No Lights, No Lights
Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia or Florence and the Machines.
Note: Spoken in normal fonts are in a different language, italics words are in English unless otherwise specified.
Arthur sat on a park bench in one of Copenhagen's many parks right across from Tivoli Gardens, a magnificently beautiful amusement park built over a century ago, he really enjoyed going inside and just sitting down in one of the restaurants and sketching people in it, or the flowers that he could see. Right now he was sketching the outside gates of the magnificent park or at least that was what he had intended to draw, but now instead of the gates taking up most of the space a person standing underneath the gates did. He had cropped hair that stuck up in a cow lick right above his forehead, the obnoxious one that Mattias reminded him of. Recently he had been drawing a lot of these mysterious people and not just the blond man. Berwald wanted him to come in to his office to talk about them, to help him remember them. But Arthur wasn't so sure if he wanted to remember them or anything else about his past life, what if there was some dark secret that he was better off not knowing? Did he really want to mess up everything he'd worked so hard these past three years by remembering his past, what if he had killed somebody and had been a runaway fugitive, did he honestly want to know? But how could he live with himself not knowing who all the people were that swirled inside his head? How could he live without knowing if they truly existed or was he making them up in his mind?
Finishing up his sketch, Arthur blew some of the eraser crumbs off of the slightly rough cream colored paper before closing up the book and standing up off the bench, his butt was slightly sore from sitting for so long but the detail he was able to add to the sketch made it all the worthwhile. Now he had a decision to make that he had been putting off making in his head before. He could catch the train and go to Berwald's office like he was supposed to and talk to the stoic man about the people and try to find strategies to regaining his memories, or he could take a different train and head back to the apartment, a quiet, empty apartment, devoid of all his roommates that made trying to find somewhere peaceful a very, very difficult task if one wanted to stay in the apartment. Mattias was at work, Lukas had a performance coming up so he had to be at the Opera House, Eric was at school, Tino was out and about doing some shopping and Berwald was at his office. It was a very tempting choice, a very tempting choice indeed.
"Who's this?" Berwald asked pointing to a shadow in the corner of his picture of himself and the blond man sitting on a park bench.
"I don't know, the shadow scares me though." Arthur admitted, he rubbed his upper arms. "I see him in my darkest nightmares but I can't rember his face, just purple eyes." Berwald nodded writing something down on his pad. They had talked about the purple eyes before. They weren't the same shade as Tino's, they were more lavender and had a more child like look to them.
"When was the last time you had a nightmare with them?" Berwald looked over the rim of his glasses at Arthur which told the younger man that his roommate expected an honest answer and not the lie he was about to give him.
"Last week." Arthur gave in with a sigh, "They happen about once a week." The Swede jotted something down on his notepad. The taller man flipped a few pages through Arthur's sketch pad to his most recently drawn item.
"This is very good Arthur, do you know who he is?"
"He's the one Mattias reminds me of." Berwald's lips quirked into a small smile and then back down to a straight line in a blink of an eye, the blond flipped to the page before it. In one part of the page there was a group of people and on the other side was one person, a young man with a strange hair curl sticking out his right side.
"Why is he always alone?"
"I don't know." Arthur had never drawn the angry boy with anyone, he had tried before but it never felt right to Arthur and he wasn't sure why.
"That's okay." Berwald reassured him in his own stoic way. Arthur nodded, they had gone through the same routine at sessions for years now. At first it had just been the blond man, and Berwald had asked question after question about him as if somehow it would jog Arthur's memory. And slowly over the past three years he began to draw other people from his past life, or at least he thought they were from his past life, and then impressions began to come and Arthur could now give vague details about these people. He knew Berwald thought that regaining his memories might be an easier thing to do if there were people from his past around him but they'd never been able to identify any of the people in Arthur's drawings.
Arthur looked around the light green painted room, he sat on a burgundy sofa while Berwald sat across from him in a leather chair. There was a small desk in the corner of the room with a picture of Berwald and Tino on it and a laptop where Berwald would type up his notes after his sessions. He never let Arthur see what those notes were on him, said it was confidential and what not. Not that Arthur really wanted to know what Berwald thought, the notes probably didn't look that much different from when Arthur first started his sessions till now. He still hadn't regained his memories.
"Who's Francis?" Berwald asked, "Tino tells me you called your date a few days ago Francis." The stoic blond clarified as Arthur gave him a confused look. Arthur wondered if it went against the Hippocratic Oath to be your patient's roommate.
"I don't know, someone I knew I guess." Arthur said with a shrug.
"Is this Francis?" Berwald pointed to the angry man he always drew alone. Arthur immediately shook his head. "What about him, is he Francis?" he flipped the page in the sketch book to the picture of the gates to the Tivoli Gardens with the over exuberant man standing in front of them.
"No,"
"What about the blond man, is he Francis?" Arthur opened his mouth to say no and then shut it again.
