Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

1924
Crown States of America
Spread of the red plague; revolutionary movements

✿

The Crown States of America walks through a field of red.

Red vines curling, red leaves unfurling, red flowers blooming, roots sunk into bodies. Plague.

Ravage.

Reminiscence.

It will not harm him.

He steps around the corpse of a rabbit, listens for the guns and cannons that fired here only a week ago, still echoing.

It will harm him, but that has little to do with whether he is within the infectious range, and everything to do with how far it spreads, how many of his it kills.

God…

But it does not do to dabble in treason. Not when the punishment is…

God, what has happened to me?

Not when the punishment is...

Would it be worth it in the end?

Equality. Liberty. Justice.

A chance to be...

What a wonderful job he’s done. What a wonderful place he’s at.

It is not one of the days when faces blur in his mind, when the past is ashes and all that’s left is the flame of rebellion, dying low into embers or blazing into an inferno, when old words disappear and all that is left is a blank page and the pen is his hand. It is not one of the days when he forgets, and so, with the weight of his journal in the bag at his side and old deaths ringing in his ears, the past creeps up on him like a fog, like a plague.

It lays a hand on his shoulder and drags him backwards until he gets lost.

He remembers (he does not) a time when he fought through the mud, muskets firing, his flag waving in the air. Again. Again. For liberty and high ideals. He remembers the moment he fell. He remembers the plagues and stitched, toxins and deadland. He remembers waking in chains.

He remembers (he does not) the flag on the wall, the fire in the hearth, the guest in the spare bedroom, the white bear, asking and then pleading and then, deaf ears.

He remembers (he remembers) his city burning, his people uniting, a book on his lap, a field of flowers, candles and westwards and being divided, hands pressed against each other in the dark.

He remembers (he remembers) years of sunshine before Wollstone’s ratios, when he had been younger. When he had been happier. Before it was taken away.

But those are murky memories, now. Muddled and rewritten by purges, by burnings, by erasures and censorship.

Would it?

He remembers a time when the Crown Empire went by a different name.

Britain.

England.

That was a time as different from his present as night is from day. Sometimes it is hard to remember that the nation has remained the same. The Crown stays across the sea, returning only to lay down punishments, to salt the land and leave him to suffer until the flames die.

Until he bows his head once more. As he did.

As he does.

He views the Crown through a single lens, but his memories of England are fractured, doubled, from a time he was smaller, from a time he was divided.

He remembers England as a figure crumpled in the mud, the one who fought for him, the one who looked at him and said family. He remembers England in toy soldiers and blue daisies. He remembers England carrying him to his new home.

He remembers England taking his hand.

Let’s go home.

His eyes are stinging. He swallows, tries to swallow back tears. He hasn’t cried in a long while, not over this.

He thought the wound had scarred already under the pressure of years. He thought it was over. He thought he had left it behind.

But he can’t remember as much as he’d like to, and he can’t forget what he wishes he could.

(Dead rabbits and dead grass and dead, dead daisies.)

England gave him his world, and the Crown Empire twisted it and took it away, and he can’t have it back. It will never be the way it was when he was young.

He breathes. Breathes. Tries to breathe free.

But those are dangerous thoughts.

What happened? but there is no answer he can find, not in himself, not in the journal, not in neighbours or allies or enemies. Ahead of him, all he sees is plague and bodies.

What have I become?

He has never been able to let go of it.

He is still trying to find a way through.

There’s an ache in his arm, now, and he thinks he knows what it is, and he knows it it not going to go away, it will get worse before it gets better. But for now he tells himself to keep moving, for as long as he is able, and so step after step, rise after fall, his steps trace the plague-ridden skin of his land.

The nation that was once America, that was once Canada, continues walking, until the fields of red swallow him up.

Chapter Text

Mid-to-Late 19th Century
Western Maine, the United States of America
The Second American War of Independence

❀

He could not stop hearing it.

The bodies and the blood and ugliness, those America had seen before. He had thought he was strong enough to face them, and he had been, and he was, he knew how to swallow down that horror in the moment and only let it bubble up after the fact, when night had fallen but sleep was far away.

But the screaming.

Gunshots, ringing in his ears, enough that he couldn’t make out the sound of his own bayonet firing among them, though he felt the upward jolt of the recoil.

And still the screaming remained.

Not the intermittent shouts of rage or pain, the scattered cries of those injured or terrified, the background din of war. But the screaming of men taken by the new weapon, by the creatures, by the parasites, men in unremitting and unceasing agony, men collapsed into the torn-up grass and being trampled by their comrades, men suffocating in the noon heat yet still screaming, the sound tearing out of their lungs, shredding their vocal cords, because they could do nothing but, because what they felt was too much to contain. It echoed through the whole wide world but the world did not answer, God did not answer, their fellow soldiers did not answer, their nation could not—

It echoed through the whole world until all that was left was the cacophony ringing all the way through his bones, dragging him down with every step so that he would join them on the ground, hands over his ears, screaming for it all to stop.

Keep moving, America told it to himself, be deaf and be blind if that is what he needed to be, aim and fire and repeat, keep up with the forward movement of his troops, closing the distance between the American army and the invading force.

Britain’s force.

Britain. All because of Britain, and at the thought that familiar white-hot rage burned through America. After two wars and peace treaties and trade and all these years and still he found English ships in New York Harbour, it wasn’t enough for Britain that he had Canada and Australia and colonies all around the globe, he still couldn't move one from the fact that America won, America was the one who got out from under his thumb, America challenged him for freedom and succeeded and maybe the world didn't bow to his might after all, huh, maybe he wasn't as all-powerful as he’d like to be.

America won, and he was going to win again, here under the sky bluer and wider than the sea, and his boys who died, men lying on the hills and bluffs, voices destroyed after hours of screaming, paralyzed, collected to be turned into—turned into—

His hands went clammy, and for a moment he remembered them, blank eyes set in still faces, stitches puckering ashen skin in a jigsaw of parts.

On the other side of a shrinking gap.

Finger on the trigger, aim and fire and keep moving, again, again, pushing away the memory, trying to keep his hands steady, trying to claw his way from the shadows into the blinding day.

He’d win, and he’ll make it mean something, mean something more than these screams and gravestones and the bile rising in his throat.

They came into clear view then, over the rise of the hill. The massed forces of the enemy lines.

The corpses walking. Blank eyes. Still faces. Skin like a map of roads in needle and thread.

“Hold the line!” someone called, but it was a small sound amidst the screaming.

Beat them back, America thought, but he stumbled, then, and belatedly realized that he’d stepped on someone, he’d stepped on one of his. His mind caught on that realization and stuck there, replaying it over and over, and he stopped moving, stuck as well.

The thing about people was that they stumbled. They felt and fell and made mistakes.

The thing about people is that they died, died for good, light snuffed out, eyes blank, no repairs to be made, no limbs to be reattached, no special combination of wires to make them be themselves again, but those stitched—

But those monsters, they never stopped, never stumbled, only walked, endlessly, and reloaded and fired and killed. If they could hear the screaming at all it was nothing to them, it mattered not if the one beside them fell, it mattered not if they cut down someone whose face they once knew. Once fallen they rose again by the next dawn, repaired to kill again. They were tools of war, and tools of war were made for winning, and so they won, and they won, and they never, ever stopped—

It wasn't as if he didn't know arithmetic.

Equality. Liberty. Justice. On the field all those grand ideals faded away until all that was left was rage and fear and the balancing act between them.

As the dead, stitched army advanced, his own men were falling out of alignment, panicking, losing their heads. Some firing aimless and desperate and some crouching on the ground and some fleeing and some simply freezing, eyes fixed across the shrinking hundred yards on their approaching foe.

People had families waiting for them. People had aspirations they reached for and little things they wished they could see again, people had—

So much to lose.

The thought rang through his mind, louder than church bells, louder than gunshots and cannon fire and screaming. Made him take another step, stumbling again but regaining his balance, aim, fire, sweat beading on his face in the heavy noon heat, moving forward.

Because he knew this land like he knew the back of his hand, knew his own people like he knew himself. Knew every little thing that would be destroyed if he failed here.

Fear. Anger. Hope. In this war, all pointed the same way.

The thing about people is that they could hope.

They had something they are fighting for.

And America’s people, they stood, they came together, rallying in a last and desperate effort, and in the midst of the blood, even with the screaming in his ears and his people in the ground, he held onto that in his mind’s eye. The light on the other side.

The world he was fighting for.

America caught a glimpse of him then, recognized the presence of the other nation. The slight figure, coat like a splatter of blood amidst a sea of it.

This isn’t how this ends.

Be deaf and be blind if that was what he needed to be, but win.

There was too much to lose.

England was approaching with his army, inexorably, and America standing with his, trying to shut out the voices of the suffering, the faces of the dead, the arithmetic that became clearer to him with every passing moment, trying to shut out everything but what he might need to do.

Flank collided with flank, maneuver slid against maneuver, jaws closed, spears of people well-aimed sank deep and drew blood while less fortunate formations broke against the skin. The two sides clashed with blades in chests and muskets firing, bodies thrown to the ground, a war, a catastrophe. Orderly lines fell to pieces and disappeared.

America cut his way through the chaos, knowing who he had to find, remembering parasites and treaties and New York Harbour and letting that rage propel him forward. With every obstacle there was a split second in which he took them in, looked into the eyes and checked the colour of the coat, friend or foe, and took his pick of action. He chose, again and again, pushing past or cutting down, arm or chest or empty air, blood or bone, life or death, right and left and forward and back, whatever he needed to move forward, whatever he had to do—

And the faces blended together, the dead and the living, until he turned and saw nothing but people, his and not, England’s and not, Canada’s and not—

Until he stepped over a body, and there—

His feet were planted solid in the ground, and there stood England, green eyes and red coat and features carved from stone, aiming the point of a bayonet at his throat.

Just as he remembered.

America’s breath caught.

It was not the revolution. There were no orderly lines or no man’s land, no rain however near the sea.

But for a moment it was only the two of them, facing each other, proof of the war in their faces and coats and the trail of bodies behind them.

The blade of England’s weapon flashed through the air between them. America moved to block it with his musket, but rather than sinking into its wood the blade slashed sideways, carving a crimson smile of a gash across the back of his right hand.

His fingers spasmed, a hiss escaping his lips, but he kept his grip on his weapon, backing away, looking up at his foe as he did.

England's eyes were blown wide now, green as some summer field far from here, his hold on his weapon turned unsteady, as if he didn't quite have a grip on himself.

"Surrender," he said, with bodies still falling on the field.

That set a spark in America's eyes. Blood was pouring down his hand, slippery between skin and smooth wood, but he only tightened his grip, heedless of the stabbing pain that resulted.

"In your dreams," he spat.

With the pleasantries out of the way, only a single decision remained. A split-second judgment, from the look of a face, the colour of a coat.

His eyes. His coat.

And with the movement of a single finger the screaming did stop.

For a moment, everything did.

☙

Arithmetic. Strategy. The lay of the land. Maps with cities crossed out. Burn circles and struck matches and fields of ash.

He'd never really thought he would lose.

Chapter Text

Summer 1922
Radham, Crown States of America
Spate of child abductions

❦

The drizzle peppers his face, dampens his clothes, and he lets it, feeling the water drip across his skin and soak into his jacket, shirt, pants, socks. He thinks that somewhere along the way he lost his distaste for being wet.

It's almost calming. Cleansing. Especially with the summer heat, the haze off the road. In the pitter-patter of droplets on rooftops, in the hushed background shhh of the rain, his mind quiets, memories and worries washing away into white noise. Puddles turn the street into a patchwork of silver mirrors. People rush by, hoods up, faceless yet familiar. His people.

Are you okay? the Crown States of America wants to ask them as they pass, as they give way or take it, finding their places in this city, cells of a great organism or mice scurrying beneath the eyes of a cat. Are you fed and warm and safe? Do you have people who love you? What happened? What’s wrong?

Are you happy, but sustenance and shelter and health are basic, material things, and happiness is harder.

He would give his people the world, if he could, the sun and moon and stars, anything for them. They are the only thing that matters.

There is only so much he can do.

The Crown States knows that, after all these years. Like he knows that the rain in which he finds that little bit of comfort is no natural occurrence, but an engineered outcome, like a pruned plant, a trained animal.

Hush, it mutters, but the nation keeps his head up, his ears alert, searching, searching for the signs. The blips in the pattern. The cracks in the veneer.

A movement in the corner of the eye catches his attention, makes him turn his head.

It’s a black Academy carriage, like a streak of tarnish on silver, moving ghost-like through the heat haze and the rain, stitched horses clip-clopping as rain flows off their raincoats. Disappearing towards the outskirts of the city, the shims.

Intuition crooks a finger around his chest and squeezes.

It is only a carriage.

But the Crown States knows this place like he knows the back of his hand. Knows its rhythms and patterns, breaths and heartbeats. Which people smile at each other as they pass and feel a little better for it, which ignore the set norms and are shunned for it. Which buildings have supports of grown, twisted wood and which are older, from the time he has trouble remembering. Knows what brings the Academy’s attention and what doesn't. What the scratched symbols at a child’s eye level on some walls and door frames mean.

Knows when that heart skips a beat. When something is wrong.

The world seems to clarify, everything coming into sharp, painful focus.

He takes a step after the carriage. Then another. Then he moves, like a startled bird, like a carriage, like the breeze, like a nation in his homeland, past the people on the street, past buildings, around waypoints, through rain, and he follows.

❦

The buildings of Radham become worn-down and ramshackle as the Crown States jogs further from the Academy of the city, into the shims, puddles turning muddy as they splash beneath his feet, bag bouncing at his side, pace driven by urgency.

He slows to a brisk walk, eventually, wiping sweat from his brow, though his eyes are still looking, his ears are still listening. The street blurs without his glasses, but they are near-useless in Radham’s constant rain, and so he makes do with squinting, at the boarded-up windows, at the refuse, at the haggard faces of the people who pass. His people.

Watching them, those questions come to mind again, safeshelteredfed, then the memory of the carriage.

There is only so much he can do.

Looking, he sees no sign of the threat, no trace of anything unusual, and to all appearances there is nothing wrong that has not always been wrong, no danger looming that has not been looming since the Academy sank its roots here, since the war, since—

The Crown States knows this place like the back of his hand. He knows when something is off, and he trusts his intuition, because he needs to. He has needed to for a long time.

There is nothing else to do but keep searching.

The blip in the pattern. The crack in the veneer. The places that shatter. The things that disappear.

And then he sees him.

The child is ten, or perhaps only appearing that small that small due to malnutrition. Clothes ragged and drenched in the rain, enveloped in a too-big raincoat, turning down a narrow, quiet side street, enclosed on both sides by tall apartments of branching wood. Feet splashing through the puddles.

A mouse, under the looming spectre of a cat.

The Crown States takes a step towards him, then another. The child hears his approach and spins around, eyes snapping onto his face, this stranger, alarm already written over his features in wide eyes and lifted eyebrows, in the way he lifts up on the balls of his feet.

Fight, or flight.

“Wait,” calls the Crown States, stopping and reaching out a hand, then, again, more quietly, “please.”

The child takes a step back, then another.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he says, dropping his arm, although words are cheap and the boy must know that. “But you shouldn't go that way. It’s not safe to be out alone right now.”

The boy stops his retreat, for the moment, though his eyes narrow beneath the hood of his raincoat. “Why’s that?”

It never is.

“There might be a fox on the prowl,” replies the Crown States, and he traces the symbol in the air with his finger, the three triangles the children here scratch into walls to signal danger.

The boy’s eyes follow the shape of the symbol, three triangles for a fox’s head, but he folds his arms. “Why d’you care?”

The Crown States swallows, swallows down the words that well up at the question.

Because.

I can’t not.

Someone should.

You're one of mine.

You are the only thing that matters.

He settles for an answer likely to be believed, one not too far from the truth.

“I was like you, once.”

Something about the boy’s demeanour relaxes. He unfolds his arms, nods once. “Well. Thanks for the tip. I need to go down that way though—” he jerks a thumb down the street “—and these streets don’t get much busier than this ‘til five. How long’s it gonna be risky?”

The Crown States frowns at the question. He doesn’t like the look of the street, doesn’t like the boarded-up windows and the way the buildings hide it from view.

“I don’t know,” he says, and his acutely aware of every raindrop on his skin, every passing step, he can’t escape the feeling that something terrible could happen at any moment, the certainty that something is wrong. He bites his lip. “I could walk with you. Only for a few minutes.”

The boy scans his face, considering. “You could be the fox for all I know.”

Something about the comment slides a knife between his ribs and twists.

I’m your nation, thinks the Crown States, I’m your neighbour and your teacher and the passersby on the street, I’m the apartments and the ground beneath your feet, I can’t—

“Yeah,” he says, so softly as to be nearly inaudible. “I know.”

But I’m not.

Please.

The corner of the boy’s mouth twitches.

“You don’t really seem the type. Kind of familiar-looking, actually. And, well.” He shrugs, adjusts his hood. “Safety in numbers.”

He turns and begins to walk again, and the Crown States catches up and falls into step beside him, allowing himself a shaky exhale of relief before he tries to pull his scattered thoughts into order.

Pay attention, he tells himself.

He sees no sign of trouble, but the puddles flicker with raindrops and their steps are too loud and so he keeps his eyes up, sweeping, over buildings and puddles and branches and lampposts. Searching for the threat.

Pay attention, but he finds his eyes straying to the boy, and he can’t help but notice the hollow cheeks, the patched clothing, the oversized raincoat, the way he looks around, as if he really is a mouse, sniffing for predators.

Are you happy? But for too many reasons it is a silly question to ask, and so he doesn’t.

He can’t help but notice, still, how much smaller the boy is, how much taller he is by comparison. And, though they both must still look youthful, how much bigger he must seem.

Blink and he sees it, clearly enough to be blinding: someone, holding out a hand to him, the light too bright in his young eyes.

Let’s go home.

For a moment he is disjointed, and he misses a step, jarred by the memory, both by the content and by the time it is from, sliding apart at the seams. As if he has two eyes but it the recollection is only visible to one. It is there. It is not. It is his. It is not. He is himself, and he is not, not, the same thing—

Who?

Both and none and he shakes his head, tries to focus.

“Who’re you?” the boy asks, breaking the silence, breaking his focus.

The Crown States presses the fingers of one hand against the scar of the back of the other.

Two answers, jumbled in his mind, vying for breath. But he lost them like he lost the border, like he lost himself, for a while. Somewhere along the way he’d stopped being able to answer to them. Somewhere along the way they’d stopped being purely his.

He wasn’t young enough for either to have grown archaic. But he couldn’t be two things at once, and he couldn’t be half of something either.

A new name, for a new nation. A book of common names, and the memory of writers like an anchor, as if he could find something to build on that was his own, as if he could hold steady after all.

The sound of it still sits wrong with him at times, but he tells himself, it is better than nothing, he tells himself, at least that means he remembers he was ever different.

“I’m called Thomas.” He tries to smile at the boy, tries to pull himself together and offer something reassuring. “What’s your name?”

The boy’s eyebrows go up.

“It’s the same as yours,” he replies. Then, as he sticks his hands into his pockets, “I know someone else named Thomas too. But he goes by Thom.”

“Is he your age?” asks the Crown States, but then movement on the intersection up ahead catches his attention.

He holds out an arm, barring the boy’s way, and the black carriage glides by, like a ghost in the heat haze off the rain-slick street.

He doesn’t realize he’s been holding his breath until he lets it out.

The boy exhales too, looking from his arm, which he drops, to the spot on the street where the carriage passed.

“He’s a little older,” says the boy. “He tries to look out for some of the younger ones.” A pause, then, “you’re a little like him, y’know. Maybe that’s why you’re all familiar. D’you have any siblings?”

His head aches at the question, a building pressure, and the Crown States presses a hand to his forehead, trying to focus on the pitter-patter of the rain, trying to let it wash away everything wrong in the world. “I used to.”

“Oh.” He hears the boy shifting his weight, then, “What happened?”

There are too many things he could say. There are too little.

What happened?

How did he get here?

How did he become this?

He can’t focus properly, he can’t pull together, and the precarious balance inside himself is tipping and tilting, from Let’s go home, from Who’re you?

He is never going to see the boy again, and the boy will not remember him. Maybe that is what lets him admit it.

“I don’t know.”

❦

When he next sees the carriage, on his way out of the shims, it is pulled over on the side of the street, and he stops in his tracks to watch.

The door opens, and a woman emerges, dressed in the grey coat of a specialist. She’s Eastern, across-the-ocean, possibly-from-China-or-Japan Eastern, and the Crown States finds his eyebrows rising at the sight of her face, because the Empire has been at war with those nations for years upon years. The Crown States cannot recall ever knowing either, and their people do not come here.

She’s his, and she’s not, the way nobles are his and not, the way some experiments are his and not.

Who are you? he thinks, what were you doing? What have you done? Where are you going now?

The Crown States is looking, and he sees the carriage, and he sees the woman, and there’s nothing but his intuition to justify his interference and nothing less than the Academy’s fingerprints to prevent him.

He was paying attention, he was watching out. He noticed it, noticed the blip, the oddity. He’s looking, and he sees it, and his fingers tighten on the strap of his bag as his eyes narrow and his heart taps out an uneasy beat, but there is still nothing he can do.

Nothing he can do that won’t—that won’t—

Weapons on the street and superweapons slumbering and the Academy’s ears and eyes and fingers everywhere, over every inch of him.

The Crown States swallows against the way his stomach roils, swallows against the questions he wants to shout.

There is only so much…

For a long moment he is frozen, unable to move, neither to leave nor to act. Seconds squeeze and stretch and lose their meaning. Every breath feels like cowardice, but he’s caught there, suspended, between fear, and fear, justification and justification. All he can do is stare at the carriage, as if stunned, and he stares, he watches, as the woman leaves.

And then he looks away, down at the rain-dark sidewalk beneath his puddle-soaked shoes.

The weight of his bag suddenly an anchor. The rain colder than it was a moment before.

He takes a step. Then another.

Nails digging into his palms, he walks, past the carriage, away from the shims, away from the boy he found there, away from the specialist in grey.

A waypoint lies up ahead. On a different day he might stop there, might have to. He might let himself be searched, he might answer the questions of the men who work there. Another mark for the ledger.

Today he walks past, eyes still fixed on the ground, and he cannot be surprised when no one reaches out to stop him, no one calls for him to halt. With all the words he does not say, all the things he does not do, is not brave enough to, all the excuses and the fear, he makes no sound and leaves no footprints. He is the spectre, he hides, he is invisible and forgotten. He disappears.

Every step feels like a failure. Every step feels like a betrayal. But he walks away, he lets it be, he leaves it alone, the thread of the mystery unpulled, his words unspoken, actions untaken.

Only so much...

❦

His pencil scratches against the paper as he sketches out the face of the boy by yellow lamplight at his desk. He is no artist, and so he erases and revises, going over the lines again and again until they are the closest to memory he can make them. It’s a frustrating task, but one he is used to, one he will regret if he neglects.

On the journal page before, he has already recorded the events of the day.

After the pencil lines of his sketch are true, the Crown States goes over them in ink, biting his tongue, holding his breath, every movement of his hand precise and careful. He captions it, Mouse in the rain, and jots down the notes: that the boy is called Thomas, that he was hungry and had older siblings who handed down their raincoats, that he trusted him after all.

After the caption’s dried he starts on the next sketch. This one is of the woman in the grey coat. He saw her for only a brief time, and he struggles to remember the lines of her face well enough to depict them, struggles not to distort them through recollection. He thinks he fails. The page becomes a blur of graphite, no features to be made out, no person to be found.

The corner of his mouth pulls down. He tries to persevere, but his hand aches from writing, and eventually his pencil stills. Point tapping against the page, his sketches blur as his eyes unfocus, the finished one of the boy, the grey smudge of the woman, until they blend together.

Something about that bothers him. The Crown States blinks and pushes his glasses up his nose, clearing his vision, but they swirl on in his mind, the remembered faces of the child and of the specialist in the grey coat, like ripples in water, like windblown leaves that refuse to settle.

In silence, in the heat haze, forms blurred without his glasses, both may as well have been ghosts.

His thumb finds the side of the journal and he lifts a stack of pages up, lets them fall in a flurry, words and drawings passing in a flipbook of days and months and years. Leaving his pencil as a bookmark, he turns to an entry from the previous summer.

It is of the day Radham’s Reverend Mauer spoke to a crowd, before he went away.

I just received word that two individuals in the upper west part of Radham were attacked. They were school-age. One of them is gravely injured, to the point that he may be crippled for life.

The other child is dead, the Reverend had said.

(The Crown States can’t see anything wrong that has not always been wrong, since the Academy set it roots here, since the war.)

That’s a reason, he’d said to someone important, once. It isn’t going to stop being one.

He looks to the drawings for that day, then. One is of a preteen boy he’d seen in the crowd, with dark hair and green eyes and a face of angles, the one who had said, We’re not safe at all. The one he had seen again later, asking, You never believed in God, did you? The one who had smiled like water, like voltaic energy, a lot like a child and a little like a monster.

He doesn’t know why that face struck him so, but he’d noted it down anyways, trusting that he had chosen right, trusting his intuition. He’d needed to, still needs to. There is nothing else to do, nothing else to rely on but.

The second drawing is of the Reverend Mauer. Not him as he stood before the crowd, speaking against the Academy, but later, after everything had devolved into chaos. It is of the Reverend pressing a gun to the forehead of a girl whose arms are locked around his waist.

The Crown States imagines, blinks and sees, clearly enough to be blinding, like an explosion in his mind’s eye: the trigger pulled, the gun fired, something sparking. Something kindling.

It puts him off balance, like the ground being pulled out from under him, a sort of breathlessness that inspires recklessness, and the idea comes to him, as it did on that day, hits him over the head and leaves stars dancing before his eyes.

Your head is a field of flowers, he scolds himself immediately. It’s too dangerous. It’s a flight of fancy. It’s treading on suicide. It was true the first time you tried it, and nothing has changed.

You owe too much to rebel.

He presses one hand against one ear. He doesn’t know what he’s trying to shut out. He doesn’t think it works, it never has, and so he drops his hand.

You don’t want to go to war.

The thing is, in this moment, he’s not so sure anymore. With the faces of ghosts swimming before his eyes, the notion doesn’t seem as mad as it did not so long ago, doesn’t feel like a daydream or like launching himself off a cliff. It feels like a hope, like a possibility, like a consequence, like the only option he can that will ever, ever change the reasons why and fix what’s wrong and make it better—

(We have the power to dictate what we need, the boundaries we expect, and the lines that should not be crossed.)

There’s something, he thinks, he feels it, a familiar rush, like sparks catching, like flags waving, like gunshots, like revolution.

Looking into the faces of the smiling boy, the man with the gun, the mouse in the rain, the ghost in grey:

There is something.

(He was always a little too good at dreaming.)

There is something he could do.

Chapter Text

1818-18??
London, England
Creation of the first stitched; rise of the Lord King Adam

♔

It seemed the rain never stopped these days, and the skies never cleared, but perhaps that was merely the slump England had fallen into since the year with no summer, since Napoleon fell and the gunfire died, since he’d shaken America’s hand for peace and sent France scurrying in retreat and felt the flush of victory fade as he returned home to reckon with the cost of the war.

It seemed the world was grey, the sidewalks and buildings, the faces, the skies, but perhaps something had been knocked askew in his eyes as he ran them down rows of gravestones and ledgers of numbers.

He smiled little, these days, and laughed less, but that was business as usual. He knew this season would pass, as seasons like it had before. One day he would find that the sniffles and flus that had plagued him in the past years had cleared. One day, he would look up and see the sun shining down.

One day.

For now he kept his umbrella up as he navigated the streets of London, other hand held over the satchel at his side, protecting the documents within from rain and pickpockets.

The bag was light, for something that held so weighty a secret. So important a discovery.

His nerves jangled. He itched to read the papers, to pore over their every word, and yet in the same moment he was uneasy at the prospect.

He wondered: would it be another disappointment? Would it be another false hope in the endless progression of days?

Or could it be the promise of a new dawn?

Calm yourself, he thought, you must face this with a rational frame of mind.

He was calm. His hands were still. His posture straight. His face marked only by the slightest frown. The tapping of his heart and the sweat on his palms and the spiral of his thoughts, all invisible.

He was calm, and he was not afraid.

He was.

A group of children were playing on the street, heedless of the rain. They made a archway of arms and hands. They clapped and laughed and sang.

Here comes the candle to light you to bed, here comes the chopper to chop off your...

England’s eyes kept darting back to them as he arrived at his house, as he slipped the key into the lock and turned it and entered. He watched them as he swung the door closed, until it shut them from his view.

He could still hear them singing, even so. Even after they disappeared.

♔

Night fell without his conscious notice or awareness. Seated at his desk, England rubbed at his eyes. He reached for his cup of tea and, finding it empty, let out an irritated breath.

The papers were sprawled out before him, yellow in the light of the single lamp, shadowed by stacks of books and a globe of the world. He and they existed in a pool of brightness, enveloped by the evening darkness of a silent house.

His head ached with a building pressure. Numbers and figures swam through his mind, ricocheting against his skull, vying for space. Words he did not know and ones he had only learned today. Diagrams of bodies dissected and laid out like pieces of a children’s puzzle. Rates and ratios.

But between the lines and within them, he had found it. All those numbers, all those words and diagrams, every drop of ink. It was the language of a miracle.

His mouth was dry, when he swallowed, and it was becoming more difficult to keep his eyes open. Yet still he scanned those pages. Wollstone’s genius. He was not a scientist enough to check those proofs for fault, those theories for flaws, but they had been checked, they had been tested, and they had been given to him to read rather than being discarded as fiction.

He was not a scientist enough, but still, he knew enough of the concepts involved to recognize the new ground breaking.

It was truly possible, then. To reanimate a man already dead. To drag a part of him back from that last unknown, to make him walk the streets once more.

Unnatural, thought a part of England, as he sat at that desk, pondering the papers, still but for his breaths. A perversion of the laws of God and nature. A breach of the sanctity of life and death.

Witchcraft.

But then he shook his head, as if he could shake away the Church. He was the last person who ought to be thinking of witchcraft in such a way. And as for beings which seemed mortal human but were not, as for those returned from death, well.

He would have to be a blazing hypocrite to condemn that.

He rested his chin on his hand, examining the papers from a new angle, pondering, then, how this discovery might serve him and his people.

The utility of the reanimated men was apparent. They could serve as tireless workers, performing dangerous occupations and menial labor. They could serve as soldiers, his own people serving even beyond theirs ends, and the bodies of his opponent’s forces turned to his own. Magnifying his power. Increasing his influence.

And Wollstone’s writings evoked potential beyond that.

In the darkness, treading the shore of sleep, it was easier to dream, and so his mind conjured up possibilities and prospects, high hopes and lofty ambitions, imagination so vivid it could almost be flesh already. Of beasts of burden and beasts of war. New sources of sustenance and new forms of agriculture. Medicine, and improvement of the human body beyond medicine. Weaponry, and communication, and art.

His eyes fell upon the globe on his desk.

This could be it, he thought, reaching out to turn it with a single finger, his heart accelerating. A miracle. A key. For every problem there was a solution and for every ambition there was a path to its achievement and this could be his, this new science, these ratios of life and growth. New ways pioneered, and unknown powers discovered, and the mysteries of creation unfolded. Expanding his capabilities in new directions. Building himself up. Growing stronger, climbing from the rut he’d fallen into. And then...

The prow of a ship, and the wide blue horizon, the sunlight on the waves. Lands untouched by civilization and civilizations of the uncivilized, to be united under his banner, a family to span the world, fingerprints on every continent on the globe. The greatest empire in recorded history.

He could imagine it, unfolding before him.

He could do that.

He could become that.

He could…

His breath caught as he paused his rotation of the globe, halfway across the world from where he’d started, with the names of the New World nations spelt out clear.

He could reclaim America.

The thought of his wayward colony sent a jolt through him. He swallowed, and the globe wobbled briefly with the involuntary tremble of his hand.

Blue flowers and storybooks. Cannons firing and words fired in anger. Two nations and Yorktown and the feeling of giving up, the taste of loss.

He was still an empire. He had won his last war. But looking at the map, that globe, all he could see were reminders of his failure. Lands taken by others and lands untaken by him. Lands that broke away, because of him and his weakness, his failure to act decisively, to do what was necessary. The blot of his defeat on history.

His fallibility.

The cracks in the control he’d fought for, over the colonies he now held.

You used to be so big.

His fingers brushed the map where once there lay the Thirteen Colonies.

He could…

For a moment he saw America’s grin as he shook his hand for a trade deal, ships between their borders laden with goods, and he caught a glimpse of it, the future that could be if he did nothing. But it was a fragile thing before that globe, and a grey one in the lamplight, unprofitable to the part of him that tallied loss and gain, untenable to the part of him that had already dared to look up and hope.

He thought of his people toiling in their factories. The rain, and the gutters it flowed into, and the children who played there. Tired faces. Rows of graves.

The magnitude of the choice he contemplated was great. The weight of all those small, ordinary tragedies was suffocating.

One did not simply want air, or even yearn for it.

Respiration was a necessity for survival.

The pixie alighted on his desk, wings glimmering in the lamplight, and she hissed something urgent in her tongue. Then there were more, a flock of them, on his head and shoulders, on the lamp, hovering in the air alongside the green rabbit that was his companion.

They did not like the numbers. The words. The diagrams. The means.

“But I need them,” he whispered, because he saw no other way but the one shining before him. Because he had caught a glimpse of the sun, and he could not let it go. “This is where the future lies, can’t you see?”

They were of the old world, and their view of the new one was narrow and fractured, too clear in some areas and obscured in others. It was only their nature to love the world for what it was, and not what it could be.

The world had changed before, and they had come to understand.

They would have to understand, in time.

A calm washed over England then, like fog off the sea, like the tide rolling in, cool and steady and implacable in its movement, focusing his thoughts, smoothing out his frown. It was the calm of one who had decided upon their course.

Blinking exhaustion from his eyes, he gently shooed the fairies off the papers.

“I can see it,” he told them, “quite clearly in fact,” to reassure them of his judgment.

“It will be all right,” he told them, to reassure them of the future.

Then, for respect of their long counsel, “Forgive me.”

It was only a matter of time.

♚

When the newspaper arrived at his doorstep, seasons later, there were children playing on the street beyond, singing, singing still.

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down...

One look at the headline, and the paper slipped from his numb fingers.

The King is dead.

Bird-like, time had flown; now it had flown away.

Long live the King.

He was not afraid.

London Bridge is falling...

There was only one direction for him to go.

Chapter Text

Mid-to-Late 19th Century
Canada West
Declaration of war by the Crown Empire

❧

Clouded skies and secret knowledge, yet it was snow, not rain, that stung his face as he hurried down the street. The winter chill bit through his coat; his steps crunched through drifts of white. A snowman waved at him from some resident’s yard, and England was at once charmed and peeved at the suggestion that anyone wearing merely a scarf in this weather could bear so sunny a smile.

In many ways, all was as he remembered, yet he knew if not for the storm he could turn and see the skeletal tree of the growing Academy, if not for the snow there might be dead men cleaning the streets.

In many ways, all was as he remembered, but for the changes of his own making.

The house he sought differed little from any other, sloped roof heavy with snowfall, plume of smoke rising from the chimney. Unlike certain nations, his colony wasn’t the type to have ostentatious tastes; still, he made his presence felt.

From around the dwelling, England heard the muted clucking of chickens. Skirting buried flowerbeds in the yard, he approached the front door, lifted his hand, and knocked.

Promptly enough it swung open, and Canada’s face appeared, eyebrows drawn together in bemusement. “Hello, who’s…” His eyes flew wide. “England?”

Canada ushered him inside, and England nodded his thanks as the door was closed and locked behind him, shutting out the winter weather.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” said Canada, as if in apology, flapping his hands helplessly at the snow on England’s shoulders. “I should’ve noticed. You didn’t have to come all the way here, it’s the middle of winter, I could’ve gone to meet you at the docks or—something.”

“Nonsense.” England removed his coat, and Canada reached out to take it and hang it up, frowning at the colour as he did. “A little snow will hardly kill me.”

Though truth be told, the chill lingered still. London’s skies had shed mourning rain like clockwork as autumn ceded to winter; here the skies spat ice and the winds had teeth, always catching him underdressed and by surprise on first arrival.

With all the lands he’d walked since he’d first set sail, and all the skies he’d seen, perhaps changes of climate should’ve ceased to faze him. Yet in some ways it was as if he had only just left, as if he had come directly here, as if here was the only destination that mattered.

He was ready.

He was.

“Come sit down,” said Canada, casting one last uneasy glance at his coat. “I’ll make some tea.”

Canada led him down a short hallway into the sitting room, where a fire blazed, mercifully, warm light dancing across the walls and the bookshelves flush against them. Cushioned chairs ringed a low table by the fire. In one chair slumbered a white bear cub; on the table lay a book open but facedown, ribbon peeking out from beneath.

“You shouldn’t treat a book that way,” chided England, “you’ll break its spine,” and Canada, flushing, rushed over to mark his place in the volume, close it, and place it cover-up on the table, before departing for the kitchen.

England took a seat, exhaling, trying to shake the cold from his bones. The fire crackled on its hearth as he looked around the room. Canada had done well with the place; the floor was swept, the books tidy on their shelves. Maps and paintings papered the walls; among them hung a single flag, a field of solid red with his own Union Jack tucked into the upper-left corner, cross visible even lacking wind to let it fly.

All as it had been, when he had last visited.

His eyes found the table, and the book that lay there: a yellowed tome of medical ethics, by Thomas Percival. Unease dragged cold fingers down his spine. Somehow the volume seemed out of place, an anomaly, a novelty, too old, too dry, too advanced in writing and mature in topic.

It was not the sort of book he had seen Canada read in the past.

It was the sort of book he imagined he’d have reason to read now.

In many ways, all was as he recalled, but for the changes of his own making.

