It wasn't regal velvet or imported silks, but Prussia was pleased to have it; seeing as the last clothes he had worn in the past thousand years or so were hardly even rags and a woman's dress. None of which registered anywhere on his 'must be this awesome to be worn' meter. Other than that and their plain ash and brown colors, the only problem he really had with them was that they were hung loosely on his frame.
Prussia could hear Aldo and Paige shift maps around in the other part of the tent while he slipped on one of Aldo's shirts in the space that the other called his 'room'. Strangely enough, ever since he had left their view he hadn't heard either of them saying anything, it felt almost as if his presence was a trigger for them to argue with each other.
When he first entered Aldo's room Prussia realized what the man had meant by not owning anything but his clothes; there was only a small bag, that looked practically empty and a single blanket that acted as a bed and like everyone's clothes it too was ash colored. Part of him felt embarrassed that his leader was this bad off, Prussia wouldn't be able to imagine some of things a couple of his past rulers would say if they were forced to live the way Aldo did. With a sigh he rolled up the ends of his pants and finally pulled aside the curtains.
Paige stood off to the side, a couple of feet away from the wood slab Aldo was kneeling in front of. From what he heard and could currently see Prussia assumed that a new map was laid out. Clapping his hands together Prussia once again gained the two's attention. "Now that the awesome me is back it's time the both of you to answer some of my questions." Neither of them gave much of reaction to his booming and rather brash voice that covered the anxious feeling that grew in size with each passing thought about how poor he seemed to be in this new world.
With a small hand movement, Aldo motioned for Prussia to once again come closer to the slab. He complied with Aldo and found himself once again surveying another unusual map. From the outline of the land that was laid next to a body of water he eventually identified that it was a map of a singular country, the singular country being him.
From what he could see it was the same land that had once belonged to him and then later Germany, the unlabeled body of water was what used to be the Baltic Sea. As he scanned the map over and over and thought about the previous map that didn't seem to have him visibly on it, an abysmal realization came to mind.
"Are you okay?" Aldo shook Prussia's shoulder lightly at the sight of him tense up.
There was a hesitant pause before he answered. "This city . . . I-It's not the only city in the entire country, right?"
The longer Aldo stayed silent, the more Prussia began to dread the answer. "I thought you already knew," the man said, soon after giving a groan of annoyance. "Wouldn't you as a nation know everything about yourself?" Prussia glared at his leader; to him, it seemed as if Aldo was once again doubting who he was.
"Do you as a person know everything about yourself?" Aldo didn't reply. After a beat. Prussia once again spoke. "How many?"
"How many what?" Asked Paige.
"How many people are there?"
Both Paige and Aldo exchanged looks between each other before Aldo answered his nation.
. . .
Johnathan stood with his arms crossed behind his back only ten feet away from the main tent his lover and leader were now in. Occasionally he would glance behind him to look at Agatha, who played with another young girl on the dirt ground not too far from where he was.
His son, who was not present, did not enter his thoughts; for more important ones plagued him. More than twenty minutes had gone by since he had last seen Paige. He remembered watching her hands clench by her sides as Prussia and Aldo stalked off, he had begun to walk closer to her at that point. He wanted to comfort her the same way he did when they first left their lands in search for something new, when their ships encountered rough waters, and when everyone choose the strange olive skinned man with hollow brown eyes as their leader rather than her.
But Jonathan couldn't. It was not the time for it seemed, that she didn't want comfort or rather her family. Unlike most families, where the women waited for their lovers he was the one waiting for her, not that it had ever upset him much.
The last drop of patience ran from his blood in that moment. Sighing, he finally moved his stiff position and advanced toward the tent; his dry,cracked hands gripped the edges of the cloth entrance and he pushed it back with minimal force.
Green irises were the first and only things that Johnathan noticed. "Love what are you doing here? where's Agatha?" Blinking the bearded man surveyed Paige's expression. He exhaled when he noticed that the familiar raging fire of determination that had been in her eyes when she followed Prussia and Aldo had calmed down.
He swallowed back the lump in his throat before replying; "I wanted to make sure that you and Aldo didn't tear our nation apart."
Usually, Paige would have called him out for suggesting that she would maim Prussia in any way, but instead she more or less let it go and rolled her eyes instead of lashing out. "Aldo may not have torn him apart but he's certainly put a hole in the man's ego." She stepped aside a few feet away from him, silently beckoning him to join her and the men.
It wasn't the first time he had been in the tent, though it was the first time he had seen the neatly organized contents of the bags in the corner scattered all about the room like the aftermath of the daily wind storms out near the edges of the country.
The wooden slab in the middle of the room that acted like a table of sorts now bared a long crack that was close to breaking it in two. To Jonathan the room reflected the silent chaos and disorganization the entire country was currently in.
"Ah Johnathan, I could use a man like you." Aldo emerged from the drapes that blocked off the other part of the tent and walked closer to him, not caring in the slightest about the maps of other countries and theirs that he was stepping on.
Johnathan's hands motioned towards the entirety of the completely devastated room. "What the bloody hell happened here?!" He couldn't fathom how so much damage could be done in such a little amount of time when there was only a few people here to begin with.
Aldo, like Paige, rolled his eyes but with more discontent and frustration than she had. "Why don't you ask the great Kingdom of Prussia, I'm sure he'd love to give you an in-depth conversation as to why things are like this. While you're at it, you can ask how he feels about being a country once again." Aldo was never a sarcastic or humorous man, the few times that he acted like one made him sound rather cocky, shallow, or even cold.
