Adventures of the Golden State (Hetalia)
Author: Ashynarr
Summary: Under much protest and complaint, I've decided that since I have nowhere else to put these, I'm going to share some of my state OC drabbles to see how people like them. Mostly focused on California, but will feature other states.
Disclaimer: Hetalia's not mine.
Warning: State OCs, somewhat AU I guess?
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It isn't often that Isabel Gomez, otherwise known as the State of California, really stops to ponder her own existence. She is a very busy woman, after all, constantly caught up in the affairs of her people and the rest of the world that demands everything just to keep her on top of things. When she does get free time, she does her best to spend it with her small pool of friends and family or, more often, tending to her not so humble garden around her property.
But sometimes, in the late hours before she's quite tired enough to go to sleep, she looks to her collections of things from her people and her travels over the past two hundred and somethings years, and marvels at the fact that she is not in the least human.
Oh, she never really forgets that fact, but it's much easier for everyone she interacts with and herself if she's just human. A very snarky, stubborn, and knowledgeable human, but nothing too impossible to the average person's mind. It's just that, sometimes, she wonders why she's been stuck with the burden of nearly forty million people's dreams and desires and hopes and messes without any sort of fun benefit to make up for it.
Alfred, her ultimate boss and her country, has super-strength beyond anything in the comics or movies, and had been her main motivation in getting Evans into the Marvel movies as the captain representing Al's ideals. Matthew, to the north, could turn invisible, unnoticeable, and had a freaking magical talking polar bear to boot.
England and his buddies had actual magic, Russia had that fear aura thingy, China had hammerspace capabilities, the Italies were impossibly fast on their feet, and she was fairly certain Japan had some form of receptive empathic ability, though she hadn't yet gotten permission to investigate it.
(Mexico had unnatural accuracy, especially with footwear, and Spain could speak to animals. Even if she didn't like them, she'd put them down faithfully in her journal alongside all the other personifications so that she could compare and contrast and examine her data points more effectively.)
Even the other states and provinces and 'subunits' she was aware of had some sort of supernatural ability - Sue's plants grew more quickly and abundantly than most, and weeds somehow only grew when she needed relaxation time in her garden. Sam could calm a horse or bull down in seconds, and always seemed to know when something was wrong with them even before they showed any outward signs.
Ginny had to have some sort of precognition to be on top of internal matters as she was, always calling or showing up just before things got completely out of hand, and that was without mentioning her actual magical abilities. Even Ben, jerk that he was, has always been able to catch a lie before it could even finished forming.
But where did that leave her? As far as she'd been able to figure, nothing she did was actually outside of what would be considered normal for any randomly chosen citizen.
She didn't have some grand form of luck despite her long history - believe her, more than enough shit went down to make up for the more well known 'bright spots' - and her sweet talking wasn't flawless enough to be considered special. She couldn't charm animals, or get a feel of future events, or push herself beyond human (well, Nation really) limits, or even get stuff to move with her mind.
The idea of even claiming she had some form of magic was laughable, as she'd played with everything from the classical elements to the four fundamental forces only to feel the same, well, nothing she always had, except tinged with frustration after each successive failure. She was, in a word, mundane, and though she doubted any of the others had realized this, it still bothered her more than it should have.
She was successful beyond most people's wildest dreams, had survived horrors to achieve wealth and prestige. She could walk into almost any high class venue on Earth and be accepted, was involved heavily with international politics despite being a State, and had centuries of immortal youth and beauty to look forward to.
Isabel sighed, shaking her head and setting the book she'd been trying to read aside for the evening. There really wasn't a point in getting worked up about it, and she needed rest before tomorrow's meetings. She could think on such things another day.
~0~0~
Isabel has a well maintained journal, the first edition's resting pages having originally been given to her by Alfred when she was still young and embittered at the world. She'd started it out with some personal thoughts, as she'd been told it was useful for, but the journal quickly morphed into questions of what the other Nations could do that she'd never seen humans do, and how all of them seemed to differ in both abilities and strengths thereof.
From there came The List. It'd been rewritten half a dozen times on the first draft alone, and had gone through perhaps several dozen revisions over the past century. In it was not only the full extent of every Nation's (and spirit's) capabilities, but also how strong said abilities were, how controlled, and how they ranked against others with the same abilities.
It's perhaps the most thorough study of her own kind ever made, simply because she has the time and resources to complete it, as well as the obsession. She's gotten over the worst of it, or so she convinces herself most days, but that's no reason to not keep her journal up to date on the off chance it's useful.
