A man travels from the far reaches of the Canadian wilderness to the pocket of civilization in the East Coast of the United States. His body aches, and there is a constant yank underneath his rib cage. Their last one was a fat, black hating man. Only good thing to his name was the mess of purchasing Alaska. Before he was tossed out on his face. Technically acquitted. Humans loved semantics. This man doesn't care much for the facts, but then again, he doesn't really care about faces and bodies that are not his own. He hasn't cared about anything in a very long time.
This man's name is Matthew Williams.
He is the good one, clean, better than his wild thing of a sister. Once sister. Almost, not quite sister. The words, familial semantics, turn to ashes in his mouth. He left to find himself, his population, in his growing nationhood. He left to find anything else but Arthur and the late nights and his drinking. He left to seek something other than anything else. He didn't find it, except a penchant for gramophones and the heavy haze that hung over the Houses of Black and White. Wagner and poppy. He got that at least.
He had a dream of his mother. A wolf. Dark fur and bright eyes in the snow. She'd laid beside him. When he blinked, he was touching foreheads with the corpse of his sister while their mother howled in grief.
He woke up screaming.
(they said a king gave his daughter to a hunter. he gave his daughter to a raven– marauder.)
"The lady wants to know what you want."
This man is in an old union jacket, so torn with dirt and faded blood that Matthew knows it cannot be his own. An uncle maybe. Even a grandfather.
"I want to help," Matthew says. Near dead ivy curl around the points of a weathered, iron gate. It creaks when the human leans against it. He laughs, and then spits out some tobacco on the ground that nearly hits the nation's shoe.
"See, that's the thing, boy-"
"Who are you?" Matthew interrupts, suddenly and overwhelmingly bored. He knows that this man is nothing but a glorified sentinel, and the lady is nothing but the ever increasing net of security.
Another snort. "Jameson. And do you have a name or will I keep calling you 'boy'?"
(I would pluck out his eye and make a button)
"Yes." Matthew murmurs, blue eyes scanning the encroaching ivy on this manor's walls. This is far–no, this is humming with something older than he is. It makes him think of before a different time, a different place. The forest. The two of them, chasing the dark together before light and sound and cold. Before they had names, only the other.
He pushes the thought away.
"I'll ask again," the man is fishing for a flask hidden in that old coat. "What do you want?"
"I can help. I can shoot." They valued that down here. The man takes a swig of his flask, and Matthew tries hard not to wrinkle his nose at the smell.
"Can you?," the man asks, drawing a pistol.
Matthew has him disarmed before the man can blink, his tipsy eyes staring at his own hands in confusion.
"It's quite fine, Jameson." A new voice says from behind the gates. A woman,with brown hair turning silver and a crumpled note in her hand stands by the entrance. Sharp, hollow cheekbones. A set mouth. Jameson grumbles something incoherent as she unlocks the iron gates, barely acknowledging him as he went off somewhere around the house. Matthew tries to smile. It doesn't really work.
"Come," the woman says.
He follows her through the old floors of the house, up two flights of stairs, and into a small room on the left end of the hallway.
(this pitcher of China white and milk is empty)
Amelia's eyes are not right. One is their shared childhood blue. The other, the dead grey of a corpse. She stares into space, unmoving, unfeeling from her spot in a chair by the window. Hung nearby is a birdcage with a goldfinch, who beats its wings and sings and sings and sings. Matthew is not himself, and Amelia is a thing in between, but they were of each other once.
(the woman is perfected. she's dead.)
Amelia's skin is pale and waning like a sunless sky. Hair mangled and long. The wound in the junction between her neck and shoulder is red and red and terrible red. Matthew's fingers itch to touch her.
Instead, he removes his jacket. "Who knows?"
"No one. Said she's taken ill from recuperation," the woman says. She brushes Amelia's hair from her face. America doesn't react. "Son of a bitch said she was meant only for him. She claws his face off. He stabs her with his wife's shears. Leaves her bleeding in the middle of the office. I take her," the woman says. Fingers card through Amelia's hair, detangling. "I take her. I take her." she repeats.
(her reds crinkle and drag in slack jawed reason)
Between the shadows of the evening, the woman leaves. First time the nation gives an audible breath is when Matthew's fingers begin to clean and sew the wound closed.
"I should kill him," Matthew doesn't realize the words have been said out loud. His handiwork is neat, barely visible. In the light of a candle, she shivers and lets out a half sob, half sigh when his hands grasp her own. The digits are freezing.
His voice, quiet and terrible at her ear. "Do you want me to?"
Those eyes, so strange, blink once, twice, and then drift closed. A tiny, almost invisible shake of her head.
"You're a cruel phantom." she says, voice soft and dry from days of silence. "Kind. And then wait to feast on my rotting corpse."
"No such phantom." he breathes, nose brushing against her temple. There's a storm in Virginia. She can feel it, twitching in her shoulder. He can feel it, an ache behind his left ear.
She wonders which is worse. Being near-alive, or not dead enough, all with him by her side.
Her fingers shake. He takes her hand and presses her fingers to his lips. Then softly, "You'll leave. With me. Tonight, if we have to."
Her laugh is sharp and hollow. "I can't leave. They won't let me leave. They won't. They won't. Congress. Forget them. But the unseen-"
"They're dead, Amelia. They're long dead. All of them. Let them sleep."
He holds her tighter, as if his life will bring something into her body.
The man in the old jacket sits in a corner, blood pooling from his missing leg. He smiles at them both. "See?" he says. He coughs up blood that stains the white of the walls. "See? See?"
"Let them sleep," he begs. Kisses her temple, her cheek. She closes her eyes and wills this solider away. Instead, the dead nurse comes back with whiskey and bandages, blood staining her gown.
"Come back." Canada's voice breaks. That scar of 1812 is still thick and terrible over the back of their necks and near their throats. He pushes aside her hair, and it's then that she begins to cry. "Come back to me, he whispers, words against the scar. Presses his lips against the raised flesh of her throat. "Come back. Come back. Come back."
Then, softly, her voice. "I can't sleep."
"I know how to make you sleep."
He takes her to bed. A tablespoon of honey and laudanum each. They curl on old sheets and stare into the haze of dreams and nothing as another rainy day makes it way through the moonless night.
A man sits in the corner, watching them both, before staring out the window. Blood pours from the wound in his head. The little boy on his lap plays with a old bullet.
Abraham sighs, looks to the bed, and gives a bloody,half hearted salute.