Chapter Text
early 1870s.
“So who’s this little guy?” Gilbert’s words were natural, cheerful, but his gaze was inquisitive. “Anyone I should be concerned—Hey, kid, cut it out!”
Ciprian had sat down on Gilbert’s foot and tangled his limbs around the Prussian’s leg, looking up at him with cheery expectancy. When Gilbert looked at him, he shook his leg a little. “My name is Ciprian,” the boy chirped. Prussia glanced at Romania, confused.
“His name is Ciprian,” Romania translated. Romania seized Ciprian’s arms and tried to drag him away. The child’s grip was incredibly strong, though, and he clung to Gilbert like a barnacle. “Let go,” he hissed in Romanian.
“I won’t,” Ciprian replied firmly.
“Just Ciprian?” It was easy to tell that Prussia was going over his admittedly meager knowledge of Romanian geography, trying to find a region that matched the name.
It took an annoying amount of effort, but Romania managed to detangle Ciprian from Prussia’s leg and pick him up. He sat the boy on his waist, choking a bit when Ciprian threw his arms around his neck. “Y-es,” he managed, jostling Ciprian to get him to loosen his grip. “Just Ciprian, so far.”
“You really have no idea who he might be?”
“If I knew, why would I hide it from you?”
“I don’t know,” Prussia said. His tone was even. “Why?”
Romania scowled. Ciprian wasn’t a heavy child – worryingly skinny, on the contrary – but his constant squirming made him a pain to hold. It could be worse, the optimistic part of him said. He could be you. The thought made him shudder; memories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contained mostly violence and hardship. “Trust me,” Romania said, “when I figure this out, you’ll be the first person I tell.” Mostly because I have no idea how to care for a child went unsaid.
Prussia seemed satisfied with the answer. He handed off the insane amount of books and papers he was carrying to a private who walked by, giving him a few orders in German, before turning back to Romania and Ciprian. “You hungry, kid?”
Romania repeated the question, and Ciprian responded with an enthused “Da!”
Gilbert chuckled. “That word I know,” he said. “Come on, the kitchens won’t be too damn crowded right now. We’ll get him something to eat.”
They settled Ciprian at one of the tables with a crude sandwich and some leftover sausage. Prussia pulled brandy out of a cabinet, which Romania gratefully accepted. “You wanna tell me what happened?”
The brandy was a Prussian brew, not nearly as strong as the țuică Romania was used to, but a pinch was a pinch. He related how he’d walked into his bedroom to find Ciprian hiding in the curtains, convinced that they were playing hide-and-seek and had been doing so for a while.
“And he speaks fluent Romanian,” Prussia mused. He took a sausage from Ciprian’s plate and broke it in half, keeping one half for himself despite Ciprian’s protests. He tickled Ciprian beneath the chin; the boy’s peals of laughter had all the lighthearted innocence of childhood, and Romania’s heart melted.
“Well he certainly doesn’t speak German,” Romania said.
“I’ll have to fix that, then, German’s a great language.” Prussia picked up the brandy bottle and held it in front of Ciprian’s face. “Die Flasche,” he said, slowly and clearly. “Say that.”
“Bottle,” Ciprian replied in Romanian. Prussia’s expression was nothing short of comical.
“Sorry, Gilbert.” Romania smirked. “This one isn’t yours.”
Prussia set the bottle back on the table and picked up Ciprian’s now-empty dishes, handing them over to one of the kitchen maids. Ciprian slid out of his seat to follow her. “We’ll get to that later,” he said. “Does he speak the common language?”
Romania opened his mouth to answer before realizing that he actually didn’t know. In the surprise of finding Ciprian, he hadn’t bothered to check. “I don’t know. I didn’t find out.”
“That should’ve been the first thing you did.”
“Like you did everything right the first time.” Romania’s eyes didn’t leave the boy, who was now being taught how to properly scrub a plate. The maid seemed confused and a little taken aback at his enthusiasm.
“I didn’t have to, everyone took care of that part for me.” Gilbert sighed in exasperation. “I’d known Ludwig was gonna come along for ages, it was only a matter of time. They actually handed him over to me, I didn’t find him. ‘Here, Beilschmidt,’ they said. ‘This one’s yours. Don’t fuck it up.’ And I didn’t.” He sat back in his chair with a self-satisfied grin.
“As much as I love your advice, Gilbert,” Romania said, “this situation is a tad different.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
There was a bout of silence before Gilbert said, “You know who you should ask?”
“If you say the Hohenzollerns. . . .” Romania let the sentence hang in midair. He liked the current ruling house. He really actually did. They were doing for his people what Cuza and even Mircea cel Ban couldn’t, and he couldn’t ever remember being this happy with life. But he would go through nine circles of Hell before he told the government about Ciprian. It wasn’t a risk he was willing to take.
“No, of course not.” He would have told them. “I was gonna say England. That Kirkland bastard has found and raised more Nation kids on his own than anyone else in the world, except maybe the Iberians. He’s probably the worst parent, too, but he might at least be able to help you figure out who the kid belongs to.”
“I don’t need to know that,” Romania said a little venomously. “He belongs to me.”
“I didn’t say he didn’t.” Prussia’s words were cautious, his expression neutral. Romania had see those combinations before many times – usually just before This is for your own good or We’re not trying to hurt you. It was condescending, and he loathed it. “Just that you should try to be sure. It hasn’t even been a day, Mircea, how can you know anything for certain?”
I just know, he thought. It was a feeling he had, an absolute conviction that Ciprian was meant for him. In the same way he knew that the sun would rise every morning, and that the world would never be without a war, he knew that Ciprian was a nation and that he was Romanian.
But he couldn’t say that to Prussia – to be fair, Gilbert was easily the most understanding of all the Germanic nations, and with Mircea he shared a love of abstract concepts and trust in gut instinct. But he was still Prussian, and his concrete, logical side won over too much for Romania to bet on.