Imaginary

Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia or Evennesance

Note: Spoken words are in another language besides English italized will be English unless otherwise stated.

"Frannie!" Monique shouted, greeting him at the luggage carousel in the Fiumiciano Airport, behind her was Marcello looking sheepish, with his hand in his pocket and the hood of a sweatshirt, with the words Bite me written across it, covering his coppery hair, at his girlfriend's over enthusiastic greeting of her brother.

"Monique," Francis said with a huge smile, kissing his sister's cheeks. "How's your studies going?" Unlike her casually dressed boyfriend, Monique was dressed in a button up purple blouse and a white skirt that swayed whenever she walked, and she wore a smile that made Francis feel as if some of the weight that had been weighing on him was lifted.

"Good, I just finished a class in Art History that required me to visit many of Rome's Art Museums, I wish you could stay longer and see more of the city." Monique said as Francis picked up his luggage from the carousel. Normally, he would have ridden the tour bus with the rest of the cast, but he had special permission to visit his sister during their performance in Rome.

"And how are you, Marcello?" Francis asked turning to the other man.

"Fine, school is well." Marcello replied curtly.

"I hear the show in Zurrick went well." Monique said, Francis nodded. The tour had started in London where their theatre was and then they had crossed the channel to the French city Bordeaux and then they had traveled into Spain and then back to France to perform in Marsilles and Strausburg, and then they went into Switzerland to perform in Zurrick. The company did European tours every two or three years performing the master of English playwriting's work. "Did you think about what I told you?" Francis sighed. Did she have to bring this up now, couldn't they have one visit where his former lover wasn't brought up. He knew she cared a lot about Arthur as he had taken care of her while she was in the Russian Sunflower but couldn't she see that he didn't want to talk about him?

"Monique, not now." He said as they made their way through the lobby of the airport. He didn't want to have this fight again. She wanted him to checkout Alfred's lead in Copenhagen, she had made that vastly clear when they'd fought over the phone last week, but he didn't want to disrupt a poor man's life by badgering him with questions. Especially if Alfred really had seen Arthur.

"So, are do you want a tour around Rome or do you just want to relax for the day before you perform tomorrow?" Marcello asked cutting into the tenuous discussion between the siblings. Francis sent him a silent but grateful look, there were few people Monique would listen to, she was very strong willed like their mother, but the boy walking beside them might just be one of them. Perhaps he could ask Marcello to tell her to lay off him about Arthur.

"I wouldn't mind a tour around Rome; I have never been here before." Francis said with his smile that could charm the panties off of most women. It was a false smile, but it fooled most people and it worked for him.

"A tour it is," Marcello said with a slight nod of his head as he waved down a taxi.

As they walked around Rome, Francis began to realize why his sister had fallen in love with the city. It truly was a city that spanned for over two millennia from the Parthenon and the Coliseum to the beautiful Renaissance sculptures and churches to the more modern buildings everyone seemed to forget about due to the city's history. It reminded him of Paris and London more than his former home in Montreal and Ottawa, they were much younger cities in comparison to the ancient ones on this content. Everything about Europe seemed older then North America and it was a welcomed change when Francis moved back to Paris three years ago. He had wanted the old buildings, the ones that inspired people to write books and wonder about the people who had lived there hundreds of years ago. This city was older than his beloved Paris, not by much and you couldn't really tell unless you knew its history.

"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Monique asked as they stood in the old Roman Forum. Over the tops of some of the lower buildings they could see the top of the coliseum peeking out like a titan watching over time. This city had made his sister alive again after the Russian Sunflower, even though she hadn't lost her spirit in that hellhole, she had lost her youth and her carefreeness that she had had as a child. "I wish I had time to show you the library. There's so many books, I can't imagine there's a bigger library anywhere in the world." His sister carried on talking not noticing her brother in his deep thoughts.

"The United States Library of Congress boasts to be the biggest library in the world." Francis replied watching the wind play with her dirty blond braided hair. He had thought for four years that he'd never see her smile again, never see her blue eyes light up as she got excited or watch her curl up and read a book, he even enjoyed watching her scowl, the way she put her hands on her hips when she was upset, she looked just like their Maman before she died.

"Whatever." Francis laughed at her, she tried to keep a straight face and not laugh as well but she failed.

Francis watched Marcello wander around the forums below doing some kind of rubbings with a piece of white paper and a crayon like one might do at a grave site or something. Monique never took her eyes off of him as if, if she did he would disappear and she would never see him again. "He asked me to marry him." She said and Francis glanced at her left ring finger for the first time during the whole trip, but there wasn't a ring on it.

"You said no?" Francis asked surprised.

"What if one day he wakes up and he realizes that he doesn't want a used girl, a whore? What then? If we get married he'll be stuck in a marriage he doesn't want to be in. I don't want to do that to him." Monique said and she suddenly looked older then her twenty-one years of age. "The way we are now he can leave whenever he wants. He won't feel obligated to stay by my side." She gave her brother a pitiful half smile.

"You can't do this to yourself. You can't live in the what ifs, you should marry him. You deserve him. He's a nice guy and he's not going to leave you just because you were forced into prostitution. If he was he would have done it long ago. He loves you, Monique; he wants to take care of you." Francis said grabbing his sister's hand and squeezed. And as he told her all those word of encouragement he could also understood where she was coming from but he couldn't see Marcello being that type of person, to just leave because he didn't want an ex-prostitute for a girlfriend, he wasn't Arthur, he wouldn't just leave her.