Canada returned and seated himself across from England, scooping the bear into his lap. The colony too was little changed from his recollections; a touch taller, perhaps, but though mature enough in his behaviour, he still wore the childlike demeanour of one who looked out into the world and believed it would be kind.

“I started the water boiling,” he said. “It shouldn’t be long.”

“My thanks.” It was still cold, after all, though England began to suspect that the weather wasn’t fully to blame; perhaps it was more the fault of this land’s strangeness, or God forbid, his nerves.

“It’s no problem.” Canada gave him a little smile. It melted away as he said, “I know it’s been a while, but I don’t think I ever said it to you in person—I’m sorry about Wollstone.”

Some part of England ached at that. It was the oddest thing, because he hadn’t mourned the scientist, had hardly thought of him at all, because Wollstone had died not long before the former King, the rise of the new eclipsing his demise. Years and seas had passed without the sentiment of sorrow. Yet sitting all those years and seas away, with another nation to confirm the loss, England remembered the rain that never stopped falling, miracles by lamplight, all that Wollstone had accomplished, and all that he might’ve gone on to.

“Great minds come and go.” He blinked and looked away from Canada, towards the flickering fireplace. “And the world turns on.” Crossing one leg over the other, he carefully folded his hands on his knee. “It’s hardly the first time someone illustrious has perished. Wollstone left his mark, at least, which is more than most men can say.”

Quickly, he added, “And it has been a while,” because it had, and otherwise Canada might assume that—

Otherwise Canada might assume.

“I know,” said the colony.

The fire crackled.

A long silence, then a breath.

“I don’t know,” Canada murmured. “I’ve been thinking about Wollstone a lot lately. How they died. It must be the most terrible thing, to be killed by something you brought to life. Sometimes I think about how if they hadn’t found the ratios, they might still be alive, and I wonder if they regretted it, in the end. If they had time to at all.” An embarrassed laugh. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not a good topic to dwell on.”

“He changed the world in his life,” England said. “And people die as easily in obscurity as they do in fame. It would be a foolish thing to regret.” Canada’s words sat uneasily with him, nonetheless, and there was little more worth saying on the grim subject; turning back to face the colony, he changed it. “I suppose you must be wondering why I’m here.”

“I thought maybe it was something to do with the Academies,” Canada admitted. “It’s not that I’m not glad to see you, but I know you’ve been busy, and you usually write ahead before you visit. And there’s been all this new construction…” He hesitated, peering at England’s face, and the words tumbled out of him in a single breath, a waterfall, an avalanche. “Is it because of what I wrote to you about last fall?”

England gave him an odd look. “And what was it you wrote to me last fall?”

He regretted his words immediately; Canada flushed, almost seeming to fold in on himself, and stammered, “N-nothing. Nevermind.” He tried to smile, though it wobbled around the edges, and England was left with the nagging feeling that he had wronged or hurt or disappointed the colony, though he could not for the life of him remember how.

“Is construction progressing well?” he asked, in an attempt to move past the moment of awkwardness.

Canada nodded rapidly. “It’s—with the wood that grows by itself—it’s very fast. Everything is moving very fast.”

“Good news, then.”

“I know,” nodded Canada, but his arms were wrapped tight around his bear, and he sounded less as if he was relating a positive development and more as if he was acknowledging a terminal disease.

“Is something the matter?”

Canada’s eyes flickered to the book on the table and rested there for a long moment. “It’s—it’s silly. I had a nightmare, that’s all. I shouldn’t be so worried about it.” He shook his head. “I really am growing up rather slowly, aren’t I?”

“You shouldn’t put so much stock in Australia’s teasing,” England told him. “There’s nothing wrong with your current pace.”

“It’s silly,” Canada repeated. “I know the Academies are important.” He took a deep breath, loosening his grip on his bear, then looked back up at England. “Are they the reason you’re here, then? Or…” He bit his lip. “I’ve heard rumours…”

“The Academies are related,” confirmed England, “but not the direct cause. What have you heard?”

Canada shifted in his seat. He looked about, as if for eavesdroppers, then leaned forward.

“That you’re going to war,” he said.

England let the words roll over him, an ocean wave, leaving monsters beached upon the shore.

He said nothing.

He hardly dared breathe.

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Canada continued. “That the King is—different—and he wants more territory.” His fingers tapped a nervous pattern on his knee; his eyes were fixed on England’s face. “Is it true, then? Will there be a war?”

...graced by the presence of the rightful Lord King Adam, Emperor of the one hundred nations, bearer of the Crown, sword, and scales…

His monarchs were symbols, his monarchs were eras, they were the shifting of the tides. He had hated them and loved them; he could never afford indifference to them.

“The King is a first, I believe.” England laced his fingers together. “Of his name, and of his kind. Where that will lead us, I suppose we’ll see. In the short term, however, you’re correct.”

It was harder to speak the words than he’d anticipated. He knew their sounds, knew their meanings, but placed together they made a push down a path with no end in sight, a shrouded and perilous unknown. There were cracks hidden between the clean precision of ink and runes, ratios and knives. It wasn’t so terribly hard to lose oneself. To lose it all.

He did not want this war.

(He did not.)

He did not want this war, did not want its cost or the harm it would inflict, but in the affairs of nations, rarely was it a matter of wanting. It was a matter of interests, and futures, and what he could live with, and what he could not.

He knew who he was. He knew what he was.

He knew what he needed to become.

“Today I declare war on the United States of America,” he said, as if it was nothing, as if he was commenting on the weather.

It was everything, it was the mountain looming before him, it stole the air from his lungs and took the words from his mouth.

It felt like taking the first step off the edge of a cliff and swaying there, between safe ground and the fall, a breathless, imperfect equilibrium.

Canada blinked. “Sorry, pardon?”

“Today I declare war on the United States of America,” England repeated. The words came easier the second time, and he added, “You might be among the first to hear.”

Canada’s hand went to his mouth. “Again? Why?”

“You said it yourself.” England found himself unable to meet Canada’s eyes. “It is a matter of conquest. Of gain—or regain, I suppose. You can expect to expand your lands in the near future.”

Canada said nothing, only stared at him, wide-eyed and wordless, as if the ground had been pulled out from beneath him, as if he had woken from a dream, and all which had been familiar was now monstrous and strange. England waited for him to speak, to ask further questions, but nothing came but silence.

“Are you upset?” he asked, and immediately chided himself for doing so, because the colony quite obviously was.

Canada jolted, blinking, and pushed his glasses up his nose. All of a sudden he seemed present once more, though England hadn’t noticed him to be absent before. He opened his mouth to speak, appeared to think better of it, then forged ahead regardless.

“He’s my brother,” he said, as if that one word was all that was necessary, was all that mattered. “And I’m his too. And you’re my…”

He trailed off, seemingly unable to find the word, and the silence was punctuated by a staccato rapping, knuckles on wood, the sound of someone knocking on the front door. England felt the faintest thread of something, like a presence, like déjà vu—

He raised his eyebrows at Canada. “Expecting a guest?”

“No. I can’t think of who it could be.” The colony’s brows were drawn together once more. “The neighbours are nice, but I’m not that close to them, really, no one comes to visit except you and France and—”

Colour drained from his face, exsanguination, writing in reverse, like ink bleeding from a letter.

“Canada?”

“I’ll get the door,” he said, leaping from his seat, depositing his bear in his place, and then he was racing from the room, footsteps pattering down the hall, and he was gone.

❧

The handle was freezing cold beneath his fingers, and for a moment he gripped it, white-knuckled, clinging, an anchor line, a balancing act.

Dread chilled his skin like frost on leaves and his heart tapped out a frantic beat and he breathed, breathed, tried to breathe, but couldn’t find the air.

Today I declare war on—

The front door swung open easily when Canada pulled, oiled hinges, quiet as a sweet dream. A flurry of snowflakes flew at his face. One landed on the lens of his glasses, and he fumbled to brush it away, only succeeding in smearing his vision.

He recognized his visitor, anyways.

He couldn’t not. 

Outside, bundled in winter clothes, stood the United States of America, arm upraised to knock again, pink-cheeked and bespectacled and oh-so-familiar, like an echo, like a deadline, like the first cold breeze of a storm.

Canada saw the Academies rising in his mind’s eye and realized their purpose; he glimpsed the colour of England’s coat out the corner of his eye and prayed America would not notice. 

He knew the shape of this refrain, this melody, this history, tug-of-war, the warring brothers, ships across the pond, a pattern he had never been able (never dared) to break.

The cold hit him a moment after the recognition, and he gasped, stood aside, frantically waved America into the warmth of the house.

The southern nation let out a breath as he stepped over the threshold. He brushed the snow from his shoulders, stomped it off his boots, squinted through his fogging glasses. Canada saw the world consumed by winter white outside, felt the breeze on his face and the iron door handle freezing against his skin, and he thought of the fire at his hearth, the kettle in his kitchen.

But America was far too close, beneath the same roof as England, match and wick with oil soaked into the floorboards, only a hall and a brother and turn between them.

Canada shut the door behind America, then slipped around him and stepped into his path, barring his advance down the hall.

They faced each other. America had loosened his scarf, exposing his face. He had the same blue eyes as always, the same unruly tuft in his golden hair, the same bearing, the same brilliant smile. Canada searched his face for similarities and wondered how anyone ever mistook them for each other.

They stood nearly the same height. Nearly, thought Canada, and then, when did that happen?

He took breath for a greeting, but a question tumbled out instead, words stretched taut, the string of an instrument strained to snapping.

“What are you doing here?”

His voice didn’t sound like his own.

America grinned and spread his hands, eyes bright behind his clearing glasses. “Aw, can’t I visit my brother?”

It was such an America thing to say that it almost hurt to hear, that nothing had bearing on the worthiness of a trip but the purpose and the destination, not geography, not climate, not time, not politics. Canada first felt the familiarity like a steadying hand on his shoulder, like an anchor line, like stepping back an hour, a day, a decade, two centuries— 

“You can’t just arrive at people’s houses like that,” he protested, voice falling into a familiar cadence, and then he felt it like an ache, because he knew it wasn’t true.

The familiarity was a thing of peacetime, and they were no longer at peace.

America only smiled his bulletproof smile, not knowing. In that moment Canada saw with terrible clarity the divide between them, the gulf of an hour’s worth of time and knowledge. It was a familiar scene, America at his door demanding entry, but Canada thought not of surprise visits but of a home invasion, a cry for aid, of matches and bugle calls, red and reddened coats. Of silence, thick as snow, tense as a predator curled to strike.

The wish crystallized clear, like glass, like a bell:

He badly did not want to go to war.

It sang through his bones and he recognized it by feel, the tug-tug-tug of discontent, and then he was afraid, because it was only his wants that had changed, not the wisdom of having them.

“What,” said America, “are you gonna kick me out?”

His tone was light, joking, but the words formed like ice on Canada’s tongue, and for a bare moment he could taste it, the simplicity of the solution. Yes, you have to leave. This isn’t a good time. This is a really, really bad time, and you can’t be here right now, and I’m sorry. 

Ice to water, swallowed back down, cold enough to make him shiver. The shape of it was all wrong, ugly, cruel, another confrontation, a betrayal. An impossibility.

It was such a small problem, keeping England and America from each other’s throats, but it was at once a problem big enough to swamp him in impossibilities, send his thoughts chasing their tails, make it impossible for him to breathe easy.

He didn’t have much time.

Canada reached out and seized America’s elbow and blurted, “Promise me you won’t get into a fight.”

America gave him an odd look. “Who am I going to get into a fight with, your chickens?”

Canada felt his grip tightening and, though he could hardly hurt the other nation, tried to relax.

“America,” he said, “this is really important. You have to promise me you won’t—you won’t go out of your way to start a fight, here and now. Promise me you won’t do anything.”

“You don’t dictate my foreign policy, bro.” America peered at his features. “Hey, are you alright? You look really pale. Paler than usual, I mean. Is the old man being a jerk again and saying we can’t hang out? ‘Cause if so, I’ll—”

“Alfred.” The name rang odd to his ears, despite the ease with which it came to mind. America’s, but it wasn’t America, not really, only the part of him Canada thought might listen. “I have a guest over, just promise me you’ll try to be civil with them, please.” 

He paused, and then, with shaky challenge, added, “Unless, unless you think it’ll be too difficult for you—”

America held up his hands, tugging his arm from Canada’s grip in the process. “Okay, okay! I promise. Honestly, it’s like you don’t trust me or something.” He paused; Canada bit his tongue. “So, who’s around? Is it France?”

I wish—

Canada let out his breath. He shook his head.

“Eng—Britain?” America looked at him with sudden searching inquisition and he was pinned in place, like needles, like the beam of a magnifying glass, butterfly to corkboard. “You know we’ve settled our differences, right? I don’t get why you’d be so panicked about me getting in a fight with one of those Europeans…”

Canada couldn’t help the brief flicker of his eyes to the coat rack, and America followed his glance, tilting his head as he noticed what hung there, smile faltering at the incongruity.

“Wait, that looks like…”

It looked like something out of place, like a sore thumb, an anomaly, something that didn’t fit, something that fit too well. It looked like war, past and present and future, like the spectre of blood on the dawning horizon. It looked like a weight he could imagine around his shoulders, a set of duties to bind him to his course, his little choices slipping away, one by one, like stars in the morning sky, until none were left—

“That would be mine.” 

Canada knew the moment he heard that it wasn’t his voice, not America’s, not the way either of them used it, the accent and pitch and tone all wrong. His heart sank to his shoes.

There were only so many people it could be.

He turned.

England had his arms crossed over his chest, like swords to bar a path. He held himself ramrod straight, chin lifted, almost rooted, almost brittle, his feet planted just outside the sitting room. Faint firelight half-lit his right; a long shadow climbed the wall to his left. Caught in the wavering in-between, he looked more the nation than the person, at once too near and impossibly remote.

“You were correct,” he said, words filed with impeccable disdain. “It is, as you so succinctly put, ‘the old man.”

Canada spun back around to see America pave over his surprise with a smile, the substance of it altered for the paving, steel in the place of gold, brightness more like armour than the sun. He stuffed his hands into his pockets and aimed that smile over Canada’s shoulder.

“Crown Kingdom,” he said, tone light, casual, and the words went over too, like light through glass, like words through air. “Social call?”

Canada half-turned to catch England’s expression, saw him drawn too clearly through the clean right lens of his glasses, America’s face obscured by a smudge in his peripheral vision. Nearly, he had thought, nearly the same height, but they might as well have been giants, might as well have been on higher ground, enough distance to afford forgetfulness, afford indifference. Annoyance flickered and died in his throat, leaving only a small lump, a bitter residue, dread like frost on leaves. He took a step to the side, then another, until his back knocked against the wall, looked from nation to nation and saw only air between them, nothing at all to bar the smiles and words and glares, to stop them from picking each other to pieces, as if there had been nothing—

Canada looked from nation to nation, the set of the empire’s jaw, the squaring of America’s shoulders, air between them taut with tension, and he grasped for the words to set it right, to soothe that acrimony, smooth away that tension, delay that revelation.

It felt like reaching for the moon, like reaching through mud, like floundering beneath the weight of words already said and wars already waged. He could feel his hands pressed flat against the wall; he remembered past squabbles, familiar tableaus, America and England, England and France. His words stuck in his throat. He didn’t have might, or experience, or independence, no reasons for anyone to listen to him, only the patience to work towards them, and he was still waiting.

There was only so much he could do.

“There’s a kettle already on for tea,” he said, “but I could make some coffee too,” and surprised himself with the steadiness of his voice.

Neither replied, nor glanced his way. England’s expression was the tide coming in, was the sea freezing over, tiredness and irritation smoothing out into nothing at all.

“I have a message for you,” said the empire, voice stripped of inflection. He withdrew a small scroll of parchment from his pocket and tossed it to America, who caught it, one-handed, before holding it out at arm’s length for inspection, as if it might be poisonous.

Canada’s hand twitched upward, then fell just as quickly. America glanced from the scroll to him to England, smile flickering, sensing that some was amiss without knowing what.

Still not knowing.

“Don’t read it here, America.” Canada’s words fell like ash, like snow. “It isn’t good news, and this isn’t a good time or place. You should—you should go home. They’ll need you, soon.

America either ignored or failed to hear him. He broke the seal of the scroll and unrolled it, fumbling to hold it open. His eyes travelled over the words within.

Canada screwed his own eyes shut, then reopened them.

The paper crumpled as America’s grip tightened. He lifted his head to glare at England, eyes blazing, colour rising on his cheeks. “What is this?”

“War,” replied the empire, stiffly. “Is it not obvious?”

“What is it this time?” demanded America. “What are you trying to take from me?”

“It’s not taking,” said England, “to reclaim lost property.”

His voice still had that emotionless quality, and Canada thought, you don’t mean that, but it didn’t matter what he meant; the words were said, the knife twisted between ribs, and wounds didn’t bleed any less for the intent behind the stab.

 America stepped forward, hands fisted, message crumpled in one, and Canada did too, because in that moment he saw the blow like a telegraphed thing, like prophecy, like consequence, the wind-up, the explosion of motion, knuckles on skin, the impact, aftershock, shockwave.

Wait, he said, or maybe it was stop, or listen, or no words at all.

That was where it ended. That was where it began.

The blow never came. America’s shoulders, tensed in anger, relaxed. The thin line of his mouth smoothed out, until he wore a broad, easy smile, although his eyes remained hard and bright and dangerous. He released the paper he clutched, letting it fall to the floor, and kicked it in England’s direction.

When he laughed it was sharp-edged, like punctuation, like an explosion in miniature. “Ha! Guess I should’ve known, huh? Your Academies and your little secrets and your monster of a king. Here I was thinking you were over this, that you were someone I could actually work with, but you’re just the same. Nothing’s ever gonna be enough for you. You just keep taking, and taking, and taking.” He shook his head. “Well, you’re not taking anything of mine. I’m not going to let you.” 

England’s face had gone bloodless, and America pointed a finger at him, like accusation, like weaponpoint. “I’m never, ever going to be yours again. You want to bleed your people into the mud for it? My people will fight to defend what’s ours. You want everything to be like the way it was? Well, hate to break it to you, old man, but the world’s moved on. I won a war to become independent. If I have to beat you again to make you acknowledge that, then I will.”

He let his hand fall, breathing hard, then turned to Canada and stuck it out again, loosely, open-palmed, like a handshake, like an offering. “Are you still with him, this time?”

Canada stepped away from the wall. He turned to face America, again, the two of them, imperfect mirrors. His brother was flesh and blood, was a ghost, clear through one eye and smudged through the other. Canada looked to his feet, the way he shifted his weight; at his hand, suspended in midair; at the way his throat moved as he swallowed. In that moment he saw the America of the present day, and the America of the Revolution, and every America that had ever asked him, Are you going to be independent? Are you still on his side? Don’t you want to stand with me?”

He felt it again, stronger, that tug-tug-tug of discontent, like raised voices, telling him that something was wrong, like hands pulling at him, as if all he had to do was step forward, reach out—

Fear, a colder thing, rooting him in place, snowperson, skeletal tree. He felt England’s eyes burning into the back of his head, felt the seams all over his skin, a stitched-up creature with parts that didn’t match up, borders between West and East, island and island, barriers of language and culture and history. Sentiments stirred beneath that patchwork skin, testing the strength of the common ground holding it together, as if he was a thing of magnets and voltaic energy, as if all he had to do was move the wrong way and he would come flying into pieces.

He thought of how America had cracked right down the middle and how his people had bled to put him back together, how strong those welds had looked fresh-forged, how terribly they’d broken. He thought of America’s long, long shadow, dark enough to disappear in; he saw the cast of England’s face after Yorktown. He remembered letters in fall, flags on the wall, the bright spark of hope, the slow press of time.

I can do it, maybe...

Is your head a field of flowers?

Freedom was a word that tasted like blood, however long and hard he’d tried to keep the two separate. He couldn’t see the future America promised. It might as well have been sailing through a storm unanchored, stepping off the trail he’d marked for himself through dark woods without a lantern to light his way.

He knew what he was. He knew what he wasn’t.

He had patience, still, for a while longer, and there was so little else he could afford to lose.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s never as simple as you make it sound.”

And we’re not as alike as you’d like us to be.

He was still facing America, and in turning to do so the shape of the confrontation had changed. It had ceased to be America against England, with Canada caught in the middle; now America faced down two nations in a land that was not his own.

Canada thought America might be angry, then, and he was, but it was a brief thing, a flash in the pan, quickly burning out. He dropped his hand, and looked between Canada and England, and said, with a nod, “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

In that moment America slipped, in a thousand minute ways, shoulders slumping, face creasing, eyes shifting downward, like disarray after a sudden breeze through an opened window, and Canada saw, through that window, as he should’ve seen all along, that without his without his shiny cheer and shrugged-on confidence and righteous anger, all America looked was tired.

He wore it badly, because he wore it so rarely, because it didn’t fit, it wasn’t supposed to be, and that scared Canada more than anything.

“It’s not that I don’t care about you,” he blurted, because it was abruptly important that America know.

America laughed, again, but this time it was a friendlier sort of laugh, one than held humour rather than derision. Turning away from England, he walked up to his brother and punched him once, lightly, in the shoulder. “‘Course not.”

“Hey!”

America looked him in the eye. “Look, I dunno why you stick with him, but I believe in you, bro. Don’t let that jerk boss you around. Stand up for yourself. You can do whatever you want.”

 Canada shook his head, wordless, but felt himself smile.

America scoffed. “Pfft. You just gotta have faith in yourself. Look, heck with experience or whatever, get autonomy and figure out the other stuff as you go. Hey, it worked for me, right?”

And look how well that turned out—

All Canada could do was smile.

America made a rude gesture in England’s direction, then turned for the exit, rewrapping his scarf in sharp, jerky motions on his way out.

The door swung open when he pulled, easily, silently, like oiled hinges, like alienation. America paused on the threshold for a long moment, silhouetted in snow, between warmth and cold, family and the way home, an imperfect equilibrium.

He looked back. The gleam of his glasses hid his eyes. “Bye, Canada.”

“Stay safe, America,” replied Canada, softly enough that he wondered if his brother heard, but before he could repeat it, the door slammed behind America, and he was gone.

His smile slipped away in the silence after. He slumped against the wall, letting his breath out in a little huff.

He couldn’t put a finger to what he felt. His thoughts were noise, formless, disarray. He was brimful and overflowing with vying emotions, exasperation, worry, desperation, hurt, shock, too many for him to name, impulses pulling him in impossible directions.

Not sadness, particularly, but his eyes stung, and he blinked hard, once, twice, trying to clear the feeling before it turned into tears.

“I hate family fighting,” he said.

A sharp whistle issued from the direction of the kitchen. The kettle had come to boil.

☙

He hurried past houses and streets, bundled tight in his coat, squinting through the snow, catching glimpses of rooftops, trees, a bright flash of fabric, a waving hand. His feet sank deep into the drifts uncleared by carriages or pedestrians, a trail of footprints stretching out behind him. He couldn’t find the footprints he’d left on his journey in the opposite direction.

Somehow it felt colder leaving than it had arriving.

The snow stung where it landed on the bare skin of his face, in the narrow gap between hood and scarf. Vividly America saw the smudge on the lens of Canada’s glasses, the look in his eyes as he peered past it, not quite focused.

His own glasses were freezing against his skin, heavy as armour, cold as hindsight. The voices of his people chorused in his ears, north, south, east, west, harmonious and discordant by turn. Something in his bones still knew the feel of war footing, the shift in balance, all the workings of his economy and the lives of every person aligned towards a singular goal.

He remembered it so clearly it hurt, and he wondered for a moment how the older nations could bear it, time and time again, century after century, death after loss after tear, without falling apart—

One hand clenched into a fist.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Anger was a push inside him, the blaze of a furnace, the spark of a musket, propelling him forward, past his knowledge of the cost.

Stay safe, said Canada in his mind, but Canada wasn’t independent. Canada didn’t have to fight his own battles, defend his own borders. It was easy for him to call for peace. Canada grew a garden and made tea and balked at the sight of blood, as if he’d never killed, as if he’d never warred when it suited him—

Promise me, said Canada, fingers at his elbow, smiling as he shook his head, the worry in his eyes behind smudged glasses, near and at once very far.

And he remembered a time when he had gone to Canada’s house and Canada had shown him the chickens in the yard, how he’d chased an orange hen in circles and scooped it into his arms and clucked until its struggles calmed, and then passed it to America, as easily as he might’ve passed the butter, easy as smiling. America remembered a moment of singular focus, in which there had been no wars past or future, no currents of trade to navigate, no vitriol of politics, only him and the living, breathing creature in the circle of his arms, and then he had let it go.

(He’d had a pet once. Had. At least once. He was sure of it.)

The memory stuck in his mind and looped back on itself, feathers on the ground, high summer sun, again, again, and he couldn’t put a finger to why, except perhaps that for a moment he’d caught a glimpse into Canada’s life, and it hadn’t been bad, precisely, but it hadn’t been his, he didn’t want it to be his.

He’d chosen between peace and liberty before, and he chose liberty. Every time, he chose liberty.

North. East. South. West. A nation and a chorus. He was the United States of America, all the pieces of him moving in unison, and beneath his anger lay hope, lay a bone-deep faith in his people, the certainty that they would see him through to the end, that this too would pass. That they could bear it between them, whatever the price to make it there.

Whatever it took, from them, from him.

He would win.

(He would.)

The snow was a blanket smothering sound, was fog obscuring vision. America saw no others as he pressed forward, and he entertained the fanciful thought that perhaps there was no one else. Perhaps there was only a traveller from across the border, returning home after a visit to his brother.

He listened for carols, because it was the season, but heard only silence, and so, glasses heavy on his face, stumbling on unseen obstacles, he began to hum his own.

Still through the cloven skies they come, with peaceful wings unfurled,

And still their heavenly music floats

O'er all the weary world…

The snow covered up his footprints behind him, and he went home, where they would need him soon.

❧

Memories. Doubts. History. Misgivings. All the things he’d chosen to ignore, everything he’d pushed beneath the surface to drown, and now they were rising back up, catching him in their jaws, like monsters he couldn’t quite slay. Like he was a ship charting off-course, drifting, struggling not to capsize. England mouthed the words he’d spoken under his breath, message, war, property, and couldn’t quite recall why or how he’d decided to voice them, or if it had been wisely done.

He took another sip of his still-steaming tea, and the scalding heat helped ground him, helped remind him who and where and what he was.

All that mattered was that he had spoken the words. Diplomacy had little meaning but as an avenue to demand surrender. Consequences were only inevitable.

America’s words rattled around his head like bullets, but away from the nation they seemed less like promises and more like bluster, to be swept away with time and overbearing force.

It was done. It was enough.

It would have to be enough.

Across the table Canada too brooded in silence, fingers wrapped around his teacup, as if his hands were cold. There was a sombre cast to his face, and England couldn’t help but compare him to the child with the too-big jacket in 1813, crying over burnt fingers from York, and the one who’d handed England the matchbox after, eyes bright, believing always that the tide was still in their favour.

It was something he’d always had difficulty recognizing, the growth of colonies.

Canada caught him looking and smiled, a reassuring thing, an expression that said everything is and will be okay. In that moment he looked every bit still the child, still capable of being enamoured by glory and righteousness and patriotic spirit, still optimistic, all the things that led him to war and which war had not taken away.

Had England not seen his face a moment earlier, he would not have assumed the smile to be anything but natural.

It bothered him that Canada could fool him with such ease, and he wondered how often he’d done it, which smiles had been genuine and which had been masks pulled on to appease an empire.

“I apologize for putting you in a difficult position,” England said.

Thank you, he thought, but the words stuck in his throat. An insistent part of him told him that they weren’t owed, not really.

Not to a colony.

“It’s all right,” said Canada. He took a careful sip of tea. “Siblings fight all the time, don’t they?”

His voice lilted over the don’t they, as if uncertain.

“Mine certainly do,” muttered England. “Though I can hardly recommend them as an example of good behaviour.”

Canada smiled again, but said nothing, only looked down into his tea as if attempting to divine the future in the leaves.

“If you’d prefer not to fight your brother...” began England, with some guilt.

Canada’s eyes went to the flag on the wall, Red Ensign in bloody glory, and for in the space of a blink his smile slipped. In that moment England had a glimmer of understanding that masks weren’t such easy things to wear, that it wasn’t as simple as picking a face and putting on, that they stuck, or fell, or chafed, or for, Canada, cracked along their fault lines into shards.

“Everything I have is yours,” the colony said. “I owe you too much to say.”

It sounded less like a reassurance and more like a rebuttal, a correction, or, in the strained tone of Canada’s voice, a worry.

Then he looked away from the flag, and met England’s eyes, and smiled a third time.

“It’s all right,” he repeated. “I wish you wouldn’t go to war. I don’t… I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. But I’ll support you, if there’s… if you’re really sure that this is what you have to do. I’ll still be here.”

This time England did manage to say “Thank you”, although the words came out softer than he would’ve liked, and he wondered at how young Canada still was, that he did not know: one could become accustomed to anything. To deaths, to war, to enmities, to dead walking the streets; all it took was time. Generations adapted.

Canada nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching, but said nothing in reply. England was paying close enough attention then to notice his eyes unfocusing, a frown forming as some thought captured his awareness. He was paying close enough attention to notice when Canada ceased to be wholly there.

The colony muttered something under his breath, a fluid thing that sounded like French, and he pressed one hand to one ear, as if checking his hearing, as if shutting out a sound.

Questions hovered on the tip of England’s tongue. He could demand an honest answer, could push and prod until he found the truth, some piece of insight he could not glean from observation, some understanding he could use to bring everything back into accord. Perhaps that was the right thing to do. The responsible thing to do.

But Canada had given him his loyalty, and he could ask for nothing more.

England sipped his tea. The fire crackled. He thought of America’s laugh, sharp with contempt and derision. He thought of the slam of the door. He thought of his stitched in rank and file, the colour of blood on black fabric. He thought of grey skies and salt breeze, deep ocean and cliff ledges, and across from him Canada thought his own thoughts, whatever they might have been.

They lost themselves to the things in their heads, until the tea grew cold.

Chapter Text

Mid-to-Late 19th Century
North America, numerous locations
The Second War of American Independence

❧

A man woke from a dream.

Like a drowner struggling for the surface, he gasped into awareness, sucking down lungfuls of air. His heart pounded in his ears. In the shapes of the shadows and the corners of the room he saw grasping hands, grinning mouths, heard laughter high and cold, a roomful of enemies.

The man fumbled for the curtains of the nearest window, pulled them aside.

Saw the moon floating high and sickle in an inkwell sky.

It was just past midnight.

Gradually, his breathing calmed. His heartbeat settled.

He looked around the room, searching the shadows and corners for demons and monsters.

Saw only shadows. Only corners.

He was alone.

The man drew the curtain back over the window, shutting out the light, then lay his head back down on his pillow, rolled over in his bed, and returned to uneasy sleep.

❧

France,
  I trust that by the time this letter reaches your doorstep, the news already will have. I trust also that the boy will have made overtures and requested your aid. If any part of you is contemplating the prospect, then I hope a reminder of what transpired the last time around will put a stop to that. In short, you bankrupted yourself to spite me, and received nothing in return.
  If you had any sense at all, you’d direct your attention to the troubles brewing in your borders, and not the ones across the sea. If you had no sense—and I find it frighteningly plausible that you may not—then I invite you to relive the consequences. I’m sure it would give me a good chuckle.
  Cheers,
  The Crown Kingdom

❧ 

The ground was slippery beneath his feet and the wood of the musket between his fingers and England couldn’t help but think of the Revolution, with every shot fired, every city taken, every battle, every step forward and step back, fire spooking the stitched and stitched spooking the soldiers, cold setting in with teeth, cities gained and lost. He thought of New York Harbour and hated the sound of the name, thought of Saratoga and Fort York. It was a story, but it ended, it always ended in the same place.

He didn’t shoot. He could not shoot.

He slipped in the snow and knocked shoulders with the ranks of the dead, with the living, and couldn’t help but imagine the shape of this campaign, of this war, in from the east and the north, leaping cities like hopscotch, trail of bodies before and behind, until, until—

Weapon in his hands. Finger on the trigger.

It was like a story. It always ended in the same place.

He had yet to encounter America on the field.

❧

To the United States of America,
  Enclosed are terms for a full surrender on your part. I am willing to grant you autonomy, to a certain extent, in exchange for a less costly war. Part and parcel are the deferral of any elected body to the nobility and agreement to accept Crown oversight over such processes.
  Make no mistake: while a prolonged war would cost me, it is well within my capabilities to bear. You, on the other hand, are possessed of a more limited set of resources. In that light, I recommend that you consider my terms and your options.
  Or I suppose you could throw this into the fire, or the sea, or to the winds. Heaven knows what new means you’ll find of destroying what I send you.
  Regards,
  The Crown Kingdom

To the Province of Canada,
  You have been given charge of the northern campaign. I trust that you will use it well.
  —The Crown Kingdom

❧

His fingers picked, picked, picked at the embroidery on his sleeve, teasing apart the threads, pulling them out and letting them fall, thin red lines clinging to his jacket, bright against the weathered wooden planks of the dock—

Canada snatched his hand away and curled it into a fist.

He felt it even so, the emblem of the crown stitched on his uniform. It chafed.

The sun was rising over the harbour, tinting the sky the faint pink of blood in water. His feet hung over the edge of the dock, swinging over the chill steel waves. In the distance he saw the silhouettes of ships, tiny, like ants, like toys, to be moved about and placed at a child’s whim.

The letter burned in his pocket.

Canada closed his eyes. In the darkness he saw a map, saw lines of red, saw possibilities and angles. Saw the beginnings of a plan he could stitch together, with familiarity as his blueprint, the pattern drawn from years and years of peering over the fence at his southward neighbour, secrets whispered between thin walls by children, ugly truths shouted across the battlefield, rough between his fingers as he wove them into a trick, a trap, a closing net, a set of chains—

He opened his eyes.

The jacket that had once seemed so big was now too tight around his shoulders. He filled his lungs with the brisk seaside air and he was there, just him, filling the space, feeling with a sudden clarity the edges of his borders, the weight of his people, his name, his footprint, his history—

—his uniform with the crown stitched on the sleeve.

Oh, he thought, and remembered. So this is war.

His fingers itched. He reached for a pencil.

☙

Dear America,
  I know that Britain’s written to you already. I think I can guess what your response was. I don’t know if I can persuade you any better than him—I don’t know if anything could persuade you at all—but I’ll try. I know I can try, at least.
  You must’ve seen the stitched by now. You’ve seen how many of them there are. Death is cheap in battle, it shouldn’t be but it is, and it doesn’t take a lot to make a soldier from a corpse. It doesn’t take a lot to fix a soldier that’s broken. It’s so, so easy for the Crown to fill up his ranks with bodies. It’s so much harder for you. And the harder it gets for you, the easier it becomes for him.
  There must be people on your side who’ve run the numbers, who’ve seen this. This isn’t a war you can win, not without those numbers, not without the Academy. I think you see enough that you know it, even if it’s easier to tell yourself you don’t. You’re fighting a losing battle, and the longer you fight, the more it will cost.
  I’m guessing that to you, surrender’s not an option. You’re so stubborn you won’t even consider it. But once you aren’t fighting for victory, you’re fighting for pride, and pride only gets people killed. So please put your pride aside, and write back to him. Negotiate for better terms, if you need them. If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for your people.
  Winter’s here. It’s wishful thinking to think that anything will be over by Christmas, or New Year’s, but maybe we can make February, we can end the war before spring flowers are here.
  Not that it will
  Couldn’t we do that?
  Please take care,
  Canada

Matthew,
  Use a name that won’t weird out the common man, yeah? Not all of us are snow hermits, and it’s a weird thing to explain when you have people looking over your shoulder and snooping through your mail.
  Anyways, nice try, but no dice. I know Britain’s strategy. Sweep in with overwhelming force, offer generous terms. He hasn’t changed. I’ve seen this game before, and I’m not playing it. We settle on equal footing, or not at all.
  I know what endgame I can live with. I know what I can live with on the way there. Don’t tell me that I’m fighting for pride, okay? You have no idea what I’m fighting for.
  You’re so certain that I’ll lose, but no one gets to play the prophet in war. Britain has overwhelming force. So what? I’ve heard that song before, too. There’s more to war than manpower. I have letters I’m waiting for replies to. I’m figuring out how everything works on your end, getting a sense of the score, testing things out to see what works and what doesn’t. I’m planning and creating and inventing. I have a lot more chips on the table in this game, and I’m giving it my all.
  And the thing is, you were right. I’m not like you, Matt. I believe in miracles. I believe that even if the world’s lined up against you and the odds are telling you to quit and the only history at your back is the one you’re writing, there’s still a chance, if you work and struggle and sweat and bleed, that you can overcome all that, and come out with what you were fighting for at the other end.
  The funny thing is, I used to think you believed that too.
  Stitched can’t fight a war by themselves. If my people are dying, then yours are too. And neither for a war they wanted. Think about that for a bit, eh?
  Merry Christmas from your brother,
  Alfred F Jones

❧

France’s reply had letters scrawled askew across the wine-stained paper, an incoherent jumble of English and French. Squinting through guttering lamplight and dawn’s pale glow, England made out Rome, Revolution, ruine, and decided that France was either once again mad or drunker than he had ever seen him.

(Or maybe, maybe there was a thread of sense, buried in those lines, too deep for him to see, or he did see it, but turned away, like France had plucked his heart from his chest and shoved it before his face in its ugly crimson glory—)

England tossed the letter back onto his desk. The distinction mattered not. Mad or drunk, there would be no France to bail a rebellious colony out, because France would be headless once more before the decade was up. France had parliaments and emperors, consuls and conventions, a parade of governments vying for some ribbon, some gold, a measure of control. England had only his Crown.