Johnathan raised an eyebrow at him before stepping forward and walking into the next part of the room. "Prussia?" He asked as he pushed the drapes away.
"Go jump into the ocean with the rest of my expansive population of three hundred people, limey bastard!" Prussia had his back turned towards Johnathan as he laid on the ground with his hands covering his head.
Johnathan took a deep breath. "What happened out there?"
Prussia stood up swiftly and spun around, to Jonathan he looked the same way he did before running off into nowhere land after hearing the fate of his world. "Three hundred . . . three hundred! In this kind of terrain I might as well go back into the desert to die."
Jonathan then realized what Prussia meant by three hundred. "Three hundred might not seem like a lot for someone like you but . . . it's better than only a hundred."
Prussia's jaw seemed to drop at the response, apparently it didn't make him feel any better than before. "Don't you get how pitiful this is!?"He snarled.
Now it was Johnathan's turn to look surprised. "Pitiful, your upset about it because it seems pitiful?"
He nodded his head up and down in agreement, a 'no shit Sherlock' look evident on his face. "Did you know that even when I was only East Germany I still had more resources, people, and land. I-I wasn't even a freaking country and I was still better off than I am now!"
'four . . . five . . . six . . . seven. . .eight' Johnathan counted, taking a breath between each number.
"Do you think you would be better off now if the same thing that happened to your friends happened to you?"
That seemed to shut him up as well as make his previous expression disappear. Johnathan stared back at him as he waited for Prussia to reply. However, Prussia only stood there with his hands by his sides. His lips formed the perfect straight line and his eyes stared off into space rather than at Johnathan.
"Johnathan, tell him if he doesn't stop whining I'll have Paige force the dress back on him and this time your daughter can braid his hair!" Aldo's voice broke the silence from outside.
Prussia finally broke the trance and growled. "I told you to shove a white flag up your ass and leave me the fuck alone, Aldo."
Johnathan's eyes widened at the brash language, no one had ever cursed at Aldo . . . well at least to his face. "For once in my entire life I agree with Aldo in saying that you need to get over this Prussia, think of the people that depend on you and us." A light smile came to his face as his lover's voice followed Aldo's.
"And I told you to walk off into nowhere land so I didn't have to listen to your annoyingly unawesome voice. Last time I checked good leaders listened to the countries when they asked them to do something." Prussia chuckled for a second, although he didn't really mean it and was just very pissed off at the both of them as well as everything else that has happened. Johnathan, however, thought that a good retort to what Prussia just said wasn't something that could be said aloud.
In the second that Prussia blinked, a considerable amount of force was pushed into his stomach causing him to fall backwards. Prussia's eyes bulged out of his head as he stared up at Jonathan, who seemed to tower over him in an unnerving way in that moment. His left hand was outstretched in the shape of a fist.
"Prussia, Johnathan what's going on in there?"
Prussia squeaked out "Nothing," before he stood up again and dusted himself off, leaving the room as if nothing happened.
Aldo and Paige didn't bother to stop Prussia as he stomped out of the tent. He would come back eventually just like the last time and this time, no one felt the need to follow him. It wasn't long before Johnathan emerged from the other part of the tent as well. While he stood next to Paige he broke the silence. "For being our nation, he's a bit spoiled."
Paige snorted at the statement before nodding her head in agreement. "Considering everything, I would think that if our nation was personified he would be a more humble and grateful man with an optimistic demeanor."
Aldo, on the other hand, wasn't smirking in amusement or even showing much emotion at all. "Did you ever stop and think that maybe the people of our nation are in reality spoiled?" He paused thinking of every suggestion or complaint they had given him. "They desire warm beds, houses, meals that consist of more than fish, and a prosperous country unlike any around them."
Paige growled, Aldo's words seemed to stoke the ever-burning flames in her eyes to new heights. "What's so spoiled about wanting to live comfortably and happy!?" She took a few steps towards him, despite being shorter she still managed to look intimidating compared to him. "What gives you the right to say that dreaming of something so much better than what we have is greedy!?"
Unlike most people Aldo wasn't fazed by this. "It could be worse and they should be thankful that they have what they have."
Her eyes widened as she took a long, deep breath, everything about her seemed to intensify as if she was about to explode from rage. She didn't budge when Jonathan tried pulling her away from Aldo's now amused stare. "Thankful? Thankful for what, YOU!?"
The taller man waited for the red in her face to disappear as she calmed down before replying in a monotone voice. "Thankful for not being dead like Prussia's friends." Paige instinctively stepped backwards away from him, a look of dismay apparent on her face. Aldo cast a glance to Johnathan. "Prussia was upset about living in a pitiful situation not that he could die from just as easily as a man lost at sea. At the same time shouldn't he be thankful for being alive unlike everyone he knew? Yet he acts like this gift from god is a burden. These people are not . . . completely spoiled children but they desire comforts and pray to god that he sends it to them rather than thank him for sending them the life they currently use."
They all stood there in contemplative silence for what seemed like forever, Paige and Johnathan were taken back by such words while Aldo just stood there only because there wasn't anything better for him to do than to wait and watch for their reaction. Finally, with her head looking down at the ground, Paige walked away with Johnathan directly behind her. "What's the point of living if being alive is the only thing to be thankful for?" With that said she was gone and Aldo was once again alone with his thoughts . . . just the way he liked it.
So I'm glad to say that Prussia is beginning to get back into his grove, I've noticed that I haven't added much of the canon characters and Prussia hasn't done as much. However I will be adding a lot more flashbacks and it wont just be Italy and Germany but everyone too. I hope to really start putting more of the focus on Prussia in these next chapters.