Chapter Text
I killed him. I killed him. I killed him. The thought echoes and echoes through his mind, hollow. Prussia is dying, and he resents Germany, instinctively, because it is Germany who killed him.
He can see the pain hiding in the corners of his brother’s eyes. Sees the anger, the deep dark animal rage buried down in the heart of him. He’s like a wild creature, cornered, wounded, bleeding, screaming to lash out. But he doesn’t, not much, not mostly. He holds his anger, rightful, instinct anger, inside himself, and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. Prussia never held his claws sheathed, never hid the sharpness of his edges, not even when Germany was a small child. But now as he lies dying, he dulls the sharpness of his tongue, holds his cruelties close and silent, weakens deliberately the one strength he has left, the only strength that could never be taken from him, all for Germany’s sake. It’s like a knife stabbing his heart every time he looks at him.
There is nothing Germany can do. But this is his brother, so how could he accept that?
Germany isn’t stupid, and he isn’t entirely oblivious. He knows, in a sideways sort of way, how he came to be, who he was, what Prussia did. He knows that he was made, he knows that it was wrong, shameful.
These are not things he thinks about head-on. Prussia, all of Europe has gone to too much trouble to keep it from him. He doesn’t dare. It would be almost disrespectful, sacrilegious somehow, to ask.
But this is Prussia. For Prussia he would break a thousand taboos and commit a thousand sins. For Prussia he would even go against Prussia’s wishes.
So he calls Austria on the telephone.
“Austria,” he says, “How was I made?”
“What?” Austria says, distracted in a way that Germany can’t tell whether is genuine or not over the phone, “Out of a sense of German nationalism, of course.”
“No, I know that, I mean, how did Prussia make me, how did he… resurrect me?”
There’s a longer pause, and then Austria says, “He didn’t.”
“Don’t try to—“ Germany says, but Austria interrupts him.
“No, I mean it didn’t work . Prussia didn’t resurrect Holy Rome, you’re some other brat. If you’re asking how Prussia reanimated Holy Rome’s corpse, the answer is I don’t know, no one does. Prussia kept it secret, and if you want him to actually hate you, the surest way is to ask him. Germany, please. Don’t try to do anything stupid.”
“Alright,” Germany said, because Austria was right it was all foolishness. Germany couldn’t bring Prussia back, and it was foolish to even think otherwise. It left him with a deep emptiness in his chest. Prussia had brought Germany life, perhaps it was always inevitable that Germany would bring Prussia death.