Bavaria is nicer with him than Holy Rome, no, Ludwig would have thought. Maybe it's because he's happy with how he's managed to save himself a little bit from the flood of the last great war, or maybe it's because Munich is bustling with energy and art. Bavaria has no time for old grudges now, not even against Austria or whatever he's doing now that the storm is over. He finds a cottage for Ludwig in the outskirts of the city, comes to pick him up once in a while to go to the concerts or to the theater in an extravagant horse-drawn carriage. In all those centuries, he hasn't changed.
It's a fine life, Ludwig can't help but to feel, in his comfortable house, living off Bavaria's pocket on a small allowance he uses to . He doesn't age the same way humans age at first, but he's grown a bit taller now, and the exercise he gets from tending to the garden behind the house has made his formerly sickly body take a stronger, healthier shape. He's happier than he was, back in Regensburg, all those years ago, with the anger and the sadness and the burning inside his chest that seemed to swallow him whole.
Ludwig grows to like this place like a second home, and the seasons pass him by. He reads and writes, learns a bit of piano because he feels like he should at least try to play the new, fashionable compositions of the young Schubert Austria keeps on sending him. Bavaria seems to appreciate the impromptu concertos even though Ludwig knows he's nowhere near as skilled as the musicians of the court, but he's not Ludwig's only public nowadays. There are humans that come to his house, now, and they call Bavaria Herr Hans Bayer, which still sounds weird to Ludwig's ears even though he doesn't say it out loud.
"What a wonderful interpretation of Mozart!" Herr Müller says. "For a moment, I was almost transported to Vienna before the war, in the salon of the Empress Maria-Theresa. Wonderful! Wonderful!"
Ludwig would say something about Mozart not being exactly the most enjoyable dinner guest, but he only gets to exchange an understanding look with Bavaria.
"Thank you Maestro."
Herr Müller is everything the last century was, in his own way, as he teaches Ludwig the piano in a way Austria himself never could, with patience and humour that Ludwig isn't sure he knows how to deal with. There's the reverence for Bach and the celebration of Mozart in his teaching, and always, always a slight hesitation whenever Ludwig presents him one of the more modern composers like Chopin or Mendelssohn. When Herr Müller leaves, old music teacher retiring in his native Saxony, Ludwig can send a few compositions of his own to Austria once in a while, always receiving little notes there and there over the sheet music telling him the weaknesses and the faults in his writing. Some things never really do change, but he knows Austria appreciates the gesture, in his own way.
.
It's funny, how centuries of dealing with the tragedies of war and peace and monarchy personally had somehow stunned him to the little pains and joys of individual men and women. Ludwig learns how to cry at funerals, when one of the boys from the nearby village passes away in a small tragedy involving agricultural machinery. He looks at the men there, solemn in mourning, and the women openly weeping over the casket as it leaves the small mass held in the small catholic church, and he realises that living in the palaces of power had made him forget about those things, the simple things, the real things. The world seems to be changing around him faster than it did in all those years he'd spent in Austria's house, sick and tired and wishing he'd never been born sometimes.
It rains on that day, and Ludwig looks at the grey sky with a thought for the future, and the inevitability of his own mortality. Once more, he realises that it doesn't scare him nearly as much as he thought it would.
Ludwig learns how to appreciate the taste of fresh food from the farmer's market, the cool beer in the late fall and the smiles of passing young girls. Human lives are short, but that's what makes them beautiful, in a way.
He falls in love, once. Her name is Charlotte, and she has full hips and a sharp nose, soft laughs and a sharp look to her eyes that seems to only ever really come alive when she plays on stage. She's an actress, too, and Bavaria laughs at Ludwig's pitiful attempt to woo her and at how typical his little crush is. Ludwig tries his best to look like he doesn't care.
She's playing Emilia Galotti, and she does it beautifully, crying and dying with an intensity that reminds Ludwig of France's theatrical fits of fury, decades ago. She opens the door of her dressing room with a knowing smile on her face and a comment about how she's seen him quite a few times assisting to her performance in the first row. It makes Ludwig bite his lips awkwardly as he gives her the best flowers he's picked especially for her in his garden earlier tonight, as he presents himself with a slight stutter that makes him feel even more like a complete idiot.
"Are you Herr Bayer's younger brother?" she asks him after she's invited him inside, placing the flowers inside a pot next to her still open makeup case.
It's a question Ludwig should have expected, in a way. He's not sure whatever it is people usually think his brother does, if they're really aware of what it all means. Most of them talk to him without seemingly realising how old and how utterly detached of some worldly matters he is, and Charlotte probably thinks he's a high-ranking government official and nothing more. It makes Ludwig sad, all of a sudden.
