovino – who has surprisingly still stayed beside him, unmoving – but he reminds the Italian that it is too late to find out about Emma now.

For a moment, Lovino looks as if he is about to say something, but then he swallows back his words and asks, "So, what about now? How did all this start?"

"Sometimes I lie awake at night, just staring at the ceiling and wondering what would happen if I were to not exist. If I were to just disappear, maybe the world would be a better place. Maybe Francis and Gilbert will have one less person to worry about, or my therapist will have one less client."

"How… How often do these thoughts come?"

"Every time," his voice has fallen to a whisper. "They always come. Even when I'm outside and I'm doing something like grocery shopping, they're there. The voices in my head never stop talking. They never stop telling me how useless I am and how I'm never going to be good enough."

"And the thing is, I let them. I'm so weak, Lovi. I let them win. I let them push me to the edge, until on most days I'm feeling as if one small step will cause me to fall. I let them push me until I started wondering how falling would be like. Until I started craving flying through air and tasting concrete, until even when I close my eyes the smell of metal and blood still haunts me."

"I began hurting myself after Emma's death. It's so twisted that I used to be someone who got people out of self-harm, yet here I am – I can't live without it. And now I know why other people choose to do it in the first place." "People ask me why, and I think, why not? I'm so horribly messed up, and I'm just an extension in this universe. Have you ever just thought about how in the grand scheme of things you're just one in a billion, and someday you're going to end up as a pile of ash and nothing you have done will really matter anymore? I don't even like myself; I don't feel like I belong at all -"

"No!" Lovino interrupts him loudly. "T-that's not true at all! That's not fucking true, and yes ultimately the world is a big place and you are only a minute part of it, but to some people you aren't. W-well to me you aren't. And I don't give a fuck about what those fucking voices in your head think because if there were to be no Antonio Fernández Carriedo tomorrow, the stars would not shine as brightly. At least to me."

Antonio is at a loss for words. He stares and stares, as the hurricane of emotions in Lovino's eyes reaches its peak and Lovino is looking at him with such an intensity that it hits Antonio why he even thought Lovino had a soul of fire in the first place.

"I don't know much about this Emma person, but fuck, I am going to do everything I can to help you figure everything out. I think when I was in the car with you I already kind of realized that I was going on some kind of ride with you. In a metaphorical kind of way or some shit. And alright, so this ride is going to be a bit crazier, but you know what? I think you are worth it. I can make this long-ass list of things that I l-like about you. For example, you care. You care about me, even though I grew up being called anti-social and all that crap and I am practically the most uninteresting person you know."

Lovino waves a hand to shut Antonio up when he tries to rebut that last point.

"You are like…" Lovino wrinkles his nose again, gesticulating in an attempt to find the right words, "The fire in our fireplace back in Florence. Always there. Always steady. Somewhere I can go home to."

"So fuck those voices. We'll do this together. I'll fight them with you; I'll make sure they shut the hell up and stop doing whatever the fuck they're doing to ruin you. You're not broken, Antonio. Do you hear me? You're not fucking damaged, you're just a little lost but we all get lost sometimes too; and you're going to find your way around. I'm going to make sure you do. You're not alone in this. Please don't ever believe you're alone."

Antonio hasn't spoken yet, but when he finally does the first thing he tells Lovino is, "You've got the words of a poet, Lovi."

"Pfft. Yeah, right. I might have the words of a "poet", but you have the heart of one. You're so passionate about people, yet you forget that you are human too."

"I guess poets do have a sad side to them then," Antonio replies, lips curling into a small smile.

There is sadness in that watery smile of his, but then Lovino scoots over and wraps his arms around him, and he really believes that he will be able to pull through everything.

"But ah, thank you so much."

Their bodies are twisted in an uncomfortable position on the sofa and Antonio has just poured his entire lifetime's worth of angst out to Lovino, yet to both of them, everything in that space in time is absolutely perfect.

Because at that moment, they believe they are going to be okay.