In the early light streaming through the window, the parchment of the letter was the same rosy pink as the sky. A cloud of birds rose into the air, dark and raucous. Somewhere a bugle call began, the brassy morning-song that jarred men from their sleep and dreams. England rubbed his own eyes, blinked and pulled his hands away, remembered the weight of a musket across them, clearly enough that he could feel it.

No France’s helping hand, no Spain toasting to Britain’s downfall and calling it freedom, no Dutch Republic with holds laden with weapons. Wollstone’s ratios were his crown and scepter, his cross and sword.

(His finger hovered over the trigger).

He felt. Like the sun on his skin. The wills of his own soldiers. The strength of his own stitched. The beat of his own heart.

(No one at his back but rain.)

Were the Crown Empire to lose, there would be none to blame but himself.

❧

Winter ceded to spring, and the rain came down in showers, miring stitched and soldier alike in mud. The rain came down, and the dead shorted out, and poisons bubbled in laboratories.

Winter ceded to spring, and America set mines beneath the skin of his land, clear-burned acres of field, collapsed narrow passes, built larger cannons, faster guns, a thousand scratches on a foe that bled so very little.

Winter ceded to spring. The war dragged on.

☙

Alfred,
  Sometimes your all isn’t good enough, okay? You can try and try and try. That doesn’t mean what you try has to work.
  The Crown can’t accept this stalemate. Something has to give soon. And you know he isn’t ever going to give.
  You told me that you were planning and inventing and creating. You have to know the Academy is too. Every day you buy for yourself, with your fires and your weapons, you buy for them as well. Whatever the things you’re seeing now, the experiments, there’ll be something worse in a month or two or three. There’ll be more.
  Even I don’t
  I’m telling you this because I wish you’d take me more seriously, that it isn’t the Revolutionary War anymore, or even 1812. You’re not the only one who’s gotten stronger. In a way, the Crown’s been ruling the world since the twenties, and war’s changed so quickly since then. I know without seeing that no one you’ve written to has sent you a good reply. If you’re planning a war, you can’t afford to look away from facts like that. You can’t replace them with dreams and ideals.
  You said you knew what you could live with. What matters is that you live.
  I don’t completely understand why it’s so terrible to you, being a colony, or having Academies, or answering to anyone else. But there are a lot of things I don’t understand. You asked me to rebel for years and never changed my mind, because words can’t change the world like that. I think I could ask you to surrender for just as long and it would change even less.
  I know I can’t convince you. I just wish you’d do anything but fight this out until you break, until you’re hurt badly enough that you can’t anymore. I wish we could stop fighting.
  If you won’t compromise, then at least stay alive, okay?
  Just know what you can bear, and survive.
  Take care,
  Matthew

Matt,
  Don’t count me out yet.
  And England isn’t gonna kill me.
  —Al

Alfred,
  There was a time I would’ve
  I think you do enough counting for the both of us.
  I hope you’re right.
  —Matthew

☙

Winter ceded to spring, and the flowers bloomed, but he was far from home, too far to sow the seeds or pull the weeds or water when the rain was sparse. America set fire to his own land and Canada curled his fingers together, remembered Fort York.

He sat perched high in the branches of a tree, fingers of one hand curled around the bough that held his weight, other palm braced against the trunk, steadying him as he looked down on the tents below. It was spring, and the soldiers had made camp not far from the border, in a clearing ringed by slender trees, near a stream that whispered as it ran. A day behind them lay a train station, steam and whistles and the screech of metal on metal; days ahead lay the front lines of the war.

Yesterday and tomorrow and today, but Canada felt the farthest from today, as he caught the shadows of leaves in the corner of his eye, sunlight off the stream below as it ran into the forest, history on his mind, and without buildings or trains to set the date he was unmoored, drifting, pages of the book turning back, until he was a child again.

“Let’s play hide and seek!”

He remembered.

His coat pinched uncomfortably around his shoulders, and he shucked it off, draping it over the branch beside him, a flag of red fabric. Without the weight, it was easier to breathe.

Without the weight, it was harder, to remember what he was supposed to be, supposed to do, to look forward and tell himself that he could place his steps without faltering, one after the other, he could keep crossing borders like nothing, cross line after line after line, he could —

Generals discoursed in their tents, desks unfolded from travel, and he heard their voices, tried to hold onto them, but from his perch above they seemed small and faraway, unreal.

Leaves stirred, at the edge of his vision. His focus frayed like a tattered coat.

“You can hide first!”

Looking around made it harder, when his eyes caught on the trees and he remembered their forms a century or more previous, how tall they’d looked from younger eyes, how deep and inviting the shadows between them. Looking around made him smaller, as if he was still the height of England’s knee, and he had played in this clearing, once upon a time, smiled and climbed those trees, almost drowned in that stream, more than a century previous, when he was a child, and there had been no national border, only British North America, only the two of them—

He remembered.

His fingers itched.

...failure to thrive…

Leaves rustled. Water whispered over stones. A sound was coming unwoven from them, a new thread, filtering into his awareness, spooling into voices, syllables, words.

...did you see that?...

A distant murmuring, growing closer.

…came out of nowhere...

Canada’s alarm was mild and brief: they were his people. It was safe.

Is it?

...potential…

Frowning, he strained his ears to listen, but caught no banter, none of the casual conversation he might’ve expected, only technical discussions and practical matters, every voice steeped in exhaustion.

...adjust the fourth ratio…

...these are heavy…

He saw soldiers pass by through the branches below, limping back to camp in a flow, a river, with slumped shoulders and stretchers held between them, coats bright and bloody against the grass. Some were held up, legs bound or splinted, injured limbs pressed against bodies, and others were led along as they stared blankly ahead, at some battlefield that never disappeared.

Canada’s hand tightened on the branch as bodies were laid out in rows.

Too many bodies.

America’s presence was abruptly overpowering, as if his brother was leaning on him, peering over his shoulder. Blue coats, among the red. Give them back, demanded the America of his imagination. Look what you’ve done.

There’ll be something worse in a month or two or three, Canada had written, like prophecy.

What happened?

Bodies. Injured in ways that weren’t musket ball or bayonet wound, bomb or fist. Claws and teeth and acid.

Their faces, like faces blurring through his mind as he reached for his people, those of the old, and of the too, too young.

There was a time he would’ve cried to see them. There was a time they would’ve stolen his breaths. There was a time he would’ve rushed back to England (France), sniffling, eyes huge with new horror, fix it, fix it, and they would’ve, they would’ve—

But the new had become the old, and he had grown up, like a nations did when they were watered with blood, leafing out crimson. His heart ached to see the faces, but it couldn’t reach across the distance, couldn’t get past the colour of a coat that wasn’t his own. If it bled, it was only over his own hands.

Remember?

This is what it means to war.

Faces. Looking up at the sky. The last thing they’d ever see still caught in their eyes.

His gaze was drawn to the face of a blue-coated soldier with blond hair and broken glasses.

It’s not America, he reminded himself. It wasn’t America. He listed the ways until the page overflowed. The chin was too harsh. The nose was too long. The hair the wrong style. Too tall of a forehead. Too frightened an expression. He had a list of reasons and none of it mattered. Dull-coated doctors were gathering the stretchers. He was sitting in a tree and he was watching it happen.

Something itched. It felt like eyes looking over his shoulder, fixed on the back of his neck. It felt like judgment.

Eyes aimed upward at the sky.

Are you there?

No.

Down below.

Canada looked down, but caught nothing through the branches, and so he grabbed his coat and scrambled down from the tree, hands against bark, foot after foot and branch after branch after another, until he landed on solid ground once more with a thump.

The woodland trees grew tall and thick. All he could see between their trunks was dappled sunlight. Water burbled. Leaves rustled.

An itch.

A tug.

“...America?”

His voice came out like a whisper.

Twigs cracked, deeper in the forest.

Canada took a step after the sound, then another, venturing into the trees, footfalls soundless in the leaf cover. Leaves brushed against his face as he pushed branches aside. His path traced the gentle curve of the stream.

“America?” he called, again.

A branch snapped, somewhere in that wood, and someone gasped, a sound half-breath, half-sob. Canada heard a splash and broke into a jog.

“America!”

The stream curved sharply; his path didn’t. Canada skidded down the bank and stumbled into the shallows. Downstream, a great log tumbled away on the current.

Across, a flash of movement.

Canada’s feet splashed through the water. He made it a third of the way across the stream before the current grew deep and swift enough that he feared for his footing. Throwing his arms out for balance, he searched the trees and found only shadows. Only light.

He was a string stretched taut across the water, and he couldn’t stretch to the other side.

Leaves crunched. The string yanked, snapped. Canada lifted his foot for another step forward but the current surged, threatening to unroot him, and he hastily planted it back in the streambed, remembering water flooding his lungs some long-ago day.

Then there was no one there that he could feel anymore, above or below or across, no sense of presence, no itch or tug, no eyes, only footsteps, the sound or echo of them, one after the other, running.

Sunlight poured down through the leaves.

He sat curled up in the depths of a dense bush, pricked by stray twigs, leaves tangling into his hair. They rustled when he moved, so he didn’t, only sat there, arms hugging his knees, still but for his breaths.

He heard America’s footsteps, quick at first as he ran, then slowing, heavier as he tromped around the forest, looking, then quicker again, as he decided that there was nothing to be found there, and moved on—

“Canada? Canada, come out, let’s play something else, I’m bored…”

America could never find him.

“Canada…”

America never gave up.

“Can you even hear me?”

America got bored, and when he got bored he would call for Canada to come out, and pull him into some other game. But America was clever, and when he saw Canada, before the beginning of the next game, he would say “Found you!”, as if he had really found him, as if he really could find him, and he would laugh, as if it was all a joke. America always had to have the last word.

America was clever, but Canada was cleverer. If he stayed in the bush with twigs digging into his skin and leaves in his hair, if he stayed still, so the leaves didn’t rustle and the twigs didn’t break, then he was invisible, and silent, and America would never find him.

If America couldn’t find him, America couldn’t win. And if he couldn’t win, he would have to admit that he had lost.

“Are you there?”

Canada stayed where he was, breathing, and doing little else.

The sun moved across the sky.

America did not reply.

No one could afford to lose.

He was alone.

He remembered.

❧

To the United States of America,

England’s pen stuttered on the paper. A scream broke the air, another, another, somewhere beyond, in the infirmary where the doctors worked, or from some far-off battlefield, or in the confines of his own mind, echoing as long as history.

To the United States of America,

Inkblots stained the paper. No words.

There was no resolution.

❧

Ah, my dear Angleterre,
  You did so always have the habit of winning the battle and losing the war.
  Tell me, has he written back to you yet?
  Love from belle Paris
P.-S. Mathieu does not seem to be receiving my letters. Please do remind him to trim his roses. They become horribly overgrown at times, and the thorns are quite vicious.

Hey, Canada,
  If you were telling the truth about not wanting to fight me, then now would be a great time to prove it.
  Do it for your people, huh?
  —America

❧

The fronts were moving, at last, after weeks or months of stalemate, fire and water and mud, steel against flesh. The front was moving, corpses to corpses, front to front. All that was comfort.

All that was comfort, yet all he felt was dread.

They moved in the rain, through mist pale and thick, on foot, on horses, on creatures and vehicles. An ache was settling in the Crown Kingdom’s bones, the ache of strain day after night after day, the ache of war. If he closed his eyes he could imagine any other battlefield, Seven Years or Napoleonic or the Revolution, some spring or autumn or winter of downpour and struggle. Old wounds twinged and new ones burned.

If he moved then he could bear it, like rain off his skin, soaking into his coat. If he moved then he had direction, had momentum, had a course that he was charting. If he moved, then that pain was in service to a goal.

If the price was right, then he could pay it. If he marked time, then he could remember that behind the fog lay the sun, and beyond the horizon lay the world entire.

Empires were not born to surrender.

With the clouds overhead and haze in every direction, it was impossible to tell how long they had been marching, whether it was still morning, or past noon, or even later, falling off towards the evening. Through the mist he saw horses in dark raincoats, hooded figures of black-coated doctors, the muzzles of cannons, trees with branches reaching for the sky. Little beyond but pale grey void, and what he could see was warped by the water, darkened and twisted and bleak.

Voices whispered, and promise of the future was mirage in the face of the present.

England’s feet made footprints in ashes and burned growth, marks quickly wiped away by rain. The drops were cold on the back of his neck. His footing slipped. They were moving forward.

He was moving forward, yet at times he felt as if he was moving towards a fall, towards the edge of cliff. He couldn’t see the way forward, he couldn’t see the other side. Nothing but mist and grey, and at times a figure too familiar, the tilt of a head, echo of a voice among the rainfall, and he knew, he knew that weapons were meant to be used—

Carts and horses. Hoods and shadows. The long, slow trudge of a journey he could not afford to stop making.

He could not afford to lose the war.

He couldn’t imagine what it would mean. What it would be like to reckon with the cost, and what it would knock askew in his eyes, for all they had done to be have been for nothing, for ashes. He never, ever wanted to know.

There was only one way forward that he could see.

The rain was cold on his face. In the haze of mist he saw figures. Saw a face. Saw an enemy.

He would have to be able to do anything.

Lines full of opponents, and only one that mattered.

He would have to be able to do something.

War rested heavy on his bones, and there was no respite, there would never be.

He would have to be able to—

A bird screamed overhead, to the rumble of distant thunder, and the sound resolved itself into words, into accusation, into mercy, mercy, fall and burn, leave and never return.

It was impossible to imagine.

❧

To the United States of America,
  I once again enclose terms of surrender. As the progress of the war has seemed not to your favour, I hope that you will make a calm and clear-headed assessment as to what will best benefit your land and populace.
  In any case, I expect to encounter you sooner or later. It is entirely in your hands whether this is on the field of battle or under terms of truce.
  Regards,
  the Crown Kingdom

❧

“Pass me the scalpel.”

Canada drew the tool from the open kit on the stool before him and handed it to the grey-coated doctor, who stood over a young man lying prone on a steel table. White drapes separated them from the rest of the field hospital. He glimpsed blood and flesh, indistinct, before he looked away.

Coward.

He breathed through his mouth, once, twice, steady.

“Pliers.”

Canada passed the pliers with one hand, keeping the other poised over the medical kit, ready to provide whatever was asked of him. This time he kept his eyes fixed downwards on his hand, at the tools. Not looking upward. Not ahead.

(He couldn’t help but look, anyways, at a surgeon’s work, at a limb cut open.)

You did this.

He’s yours.

Oblivion, bleeding, like ink in water.

“Syringe.”

Canada’s hand brushed the surgeon’s glove as he passed the syringe, and he withdrew it to find blood congealed on his fingers, bright red and sticky. Instead of wiping the liquid away, he found himself studying it, noting hue and viscosity with a distant, clinical sort of fascination.

Look.

Isn’t this what you wanted?

“Aqua verna.”

A little green bottle, the label hand-written. Canada reached for it, then paused mid-motion, frowning.

“Aqua nuciferum?”

“Aqua verna.”

The doctor’s voice was impatient, but Canada’s hand still hesitated over the bottle, stayed by memories of other doctors, other surgeries. “That’s not for medical use.”

“That’s not for you to decide, boy.”

Smears of red swam over his fingers. In the reflection of green bottle-glass Canada saw dark fabric, glass tanks, lab notes in ruinous scrawl. “It’s for making—” He bit his tongue. “It causes mutations. Makes cells grow too fast, makes them change. If you have the clotting powder and the aqua nucifera, then why would—don’t you need—”

“Just pass it.”

No, thought a part of Canada, but it was a small part, outweighed by the rest of him that recognized the folly of arguing in a hospital, with a medical professional, in the middle of a surgery. He held out the bottle, carefully, as if it was an egg, and the doctor snatched it from his hand, muttering something harsh under his breath.

Tubes moved, in the corner of his vision.

“The usage is experimental,” explained the doctor, terse, the loose ends of words clipped away. “Cell growth is facilitated, recovery is accelerated, with some side effects. The current aim is to take log of those side effects. The standard subject is male. This age. Avulsion to an extremity.”

Like with three simple descriptors, you could clip-clip your way to the heart of a person.

“Did you ask him?”

“What?”

Canada looked up at the back of the doctor’s head, at blond hair curling. “Ask him. If he wanted to be—experimented on.”

“He arrived unconscious.”

“But if you—”

“I’m a doctor. My job is to return soldiers to fighting condition and find ways to expedite that process, not fuss about their feelings.”

“That’s not okay,” said Canada.

The doctor looked at him. His gaze was the pressure of the sky before a storm, that time when birds flew low. . “What was that?”

Canada swallowed. “You’re supposed to—doctors are supposed to ask.”

The doctor studied him for a long moment. Canada felt the weight of that disapproval settle on his shoulders, like the sky, like snow, like hands, and he didn’t squirm, not an inch, wondered if that was self-control or fear’s cold do not dare.

“Look,” the doctor said, “maybe you should take a walk. I can manage by myself.”

The chill in his tone made it clear the suggestion wasn’t much of a suggestion at all. Still, Canada lingered. “I—”

“Leave.”

Don’t interrupt me, thought Canada, but the words were very far from his mouth. The doctor’s hands were gloved in blood. A man lay cut open on the steel table, incision gaping open to the air. Don’t interrupt me, but his words felt like feathers, like ashes.

Refuse, cajoled a part of of him, stay, argue, maybe that was what America would’ve done, but somewhere there was a river, and—

—we’re not as alike as—

The doctor glared at him and he backed away, hands half-raised in unconscious surrender, ducking out from the curtains that enclosed the surgical theatre, back into the crush of people filling the field hospital.

A babble of voices engulfed him, patients questioning, doctors reassuring, patients screaming, doctors shouting, patients moaning, curses and prayers both. Shoulders and elbows jostled against his own. White and grey and black coats moved among the hospital beds, across his path, around him, like birds in spring molt, growing darker as the months dragged on. The air was filled with the stench of blood and worse. He couldn’t breathe.

For a moment he was lost, rudderless.

Voices screamed in the back of his head. They had been screaming for a long time. He remembered a book heavy and old between his hands, a book of medical ethics. From a glance it was impossible to tell whether any given patient was his or Britain’s or America’s, only that they were all either suffering or unconscious or dead.

Who are you and you will you—

Through the crush of people he caught a glimpse of the exit. A chink of clear blue sky.

Fresh air.

His heart leaped.

Someone dressed in a lab assistant’s uniform shoved past him with a tray, nearly knocking him off his feet. Someone swore loud and vicious in an accent from America’s South. Canada looked down at his hands and saw the blood smeared on his fingers. Saw that he was standing in some liquid he couldn’t identify.

You’re not done yet, he thought.

“You there! C’mere!” called another doctor, and he obeyed.

❧

It was dusk by the time he left that tent. Night crept in from the east; day faded from the west. The edges of everything were soft and blurred, smudged out into long, all-consuming shadows.

Canada breathed in the fresh spring air and couldn’t find it in himself to appreciate it.

His fingers itched. They itched to be doing something, anything. Inside his pocket was a neatly-folded stack of letters unfinished and unsent and damaged in frustration. There was no solution in writing.

Instead Canada found a rock to seat himself upon, threaded a needle, laid his coat over his knee, and took stitches to its tears and seams.

His needle moved through layers of fabric, piercing, mending, tension, release, again, again, until gradually the motions turned to muscle memory. He settled into the rhythm like a leaf floating on a stream. Time stretched and drip-drip-dripped away in grains of sand, in water beneath the sun. Shadows smudged out; it grew colder. He remained.

The side of his hand brushed up against the stitched emblem of the Crown. He remembered a surgery.

I’ll still be here.

His stitches fell small and neat and precise. Wounds closed; harms were remedied. Every frayed divide was brought back into harmony.

There was a place where people went to be healed, a place of white curtains and glass bottles. The bird-masked doctors wielded their tools and medicines and worked small miracles with time, buying another day, another year, another lifetime.

The needle gleamed in the dim light as he worked, bright and thin as a wire woven into flesh.

There was a place where people went to die. They were laid out flat on rows of cold metal tables, surrounded by the stench and the blood and doctors with too much to do and not enough to care about, a place of knives and shouting. That was where they died, staring up at what was not the sky, until their flesh turned to clay and their eyes to glass.

He looped the thread around and around. His hand hurt.

He couldn’t seem to stop.

There was a place where people went to be made into something new. They were cut up and put back together differently, pieces missing, pieces added, flesh and metal, flesh and flesh. “Isn’t this a miracle?” cried the birds, and he nodded until his head fell off. They said that you learned by doing.

The thread ran out, snapped taut.

He was no longer stitching.

Canada blinked, and found his hand pinned tight against the coat, entangled in a red thread, pulled from the spool, torn from the seams he’d made, picked from the embroidery on his coat, wrapped around and around his fingers, over his knuckles, somehow everywhere without him having noticed, biting into skin, leaving him not an inch of freedom without some form of destruction, of coat or thread or flesh.

(There was so little he could afford to lose.)

He saw the play of tendons across his hand. The shadows of veins beneath his skin. Scrubbed raw and deceptively clean.

I’ll still be here, he thought, words like snow, like feathers, like string.

Canada fumbled blindly through the darkness. He found a pair of scissors.

❧

To the Crown Kingdom,
  The northern campaign has reached most of its objectives. With your permission, I’ll cede our captured ground to your officers and start withdrawing before season’s end. There are troubles at home, and I can’t take the same losses you can.
  The ports and railways and post offices will still be open. This won’t interfere with supply or training or intelligence. I don’t mean to abandon your troops, only to change how I’m contributing.
  Please don’t give up on negotiations with America. He’s stubborn, but he wants what’s best for his people. I hope I know he does. If one of us can find the right words, we can end this without needless bloodshed, without hurting him too badly. We just have to keep trying.
  Good luck,
  The Province of Canada

To the Province of Canada,
  You may withdraw as suggested, barring contingents to be sent to bolster the east (quantities and locations marked on attached map). Your current rate of supply is sufficient, although I anticipate an increased demand for ammunition and specialized laboratory equipment in the near future.
  War fosters unrest. If your troubles are again with the republicans, then I suppose you can no longer direct them to an amenable government in the south; perhaps they ought to be instead reminded of the folly of treason. If it is the French that trouble you then I trust that numbers will win out in the end, and in the meantime I shall be grateful not to share your predicament.
  Thank you for your aid in this matter.
  Regards,
  The Crown Kingdom

❧

It was past midnight in a fort of silent, sleeping officers, but in London the sun was rising, mothers calling children for breakfast, men heading out to work, and the sun was rising, it never, ever set—

England threaded the sturdy needle by dim, guttering lamplight, missed the eye once, twice, thrice before the thread went through. He worked the needle into a length of heavy linen twill and formed one stitch, another, a line, embroidery.

Red, on white stained yellow.

The needle wove in and out of the fabric, looping threads into a shape, into an outline, and he tried to lose himself in the rhythm of his work, but it was morning in London, and his thoughts were scattered and flighty, like flocks of pigeons startled into the sky.

Someone aims and fires, bang, bang, birds falling—

The thread snagged.

There was a time he’d carved toy soldiers for America. There was a time he’d travelled the world to bring him flowers.

Knots formed.

There was a time he’d read him bedtime stories to lull him to sleep, stories of heroes slaying monsters, when the night was old in London and young on this foreign shore, and enemies were waiting across the sea—

You're not leaving, are you?

He raised the needle and couldn’t think of where to place it next, stabbed it through the linen anyways, stitched on, the rhythm of his work falling into the frantic pulse of his heart.

The night was dead in London, now. It was old on this foreign shore.

He grew closer to triumph by the day, but those days only ever drifted further away.

The thread snagged, again. This time he couldn’t pull it free.

Shapes, in the shadows.

Shapes, embroidered, like the edges of a country on a map, jagged and wobbly by nature, straight and angular by artifice. England stitched the edge of a red petal and found his hands unsteady, the shape wild, warped, coming apart.

Everything coming apart.

The edge of the cliff loomed. The battlefield, waiting. He still couldn’t see a way forward, couldn’t find his way through, like threading a needle blind, metal slippery and elusive between fingertips, struggling to string together a victory.

The needle moved in and out of the fabric. Clumsy, imperfect stitches. He tried, again, again, yet the shape of it was all wrong, his every attempt coming out warped, ruined.

His hand shook. The metal slipped.

The bayonet shifted in his hands, wood slippery against skin slick with blood and rain.

The needle pricked his finger.

Metal blade catching on wood, flashing like a needle in the dark, a blow deflected, feet slipping in the mud.

The needle pricked his finger, again.

Dread, cold and fluid like the downpour. Weapon upraised.

He knew was he was supposed to do.

He could not move.

He did not move.

The needle stabbed into his finger for the third time, and blood welled, red on red, a drop, but England saw, a gush, a fountain, a field of flowers. He saw the edge of a cliff.

You fool.

That is how a war is lost.

Blood welled. He was a map of veins and arteries, chambers of air, factories of bone, each part of the structure moving in harmony, serving its intended purpose.

He had to be able to—

It was a fault of his nature that he had been given a heart.

☙

America,
  I’m going home. I missed it, these past few months, but I always knew that it was safe, and well, and that my people could live their lives without having to be afraid. I’m sorry that you can’t say the same. I wish you could.
  Sometimes it feels like there are always tensions between us, like there’s always just been a war or always will be a fight looming in the future, because Britain’s Britain and I can’t help being British any more than you can help being you, and neither of us got to pick our battles. Sometimes it feels like we’ve always been watching our backs and watching our borders, and it’s almost silly to think that once upon a time we weren’t.
  I wish it could stop being that way. I wish the two of you or your leaders could work something out. You’ve talked about war like games and scores and chips on the table, but we don’t get a full deck in our hand. We can only play the cards we have. Sometimes that means we can’t win, in the end. Sometimes we can only cut our losses.
  Please watch out for yourself. The battlefield only gets more dangerous by the day.
  Take care,
  Canada

Canada,
  Don’t make me laugh. You’re talking about watching our backs and our borders? Yeah, this is what I was watching out for. When the colony of a world superpower is sitting right across your border, you get a little twitchy, ‘cause you can’t forget how that in the end, you’re part of the world.
  And don’t talk to me about being helpless. The whole entire reason I’m me is because it turned out I could help being British after all. Maybe you can’t. Fine. No room for me to talk with the way the war’s going right now. But there’s a lot that goes on between claiming an identity for your own and full-on rebelling against it.
  You say you’re British? You’re British. You say you’re my brother? You’re my brother. You want to be both? That’s a little trickier to balance. I say you’ve been doing a pretty decent job of it so far. But it isn’t going to get any easier.
  Fact of the matter is, you can’t just claim everyone as your family. At some point, you have to pick and choose your sides. You have to decide which part of you gets to make the decisions. I’d like it if it’s a part of you that’s accountable to your people, that can stand up to the Crown a little, that can shake hands with me. But you know what? In the end, it’s your choice.
  Take it from me, though: it’s pretty damn hard to be two people at once.
  Figure yourself out, Canada. Because I’m sure not about to.
  Sincerely,
  The United States of America
P.S. If Britain had asked me to play cards for everything I owned, you can bet I would’ve said no. Too bad he wasn’t kind enough to give me that option, huh?

❧

The snow was long gone from the streets, and when Canada looked around he saw that scarves and boots had been replaced by lighter fashions. It was bright, beneath the summer sun, bright like the season had opened its eyes and stretched and blinked and smiled like forests burning. Children chased each other with imaginary swords. Passersby made way for a tall man in a dark coat. A lady weeding her flowerbeds smiled and and waved as he passed, and he started, because he hadn’t though he’d walked with so heavy a step.

Canada didn’t look back as he navigated the familiar streets.

(He didn’t dare look back.)

His house looked the same as ever, gabled roof and unused chimney, the walls two seasons older, the yard two seasons wilder. His neighbour stood waiting for him outside that yard, one foot tapping in benign impatience. He held out a ring of keys as Canada approached.

“Thank you for looking after the house,” said Canada, accepting the keys. They clinked cold and heavy into his hand.

“Some fox raided the henhouse last winter,” replied the neighbour. “We lost a few. I’m sorry, lad.”

The keys weighed cold and heavy in his hand, and Canada curled his fingers around them, felt the edges dig into his skin, wondered if it would bruise or if the metal would warp before then.

“It’s all right,” he lied.

The neighbour nodded at him, then brushed past as he departed. Canada flinched at the brief pat of a hand on his shoulder.

We lost a few.

Everyone lost.

He heard chickens clucking as he walked the path around his flowerbeds, the sound somehow fainter than before. Roses grew tall and wild and straggly around a weathered front door. For a moment he paused on the threshold, key in keyhole, before turning it, giving the door a sharp tug to dislodge creeping tendrils.

The door creaked open on rusted hinges, loud as a nightmare, like the opening to a tomb.

Stepping inside, Canada transferred his keys into his pocket and removed a sheaf of letters, then stripped off his coat and hung it on the rack, movements deliberate and mechanical. Every bump and step echoed loud as a declaration in the silent house.

A bear pawed at his ankle. Canada stooped to pick him up.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

Felt claws, light through the fabric on his shirt.

“I know,” he murmured. “I know. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry I ever left.

Bear under one arm and letters in his free hand, Canada proceeded down the hallway, pausing outside the sitting room but passing it by. Instead he ascended the claustrophobic stairs to the second floor and, passing the guest bedroom, opened the second door on his left, revealing a small, dusty room. Afternoon sunlight streamed in from a large window on the far wall. Below the window sat a desk; on that desk rested an inkwell and a pile of stationery. Cabinets and maps occupied one wall; shelving, the other. Canada’s gaze snagged on the single flag and for a moment he saw stars, saw a cross, saw a burst of jagged leaves—

He blinked.

It was flowers.

It had always been flowers.

Of course.

He looked down before he blinked again. Studying the floorboards, he made his way over to the desk and seated himself, setting the bear on the desktop. Leaning over, he pulled open the desk drawer labelled War, revealing rows of dense folders, and filed his letters by date.

Then there was nothing to do but sit.

For the same reason he’d been unable to look back on the street below, he couldn’t bring himself to look out the window now. Pins sprouted across maps, but there was no more command for him to wield, nothing he could do that hadn’t already been done. A few books rested on the shelves, but in the south Britain and America were trying to pick each other to pieces, and the thought of sitting and enjoying some novel seemed unbearable.

A small room, away from the noises of the world below, with natural light, and cabinets, and stationery. He’d thought it might be good for paperwork, once, but the paperwork had never really come.

There had been wars.

There had always been wars.

The edges of his borders jostled against each other, river broad and ocean coast. He was made of pieces, the same way America had been, before. Maybe they’d been cut from the same cloth. Maybe that was why Canada had spent so long watching their border, worrying, worrying, worrying that any day some clash of personalities and interests would trample that line in the sand into nothing, into footprints.

“I guess I don’t have to worry about being annexed anymore, huh?” he found himself asking, voice small and shaky and cobwebbed over.

The words echoed impossibly loud in the silence. The bear looked at him, wordless.

Is that what you were worried about? asked the tilt of his head.

Somehow that fact that he’d admitted the fear made it worse, as if by speaking it aloud he’d brought it into the light, as if the absence of that one possibility only opened up a wealth of others, and was that why, was that really why he had -- he had --

“I remember how quickly he grew, you know.” The words spilled out like a venesection. “So many of the things I wanted, he had, just like that. He made it seem so terrible and so simple. Like you could spill some blood and become a nation. And I told myself my way was going to be different. It was going to be bloodless. I told myself, if I waited, and worked hard, I could have that too, someday. And now…”

The bear regarded him calmly. Silence demanded to be filled.

“I can’t tell where any of us are headed anymore.”

No reply to that but a blink.

Who can?

When they were children, he and America had raised castles from beach sand, and they’d known even then that what they built wasn’t immortal. Now Canada was older, and he was learning, had been learning for months, years, decades, that plans were like sandcastles; you could build them as well as you could, but sometimes you tripped over one, or your brother knocked one over, or the tide came in and swept them away, and there was nothing to do but make more.

He knew that he could make, had to make more, but America was gone now, and the tide was rising around his ankles, and it was hard to forget drowning.

Coats fraying. Skin scrubbed raw. His layers were peeling off, a few layers deeper and he’d be able to see the true shape of his bones, he didn’t know what he was made of. He didn’t know what he’d find. If they’d fall apart under pressure, pieces clattering to the earth, back to sand, back to water. If they’d be someone else’s he was borrowing. If there’d be nothing at all under the surface but flesh and veins and blood, his brother’s, his own, spilling out over his hands like dye, like guilt—

Canada looked out into the future and he was afraid. He was afraid to be unready, without knowing what he was readying for. He was afraid that something had been hurt and it had been hurt in a messy way, shards embedded and infection deep, until there was nothing for the surgeon to say but chop, chop. He was afraid that he did not exist and that someone important would notice.

Republicans and French and English and loyalists, voices crowding out his thoughts, and he pressed one hand to one ear, as if checking his hearing, as if blocking out a sound, but the song rang on in his bones, high enough to shatter glass, Who are you and who will you—

Canada grasped. Reached out, for solid ground, and found a pen, found an inkwell, found stationery, dipped nib in ink and tried to string together a remedy, a solution, a hand reached out into the dark for cues.

Dear America,

Are you

It was wrong. He crossed out a word, scrawled another in the margins, crossed the first word out again, again, messily, too messily to read, tried to continue writing but found inkblots on his paper, swallowing letters and syllables and whole words. He reached for more paper, found a fresh page, a new leaf, wrote, but the paragraph rambled without clear rhyme or reason, and he turned a new page and started fresh, but he sounded too solemn, too cheerful, too childish, his writing was too messy, an explanation too much like an excuse, a request too much like rebellion, the wrong language, the right language, and he turned, and he turned, and he wrote.

(He wrote).

He was sitting at a little desk in a little room, a window before him, a flag to his right. Shadows stretched long and dark across the desktop, smeared-out, all-consuming. His left hand ached; his right held the pen. His mouth was dry. His stomach grumbled.

A white paw pressed down on his left wrist.

“Stop that,” said the bear, nearly inaudible through the ringing in his ears.

White fur and dark shadows, steeped in light that was—

—so much redder than he remembered—

—amber-orange.

Disorientation settled, dreamlike, like floating, a sense of unreality at the thousand small changes which had taken place: the positions of inkwells, the colour of the light, the crick in his back.

His hands ached.

They were strewn over the surface of the desk. Piled thick like autumn leaves. He stood, chair legs scraping against the floorboards, for a better view of the catastrophe. Letters, and the drafts of letters, layers and stacks of them, some hanging off the edges of the desk, some lying on the floor, neat, messy, crumpled, smoothed-out, some French, some English, some a single sentence isolated on a blank page, others spanning pages and crowded to the margins. Drawers had been pulled out and gaped open, files half-removed and stuffed back in the wrong order, a litany of years poking up their heads.

Everything gone to pieces.

His hands ached. From writing, Canada realized. He reached for the memory of the writing and found nothing, as if it had simply imploded, folded itself up and disappeared, never to be found.

As neatly as a letter.

Is this what happens? he wondered, and couldn’t tell if he was thinking of nations or people.

The bear looked at him, eyes dark, no answers to be found.

Canada looked up at the window. After all the I can’ts, after all the worries, all it took was a movement of his head. It wasn’t so hard to find the truth, when you were willing to see it.

A face floated disembodied against the glass, pale and fearful and transparent, a ghost staring back at him, beseeching, from some cold and narrow world. Beyond that ghost burned an orange sky, and against against that sky sprawled a silhouette skyline, gabled rooftops and unused chimneys, buildings cut from crisp shadow.

There it was, among those buildings. Like a tree in full summer glory, reaching out towards that fiery sky. Looming over his shoulder, with branches stretching out before him, shape known even when he was turned away.

(The beating heart of it all).

The Academy.

He was looking at it. He was looking at himself. He couldn't seem to—

“Stop it,” said the bear, again.

His heart pounded in his ears.

“Stop it,” and Canada tore his eyes from the window, cast them back down to the floorboards, his footprints in the dust between light and shadow.

He swallowed.

“Okay,” he said, his voice small and strange and scratchy.

Okay, he told himself. You’re okay. You’re fine.

On the most basic level, that of flesh and blood and people and economy, he was.

(Hadn’t the textbooks laid it out so simple, the secrets to winning the world, a few ratios and a few pounds of flesh, but move beyond that and suddenly everything was blood—)

“Okay,” he said, again, more to himself that anything.

You’re fine.

Haven’t you gotten so tall?

Letters old and new littered the floor around his desk.

Haven’t you made such a mess?

He knelt. The letters slipped between his fingers like water, but he gathered them. Tried to gather them. Gathered them the best he could.

A ringing filled his ears, high enough to shatter glass, like the echo of some bell that went on and on.

Canada stood, sheaf of unfinished letters in his hands. He tapped them into order against his desk. More drafts covered the surface, like leaves, like snowdrifts, and he tried to gather them too, sift through them, sort them out into drawers, into folders, into piles, like he could smooth creases into invisibility, return ink to the inkwell. As if he could turn back seasons in tidy edges and crinkling paper, turn a fresh page and know all the words to the story, as comfortable as a well-worn coat, a parable.

For a long time he’d thought he could see a path into the future. He’d thought that if he followed it, he’d end where he belonged. But there was no path, no lighted trail, only trees rising tall and slender, sometimes a footprint, sometimes a river.

Dates and salutations and signatures passed before his eyes. He tried to return everything to its proper place, but the words bled out like ink in water.

Nothing was the same as before.

He was standing in the light with papers in his hands, but the shadows were deep and the weather uncertain. Letters were leaves and leaves were snowdrifts. A window shattered in Montreal. He couldn’t see what tomorrow would bring. He couldn’t see how the war would end.

This is who I am and who I will—

He couldn’t see what and where and who he’d be at the end of it.