"Yes," he says softly, and he's not really sure where he should place himself in her changing room as she takes off her stage makeup with a dedication that looks almost out of place.
"He's quite the handsome man, isn't he?" She's joking and the polite laugh that comes out of Ludwig is insincere. "But there's something cold about him, unlike you."
He has to keep himself from saying something stupid at her words. "We've been raised differently" is both the nicest and the most honest thing that he can come up with.
She offers him a smile, on that makes Ludwig's heart beat furiously in his chest without him really wanting to. That's how it feels, he realises, and it's different from the longing he felt for Italy, centuries ago. He feels older, now, older and smaller at the same time, as if he couldn't truly possess himself the same way an empire did. Charlotte allows him to help her out of the impressive jewelry she'd been wearing for her death scene, and his hands try their best not to linger on her soft shoulders. It makes her laugh once more.
"Thank you, Ludwig," she says, and he wonders what it means, the way his name, his new name, rolls over her tongue like this. She's playing with him, but it doesn't bother Ludwig nearly as much as if it was Austria or Prussia doing the same thing. It feels different because she's a woman, and because her hair brushes her shoulders in a pretty movement as she rises up to bid him goodbye.
He blushes furiously in a way that isn't very becoming of the young man he has become when Charlotte kisses his cheek and dismisses him with a soft voice and an elegant move of the hand.
That night he gets very, very drunk with Bavaria and cries a little. It feels strange because his brother doesn't understand him when he tells him about the tragedy of the simple bourgeois existence, of that strange longing that drags him to look at the past sometimes, how emotions aren't the same anymore, aren't tied to the earth and the changing seasons as much as they used to.
"You've read too much of that Goethe guy," he says with an odd sort of amusement that makes Ludwig angry enough to hit his shoulder petulantly. Bavaria laughs more and Ludwig sighs. His brother cannot understand how it feels like, to have your own mind and your own body truly belong to yourself, and to feel it break in a much more personal level than all the treaties and wars and alliances in the world.
Ludwig doesn't go back to see her playing Lessing, and she leaves, as actresses always do, but not without a little souvenir.
"Pretty, isn't she?" the king asks him as they're visiting the Gallery of the Beauties along with Bavaria, who can't help but to feel that slight amusement at his brother's obvious discomfort. "Did you see her perform?"
The king, who, because of some sort of strange turn of destiny, share the same name as he does, is agreeable enough, even though Ludwig can't really help but to feel uneasy in Nymphenburg. It's the air of the city, he tells himself, or maybe it's because he's not used to heads of state anymore.
He nods politely, with a blush he can't get himself to hide, and King Ludwig laughs good-naturedly. Still, there's this weird feeling in his chest as Ludwig hears him talking about his kingdom like he owns it, and when he sees Bavaria quiet expression as he speaks. Ludwig knows that he's out of it all, out of those games and those feelings that come from a heart made of stones and wars and people walking through its streets every day, but he also knows his brothers. He knows that there's only a very thin line that keeps them to tear each other apart now.
.
There are letters from his brothers, from the North, and the East, and the West, and the South. Austria is the one who writes the most, endless letters full of half-sincere niceties and verbose descriptions of Vienna's latest intrigues, but Saxony's handwriting is prettier. Baden is the only one who never, ever writes about politics, but that's just because he's the only one clever enough to realise that Ludwig, with his new name and his new life, has had enough of the ever changing course of history in his centuries as someone else, someone that feels like a different person from the man he's become.
Prussia doesn't send him more than a few lines one time, which Ludwig doesn't answer to as honestly as he should. It's not because he hates Prussia but more because he's still afraid of him, in a way, because he never got to read Prussia the same way he could read Austria or Hesse.
He's already a man in 1848, and he's feeling strange about it, as he's never really grown into anything bigger than a sickly teen in all those centuries of life. When revolution swipes over Europe, he hears about France taking up the streets again in Paris and Austria calling up on Russia to crush Hungary's rebellion. Bavaria goes to his own set of trouble and Ludwig, because he knows and because he can't bring himself to care all that much at the same time, doesn't take over the streets of Munich against King Ludwig and his scandalous mistress.
He's not sure what it all comes, when Prussia says things he doesn't mean the same way Austria does. Yet, Ludwig doesn't find it in himself to refuse his invitation to come to Berlin.
"He probably wants to brag or something." Bavaria dismisses him when they have their usual sunday afternoon Kaffee und Kuchen. "Don't worry about it, it's not like he could do anything to you anymore."