As such, it's plain as day that she'd at some point go over her notes while some cooking show played on the TV, her body sprawled across the fold-out couch (permanently pulled out for maximum comfort area), piles of pillows and blankets pressed to the wall and providing a convenient place to stuff her journal when she senses her cousin at the door.
Unfortunately, she'd failed to stuff it all the way into the mass of pillows and sheets, meaning that a small corner of it was visible when Sam entered the room a few moments later, intending to find a good seat while Isabel threw together lunch for their movie binge. And it's natural that, being related to such an inquisitive woman, that he would take interest in what she'd been working on before he got there.
As such, it's more than a bit awkward when she catches him staring somewhat nervously at the detailed entry of his own capabilities, some of which he hadn't even realized had been that special before it'd been laid out in neat blue ink.
Isabel is not in the least amused.
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"You don't have everyone in here."
His cousin glances up to him, somewhat softened from earlier's tirade about snooping in other people's business, which is laughable when she has an entire goddamned study paper in here about 99% of the supernatural world. "Of course not; I don't know much about the Nations who don't show up to the meetings, and it's not like I can just go up and interview all the other districts or states or what have you that work for their respective Nations."
"I meant you."
"Why would I put myself in there?" She asks reasonably, tilting her head and frowning. "I know where I rank compared, and it was supposed to be private anyways."
It's reasonable, and yet. He looks back down to the charts and carefully organized entries, the care put into every letter and sentence and line.
"You don't seem like the type to keep track of all of this and not at least note down where you're stronger or weaker than the others."
Her gaze on him is closed in, calculating, and he thinks maybe she's considering whether to throw him out of the house, all before she seems to slump into herself and close her eyes. "That's because I don't have magic, Sam. There's nothing there because there's literally nothing worth comparing."
He thinks she's joking or being humble for maybe three seconds. Then he realizes she's serious, because self-deprecation is not her style.
He also considers the idea that she's just missed something obvious, like her luck or her skill with money or her way with people, but someone who's kept a hundred years of meticulously organized records on nearly every Nation on the planet would be hard pressed to miss their own talents even if they were capable of humility.
When he looks back at her to see her staring at him, he's at a complete loss of words, because simply put - What The Actual Fuck?
The full story comes in fits and starts, his cousin's reluctance to show concern with the past or herself warring with the lack of desire for another heart to heart intervention and her trust that he would keep his mouth shut. Not even Sue could know, not even Alfred, and there was something in that gaze that had him already deciding he wasn't going to break the promise escaping his lips anytime soon.
But the idea that she'd made such a study simply because she could not understand why she was singled out in this way… it was perhaps more understandable considering the exact same question was now bothering him. Why, of all the Nations around, would his cousin be left as the only non-magical non-human?
When talents came with birth, it couldn't be blamed on her rapid growth. Nor could he point to any obvious aspect of her daily life and claim it was something Else, for she already had three papers each time showing the opposite. A hundred years was a disturbingly long and short period of time to know such things so thoroughly, and he couldn't help but imagine how she'd looked in those early days, when she'd first gotten the feeling something was wrong.
(No, not wrong, because applying that word to Isabel is impossible, except perhaps when she lets her ego get ahead of her. Odd, then, or suspicious.)
He's learned more about himself and everyone he knows (and many he doesn't) in the past few hours than he has over the past few centuries. He's learned something new about his cousin as well, how her fluttering interests and phases and obsessions are just waves on the surface of an extremely dedicated, meticulous sort of focus that he imagines would exhaust anyone else.
(And that fact that even something related to that, capabilities of the mind itself, had already been explored and discarded said… quite a lot about for far she was willing to search for answers.)
"Maybe the world knew you wouldn't need it," He'd eventually offered, late in the night, while they'd both been allowing themselves to drift towards sleep. "Not much of it seems to be useful outside of specific cases for the rest of us anyways."
She'd only hummed in response, keeping whatever thoughts she had on the issue to herself. If it affected her in any way, he doubted he would ever really know before she let him know.
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AN: So after some fun contemplation with my friend as to what supernatural abilities all the various Nations and States have or would have based on their personalities, I sat back and realized that... I never gave Bella any powers. And I never actually intended to, because to me she doesn't need them to be awesome. Which then led to the idea of her making a journal on everyone else's abilities.
Yeah, it's not really a sad AU, but it's definitely something I doubt many other people would take time to explore? It's also building on that old old bunny of mine where Alfred's the only Nation w/o magic, except it's not the same continuity at all honestly. So... shrugs?