☙

America,
  You don’t have to tell me anything, but please just write back to me. It’s hard to get news of the war. Britain isn’t replying to my letters. I’m sitting at home and piecing together stories and guessing, but every guess is a shot in the dark. I don’t know where you are and where you’re doing and I guess I’m not supposed to. I guess you don’t owe me anything. But I would like to know if you’re all right.
  Please write back to me so I know you still can.
  —Canada

Mexico,
  Look, I know there’s bad blood between us. I know we don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. But I figure there’s one thing we can agree on: that we’re damn too close on the map.
  I won’t spell it out for you. You know what’s going on. The Crown’s trying to plant its flag every hill the sun touches. Right now that hill is mine. But from mine? There’s a pretty good view of yours.
  If you want to secure your border, then join the war and help me beat him back. If you want compensation, if you want a favour or payback or whatever, then fine, fair’s fair. But save that for after the war, unless you want to wake up with the Crown’s boot in your face.
  Until next time,
  The United States of America

To the United States of America,
  After the war, you will be his. I'm in no position to throw away the lives of my people on a doomed struggle. As long your fortunes remain tipped towards defeat, that position cannot change.
   I offer neither condolences nor condemnations. Either would be empty. For the present moment, your neighbors have abandoned or turned against you. Occupy yourself with your own borders, and not mine, because your fate rests in your hands alone.
   I am attentive as to what becomes of it.
  Buena suerte,
  The Mexican Empire

❧

The musket came apart in pieces, lock, stock, barrel, ramrod, assorted odds and ends collected in a pile, a longer part sent skidding into the shadows. Black powder stained the wood and metal of the weapon, speckling the ground, dirtying his hands, dark smears and crumbling clumps, like coal, like ash.

England poured water from his canteen, drop by drop, over the lock of the musket, then wiped it away with a linen cloth, revealing the metal beneath the powder. He repeated the process with the barrel, attaching the cloth to a metal musket worm so as to access the interior.

His hands remembered the motions, and he watched as they soaked and swabbed and rinsed and disassembled, mechanically, the movements somehow just beyond his conscious control, familiar enough that no thought was required to complete them.

Thought came to him, nonetheless, in the form of a vision, of a figure standing at the edge of a cliff, looking out over a sea of monsters, all clamouring for him to fall.

England dipped his cloth in oil. He wiped down the wood of the musket barrel.

A door slammed in his memory. It slammed half a year ago, a winter day in Canada, the echoes of laughter falling around him in lieu of snow. It slammed nearly a century before, America storming from a house on his colonial shore, leaving a teacup in shards on the floor. It closed, with a click louder than any slam, as he pulled it shut behind himself one cold and rainy evening, leaving two young colonies slumbering upstairs, unwoken and unaware.

England began to work rust and grime off the lock of the musket.

Empires. They bled. They bled others. They fell.

He could do the first two, or he could do the last.

He could do the first two, and then the last.

It was all entwined, the rise and the fall, the blade and the blood, impossible to tease apart, to make sense of. Pull one thread, and the embroidery would unravel.

Using an oiled cloth, England buffed the metal of the lock.

He was standing in the mist, with paths closing themselves off around him. He couldn’t see where his path led. He couldn’t see the end.

It was all too easy to lose himself.

To lose it all.

Hubbub, outside his tent. Voices raised, people moving, gathering.

His hands paused in their work.

A horn sounded.

Putting down cloth and musket, England rose and slipped from the tent, blinking into the noon light. Among the tents he saw soldiers in red, shading their faces with their hands; saw doctors in black with blood on theirs from interrupted work. Every head turned to the west, and he turned his as well, trying to see what they saw.

A distant horse, pristine coat gleaming in the sunlight, fast approaching.

As it drew closer, the rider.

England sank to his knees, and around him others did the same, soldiers in red and doctors in black, head bowed, all equal in submission.

Staring at the grass, he could see neither horse nor rider, but he could hear the hoofbeats, growing louder and louder, until they stopped.

Only breaths, in the silence, like conversation, like the calm before the storm.

“Soldiers of the Empire.”

Her voice was honey spun from sunlight, sweet and rich and at the very edge of humanity’s potential, the voice of a singer who came once a century.

The voice of a Noble.

“Wherefore do you fight?”

The question sang in the air, it hung, but only silence met it, even breaths swallowed down, every doctor and soldier with eyes fixed on the ground, unmoving, scared schoolchildren once more.

“Will none answer?” asked the Lady, disappointment clear in her voice, but in that disappointment hid an edge of steel, like a bell from some church steeple at break of day, like a blade.

Like a blade, waiting to rest at the neck of whoever dared raise their head and answer.

Waiting to fall.

“For the triumph of our Empire,” said England, and he saw the stains of mud on his boot from the last battle, heard his words at once too small and too loud. “For allegiance to our King.”

He kept his eyes cast downward, but he could hear hooves clip-clopping, again, until he not only heard but saw them, dark shapes at the edge of his vision, the heavy breaths of the horse.

“For duty then, I see,” came the Noble’s voice, at once quieter and nearer than before. “Tell me then, soldier, have you bled for your duty? For the triumph of the Crown? At the King’s command?”

A drop, but he saw a gush, a fountain of coins and flowers—

England swallowed.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Have you killed?”

The shot echoed ‘round the world.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Would you die?”

His blood rushed in his ears. The mudstains on his boot traced shapes like continents on a map.

He was not there, but some other where.

“Yes, my lady.”

A long moment, silence stretching elastic.

“Then all is as it should be,” declared the Lady, raising her voice for the crowd, and England could hear that she was smiling. “For it’s a poor soldier who can’t sacrifice some part of himself for a greater cause.”

The reply came loud this time, in chorus, from the throats of every soldier in red, every doctor in black, from him.

“Yes, my lady.”

“Do you serve the Crown?”

“Yes, my lady.”

Emblems stitched in red and black.

“Some among your number have been less loyal,” she said, lightly. “And fled, the cowards, for such little things. Weak stomachs and cold feet, common blood and bleeding hearts.”

A silence of cat-caught tongues.

“You have no stomachs.” The Noble’s voice was iron, the bell ringing out. “No feet. No blood. No hearts.”

The blade carving into them, cutting away.

“You were born from the mud of your motherland.”

Mud on his boots. Continents.

“What you lose in war, becomes the fertilizer of its soil.”

London, waking.

“And waters the trees, and they grow green.”

—as a sceptre for England, the queen of the—

“So is any loss in vain?”

“No, my lady.”

Again, a chorus of replies.

England saw hooves move from his field of vision, heard them clopping away, heard that voice, calling out.

“Who holds the right to your lives?”

Voices answered loud, each voice a different answer, each answer nearly the same.

“The nation.”

“The Empire.”

“The Crown.”

“The King.”

The people, thought England, reflexively, but no, it wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t quite—

“The Crown does not lose.” Again, that smile in the Noble lady’s voice. “And should one of you men flinch at the cost of victory, he may lose all that and more. So bleed, and kill, and die, my boys. But see to it that it’s so.”

Hooves clopped away as they bowed their heads in silence.

England remained staring down at the grass, as his boot, as the people around him began to venture glances upwards, to look about and rise to their feet, unsteadily back into the light. Their chatter rose up, but his head was stuffed with buzzing. He could not make out a word.

Chatter, noise.

The sun was hot on the back of his neck.

Chatter, mutters.

Here comes the candle to light you to bed—

Chatter. Gasps.

Curses, and prayers.

England lifted his head and saw a forest of fingers pointed, heads turned eastward, and then he was lurching to his feet, peering through the crowd, then pushing through it for a better view, elbows jostling against elbows—

He saw it.

Through a gap among those heads and shoulders, clear as day.

A tree as old and broad as his own homeland oak. Its branches hung with torn, empty coats.

Red, and black.

—and here comes the chopper to—

Like flags.

Rust-stained.

—chop off your—

Blood, splattered over the leaves of the tree, dripping down its trunk, watering its roots.

A red, red rain.

Weak stomachs and cold feet—

A metallic breeze.

—common blood—

He was trying to make sense of what had happened. He was trying. He was trying—

—and bleeding hearts.

He had knelt in the presence of a Noble. He had—

—been cut to pieces—

—heard her command.

There was no more sense to be made from it.

(He could allow himself no more.)

England remained standing there for a moment longer, looking on, then spun and marched away, pressing his hands against his sides to still their shaking as he ducked back into his tent.

Inside, he found a musket dissected, pieces scattered across the ground, barrel, lock, stock, ramrod, odds and ends. Cleaning supplies strewn among them, a stained and crumpled linen cloth, a metal musket worm, a bottle of oil, a canteen. Smudges of dark powder marred wood, fabric, metal, skin, the edges of everything softened by dim, muted noon sunlight.

His hands remembered the motions, and the supplies were packed away, the cloth rinsed and wrung out and folded, bottle and canteen securely screwed shut, everything returned to its kit.

He saw his powder-stained hands tremble as he worked. Felt his heart in his throat.

There was a dream he had in which he was surrounded by all he knew, but their aspect was strange, and their expressions twisted with cruelty or mockery or hunger. They gathered around him, loomed over, leered, and he twisted and turned, searching for a way out, a gap, a path through the mist, some escape, caught a familiar silhouette or the flash of teeth, but found nothing more, no salvation, only an ever-tightening ring of enemies.

Lose all that and—

The musket snapped together in his hands, pieces falling into place, lock to stock to barrel, glossy in the soft light, cold and smooth against his palms.

—more.

A weapon.

Show your heart and that is where they will aim their blade.

In the corners of the tent. In the corners of his mind. Amidst his own ranks. There were hiding.

England rifled through the corners of the tent, and drew out the final piece of his weapon.

The blade slid into place beneath the barrel of the musket, jutting out past where it ended. Giving it reach, in the close range, the ability to draw blood with a sweep or a stab.

A heirloom of a different time, of a different war. Blades had given way to firearms, and firearms shared space with rates and ratios.

The world had changed, and it had stayed the same.

The blade gleamed. It gleamed in his memory, in the Revolution he couldn’t help but relive, slick with rain and blood, shaking as it pointed a path to the heart of America, shaking like a needle between his fingers, stabbing into flesh—

It was a story, but it ended, it always ended in the same place.

He fell to his knees in the mud.

England weighed the bayonet across his palms.

It felt right.

It felt necessary.

All his demons, his monsters beneath the sea, they were waiting, in the shadows, in the corners, drawing closer, encircling him. Reaching out with hands and claws. They dragged at him. They dragged him down.

If he let them, they would drag him back, back in time, to the grey seasons, to the Revolution. He couldn’t afford to hesitate, to stop. He had to keep moving. Moving out of their grasp. Moving forward, one step after the other, even if he couldn’t see what lay ahead. Even if he could.

England closed his hands around the bayonet. He placed a finger at the trigger.

No one could afford weakness, empires least of all.

Mercy, mercy, leave and never—

Forgive me, he mouthed, the words soundless, voiceless.

He knew what he needed to do.

❧

To the United States of America,
  If you have any regard for our past ties, for your relationship with your brother, for the well-being of your citizenry, for the colour of your wheatfields from above—then I beg of you to cease your resistance and sign for peace. At this point in the war, withdrawal, even were it in my volition, is beyond my means. Victory, meanwhile, grows further from yours by the day.
  War is always a dangerous task for a nation. To war is to exert force, and in war, it is easy for a nation to misjudge the amount of force they are able to expend. As I’m sure you’ve seen, the costs accrued in the heat of battle can be staggering in hindsight's clarity.
  Conflict unsettles stable identities. When the status quo is called into question, changes which would normally be temporary or minor may become permanent and dire. Scars form. The door to true death is opened, should the integrity of a nation’s status come into dispute. It is as easy to fall as it is to rise. I have seen it before. I never want to see it happen to you.
  Come back to me. The reservations you have, the objections you hold to my presence, they can be discussed. We do not need to be at war.
  If you remember

To the United States of America,
  For the third and last time, I extend to you the opportunity to surrender, under my previously specified conditions.
  If you refuse, then there will be no quarter.
  Stop this foolishness. You are hurting yourself more than anyone.
  The Crown Kingdom

❧

An envelope lay in the letterbox, and Canada drew it out with his heart in his throat, turned it over and looked for the sender, roll the dice, north, east, south, west, who it could be, who it wasn’t —

He saw blue.

A blue stamp, with a profile of the King crowned.

And circling that profile, the words STAMP DUTY NEW ZEALAND, in block letters.

Dated in the summer of last year.

Oh.

The paper was warm between his fingers, as if it had only been released moments ago, not all of a year. As if it had only just been sitting in the sun, not lost in some train or boat or box or pile awaiting delivery. Like it hadn’t come all the way across the ocean.

For a moment all he could do was stare.

Like someone had cleaned off his glasses and righted them on his face, look, there was a world beyond the fog of war. Like someone had turned him around and pointed him to a window, look, and he’d seen all the way across the sea, far from his native shore, and he remembered there was more. There was so much more.

There it is.

All it took was perspective.

Canada wandered from the post office with his eyes still fixed on the stamp, heedless of the shoulders bumping against his, of the closing door knocking against his back. Descending the entrance steps, he seated himself on the bottommost, opened the envelope with careful hands, and unfolded the letter within. New Zealand’s open, curvy handwriting was a far cry from Canada’s own small, neat print, America’s bold scrawl that devoured paper faster than fire, England’s impeccable penmanship that devolved into a doctor’s scribble when hurried.

Canada smoothed out the letter. He began to read.

Dear Canada,
   How’s it going in the other hemisphere? I heard your brother was in a bit of a kerfuffle—hope that didn’t end up bothering you too much. Sometimes it gets to be a bit much to have a loud neighbour.
   Me, I was in a spot of trouble recently, but the Academy stepped in and cleared it right up. To be honest those stitched soldiers really skeeved me out, but I don’t want to dwell when it’s quiet now. It’s a lot better without all the fighting.
   Anyways, it’s not all war and gloom. I found gold! Australia’s been obsessed with the stuff since Ophir, and now I can see why. It’s a bit of a rush—pun not intended—everyone flocking to your land hoping to get rich. I still think all the cheering and dancing was a bit excessive though. And the moping once the stuff started running dry. And especially the rioting. Really, he should know better.
   You know, I’ve been meaning to ask—how do you deal with having a loud neighbour?
   I bet Aussie and I have an easier time of it than you, both being Crown and having a straitful of water between us, but I figured we could exchange tips anyhow. You know, I have pretty good relations with him, but sometimes it seems like he grew bigger so fast (probably the gold), so I get a bit worried about being overshadowed, and, well, I guess he never listened to me anyhow, but I wouldn’t like it if we couldn’t talk freely like equals anymore, you know?
   I mean, we get along pretty well when he’s not acting out so much—you don’t have to worry about us going to war or anything!—but I figure I could get your take and catch up a little. Us Crown colonies have to stick together, huh?
   Hoping to hear from you soon (as soon as you can get with all the oceans in the way, anyways),
   New Zealand

Canada held the letter for a moment longer, reading and rereading the words.

Felt a faint smile on his face.

Fumbling, he reached into his pocket. Found the stub of a pencil.

Turning the letter over, he braced it against his knee, set lead to paper, and began to draft out a reply.

As he wrote, something loosened inside him, like thread unravelling, like jagged edges smoothing out. He breathed, breathed easy, let the words flow and knew that even without a war, even without independence, they mattered. Maybe, in some small way, they could help someone.

Like a little bit of light, in a forest dark and tangled.

Like a glimpse of what he wanted.

Of who he was going to be.

After the war.

Someday.

He was going to be better.

He would make it better, somehow, with pen and paper, with stitches, with weeding and watering and waiting for something to grow. He would figure it out, his balancing act. Find a path through it all, one not written in blood, a cleaner way, his own way.

Like organizing letters in the dying light, papers like flags against the shadows, stacks aligned and drawers neatly labelled, everything returned to its proper place. Like closing wounds. Like standing in the current.

Who?

He could be.

I’m Canada.

He could see it.

In the sunlight that poured down around him, soaking into the paper he wrote on, the steps he sat on, the pores of his skin, caught in his eyes, like gold, he could believe it.

❧

Dear New Zealand,
   I’m sorry for such a late reply—I think your letter was lost in the mail, and it only just arrived. I’m glad to hear that things were going well for you, and I hope that hasn’t changed.
   I think you must’ve heard by now about all the fighting just next door from me. It's not the first time it’s happened, but I think it might be the worst. I’m okay, but I’m not sure what anyone else will be, going forward. A lot has changed. A lot is still changing.
   When it comes to Australia, I’m not sure how the past year has changed things, or if I can help you very much, but I’ll try. I know the feeling of seeing someone you’re very familiar with suddenly grow so much bigger. It makes you feel small. But I think that Australia won’t really outgrow your company, even if it seems like he has. It’s hard to do that with someone you’re that close to to, geographically or otherwise.
   If he’s thoughtless sometimes, please try to let it go after a while? Someday it might be harder for you to maintain good relations, and I’d rather your relationship be strong enough to weather it anyways.
   I’m probably not the best nation to give advice on being overshadowed, really, but I’m thinking what matters is that we start to make our own choices, to be ourselves, clear enough from Britain or our neighbours that you can tell from looking. It's something to be careful about, what you have to work with, how far you can afford to grow from someone, or how close. But the world is different now, and we’re supposed to be the New.
   Maybe we can be different too.
   Sincerely,
   Canada

❧

Canada’s letters arrived like snow, quietly, and like snow they melted away, beneath piles of maps and manifestos. England told himself he would send reply, and he tried, he truly did, but he set pen to paper and found that he had no words left, nothing to say.

All that was left was action.

Days passed into weeks, like the pages of a book, flipping. He thought of snow heavy on the ground last winter, he thought of libraries, how vast they could be, how empty. He thought of silence, because silence was what met him.

It mattered very little that letters continued to come, from Canada, from his government. It mattered very little that he was surrounded by doctors and officers and soldiers every hour of the day. It mattered very little that day and night he could hear bells and birdsong, near or in London.

America was losing. America continued to fight.

England read the newspapers when there was room for breathing, for reading. In the papers of the unconquered cities he found diatribes against the latest crimes of his campaign, exposition on the unnatural nature of the stitched soldiers, adulation for the courage of soldiers. Headlines glared at him in blackletter typeface. Sometimes he found the newspapers of Crown presses, and columns of miniscule text informed him that he was winning. Victory was at hand.

If he kept moving forward.

If he did not falter.

It came to pass that the hours of his sleep shrank to a sliver. More and more often he lay awake, with the nights growing shorter and shorter, and imagined he was speaking to America.

I never taught you such suicidal stubbornness, he thought, although soon enough he would remember all the wars he’d fought, they way they’d called him across the sea and left him battered on return, and wonder if that was why.

Look what you’ve done with your freedom, he thought, look what your freedom did to you. Didn’t it tear you apart? Look at France. But England had fought more civil wars than he could count on one hand, and he remembered—

—then will I wait, till the waters abate

Which now disturb my troubled brain—

—that his monarchs had been the shifting of the tides—

I had reason, he thought.

I have reason.

You have always belonged with me.

Like bells without clappers, ringing soundless and hollow. He could hear America snapping back at him, Nothing is ever enough for you.

It was there in the dark that he sometimes came to doubt himself. Memories of better times glimmered like sunshine on a lake, and he wanted to believe that he could sail upon them. He wanted to believe that none of this was necessary. That nothing had broken which could not be fixed. That he would not to face America, someday quite soon, would not have to—

You were always so naive, he thought, and he was standing on a battlefield in the pouring rain, but it was not America he faced.

Only a mirror, his own face looking back at him.

You fool.

In his mind he spat the word.

That is how a war is lost.

He levied the bayonet at his own heart.

The silence stretched, elastic and unbroken. It lingered until sunrise, until he emerged from his tent scoffing at his fancies and dreams. It lingered through days flipping past like pages, running out like sand in an hourglass. It persisted as spring ceded to summer, as resistance concentrated and maps sprouted pins like garden flowers, as Academies began to grow in Crown America.

Then let's hope for a peace, for the wars will not cease

'Til the king enjoys his own again…

His feet paced lines and his mind paced circles. There was nothing left for anyone to say.

❧

For review by Consultant Arthur Kirkland, by order of his Majesty
   Attached is an annotated map delineating proposed borders and subdivisions for the Crown States of America.
   It is and has always been vital to maintain unity in British North America. It is our considered opinion that this proposal simplifies the relevant administrative processes while appropriately asserting the authority of the Crown.
   In the consciousness of the populace, there is symbolism in name and border. Remove both, and the inevitable conflicts of identity are stifled.
   Awaiting your opinion,
   War and Colonial Office of the Crown Kingdom

❧

A boy woke from a dream.

He gasped, like a swimmer, head breaking the surface of the water, reaching for the sky, searching for the stars. Pushed himself upright, into a sitting position, and looked around the room for monsters in the corners, monsters in the shadows, but felt only the whisper of his fast, shallow breaths, the pulse of his heart in his ears, skin drawn over muscles over bones. A creature of moving parts.

It was just him.

Fumbling through the darkness, he reached for the candle on the nightstand, a matchbox. Tried, once, twice, thrice to light a match, before it finally caught, and then the candle flared like a miniature sun, almost blinding to his night-accustomed eyes.

He held the candle in his hands. Felt the heat of the flame on his face.

A white paw landed on his knee.

“Who?” asked a voice.

He tried to answer.

“I’m—”

Three syllables.

“I am—”

Three syllables, six letters, easy as that, but they came apart, like a musket, into pieces, into regions, into settlements, into tribes, into languages, into cultures, into names, into history, like plucking a lark ‘til nothing, nothing was left—

What was he doing?

“Je m’appelle—”

He was made of pieces. He was made of layers. He was alone, and he felt his dream in his bones, in his blood, in the shifting of his skin.

(This is who I am and will be.)

The bear’s eyes glinted in the dark.

“I’m,” and this time he did manage to say the name, but somehow his words came out like a question, like uncertainty.

He stared up at the ceiling and did not sleep again that night.

❧

(Blockades and interception, birds falling from the sky, a world linked by threads until someone’s hand reached out with shears, snip, snip, and the strings snapped, words unheard, pieces falling away into the sea, into the void of silence.)

♚

America fell, piece by painful piece and his lands become England’s, became the Empire’s. That was all that mattered these days, the Empire, united under the King, under the Crown.

The Crown Empire.

The name fit like a coat cut a size too big, but he would grow into it. He already had. With maps spread out around him, he could trace the paths he would take and had already taken. He could watch his reach expand.

Maps are spread out around them, the crisp and new and the yellow with age, annotated in ink. Names of cities retaken. Names of ones yet to be gained.

An fat white envelope, atop a map of North America, the letters of the address sharp and angry.

It had been sitting there since morning, and with night falling and lamps burning, England could ignore it no longer.

He picked up the envelope, weighed it in his hand. It was lumpy, and heavier than a letter ought to be. He felt a substance inside, a sort of powder.

He wondered if it was poison, though America was hardly the type.

England opened the envelope, carefully, though still the paper tore, and he dipped his fingers inside.

They came out smudged with ash.

Oh, America, because it was not a surrender, and if it was not a surrender then he knew—he knew—

He knew what he had to do.

Maps spread out around him. Too much to gain.

Cities like hopscotch. He could imagine it. The cliff’s edge. The aftermath. All the ways to fall and break.

He was the Crown Empire.

The Crown did not lose.

He was not afraid, but his hand shook. It shook badly enough that he dropped the envelope (as if it was still burning) and the ash spilt, all over the maps, over the cities taken and not yet so, paths trodden and yet unreached.

Everything was ashes.

Chapter Text

Mid-to-Late 19th Century
Western Maine, the United States of America
The Second War of American Independence

♚

England’s thoughts buzzed slow and muddled in the summer heat, like the wingbeats of a dying fly throwing itself futilely against a windowpane. Nausea rose in his throat like the sea beneath a pitching ship, he was leaning over the edge, he couldn’t quite catch his balance. Before and around and below him, doubled armies trembled in the heat haze, haze trembling from pain-torn voices. The gaze of the sun seared the back of his neck.

Nothing felt quite real.

A face leaped out at him from the blue-coated ranks of the enemy. Recognition hit like a blow, like a pit yawning wide open inside him. He was staring into it. There was nothing but a long, long fall.

Remember what you have to do.

The bugle call rang out like morningsong, like answer: Charge.

They charged. Stitched leading the advance, a shield of flesh, soaking the first blows. Living soldiers rushing behind. He was alive. His boots pounded against the grass. Time twisted odd, stretching and knotting, at once too slow and too fast. He moved as if through a dream. Suddenly the two sides were clashing, muskets and rifles and cannons firing in cracks and booms, blood splattering, bodies collapsing underfoot. Fire bloomed; sparks sprayed; bayonets flashing blinding in the sun. Suddenly his own bayonet was buried in someone’s chest, and he was close enough to see the widening of their eyes; suddenly the blade was bloody, and they were gone, and he was pressing forward through the gap left behind, like a shot fired from a rifle, ceaseless, inevitable.

Until suddenly—

A pair of blue eyes.

—he found him.

There you are.

America’s face was thin and sharp-edged in a way that made England want to say, you should eat more. Dark circles shadowed his eyes. Get more sleep. There was blood on his coat, scarlet impossible to miss—that’s where you should wear red—and more dripping sluggishly off the tip of his bayonet. He was breathing hard. Both of them were.

The moment spooled out long, and for a moment that was all there was, the two of them on the field of battle, facing each other across a distance smaller than it had been in years.

Then America moved his head, some infinitesimal centimetre, and the sun gleamed off his glasses and that was all England could see, blue eyes disappearing behind harsh white glare, like they had the winter before, like they had every time America had smiled and lied and tilted his head just so, glasses the child America had never worn, and he remembered, that he was fighting a war—

His bayonet flashed through the distance between them. America raised his musket to deflect. It was a futile gesture. Guns were not shields.

But the old memory of a younger face surfaced from beneath the water, and—

—have mercy—

—the blade slipped sideways, catching on flesh, slashing a red line across the back of America’s hand.

That was what it looked like at first. A thin red line. Then the blood poured down over America’s knuckles and the brightness of it hit like a voltaic shock and the younger nation stumbled back with a hiss, fingers red-stained, and suddenly everything was terribly, terrifyingly real.

You fool.

England’s hands were shaking badly. He had thought he’d had the resolve to complete the strike. He had thought he’d had the heart and stomach. He had thought that even as tides turned and seasons waxed and waned and allies turned their coats inside out, he could control this, this one thing: the movement of his own body. The weapon in his own hands.

You did so always have the habit of winning the battle and losing the war.

If he could not trust himself to do what was necessary, then he had nothing at all in the world. That was all, the thin line between defeat and victory, strength and weakness, life and death: the ability to take a single step, land a single blow, make a single shot.

“Surrender,” he said, words ringing metallic and hollow.

“In your dreams,” spat America, all fire and steel, with his musket aimed at England’s heart, a finger poised at the trigger.

Death loomed like the star-studded night at close of day.

Later England would tell himself, watching water run pink, that his hand had slipped, he had not meant it. Later he would tell himself, in the late hours of the night, that he had planned it from the start, heartless, he had meant it all along. Later he would tell himself that he had tried, tried, tried, but the crossroads had narrowed until there was only one road that ended with him standing. Later he would tell himself a thousand lies, because the truth was that the truth was a second split, a thin golden needle in a mound of a hay, and it was lost to him.

The shot echoed. Wide as the equator.

Deafening.

For a moment all he saw were America’s widening eyes, before the other nation gasped and doubled over, weapon dropping to the grass, hands going to the wound at his chest.

He didn’t think you would do it.

America fell, and the ground crumbled beneath England’s feet and he was falling, too, down and down, plunging off the edge of a precipice with nothing to catch him but the ground.

You proved him wrong.

Terror swelled, vast and formless, like cold water flooding the holds of a ship, black waves breaking over the deck. It washed over him and he was drowning in it, struggling for breath, against the roiling of his stomach, the trembling of his blood-slick, sweat-slick hands, but he had left it all behind himself, the cliff’s edge, the white coast. He was very far from land.

Monsters. Teeth in the water.

If they taste your blood then they will tear you to pieces.

His breath rattled in and out of his lungs. God, he was afraid, but he couldn’t let his hands shake. He couldn’t let it show. Couldn’t crack, not a hairline sliver, or else everything would go to pieces. His heart pounded against his ribcage. His grip on his weapon was white-knuckled. He swallowed, tried to muster his voice, hold it steady, steady, but cannonfire and screams and a single echoing gunshot and America’s blood was so very red as it spilt past his fingers and he’d shot America, his gun his fingers his decision and he shouldn’t have—shouldn’t—

—couldn’t ever take the moment back—

“Surrender,” he said, for the second time that battle, and his voice was worlds away but somehow the word came out the way he’d intended it. Flat. Merciless. Devoid of fear. Of pain. Of regret.

Monstrous.

America mouthed a reply, but no words came, only blood and a groan. England’s fear spiked dizzyingly fast and he almost moved from the force of it, almost took a step forward, stretched out a hand, anything. He wanted to rush to America and catch his shoulders. He wanted to help him staunch the bleeding as if he hadn’t caused it. He wanted to drop his weapon to the grass and make promises he couldn’t keep and do one thing that felt clear and right, in this mess of a war, this morass of fear and doubt, but all he could do, all he did, was stand frozen, watching America bleed, as the world tilted into a new configuration around him.

Right and wrong were far behind him on the path to victory, and the only way left for him to go was down.

When he blinked the aftermath of the red lingered, like a terrible dream.

“America,” he said, and this time there was an affect to the word, something he hadn’t intended and couldn’t identify, a sort of urgent, muted desperation.

Please.

America looked up at him then, with blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, face tight with pain. Wordless. Accusatory. Kneeling in the torn-up ground, coat red-stained, with England standing above, musket in hand, still aimed.

A memory. A mirror image.

You—

Something shifted in America’s expression, then, like the tilt of a head, like the gleam of glass. For a moment he became a stranger. There was no trace of the child England had known, the one who had looked at him with trust in his eyes, clung when he left and lit up when he returned, the one who had chosen him over France. England had grown so accustomed to seeing that child stir behind America’s eyes that he had come to believe that he was immortal. That they could war, that they could hurt each other, but that memory, the ghost of it, would remain.

—used to be—

Like homes burning. Like watching someone die.

Almost like hate.

America’s gaze cut into England like glass, and he felt the weight of what he’d done like a vivisection, sins laid out like organs, bright and bloody. He felt the weight of those eyes, others, a world’s baleful judgment like nails scraping across his skin, digging, scrabbling, all searching for a crack, a foothold, some leverage to topple him, to bring him low. He felt the weight of that future, his future, settle like an anchor, a crown, a sky wide and blue, and he was falling, he found that he was still falling, down and down without end, because that was what it meant, to be a nation, to be an empire: a long fall towards an uncertain reckoning, a sea of unseen monsters, waiting for a promise to be fulfilled.

That everything dies, and turns to ashes.

But if he never hit the ground, then he might as well be flying.

America’s gaze sank between the ribs like a knife, and he almost broke from the twist of the blade, but he was trying to grasp the world in his hand, and he could not bleed. He could not be afraid. Not of what he’d done and what he’d have to do. Not of what he was becoming.

Not of anything.

He was the Crown Empire, ruler of the world entire, and he had taken another step forward, towards victory.

The Empire took a tattered, unsteady breath. He met America’s eyes. It was only the two of them, in that moment. A graveyard of golden memories between them.

Let him hate me, he thought, with a resolve slim but waxing. Let him rage against me. Let him curse my name.

Each word felt like dirt heaped on his own grave, but he kept raising the shovel.

Let him hate me, but let me win.

More soil to smother the him that bled.

Let him be mine.

Until that old face disappeared beneath the water.

Chapter Text

Summer 1921
Radham, the Crown States of America
Rise of the Shepherd and his Firebrands

❦

The stained-glass windows of the church bloom with red and it gleams, in the few rays of sun that pierce through the clouds, the clearest the weather ever is in Radham. The Crown States has stayed long enough to know that the clouds above will never depart, and the rain will always be waiting. The Academy planted their seeds in the sky long ago. Yet somehow, that glimpse of sunlight, that gleam of red, bothers him more than seasons upon seasons of grey and ceaseless rain.

Life thrives, in water. Things grow.

The Crown States has wandered from Lugh to New Amsterdam to the French-speaking cities of the North to the frontiers of the West. He cannot say why he has lingered in Radham. It is an Academy city, through and through, its heartwood grown from a cutting of a transplant from across the sea.

Maybe that is why he stays, because it is easier to forget. Maybe he stays as a reminder that whatever his past, this is what he is now. This is the land he grew from. This is his birthright.

Or maybe he stays because of the taste in the humid air, of ever-gathering clouds pregnant with rainfall, of something about to happen.

The crowd stirs, murmurs, and the Crown States shifts his feet, shoulders brushing shoulders. Their agitation bleeds into him like ink across damp parchment. Their voices snake through his thoughts. Keenly he feels the distance between what he is and what they are, this line he drew, but he has never been good at drawing lines. He doesn’t know where they end and he begins. He cannot say which one of them is anxious, restless, fearful, angry.

All he can do is wait.

The double doors to the church swing open. A man steps out.

Silence falls.

The Reverend Mauer has a young face and a sharp nose and hair the colour of a freshly-struck copper penny, and when the light catches on it the Crown States feels a flicker of recognition, blood and ash, spluttering out before he can make anything of it. He watches the Reverend approach a wagon near the doors, notes his asymmetrical gait, and the murmur comes to mind that he was a soldier, once, in the wars to the South, against Mexico.

Pound of flesh and blood, the Crown States thinks, nonsensically, and shivers.

The Reverend climbs onto the wagon. He surveys his people, and they settle at his presence like windblown leaves. One sleeve covers his arm past his fingers; the other cuts off at his shoulder. It’s his bare arm he uses beckon a man by the wagon, who climbs up to join him.

“Everyone!” calls the man. The Crown States has the sense he’s a sort of official. “You’ve heard the rumours, and I have to thank you for passing the word on to others so they know what’s going on and can make sure they’re safe. For those who haven’t heard: yes, there is a creature loose from the Academy. It is dangerous to you all, but you can minimize the danger by staying in groups.”

The crowd shifts, parents drawing children close, families drawing together. The space around the Crown States widens, islands forming in a sea of heads and shoulders.

Fear is a chasm yawning wide inside him. Creature has always meant monster.

“Sources with the Academy have told me it’s a project meant to advance research in the five senses,” the official on the wagon continues. “That it’s not meant to be dangerous, but we should take care all the same.”

“We heard people had died!” someone shouts.

The Crown States’ fingers knot in the strap of his bag.

“Yes,” says the official. “Nine individuals have been gravely hurt in and around the the Academy, but so far, the damage—” the Reverend places a hand on his shoulder “—is contained to the institution. They’re putting all resources forward, to stop…”

He trails off. The Crown States sees the Reverend’s fingers digging into his shoulder.

“That’s not true, I’m afraid,” says the Reverend, and his quiet voice carries like a church bell ringing, words hanging in the air.

That’s not true.

“I just received word that two individuals in the upper west part of Radham were attacked,” the Reverend continues. “They were school-age. One of them is gravely injured, to the point that he may be crippled for life.”

He pauses, and in that moment seems to age, growing wearier with the weight of his knowledge, worn down little by little, like stone by water, inevitably.

“The other child is dead,” he finishes.

The crowd roars, and their voices sweep over the Crown States like a windstorm, trees bending and clouds churning, their rage, their grief. It picks him up and it’s his fury, his sorrow, his need to shout, the loss of a life transmuted into an ugly, bloody, righteous energy. He can’t hide away and let the storm pass him by. He needs a listening ear to sway to his side, he needs a torch to light and raise to the sky. He wants a banner, he wants a cause, he wants a gun—

“Please!” cries the Reverend, nearly inaudible. “Please!”

He is perched on a knife’s edge, a mortal height to fall, but oh, how bright the stars are, how fierce their fire. Maybe if he follows this trail they’re blazing, he can capture their light in his hands. Maybe if he goes up in flames, it’ll burn away the tears yet unshed.

“Please!” calls the Reverend, louder now. “This is not about the monster, and it is not about the Academy or the mistakes they made!”

What is it about, then? the Crown States wants to ask. What else is there to do?

The answer comes like the bone-shattering impact of a long, hard fall:

Nothing.

His anger sputters out into embers. Colder, heavier things rush to replace it, like water carving channels through stone, tears filling up a cup and overflowing. The energy in this mourning crowd might blaze a trail, might wake the dead, might start a war for the history books. But no measure of righteousness has ever defeated the Crown.

There is nothing they can do.

(Is there?)

“This is about the children!” shouts the Reverend, voice ringing. “Please! A moment of silence and a prayer!”

Please.

The crowd quiets. Reining in that reckless, desperate energy, swallowing down their reckless, desperate words. But the Crown States chokes on those words in his throat, and knows their anger has not gone, only cooled to a simmer.

A few steady embers.

“Their names are Martin and Oscar Meadows,” says the Reverend. “Let us give them a moment and a prayer.”

Around the Crown States, people bow their heads like trees bending in the wind, even those loudest moments before folded into the silence. The Crown States bows his with them, eyes to the cobbled ground, and in the corners of his eyes sees lips moving, prayers mouthed in silence. The faithful.

Martin and Oscar Meadows.

He blinks, and cobbles swim before his eyes. Two children with one surname. Relatives. Brothers.

Maybe even twins.

(A shadow looming in the corner of his vision, and a reflection right before him, mouthing words he cannot hear, speaking words he cannot read: Who are your people?

He says—he says—)

The silence stretches on and on, until it becomes painful, like muscles and tendons straining. The crowd shifts, ever restless, but no one dares speak. With a gentle phrase this silence, the space of this minute, has been made sacred.

A church, and a reverend to lead it.

“Now,” says the Reverend Mauer, and heads rise, like leaves stirred by the wind, like flowers turning to face the sun, “I know you’re upset. It is hard not to be, given the lives that have been lost, and your fear for yourselves, your neighbors, and your loved ones.”

It’s the thought of the pitfalls that makes the Crown States see them, the cracks in the foundations of the world, where toothed things hide. It’s the news that reminds him how precariously they’re balanced upon this earth. It’s that awareness that begets vertigo, sick and dizzying, and vertigo twists into fear, fear for the children, for the city, for everyone in the crowd holding their heads high enough to lose them.