"I'm not sure." Francis… that could fit the blond man, it didn't sound wrong but Arthur wasn't sure it sounded right either.
The blond man stood on the bow of the ship barely holding onto the rope that was the only thing preventing him from falling over the edge. He was saying something, but Arthur couldn't hear him over the wind of the sea. He looked like an angel with his white shirt billowing behind him from where it had become untucked from his blue breeches. "How could you do this to me, Arthur?" He asked as Arthur got closer. What had he done to the blond man. "How could you do this to me? Do you see what you've brought me to do?" Arthur reached his hand out the blond man and opened his mouth to tell him that he wasn't sure what he had done to wrong the man. But no words would come out and he found himself opening and closing like a fish trying to take in water on a boat. And then the man leaned back, a small smile on his face as his sapphire blue eyes looked directly into Arthur's emerald green. "Au-revoir, my English Rose." And he fell backwards into the stormy sea below and Arthur could hear someone shouting a name only to realize it was him.
"FRANCIS!" It had come out of his mouth on pure instinct and he ran to the edge of the boat to see the splash the taller man had made and without too much thought, Arthur grabbed rope so that he wouldn't lose his ship and jumped into the water below after the other man.
The water was a greenish blue color as Arthur tried to find the man, Francis, that was what Arthur had called him. And then he saw the movement of Francis's hand and Arthur kicked himself in that direction not letting go of the rope. It looked as if he was caught in the entanglements of kelp. "Francis." Arthur said as he reached down to grab the man's hand. But their fingers slipped against one another. "Grab my hand." Francis shook his head.
"How could you do this to me?" he asked again. Arthur felt the sting of betrayal, but pushed it aside, he had to save him. This man was important to him. Pushing aside his feelings of doubt Arthur reached down again and grabbed Francis's waist. The man thrashed about, grabbing on to the kelp as if he didn't want to be rescued by Arthur but the stubborn Brit didn't pay him any mind as he kicked upward and back towards the boat.
And then it was over and Arthur was in his bedroom, he felt himself trying to catch his breath and he glanced down at his clock. It was five in the morning. "Francis." He said to himself. "Francis." The blond man was Francis, and Francis had been with him since the beginning. "Francis what?" he asked himself as he climbed down the ladder, his mind racing from his dream. "How could you do this to me?" Francis's haunting voice asked him over and over. What had he done to the man, how had he hurt him? Was it the accident, or had it been something before then? Arthur clutched his head trying to figure out the inter-moil inside his head.
"What's wrong with me?" Arthur moaned to himself.
Alfred F. Jones smiled to himself as he walked out of the dark alley way in Copenhagen's less then savory district, so there really was a war heating up between Oxenstierna and Kohler, and he would be right in the front row. He'd have to call Tatiana and tell her he would be gone for a little while longer, surely she would understand. He hadn't seen Arthur again, but he also hadn't dared to go back to the café yet either. What if Arthur didn't want to be found again, he hadn't given any indication these past three years that he was ready to see everyone again. It didn't matter, he needed to focus on the crime war heating up between the two largest crime syndicates in Northern Europe outside of Russia.
"You should be more careful, you don't want to get on either of their radars with your constant questioning of people." Said Alfred's photographer an Indian man by the name of Rajesh, Alfred let out a small snort, Alfred was anything but careful and Rajesh knew that. How many bad situations had they ended up in together? They'd always been able to pull through, but Alfred understood the warning, reporting on the revolution in Russia was different from reporting on a crime war. He wouldn't be the first reporter to be killed on duty for being too nosy about certain subjects. Alfred's left hand drifted slightly over the gun holster he kept on him since nearly being killed by raiders in the Sahara a few years back. Being a freelance journalist would do that to you.
"Careful got it," Alfred said sending the dark man one of his famous 'hero smiles'. "We now know that Kohler is planning a small raid on one of his own drug houses and making it look like Oxenstierna did it, we wouldn't have found that out if we'd been careful would we."
"I don't trust anybody in this area." Rajesh said honestly, "Can we go back to the hotel now?"
"Wimp," Alfred muttered under his breath but nodded anyway. There wouldn't be too much more to find out anyway tonight. Tomorrow he'd go back out and scower the underbelly of Copenhagen looking for his story. If he wrote the story right he could win a Pulitzer, he'd like that. He'd get known throughout the journalistic world if he did that.
No light, no light
In your bright blue eyes
I never knew daylight could be so violent
A revolution in the light
Of day
You can chose was stays
And what fades away.
And I'd do anything
To make you stay
No light, no light
Tell me what you want me to say.
Author's Note (the part of the story where the author comes out and writes a silly note):
Meant to update this yesterday. Sorry, got distracted. And sorry this took so long, but I got back from the Thanksgiving break only to find myself swamped with the play i was doing at school. And then Midterms. But we survived the Apocalypse so glad to see everyone's okay. Merry Christmas.