Ludwig nods, but he still feels uneasy about it. Bavaria doesn't know Prussia nearly as well as Ludwig did, all those centuries ago, and he's always been far too laid back, as if going with the flow wasn't something that might end up swallowing him alive. Maybe it's Ludwig fretting over nothing. He's been doing that quite a lot lately, as if his brothers needed any of this, as if Austria needed anything after he'd had Hungary's fingers broken one by one from what he's heard from Bohemia. It's dumb to be afraid of Prussia, especially since Ludwig doesn't amount to anything anymore, and he writes him back with the intention of seeing the Baltic Sea's charming scenery this summer.
He leaves early in the morning, with only a few words of instruction to the servants of the house, his travel coat on his shoulders and hopes for the best hiding themselves in a few melancholy sighs and the short look he gives to the sunrise. Prussia and him haven't had the best relationship haven't had the best relationship, of all the years they've had together, but maybe these last few years Ludwig has shouldn't be spent on old grudges anymore.
Prussia's welcome in his house is both ridiculously warm and succeeding in making Ludwig incredibly uneasy. It's probably because of the uniform Prussia refuses to take off even though he is off-duty and the way he speaks like they've always been the best of friends.
"You got big," he says as he punches his shoulder once with a calculated strength. Ludwig doesn't know what to makes out of it just yet. "I take Bavaria's treating you well?"
He's different from the last time he'd seen him, but that's only because he somehow managed to patch himself up after the war into something better, something stronger. And yet, Ludwig's taller than Prussia, now, and it feels weird because he doesn't even remember not having to look up to meet his eyes. Prussia crackles uglily at his own joke, dragging Ludwig into a hug that feels out of place.
Last time he was alone with Prussia, somewhere in the last century, he had ended up breaking the entirety of Saxony's porcelain collection and storming away. He knew Prussia had resented him both for being weak and for being too much like Austria, in that other life that seemed so distant now. He tries to smile.
"Yes, Munich is nice. Maybe you should come for a visit sometimes, too?"
Prussia makes a face.
"Nah, Munich ain't for me right now, and I got everything I need here."
He rolls his eyes and give Ludwig another snickering punch to the shoulder.
"Besides I ain't sure you and Bavaria could stand me for more than a few days at the time, am I right?"
There's more laughing coming from him, and Ludwig's somehow forced smile manages to stay. He will try, he'd said to himself, and he intends to make the best out of it.
Prussia's good mood never seems to waver, at least to Ludwig's eyes. He drags Ludwig around Berlin like an over-excited child during the day and to the opera or the theatre at night, filling their days with frightful efficiency.
The one thing that scares Ludwig in a very strange way is how Prussia never seems to sleep. It's the changing century, he tells himself, the wheel of time going faster under the power of machinery.
"Did you enjoy this?" he asks as they're leaving the concert hall along with a crowd that mixes both the sharp colours of the rich junkers and the more sober looks of the common folk. It's one of those modern productions, an opera that is desperately trying not to be an opera, and it make Ludwig wonder if there isn't a hidden meaning to all of this. There's always a hidden meaning to everything Prussia does, in a way.
It's true that, as Prussia had mentioned in his letters, Berlin had changed in a few short decades. Ludwig doesn't know how what he should think about this, in this mortal life and this mortal body, but he tries to look like he enjoys it, the whole show Prussia is putting on for him. He lets out a somewhat softer smile.
"I'm not sure yet. It's very different from what I'm used to."
Prussia snorts.
"Of course it is. You've had enough of Austria's musical picks for a lifetime. Italian opera is for old ladies and sissies anyway."
Ludwig would comment about that too, but he's very certain that he doesn't want to get into a fight with Prussia on the topic of Austria, of all people. Prussia has been delicate enough not to mention politics so far, and Ludwig feels like he consider himself grateful enough and not push his luck. Prussia has always been a tricky one to deal with, with the fits of anger and the headstrong temperament that always clashed with Saxony's more reserved notion of diplomacy. It's the rivers of Polish blood that run through his veins, Westphalia had once said with a small hint of disgust in his voice, and it had made Ludwig smile a little bit. Now Westphalia had gone, forever, and it made Ludwig wonder if he'd ever try to contact them one last time
He leaves Berlin for the Baltic shore the next day with a strange feeling in his belly, and Prussia cracks a few jokes as he helps him packs that make Ludwig's stomach feel funny. He doesn't want to dwell on the implications of whatever Prussia is saying about France, about England, about whatever it is that is brewing in Italy and about Denmark.
He'd told himself that this, all of this was over, and yet it seems like his family and their games always come back to him, one way or another.