Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia.

Warnings: Slash, AU, swearing, sub-par writing, wonky plots, appallingly slow updates, and Hitler jokes.

I don't know what I'm doing.

Unbeta'd.

[Chapter 12]

When Alfred wandered back into the hotel room around noon, Arthur was awake and glaring at him balefully.

"And where have you been?"

"Out." Alfred said with a shrug and kicked the door closed behind him. "Had some errands to run."

"And you didn't think to tell me?"

"I tried. You went ninja on me."

"I most certainly did not!"

Despite Arthur's protests, he had indeed 'gone ninja' on Alfred. Upon attempting to shake Arthur awake earlier that morning to inform him where he was going, Alfred had found himself suddenly and painfully pinned to the floor. He'd spent the better part of five minutes convincing the spy that he hadn't been trying to kill him. And Arthur hadn't even been awake enough to remember it, apparently.

"Dude, you totally did! Check it!" Alfred pulled up his shirt revealing light bruises smudged across what a few weeks ago had been some sweet six pack abs. Alfred spent a minute mourning the loss of his muscle mass and fearfully thinking of the hours he'd have to spend in the gym to get them back. Arthur spent the time staring at Alfred's abdomen with an odd expression on his face.

"Yes. Well. I apologize. But you should have left a note or something to that effect. And would you please put your shirt back on?"

"I did leave you a note." Alfred protested, tugging his shirt back down. "It was on the table for you."

Arthur looked over and found that there was a folded piece of paper awaiting him. After a moment's examination, he looked back at Alfred looking annoyed.

"Did you really spell my name with a 'W'?"

"What? No! That's a 'U'."

"How was I supposed to divine anything from your chicken scratch? Where did you learn to spell?"

Alfred sighed, used to Arthur's combative ways. "Look, I know you like arguing, but we can do this later? Why don't we load up the car and get out of here first?"

"Car?" Arthur asked, anger having been successfully derailed. "What car?"

"Well, if you'd bothered to read my note, you'd know that while you were in snoozeville, I managed to track us down a car."

"Where on Earth did you find a car?"

"Internet."

Arthur gaped for a moment. "How?"

"Well, there was this guy on one of the forums who was complaining about this car he'd one in a game of poker. Didn't want it. Didn't need it. Couldn't seem to get rid of it. I traced his IP address, and I saw he was nearby, so I shot off an email asking about the car. He was willing to hand it over no questions asked, so I swung by to discuss the price. Turns out, he'd give it to me in exchange for the motherboard of a Dell Inspiron 6000, a PCI-X graphics card, and one of the fiddly bits from a Commodore 64. Didn't want cash or anything, just computer parts."

"And you just happened to have all this stuff."

"Well, no. I mean, I had the motherboard, but the rest was sort of improvised. I haggled him down from a PCI-X to a PCIe and instead of handing over C64 parts, which are uber rare I might add, I fixed his cable."

"Couldn't he have just gotten his cable company to do that for him?"

"If he'd actually been paying for his cable, I'm sure he could have."

"Ah." Arthur said in understanding.

"So, wanna get out of here?" Alfred gestured to the door.

"Give me a minute." Arthur replied, and gathered his few belongings before following Alfred out the door.

They wandered outside, and Arthur was able to confirm that Alfred had indeed acquired a car. Not that it was much of a car. It was if someone had taken a car on the same tier of crappyness of Alfred's last car, decided they didn't like the look of it, and gone at it with a nine iron. There was also lots of tape involved, but, unlike the dents, that probably hadn't been done for artistic effect. The interior was in much better shape with the exception of the right side of the back seat, which had at some point incurred the wrath of a host of angry cats. A multitude of scratches had split it open, spilling stuffing everywhere. They tried to bypass the issue and throw their things in the trunk, only to discover it was already occupied.

The trunk contained a roll of black plastic trash bags, piles of duct tape, and an ammo box that claimed to contain several hundred rounds of 5.56 MM ammo but turned out to be full of glow sticks. The duct tape was presumably for repairs. What these items might be for, they had no idea. In the end they used the tape to fix the seat and stored their gear there, ignoring the other questionable objects left by the previous owner. Possessions stowed, Alfred climbed into the driver's seat and Arthur slid in next to him.

"You failed to mention this thing had manual transmission."

"Don't worry!" Alfred patted the clutch. "I know how to work one of these!"

Arthur looked from Alfred to his hand and back, then gave Alfred another extremely odd look.

"What?"

