Iris, Princess of China.

Mehehe, I'm closing in on the end of my HetaOni fics, so hopefully I'll have more time for this story come September. Thanks for holding on, guys!

I also found out recently that the name I gave Seborga in this fic (Carlino) means "Pug" in Italian and is, thus, the silliest of the three, not the least silly. But I still like it and since there's that point about them having stupid names I'm not gonna change it. I DID go back and edit that part where Feli said it wasn't as dumb though, because that's wrong... It's like naming your daughter "Poodle".

The Gay Brother

Cold Beds and Wedding Rings

"Tell me about your wife."

"Huh?"

They were on the train now, chugging southbound through the Alps with dark skies outside the cabin window. Lovino had paid for their dinner and bought Feliciano's ticket, but the younger brother covered the costs of upgrading them both to get a bed. They were fortunate that the mid-week train wasn't full…

"The ring makes it a little obvious." It was eleven hours from Munich to Rome, and from there it would be a long drive to reach home, but for now it was quiet with the two of them plus another pair of travellers sharing the same four-person compartment.

"Oh… Yeah."

Feliciano had taken the top bunk because Lovino didn't like the idea of using the ladder to get up that high, huddled under the covers now and dressed down in a tee-shirt and shorts pulled from his bag. Lovino was standing by the window trying to see if he could jimmy it open and have a smoke. Neither the question nor the window were working, so Feliciano tried again.

"How's Isabella?"

"I don't see how that's any of your business." Lovino's response surprised him, not because it was harshly put but because it was a blatant refusal.

"Why wouldn't it be…?" Rolling over to the edge of his platform, Feliciano hooked one arm over the mattress and peered down at his brother, curious and concerned. However, he thought through his next words carefully: "Unless she went back to Spain."

"Something like that." Unless she wasn't the woman his brother had married.

Isabella Fernandez Carriedo, a beautiful, vibrant woman from the south of Spain. She'd come to their town years ago and made quite a name for herself, a travelling artist with a camera and an almost sinful love of dancing and good food.

Feliciano knew seven years was a long time away from home, but four of those had been for study and even on his last visit, Isabella had been very close to the Vargas family. It had been a little strange to see a woman so much older than his brother take up so much of Lovino's attention, and to see him always blushing and stuttering and never knowing what to say, but it was something else to think of her as gone.

"So, do I know her?" Lovino was being difficult so Feliciano asked a third time, but there was no answer before the compartment door swung open. A cute caramel blonde and her stalwart companion entered with lightning-fast Dutch, the two of them carrying the scent of pipe-smoke and beer on their clothes.

What conversation followed wasn't worth recording, because between jumbled French, Italian, Dutch, German and English the four of them only agreed that the brother and sister pair were too excited to sleep, and the Italian brothers knew more than enough about their country to talk the night away. Feliciano could forgive his brother's evasiveness when Lovino sensed a sales opportunity and pitched it:

"Just let me say this: if you're going into the mountains of Lazio province on your way to Rieti and you don't come to my restaurant, then you're missing the best of Central Italy."

No. Ludwig was not going to do this.

He was not sleeping in a cold bed again. He couldn't stand it. He tried it and he woke up four times, giving up by the time 3 AM rolled around and there was just no point anymore. He sat down to go over plans and procedures for work instead, shuffling papers until 5 in the morning when he tried one last time to sleep.

He woke up sick with fear when he checked his phone and there was still nothing from Feliciano.

Should he call the police? The first twenty-four hours were crucial in these matters, and Ludwig had already burned through almost twenty of them just with sheer anxiety.

But no. No he wasn't going to do that either.

Ludwig sat on the edge of his cold bed and waited. He waited for the man he loved to come home.

"You look like shit."

"Couldn't sleep…"

"Why the hell not? You can sleep anywhere."

