It happened again.

This made it forty-two. It was the forty-second time in a row that he had woken up in the middle of the night, face and body coated liberally in cold sweat which trickled down into the bedsheets, panting as though he had just run a marathon. He would never admit it to himself or anybody else, but he was chilled to his core every time.

Forty damn two…

Romano sat up in his bed, rubbing the freezing fluid from his damp forehead. He had been hoping that since he was no longer alone in the house, maybe the nightmares would finally come to an end, but no. It was to no avail. Another idea of his had fallen flat, and he was stupid to expect anything else.

Was Veneziano the same?

No, he couldn't be. He wasn't the one who was locked up in a dungeon for five whole days without any food or water or contact with the outside world, neither was he lured to a forest in the pretence of meeting a friend and then hunted like some common animal. Romano wasn't an animal; he was a human being, dammit!

And a nation too, but that was beside the point.

He knew there was no way he would get back to sleep if he was on his own, so he dragged himself out of bed and staggered dizzily to the door.

His footsteps were the only sounds in the whole house – a soft thump of his toes on the floorboards which creaked slightly beneath his weight. Outside was a true cacophony of nature: a full orchestra of crickets chirruping and owls hooting and perhaps even the occasional blood-chilling bark of a fox, but inside this building, everything was utterly silent. Silent as the grave, a poet might say, with not a sound in the world to fracture the hush.

He slowly pushed open the door to his brother's room, thankfully avoiding any conspicuous squeaking, and paused for a brief moment.

Veneziano was dozing peacefully, hugging his pillow, a thin strand of drool stretching from the corner of his mouth to the surface of the soft cushion. He barely moved beyond the gentle rise and fall of his chest as he quietly breathed, for once not snoring or snuffling or mumbling in his sleep. Romano only wished that his little brother could be this quiet all the time.

He hadn't put his wheelchair aside. Just left it sitting in the middle of the room.

It had only been two days since the smaller man was discharged from the hospital in Verona, and already he was starting to get on Romano's nerves. Due to his legs not being healed yet, not to mention being told to use his left arm as little as possible, he had to go everywhere in a wheelchair and needed someone to push him. As the elder brother, it was only natural that this responsibility fell to Romano, who was already sick and tired of having to take his little brother everywhere.

'If he loves that damn potato sucking bastard so much, why doesn't he get him to push him around all the time?' he thought as he moved the wheelchair to the other side of the bed and out of his way.

Then he remembered.

A couple of days before Veneziano was due to be discharged, someone had noticed the wounds on the potato bastard's back poking out of his collar and demanded that they be examined. The stupid idiot had made such a fuss trying to escape the people who were trying to help him that the wounds were accidentally reopened and he lost so much blood that he needed a transfusion and was probably still shut up in that place. The thought of the damn kraut holed up in a hospital bed was, Romano had to admit, a satisfying one.

But now he was stuck with his dumbass brother. His dumbass brother who was, apparently, a hero.

Careful not to awaken his sleeping sibling, Romano lifted the covers and gently slipped into bed next to the smaller man, although he probably wouldn't have woken up if the bed was on fire.

It definitely was not the face of a hero.

He refused to believe it. Romano refused to believe that this little idiot could possibly have stormed a castle all on his own, which may have been a lie if it was true and those guns could turn into people, and also killed the… what was it that reaper brat had called it? A kee-shun? Kee-shin? Whatever, it was a dumb name.

Unfortunately, there was definitely some kind of change in the man. He wasn't anywhere near as whiny as he had been when he left to 'buy more tomatoes' (which was, in hindsight, quite obviously a total lie) and the gaps between his eruptions of tears had gone from several minutes to several days. Sometimes he could go a whole week without as much as a mild whimper. He had spent more and more time going around with his eyes open, which somehow made his near-constant smiles seem less stupid and absent-minded and more honestly happy. He was less like Italy Veneziano and more like… someone almost normal.

And when he wasn't smiling – a rare occasion, one of the few things that hadn't changed since the Atlantis Incident – there was something in his eyes. It was unnerving to look at and almost painful to feel, and it was very, very dark. Like a demon or a monster or Turkey, and it hid itself, waiting for the little idiot to get angry. What annoyed Romano the most was that he was apparently the only one who had noticed. Maybe nobody else had realised thanks to that damn reaper brat, but since he had come back there was something horribly WRONG with his brother.

What was that thing the noodle nutjob sometimes talked about? Yin and Yang? Two different halves, each containing a small piece of each other. The white was good, but contained a little bit of bad. The black was bad, but contained a little bit of good.

Romano was damned before he thought of himself as a bad person, but if his brother was good, it seemed that the darkness had finally begun to show itself. And it had only taken one and a half thousand years to appear.

The younger of the two brothers heaved a heavy sigh and his eyes slowly flickered open, focusing on the new occupant of the bed. The inner demon was still sleeping. For now.

"Romano, what…" he mumbled. "Why are you here? Ve~ what're you-"

"None of your damn business why I'm here," Romano snapped bitterly. "Go back to sleep, idiota. Else you won't have all the energy you need for crying in the morning."

A couple of months ago, this would be the point where Veneziano would start blubbering and asking why his fratello was being so mean before bawling his eyes out, but now he just fixed Romano with a death glare from hell. The elder sighed in gritted-teethed exasperation.

"I had a nightmare, alright?" he confessed. "Dreamt I was back in that stupid dungeon again, waiting for someone to come rescue me, as if it makes any kind of difference. No-one did. I died in that wretched place."

"But you're right here next to me and-"

"I meant in the dream, you dumbass! Now shut the hell up and go back to sleep!"

The younger man winced on every word, which Romano was adamant in ignoring, and tried and failed in shrinking away. With a small growl, Romano screwed up his eyes and tried to get back to sleep.

What right did that useless piece of nothing have, talking to him like that? It wasn't like he ASKED to have the same nightmare every night for the past six weeks. It wasn't as though he had deliberately allowed himself to be hunted, kidnapped, locked up, half-starved and half frozen. And this idiot thought he could actually help in any way?

His eyes popped open in shock as what felt like two warm and rather thick ropes wrapped around his body and drew him closer. He looked down at his younger brother, who was now silently hugging him around his chest, and had apparently fallen back to sleep already.

Romano softly stroked his auburn hair, careful not to wake him up again lest he rouse the hidden demon, and rested his arm on his little brother's shoulder in what an amateur might call an embrace.

"You idiot," he whispered. "You know I'll never be able to make it up to you, right?"

Hopefully, thanks to the presence of his only remaining family, there would be no more nightmares tonight.