And for himself.

He is afraid for himself as well.

“Aimless anger won’t help anyone, and would be an affront to those we’ve already lost. Nothing would be sadder than if we went out looking for answers or justice, only to sully the memories of Martin and Oscar, or worse, to join those killed by the escaped creature, because you were acting with emotion, not caution.”

Emotion and caution. Action and inaction. Peace and war. He’s tried them both, every path, each way, footprints in mud and snow and water and blood, but somehow the paths always cross, every which way, turning back upon themselves, to the same destination:

Standing among his people. Knowing there is nothing they can do, and nothing he can do for them.

Is there?

“The Academy, from what we’ve been told, is deploying more creatures, weapons of war and armed men, with the intent of finding and stopping the escaped creature. Dog and Catcher are the least of the assets being brought to bear.”

From where they’re standing, with the Meadows and the words stressed just so, it is not reassurance they hear, but a warning: There are monsters in the streets. Beware. Beware.

Be wary, and be afraid.

They are. They are.

They are angry and mourning and so very afraid.

Teetering on that thin dividing line between rage and fear, action and inaction, fight and flight and freeze, and the Crown States teeters with them. All they need to fall one way or the other is a hand on the scales, tipping that precarious balance.

A shepherd.

The Reverend Mauer looks out over his flock, the faces that know him, the faces that don’t. In the silence, the Crown States hears the way they hang onto his every word like the edge of a precipice.

He has the trust of a church. The eyes of a community.

The ear of his nation.

“I don’t like this,” says Mauer, “but at the present time, the only thing we can do is stay safe. Stay with family and friends, give each other comfort. If you still find yourself lacking, you’ll find Dicky, Bill, and myself here in the church, with several others, ready to offer prayer and counsel, should you need it. If you have any news, please, come to us.”

No one wants to be alone. Prey least of all.

The Reverend lifts up his arms like a conductor, a magician conjuring a miracle, an embrace.

“A prayer!” he declares.

Like musicians, they obey. Heads are bowed and hands are clasped. Words are lifted from heavy hearts. The heads that bow are not in deference to the Academy. The hands that clasp are not in supplication to the Crown. The words that scatter to the air would invite mockery at best and ostracization at worst in high society.

But they are the mice, they are the cats and the cockroaches, they are the sheep.

As the doors to the church swing open, the Crown States finds a measure of unity in that, despite the stitches that snap between this congregation and the rest of the nation, skin splitting, wounds growing red and inflamed, rage and resentment like an infection pounding through the bloodstream.

He clings onto that unity, because he needs it to survive. He clings, because it cannot last.

All that anger. It has to go somewhere.

It calls for blood.

❦

Over the course of the next hour, word trickles in of three more escaped monsters. As dusk nears, the church fills to crowding, people congregating in and around its beacon light, moth-like. The Crown States marvels that they fit inside its walls, the meagre space the church manages to occupy despite the constant outside pressure to shrink, decay, disappear.

On a side wall, veins of grown wood weave through brick and mortar. Red light spills like wine through the stained-glass windows, washing those bricks the colour of a flag, of blood. The Crown States watches the light play across his hands, and the restlessness of his people plays tricks with his mind, making the colour a shade deeper, giving it a warmth, a texture. Where they find comfort in the pews and pulpit, shelter in these walls from monsters, all he feels is the itch of eyes on the back of his head, the need to look over his shoulder, a longing for the wide sky above him.

Their memories of this church are page upon page of community and devotion. There are churches in his pages too, songs and sermons that once brought him closer to his people, but those churches have all collapsed into the overlay of one church, the only walls that stand sharp and clear, lines drawn out in tears and blindness and being so very small.

The Crown and the Academy have not been kind to the faithful. It has never been their nature to be kind.

(Never.)

He sees and hears the evidence of that unkindness in the people around him who clump and huddle, heads close and voices low, exchanging grievances and plans. Young people, fiery-eyed, hungry for a crack in the walls that entrap them, and older people, eyes misty with age, and the time-smoothed memories of a better world. That infectious anger spreading from mind to like mind, taking root.

The Reverend moves from group to group, speaking in a low voice, as if to soothe, but the fever only climbs higher.

The Crown States shifts his weight from foot to foot. He has moved among them, too, seen faces and heard words, but there are no words in his own mouth. What is he meant to do? What is he meant to say? Is it fair to promise false safety, soothe their worries, let the night pass as it will? On the flip side, how can he advocate decisive action, when there are no clear means to act, and no clear foes to act against? Maybe he wants the malcontents to gather, believes they can dream up a solution to this cage of theirs, or maybe there’s simply nothing he can do to stop them. Nothing he should do.

What has he ever done for them? What reason do they have to listen? He does not blaze trails, only follow them; they have always walked ahead.

He wants them hale and hearty and whole, in that dark woodland path. Maybe it’s too much to ask for. Maybe it’s not enough.

Fear and rage. Fight or flight.

He cannot decide what course to set himself upon, and so he does not move at all.

Hands, red-stained, a jagged patchwork of scarlet and crimson. His shadow doubled across the floor, one silhouette in red light from the window behind the altar, one from the red light through the open doors, two bodies sprouting from a single pair of feet. Maybe there’s a pattern in the figures and voices around him, but his memories are a patchwork too, an overlay of two disparate narratives. He has to remember, but it hurts to remember. He remembers—

Glass shatters. His hands find his glasses before he realizes that it's only a window that's shattered, and not something more vital. Glass shatters, and the echo of the shattering rings on after the deed is done, dozens of pieces breaking into hundreds breaking against the floor, orchestral.

The Crown States wheels around. There’s a jagged hole in the great window behind the altar. A boy of twelve or so writhes on the floor below, covered in wounds and slime. A young red-haired woman helps him up and he looks around, wild-eyed, takes one breath and screams, the sound a continuation of the shattering, shards splintering into gasps and shouts as the words break against the choir-hall acoustics of the church walls.

“The things are attacking!”

❦

Pandemonium.

People shoving past each other, feet trampling over feet, hands cast out without care or courtesy. Not charge, but ricochet, dozens of fight-or-flight reactions unfolding movement in a hundredfold directions. The Crown States is buffeted this way and that, shoulders and elbows and knees knocking past, but rudderless, he lets himself be buffeted, only straining to keep his eyes on the boy among the shattered glass.

“Stay inside where it’s safe!” shouts the Reverend.

There’s a fiction in the words, clear as day, that anywhere in the world entire can ever be safe from monsters, but it’s one people want to believe, as they hear, listen, draw away from the doors.

The windows are made of stained glass, thinks the Crown States, with an edge of rising hysteria. The windows are made of stained glass and one is in shards on the floor.

Amidst those shards, the boy who is scared of monsters fights tooth and nail against the grips of the red-haired lady and two men.

“It’s going to kill us!” he screams. “It’s going to kill us! It’s going to kill us!”

The people hear that too and it’s panic that grows, like wood between the brickwork of their bedrock faith.

All they need to fall one way or the other—

‘The Reverend barks for idle hands to retrieve the guns in the office, the garden tools in the shed.

—is a hand on the scales, tilting that precarious balance.

The Crown States tilts in the balance. His heart is a bird beating wings against a closed window. People pull in dozens of directions that fracture into hundreds as they shout and weep and shove and clash but he is earthbound, there is no way up and out for them. There is nothing but the choice of where to fall.

Fight, or flight.

The thing is that he knows what happens when people battle monsters with firearms and garden tools, and he knows what happens to the people who run, bloody-footed, with fever in their hearts and shelter far behind them. He knows, like flowers know the sun, that there can be two opponents and no victors; there can be two stories and no happy endings.

In the crush of bodies, he loses his footing. Terror swoops sick in his stomach before he lurches into another body, hard enough to bruise. Sorry, he opens his mouth to say, but his heart sticks in his throat; he can’t fill his lungs past the obstruction.

Behind the altar, torchlight flickers on the jagged edges of the broken window. Radham’s clouds churn in the dim sky beyond. He wants it to count for something that so many have prayed before that window, have prayed within these walls with clasped hands and faithful hearts. He wants it to count for anything at all that they believe in these walls, their words, their Reverend.

“We’re going to die!” cries the boy who broke that window. “Please, please God!”

In the killing fields to the south, people had prayed, hands clasped, to a cloudless sky. The summer had blazed too dry the year they fought Mexico; salvation for the Mexicans, damnation for them. Then the Academy had sent up its clouds, and questions of salvation and damnation had ceased to matter.

Playing God wasn’t much different from being, when you lived beneath someone else’s sky.

The fall of the rain is beyond the control of anyone in this building. The Crown States can’t trust the heavens to grant them reprieve. He can’t trust the Academy to recapture the monsters.

“We’re counting on you!” calls the Reverend, as people race to gather firearms and axes.

All he can trust are his own people, his own families and communities and heroes, and the steadiness of his own two hands.

His heart settles as he remembers where to place it; he draws breath he doesn’t use for words.

“Get off me, let me go!” Beneath the broken window, the boy twists in the hands of the adults restraining him. The Reverend is at his side when he breaks free, and somewhere in the whirl of limbs a fist flies out, striking the Reverend in the jaw.

It seems as if the crowd stops breathing.

Blood, crimson, transferred from the boy’s wounds to the Reverend’s face. The man wipes at the stains with his handkerchief, but he can’t erase that afterimage in the eyes of the silent congregation, the dozens upon dozens of faces that look to him for strength.

A broken window behind the altar, the arterial spray of glass across the floor, and among the carnage, the bloodied Reverend and child.

“Please,” says the boy, no fight left in him, only the words, ragged against the silence. “Please. They’re going to come after us. We’re all going to die if we don’t do something.”

I’ll survive.

The Crown States feels the breath moving in and out of his lungs, the expansion and contraction of his ribcage, the expansion and contraction of his heart.

I’ll survive to see the morning. I’ll survive to count the graves and see them robbed.

A steady, immutable rhythm.

No matter what happens in the span of one night, I’ll survive.

Somehow I always do.

He wants them to survive too. He wants them to be here when the sun returns. He wants them to see another night pass, and another, and another, until the memory of this night is nothing more than a bad dream. If the walls hold—if they hold together—if they—

“They?” asks the Reverend, and it takes the Crown States a heartbeat to realize he’s referring to the boy’s mention of the monster.

Not it, one monster, but they: a damning point of grammar.

“Yes,” comes the hesitant reply. “I think it’s a mother? And it has babies.”

The knowledge ripples like a coin tossed in a well, gasps and murmurs, the hitch of a breath, a missed beat of the Crown States’ heart.

Another ripple comes as their porters return, bearing weapons.

“Lots of babies,” the boy adds.

Firearms and tools are passed from hand to hand. Saws and pitchforks, blades and shovels, tools made not for monsters, but for another creation of the Academy’s: buildings, grown from living wood.

The boy rambles. “Big, and scaly, and it drooled and it had ears and it picked me up with these smaller arms and carried me up—”

Lots of babies.

What is lots, in the eyes of a frightened child? A cat’s litter of four? A pheasant’s clutch of ten? A lizard’s batch of twenty? Or frogspawn, a gelatinous mass that bursts into hundreds of offspring? Is the growth linear, a steady timely increase in population, or is it exponential, each generation maturing weed-quick, bearing its own progeny?

Taut-wire memories of textbooks and lab work force the Crown States to ask these questions, but away from the textbooks, the lab, and the professors, he has no answer for them.

Up ahead, a man shushes the boy. The Crown States half-hears the words, half-reads them on his lips. Quiet. You’re safe now.

“We’re not safe at all,” pipes a voice behind him, and he doesn’t think of turning but all of a sudden he has, and through a forest of heads and shoulders sees the speaker.

A boy, no older than the one at the altar, perched on a pew like a preacher on a pulpit. Short and scruffy, with rainwater tamping down his unruly dark hair, sharp-edged as a sign carved in wood, the way street children are. In a chamber of red and shadow, the Crown States is struck by some bright, hungry intent in his green eyes, like sunlight through a bottle of poison, like sparks off a live wire, like glimpsing the eye of a beast through the bars of its cage.

(Like someone he knows—?)

“We might be getting surrounded by the monsters,” the boy continues, with all the confidence of youth. “We need to run, before they close in.”

No prophets in war, comes first to the Crown States, then the voices of generals upon generals, the victorious and the doomed. And finally the realization that as the adults arm themselves to fight, knights slaying monsters like a children’s tale, it’s a child who’s calling for flight.

We’re all going to die if we don’t do something, the boy at the altar had said, but still the Crown States calls for nothing. He is borne on the flow like a leaf on a river, a cloud on a breeze. Freeze.

When he blinks, the boy on the pew is gone, and faces of the crowd have shifted, like sun on water.

The Crown States turns back towards the altar, to that broken window flickering in the guttering light. Night has fallen on the city beyond. Maybe the boy is right, and the monsters have surrounded them. Maybe they are watching even now. Maybe there are four, ten, twenty, hundreds. Maybe all they have are maybes, but in the night, looking up at that jagged glass, it is hard to hold onto anything else. No monster will ever loom larger than the one in their nightmares.

His thoughts circle back around to these monsters, this wayward experiments of the Academy. A study of the five senses, the Reverend had said, and his mind conjures up whiskers, bat-like ears, a long tongue that snakes out to taste the air, eyes upon eyes peering through the shrubs outside. He shivers, and yet the thought of the creature’s appearance doesn’t fill him with the same disgust it might’ve, once upon a time. This is another war he’s facing, another cold night peering at the enemy lines, wondering what they feel and think and dream, if they are looking back at him. He can wonder all those things without disgust, without contempt, and still fear the moment when they clash and one must die.

Something twists and aches when he thinks of the injured children, the graves, but behind claws and teeth he sees black coats and syringes. He sees his own reflection, in glass, in water, and the places where he has fallen short. He sees all the way across the ocean to the one who made him this way, and knows he is not looking back.

Look at me.

A scream splits the air. High-pitched. A girl’s voice. The Crown States snaps his head around, glimpses blood, blond hair, a mouth yawning wide open.

Another young voice cuts through the chatter, familiar as a prophet, crying “They’re in the church! Run, run, run!”

Ricochet.

They’re not ready. They can’t. They can’t—

Something gives way in the crowd. Something gives way inside him. The dam breaks; water flows.

End of days.

A flood, apocalyptic. People surging out the double doors to the church, from light to darkness, from warmth to cold, from torchlit walls to rain pouring down from an ashen sky. The Crown States follows them, or maybe they bear him along in their flow. He tries to turn, to catch one last glimpse of the church’s light, searching for the monster, but the current is too chaotic, and he is in too deep.

Again, he loses his balance, his feet knocked out from beneath him, and this time his head slams into the doorframe of the church.

Stars that shift before his eyes, despite the clouded skies. His fingers digging into brickwork, finding purchase to hold himself upright.

He grasps at anchors, but then a shoulder strikes his face, knocking his glasses halfway off, and he is plunged back, into the water beneath the bridge, into the church that is a monster’s lair, into slick nightmare terror. The world is smears of orange light and charcoal shadow, like a painting running in the rain, everything melting away. He can’t see anyone’s faces. He can’t see—

His glasses are dangling from one ear. He jams them back into position and his vision clarifies but that sick, disorientated rush doesn’t settle. Through rain-speckled glass he sees people and shadows of people rushing past him, where he stands pressed against the doorframe, halfway in and halfway out. He reaches out to hold them back, and yet he wants to join them—

Bang.

In the echo of the noise, there is silence, stillness. The Crown States touches his heart, then his ear, turns with the sound still ringing in them. Vision running with rainwater, hearing drowned out by noise, the world is nightmarish, with the light promising a false safety, the darkness a true danger, no middle ground, only teeth, waiting in the shadows, hiding behind sheep’s clothing.

Nothing seems quite real.

A trail of smoke spirals lazily roofwards from the muzzle of the Reverend’s rifle. The man stands in the light of the church, the weapon at his shoulder, hand still near the trigger.

Somewhere in the chaos, fabric had fallen away, and it was fabric that had hidden an arm. The Crown States sees a limb like bone-dry soil ridden with cracks, crevices filled unevenly with woody organic matter, seams gaping open, ragged edges and crude bulk. It looks like malpractice. It looks like experimentation.

The Reverend gestures with that crude, ragged arm, a crisp conductor’s direction, and guns cock in staccato rhythm, click, click, click, the beginning of a short and vicious melody.

Men, with firearms held ready, their eyes turned not towards the shadows or the light, but to the crowd.

“The Academy is coming,” says the Reverend, standing among them, a general amidst his soldiers. “They’re coming for us. It was always their plan, and I’ve been planning how to stop them for some time. I’m going to need all of you to listen very carefully.”

❦

The creatures are gone. Mother and babies both. It was a shock tactic, nothing more.

The fear and confusion you’re experiencing right now is theirs. So is the anger, and that deep-seated feeling of frustration that there’s nothing you can do about it all. You’ve all heard it before. The Crown doesn’t lose wars. When they fight, they do it using monsters.

The Reverend had said those words, and it had struck the Crown States how he and the children had shared the word monster between them, childhood bedroom terrors and the very human beasts of adult life uniting in things used by the Academy, as real as they were horrific. Then the Reverend’s soldiers had put the red-haired woman at gunpoint, told the crowd she’d sown the children and chaos like seeds from her hand, and the Crown States had thought of others the Academy had used, like the soldiers and the students, like the Reverend, like himself.

If you run out into the rain and darkness tonight, you will be running straight into their embrace. They’ve used fear as a weapon for a century now, and they’ve gotten very good at it.

They had used the nation and moulded their fearful hearts, but the Reverend had been used, sent to war and gifted his calamity of an arm, and it was a flame and not fear they’d struck inside him. He’d told them about his years of groundwork, secret conversations and clandestine meetings with his former wartime comrades, a decade of fearful, vengeful, righteous preparation, culminating in this.

Trust me, I’m not asking you to fight. I am asking you to take a stand.

The Reverend had said that, and the people had trusted him. Three years and change of familiarity and their own anger conquering that flight or freeze, the fearful instinct instilled by years of engineering by Crown and Academy.

The Reverend had said that, but now weapons are being passed through the crowd, and cloths to tie around a face in case of poison gas.

The Crown States can’t swallow down the upside-down nausea that’s followed him from light to darkness. People pass, offering guns and cloths, and he knows he should take them, take any sword and shield he can get, but he flinches from the thought of shooting blindly through rain, of tying a cloth around his face to keep shooting through choking gas. He knows he can do those things, because he has done them before, but before is a chasm he’d give flesh and blood to avoid. He doesn’t want this night to become another battlefield, another war, another story with an unhappy ending.

As he draws back, others step forward in his place, seizing the tools they need to survive coming battle. Is that heroism? Common sense? Maybe it’s both, but if so he has neither. His instinct has been trained for longer; his fear spans a generation. He has been here before, surrounded by rebels and gunpowder, staring into the darkness at monsters real and imagined. Without moon and stars to light their way, it is impossible to see the cracks in the foundations of their world. It is impossible to see when this virulent anger, this desperate faith, might lead them off the edge of a cliff.

At the same time, he can’t ignore the giddy high of almost two hundred people rallying against their fears, taking up arms against their rulers, retaking control over their lives, the heady adrenaline rush of making history.

Maybe this isn’t the moment they fall, but but the moment they rise, and maybe gravity is only another force that can be overcome. All he has are maybes, but against the night, even a match’s flicker resembles a constellation.

Stand at our back, respond to fear not by pulling away, but by banding together. The Academy is built with flesh and blood as its foundation. With people.

As these people unite, the rifts between them and the rest of society gape red and wide, like the cracks in the flesh of the Reverend’s arm. The Crown States stands with them, buoyed by their strength, but he is stained glass, each panel a different red, black, green, fractures snaking across the land like a familiar melody until he shatters into dozens of pieces that shatter into hundreds on the floor. He knows this isn’t a path that ends with him whole.

We have the power to dictate what we need, the boundaries we expect, and the lines that should not be crossed.

Despite those cracks, despite everything, there are pieces of his contrary heart that long for the world the Reverend promises. He wants to draw lines in the sand that withstand the tide, he wants to choose his own battles and keep his own peace. He wants the ear of a nation across the sea, he wants to write his own history, he wants to breathe free. He wants the people around him to be fed and warm and secure in their peace, their futures. He wants all that. He wants.

He wants.

Nothing but darkness. Darkness and fires and rain. Two needs warring inside him. Two wills pulling him apart.

“It is fine to be afraid,” says the real and present Reverend. Even outside the church, his voice carries. “God-fearing is praise for a reason. Fear makes everything clearer. But do not panic. This is the first momentous step among many to making it so that the Academy’s wrongs and mistakes no longer weigh on our minds. We do not build or change something without care.”

A horn sounds in the distance, like war.

“The Academy is coming,” says the Reverend. “They’re meant to be serving us, bettering mankind with great truths and brilliant discoveries. Instead, they crush us under their heels. You’ve felt it in your bones for a long time. Maybe you’ve felt it since the day you opened your eyes and looked at the world. Maybe you’ve wondered if it could be different. I’m promising you that it can. You get one chance, and this is it. Turn around. Be ready.”

The words strike a heartstring in the deepest, earliest part of the Crown States, the part that stood on the bridge between two worlds and knew his wholeness only came from compromise, from the middle ground of both. Ideology, morality, duty, borders land and sea—all those are creations of the people. He is dust without them, and they are the heart of him, the common thread that binds him together. They tug, and he follows.

From the city to the sea, and from the cavern to the cliff.

In that moment, as he turns with his people, he is almost swayed. He perches on the knife’s edge and he is not a cloud on a breeze, not a leaf on a stream, but a storm, crackling with years of frustration, but wood, a thing of solid trunk and deep-set roots.

Then comes a clatter, a stir, the sight of a black Academy carriage approaching, and the balance reasserts itself. His people. They’re here, standing with makeshift weapons against monsters in the night, but they are also elsewhere, in their homes fearful, in Academies feverishly climbing, in the army pledging loyalty to the King. The nation is bigger than this church of dissidents; the cracks run deeper.

He is deep-rooted wood and he is the storm churning above it, but gales rise up, and voices call; for now, he yields, not falls.

“Teacher!” A boy with a bookbag rushes to the coach. Across the crowd, there’s another stir, as someone clashes with the Reverend’s retinue.

The Reverend. It counts for something that the people look to him for guidance, that they flock to his side in these dark times. It counts that Radham’s church is strong-boned and wood-grown, despite the smothering of its creed beneath Crown and Academy. It counts that he wears his crude, piecemeal arm, although the Academy could grant him another as easily as they crafted his first.

All those things count, and when the Crown States takes measure of his faith, they count in his favour; but it takes a great deal of faith to go to war on the word of one man.

He remembers watching his people pray, hands clasped, lips moving, and he remembers bowing his own head in silence, because in the end, when he fumbled through the dusty corners of his heart, there wasn’t enough faith of any stripe to be found.

“You never believed in God, did you?”

The crowd is quiet enough that the words ring out. A child’s voice, again.

The rain-drenched, green-eyed boy from the church crowd, now sitting atop a short wall.

“You just want to manipulate us!” he calls to the Reverend. “You chose a job that would mean we listened to you, you used us, you lied to us! You never told us any of this!”

The Reverend says nothing.

“You didn’t give any proof that she did anything, you only needed a—a scapegoat!”

She.

The red-haired woman.

“Why are you hurting my teacher, Reverend Mauer!? Why!? She’s nice!”

A soldier reaches for the boy and lifts him down from the wall. His face disappears behind a forest of heads and shoulders, but his voice remains audible, protesting.

The Reverend addresses him. “Sid, I want you to listen, and hear how much I mean it. I wouldn’t be doing any of this if I didn’t truly believe.”

“You don’t sound like you mean it much at all!”

“I do. You’re scared, and you’re hearing only what you want to hear. I don’t think any regular member of my congregation has any doubt how much I believe, or how much I care for their welfare.”

Everyone has doubts, thinks the Crown States. Whenever there’s a leader, an institution. If it seems like they don’t, that only means they’re trying to keep it a secret.

(Even you, someone murmurs. You aren’t free from doubts.)

Despite himself, the Crown States overflows with doubts, from the words he’s heard from every mouth, from the things he’s seen—smoke rising from the Reverend’s rifle, children fleeing monsters that disappeared. Even doubts spilling over from a congregation lost in the hungry darkness, between the rebellion’s flames and the Academy’s rainfall, shepherded from sanctuary to battleground.

The boy with the bookbag is weaving back through the crowd, followed by a young man who must be his teacher. The Reverend calls for them to join him; the man shakes his head.

“There were more riots,” he says. “Men, boys and women from other areas got hurt.”

“If there were more riots, we would have heard more horns,” replies the Reverend, and his voice carries. He stands tall, with his people around him; their number is his strength.

By contrast, the man from the Academy coach, the teacher, is made small by the multitudes he faces. His voice is shaky as spring ice. Halting.

Afraid. Like the rest of them.

“I don’t know,” he says, in his voice not at all like a lecture. “I’m just reporting… reporting names.”

The Crown States hears them both the same.

The teacher bends his head, reading from a paper he’s holding. “L… J.J. Bridges. K. Downs. I—I can’t read in the dark, with this rain.”

Someone offers him firelight.

“R. Hartman. D. Estrada. M. Mayes. D. Thomas…”

In every way that the Reverend is a conductor, the teacher from the Academy coach is not, and yet there’s a song that comes from his litany anyways and that song is shattering. Dozens upon dozens of pennies drop like a flint striking hundreds of sparks that catch on the brushwood of a nightmare and blaze.

“What happened!?” someone calls.

“I just know that they were hurt and killed.”

Hurt and killed, but the Crown States turns the too-familiar names over in his mind and finds nothing but fearful echoes. If there’s a power he’s meant to have, to know the truth of things, then it is lost to him. Like the crowd, he sees no further than the torchlight; he hears no more than names.

“The full name. Was that Doug Thomas!?”

“I don’t know the full names,” says the teacher, and he sounds like the boy who crashed through the window, after his struggle had died.

Hopeless. Helpless.

Things reach their breaking points. Things shatter, shards ricocheting into the darkness, aimless. Pinging off each other, careening in new directions, each time a little sharper, a little smaller, a little more broken. Rather than settling on the floor, the momentum climbs, voices rising into cacophony, a discordant chorus.

The Reverend shouts for order, but his words no longer carry. He is no conductor, now, only another voice shaking the night air, vying for a listening ear and finding none.

Once more, something gives way. The shouts of the crowd crescendo to a fever pitch, each degree of mercury rage fuelled by a lifetime and night of unanswered grievances. The Crown States hears nothing but a building roar, sees nothing but shadows and flames through rain-slicked glass. Something has to come of this. Something must.

Guns fire. Shots punctuating the noise.

In the flicker of torchlight, the Crown States sees the glassy eyes of stitched soldiers, twenty or so, armed and dressed in the uniforms of the Crown.

Gunfire, from both sides. Ringing in his ears after bullets fly, no time for that ringing to fade before the patter starts up again. People sprint past each other, grasping at makeshift weapons, throwing objects and rushing the stitched. No order, no unified charge, only ricochet, each action disjointed from the last, screams in the place of commands.

The Crown States tries to approach the conflict, one hand in his bag searching for something, anything useful, but shoulders and elbows knock into his own, lights warping through his glasses, shots ringing in his ears, and he’s turned around, adrift, directionless.

In a sea of darkness, through rain on glass, he catches a single clear glimpse of a face. The green-eyed boy has climbed the wall again, and sits perched atop it, looking at the Reverend, almost on equal ground.

The firelight illuminates his smile.

Like the cat that catches the bird. Like the gleam of red on a church window, the gleam of green through a syringe, the shifting sunlit sea. Like the spark of voltaic energy, right before the skies light up, and the dead sit up, and the natural order turns upside down.

❦

They lose.

(Everyone loses. That’s the rule of war.)

(Everyone loses, except the Crown.)

Guns fire, and people fall. People charge, and they are struck down, firearms and blades and brute strength winning over their desperate adrenaline.

People flee.

He wishes them all the best.

Fire blooms. The Crown States has seen stitched freeze at fire; he has seen them go up in flames.

Science marches on.

These soldiers do so, too.

Their faces. They used to be his.

(Are they still?)

Maybe it’s only the fire reflected in their eyes that he mistakes for light.

His fingers find the metal edges of a medical kit, shoved down deep in his bag, but as he pulls it out his journal is jostled, tipped from the bag, and it falls, landing on the ground with a thump he doesn’t hear.

He lets it lie.

“Burn the handlers!” comes the cry. The Reverend’s veteran soldiers, reasserting a measure of control over the battleground.

Again, fire blooms. Heat rolls over the Crown States; he flinches at the sudden blaze of light.

Head ducked against fire and rain, medical kit clutched in his hand, he picks his way through the chaos, treading carefully, carefully. Eyes trained on the front lines. Searching for the injured.

A sense of déjà vu.

(Hands, reaching upward, mouths wide open in screams, treading carefully, but not carefully enough—)

The stitched advance, and their advance halts his own. He has no weapon, no sword and shield. He chose to refuse them, and now he thinks that was cowardice, that was folly. Even on the brink of battle, he refused to entertain the notion of war.

(Because war is—war is—)

(—there are no prophets in war—)

“Run away!” howls a voice amidst the gunfire, and there’s no face to put to the words but he thinks he knows them anyways.

They’re in the church! Run, run, run!

From light to darkness. From warmth to cold. A few drops become a downpour that becomes a stampede. In the face of the dead, the living flee, holding their lives in their hands, and little else.

In his hand, the Crown States feels the cold metal of the medical kit. He does not flee. He feels as if he is again at war, the farthest he has ever felt from being one of his people, the direst the need to aid them. No permanent grave awaits him here, no injury that will not heal. Only vague fears of a greater consequence that have prohibited him from action.

The loss of a life is a great consequence. He believes it.

A figure lies crumpled on the ground. In his half-dreaming state, the Crown States does not focus on the face. He sees blood and thinks of gunshots and thrown things, hard ground and blades. Old scars twinge in sympathy; one gleams on the back of his bare hand. He remembers that he will need gloves.

Stop this. This isn’t the shining opportunity, the operating table, the hand stretched up from the side of a bridge.

His fingers pry at the kit. Cold and numb.

This isn’t the moment you are the hero or the angel.

He works the clasps open. Clumsy. The kit gapes open; things spill out and disappear into the shadows with soundless clatters.

This is only the moment in which you play at giving life, play at saviour, believe there is anything at all you can do to make things better.

A cracked syringe rolls across the ground and is crushed to sparkling dust beneath a careless foot.

This is the moment you fall.

In the darkness of people fleeing in every direction, a shadowy weight slams into him. He is knocked off his feet, breath driven out of his lungs, the back of his head cracking against stone.

Remember?

The kit is kicked out of his hands. He gasps for air, suddenly awake and drowning, gasping for a moment to regroup, rethink, sweep up the scattered pieces of his wits, but voices and gunfire simmer and bubble like hellish ocean waves, lights playing across water, water falling onto his face. He tries to brace a hand against the ground, gain leverage to rise, but a boot slams down on his knuckles and crushes his bones into the earth and his mouth opens in a voiceless scream, a sound that exists only in the wide wind-stirred field of his mind.

He is looking up at the sky, head swimming with pain, but he can’t see the moon and stars.

One moment, he thinks. Please. Let it all stop for just one moment.

“Stop fighting!”

The voice is a roar and the roar is the river in flood, a summer wildfire, the voice of the wind when it rises up and sweeps everything away. “Everyone stop fighting!”

In the silence that follows, the Crown States is able to manoeuvre himself into a sitting position. His bad hand throbs and stings with grit. His head throbs in unison; his throat aches.

He’s breathing too fast, but he can’t seem to fill up his lungs.

“Stop fighting!” and there’s a raw ragged-wound edge to the cry. “Please!”

A child’s voice. A child’s plea. Belatedly, the Crown States recognizes the timbre of it, the helplessness of the please, and knows it is the boy who crashed through the window covered in blood and slime, the boy who was afraid of monsters.

The boy who stands here, speaking, as monsters fill the night.

The Crown States rises. No one is near enough to help him, but there is nothing wrong with his legs. He stands, and the world wobbles like a children’s spinning top, but he keeps his footing. He is steady, alone.

Through a forest of heads and shoulders, through rain-streaked glass, he sees the distorted form of the boy, struggling against the grips of soldiers. Living soldiers.

The Reverend’s soldiers.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” says the Reverend.

Even knowing the gesture won’t be seen, the Crown States shakes his head.

A finger lifts in accusation. The boy’s finger, smeared with blood and slime, levied at the Reverend, the man of the cloth, the pillar of his congregation.

The revolutionary.

“He did this to me,” says the boy. He touches his fingers to his face, and they come away stained with blood. His voice rises. “He cut me so he could scare you! The monsters are made up!”

So very red.

They’ve used fear as a weapon for a century now, the Reverend had said, and they’ve gotten very good at it.

Monsters under beds. Monsters in the dark. Monsters in sheep’s clothing, with smiles full of teeth. None of them ever made up. But some harder to catch than others.

Seeing isn’t believing.

The Crown States doesn’t want to believe it. He doesn’t know if he should. He doesn’t.

The boy breaks free from the soldiers. He lunges forward and gathers up two objects from the ground, holding them up for the crowd to see.

A scalpel, and a jar.

(Theatre?)

“Look at this, taste this slime!” Splattered over his skin, his clothes, sloshing inside the jar. “It’s soap! My teacher didn’t do anything at all! He blamed her to take attention off him!”

(Sleight of hand?)

The soldiers reach for him, but he keeps speaking, and every word he speaks, every attempt to restrain him, places another finger on their scales, another crack in a congregation’s bedrock faith.

“Before it all started he called us into his office and told us what we were supposed to do, and threatened us. The man who read out the names! He was working with Reverend Mauer too!”

The Crown States knows not to believe every word he hears. He knows that a child threatened into a lie once might be threatened so again. But in the darkness, he sees the harsh torchlight shadows on the Reverend’s face; he hears the Academy teacher reading out a list of tragedies. Some words are easier to swallow than others.

“The boy is deluded,” says the Reverend. “It’s easier to imagine a monster here than to recognize the monsters that the Academy created.”

The Academy created me, the Crown States thinks, and flinches.

(I am of my own creation.)

The Academy created you, in the battlefields of the south, when they lit this fire inside you.

The Academy creates monsters with claws and teeth, and you armed us to fight one. You prophesied it, like the children did.

But all we’ve seen are human monsters, and monsters that used to be human.

He looks from the child’s face to the Reverend’s and thinks about how he should know his people, how it should be easy, to sift truth from lies like gold from gravel, to read the minute movements of a face like the hands on a clock. But the Reverend’s face is as hard and opaque as a profile etched on a copper penny, and the Crown States’ eyes and ears, in the chorusing night, are only eyes, only ears.

Who’s creating the monsters? Who’s imagining them?

And where are the monsters hiding?

The stitched press forward. The people move away, towards the Reverend.

Flight, not fight.

The Crown States retreats with them. He looks from the Reverend, to the stitched and their handlers, to the boy with the scalpel and jar.

A woman is lifting her mouth from his slime-coated knuckles.

“Soap,” she says.

(The monsters are made up.)

“Soap,” confirms the boy, pressing jar and scalpel into her hands. “Soap and a knife. Please don’t let Reverend Mauer hurt me anymore.”

He turns to look up at the Reverend. The woman embraces him.

Foundations crack. Windows shatter. A scale tips with the crash of a great bronze bell breaking.

A church, built from years of work, crumbles to the ground.

Words fill the air, flung like bricks and stones, like the projectiles hurled at the stitched. People lift voices, list fists, lift weapons too far away to use, against this man they flocked to, this leader they followed. They shout, fueled by a tide of reckless, dizzying, feverish rage, that same bloody energy from the children, the church, the list of names, now turned upon a new target.

Monster.

No.

Traitor.

The Reverend lets the words land in silence. In place of reply, he gestures with his hand.

Conductor.

A soldier lifts a horn to his mouth and blows twice in quick succession.

In the single motion, the remaining soldiers turn away.

Retreating.

The stitched advance, guns drawn, pressing the furious crowd towards the departing rebels, but living soldiers turn and aim their weapons at the people they were arming not long before. The stitched advance, and the people give way, but they are met with gun barrels in every direction. Crown or rebellion, fight or flight, there is no sanctuary, no open path, only the promise of death.

Freeze.

Someone drops to their knees. The Crown States follows suit, lifting his arms in surrender. People kneel like a forest toppling, like field mice ducking into grass. Every bright ideal becomes illusion, dust and shadows, a dream crumbling away. There is nothing but the gleam of a blade, the knife’s edge between life and death.

They’ve used fear as a weapon for a century now.

And they’ve gotten very good at it.

The Crown States has knelt like this before, among his people, stones digging into his knees, sharply aware of the blade hanging over their heads. He has knelt like this and bent his head until all he saw were grass and shoes. But this time, he keeps his head up. This time, he keeps watching.

As the crowd stills, the stitched do as well.

The Reverend turns to leave, but before he can, a pair of arms wrap around his waist.

A girl, twelve or so, who’d emerged from the shrubbery behind him. Her fingers locked into each other, her weight holding him in place.

“Let go,” says the Reverend.

Let go, thinks the Crown States, like a plea, but she doesn’t.

“Let go!” the Reverend repeats, louder. He tries to pull her arm away, pushes her off balance, but her grip is unshakeable. An anchor.

The Reverend pulls out a pistol. He presses it to the girl’s forehead.

The crowd takes a breath and doesn’t let it out. The sky yawns wide above them, but there is no air. There is only a gun, and a child, and a life hanging in the balance, powder waiting for a spark like a revolution’s embers before everything goes up in flames.

The girl looks up at the Reverend, eyes blank.

“Helen!” calls another young voice. “Let him go!”

Her arms unclasp. The anchor coming loose like a breath exhaled.

