"Sweden?"
"Hm?" Sweden responded, glancing (glaring) at his western neighbor. Norway held out a banana.
"Could you peel this for me?"
"..."
"... please?"
"..." He sighed and accepted the banana, peeled it quickly and went to hand it back, only to find Norway holding out another banana.
"This one too? Please." A new heavy sigh and another banana was peeled. A third was offered.
"Not without pay," Sweden grumbled, definitively glaring now. Norway nodded slowly and searched his pockets.
"Very well then. You're hired, the pay is 388 kroner an hour," he said, and placed the money on the table. Then he pulled a crate of bananas out of nowhere and left the room. Sweden looked from the crate, to the door and back again. He then counted the money, sighed heavily and went to work.
Time skip
"HEJ SWed…" Denmark trailed off, staring at the other nation. "What the fuck are you doing?" Which was an understandable reaction, seeing as Sweden was sitting at his kitchen table peeling bananas, a large pile of peeled ones to his left and an equally large pile of banana peel to his right.
"Peelin' bananas," Sweden responded.
"Why?"
"Don't know, ask Norway, he's paying." Denmark looked at him in disbelief.
"Norway no-that's-too-expensive-can't-throw-away-money-on-useless-stuff are paying you to peel bananas? He couldn't just do it himself?"
"Hm," he hummed in a confirming and agreeing sort of way.
"You sure?"
"Three eightyeight an hour. He's got the money."
"Why, why did I let him have all the seabed. WHY?" Denmark cried half-jokingly, raising his hands dramatically to heaven. Sweden rolled his eyes at him.
"At the time we all laughed at it, t'was just rumours and speculation. No one believed it."
"He did, obviously." The southerner tried, and failed, to pout and proceeded to break into laughter. Sweden chuckled with.
"He could've, or he was stupid, or drunk or had a bout of insanity."
"Or thought he had nothing to lose."
"Or that, for some reason I find that to be more likely than him believing in anything."
"He believes in magic," Denmark objected, his face red with the effort of holding back his laughter.
"Insanity it is then," Sweden agreed with a huge grin.
The two of them were still joking around when Norway let himself in the front door. Not that they noticed, their laughter easily drowned out his footsteps. He knocked twice on the doorframe.
"You're awfully chipper," he accused when they turned to face him. "Are you drunk?"
"Are you," Denmark shot back, still red from laughter.
"...No. Not yet."
"We'll correct that soon enough, just one question; what are you gonna do with the bananas?"
"...What do you usually do with bananas?"
"Eh…"
"They're for eating. Idiot."
"..."
"..."
"Let's go get drunk."
And thus the three Scandinavian brothers ended up in a bar just over the Øresund bridge, after a short stop to cool down after the argument that broke out when Denmark started teasing the two other about alcohol prices.
-:- -:- -:- -:- -:- -:- -:-
Translations:
Kroner (all Scandinavian languages) - currency used in Scandinavia (directly-"crowns")
Hej - equal to and pronounced as "hey"
Notes:
388 NOK (Norwegian kroner) are worth around 47 USD
The banana thing is real. There is apparently a factory that hires people to peel bananas for a bread topping called Banos, which destroys all my childhood fantasies of owning a Banos-factory filled with little monkey-like robots. And, for some reason, my fellow countrymen does not feel like taking this easy, well-enough-paid job, leaving them for the Swedes.
It has also been brought to my attention that the Danes are annoyed that we got all the oil, and the Swedes are annoyed that we are getting so pampered by our oil-money that we can't be waiters or clean or peel bananas.
Author's note:
I believe an apology is in order, a writer's block combined with a multitude of distractions has kept me from writing as much as I would like to. However, school starts this week, and with less spare time I probably won't be as distracted. Probably.
This chapter is brought to you by my sister's Home-Alone cheese-and-egg pie and a long day of watching many boring (and a few good) films.
Auf Wiedersehen,
Shrizyne