So... it's been almost three years since I posted Past Memories for the first time. A lot has happened since then. I graduated high school (does it count as graduating if you don't get a ceremony and diploma because of the pandemic?), and I'm set to start my first semester of university soon. Basically, I was rereading some of my old works and realized what absolute trash my writing was back then, and I challenged myself to do better.

I decided to rewrite Past Memories because I'm actually going in to history as my undergrad and I've come a long way in my research and writing style. I was going to wait until I had the entire thing finished to post it, but I'm starting uni in two weeks and I don't know how often I'll be able to write. Updates will be pretty consistent until I run out of content and have to start writing it when I have time.

Basically, enjoy!

(Also, biggest thanks to my grandmother for being my editor even though she doesn't understand fan fiction and hates history)

oO0Oo

If someone were to ask Canada what his favourite thing about the world was, he would have to choose the stars.

For as long as he can remember, the stars were there. From the moment he first opened his eyes, to the day he left home for the first time and the world was shattered, the stars were always there to watch over him in the night. They were the one constant thing about his existence.

And yet he knew that was not true. Everything he saw was an illusion, thrown across time and space, riding on the final triumphant rays of a star, dead and dying across thousands of years only for its legacy to shine brilliantly in the inky blackness of space.

Immortal as long as they shone in the night sky, forgotten the moment their light fades.

Canada liked stars, because they were like him. He, too, would be a beacon of light in the darkness of mortality, a rock holding steady in the storm-swept seas of history. And he, too, would never know when or how the end would come except that one day he would just… cease to exist, what he once was only a footnote in the vastness of the universe.

He had seen it happen before. Children caught up in things bigger than they would ever understand, gone before they'd ever really existed. Adults who'd lived their lives but always craved more, with wishes and dreams left unfilled as society got in the way. He'd seen Nations burn up in an instant, too. The dying breaths of a being who'd never known what it was to fear mortality. The ghosts of his friends would haunt him forever.

But the stars, they shone uncaring through the night sky. Canada knew that he could look up and see the same sky he'd been looking at his whole life. He could almost pretend that he didn't know that the stars would one day disappear.

It helped him pretend that he wouldn't, too.

oO0Oo

Matthew {not Canada, not yet} blew into the world on a cold night breeze that only hinted of the gale hiding in its wake, the elder twin to the prince of a yet-unknown empire. Full of hidden strength and lethal calm, much of his youth was spent hidden away from his world, safe inside uncharted territory Europeans had only once dared to roam. He and his brother were something new, something not entirely like their half-brothers and sisters.

They had always looked different from them, from the Nations that were their mother's oldest children. Their skin was fair and pale, their eyes light and swirling with the reflections of a thousand galaxies.

Matthew and Alfred, though their names had been different, back then, never knew their father. From what their mother told them, they looked like him - had his hair and Alfred had his eyes {Matthew's looked so similar to the child he'd brought with him}, but they were, in every other way, their mother's sons. They had her strong cheekbones and her long lashes, but she'd also darkened their skin from snow-pale to a light tan.

And they were beautiful. When they were born, their siblings, Nations who'd lived together for so long they no longer felt the same familial bond they once had, called a temporary truce as they gathered to welcome their new brothers into the world.

Soaring Eagle, she'd called Alfred.

Matthew, she named Silent Warrior.

Matthew never really knew who his father was. Sometimes, when his mother thought they were asleep, she'd look toward the stars and quietly tell the tale of their naming, not knowing her sons were listening.

Skandia, she called the man who, in another time, if they were someone else, might have been their father - their true father. And his son, Ísland. They stayed for only a short while - a few winters at most. He was proud of you, so proud, but they couldn't stay. She ran her fingers through Matthew's soft curls. He had gotten the wave in his hair from Skandia, but Alfred's hair had always been straight and messy.

Right from the beginning, Matthew and Alfred knew they weren't human. They lived far longer but aged far slower. Even after decades they still possessed the bodies of toddlers, despite the knowledge that accumulated in brains far too aged for their appearance. Once, when they'd begged and pleaded with their mother, she sat them down and told them who, and what, exactly, they were.

You were born as the Children of Vinland, she explained. Together, you make up what was once a single colony, now lost to dust. When your father and his men left, I feared you would disappear, but here you stand today.

Tears brimmed in her eyes as she said that. They didn't understand yet what she meant - wouldn't understand for hundreds more years. They didn't know that their mother was slowly giving up her domain to them so that her youngest children might live. They didn't know that with each passing decade, she grew weaker and weaker as her sons absorbed her immortality and shaped it as their own.

They never understood that with each passing season spent frolicking around in fields of wildflowers and snow, their mother stepped farther into the shadowy place where Nations went when they died.

Look to the sky, child, she suddenly said one night as they lay beside a crackling fire. The crisp autumn air fanned the flames higher, sending sparks snapping into the inky expanse above, the closest thing the ground would ever have to stars of its own. That star there - no, not that one, Soaring Eagle - that one, right to the north, the brightest star in the sky. That is where our kind goes when we finally lay down to rest. One day, I will journey across the stars myself and you - you, my children, will be the harbingers of a new age.

Matthew curled into her warmth. He didn't know, at the time, that their mother knew her days were numbered, that she would soon have to cede her position for them. It had happened to all the greats: Ancient Rome for the Italies, Britannica for her children, Iberia for Portugal and Spain. And she, the mother of the New World, had lasted longer than most.

{Matthew didn't know that she could already feel the invasions that had begun farther south. He didn't know that her children, the Aztec, Incan, and Mayan empires - the siblings he'd never gotten to meet - had fallen beyond salvation. He didn't know that, at that moment, they were already gone, killed by greed and the conquest for gold. He didn't know that their legacies were trapped in tiny children just as he and his brother were their mother's. He wouldn't know any of this until centuries later, when he met Mexico for the first time}.

Instead, Matthew snuggled closer, sighing contentedly as she wrapped an arm around him and Alfred. But not soon, right? He asked, half-asleep.

She just brushed the hair out of his eyes and smiled sadly.

When Matthew woke up, Alfred was gone.

{He'd wandered away in the middle of the night, following something subconscious in his mind that led to a green-eyed man and the commencement of an empire.}

His mother wiped away his tears as she had done her own and put on a brave smile. Be brave, Silent Warrior. Someone waits for you, too. Not now, but soon. She rose from her crouch, letting her hand linger on his small shoulder. Come, we must leave now.

Matthew thought that even after Alfred had left {abandoned him without a goodbye or even an explanation}, his mother would always be there for him.

He was proven wrong when the ship sailed up the river.