"Nothing. It's nothing. Just get going." he buckled himself in. "Remember, we've managed to buy ourselves some time, but Tino will eventually come looking after us. We have to be smart about this. We're going to need to keep moving and stay away from populated areas. It will make us far too easy to spot."

"Dude, we're in Iowa." Alfred laughed and started up the car. "I don't think that's going to be a problem."

"So, if you could be a tree, what type of tree would you be?"

Arthur groaned and leaned back against his seat. "If you're going to ask me all these questions, could you at least make them less nonsensical?"

"Come on, you agreed to this."

Shortly after starting off in their new ride, Alfred had suggested they get to know each other and Arthur had reluctantly agreed to some icebreaker questions. So far, Arthur had been asked everything from "What is your favorite color?" to "If you were to have a limb eaten by a shark, which limb would you prefer to lose?" and was running out of patience with the odd queries Alfred was coming up with.

"Yes, but I was under the delusion that you'd actually be asking practical questions."

"Hey! I stand by my statement that you can tell a lot about a person based on what limb they'd offer up to a famished cartilaginous fish!"

"Alfred. Ask me something else."

"Ok, tell me something embarrassing you used to do as a kid."

Arthur sighed. "I used to look for fairies in the woods outside my mum's place."

Alfred burst out laughing. "Fairies! Seriously?"

Arthur immediately broke out the scowl Alfred was so used to. "Oh shut up!"

Alfred chuckled again, and then attempted to pacify his companion. "It's ok that you believed in fairies. I used to spend my nights looking for aliens. It was part of the reason I decided to work for NASA, actually."

"You worked for NASA?"

"Well, I interned at NASA. They cut a lot of people loose when they stopped sending people into space, so I didn't get a chance to get a full time job there. But anyway, back when I was a kid I spent my nights in my tree house looking up at the sky. Did you have a tree house?"

"No, I never had a tree house. I had a condemned fishing boat, though."

"A what?"

"A condemned fishing boat. When I was young, I used to spend my summers at my aunt's. She lived in what used to be a fishing village, but the industry had dried up, so there were all these abandoned or condemned fishing boats that had be pulled up above the waterline and left there. I used to play in them. There was one I liked more than the others, I think it was called the 'Britannia Angel', it was hard to tell with the paint peeling."

"Did you look for sea fairies, or mermaids, or something?"

"No, I-" Arthur flushed "I pretended I was a pirate captain."

Alfred grinned. "Captain Kirkland, eh? I like the sound of that. You were probably the cutest pirate on the seven seas. Hey! What have I told you about throwing things at me while I'm driving? Alright! Next question. If you were to get a tattoo, what would it be and where?"

Instead of giving some answer dedicated to how improper they were and how only punks would get tattoos, Arthur went an impressive shade of red and refused to say anything.

"Dude!" Alfred exclaimed.

Arthur still refrained from speaking. Taking Arthur's silence as an admission, Alfred continued.

"Dude, you didn't! Seriously! I didn't think you had it in you! So, what is it? Fairy? Jolly Rodger?"

"Ask another question." Arthur growled, still bright red.

"Ok, ok, don't bite my head off. What is your favorite thing to eat with ice cream?"

Arthur answered cake and Alfred answered fries. Arthur called Alfred a pig and Alfred just laughed and asked about Arthur's favorite cereal box character. They continued trading questions, Alfred learning about Arthur's failed attempt at starting a rock band and Arthur learning about one embarrassing summer Alfred had spent on his grandparent's farm, and by the end of the afternoon the two of them were starting to look like something resembling friends.

Dinner had been some disappointing sandwiches, and Alfred was soon discovering that he had consumed neither enough caffeine nor food to keep going at their usual pace. After about the third time he'd zoned out, Alfred pulled over and called it quits.

"I need to stop or I'm going to flip this car and save Tino a whole lot of trouble."

"Alright, move over."

"You good to drive? Do you even know how? Last time I asked, you gave me a list of reasons why I had to be the one to drive."

"I think you'll find that circumstances have over ridden whatever reasons I might have given you for not driving. Tino has tried to kill us at least once already. I'm not going to give him another chance. Also, I'd like to sleep in a bed instead of the backseat. And I'll have you know that I can drive perfectly well."

"Do you know how to drive a stick?" Alfred asked.

"Of course I do, now move over." The two switched seats and Arthur took the wheel.

Five minutes later they were pushing the car back on the road from the ditch Arthur had driven it into.