The Reverend steps away, pistol still held at the ready, but targetless, unaimed. Freed from the weight of the girl, he turns away.

His people watch him leave with their knees on the ground and weapons trained on them, back and front, from the Academy that’s failed to protect them, and the rebels that never did, and caught between two opposing forces, they kneel together, but they are alone.

The Crown States sees the afterimage of the pistol raised. He imagines the crack of the shot, the burst of heat as the powder catches. In the press of the trigger he finds a window crashing across the floor, smoke pluming from a rifle, torches blazing in the rain, words falling like meteors.

A nation’s fear. A nation’s anger.

His hands are open in surrender, but that heady, dizzy rush of momentousness doesn’t go away; it only twists into nausea, twists into dread, twists into a headache that saws his skull in two.

The rain is cold on his skin, but he knows that something is raging which it cannot quench.

❦

The Crown States flexes his hand. Bones shift; tendons stretch. Hours later, nothing remains of the injury but the thrum of an ache.

Doctors had come to treat the people; he had slipped away. The turning-forward of the clock will turn back all his injuries in time, without questions or sharp observations.

Still, it counts for something that care was sent. It counts for something, in the face of worse endings, that there was kindness in the end.

(Was there?)

His journal is a steady weight in his bag; the memories of a sleepless night run through his head in vivid detail. He should commit them to ink and paper, but vivid is not the same as clear. There are too many blind spots, too many falsehoods, too many facts that don’t add up in light of day. Spinning a story is easy; picking out the thread of truth is harder.

What he remembers are faces, the fresh and the old, flushed or pale with emotion, upraised, downturned. What he remembers is the light of the Reverend’s coppery hair, the fire in his eyes; the reflected firelight in the eyes of the stitched. What he remembers are children, raising their voices, sitting on walls and crashing through windows and tempting death, appearing and disappearing like ghosts, like storybook creatures.

What he remembers was that there was no way out, no safe path, only knees to the ground, hands in the air. What he remembers is a pistol raised, a finger close to the trigger, the pitch silence and gunpowder air.

(There is nothing you can do.)

What he remembers is the moment of bitter division, with the people of Radham gathered outside their church, Mauer and his army departing, the ever-widening distance between them. What he remembers is the city cleaving like flesh beneath a scalpel, carved into factions: the Academy, the Crown, the poor, the rich, the loyal, the wronged.

An injury that time has not healed: his headache, from a city’s worth of dissenting voices, the toll of a steeple bell, the rattle of an unfired gunshot inside his skull. When he lifts his head he sees the writing on the wall.

Revolution.

And then two words, bubbling to his lips like blood, because maybe he forgets history but he knows it repeats itself. At last, at last, he sees the pattern it makes.

First, the war over independence. Then the war with the neighbour to the south.

And finally, like bisection, like twin shadows across the floor: the war against himself.

Civil war.

Chapter Text

Early 20th Century
North America
The Second Mexican-American War

❦

“Sign here.” 

The Crown States beheld the empty line. His heart lurched; for a moment his mind flashed equally blank. In the place of a signature’s letters he found only letters that opened with To and closed with Regards, the name of Crown set to paper time and time again, bookending their correspondence.

The only name that mattered.

His grip tightened on the pen. Eyes fixed on the document he breathed in, out, willing blank paper to become old covers of old books and the scriptwork lines of old names.

For I have promised to do battle to the uttermost…

His hand loosened; reason returned. The Crown States set his jaw and signed a name that worked on paper.

It was not the first time, after all.

A clerk swept the form away. When the Crown States extended his hand, coins clinked into his palm, warm and coppery.

Payment rendered for one body more.

With a nod, he turned and sloped out of that office, into the crisp early-autumn morning. Men and boys were queued outside the door, faces grim or sombre or trying at light. The air crackled like dry leaves. 

It was a lovely day, and the sun warmed all their bones as they waited to sign them away.

The Crown States felt too warm, where that sunshine touched his skin. Beneath, where it didn’t, the future loomed like winter.

Fingers clenched around his coins, he turned to examine the poster pinned in the window. Stark black type on yellowed paper spelt out instructions dry as a summer drought. The only concession to embellishment was the image of a soldier, clad in dark red, the colour of vein-blood.

For King and Country.

The news had come without embellishment, without persuasion, without attempt at justification. Stark black type on white or yellowing sheets, no word wasted, waste stripped away. First in the papers, and then in the streets, and finally, when he sought it, in a letter to his name.

The Crown was at war, and that was all that mattered.

Southwards.

His coat would be dark red, the colour of vein-blood. It was autumn, and the Crown was at war with Mexico; gazing at his reflection in the dusty, branch-framed window, the Crown States could say no different.

It was autumn, and he was at war with Mexico.

His hand that would hold a gun found a pen instead, but no words came to mind that could spare them.

❦

To the Crown States of America: 
  Know that your task is the subdual of Mexico. Though negotiations may prove fruitful once blood has been shed, I doubt your neighbour will yield, and their disposition is, in any case, irrelevant to your ultimate goal. Negotiation is the province of rulers. As a soldier, you may only fire a gun.
  As you are, your words could yet pass to enemy lines, your own rulers be willing, or you yourself recognized and raised if you sought a higher role. But do not expect to profit from your name without paying its dues.
  Whatever path you choose to tread, learn from it. War is an education, with all the opportunity that entails. Make note of what you see.
  I do not lose, and I do not intend that you lose either.
  Regards,
  The Crown Empire

❦

Commands rang out, snow-muffled: Step. Turn. Lift.

The Crown States’ breath fogged in the winter chill, mingling with the lingering morning mist. His fingers slipped against the wood of his rifle.

Fire.

Staccato shattered the morning calm. Holes punched into targets.

The Crown States breathed out, and his glasses fogged over. Up and down the line, soldiers breathed to divers rhythms, red-coated ghosts amidst pale land, sky, and air. Spectres of the Crown.

His rifle drew a straight line from his shoulder to the wooden target.

Bloodless. For now.

A long, chilly pause. Then the command came, and they lowered their weapons, falling out of line. Dismissed for the noonday meal.

As his people trudged away, the Crown States lingered on the field. Where dark lines marched across the muddied snow, stitched were digging, their shovels hacking through frostbitten earth. To the south, where the pale land met the bright sky, only distant smears of hills and trees sutured the divide.

For now.

Had Mexico looked over the horizon at him, time and time again, pinning him to the end of a rifle? He had looked, once, south or north or west or east, for the gleam of a knife in the dark. Seeing enemies, everywhere. Enemies and spectres.

Take another’s land, and you will be greater. Break another’s strength, and you will be stronger. It had worked for the Crown, once, and empires before him, when the Crown States had been Mexico, the neighbour or the conquest or the colony. 

Even then, with the worst of the war future-shrouded, he could not believe it would work for him.

(Learn from it.)

The Crown States took his lunch break. Returning from the field, he found a resting spot and opened his journal on his knee, set pen to paper and drew a line, and another, another: a line of soldiers, the line of a horizon, the line of a weapon that had chosen its target. All the world faded into the fading mist, and he set his memories in ink, like footprints in snow, that some future him might benefit.

Sheaves of old wars. Ink smudges and blood.

The Crown States turned the page. This time, when he put pen to paper, it was to compose a written account; but the thread of the day slipped from between his fingers and lost itself amidst other threads, other words. Words more weighty than a morning’s training.

Words meant for another’s eyes.

His breath fogged. 

Red spectres in mist, and he was one of them. He knew it.

Negotiation is the province of rulers. As a soldier, you may only fire a gun.

Then you are the one who rules, he thought. And you hold the gun that holds us in line. He saw deserters, judgment in the pale dawn light, the fates that awaited them. You are the one who wins, and we only share in those victories, when they don’t exceed our losses.

Some truths were dangerous to believe, but some were moreso to forget. In the fog of war, he had to keep a level head on his shoulders; he had to keep sight of what was real and what was mirage. As long as he wore this red, red coat, he needed to remember what mattered, and what mattered was— 

—the only thing that matters—

The pen was warm between the Crown States’ fingers, a finger to lay on the scales, a tool he’d be foolish or cowardly to ignore. All the promises he’d made, to be who he was, the heart and scaffolding of him—by nature or nurture, he couldn’t betray them. Dread welled up cold water from the bottom of a pit; he shivered not from the cold.

The pale line of a scar carved across the back of his hand. 

Surrender.

The stitched dug on, shovels in the dirt, breaking the ice again and again and again. It was winter, thought the Crown States, and the dead were digging graves for the living.

❦

Dear housemate-across-the-pond,
  Word of your new venture has spread, as word tends to. Although you will not come for tea, know that the Crown and its dominions stand behind your efforts.
  As always, of course.
  Tell us how you fare. Is it strange to fight your neighbour? Then again, we all fight our neighbours; it is only when we fight across the sea that new ground is broken. New Zealand did wonder. Has he written you? You know how unreliable the post can be.
  I hear that amenities may be scarce in wartime. Accept the package I send with this letter. If you can heat water, a cup strongly brewed may wake a soldier in the morning. Drink it, or sell it, or give it away; it’s not my lot to tell you how to use your resources, only that a simple beverage can amount to a great deal.
  And take care. I’ve seen a war over taxation, and nations laid low by debts unpaid. I was ruled by a company. Count your coins like blood, or measure your blood like coin, and deal with care if you deal in either. It doesn’t do to fall ill, when we all breathe beneath the same roof.
  With well-wishes,
  The Indian Empire

❦

With every passing day, the Crown States felt farther from what was happening; and perhaps that was in part because he was farther, southwards and southwards and south. He dreamt of powder flaring, a man crawling over a wasteland, three limbs left; he woke, and the nearly-dead would be screaming, paralyzed by creatures that burrowed inside them. As his body went through the motions, he drifted further and further to sea, borne on the tide that was blooming with red.

Snowfall melted from the land. After rainfall, sunshine ruled.

It was a warm spring, and would be a hot summer, in time. There had been a year without a summer, once, a year of hunger and ash. Strange how he remembered.

Seated by an evening cookfire, the Crown States let the crackle of flames swallow the conversations around him. He closed his eyes and dreamt of battles near and far, as nations did.

This could be a world unto itself, he thought. A world of blood and noise.

In a sea of blood and noise, he drifted. He was far from the world he was used to, and farther from any that he might want.

Pen tapped against paper. The Crown States opened his eyes. Firelight danced over a blank page; a single dark dot, like the end of a sentence, marked where should’ve been a beginning.

Negotiation, he remembered, is the province of rulers.

By the nature of compromise, there was truth in that. A missive was scribed with authority, with a knowledge of sender and recipient that determined everything from opening to close. The Crown States thought of Mexico and tasted blood and dust and old frustration; as for himself, he wore a soldier’s uniform, and if to know was to have power over, then he was trying not to be known.

Dues.

A letter was scribed with purpose, but his purpose had been given to him like a coat. Was that all there was? If he had a perfect world, it did not fit within the fabric; but his purpose was not perfect, because it was quartered again and again and again, pulled north and south and east and west by a command, a nation, a soldier, the memory of someone who had lived a long time.

Surrender, he could whisper, like lulling tide of a drowning wave, it is not worth the price.

Fight, he could dare to say, like a heartbeat into the silence, until you cannot justify the cost, bleed, and perhaps stay free.

There is nothing I can do for you, he knew, he knew.

In this war like and unlike one he had fought before, parts of him wished to stretch a hand across boundaries battle had gouged in the sand; parts of him saw the scars and raised his guard. He could shake his head and wash his hands of guilt, as others had; he could pick up a gun and settle scores old and new, grasp at pride, or talk of the past. He could say anything or nothing at all, seeking a lever to shift the balance of the war.

When the Crown States finally wrote, he wrote like trying faces on for size; he wrote like he was trying on lies. He wrote, and fed his paragraphs, one by one, to the fire. All his words turned to ashes.

Had Mexico written, too, in letters that burned or disappeared into the postboxes of the Crown? He was wasting paper in a war of steel and flesh.

The Crown States rubbed at his eyes. He lifted them from the flames. In the darkness of night falling, every cookfire threw harsh shadows across shadowed faces. Over the course of the war, the ugly had been made prominent, and the ordinary made ugly. People flocked now to the light to drown that ugliness in food and banter, or had retreated to darker waters, closing their eyes to figment silhouette monsters. Some he knew had been consumed by the machinery of war, the beast, rendered into flesh like the stitched that dug their trenches.

More would follow.

The Crown States let out a breath. Two truths settled on his shoulders, like birds.

The first came bitter as old medicine: he was the Crown’s creature still, leashed and trained, sure and true as his name declared. He was the Crown’s creature, for this war, purpose crimson and singular as a killing shot, because to swerve would make it redder. He was the monster of Mexico’s story, as surely as the Crown had been the monster of many others. 

He did not consider himself a traitor yet, to his people or the King across the sea; but betrayal rasped over his bones nonetheless, like the rattling breath of an elderly dream.

The second truth came easier: that his words were worth ashes. There were matters, like a nation’s capitulation, that lay beyond his grasp; there were things no one would surrender, like a home, like a dream, until all other paths had been closed to them. All he could hope to gain from ink and paper was an edge in closing those paths. A measure of understanding. 

A moment of hesitation.

In the darkness of night gathering, the Crown States looked to the dusky southern sky.

Since before the advent of this conflict, there had been names for those who hailed from the countries to the south, words that marked them as other, lesser. Battle had only deepened those lines. But here and now, in this war of blood and bone, he had to remember that Mexico bled the same as him. Both were nations of this New World. Both had fought with the Crown, quarrelled with a neighbour, and been beholden to a guardian across the sea.

That common ground begot a measure of empathy, despite the graves between them. And if to know was to have power over, then the Crown States had understanding, slender as a needle.

Mexico had found allies, in the nations to the south, but the Crown States had allies, too, across the King’s Ocean. He was paying the price of the crown on his sleeve, but as long as he wore it, he did.

❦

Greetings to Crown Hispana, 
  As you may know, we have been charged with making war, and we are doing so. I believe the coming summer will be ugly, as summers often are, but not the sort that gives way to peace. Nonetheless, I will meet my opponent on the field, and I will make something of it. All is fair.
  Though I know your time with them ended decades ago, on poor terms, I’d still ask whatever insights you may have on my adversaries. There are lessons to spare in the history books, but though it’s been said that states are ships there are reasons we call lands mothers and fathers. We all do have hearts, in the end.
  My memory is much poorer than it was, but I know you once offered a desperate boy a handful of silver. This war is no treason, and I don’t ask for silver, but those debts were repaid, and this one will be, too, when there is opportunity.
  I hope that your own summer will be kind to you, and to your neighbours too. My well-wishes to you all.
  Sincerely,
  The Crown States of America

Hello to the Crown States of America, from sunny Hispana:
  ‘Tis strange to hear from you again. How long has it been? Only the other day I was discussing you with a colleague. The ocean is wide and deep between us.
  In any case, we were speaking of war. Such bloody matters that bring us together! Yes, I knew the children that now give you such trouble. But that was a long time ago, and it has been a very busying century.
  You write of hearts and parentage, and certainly what you write is true; but there is more to us than blood, no? Oh, we can’t deny that nobility is of a different stock, and that there are patterns in the blood to be dissected, but patterns can be deceptive. Some parts of any living being lie unexpressed until the proper moment. None of us are who we were a century ago.
  Yes, I remember the desperate boy who used my dollars, but even then I was learning how little silver was worth. I might as well have shown him a handful of dust. I should have. These debts bring nothing but trouble.
  Here is what I have for you: that I taught my colonies to pray, and perhaps Mexico still believes. And that when I went to speak with him, at the birth of his revolution, he shot my hand against the wall. He was a very good shot, but here is the key: whatever guided his aim, I did not die that day.
  Try to follow that example.
  This side of the ocean is doing well as can be expected, given the circumstances. Old friends send their regards. Still, in the interests of professionalism, perhaps avoid return post unless necessary. Focus on the task ahead of you.
  If you doubt or falter, look up: the same sun is shining over both of us.
  Cheers, 
  Crown Hispana

❦

Black spots shifted before his eyes. The Crown States raised a hand to shield them from the blistering noonday sun. In the heat, stitched and living worked in unison, digging and moving what had to be moved: supplies, artillery and ammunition, tools of the Academy.

When he blinked he saw a wide and wind-stirred field, felt sea spray, heard the gunshot drumming of a thousand heartbeats. 

Here and now, shovels excavated earth, but no water welled up from below; there was only damp black soil that dessicated into dust, coating boots and trouser legs. In the course of the war, the stitched had grown cruder, amateurish seams joining borrowed skin. The people had grown cruder, too. It was harder to tell them apart.

Did he resemble them? He had no mirror to tell. As the Crown States looked from the workers to the dark soil to the cloudless blue sky, he felt as if he was staring down the barrel of some disaster, or as if a blade was poised between his shoulders, pushing him onwards. He couldn’t say what that disaster was, or what would become of him; but like the person at the end of the gun had to put up their hands, all he could do was what of asked of him, and hope it would be enough.

The Crown did not lose, and he was of the Crown. That would have to be enough.

A voice called. The Crown States turned, still half-dreaming, and the sight splashed through his reverie like a slap of cold water.

The man had died tangled in the brush; he’d been dead for more than a day, gone before the medics arrived, or lost in triage. There was a great deal of dried and drying blood, primarily from his torso. The young soldier trying to extricate the corpse had red-stained hands; he couldn’t be more than twenty, green from inexperience and nausea. The dead man’s skin held a different sort of pallor. 

The Crown States recognized that face like he recognized all faces; he knew it the way he knew a bad feeling, a bad dream, the shape of his own features twisted in glass. He had been looking at the sky, but the feeling of his boots in the earth returned more like a fall’s sharp impact than a realization.

The only thing that—

The Crown States stepped forward. Brambles scraped at his gloves; his hands closed around the dead man’s boots. He would’ve smiled at the young soldier, said something reassuring, if he’d trusted his mouth or his tongue. Instead his heart lurched into his throat, and he breathed through the gaps it left behind; he tried to live a thousand heartbeats in the space of a lecture where a body was only biology. The dead were heavier than the living, they were, they were, but he could keep his hands steady, here and now.

He knew he could bear it, this dead and silent weight, because he had done it before.

Down they went, down the same rut on the same dirt road of the same war, and the Crown States helped bring the corpse to the cart. There he relinquished the burden, feeling no lighter upon the earth for it. 

The cart was past full. It was impossible to look away.

Limbs, tangled the way brambles were, muddied fabric and red ruin, glassy eyes like rows of windows to empty houses. Flesh, warm not from a heartbeat but because it had been sitting in the sun, and decaying. Awareness, the touch of it cold, more steel than water, I know you I know you I know you.

His feet were sinking, they were rooted here. Here it was, this ugly summer he’d foreseen, this muddy and blood-ridden road, and he’d believed he could get through it. He knew he still could.

Yet everything weighed heavier on him than before. 

Faces, and missing faces; ghosts to follow him to sleep. The stench. The flit of a carrion bird overhead. A view where even those who moved seemed more dead than living.

The enemy had been driven from this battlefield, and the stitched still rose, so the war was not lost; but they were losing, surely, surely, to the tune of faraway gunfire. There could be coin in their coffers and grain in their silos, but the Crown States was bleeding the people that were his lifeblood: parents and offspring and siblings, workers and leaders, wounds in families and cities that no gain of land could mend.

This ugly summer he was living, it would birth an ugly year, red and glistening, an ugly decade, the mangled meat of a hand in the jaws of a beast. He knew he had to stem the flow, yet he couldn’t write a wound into closing, any more than he could seal it with pitch and gunpowder.

As a soldier—

All he could do was attend to the dead, and the grim business of death.

For a moment the Crown States thought he glimpsed in those windowed eyes his own reflection, but it was only dust and sky. He pulled his feet from the earth, turned away and left that cart, returned to the killing ground. Seeking bodies for the students and doctors who might make something of them. 

In time his command changed. Like vacancies in the Academy had opened doors in years past, like the shortage of coats had opened similar doors, there were too many dead for students and doctors to attend to them all. Common soldiers had been trained.

(You ever been to the Academy? the instructor had asked, in a room that smelled of snow and tea and blood.

I sat in once, the Crown States had said, because it was true, and because was easier than saying, I left. The schools chewed me up and spat me out the other side. I remember what I tried to forget and I’ve forgotten what I wanted to remember. Some secrets I think are still buried beneath the earth.)

Where the dead were not buried. Not in times of war. 

The Crown States heard the faulty stitched before he saw it, where it laboured at the bottom of a pit. It was humming, and it hummed the same way it dug, the same motion repeated, the same refrain looping and looping and looping.

Peace on Earth, and Mercy mild,

God and Sinners reconcil'd…

The Crown States stopped in his tracks at the edge of that deepening hole. Something about those words shook him to his core. He felt as if he was listening to the same song, the same story, except he was living the story, and it ended with blood.

As a soldier, you may—

When he looked out past that grave to the battleground, when he closed his eyes and saw that wide and wind-stirred field, there was a blade at his back, or a gun at his temple, but he could feel a weapon in his hands, too. He could look down the length and see where the shot would go. He knew which heart the blade would have to pierce, to staunch the bleeding of his own.

Joyful all ye nations rise...

Like a needle. Threading through flesh.

Join the triumphs of the skies...

Closing a wound.

...come, Desire of Nations, come…

Weapons buried and imagined. The clear, bright sky. Corpses in the summer sun. Letters and letters and letters.

...Glory to the new-born King!

Something had to give.

❦

Mexico, 
  Someday soon, we will meet as adversaries. I understand that there can be no compromise under current conditions, only one party’s fall or concession, and you know my Empire never loses. 
  I don’t write this to threaten or warn. You must already be aware. I write this because some of mine lost a war once, and I want you to see what has become of me, to judge as you will. And I write this because win or lose, the course of a war is an ugly red thing, and there are those far worse off than I. 
  I don’t wish for you to be among them. Despite our circumstances, we are still neighbours. Someday, time and tide be kind, we will either be united under the same crown, or returned to an uneasy peace. No matter what becomes of this war, we will be left with the consequences.
  There are people of mine who hate yours, and I’m sure yours have no love for us. We have reasons to hate each other. 
  I find I don’t wish to be hateful—whether filled with hate, or deserving of it. I will fight you and yours, because it is necessary, and you will do the same with me, but this year has been ugly enough. For pragmatism or history, let’s keep hatred from our dealings. We were born from the same earth, and the distance between us is the width of a line on a map.
  We will last a long time, if we are lucky, and we have enough burdens.
  Good luck,
  The Crown States of America

❦

Words had been set to ink, to be passed on, Crown post be willing. Now the pen and paper lay beyond his reach. Campaign desks, hospitals—all lost in the dust of their footprints. There was only the rifle in his hands, sun glinting on the bayonet blade, flashing as it pointed the way forward. 

To Mexico, a pressure in the air like the warning of a storm.

Machine patter, great beasts, blood in the earth he’d been born from and the no-man’s stretch between them, filled with people who all died the same. The wind kicked up dust; the Crown States choked on it, coughing. It was a struggle to see, hear, breathe.

Yet the command came clear, that director’s call, passed down from commander to platoon to soldier:

Forward.

Stitched charged first, smooth as rehearsal; steel-pelted, they shielded the living who followed. But as a follower the Crown States saw the lie of formation: that all their forces were beyond exhaustion. People fell the same old bloody way, and even the stitched cost more than bodies.

As his feet pounded against the earth, the Crown States felt exertion keen as a knife, every tendon and bruise and bone of his body creaking and aching. He felt the fact that he’d been pushed for months, had lost blood and more vital things, hadn’t eaten or slept well, with everything put to war. He was putting himself into the war, but he hadn’t the world to give.

Only this. The rifle in his hands. The slip-slide of wood and sweat. This decision.

As a soldier, you may only hold a gun.

He wore the Crown’s skin, this red, red coat, this emblem. He knew it. 

Mexico appeared like a ghost from the dust, in the skip of a blink of an eye. Dark shadows and hunched shoulders and a desert of blistered skin—he looked more battered than the Crown States felt, looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week and hadn’t had a waking moment’s respite for longer. And the Crown States remembered, like splashing into a lake, what it was to feel that way, boxed in by numbers, quashed by force, driven back by horrors, until you were small, and so tired—

His thoughts skipped off the recollection like a stone over water but he couldn’t unsee the flash of his reflection, the mirror image.

The Crown States lifted his rifle. The compass-blade of the bayonet gleamed, pointing home, but he set his finger at the trigger to find his hands were slippery with salt, they were shaking. Had the ugly months stolen his steadiness? He hadn’t fought with shaking hands, hadn’t lifted the dead with a tremor. Yet this war, the bloody price of it, Mexico’s glare and the emblem on his sleeve, it stuck in his throat like something rotten, he choked on it like he choked on the dust. He was clothed in the threadwork skin of the Crown but beneath he was flesh and blood like the flesh and blood of a thousand other soldiers, he was the dust of the bloodied earth like Mexico was—

This is who I am and who I will—

He’d heard somewhere that one in twenty soldiers couldn’t bring themselves to claim a life, fired over the enemy’s heads to spare them, and he’d killed but Mexico was standing there and despite the imagined prick of a blade between his shoulders his aim wavered and he couldn’t shoot—couldn’t shoot—

—couldn’t—

Bang.

The Crown States staggered back, ears ringing, world gone silent. At once his hand went to his chest, expecting blood, but found only fabric. 

Untouched.

He looked up. Mexico swam in dust and heat haze, expression shadowed and unreadable, his rifle upraised. Smoke trailed from its muzzle. 

The Crown States touched his fingers to a deafened ear, felt the bite of pain when he brushed the shell, but it was nothing, a graze, a burn, only the aftershock of a too-loud noise. Heart pounding like a bird’s, he drew those fingers away, expecting red, but found them clean. They were clean.

Nothing but dust.

When he looked up again, Mexico had gone. There was only the swirl of dust and smoke over grass, the muffled staccato of gunshots, and the echo of a phrase, looping over and over itself, like a song:

One in twenty.

Why? the Crown States thought, like the air could give him answer. What does it mean? There has to be something it means.

Then the world blazed white like fired metal, like the flash of lightning, like a tree bursting aflame and as the Crown States went to flames, went to pieces, he screamed, unheard even by himself, as he recognized the mercy for what it had been.

A warning.

❦

Collected writings from front-line informants. Perusal with authorization.

  It hasn’t rained in a long while. No storms. Makes the stitched men harder to make, if not to use. It’s funny, how we raise the dead, but we still rely on favour from the sky.
  Water and fire: the weakness of their creation, and the weakness of their humanity. The brush down here catches like oil. Here’s how the summer will kill us: through lack of clouds, and surfeit of fire.
  The sun, this heat. It won’t let up. I hear people praying for rain, miserable as war in the mud is. Maybe when autumn comes, they’ll pray for sunshine. Somehow, out here, it’s easier for them to say these things. I don’t know if they believe, or if they’d only like to. But it’s not as if the Lords will change the weather.
  Though perhaps someday they will. Sooner than later, I would think. 
  I am going to clean my gun. I’ll need it soon.

[…]

  Today I fell ill. I vomited repeatedly, though I tried to do so quietly, so no one would take an interest. All this business is very tiring. I don’t dream normally anymore, I see things. A letter cold at the bottom of a mailbox. Red stains on white sheets. A town with a well. Why does it matter, that well?
  Why does it matter?
  Haven’t grown any fonder of dreams. It’s hard to keep ahold of them. I wake up and the sun chases them away.
  What else does the sun chase away?
  Maybe it’s only fever, but sometimes I can’t seem to make sense of my own thoughts. If I could find the words, I could remember. But I put them away, didn’t I? So I did.
  It doesn’t matter. There is only one thing for me to do. And I will grit my teeth and keep my lunch down when it comes to it. 
  Somehow I am still alive. I don’t know if these things happen for a reason, but I am giving it a reason. I still have promises to keep.
  I will write again in the morning.

[…]

  It’ll look better in the morning. He must’ve said that to me, because I remember it in his voice. It’ll look better after the moon and stars are gone; after the sun rises to its proper place; after judgment and after blood. 
  That with enough sunrises, even the worst of nightmares are forgotten. 

[…]

  I remember letters. My head hurts, but I remember them. Letters and letters and letters. So many words on deaf ears. No one really wanted to hear each other.
  I have letters. I can almost grasp what they warn me about. Yet I can’t seem to avoid it. Battle, inevitably, leads to death.
  I think I could lose this ugly summer, if I lost these letters, the ones I write or the ones written to me. But I am not home. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere or anyone I can trust to keep them. 
  That’s how it is in this world of ours. There’s only you for yourself.
  There’s only me.

❦

He woke to sharp scent of disinfectant, to sunlight bright enough to blind his bleary eyes. The Crown States blinked, once, twice, into and out of darkness, and tried to make sense of where he’d landed.

Walls, the brickwork twisted with branches black as charcoal, like lightning had run its fingers along them. A window, without latch or hinge, framed by those same branches, and crooked limbs of an oak outside casting shadows of twigs and leaves. White sheets.

The door was shut.

The Crown States sat up in his bed, and in that action pain scraped a sandpaper tongue across every nerve of his body. He bit back a cry.

Dark spots danced before his eyes, fading in, fading out.

The Crown States forced his eyes to the window, willing the blaze of light to wash away shadows and sleep. Pain came, in shards, but he blinked it away.

As his vision adapted, his own reflection gazed back from the glass.

Ragged as a ghost.

The Crown States lifted his hand, and the fingers of it brushed the fingers of the him on the other side of the mirror. They went no further, but the thought formed, murky: the notion of broken glass, a downwards descent, and an escape to—

—where?

Memento mori, came the whisper like the rustle of paper, and his fingers shivered, skin drawn tight over flesh over bone. Remember that you will die.

When the Crown States drew his hand from the window, the glass beneath still gleamed. Somehow, in high summer, he’d almost expected condensation. It felt so cold, in this place that was so bright; he could’ve been a weed, tilting futilely towards the sun, but there were flowers on neither windowsill nor wall. No warmth in that pale disinfectant light. Only clarity.

Wake and see, it commanded, and so he did.

Lines of pain, where sutures had been set into his skin, quilting him together piece by ragged patchwork piece. Fresh regrowth, raw and pink, jostling against old bruises and new burns beneath new bandages. Every rustle of blankets was sandpaper friction, each shift of skin a strain, and as the Crown States breathed, as his heart beat, the truth came clear: work had been done to him, while he had been lost in the darkness, and the knowledge of what and how much had been lost there, too.

Bile agitated in his throat. Nausea curled, cold and slippery, in his gut and over his skin. He told the fingers of his hand to move, and watched them move, and tried to tell himself that nothing had changed. He was still himself.

Whatever he was, he was still himself.

When that line of thought failed, he sought distractions.

His glasses still glinted on the bedside table; he slipped them on with weak but steady fingers. Of his journal there was no trace, but a tall glass of water and a small metal capsule rested on the same surface.

The Crown States picked up the capsule—plucked from a messenger-bird’s leg, it seemed—and rolled it across his palm. When he twisted it open, three coiled slips of paper fell out. 

The largest was scribed in an untidy hand:

Crown States of America,
  He cares nothing for you and yours. As you care nothing for mine. That is what we are.
  This war is a game he plays with the lives of your people. In this game, he is the only one who will not bleed.

Unsigned. Yet he could guess at the writer, and with that guess came unease, clammy as a corpse’s fingers: that the words had surely been read, but had made it here nonetheless.

The second note was the heading of a letter, only the date and names and rough address, sliced away from the paragraphs that followed. The Crown States recognized the word Mexico, and then, a heartbeat later, his own handwriting.

With that, the unease sharpened, the gun at his temple, the blade at his back. He had no secrets beneath the sun.

The Crown States opened the third and final note. There, in black, officious type, was a sequence of three stark numerals..

A room number. 

The Crown States stared at that note for a good while longer. Then he swung his legs over the side of the bed, took a few faltering, experimental steps, and strode for the door.

Lords. 

Blood rushed from his head; the room swam fishlike, in and out of focus, and darkness lapped tidal at the edges. When the Crown States closed his hand around the doorknob, the shock of clammy skin against cold metal sank all the way down into his bones.

Frost over leaves. Paralyzing. 

He’d been burned once, the Crown States knew, taken to pieces, his world consumed by light and fire. Now he was being destroyed in a different way: imploding inwards, where there was nothing but cold and ashes and slick horror. His memories were ink on paper; his skin was a new creation; he was two footprints frozen to the earth and a cup from which blood was spilling and he was becoming nothing, as all the layers of him collapsed—in the end, he was small.

And yet. By nature or nurture, he could not rest.

The doorknob turned, the door swung soundlessly open, and he proceeded down the hall likewise. The door he found was closed; he knocked, or rather hit the wood once with his knuckles, before the rasp of raw skin against wood forced him to withdraw.

“Come in,” called a voice in a crisp Crown accent.

The door was unlocked. The Crown States fell more than stepped into the room.

It was bright there, too, the air honeyed and cloying with sunbeams. A young man in formal monochrome was seated behind a solid mahogany desk, his pen proceeding briskly down a document. Every inch of the desk bristled with files and paperwork, except for a single clear space on the visitor’s side that held only pen and inkwell. There a chair had been drawn up.

The Crown States observed this, and through the act of observation, his dread congealed into something solid: not a tide that could carry him away, but rather a stone in his belly, weighing him down.

Breathe, murmured a memory.

Like reconstruction, he built up layers from the inside out: bone, flesh, skin, fabric, name, face. Covering the cracks where monsters and worse things could sink their teeth.

The words fell from his tongue like river-smoothed pebbles. “Would you happen to know the date?” 

The young clerk’s pen paused. He glanced up, noting his visitor, then shuffled through his files. Whatever he found made him frown.

“You’ve been here a week,” he said, and glanced up again, the frown deepening. “Your injuries were grave.” 

Grave as a plot of dirt in a churchyard, the Crown States knew, as bones beneath a tree. That sort of grave. 

Except he had been plucked from the earth, and brought here. Salvation.

Tell me how I was found, he wanted to urge the clerk. What was reconstructed. The number of pieces. The names of the drugs and the length of the string. How much blood was on the table? 

How much?

“When might I be released?” he asked, instead.

“When the doctor signs on your good health,” the clerk replied. “But I read that you might have business here.”

When the Crown States thought of business he thought of a signature; of a handshake; of the exchange of metal. Most of all he thought of a drop of blood, falling, like a penny tumbling face over face, except it was not a penny to him.

The pen gleamed where it lay on the desk. A finger to lay on the scales. A tool he’d be foolish or cowardly to ignore. 

He must have spoken, or made a sound, because the next moment the young man was furrowing his brow. “Is this a medical issue?”

Promises.

The Crown States opened his mouth. He measured out his breaths, carefully, to ensure he spent them right.

“I would like to write a letter.”

“There’s pen and paper on the desk, if you like.”

The Crown States stepped forward, though those steps, like his entrance, felt more like a plummet. They were spitting lines; they were going through the motions of a stage play, orderly and inevitable. Yet stages were wider; stages had exits on left and right. He was trapped in this room, in this chair he lowered himself into, pinned in the sunlight through the window.

As the clerk reviewed his file, the Crown States picked up the supplies that had been laid out for him. He wrote a letter, and let the ink dry, and folded it in quarters.

Then he said, “I would like to send a letter.”

“Post is hazardous business,” replied the clerk, “in times of war. Where to?”

The frost crept further. 

“I would like to send a letter to Crown London,” the Crown States said. “By the most reliable means available.”

A capsule fell open, words came uncoiled: Mexico’s and his and those of authority, intertwined. Words falling on deaf ears. Words cut out.

Anyone can write a letter.

He knew how fickle the post could be.

“Overseas?” The clerk raised his eyebrows. “It’ll cost you.”

“I’ll pay,” said the Crown States. “I’ll pay for the postage, for the paper and ink. I’ll give the coin. All I need is for it to be seen there, and handed over.”

The clerk said nothing.

It wasn’t coin they wanted, not in this moment, not ever. Everything came back to power; all things returned to control. Coin was simply a means to an end, and he could give them things worth more than a handful of copper.

A stitched server entered with a tray of tea. He set it on the table.

“Have a drink,” said his clerical envoy.

Steam rose from the teapot. When the Crown States extended his hand, he felt the heat on his newly-sensitive skin.

Now that parts of him had been peeled away, had collapsed and gone to pieces, he recognized how much of it had been false armour, grown to prop him up and not to protect him. All his false names, his wandering path, none of it mattered. He would always enlist, always sign his true name on wartime letters, always burn and burn and stay alive. He would always be sitting in this room, with a letter in one hand and a choice before the other, except, by nature or nurture or circumstance, that choice was no choice at all.

The Crown States poured tea. The hot porcelain was fire against his skin, the one warm thing in this sunlit room that felt so fever-sweat cold. His reflection danced on the amber liquid like a sepia photograph; dessicated leaves swirled below. Was it tea? All leaves looked the same, dried and shrivelled.

He could trust nothing, and yet he had no choice but to play at trust.

“Promise me,” he said. Promise us. That this matters. That it is for something. It is—

“Take a drink,” was all the envoy said, as foreign to the Crown States as his own flesh.

No answer in that expression. All he had to go on was faith.

Bitter wine, the Crown States thought, light through the stained-glass window. Bitter wine and wafers. Except this communion had tea, and biscuits, and a heaping pile of sugar; and it was the high and noble he was communing with, not anything divine.

They said that some deals you would always regret. And yet—and yet —that did not mean the monsters always lied.

This was the business of a nation.

The Crown States drank deep.

Immediately, the world wavered. The cup clattered to the table; there was no strength in his fingers, his arms, anywhere. He wasn’t moving his head, but perhaps he was, because everything was tilting and shifting like the deck of a ship in a storm. Hands landed on his shoulders, supporting him; between the dark spots of his vision, he saw black fabric. In the distance, sunlight, searing, but there was no refuge in the night, either.

Inevitable.

That light glimmered, glimmered, glimmered, but he sank down and away, down and down until the darkness and the monsters that lived there swallowed him up. And he tried to find his way to shore, but it was too dark to see the stars.

