For The World's More Full of Weeping Than Ye Can Understand
Genre: ...fantasy?
Rating: PG-13
Characters: England, France
Warnings: none really
Disclaimer: don't own Stolen Child or Hetalia
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Nobody else remembers the time he disappeared into the woods for almost a century.
He'd been very small at the time. France had been Gallia then, and preoccupied with Rome and the Goths. He'd had no spare time for little Brittania, who would still paint himself blue on occasions and go off screaming and slinging rocks at Romans. England had been glad of that, when he'd been Brittania. He had loved the woods and the streams and the ceremonies under sickle and full moon, loved them alone, and France-who-had-been-Gallia had thought him barbaric even then; when he was there, he would spoil all Brittania's fun.
There had been no one the day he followed the singing and the light into the woods, England remembers. Just him and the whisper of the breeze, and the most haunting, ethereal voice, calling, calling him home. Centuries later, he would hear the ring of wet crystal goblets as a finger dragged around the rim for the first time, and he would think, yes. Exactly like that, and not remember why he had thought it until even later.
He remembers mist on the hills and dew on the grass, cold on his bare feet. Remembers trees like great pillars in halls that then-Gallia had taken him to once, showing off the wonders of what Rome could do. Remembers moss underfoot, giving and woolly, remembers pale sunlight creeping through the trees, lighting his path towards...
He remembers pools of starlight, silver fish slipping past his fingers, the red sweet sunwarmed juice of summer berries, trees with branches of emerald hoards, lit up in the twilight by fireflies and pixies. He remembers learning the languages of birds and fish, trees and flowers, insects - everything, it seemed, spoke in those days. Everything had a voice. He remembers how he drank it all in like fairy wine and buried it inside himself like dragon's treasure, but the spot where it was buried is nothing but a dusty hole now.
He remembers being happy. So happy that everything else pales before it.
He remembers waking up one morning in a haymow, alone, the smell of livestock and poverty around him, the fairy-world gone as though it had never existed.
He doesn't remember why it had to end, and sometimes he wonders if it would hurt any less if he knew the reason for his exile.
(And sometimes the wind whispers of memories fading, significantly insignificant, sunwarmed and full of colours long extinct, and he thinks it might be as simple as that everyone has to grow up sometime)
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