Hey! Since my first story got a crazy amount of views, I thought I'd fix you guys something different! It's not technically a new series, but it's one of my few non-AU shots at FrUk. I know the tags don't technically do the piece justice (or so I've been told) but it's the closest I could get to describing this little thing. uvu'' Anyway, without further ado, enjoy!
They would meet on a slope. A tiny uprising of dirt, nothing around save for the twinkle of candlelight. It would find Arthur Kirkland. It always would. He had come to associate the desperately cavorting ember with an array of emotions, in time. First awe. Then Acceptance.
Now? Disgust. Specifically, disgust toward its wielder. France. Hair illuminated a sharp gold in its light. The lines in his face brought out, emphasised. A grizzly reminder of just how old they were, what they had seen over the years, and what was to come.
"You're late, frog." England looked up, a fierce light in his eyes. He had them too. Those eyes also served as reminders. A warrior's gaze, a nobleman's scoff, all of the roles he had been obliged to play for one monarch after another, all in one.
"Désolé, cher. I was not aware that you were so desperate to see me." He sat down beside the fellow nation, placing the candle between them. A diving instrument.
"Say… I was wondering if you had noticed something." A languid gaze. A fierce battle against cerulean and viridian.
"Hm?" Go on, the Frenchman's own gaze seemed to beckon, humour me.
"The way they look at us. The scourge, the common folk, if you will."
"You know, modesty never had been your thing."
"Speak for yourself."
The silence of the night swallowed up their attempt at conversation. The candle's flame wavered in the slightest of breezes.
"Contempt." France was the one to tarnish the brief, lonely period. "Non?"
England nodded. "Ferocity. Such a primal exhibition. Self-assertion may be the goal, but the outcome is devoid of it."
"You think they are jealous? Mon ami, please, they believe we are devils."
"What the mind cannot rationalise, it makes a threat. How one would handle a threat in this day and age is a fairly simple matter."
"Bloodletting, waterlogging…" He sounded disinterested, as though calling off a list for market.
"Hanging." The island nation murmured. All fell into perpetual stillness once more. They both remembered back then (France more out of being informed by his boss). If one were to peer closely, he still had the mark. Rope burn. An inflamed, gruesome red circle. He did not know why he thrashed at the time, or why he called for the one who was miles away across a sodding body of water. He wouldn't die as it is. A state of pseudo-immortality was not what his people fluffed it up to be. They humoured the thought, perhaps, indulged in it. A common desire, despite that the ones who had obtained it, their very nations, were treated as monsters for possessing it.
Throughout the moment of unease, the crippling weight of quiet, a hand found his own, slender, bony fingers grazing his insipid skin. They crooked inward. A minor twitch passed through his nervous system as a set of nails kneaded, no, dug into the surface below.
A token.
A reminder (they were there; they could feel, and there was proof).
A gesture to be reciprocated.
Which is why, drawing the offender in by his tunic, he provided an offering of his own. Teeth grazed and gnawed at thin lips (a token), soon making way for both of their mouths to come together, like pieces of an intricate puzzle (a reminder). France's grip turned light, careful (a gesture to be reciprocated).
The candle's flame snuffed out.