❦

Crown Empire,
  We bargained for peace once, I remember, but it’s on your word that it’s been broken. I know, and I accept that.
  You claim me as yours, but you won’t claim my people. They will never be worth as much to you as your own interests. And I know. I accept that.
  In the times I fought against you, it was for reasons that sounded right and just, and maybe it was only justification, but it was the sort men were willing to die for. When I fight for you, there is nothing about it that is justified. Only the command.
  And I know. I do accept that.
  People accept all that you and yours do in exchange for the peace of their everyday lives, for their safety and security, for the prospect of prosperity. If you can’t give them that, then why do they continue to obey? What does it matter, if you show them as much favour as the sky?
  Prove to me that our bargains hold value, and that the prices we pay are realized. Prove to us that you can be kinder than the rain, because the summer has been long and dry. And if you cannot, then try. Put your skin on the line, as I have, and try.
  You told me that you never lose, but I do lose. I lose pieces of myself in the earth. Red sky in morning, and red sky at night; that’s how the rhyme is meant to go. But the hours are red and red and red, and I can’t say when the storms will come.
  With regards,
  The Crown States of America

❦

Curled against the trench wall, he wondered if he could sink into the earth if he lingered long in this position, feel the soil part and embrace him, dissolve back into sand and memory. Would that be his grave, soaked in blood and baked sun-dry? Would a tree grow from the fragments of his bones?

Difficult, to imagine anything that grew. Death loomed large in his mind; life was a short and bloody path that led inevitably to it. 

A breeze stirred the air; he shivered as it hissed over his skin. Every sensation came painfully crisp, from the heat of the sun to the rattle of gunshots. His ears rang; his skin burned. Light blazed into a headache when he looked up, and so he ducked his head and shut his eyes, lacing his fingers into each other. Skin against skin. Memories in bones beneath flesh beneath skin beneath cloth. Layers.

His?

Once more, he thought of the grave. The cool darkness of the earth.

Memories dissolved into each other, a droplet suspended on a needle, organs suspended in fluid, tubes and wires. How many were history and nightmare? How many were truth?

His thumb brushed the spine of his journal, back at his side after seasons of separation. But paper was as easy to alter as flesh. No part of him could be trusted.

The earth shook, and the Crown States opened his eyes to see it crumbling away. Alarm gave pause to gunfire’s relentless beat. People were rising, looking down the hill at the coast below, and the Crown States felt the impact in his bones and knew something had come to harbour. A ship? A great beast? It didn’t matter; he didn’t look. Crown or Academy, it was theirs.

Peace on earth, he thought, he hummed, goodwill to men, from heaven’s all-gracious King. But the sun turned on, he knew, uncaring.

Onwards.

At the command, the Crown States gripped his weapon and rose from the earth. There was no helping hand. He looked forward into the barrel of promised death, then at those who would die alongside him. Down the line, he glimpsed hair like the flash of a penny, a bowed head, and lips forming words he could not make out. 

And man, at war with man, hears not—

They charged. The Crown States searched the faces of their opponents, seeking his reflection. Their skin crawled with other creatures, clinging and colonizing creations of the Academy, but he thought he glimpsed something familiar in their eyes. There was something—

People fell due to his actions, and he fell. Later, he wouldn’t be able to say what injury had brought him down, or where it had come from; if it had been a gunshot, or only a misstep, some lingering poison, months of poor health. All he knew was that he was lying on the side of a hill, and his ears filled up with gunshots and his skin broke and he was bleeding. More blood than he could afford.

Wisps of orange fog drifted through the air. The doctors would find him, if he remained here. The doctors would find him, and they would—

They would—

Pain blotted out his vision, and nightmare blotted out the rest of his thought. The pain was more bearable than the dreams.

His fingers dug into the earth. Leverage.

The Crown States tried to stand and could not. He tried to crawl, and on hands and knees, and sometimes only hands, he dragged himself forward. He was not seeking a destination.

Only away.

Twice he lost time, when the darkness overtook him, but both times he awoke with his cheek pressed to the grass, and little time seemed to have passed. The sounds of the battle rang on. Deserter, he thought, but his weapon was behind him now. He was not fleeing the war or death, only what came after.

He seemed to pull himself over some vital precipice, because the next moment the ground sloped steep enough that he was rolling, and his last thought before the world winked out was that he could hear the murmur of water.

❦

It did not rain. He lay, tangled in the inconstant shade of bushes, as the sun turned onwards. Time ceased to exist except in terms of light and shadow.

Eventually the worst of the bleeding slowed to a trickle, but sunburn and rash and worse things crept over his skin, and a sky-high fever set in, followed by trembling chills. At times he attempted movement, but each attempt ended with him waking on the ground, the light having changed in the blink of an eye. In time he stilled and throat parched, wracked with pain, awaited some sort of end, but he existed at the edge of death, sustained by a country’s vitality, a body’s resilience, forbidden from rest.

Onwards and onwards and on—

Delirium enveloped him, fog-like, blurring the boundaries between dream and waking. He was lying on a bed with tubes in his arms and blood was being taken from him. He was standing up and stepping into the sunlight, his skin flaking away like old clothes. He was young, and ill, and someone was placing a cool washcloth on his forehead, singing snatches of song, when I am king you shall be queen. His fingers dug into soil, burying secrets; he picked the dirt from beneath his nails. A bird pecked at his flesh and spoke words he couldn’t understand. Boots in the earth, he was walking—

—and boots in the earth before him, step after dull heavy step. The Crown States heard a muttered profanity, the echo of a distant song. Felt the pressure of an oncoming storm. Something hard and cold pressed into his forehead—the muzzle of a gun. His body wouldn’t obey his desire to look up. 

Questions swirled through his mind, why and what and how, but there was no answer. Only the explosion of the shot.

He slipped from both waking and dreams.

❦

When the Crown States awoke, it was raining. He stood. Every part of him felt stripped raw, but he looked down and saw no wounds. When he breathed it was an easy thing.

For a moment he revelled to have enough air, knowing what it meant.

Peacetime.

Kneeling, he scraped his hands through leaf litter and found the damp lump of his journal. His shoulders sagged in relief.

Rising, journal in his hands, he began to stumble away, from the leaves that had swallowed him up, from the burbling stream, back up the hill people had died on. Rain had not yet washed away the traces of war, the barbed wire and torn cloth and dead flesh. The thought of unexploded shells flickered in his mind, and he adjusted his route to skirt around the worst of the fighting.

As the earth sloughed from his skin, his accounting of the past months grew clearer.

Amidst the relief of rest and the exhaustion of war, he felt betrayal.

❦

The Crown States tilted his hand, and coins spilled onto the counter, two-faced, heads and tails. A clerk swept up the coins, counted them, waved him on with a nod.

New medical kit in his hand, the Crown States stepped out of that store to a bell’s soft jingle, into the pouring rain of streetside. His free hand found his hood, then dropped away. 

There were seeds sent up into the clouds, now, that flowered. The rain was here to stay.

He would learn to tolerate it.

The Crown States stowed the medical kit in his bag. He hiked up the strap and felt the heft of it, the added weight. Evidence that science did march on. 

As they had.

As he had.

What was it people said? That necessity was the mother of invention? He’d paid, in more ways that one, and he’d gotten something out of it, he supposed. 

It was the business of nations and empires.

The Crown States lingered there, beneath the awning outside the store. People hurried by, huddled in their raincoats, eyes downturned. In the end, it still surprised him, like the clarity of window glass in the summer, how quickly the world had moved on. Old newspapers crumbled in puddles and cities kept churning, a few lives poorer. Rain fell, hush hush, clouds day after day like grim reminder, but down came the water and mingled with tears that washed away.

Day after day, they forgot.

The Crown States stretched his hand beyond the awning and felt rain fill his palm, cold as autumn. Stepping out into that rain himself, he started down the street, heading east. Boots splashed through puddles; a downwards glance revealed his reflection, the bitter twist of his mouth.

Faces, turning, like coins, the warm metallic taste of copper and blood. Lessons carved deep enough that they would scar and stay, for a time.

That as the Crown did not lose, it had no patience for lost causes. That it was only canny business, to forgo an unprofitable venture.

Peace tasted bitter in his mouth as regret, saline as sorrow. It tasted of sour resentment and the patient heat of a frog boiling in a pot, the ozone crackle of thunder on a distant horizon.

Reckonings.

Hush, hush, murmured the rain, but people could murmur too.

In the puddles of groundside, the Crown States saw the clouds mirrored, massing overhead like a bad mood. To the south, beneath the same sky, Mexico was free still, in whole or in part. Did he celebrate it? Or had the plagues and poisons, the graves and tears, the costs, tainted his peace as well?

The Crown States couldn’t know. Perhaps it was better that he didn’t.

Mexico and his allies had succeeded where others hadn’t. Their resistance had cost more than the Crown was willing to pay.

How much, the Crown States had wondered, in the weeks following his awakening, and penned a cursory paragraph of report, concluding with:

Was it worth it?

What did it cost?

His signature had almost been violent enough to tear the paper, and he hadn’t expected reply, but nonetheless it had been delivered, like a blow, in thick parchment and elegant script. Paragraphs of terse, dry numbers, ending with:

Omnia cum pretio. Everything with a price.

The price is right.

Faint lines had criss-crossed the paper, pen-marks where the sheet above it had been written on. Deliberation and drafts? Or simply the mark of industriousness?

How much did it cost, the Crown States had wondered, to keep me, but in the end, he’d set the letter aside.

He’d heard all he needed to know.

Children swirled, like autumn leaves in a gale, down side-streets and alleyways: light-footed, but thin and brittle. The Crown States worried about them. How they would grow, with families gutted, resources thin on the ground. The desperation that’d gnaw at their heels, the places they’d disappear into. What they’d make of themselves, and what would be made of them.

What they’d make of him.

Like mist. Nothing ahead but grey and sickly seasons. Like something had been knocked askew in his eyes, except perhaps that something had been askew for quite a while, and was now tilting back into its proper place—because through that grey, he could imagine the flash of lightning.

But carefully—we round the corners— 

—of the seasons of our lives—

The rain wicked over his skin; the Crown States shut his eyes to that future, let the flow of the crowd bear him along. He breathed in; he breathed out. His bag was heavier than before, but he stood on the same ground, beneath the same sky. For now, he made his peace with what had happened, and hoped the peace would last,

Hush, hush, murmured the rain, and he hoped, but he didn’t believe. 

He knew better than to trust the sky.

Red sky in morning, sailor take warning. Every action had its consequence, if not its reward. 

It was at once the soothing of his anger and the promise of his fear: that all debts would come due in time.

Debts of coin, and debts of blood.

Chapter Text

Winter 1921
Kensford, the Crown States of America
Leashing of Kensford and other communities

❦

The reflection stirs murky in the still water, framed by cracked and brittle ice. Messy hair falls over a furrowed brow, over eyes blinking behind old-fashioned eyeglasses. Behind the face, branches laden with strange misshapen fruit spill across an overcast sky. Skin, hair, eyes, branches, the clouds that smother them all: everything is tinted green by the algal cast of the water, except where blotches of red mar the mirror.

Another drop of blood falls down from above, like a single pristine raindrop, and that mirror shatters when it lands, reflections lost into ripples of ripples. Then the surface smooths itself out like a miracle cure; the pieces come back together; the Crown States is looking into the water, where the tendrils of red have extended their roots further into the murky green, and he sees himself again.

Splashed with scarlet.

The Crown States’ fingers break the reflection again when they touch the water; he sweeps a hand through the roadside puddle, grimacing as algae, mud, and worse sediment stick to his skin. His fingers close around his prize and he drags it out like a dead fish: a sopping bundle of paper.

Shake it a little, let the water drip out; pages crumble but the cover is made of sterner stuff. There, in stark serif letters: 

Ratios by Species.

The Crown States’s fingers slip. The cover yawns open. Decaying pages fall away one by one into blurred black type and precise diagrams and something in his mind is slipping open, too, seeing it, a door, a door that has been closed for years and years and years and years and years—

—and he tries to force it closed because it is for something it is for something there is always a reason but looking at that Academy textbook crumbling in his hand all that comes to mind is that—

—there were stars, once, somewhere in the darkness, there were—

The remains of the book splash back into the puddle. The door clicks shut in the Crown States’ mind and he’s safe, safe for now, and he breathes. And he breathes. And he stands.

—You ever been to the Academy?

I sat in once.

Above him branches sway, laden with their strange fleshy fruit, and where that fruit has split red drips down and down like rain, and where those fruits have fallen they buzz with flies and a putrescence of iron. This is the tableau he faces: green water. Red blood.

The Crown States dries his fingers absently on the hem of his coat. The road winds on west, around hills and hills like a trailing thread, and in the distance smoke puffs into the air

Kensford.

Did you put these secrets here? the Crown States wonders. He feels the pulse of the city, distant, liquid, but cannot diagnose it. Books are lost every day: fallen, taken, burned and broken.

And yet.

The Crown States pats his bag, feeling the solid weight there, then starts down the long and winding road. It is a peaceful walk, and a lonely one: around him the hills are free of snow but not a single cow grazes or lows into the winter air. Meat is vegetable and blood is water.

The smoke, he knows, is from the crematoriums.

After this long, it shouldn't still feel as if every step he takes is one step closer to the blade, the shot, the fire, the body in the roots, floating just beneath the surface: and yet that knowledge dogs his steps, a constant awareness of—of—

—something’s changing, can’t you tell? Can’t you feel it in the air—

—see it in the stars—

—in the water—

—something in the water—

❦

Kensford is a storybook town, all done up in red leaves and toothy smiles and girls walking their pets on leashes, Academy like a tumorous heart cut from the chest of some princess, framed by that arterial, arboreal spray. He knows about red leaves. He does.

He did.

The Crown States wanders the streets, a cloud on the breeze, a leaf on the current, aimless. Searching for something.

For something.

It doesn’t add up that he can wander and wander and not find one crematorium when their smoke was all he could see of this town hills and hills from here. It doesn’t add up that in his pulse he hears the rush of water, drowning out whispers that sound like education. It doesn’t add up that sitting in a cafe he looks out the window and sees, for a moment, on a balcony—

—a wild-haired boy, speaking to a young woman splashed in Academy black and red—

—and feels as if it is the most important thing in the world.

The Crown States finds himself meandering down to the river, standing by the ice-bitten shore, hands in his pockets. That’s right, Kensford is a river town, away you rolling river. From the mountains to the eastern ocean, like a thread, around and around, stitching the land together. In the current twists a sea monster, a riverbound dragon from some folktale, movements sinuous and sluggish in the winter chill.

That’s right, thinks the Crown States, it gets into your bones, doesn’t it—

—and yet that doesn’t add up either, when a monster is made with a place and a purpose, and there is a winter you know will come, and yet in the cold the beast is sluggish—

The Crown States shivers. The door in his head is there again. Inching open a crack.

—You ever been to the Academy?

I left—

And then, like a doctor attending a patient, he feels a change in the pulse of the town

❦

When he retraces his steps downtown he finds Main Street clogged like an artery. There are papers everywhere, papers and papers and papers, Kensford choking on words: papers in people’s hands, papers fluttering through the air, papers on the ground, trampled underfoot, like leaves. 

The Crown States picks one up. 

Skips his eyes across the words— 

—and there, in stark black type like a notice of war, it lays it out, the proper formulations, the compound to restrict the conception of children, numbers upon ratios upon diagrams, another drug that builds a dependence until you die from lack of it, how the art of acid and base can be wrought into chains, an anchor, heavy, heavy—

Kensford, he thinks, with a kind of faraway shock, Kensford by the water. 

It would be so easy.

Voices fly up like a flock of startled birds. Horror has bled into the rhythm of the day and it does not bleed out. They are living a bad dream. They have woken into a nightmare. 

Poisoning the well.

The heart of this town seizes with the enormity of it.

Tension builds like static, towers of clouds overhead, and then, like a strike of lightning, finds release.

A window shatters.

The Crown States turns away; he presses his hands to his forehead. Behind his eyes there is a window forever shattering, red as blood, as war, as the sky that once promised a storm. Now there is a door straining open in the recesses of his mind and the vessels of his blood are a net that binds and that storm is upon them—risen out of the water— 

His feet take him down winding side-streets, and yet that drumbeat follows him like the pulse of his own heart.

I have to get out of here.

Each step presses the thought more firmly in his mind.

I have to get out of here. 

I— 

With sudden cold realization he sees a cup, a cup of coffee in a café.

— will have to die to get out of here.

Lords. It washes over him like a rainshower; it brings him to a standstill. In his mind’s eye the guillotine blade comes down, the forecast comes true: stormy skies and a body in the ashes, beneath the earth, falling, floating just beneath the water.

Something in the water.

The Crown States is criss-crossed with the threads of roads and yet they loop upon and upon themselves. No matter where he walks, he comes always to the same conclusion.

❦

What is your perfect world?

Later he is sitting on a train, letting the cool glass of the window soothe his pulsing headache, watching fields and fields of brown and dull green streak by outside. It is raining, pouring, and a sheet of water divides that world from this one, droplets like tumours breaking up the lines of the view and his reflection.

The question floats on his mind like a leaf on a lake, poised and green.

They have taken my eyes, the Crown States thinks, and sees grey and sickly seasons ahead, only grey and sickly seasons, until they break into storm and fire. They have taken my eyes and I can’t see it. I can’t—

A rebellion of fire and steel. A rebellion of mirrored water and books breaking their spines and back-alley formulations, of wells and paper, the secrets of the Academy changing hands like coin.

Paths that turn upon themselves, leading always to the same destination.

The Crown States closes his eyes, abruptly tired. He could doze in the steady trundle of the train yet still the question floats, in the darkness, with a quiet persistence:

What is your perfect world?

In the shadows, answers flutter, ragged as paper in water, as paper crumbling to ash. 

Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness.

Peace. Order. Good government.

They glimmer like the stars and moon but they are only a reflection, he knows, he tells himself; like old myths and legends of queens and lions, a world seen through glass which he can never touch. More and more they sound like an old story of a dream that recedes further and further into the past, a station from which the train departed before he ever boarded. The laws of the world as he knows them are simpler, and older, and scrawled in blood: that children resemble their parents. Expansion is key. Those who change to suit their environment survive. The dead have no legacies.

The things he wishes for are small, material: lodgings for the poor, safety for the children. Improvements like bricksetting a house, plain and solid: you can’t lay a foundation on starlight. 

And yet those words that trace out such grand visions call out to him, still; and he clings to them, still, dangerous as they are, as bitterly as he clings to any other scrap of history. Dreams are allowed to be foolish.

It is all right to dream, as long as you remember that you will wake up.

Will you?

The Crown States opens his eyes. His glasses are fogged over; he blinks, waits for them to clear. Outside the window all is brown and green and grey and nothing has changed.

What is your perfect world?

His mind is the surface of a lake, dark and green, free of answers. His headache spikes in an orchestra’s broken-glass crescendo; his reflection blurs in the rain-slick window until it could be anyone, from anywhere. The edges of him wash away.

Everything washes away.

❦

It is high summer the following year when the Crown States returns to Kensford. The leaves are still red but the snow has gone to the soil and the sea, the city strangely darker in its absence. Meat sways from hooks on chains. His mind buzzes like flies at noon, busy, busy.

In his pulse he hears the rattle of black carriages down cobbled streets and glass shattering and a single gunshot and water flowing on and on. Behind the darkness of closed eyes he sees the beauty and terror of rebellion, the beauty and horror of loyalty. A long time ago there was a meadow and the sun shone down upon it.

Slowly, by degrees, the world is shifting on its axis. There is something in the air, in the water, like a great beast stirring to life. Cities interpose themselves as landmarks in his mind: connections form, struggling to assemble into a path. Into a constellation.

There is something he could do, the Crown States believes, with a fire in his head and a rush in his ears and a dream clearer than reality. There is something.

There must be something.

(It is not a season of idleness.)

What is your perfect world?

The Crown States proceeds down collections of side-streets, a maze of alleyways. His feet move out of their own accord and he lets them, lets his body remember what his mind has forgotten.

There. Tucked away to spare the eyes of passersby.

A mass grave.

Bodies. Bodies upon bodies. It would look like war, in a different time; it still feels like war, to a part of his heart that beats to the song of broken windows and storefronts. Bodies altered, not human, not quite, and yet human enough, after all, to die.

The smell is overpowering. This is a place where the dead are not buried.

Except he did bury it, the Crown States remembers, phantom paper crinkling between his fingers, and the streets here are old cobbles and he’s running his eyes along them until he finds it, there, a scratched mark on a stone, x marks the spot —

His fingers dig into the ground. Mortar crumbles; the stone comes loose, comes out. The Crown States reaches his hand into the dark empty space it leaves, like dredging through water, and fetches up with his prize: a rusted metal tin that rustles like paper when he tilts it.

The lid stamped with flowers.

It feels like a key fitting into a lock. It is the rightest thing he has ever felt and yet he has never felt more like a prisoner awaiting execution.

What is your perfect world?

His heart is beating very fast.

The metal of the tin is cold beneath his skin, cold as the dead. It is a coffin from a tomb and he is a grave robber. And the dead— 

—are only ever buried for a reason—

Cities are drowning or burning but there are things he knows he cannot do, even now, without breaking himself in two. He made himself a promise once and he has kept it because it has kept him.

This rebellion bigger than torches in the night, though. Bigger than alleyway textbooks. 

What is your perfect world?

He doesn’t know; he can’t see it.

But maybe—maybe if he digs it all up, the pages and the boxes, he can fill in the holes they’d been lost from. Maybe if he follows every river to its source, every monster to its lair, every red thread to its beginning, it’ll make the difference force of arms cannot. Knowledge could be the key in his hand that fits the lock of his cage.

And maybe—his pulse thuds in his ears—maybe if he fills in those holes, he'll flip through his pages and find a story he knows. He will recognize his life reflected; he will know where his footprints have taken him and know where they should take him next, write his own next chapter in full awareness of what came before. This is who I am and who I will be.

He could somehow learn to be whole again.

The Crown States’ hands tremble around the box, the tightly-fastened lid. He fastened it, with his own hands, years and years ago, and thought it wise at the time. There is a reason, there is a reason, there is a reason, he knows: knowledge is never free.

Yet neither is ignorance.

The lid of the tin falls away like a door falling open and it’s the smell that hits him first: flowers. Yes, there are papers in his own handwriting, but they are lying in petals, a bed of elongated petals. Daisies, he knows without knowing, brown and withered now, but they were blue once, they— 

And haven't they said that smell is most intricately linked to memory—

Chapter Text

Year 1, Q2
An Academy of Some Repute
Exam season

❦

His hands pressed hard enough against the windowsill, knuckles white. The Crown States drew rattling breath, measuring each inhale to a four-second count, but his nerves refused to settle.

The world through the window was grey as ash, the colour of an old picture: unreal. Rain trickled down the glass, and his eyes followed the droplets downwards, to the blue flowers that peered up from windowsill pots.

The next breath, earth-flavoured, hurt. There was no injury, no medical explanation, only the sense that his heart was bruised, somehow, and each motion drew new pain to the surface.

His reflection blurred in the window, dissolving in the rain. He couldn’t remember the face of a boy in a field long ago. He couldn’t remember what shade the sky had been the day the Crown came calling. Yet the bruises lingered. Somehow, the marks lingered. 

Something’s wrong. He pulled his hands from the windowsill and they tangled together, formed fists, came loose again. He spun around. Something— 

Only a desk, the textbooks piled high, lab notes spilling off the edge. Yet at the sight of it panic snapped through his heart like voltaic defibrillation. A clock ticked towards midnight, always, towards the next test, the next test, the final test. If he wasn’t ready—if he failed —

He hoped to succeed so desperately much, like he could let the world outside that window wash away if he could be good at this one thing. 

Yet that desperation—

—it wasn’t wholly his own.

Now that his breath had settled, he felt it.

The fever pitch of this Academy, the itch of seconds flowing through their fingers, deadlines snapping their teeth. Crabs in a bucket, clawing for the sky.

(He knew what it was to reach for the sky).

The Crown States stepped over to his desk and collapsed in his chair, shoving papers back from the edge. Papers shifted over papers, revealing more papers upon papers upon papers. Ratios spun and blurred; diagrams intersected. He needed—he needed—

Those crabs, that desperation, he drowned in it like ocean water. He was clawing for the sky, too, but there was only water tinged with blood. The waves wore away at his edges. Wearing him down into sand.

A window framed by branches, and outside nothing but water.

Something—

❦

The syringe glowed green in misplaced sunshine. Their eyes were drawn to it. Caught. Moths to the flame.

“The dosage will be strictly regulated,” warned the instructor. 

Shoulders tilted, people leaned forward, listening.

“It improves brain liquidity, accelerates the processing of new information…”

The study drug.

In the back of the room the Crown States, looking past shoulders on shoulders, tasted desperation like blood. The list of warnings, the promise of agony—all dust on the wind. He’d heard stories worse than pain and memories, of the things students had done to themselves in the name of success, of those who perished at the hands of their creations. 

Education was nature was—war. The doctors and professors did not need to cut them into monsters or put them in early graves. They happily snatched up the scalpel and shovel, chained their own wrists as they awaited judgment. They’d throw away the key for a better shot.

Judgment.

Jailors.

His gaze swivelled back to the syringe lying on the table, the green light, to the instructor’s bland face. Warnings read out like a label on a bottle of medicine: pain. The fluid risk of adaptation. The importance of moderation.

That couldn't be all.

There has to be a reason, thought the Crown States, with the lesson lodged deeper in his heart than any scalpel could reach: There is always, always a reason.

This place had taught him that.

Always something to be learned.

❦

Some seasons, the Crown States knew, were sickly. Some seasons were seasons of tossing and turning, of fever and chills, of coughs that never left, and stranger symptoms besides. Those were the workings of biology, of nationhood: illness when times were hard, when the natural systems of defence were impaired.

And yet—and yet—

(When he blinked he saw water, how it flowed—)

All this time there had been tests. Tests for students. For experiments. For drugs. For weapons. A profusion of tests. Who filled them out? Who was the pencil, the rubric, the instructor grading with a shake of his head?

What did they learn?

When he moved his hand papers shifted over papers, revealing papers upon papers upon papers. Lab notes in his own handwriting peeked out—not his notes, but a transcription, a retelling, of the yellowing buried things he'd found in the archives.

It had been easy to uncover, in the end. Standard practice, when of use, in the hush hush of falling rain. Data needed, a community found, something released in the air, in the food, in the water. Always in the water.

Here is the law of the land that the sky weeps upon—

—that each decision is nothing more than a scale tipped—

—the animal calculus of risk or reward.

(It was in their natures.)

And now—rain hurled itself against the window—now, on a night marked by the push to work and learn and be more, with green liquid surely finding syringes and willing subjects, the Crown States felt sickly. Not in the body, but in the mind. Inside of his skull there was only sand in water, shifting in the broken light of some tide, melding to the shape of this night, this scrabble for the nod of approval, the coat, the edge of the bucket.

When he looked down at the notes, sentences blurred, only select words leaping out sharper than any blade: control, fruit, death. He felt at once as if he had lost his glasses and as if he had only just donned them for the first time. Quicksand-thoughts flowed and connections formed like castles in the serendipity of grains aligned: the green of absinthe, like water left to sit too long. The way the mirror of a puddle broke like glass, his face forever disappearing. A syringe like a needle like a knife.

Pieces came together.

A flight of steps. The bottom step.

A book.

He grasped at those pieces but he was a dreamer waking in the night with a notion he’d lose by morning; they slipped like water and sand between his fingers. Water and sand, glimmers and castles of water and sand, only water and sand until the tide receded beneath the moon’s silvered eye, giving and taking and leaving words and strange ripples etched on the shore.

It’ll look better in the morning, the Crown States told himself, in his quicksilver thoughts, like some old lullaby could soothe him: for you never shut your eye, ‘til the sun is in the sky. He saw the daisies blooming on the windowsill, groped for the reflected water-memories that told of their origin, and when numbers and figures and ratios filled up his mind instead, he thought, no.

The book he grasped for had no words on the cover and the writing in it was his own. He flipped to a fresh page: he put pen to paper and began to set down a story. It was a yarn that started like a child’s fairytale: once upon a time. It was a story he had taken out of a library that tasted of desperation, from records that were yellowing and ones that were fresh and new, and it was happening, right now, right now, to a town somewhere, it wasn't going to stop.

The patter of raindrops like gunshots and seconds knocked at his window and reprimanded: it reminded him of the responsibility, of the danger, of his time in this institution and the coming exams. The gutters would run red with the blood of education.

Yet this story—it was his education.

Remember.

Flowers, sketched in grey, always grey in the end, yet the scent lingered, not sweet, never sweet. It clung.

Remember.

Ink drying over pencil and ghosts of pencil erased.

Remember.

Words written in the sand again and again until the water flowed through the grooves and carved them deeper.

Remember what you have learned.

This was what he had come for.

Chapter Text

Late 19th Century
Canada West
The aftermath of a battle lost

☙

The first time he woke, it was to darkness. He opened his eyes to the stars streaking past above him. The thought formed that he could lift his arm, reach up to touch them, but that thought never became reality. His bones were lead; his flesh was sand; every inch of his body ached. Eyes half-open, he watched the stars fall away, until he, too, fell away, back into the darkness.

In the starless night of sleep, he drifted from dream to shifting dream. Rows and rows of glassy eyes shattered like windows. He ran, past trees and under branches, over a log over a river over a meadow red, until he fell to his knees beneath the deathless summer sun, choking on his own pulse. Like a lump of dead meat, he lay on an operating table, as doctors poked and prodded with needles and blades; he was cut in two, four, eight, the pieces parcelled out, his veins filled with tar, his heart transferred two inches to the left.

(Someone was reading to him in a voice that sounded like his youth, “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear… each singing what belongs to him or her, and no one else…”)

In the dream, he understood what had happened.

The next time he woke, it was to a ceiling of slatted wood, and the moon shining full outside a latched window. A headache pounded like a drum; the room wavered; he attempted movement but found his limbs heavy as lead. Each breath came wet and ragged and laboured. The panicky certainty of suffocation soon seized him, and he focused his attention upon his respiration, taking a breath in, a breath out, a breath in, and breath out. The suffocation faded. He continued to breathe, because another species of panic was blooming inside him: panic that at this moment in time, he could not rise, he could neither speak nor run, there was nothing at all he could do.

America turned his head. A book lay open and face-down on the nightstand; moonlight illuminated the creases in the spine.

He realized that he was in the home of his brother.

Then the fear did not leave him, because its cause had not been vanquished; but he found that it felt farther now, a concern for a future him at a future time. He kept breathing, breath in, breath out, breath in, breath out, until it faded back into the territory of reflex; until he faded back into the territory of dreams.

☙

The third time America woke, it was to daylight, remarkable enough that for a moment he simply lay still and observed the sunbeams streaming in through the window above him. It brought to mind mornings upon mornings past, birds singing, sky clear as a bell, the day opening before him like a door, like a window, overflowing with golden opportunity. It had been true, then.

Transmutation. Lead, to gold—

—to lead?

America took account of his state. His head was clear. The pain in his body more a dull ache than a present agony. Miracle of miracles, he could breathe, and the breaths he sucked down were greedy. He was still alive. 

He took account of his surroundings. The bedroom which housed him contained only the bare necessities—bed, nightstand, cabinet against the wall. America realized that he had stayed here before, years past, as a guest and not a captive. Dust danced in the sunbeams. It seemed Canada did not receive many guests.

On a stool at his bedside sat the Crown Kingdom, straight-backed, head turned away.

America considered him for a long moment. Then he leveraged himself into a sitting position, grimacing at the stab of pain through his right hand when he leaned his weight on it—bandaged, he saw, and remembered steel flashing.

Red—as a sliver 

 —as a river—

America blinked the recollection away and propped himself up against the headboard. Springs creaked. The Crown Kingdom said nothing, though he must have heard.

America wet his lips. Swallowed.

Fearful that his voice would crack, and that it would sound like fear.

He refused to sound afraid.

He was not afraid.

Sitting there, in the morning light through the window, he contemplated faith. He contemplated words. Pondered smoke, and embers, and fury. Some things you could make true, America thought, by believing in them. Nations were one of those things, and he had been born from another.

“Any regrets?”

His voice cut through the air like a rusty saw, edges rough from neglect.

“There’s water on the nightstand,” replied England, neither missing a beat nor deigning to look at him; and indeed, there on the nightstand beside him rested a tall glass of water.

America’s throat screamed, smoke and embers. He shrugged.

“Not thirsty.”

England made a noise not quite a scoff. “Suit yourself.”

No real bite in those words. Only a fragile, brittle indifference, like lake ice in the spring. 

“You didn’t answer my question,” America prompted.

Look at me.

“I only stabbed France once before shoving him into the Atlantic at Trafalgar.”

It shouldn’t have been funny, but it was desperately funny. America coughed to hide his snort, and the forced cough became a genuine fit.

“Liar,” he gasped. “I bet you—stabbed him twice. And kicked his teeth in.”

The corner of a smile touched England’s face. “Well, he ought to know better than to run his mouth in a scrap.”

Seemingly emboldened, he turned to face America at last. The long months of battle had pressed shadows beneath his eyes, and a scrape crossed one cheek; otherwise, he looked just the same as America remembered last seeing him, standing in a hallway of this house with a declaration of war in his hands.

No. That hadn’t been the last time.

Bang.

America’s hands rose, as if to find the wound in his chest; realizing, he set them back down on the covers, fisting them into the fabric. England’s eyes tracked the movement. The older nation folded his own hands together.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

I - 

 The reminder of his state quickly sunk America’s brief good humour, and he laughed, harsh and jagged and interspersed with more coughing. “I’ve never—been better. Can’t you—tell?” He sucked in a deep breath. “Give me a week and I’ll be a brand—new—”

—nation— 

A glass was pressed into his hand, and America drank greedily, despite himself, the cool water a balm to his aching throat. He placed the glass back on the nightstand without thanks or acknowledgement.

“You should rest your voice,” advised England. “You’ll only lose it if you strain yourself.”

Bang.

When America blinked the blood on his hands swam before his eyes.

A river—

A flood —

In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to snap back. Whose fault is it that I’m lying here? Why should I listen to a word you say?

(Because you have to, whispered a little voice inside him, but he shoved it down, down and away from his hearing. In his heart he had not surrendered.)

America looked at England then—truly looked. There, in that golden morning light, he could see the England of his childhood, who had watched over him when he was ill; the England of the revolution, sinking into the mud; the England of the last war, hands shaking as he gripped his rifle. He wished he could separate them in his mind, keep the dark memories from tainting the bright, but the fact of the matter was that there had only ever been one England. He had been blind to the cracks and flaws, once, because children were blind; that didn’t mean they were a new development. 

He couldn’t forget the truth of what was and had been because it was easier.

America saw England clearly, in the way that mattered, and the fact that he didn’t see England clearly in a literal way made him realize the absence of his glasses.

They were on the nightstand, too. He fumbled for them, set them on his face. The world clarified. Behind cool glass, he breathed easier; looking through this window, it was easier to think, and to keep those thoughts from translating into expression or action.

“No regrets?” he asked, tone light, because it was important to know. “No real regrets?”

“Of course I have regrets.” England sounded bone-weary. He sounded old. “There isn’t a nation in the world who doesn’t, whatever bravado they might spout. Even you—you aren’t free from regrets.”

A child in the woods, in the fields. Boats in the harbour.

“You’re right,” America breathed, “I’m not.” He leaned forward, keeping his tone conversational. “But I’m not asking about me, see. I’m asking about you. Empire.” He spread his arms, though the movement made him wince. “You’ve fought a lot of wars, huh? Hurt a lot of people, seen your own people hurt. So tell me.” A smile, dragged up from the depths of him, aflame. “How many of ‘em hound your dreams?”

“I’m not in the habit of counting my demons,” said England stiffly. “You’ll find that the more heed you pay them, the more they pay you.”

America laughed, again, the sound broken by coughs. “Am I one of them? If I can’t—give you a run for your money in a fight—then I might as well keep you up at night.”

In the silence that followed, America’s laughter petered out, fire without fuel. There was nothing for him to laugh about, in the end. Nothing that was suited to laughter.

“This isn’t what I’m here to discuss,” England said into the ensuing silence. Now he sounded impatient. Papers shifted between his hands, the print too tiny for America to read from afar. “As you are now again my colony—”

Like the pull of a lever bringing an engine to life, igniting embers and oils that had been simmering low, every inch of America rose up and said—

“No.” 

“—there are certain matters we must resolve. Let go of me.” America realized that his fingers were knotted on England’s collar. A moment ago he would’ve released them; now that England had commanded him to, it was unthinkable. 

“I am not yours.” His voice began reedy; it grew stronger as he went on. “Understand? Not your anything. Not your ally, like I ever was—” the cast of his words was bitter “—and never your friend. The only family I’ve got is Canada. All you have of me is what you took from me, and I’m going to get it back, and then there will be nothing between us but an ocean.” He was breathing hard. “There will be nothing.”

England reached up and pried his fingers away. It surprised America enough that he could that he didn’t think to fight it. His hand lingered in the air until it was pushed away.

 “Are you done?” asked the Crown Kingdom, and there was a glint in his eye that America imagined the likes of Spain or France would’ve seen, once upon a time, try me if you dare. “Or would you like to have another go? A rousing debate? A round of chess? A war?”

“I hate you,” spat America, and he didn’t know if it was true, but he didn’t care.

“You’re a child,” the Crown snapped back.

“And you’re a monster,” said America. “You can dress it up all you like but at the end of the day all you do is take and take and take. Gold—silk—sugar—land—nothing is ever enough for you—”

“As if you never did the same,” the Crown retorted, “as if you never tried to expand your lands or win wealth for your people—and how rich of you to accuse me of taking. I taught you the language we’re speaking—I gave you your legal system and your cities and the weapons you used to war against me—I gave you everything that made you who you are today!”

