Disclaimer: It has been seven chapters, and we passed the halfway mark of this story two chapters back. If you still don't understand that Hetalia belongs to Hidekaz Himaruya and Alice Isn't Dead belongs to Joseph Fink, we're going to have a bit of a problem.

Peter, Feliciano, and Alfred were going to break into a police station in Savannah, Georgia, so that they could find any evidence of what this Officer Beilschmidt had been planning to tell Peter. They just weren't clear how they were going to do it.

The front was a big glass window, fine. But the rest was a cinder block. Barred windows, no back door… nothing that could be crawled through or into. It was a box with one opening, and that opening was right on the street. Even trying to scope the place was hard. There were cops everywhere, hanging out, chatting, and staring at the three as the tried to casually walk by.

"Nothing casual about the three of us, I guess," Alfred said.

"Could we just run in and run out?" Peter asked.

Feliciano clicked his tongue. "Well, there's only one door. If you run in, chances are, you're not going to run back out.

They took their fourth walk down the block. An officer across the street watched them with open suspicion. After what happened in Kansas, Feliciano could feel his heart pound just looking at his uniform, the contempt on his face.

"Not the front then," Alfred said. "Alright, Peter, you keep walking this way. Feli and I will walk down that alley. Meet us on the other side."

As the two walked into the alley, Feliciano laughed quietly. "So when did you decide on 'Feli'?"

Alfred grinned and grabbed his hand in his own, swinging it lightly as they walked. "No idea, to be honest."

At the end of the alley was a dumpster. Alfred sighed, and climbed up on it, Feliciano following shortly afterwards. From there, both got on the roof, crawling, body prone, so they wouldn't be seen and no footsteps would be heard from below.

Along the top of the building were skylights. Feliciano crawled to the edge of one. He was above a desk that needed decluttering and a floor that needed mopping.

He inched his way back, motioned for Alfred to come with him, and hopped off as casually as someone could hop from roof to dumpster to ground, and met back with Peter, explaining his plan to Alfred as they walked.

"Okay, so here's what, Peter," Alfred said. "We're gonna need you to make some kind of distraction."

"What kind of distraction?"

Feliciano shrugged helplessly. "That, we're not sure. But we need to do something very stupid and very loud, so we need you to do something more stupid and more loud than us."

Peter grinned. "I know just the thing."

Feliciano sighed, but grinned along anyways, and Alfred did likewise. "Don't tell us. We'd have to try to stop you. Just go for it."

Feliciano and Alfred got back on the roof, and waited. Feliciano couldn't see anything, crouched as they were, but if he couldn't tell when Peter's distraction happened, then the distraction wasn't big enough. They waited and waited, and Feliciano just knew that something had gone wrong and Peter had been caught, and he had aided and abetted him into this nonsense.

And then the distraction came, and it was certainly… something.

Peter had gone a few blocks, broke into a car, hot-wired it, pointed it at the glass front of the station, gave it a rev, and rolled out. It wasn't going fast enough to hurt anyone - it didn't do much more than make a loud noise as it took out the glass - but not something you could really stop either.

Some of them ran after him, but he had planned out a route that got him into hiding before they could even turn the corner.

Even as an adolescent, he'd been on the road by himself a long time. And a kid in a place this dangerous, the one thing they knew more than any other thing is how not to be noticed.

When the car came through, everyone ran to it. Feliciano got up immediately and started stomping until the skylight gave. The sound was so loud, but the car hadn't stopped moving. It was taking out desks on its way to the reception area's wall. Feliciano gulped, and jumped down, Alfred following right afterwards. Alfred immediately grabbed a chair and dragged it over to the skylight. Feliciano wasted a good thirty seconds checking all five of the desks before he found Ludwig Beilschmidt name plate. By that point he had no time to spend looking, so he grabbed everything he could from on top of and inside the desk, threw it into his bag, and stood back up.

At this point, the problem was obvious. Alfred was panicking, because even with a chair under it, the skylight was too high, and it would still take a miracle for both of them to get up and out before anyone noticed.

Of course the ceiling was farther away from the ground than it looked. Easier down than up. Feliciano and Alfred were standing in the back of a building with only one exit, and every cop in shouting distance was gathering at that exit looking at the goddamn car that had gone through it.

They were trapped.

It had been maybe less than a minute. Attention was still entirely on the crash, but there were seconds, maybe, before someone noticed Feliciano and Alfred standing there. The idea of hiding flashed through Feliciano's mind for a moment, waiting until everyone went away for the night. But first of all, it didn't seem likely that that was a thing that happened at a police station. They probably had a night shift, and even if they didn't, there was no way they were going to just leave the building unattended that was missing its entire front wall.

Every second they stayed, the probability of Alfred and Feliciano getting caught ticked toward one. Even with the chair, the skylight was too high and rimmed with broken glass. Feliciano looked around for… what? What did he think he would find? Feliciano supposed he looked around for a miracle.

