The Nations and their beloved humans
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He extends his hand.
Otto looks at it for a moment. Then he takes it - a firm grip, the hand of a man who has shaken hands with kings and never let them feel that he was anything less - and releases it.
"Go," he says, "And try not to start a war with everyone at once."
Ludwig almost smiles. Almost.
Series
- Part 1 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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"You're doing it again."
He turns. Anastasia stands in the doorway with paint on her fingers and a stubborn crease between her brows, the look she wears whenever she feels that the world is arranging itself in a manner that does not suit her. She is perhaps nine years old, perhaps ten; Ivan has lost precise count, children growing in the strange, sudden way they do - how many children will not reach her age, dying with this winter? - and she wears a dress the color of winter sky, and she is looking at him with the frank, fearless assessment that only children and very old people that have seen too much to care have in common.
"Doing what?" he says.
Series
- Part 19 of Writing exercise
- Part 2 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain by Sangue_di_drago
Fandoms: Hetalia (Anime & Manga)
18 Jan 2025
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Under any other circumstances, England would never have allowed himself to appear like this, but he was too drunk to maintain any semblance of composure. He collapsed to his knees, clutching the jewel to his chest, and began to cry.
"Her voice," he choked out between sobs. "Her voice, I can't remember it anymore."
Series
- Part 3 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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At a first sight, nothing seems to have remained of that women who, with her ambition as large and great as the country she has ruled, has swiped away every man and woman that dared to defy her, underestimating the intellect and the slyness of that girl of humble origins and realizing their mistake only when it was too late.
China knows better. He can see it in her eyes: nothing in them has contracted, shape and assessing like always, with fain amusement in them, the eyes of a woman that has spent a lifetime reading rooms and people and the pauses between what is said and what is meant, and who finds, even now, the exercise worthwhile.
"You look terrible."
No greeting, not reverence that would usually be reserves to a country as ancient as him.
"You look worse," he replies.
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- Part 4 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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He is Rome. He is the most powerful thing in the world as the world is currently constituted. He has no vocabulary for the specific desolation of feeling the gods go quiet, nothing in his vocabulary was built to accommodate the possibility.
A fisherman from the wrong province should not be the thing that has this in common with him.
Series
- Part 5 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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Ottoman Empire has lives long enough to know what he is seeing. He is not sure if he is supposed to be able to see it in a child of eight who arrived three months ago in a travelling party from Wallachia and stepped onto Ottoman soil with the expression of resolute determination.
Ah, but wait. Captive is not the word the court uses.
The court uses guest.
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- Part 6 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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He is two thousand years old. He has read the faces of emperors and popes and condottieri and dictators and every variety of powerful man the peninsula has produced across the full length of its recorded history. He knows the face of calculation and the face of guilt and the face of grief and the face of satisfaction and the face of a man performing grief to cover satisfaction.
He knows all of these faces, he has a complete catalogue.
Andreotti's face is not in the catalogue.
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- Part 7 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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He has watched him for a long time, longer than Franz Ferdinand knows - or perhaps exactly as long as Franz Ferdinand suspects, in the way that some people sense they are being watched over without being able to name the watcher. Austria has been many things to many people across the long accumulation of his centuries, but the particular attention he brings to this man is something he does not have a clean word for.
Not quite guardianship. Not quite pride. .
He has watched him grow.
That is, perhaps, the simplest way to say it.
Series
- Part 8 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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The square smells of petrol and spring and the human smell of a crowd that has been standing in the heat for a long time, pressed together, running on something that is not quite joy and not quite grief and is not, whatever the newspapers will call it tomorrow, simple.
He stands at the edge of it and looks at what is hanging from the girder of the Esso station and feels nothing he expected to feel.
He expected... He doesn't know exactly what he expected. He has been waiting for this, or something like this, for years.
The thing has come.
Series
- Part 9 of The Nations and their beloved humans
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"She stood up for her friend, that counts something," he pauses, "She needs to know that someone sees her."
Theodore is quiet for a long moment. When he speaks, his voice is stripped of performance, of the vigour and the emphatic delivery and the teeth and the energy. It's just the voice of a man saying the true thing plainly: "I am the President of the United States," he says, "or I am her father. I have not found a way to be both. I have looked for it - I want you to know that I have looked for it - and I have not found it. That is not an excuse. It is simply what is true."
Series
- Part 10 of The Nations and their beloved humans