"You can't drive stick, can you Arthur?" Alfred grunted.

"No I cannot." Arthur admitted. "Now shut up and push."

They got the car back on the road, and checked it for damage. There didn't seem to be any. Well, at least any damage that hadn't been preexisting.

"Sorry Arthur." Alfred said, dusting off his hands. "Looks like you'll be sleeping in the backseat after all."

"What? Why?"

"If I have to drive anymore, I'm going to land us in a ditch. And you- Well, you've already landed us in a ditch. Help me search my things; I think I've got some road flares. We should set them up in case someone comes along, don't want them to hit us."

They didn't have road flares, but they did have glow sticks and tape. Arthur dubbed the result the stupidest thing he'd ever seen. Alfred was of a different opinion.

"I dub thee 'Rave Car'! Party on, good traveler! Party on!" he declared, waving his arms enthusiastically. Arthur merely sighed.

"If we're going to be sleeping out here, can we get on with it?"

"Sure. Here you go." Alfred tossed Arthur a blanket.

"You turning in?"

"Nah. I'm gonna stay out here a bit longer."

"Do what you will." said Arthur and climbed into the backseat, closing the door behind him.

"Night."

Alfred spread his blanket across the hood of the car and settled back against the windshield, moving the wipers to get comfortable and raising his gaze skyward. Eventually, Arthur climbed up on the hood with him.

"What are you doing?"

"I always liked looking at the stars. A lot of people don't pay much attention to them these days, some can't even see them with the light pollution and all, but I've always liked looking at them. Ancient sailors and stuff used to navigate by them. I'm not very good at directions-" here Arthur snorted which prompted an elbow jab from Alfred "and I get lost a lot. I can't read maps well, and I was a miserable failure in Boy Scouts whenever we did things with a compass. But for some reason whenever the stars come out, I've always been able to find north."

Alfred lifted his arm and pointed up at the sky. "You see that there, that bright one? That's Polaris. The North Star."

"You're not making this up, are you?"

"No! You see that over there? That's the Big Dipper." Alfred began to move his finger through the air, tracing the constellation and naming the stars as he went. "Alkaid. The across to Mizar, I think it's called. Not sure. Then Alioth. Megrez. Down to Phecda. Over to Merak. Up to Dubhe. Those last two are important, cause if you start at Merak and draw a line to Dubhe and keeping following that line, you wind up at Polaris."

"How do you know all this?"

"I interned at NASA, remember? I learned star names in self-defense."

Arthur made an interested noise and leaned back against the windshield, his shoulder a few inches away from Alfred.

"You know, a lot of people think the Big Dipper is Ursa Major, but actually it's only part of it. Ursa Major is a bigger constellation. The Big Dipper is just the bear's tail. That's its head over there, and that's its front legs, and that's one back paw and - where are they- there's the other back paw."

"Do you know where it got its name?"

"Yeah. Some Greek myth. A lady got turned into a bear, or something."

"Callisto. She was a nymph who attracted the affections of Zeus, so the ever jealous Hera turned her into a bear. She wandered lonely through the forest, until one day she happened upon her son. Overjoyed, she ran forward to embrace him, but her son saw only a charging bear and prepared to shoot her. Zeus, however, saw what was about to happen and turned her son into a bear as well. He's the constellation Ursa minor."

"Huh."

"I've always thought the story very sad. Callisto only wanted to express her love, but found herself the target of violence for something she couldn't control." Arthur said, his voice soft and sad.

Alfred didn't know how to respond to that and lay there quietly until Arthur pointed up at the sky and asked about another star.

"Which constellation's that?"

"That? I think that's Draco." he said, finger tracing a squiggly line. "Fourteen stars. Its head is there, and then it sort of loops on itself. Does it have a story too?"

"Yes. It was a Titan, defeated and thrown into the sky by the goddess Minerva. It twisted upon itself and froze before it could get its coils untangled."

They stayed like that for some time, exchanging constellation for myth until they both drifted off to sleep, shoulder to shoulder, on the hood of a pseudo-stolen car.

[End Chapter]

The ammo box full of glow sticks actually exists. It was found while cleaning out a basement. A satisfactory explanation as to how it came to be there does not yet exist.

School's started again, and it's draining my creative juices like nobody's business. Hence the late update. But please don't think I've stopped writing.

I tried writing fluff, but it's been a while and I'm rusty. Let me know how high you want me to try and crank it up. Your fluff, dear readers, is long overdue. I will try my best to get it to you in a timely fashion.

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