But there wasn't a miracle. Only him, Alfred, and whatever Feliciano decided to do next.

So he steeled himself for the pain, clambered onto the desk, and motioned for Alfred to come over.

"We are going to get out of here," Feliciano said, voice shaking but eyes resolute. "And I want you to get out first, because I am not going to abandon you, Alfred."

Alfred nodded, eyes wide but focused, "Yeah. Yeah. A kiss for good luck?"

Feliciano laughed a little at that. "That'll wait for when we're back in the truck. Now go!"

Alfred nodded, turned, and hurled himself from the desk up at the skylight, sucking in his stomach in what he thought of as an half-assed attempt to keep from getting bled out on the glass.

His stomach slammed into the broken glass, and he let out a short yelp of pain. He pulled himself up as he heard the shouting of the cops.

Even with the excitement of the car, there was no way they weren't going to notice a man jumping off of a desk, and pulling himself through a skylight. Alfred turned and looked back down at Feliciano, who stood trembling, holding onto his bag.

"Feli!"Alfred hissed, panicking. "Come on!"

Feliciano turned and looked up at Alfred. His hands shook, and he nodded his head. Without giving himself a moment to think better of it, Feliciano threw himself from the desk up at the skylight, also sucking his stomach in. His hands slapped on the roof, and his chest slammed into the edge, and that did some bad things. But there wasn't much glass where he hit, so he avoided getting completely skewered.

His chest was on fire, and he could hear the cops getting closer. Alfred grabbed his hand, but even still, Feliciano's hands were rapidly sliding back, but he could hear footsteps coming, he could hear shouts, and he knew he was moments behind a hand wrapped around his ankle.

Feliciano thought about the parking lot in Kansas. He thought about an arm on his throat. And through the numbness of shock, he pulled himself all the way up through the skylight and off the roof, and onto the ground with a brief awkward stop on the dumpster that didn't so much slow his fall as roll his ankle. Alfred followed him down shortly afterwards.

And so, both of them bleeding and Feliciano limping slightly, they tore as fast as the could away from the station.

They were rounding the corner from the front, five of them running after Feliciano and Alfred. And that's when Peter, bless him, ran behind them, shouting, "Hey, assholes! How's your front window?" as he sprinted in the opposite direction.

That took care of three of them.

Feliciano honestly didn't know how they lost the other two. He never looked back, he ran until the world went dark at the edges, until all he could hear was the hollow of his and Alfred's breath as he clutched at his bag. It must have been a memorable sight in quaint Old Town Savannah - blood dripping down from both of their chests, big ragged gasps as the sprinted as well as they could, injured as they were - but they made it back to the truck and threw themselves in and sat there, gasping and wheezing, trying to figure out if they'd gotten away, and hoping Peter would come along soon.

He did, about seven minutes later, flying in through the door and landing in a heap on the floor of the truck with a, "I'm here, now drive!"

They were about a half hour out of town on the highway when they started laughing. Every time one of them met another one's gaze, another wave would come. They laughed until there was no sound, only uncontrollable shaking, and then had hiccups for the next two hours.

And, of course, Alfred kissed Feliciano. As hard and as long as he could, and he probably would've gone for longer if Peter hadn't made a gagging noise from next to them.

And that's how they broke into a police station.

They stopped in a parking lot off 95 and went through what Feliciano had taken. There was a lot of crap on his desk. Reports, department memos, printed out emails (because it became apparent that Ludwig was the type of person who printed out his emails in order to read them, which would have been amazing luck if his emails had been about anything other than the dull minutiae of his job), ticket quotas, reminders of policies, automatic emails to let him know that someone had responded to his comment on Huffington Post.

"Wait," said Peter, after nearly an hour of tedious reading in which Alfred learned a lot about Ludwig's opinions on Naruto Shippuden. "Do any of these places seem important to you?"

It was a handwritten list of cities, written on the back of one of the printed out emails.

Everett, Kingston, Waco… There was a bunch of them. Most of them had been crossed out, but it was what was written at the top of the paper that tore at Alfred, brought fresh grief and rage and misery that he hadn't known was still there.

"Vector H," it said at the top of the page. Just like Arthur had written in his papers.

"Yeah," Alfred managed. "This is definitely something."

Feliciano moved over to look, and his eyes widened in sympathy. He reached for Alfred's hand, and Alfred squeezed his tightly.

Most of the town names were scribbled out, but one of them had been circled.

"That's as good as a next step as I think we're gonna get," Feliciano murmured.

"Okay, great. This is gonna be a long drive," Peter said. "You got an iPhone hookup in here or something?"

Peter laughed, but Alfred and Feliciano didn't. Or rather, they couldn't. Alfred looked at him. Really stopped, and looked. Peter was so young, and so fucking brave!