"Bed was cold…"

There were no showers on the train, and even if there were neither of them was willing to shell out the extra forty Euros to use one. Feliciano smeared jam on a piece of toast in the breakfast car and tried to pretend that just washing and shaving had woken him up enough to keep travelling. There was a lot of distance left for them to cover today…

"So, have you called the bastard yet?" Lovino was drinking the black coffee served at the small buffet, finished complaining about the taste of it and willing to just swallow the caffeine now. Still, Feliciano didn't expect the question, and with too much sweet sticking to the roof of his mouth he didn't have an answer. "Oi, Feliciano I'm talking to you."

"I know." He drank some of his own coffee and washed the bitter brew back and forth over his tongue before swallowing. They were only another hour from Rome…

"Have you called him or not?"

"My phone died," he lied, because he didn't want to think about it.

Lovino reached into his pocket, pulled out his cellphone and held it up so he could see the screen, then he placed it with a thunk on the table between them. Feliciano stared at the black device on the white table cloth, letting the circles of light from the clear glasses and cups catch his attention with the early light.

"Feliciano."

"Why should I?" He asked, hating the words because they didn't sound like him, and hating the raw little pain that caught him in the back of his throat.

"Did you tell anyone where you were going?" Lovino drilled.

"My boss."

"And is he going to keep your boyfriend from calling the cops?" … "Feliciano, how much worse do you think it's going to be if you show up back there and the police are snooping around in your business?" His personal life was not the government's business, but Feliciano hated how his brother was so right about this: Ludwig would call the cops. He'd be sweet and kind about it too, he'd wonder why Feliciano wasn't home, or where he'd gone, or if he was hurt or had been taken advantage of by someone. He was probably sick with worry already, and Ludwig just didn't know that some things weren't for the authorities to meddle with.

Frustrated, the younger brother picked up the phone and let Lovino excuse himself so he wouldn't have to hear the conversation.

"…Feliciano?"

Ludwig couldn't believe it happened that way. He wasn't even sure if he'd be able to forgive himself for it.

"Ci… Ciao, Ludwig…"

Because after an entire day of waiting, and worrying, and wishing…

"A week!-? Have you lost your mind?"

In less than five minutes they went from barely speaking to suddenly screaming.

"A week in Italy, yes, it's not unheard of."

"So this is your solution to everything? Just drop your life and run off to another country!"

"For a week, yes, my decision is to go see my family for one week!"

Ludwig's office was frighteningly small when he filled it with his voice. Between the desk and the thin walls of the portable building he could only pace three steps in any direction, and the ceiling almost grazed his head when he stood at his full height to shout and be heard. He completely forgot himself, and he just couldn't bring himself to care that the crew outside could hear him.

"Without even telling me! You just storm out the door for no reason, not a single word! You wouldn't even look at me: that's how much you don't care!"

"Don't accuse me of-!"

"The truth? I think I'm entitled!"

"Don't interrupt me!"

It took so, so much to make Feliciano angry enough to yell at someone. Ludwig never forgot that he was the one with the temper in their relationship, and as patience went he had an abundance of them. Feliciano did not shout at people, and Ludwig had never seen him lose it to the point where his lover lost the handle on his languages. He'd heard Feliciano lose his German when excited, or frightened, or exhausted, but never, ever, because he was-

"DON'T tell me- DON'T try to- DON'T say that-" Ludwig's Italian couldn't keep up, he just couldn't process the language fast enough to understand. He heard the same grammatical point hammer into his skull again and again and again, but he couldn't find the knowledge to translate the rest of it. And he didn't have to. Even without the vocabulary or the grammar, Ludwig understood everything else.

He understood that he wasn't going to see or hear from his lover again for a week. It would be seven days give-or-take several hours for travel, and if Ludwig crossed that line and tried contacting him before then, then Feliciano would not forgive him.

He understood that even if Feliciano did come back, because he said he would but that didn't mean he was going to, that things weren't going to be magically better between them.

And he understood that somehow, somewhere along four years of love and companionship, something had changed between them.