"You really think so?" Monique asked a hint of desperation in her voice, Francis knew that Monique wanted to get married; she had always wanted to get married ever since she was a little girl. Sometimes when they were little she'd force Antonio to play "Wedding" with her where he was the groom and Francis would give her away and Feliciano was the priest. Lovino would just watch from the sidelines scowling, Monique liked to call him a meanie head and they didn't get along too well as children. Before she had left to live in France with their grandparents she had told him that she was afraid that now she'd never get married because no one would ever want someone that had been through what she had been through. At that time Francis hadn't been sure what to tell her as he was still reeling over his loss of Arthur, but now she had found someone, someone who truly cared for her and understood that her abduction and forced prostitution wasn't her fault.

"Yes," He watched her face light up and then she jumped up and ran down the hill to where Marcello was wandering. Francis watched as she ran up to him and then after a few seconds she wrapped her arms around his neck as he spun her around. He could see the smile on both of their faces and he found a big one working its way on his face. At least someone in their family would be happy, their mother was dead, their father a drunk, and he was nothing more than a broken man who hid his true feelings behind a façade and tried to be people he was not. But she would get her happy ending and he couldn't ask God for anything more. And then Marcello put her down and kissed her and Francis became really glad that he had brought earplugs so he could sleep on the plane because he would probably need them that night. And through the clear air that had settled on the area he heard a sound he hadn't heard in years, his sister's laugh. It was a beautiful sound, ringing like a bell and sounding so crisp and clean.

"O, I die, Horatio; The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit: I cannot live to hear news from England; But I do prophesy the election lights On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice; So tell him, with the occurents, more and less, Which have solicited. The rest is silent." Francis lay on the ground looking up into his friend Oliver's bright green eyes. Oliver played Hamlet's friend Horatio, he was a few years older than Francis and had been performing the works of Shakespeare much longer but he was by no means a snob about it to Francis. That was one thing Francis liked about working with this acting company, even those who had been performing for a while took the younger actors under their wings and tutored them in the art.

"Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince." Oliver bent down and kissed Francis's brow. "And flight of angels sing thee to thy rest! Why does the drum come hither?" Oliver stood up after bending over Francis as he lay dying and looked over to stage left where Charles who was playing Fortinbras the Prince of Norway and a couple of fill in actors stood who were playing the prince's entourage.

"Where is this sight?" Charles asked walking on stage, his entourage following him. One thing Francis admired about the American actor was the way he held himself on stage. The man looked as if he could be the prince of Norway right then as he walked on the stage.

"What is it ye would see?" Oliver said the line with such anguish Francis half wondered to himself if the Brit knew what it was like to watch a friend die right in front of him. "If aught woe or wonder, cease your search."

"This quarry cries on havoc. O proud death," Charles too bent down over Francis. "What feast is toward thine eternal cell, That thou so many princes at a shot So bloodily hast struck?" He stood up to be even with Oliver, his voice sounding angry as he looked over at some of the other actors who also lay "dead" on the stage.

"The sight is dismal, And our affairs from England come too late:" said one of the stand ins, "The ears are senseless that should give us hearing, To tell him his commandment is fullfill'd, That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead: Where should we have our thanks?"

"Not from his mouth, Had it the ability of life to thank you:" Oliver replied to the man defensively. Francis was really enjoying playing a dead man on stage and having everyone talk about him like he wasn't there. It was really entertaining. "He never gave commandment for their death, But since, so jump upon this bloody question, You from the Polack wars, and you from England, Are here arrived give orders that these bodies High on stage be placed to view;" He gestured to the uncle and his men who were dead. "And let me speak to the yet unknowing world How these things came about: so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall'n on the inventors' reads: all this I can Truly deliver." Oliver looked at Charles as he spoke.

"Let us haste to hear it, And call the noblest to the audience. For me, with sorrows I embrace my fortune:" Charles put a hand on Oliver's back as if in some kind of condolence to the man. "I have some rights of memory in this kingdom, Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me."

"Of that I shall have also cause to speak, And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more;" He began to walk away from Francis's "body" as he spoke. "But let this same be presently perform'd, Even while men's minds are wild; lest more mischance On plots and errors, happen."

"Let four captains Bear Hamlet, like a solider, on the stage;" Charles said motioning to his men. Four of the fill ins lifted Francis up on their shoulders walking behind the two as they walked off the stage. "For he was likely, had he been put on, To have proved most royally: and, for his passage, The soldiers' music and rites of war Speak loudly for him. Take up the bodies: such a sight as this Become the field, but here shows much amiss. Go, bid the soldiers, shoot." The curtain closed with the other still dead on the stage. Francis was slowly lowered to the floor by the four he was carried off stage by as they did the curtain call.

Francis ran out first out of the whole cast being the star and everything and then would run out Sharon who played Ophelia, and then other members of the cast based on what role they had played throughout the play. Francis smiled as he grabbed the blond Finnish woman's hand to take a bow with her. Somewhere out in the audience his sister had just watched him perform and she was now standing up with the audience clapping and cheering them on and that somehow lifted a huge weight off of his shoulders.

"You were amazing out there, tonight." Monique gushed as she met him outside in the lobby area after the curtain call. "I never knew what an amazing actor you are." Francis shrugged sheepishly, acing was just something that came naturally to him, it wasn't something he could turn on or off. He liked it because even for a brief two hours he could imagine he was someone else, he could become that other person and Francis Bonnefoy didn't exist and all the pains of his life no longer existed. And in this imaginary world he was someone else, and that was the only thing that kept him going sometimes.

Don't say I'm out of touch
With this rampant chaos- your reality
I know well what lies beyond my sleeping refuge
The nightmare I built my own world to escape.

In my field of paper flowers
And candy clouds of lullaby
I lie inside myself for hours
And watch my purple sky fly over me.

Author's Note (the part of the story where the author comes out and writes a silly note): Happy New Years everybody. I had hoped to publish this two weeks ago, but I had family issues come up. Family can't live with them, can't live without them. Please review.