He's so much braver than me, Alfred thought to himself. Faster, stronger, by almost any measure a better person.

Alfred looked at Feliciano, and he knew what they had to do.

"Well, you can kick me out if you want," he said. "Be a dick after everything, but I'll just find another way to get there."

And Alfred knew he would. Feliciano thought he had never met anyone so dedicated and brave. It made him wonder what he was.

"It's silly, what we're doing, Peter," Feliciano said softly. "Maybe even it's wrong. But the three of us, we can't not do it, right?"

He nodded, jaw set.

"Right," Feliciano continued. "We… We would be out there no matter what, even though whatever is waiting in that town, it's not a good thing. Maybe it's the kind of thing a person doesn't come back from.

"And Peter, we are foolish, foolish people, Alfred and I. Because we're going to go. No matter what, we are going to that place. But you are not a fool, Peter. Whatever it is we're working against, they should be very afraid of you. Because I think you're our best shot at stopping it.

"Of course, you won't stop anything if you get yourself killed poking around some town that may or may not have the answers, but that doesn't have to happen. Because no matter what, I'm going to go there. Whether you go or stay, it is too late for me.

"I need you to be smarter than me… Than us." Alfred grabbed Feliciano's hand and held it tightly. "We need you to lay low, and keep trying to hear what you can hear, and we need you to grow, and get even smarter and more powerful than you are now.

"Let us be the fools. You be the one that lives."

Feliciano broke off, and struggled not to let tears come out of his eyes. Alfred gently rubbed his back and took over.

"Peter, listen. Whatever needs to be done in that place, we will fucking do it. We really will, and if we fail, you will be right here, alive and ready."

They didn't say please. Didn't try to touch Peter's shoulder. Either he agreed with them or didn't, he had gone through enough to which.

Peter glared at them. His arms were crossed. Then he uncrossed them and pulled them into a hug.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. Okay, okay."

He shook through the hug, and his tears soaked into both Alfred and Feliciano's shirts.

Peter let them book a room for him for a few weeks at an Extended Stay America. They said their goodbyes, and Alfred and Feliciano hit the road once more.

Alfred sat in the passenger seat, one hand on the steering wheel, Feliciano snoring next to him softly.

He needed to sleep, eventually. But every moment he spent sleeping was a moment where he wasn't driving. Hopefully. And this was a long drive.

Eventually, he pulled over into a parking lot at a random place in Meridian, Mississippi. Locked the doors, unfastened Feliciano's seat belt while being careful he wouldn't wake. Then he laid down, and slept.

When Alfred awoke, it was noon, and Feliciano was awake next to him, food in his hands. Turned out that the place they had stopped last night was a fast food place. Feliciano had a box of fried things, cheesy things, sweet tea.

After they ate, Alfred drove over to the motel across the road, and both of them grabbed a quick shower, their first in… well, a while. Alfred watched the water pool around his feet in a beige bathtub. Somehow he couldn't look away. He stood there for a long time, watching water run through his toes.

And then he was back in a driver's seat with Feliciano next to him, and back on the road, and back out of Mississippi.

Half a day later, they were in Texas.

The average flag size in Texas was so much bigger than anywhere else they'd been, Feliciano noticed. He knew the usual joke, but what was it about Texas that makes them want their flags so big? American flags the size of minivans, the size of small houses, waving them from car dealerships and libraries.

There was something to be said, obviously, about insecurity. The wisdom is that the most performatively loud person at the party is the most insecure. And Texas is nothing if not performatively loud - their threats of secession, the bluster that permeates their politics, and of course, these huge flags.

And then you see the countryside of Texas, and… maybe you understand a bit. Because it is beautiful, sure, but a lot of it was empty. Empty in a way that feels heavy. Like the big cities in Texas are just fronts to hide that it's mostly an empty state, with a population trying to be as loud as possible so no one will notice that all of them live tucked away in the east.

"All hail West Texas, right?" Feliciano said under his breath, laughing a little.

Most of this could be said about America as a whole, and probably should be, but Feliciano wasn't in America at the moment. He was in Texas.

Fourteen hours later, they crossed into California, north of Lake Havasu. The Inland Empire. Land that would hardly be populated if it weren't for the tempting light of L.A. just over the San Gabriel Mountains. A daily commute for those who want a house more than they want the hours of their day. Land that would be uninhabitable if it weren't for the water brought in by canals, portioned out to farmers, who sold their portions to the thirsty cities, making them water farmers.

Foreclosures, and cabbage, and Vons Supermarkets… the Inland Empire.

They passed a town called Needles. Got on 15 at Barstow, and then 2,400 miles from Savannah, Georgia, Alfred pulled into the town that was circled on Officer Beilschmidt's list: Victorville, California. What was hidden here? Or what was hiding?

Alfred supposed that he and Feliciano were about to find out.