And that understanding broke his heart…

"Feeling better?"

"Please don't joke about this…"

Feliciano splashed his face again with cold water, determined to use up all the water on the train if that was what it took to cool his cheeks and control the burning in his eyes. It was like him to cry when he was upset, and Lovino was the same way so he couldn't judge him for it.

But it wasn't like him to scream and shout at someone over the phone, and Feliciano couldn't even mentally backtrack through the conversation to figure out when he'd snapped or what had set him off. He couldn't find it, and he didn't know when Ludwig had turned on him either, not that that excused his reaction, but he couldn't process what had happened.

He didn't understand.

He splashed his face again, holding his hand over his eyes while his brother leaned on the bathroom door, keeping the small space closed off. He'd given the phone back already, he didn't want to touch it again. Over their heads an intercom message began to relay itself through the train, carefully pronounced German, Italian and English informing passengers that they were entering Rome and would be disembarking in another fifteen minutes.

"We were happy…" He whispered. They'd been happy together and now they were like this, and it was killing him. Feliciano could barely think past how much it hurt, all this pain flooding his lungs like hot water, suffocating him and burning him, filling him with heat and pain until he thought he was going to burst.

"I believe you." And Lovino was still being so patient with him…

"Why should you?" the question hurt. Everything was unfair and it hurt so much… "All you saw was tension and screaming before he kicked you out. And all I've done is tell bad stories…" He ran the tap again and went back to splashing and rubbing his burning face, trying so hard to just wash the shame away. Why wasn't it working?

"Just trust me, I believe you." But Feliciano couldn't understand how… "You wouldn't have left us if you weren't happy. It's not in you."

Why didn't that make him feel better…?

"You're not gonna like it…" Three hours later, Feliciano was so desperate for a shower that not even the warm breeze hitting him in the face was enough to take his mind off it. Rome had come and gone in a blur of loud noises and racing pedestrians, and although it wasn't too hot yet in his homeland, he was dying under the sun. "When we get there."

"What do you mean?" Lovino'd been really good about not being a dick for the last day and a half, so Feliciano picked his head up off the back of the headrest and looked at where his brother was driving. They were in a convertible rented on Feliciano's credit card, because he'd be the one who'd have to take the vehicle back in a week: Lovino had originally gone down to Rome with their uncle who'd been on business, and had since returned home.

The sunlight and blue skies were like a welcome home, especially with the smog of the city slowly fading as they wound their way up into the mountains. It was a long, long drive to their village but they couldn't have picked better weather, and with sprawling farmland and scenic valleys spread all around them, it was paradise.

"I mean this." Lovino was wearing his dick-ish smile, the one he used right before you realized he was going to dump a handful of worms down your shirt, or kick you off the dock into the cold river water. But he lifted his left hand where it was draped out the drivers' side window, the top down behind them and the glass wound down on both sides. Feliciano saw his brother's dark fingers and watched his thumb tap the gold band around his ring finger, and he felt a childish groan work its way up his throat.

"Who is she?" He asked, or more like he whined, really. It was so strange, he'd been curious last night and his brother had wanted to talk about anything else, but now their positions were reversed. Maybe he was looking forward to seeing his wife again, he wanted to gloat? They were on the road now, still a good ways away, but the mountains were rising and his brother was ignoring the speed limit completely. Home was coming up too fast…

And now Lovino was grinning.

"Oh come on! Stop being a dick!"

"You're going to hate it."

"I hate it already! Who is she?"

"You know her." Very funny! He knew almost all the pretty girls in town! Or at least he had! So that meant that the only reason Lovino had for sounding so secretive was- "And relax, it's not her." Oh… Well, that was good then. It made things a lot easier.

"Why couldn't you have just said that last night?" it would have saved Feliciano a lot of trouble. Now he could just settle back in his seat and-

"It's her sister." W… wait what?

No, he-

"AAAAHH!"

Stupid place to stop, but here I stop.