“You didn’t give me anything because you always thought I was yours!” America shouted back. “It’s not giving if it’s all wrapped up in strings, it’s not giving if you think you can get it back whenever you want like a kid lending out a toy. You’re right, I do have regrets, and I’m not afraid to say them. I hate you—I wish I hadn’t taken your gifts—I wish I hadn’t trusted you—”

England’s face paled, but he took the words without flinching. “I know—”

Long ago there was a wood and the sun beamed down through the leaves.

“I wish I’d never chosen you!”

There, like the aftermath of a storm, of a gunshot: blessed, terrible silence.

America sucked in breath. He pressed his bandaged hand against the bed, let the throbbing pain anchor him in the moment. Emotion rolled over him like the tide and he rode it out.

At last, a blow landed: the way England’s eyes widened slightly, as if he’d been struck.

“I think we’re done here,” said the empire, with that brittle-ice composure. He stood from his seat. “We will speak again tomorrow.”

As he spoke America heard some sort of scuffling outside the door, though England didn’t seem to notice. The other nation set his papers down on the stool and made to leave the room. 

“Fall down the stairs and die,” America called after him.

By way of reply, the door clicked shut. 

☙

The door out into the hall was locked, America would come to discover, although this discovery was late in the coming, on account of how his head spun and darkness swam before his eyes with each attempt to stand and walk. Another door led only to a small washroom. The window, too, was locked, and in any case he was on the upper floor, and where would he go, anyways?

Where would he go?

The home of his brother. A prison of a room and a prison of a house and a prison of a country. 

The papers the Crown left on the stool were the humdrum paperwork of conquest: the toppling of government, the scrapbook made of the Constitution, nobility, law, trials and execution.

America read them, alone in his room. A dead man brought food and he left it to go cold by the door. Then all the documents were read, and he was still alone.

That’s how it goes, isn’t it, he thought, with an empty sort of viciousness, and closed his eyes. 

In the beginning, America wrote himself a law, passed and signed and approved by himself truly: he was not to cry. 

It proved moot. Like the fires, like summer droughts, his eyes were as dry as bone. There was no prickling of tears, no sniffling. He didn’t want to sit and weep. He wanted to throw the Crown off a pier like so many boxes of tea. He wanted to shatter the window and climb out and fall two stories to the grass below. He wanted to scream.

America did none of those things. He rummaged through drawers until he found an old quill, a broken white feather. Couldn’t find an inkwell to match. But when he pressed the tip of the quill to parchment it carved an indent, visible when he tilted the paper. 

Good enough.

America wrote his law. He wrote his recollection. He wrote songs and the old dreams of the Revolution. He wrote, inkless, until it was too dark to see, until the papers ran out. The floor creaked and he pried up a plank and hid his words beneath the floorboards.

Lying in bed, he imagined those papers, breathing, in the darkness below. The two of them. They were still alive.

☙

When the Crown came calling the next day, America was sitting on the edge of the bed, humming to himself, his eyes fixed on the clear blue sky beyond the window— 

In Freedom we're born, and, like sons of the brave, 
Will never surrender, But swear to defend her; 
And scorn to survive, if unable to—

“That’s an English tune,” commented England, and America swivelled to look at him, eyes narrowed. As if it mattered.

“A Navy song,” England continued, “listen,” and then, in the same melody, he sang:

Heart of oak are our ships,
Hearts of oak are our men,
We always are ready, steady boys, steady,
To charge and to conquer again and again.

America tapped out the beat on the windowsill, rat-at-tat-at,and he smiled thinly. “Good to know you haven’t changed.”

“If time changed nations the way it changed our people,” said England, “then it would kill us just as surely.”

Petals, like tears, blue and falling—

“Ah.” America mimed opening an envelope. “Dust and ashes, am I right?”

“So you did read them,” said England, halfway triumphant.

Of course I read them, you idiot, America thought, abruptly weary, abruptly furious. Do you think any nation you warred against could justify ignoring your letters? Do you think I’m proud enough, that I wouldn’t give a damn what it meant for me and mine?

Of course I read them, you fool, but you never gave an inch.

“Don’t need to read something,” he said instead, “to light it up and watch it burn.”

His gaze drifted back to the sky outside the window. Clouds sailing by quickly enough that they might soon pass out of sight.

Come swallow your bumpers, ye Tories, and roar,
That the sons of fair freedom are hampered once more;
But know that no cut-throats our spirits can tame,
Nor a host of oppressors shall smother—

“Would you stop,” England burst out.

“You could stop interrupting me,” America suggested, acid. “It’s my song, after all.”

“It was my song,” England said, low and intent, “before it was ever yours. You could say I gave it to you. You could say you took it, because it was my people who settled you, my hand in your formation—”

“—you could say,” said America, “that England is a greedy little jerk who wants to get his hands on everything he’s ever looked at and some he didn’t.”

A beat, a silence, like a door slammed shut.

“I see where we stand,” said England, tone notably cooler. 

“What, skull too thick for it to get through yesterday?”

“Very well then,” said the Crown. He began to rise. “I see you’ve resolved to be difficult today. When your tantrum is over, and you can carry a civil conversation, then we may speak of the business of government and nations. Until then—”

“I don’t need you lording your victory over me to tell me what I am,” America interrupted. “D’you think I can’t feel it?” Whispers in his ears, trials and restructuring, thrumming in his heartbeat, crawling over his skin. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing in Washington and New York and all the way down the coast? Because I do, thanks, and you can stay out of it.”

But then there was that glint in the Crown’s eyes like the flash of a hidden blade. Mistake.

“Do you know?” he asked. “Do you?”

“Better than you ever will,” America snapped back.

“But you don’t even know the name of your heart,” the Crown said. “New York.” He pronounced the word like he was tasting it, trying it out, wrinkling his nose at the flavour. You named that city, England. You did. Don’t tell me—“We call it New Amsterdam, nowadays.”

America opened his mouth to fire back a retort, but his breath caught in his throat like a fishhook. He tasted salt on his tongue like he’d gone ocean swimming, he’d gone drowning, and the water filled his mouth and the Atlantic was in his lungs and it wasn’t coming out. When he blinked a map fluttered behind his eyes like a flag but the edges of it were tattered, oh God, and the seawater was soaking in and all the names of all the cities were blurring.

It was true, America knew it in that moment. It was true.

“You are not different or better because of your principle,” said the Crown. “You are the same clay that we are all made of. You fought a war, and you lost. Now accept it.”

America pressed a hand to his heart. There had been lead there once, hadn’t there? Bullets and blood. Was that why it ached? Why it felt so heavy?

After a moment he heard the Crown rise and leave the room. There was the shuffle of footsteps upon footsteps. The click of the door.

America looked sideways and up into the sea of the sky. The rhythm of his heart jostled against the rhythm of his mind. Above the clouds sailed by, ships buoyed on distant winds still too quick for him to catch.

He could make out their shapes but in their shapes found no sign, no answer.

Nothing but a map. The edges of him tattered. Leaden cities falling away into the sea. 

☙

That night he wrote himself a law: he was not to die.

He had to survive. Survive, in the physical sense, of his heart pounding against his ribcage and the rush of air in his lungs, of tendons flexing in movement, alive and whole. The grave was a termination, a premature ending to the history. A corpse was a weakness, was fodder for dissection and pillage. While he breathed, while he lived, he moved. Still things made easy prey.

Dust and ashes, am I right?

And then there was surviving in a sense more abstract. The way nations survived. America had seen men return from war hollow-eyed, some light inside them snuffed out by what they'd seen. People carved into strangers by the scars the world left on them. New faces and the forgetting of songs. The Crown was a fool but he was a nation, too, and he was right: some change was to be fought for, but change in excess was only another form of death. 

He needed to keep everything.

He couldn’t afford to lose any of it. 

That night America drew a map with a broken quill on the back of a King’s proclamation, labelled his cities and rubbed dust into the indents ‘til they showed. At times he thought he heard breathing outside his door, but the clouds were out and the moon was lost behind them. Maybe there was only the whispering of the wind.

☙

America was permitted walks, now, from time to time, through the house and out into the garden, escorted by a dead man or the Crown himself. Now he stood on the grass he had looked down upon from the window above, inhaling the fresh air. A pilfered inkwell burned in his pocket. Chickens pecked at the dirt. All the leaves of all the trees were catching autumn fire.

He had visited here, before.

Of his brother there was still no sign. 

“You’re going to have to speak to me eventually.”

The Crown’s voice was weary. They were both weary of this stage play, this pointless exercise of pride. Same set, same actors, same tired lines: a few biting words, a new sky, exit stage left.

“I am speaking to you,” said America, hands folded behind his back. He hated this. The tiredness. Some part of him still wished to fly away, but his bones were made of lead. Sometimes he worried that he was stuck this way, like if he lingered for a day longer he would sink into the earth and forget the song of the sky.

Like his body was the prison, or his skull was, or even his mind, with its odd resigned lethargy, a nation sighing and going well, we tried.

“If you cannot give me assurances of your cooperation, then—”

“I’m through,” said America, “with promises.”

“We’re never done with promises.” That was something else America hated: the weariness in the Crown’s voice, like he understood. The weariness that America understood. Like the little-kid part of him that had wanted so badly to be grown up was getting a taste of what it was really like. 

A life with no room for quiet mornings and chickens in the yard.

“It’s difficult to take a loss,” continued England, in that same weary tone. “The sting never lessens, and you haven’t weathered enough losses to have learned to bear it with grace. But you will learn.”

America almost snorted at the thought of England bearing any loss with grace. France wrote to me. Did you always go drinking, on the anniversary of that day? Did you cry?

“Easy for the victor to preach about losses,” he scoffed instead.

“I haven’t always been a victor,” argued England, and oh, was he the one dredging that up? “Others have struck at me and succeeded. The world has turned on me before. You should remember—”

And America did remember, with a spark that accompanied that briefly seared the heaviness from his bones. He whirled on England.

“Don’t you dare tell me that I left you alone,” he said, aiming his finger, accusing. Bang. “You had everyone, you always had everyone, you had an empire. Canada and Australia and India and New Zealand—”

England, seemingly thrown by his sudden fervour, fumbled for words. “—you had France—Spain—the Dutch Republic—”

“And where were they this time, huh?” America raised his voice like it could echo past the fences, like someone could hear it across the ocean. “They never cared for me; they just wanted to get one over you. You, meanwhile, you have people who are—who are actually on your side— and you tell me with a straight face that they don’t count. Do you know who was alone? I was alone. God, I would’ve given anything to have had Canada on my side a month, a few months ago. To have had anyone. And there you are, feeling sorry for yourself—when you have everything you ever wanted—”

“Not everything,” said England.

America could only laugh, half-furious, half-incredulous. “Is your hearing going? Can you hear yourself? Can you hear the things you’re saying?”

He saw England process the comment, like a cat bristling, ready to scratch back.

But the moment of pique passed, and they resumed their places.

“You lost,” came that line again, like repetition could drive the message home. “Accept it.”

“There’s always another war,” replied America, and the words settled deep in his bones with the gravity of true things: a promise.

A white hen pecked around his feet.

Promise me.

“Have you no loyalists left?” England’s voice was soft. “Or did you tar and feather them all away?”

The same old pattern. The same rut in the same dirt road. Century after century.

“Canada took them,” America said, the edge to his voice filed to bleeding. “Canada took them, and your people who happened to be living in the south became your people who happened to be living in the north. And me? I had mine.”

A nation of patriots.

“I have mine,” America repeated. He felt as if he had a knife in his hand, cutting, cutting, at he knew not what. “And the people who wanted to kneel to your King? They were yours. That was the way it was then, and the way it is now. That’s the way it will always be.”

The words hurt to say but, God, they hurt like that cutting, bringing down the axe on his wrist and severing a gangrenous limb from his body. Or perhaps it was a heart, or a lung. Could he know they hadn't carved things out, while he was dreaming?

I won’t claim my traitors.

A rift yawned wide inside him. Stones fell away into the void. Like lead running molten, wicking off his bones. Leaving him lighter.

“What are you doing?” demanded England, catching that there was a purpose to the words he could not discern.

Yet could he feel an inkling of it? The bleeding edge of rot excised?

There could be no forward progress for a nation in which cowards held sway.

America at the cliffside, at once lesser and greater than before, smiled. 

☙

After England left, after he’d returned to his room, America went to stand by the window. He gazed for a long while into the sky. Some dark bird flew by, crow or raven shadow. He looked for answers. For something to hope for. To believe in.

But the sky was a piece of faded blue cloth, a tattered old banner bleached in the blinding sun. It could not save him.

America bowed his head. The truth perched on his shoulder like a bird with talons, heavy as lead. It whispered words he did not wish to hear. 

The fact of the matter was that he had never let himself think of losing, because he was so accustomed to the notion that thoughts could become dreams could become reality. 

But he had lost. That was the truth.

It is not the only truth, the bird whispered, heavy as gold. But looking up into that sky as blue and clear as the heavens smiling down on a battlefield, it was hard to think of anything else.

☙

Yet that night America woke at a noise in the hall. He lay still, awaiting its recurrence, but the house stirred only with the house-sounds of drafts and creaking wood. Nonetheless, some obscure intuition propelled him out of bed. To the window. 

America drew back the curtains. Outside the sky was clear. Miracle of miracles, there was light in the world: steel in a flame, fires in the night. America mouthed the names of the constellations under his breath. 

A banner, still flying, forever spangled with stars. 

He felt their tug on his lightened bones, ever upwards, like a bird taking flight: that is who I was and who I am and who I will be. 

And standing there, beneath the clear-eyed majesty of the night, America wrote his third and final law: do not forget.

There were stars, in the darkness, now and always. Storms would pass, and the sun would set and rise again and again, and the stars would remain. 

Somewhere in the night there was freedom still, the dream and the promise of it, and it would never die.

That was true.

He believed it.

☙

The next day, when the Crown opened the door, America caught the edge of it.

“I’ll be going for a walk,” he drawled. 

Perhaps what should’ve bothered him most was that the Crown seemed unbothered. He piled with papers, and on top of the stack lay a sort of map, the angle wrong for America to read it clearly.

“For someone who claims to be such a proponent of democracy,” said the Crown, “you have remarkably little regard for the will of your people.”

The comment, though abrupt, was spoken easily, as if he were simply picking up the thread of a previous discussion.

America tightened his grip on the door. He played at lack of concern:

“I hate to break it to you, but it’s not everyone’s secret hidden desire to be British.”

“Oh, so is what they want a revolt?” asked the Crown, raising his eyebrows. “To leave behind their farms and families and go fight another war for the same tired old flag? What does that petty rebellion serve, besides self-conceit?”

“Hey, you’re the warmonger here,” shrugged America. “If you’re trying to confess to being conceited, then I’m on board with that.”

“Do you truly believe it?” The Crown tilted his head. “That your populace would rather be dead than English?

“We’d rather be American than English.” America glared. ”Should be pretty obvious by now. You’re the one who introduced death to the equation.”

“American,” mused the Crown. “The meanings of words change, you know.”

“That one hasn’t,” said America. With his free hand he pointed at the Crown. “This is how it starts, not how it ends. This is how it begins: you’re an old nation in denial, and I’m fighting for my freedom.” He clenched the hand into a fist. “And sure, maybe I’ll be beaten down. Or maybe you’ll come conquering again in a couple years. But I’ll fight you again, and again, and again. I won’t stop until I win for good.” He spat on the ground. Shake hands, seal the deal. “I promise.”

America knew that a promise was merely air shaped into sound. There was no force in this world that enforced the action it described. It was not the law of falling or the cycles of stars. It was fragile. 

Yet some things you could make true by believing in them. He could be the force that acted. He could put truth to his words.

He would.

“Fine then,” snapped the Crown, with that glitter in his eyes again. “Let us speak of the past. When you decided to cast me off, your brother’s people did not join yours, despite your—“ he snorted “—forceful attempts at persuasion. And a revolution is nothing without popular support.”

“A revolution’s a revolution,” said America, and pushed from his mind that old betrayal which still twinged like a long-healed bone on a cold day: Canada casting him out, refusing his cause, choosing England over him, always so blind. His own brother. “Canada’s people aren’t mine, and mine want to breathe free. That’s all that matters.”

It was a story that ended in the same place: the flag on the wind, the banner of stars. Revolutionaries striking in the night, torches burning. A white handkerchief. 

He could see it.

“But they are your people.”

America blinked. 

“What?” he asked, like the notion was laughable, like the Empire had gone mad.

“But they are your people,” repeated the Crown. “Or they will be, in any case.”

He took the map that lay on top of his stack of documents and showed it to America. It was North America with the Atlantic to the East and the Pacific to the West and Mexico to the south. But all the names of all the cities were wrong, and there was something missing. There was a border missing— 

“You are the Crown States of America, after all,” the Crown softly said. “The both of you.”

And there was England watching him with those sharp green eyes, watching for the reaction, so America didn’t give him one, but his thoughts turned clockwork in his head as he affected indifference. “You’re making some sort of treaty? Forcing a union? I’ve asked him already and he kicked me out with bayonets, like you said, so you might want to rethink that.”

“There is one British North America and its name will be the Crown States,” said the Crown. “The two of you will be together. One nation and one people.”

Together. Once upon a time he might’ve liked the taste of that word, but America knew better now. He narrowed his eyes. 

“There’s only one of us per nation,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”

Is this the bullet you put through my heart? The one that sticks?

His law burned inside him: do not die.

“There are and have been exceptions,” England pointed out. “I should very well know that, the Kingdom being as it is. There’s no need to be dramatic—it’s a union, not a duel to the death.”

“But you don’t care, don’t you?” hissed America. “You don’t care what’s going to be left at the end of this, so as long as he’s yours.”

“I act for your benefit,” bristled the Crown. “Both of yours.”

“Bullshit.” 

But with the word pain lanced through his chest, through an injury that should’ve healed long ago, and America found himself stumbling back, at last releasing his hold on the door. The pain departed as quickly as it had come, but he was left shaken.

Reminders.

Behind England, in the shadows of the hallway, America saw a face floating in the darkness, pale with shock. Canada stood with one hand over his mouth, eyes wide and fixed on the map in the Crown’s hand. 

Their eyes met for a split second. 

Then Canada was turning away, disappearing, into the shadows of his own house, where no one could ever find him. This time his escape was sloppy; the Crown heard his steps soon enough to turn his head, stretch out a hand. 

But Canada had gone.

“Think on it,” the Crown told America, and then he departed too, and America was left standing there.

The door was open. Yet still America stood. The truth was that he had never been a prisoner of this house. There had always been a window, a door that opened for a brief second, floorboards, excursions. He had been ill, but he could walk. It had never been that he could not leave. 

No. The truth was that he had nowhere to go.

The chains that bound him were the borders on the map, and the people of his soul that would forget who they were, and laws he could not uphold, and names he could not keep. Those would follow him wherever he went, now.

When he closed his eyes America still saw a sky of stars but in each night sky there was a moon, and when he imagined his people there were strangers vying to join that chorus of patriots, to pour obedience into his ear like poison. They had cut into him with their scalpels and their quills, injected medicines and grafted parts, and he could have no freedom without taking the axe to his leg caught in the trap, the knife to the poison in his veins, his traitorous heart. 

They would change the substance of him, like gold to lead. He would always, America knew, be running from himself.

Chapter Text

Late 19th Century
Canada West
The aftermath of a battle won

❧

Blue skies and victory bells, and the breeze that ruffled his hair when he stepped out of the carriage was gentle, the sun warm as a benediction. All had been white, when last he came calling; but now the Academy rose full-fledged over a city of late-summer gold and all the flowers in all the yards were fading to harvest. No smoke from the chimney today, not a single cloud, only clear blue sky above, and the chill in his bones was a bad dream and snow merely a memory of winters past.

Still, advancing up that garden path, England could almost pretend to himself that the entire crimson road of the war had been merely a figment of his imagination. He had never journeyed south, never opened an envelope of ash, never levelled his weapon once more at the boy he’d raised. He could knock on that door and Canada would answer, as surely as he had in the winter: tabula rasa, time folding back on itself to paper over their wounds with autumn leaves.

The rose-bushes framing the door had been pruned back, all vicious thorns and dying flowers. England came to stop between them, lifted his hand, and knocked. 

A heartbeat passed—

The hinges shrieked as the door swung inwards and Canada was there, propping it open, as if he’d expected them. But in another heartbeat the blood drained from the colony’s face: exsanguination, writing in reverse, ink bleeding from parchment.

He had seen the doctors, and the patient on their stretcher.

England came back to the present with the unpleasant jolt of a daydreamer walking into a wall.

“We’ll need the use of a guest room,” he said, crisp as dry leaves. Canada nodded jerkily, face still ashen, and stammered out the directions. Upstairs, on the left . He stepped aside as the doctors passed into the house, and turned to gaze after them as they carted their patient away. One hand tugged down a too-long sleeve, the motion twitchy, reflexive.

It was due to the changes of England’s own making that nothing was as he remembered.

“He’ll make a full recovery,” he promised eventually, for lack of better words, and Canada turned to meet his eyes. In the cast of his face England found the understanding of what had transpired.

Blood on the grass.

Noonday sun.

Bang.

Silence stretched between them. Miles and miles of wild blue ocean, bridged by words like family, loyalty, history —old clothes worn threadbare which fit them worse each passing mile.

It was a beautiful day.

❧

I wish—

God, why had he surrounded himself with walls? Outside surely the sun still shone and the sky stretched blue and limitless from horizon to horizon; yet in here England found only the echo of America’s words, wherever he turned, like a curse.

I wish— 

Wish on a candle, wish on a well, wish on a star for all he cared—it was all the same to him, children’s tales to pretend the universe heeded their pleas. No, it didn’t hear a word; but he heard—he could not stop hearing— 

I wish I had never chosen you! 

England rounded the corner into an empty room, and saw the sky.

Cabinets and maps rose to the left; shelves to the right; up on the wall hung a white flag strewn with golden fleur-de-lys, New France. Straight ahead lay a desk laden with papers and above that, a pane of blue, a window, through which sunlight flooded the room.

It fell upon his face and for the moment chased the echoes from his head.

England let out a breath. Seconds passed and he stood, motionless, watching motes of dust dance golden through the sunbeams. This room seemed a fine place to work, late into the afternoon, by natural light—yet that dust was evidence that Canada thought otherwise. The air was thick with silence and disuse.

I should open the window, England thought.

A faint trail of footprints led from the doorway to the desk; England’s own steps effaced that trail as he walked forward. He peered into the window as he drew near and found no trace of his own reflection, only bright sky and a view of the distant Academy.

As he came to stand before the desk, he took a moment to skim the papers piled upon it, and the phrase Dear America caught his eye.

Wartime correspondence. 

England knew that at that very moment, America occupied the room down the hall. All that divided the two of them was a wall of wood and plaster. Yet America had closed his ears to him; they could stand within the same walls and still be shouting across an ocean.

Had Canada fared better, during the war? Had his words burned?

England found himself leafing through the letters, searching for—something. Whatever he sought, he was left dissatisfied; all he found were litanies and fragments of litanies, in Canada’s small and tidy hand, repeating themselves over and over: Are you okay? Did you hear? Stay alive. Please take care. Please reply. I wish—

I wish—

Drafts upon drafts of letters, not a single one complete. England let the latest missive slip from his fingers. Thought of a curse, and an envelope of ash.

He doesn’t listen, don’t you know—you will never persuade him— 

A waste of time and parchment.

England reached for the latch of the window, but paused. Outside the trees were swaying, shedding their burning leaves. If I open the window, a breeze will come in and scatter the letters. First, I must tidy them away.

He opened a desk drawer instead. Inside were rows of dense folders, labelled by date. He counted April, May, June, July—spring passing and summer falling away— 

—and as if the breeze of seasons passing had whirled through his memories and stirred them up like autumn leaves, he heard— 

Is it because of what I wrote to you about last fall?

Crackling fire, chill in his bones, tea: Canada’s words, spoken the winter England had come calling with a declaration of war tucked in his pocket. Words yet ignorant of that declaration, inquiring after the reason for his visit, if it might concern—

England leafed through his memories and found only islands and sea spray and the sunstroke of the future. Standing here, a few scant years later, he found that a season had been buried, beneath fallen leaves and winter snows, deeper than any spring thaw could unearth.

Where had he been, that long-ago autumn? What had been written to him?

Had he ever given reply?

Get a grip on yourself, he thought. Get your affairs in order.

August, September, October—snippets of salutations and signatures, from America, from France, from New Zealand across the seas. The months flipped back and he found his answer, in a letterhead and a few curt lines:

To the Province of Canada, 
  I regret to inform you that I am unable to grant your request at this time.
  Regards,
  The Crown Kingdom

England was still frowning at his own cursive when a knock broke his reverie. He whirled about to find Canada standing in the doorway, white bear tucked under one arm. The sunlight fell upon his face, catching in his hair, gleaming on his glasses, picking him out brightly from the hallway shadows; yet where England had found clarity in that light, Canada had brought up a hand to shade his eyes, squinting.

“There’s someone at the door asking for you,” Canada said. With his eyes in shadow,it was difficult to tell what drew his attention; whatever he noticed made his brow furrow. “They said they were from the—War and Colonial Office?”

“Ah—yes.” England set the letter on the desk behind himself, pricked by an oddly familiar discomfort—the sense of having wronged, without knowing the wrong. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

Canada nodded. England thought he might leave, then, but he lingered in the doorway, looking at England and—

The letters, he realized.

Silence stretched between them. 

England remembered the silence of his arrival. He remembered the silence of a hallway, seasons ago, after a door had slammed shut. He remembered the silence of letters upon letters.

The silence has a name, he thought. He imagined it like his shadow sprawled long across the floor, a figure poised between the two of them. The name of the silence is America. America, whose presence was felt even in his absence; who had always, always been there.

“Have you spoken with your brother?” he felt compelled to ask.

Slowly, Canada shook his head.

“I would’ve thought you’d have sought him out as soon as he awoke.” Certainly Canada had present during the convalescence; he had even given a blood transfusion, which the doctors had asserted correctly would prove effective.

Canada shook his head again. Beneath England’s scrutiny, he shifted, a flurry of gestures—tugging down his sleeve, touching his ear, shuffling his feet, glancing backwards.

“It’s not as simple as that,” he said. 

He took a step back into the hallway, and his face fell into shadow. Then, a quick turn, a dodge of the eye— 

—footsteps—

—and he was gone, leaving England to swallow down his next words.

They soured in his mouth. Frankly unmannerly, to flee a conversation like that; and not much like Canada, either, who had always put stock by manners. For a moment England even contemplated following after him, to press the matter.

Ultimately, he decided to leave the boy be. Times were strange. Perhaps none of them were quite themselves.

—bang—

Perhaps they’d left pieces behind, in the turning of the seasons.

England turned away from the empty doorway, back to the tableau behind him: open drawer, stacked letters, latched window. He remembered that he had opened the drawer, so as to file away those letters; and he remembered he had wanted to remove the letters, so that he might open the window. He had wanted the breeze to clear the dust from the air; he had wished to feel the sun.

Such small, petty things, in light of his downstairs appointment.

When England closed his eyes he still saw the wide blue ocean; he felt the sea spray at the prow of a ship, stirred up by the salt breeze. In his mind’s eye London beckoned on the horizon, Colombo and Sydney and Cape Town, islands upon islands. A thousand ports and not a wall in sight.

Yet that dream was a mirage. When England opened his eyes he was still here, far from home, and the walls leaned in and duty knocked at the door like some cold northern breeze of seasons changing.

This was where he would remain, certain as the sun in the sky, so as long as the matter of America remained unsettled.

It was with that thought in his head that England exited the room and proceeded to the stairs.

A singular voice that nagged at him as he descended to the ground floor: the voice of this is what you wanted. He had dreamed upstairs of escape from duties, freedom from walls; but wasn’t this what he had wanted? A house, far from Europe’s snakes—family, America again within reach—

I wish— 

No, England decided. No.

He’d grasped victory, perhaps; but it was victory fraying, victory unseamed, victory incomplete. Only with toil might the loose ends be tied off: hours working the needle and thread, hours spent in meetings and poring over paperwork. And letters—letters had failed to reach America, in all senses of the word, but perhaps with the work of hours England could talk sense into him.

Perhaps.

And if not, well—

Fall down the stairs and die, America had told him, but England’s foot left the final stair without a stumble. The wishes of a colony were light things; spoken, and then gone, like leaves to the wind.

It was his wishes that bore the weight of an empire, heavy enough to compel the world to listen.

❧

The letter arrived towards the end of autumn. England read it in the evening, by guttering candlelight, in the room he’d commandeered as his own, passing his eyes over the the elegant script, the flourishes, and stains— 

My dear Angleterre, 
  Felicitations on your great victory. All Europe was abuzz at your audacity. Though of course, we expected no less from you. To think that you were once merely a cantankerous child with a longbow! My, how the years fly by.
  Do you remember Utrecht? The stately quadrille of Europe’s great powers? Prussia and Austria, you and I—how we danced! What of Vienna? Our great concert? The tempo changed, yet balance existed between the sections. That was not so long ago.
  Yet any fool who casts out to sea these days can feel the wind is changing and the tide is turning. Some might say it may be turned back, but if we are honest with each other I think them like Caligula issuing challenge to Neptune. The blood is in the water. We missed the red skies that warned of the storm and now it is folly to war against the sea.
  But Caligula sent ships forth to Britannia, nonetheless, and perhaps none of us have changed. 
  Between a battle lost and a battle won, the distance is immense and there stand empires. My little emperor said that. He was not so little as you made him out to be—in fact I think you two were much alike. Do you believe him? He fell in the end. Must not all of us fall at some time or another? Emperor after emperor; empire after empire; song after song.
  Come home, my dear. Come home and tell us what you have done.
  Love,
  Your erstwhile neighbour, France

England’s hands trembled, words fluttering in the uncertain light. His efforts to master them came to nothing. France raved of the past; he gestured vaguely at the future; why should France’s words disturb him so? And yet his hands would not cease shaking. 

Get a grip on yourself.

That was where it began: with himself. The Crown Kingdom breathed, in, and out, to some distant tide upon a familiar shore. Hands steady, he refolded the letter and tucked it into his pocket.

Up here the nights were waxing colder; the curtains had been drawn over the windows; the fires burned low and all the shadows of all the corners were coming alive. Europe-that-he-had-left called like a siren song, bristling with jagged rocks and shipwrecks, and England tried to reconcile the contradictions of his impulses.

He did not want to be there, and yet he wished for the salt breeze, the rocking of a ship and the boundless horizon. He did not want to leave this place, where he had nothing to fear from serpent tongues and knives in the dark; and yet he wished to step out the door and see anything but walls.

He did not want to leave, and yet it seemed he must return.

A map had been sent to him, during the war, of a place which did not then exist. A map, and a letter.

A request for counsel in redrawing the lines of a continent.

In the consciousness of the populace, there is symbolism in name and border. Remove both, and the inevitable conflicts of identity are stifled.

Patience had failed England. He had walked that road and found no light shining in the distance. He had tried, for long weeks, to bend America to compromise, to reconciliation; he believed he could try, every day, into winter and spring, and nothing would change. It was not in America’s nature to bend.

Not yet. 

Here was the lesson his years had taught him: the way to a nation was always through their people.

Once upon a time England had sung to children that everything would look better in the morning. Now the Crown drew over a fresh sheet of paper and penned a letter back home. He let the ink dry, then folded and sealed it. The candle guttered and guttered and guttered. Tomorrow it would be done.

❧

You don’t care who’s going to be left at the end of this—

—so as long as he’s yours. 

It was déja vu; it was time folding back on itself, walking back the months of fog and rain and slaughter. England entered the sitting room, and Canada was there. 

Yet nothing was as he remembered. The hearth was dark and dead; night had fallen; the candle Canada balanced in one hand provided the only light in the room, a flickering, fragile shelter amidst the hungry shadows. Canada himself curled in a hearthside seat, seemingly engrossed in a book. 

His bear lay in his lap, awake, eyes dark and beady.

England lifted a hand to knock on the doorway, but the bear’s eyes found him before he made a sound and a moment later so did Canada’s. A shadow crossed the colony’s face like a cloud passing over the moon. He closed his book and set it on the table before him.

England walked forward, into the light. He seated himself across from his colony. Canada lifted the candle, and the firelight played across his frown, his smudged glasses, as he and the bear regarded England in silence.

It was Canada who broke that silence. 

“Why?”

Because of your brother, came the first thought in England’s head. Because everything returns to the matter of America. Then, because I decided it would be so, and that’s the end of that. But the questioning was honest, and so England found only an odd tiredness in the place of his earlier frustration. 

“It’s not a punishment, or anything of that sort,” England began slowly. Was that the reassurance he was meant to give? “That is to say, it’s not on account of your behaviour. It’s—almost symbolic, I suppose you could say, as the naming of New Amsterdam was. It eliminates the divide between the United States, the Thirteen Colonies, and British North America, now that both are one and the same.”

“But we’re not.” Laughter bubbled incredulous beneath Canada’s words, that humourless humour which reminded England uncomfortably of America. “And—and it’s not only symbolic. ”

Like a plea or a prayer: let me be wrong.

“They’ll have to change all the maps,” England admitted, “it’ll be a right pain—and of course a nation united must have a unified government. There’ll be a tight rein at first, but I expect more powers to be devolved in time. The bureaucrats will work things out.”

“Of course,” Canada echoed. The corners of his mouth twitched upwards: a smile with a hairline fracture. “I—of course.”

A moment passed and he began again. “It’ll be in New Amsterdam, won’t it? The government, I mean. I saw on your map where the star was. But—why will it be there? When I—” His eyes darted to the shadows above the lintel, the dim firelit folds of the flag that hung askew. “I—”

“There was a committee, I’m given to assume.” England knit his eyebrows. “You’re upset with me.”

“I fought for you!” England started at the outburst and Canada clapped his hand over his mouth; wide-eyed, he dropped it and continued more evenly. “I fought against America, for you.” He hesitated. “For myself. A long time ago. So I wouldn’t have to be a part of him. I fought so I could be me, then.” His eyes were bright in the wavering candlelight. “I fought family for family again, this time, when the reasons weren’t so clear. Because I wanted my people to be happy and safe, and I wanted my family to stop fighting, and I wanted to be me, someday when I was older. That’s what I bled for. Doesn't that—doesn’t it—”

Doesn't it?

Doesn't it what?

“Nothing will be taken from you.” If America was prone to stubbornness, then sometimes Canada fretted for reasons England could not understand; but he tried, nonetheless, to allay those fears. “You’ll still have your people, and they’ll keep their language and their culture and their faith. That was promised, a long time ago.” Though Lord knows what you see in the French. 

“My name.” Canada looked down at the book on the table, but his bear’s beady gaze remained fixed on England. “My border.”

England waved the concern aside. “Names and borders change. I’ve been called Anglia and Loegria and Albion. I signed union with my brother in 1707. You already consider your brother family—and at the very least you didn’t attempt to kill each other in your childhood.”

“But I’m not you!”

Canada had been sitting; now abruptly he was standing, candle in one hand and bear under the other arm. England realized that he was almost the same height as America, now.

“I’m not you,” Canada repeated, voice stretched taut. “I’ve never been Anglia, or Albion, or the land of legends. And I’m not America, either—I’ve never been my own country. I am a name and a border! I am the pieces of French and British North America! All I am—all I am without that is quelques arpents de —”

Pain flashed across Canada’s face; England wondered if he’d literally bitten his tongue. The colony collapsed back into his seat, shoulders curling in.

“I'm sorry.” Canada’s free hand smoothed down his bear’s fur, tugged at his sleeve, tapped against the armrest. “I don't know why I said that.”

“I’ll forgive it,” England said formally, because it was forgivable; and because America had been saying worse, day after day, for months on end. He shook his head. “Listen, there’s no need to fret or be dramatic about this. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: your people and lands will be right where they were before. Yes, they’ll be joined to those of your brother, but I’m sure that by this point you’re accustomed to reining in his wild ideas. I’m trusting you to be a good influence on him—and I’m hoping you’ll deal with this with more maturity than he has, at this point in time.”

The bear bared sharp teeth at England. England glared back.

Canada was silent for a long moment; then he reached up and touched his ear with one cupped hand, as if trying to catch a sound.

“Did France write to you?”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“Are you going to war again?”

“There’s always another war,” replied the Crown, with the echo of another colony’s voice, promising the same.

Canada nodded, then, as if he understood.

“You know,” he said, “for the longest time, America kept asking me why I wouldn’t follow his example, why I didn’t fight to leave like him—and I didn’t understand why he did. Why would I decide to fight family? Fight you? Just to stand alone in the end?” He took a deep breath. “I haven’t changed my mind. But you can’t complain about me being too much like him when you’ve done something to make us—to make us one and the same. And - if you’re having so much trouble getting people to accept things, maybe that says more about what you’re asking than it does about us!”

“Canada,” England snapped, but Canada was rising, bear under one arm and candle in the other hand. He rushed from the room, plunging it into darkness. England heard footsteps ascending the stairs. 

He slumped in his seat, burying his head in his hands. Muffled a curse.

Colonies.

With a shake of his head, England reached out into the darkness, fumbling until he found the book Canada had left on the table. He ran his fingers over the cover, feeling out the embossed letters that spelt out title and author.

A book of Arthurian legend, by Thomas Mallory.

England traced the title again, making certain there was no mistake. He had read it before, once, or twice or many times—and still the words came to him—

For I have promised to do the battle to the uttermost, by faith of my body, while me lasteth the life…

England drew his hand from the book and stood. 

What was done could not be undone, he thought. He knew. Like a bird that flew remained moving in the air. The falling man in perpetual plummet. Orpheus emerging from the land of the dead. Ever forward.

Seasons passed and each buried the last and was buried in turn, like bodies beneath the grave dirt. No good could come out of indulging phantoms of the past. Stay, they might whisper from the shadows, return, to a bedtime story, a simpler time, a brighter day; but time did not turn back on itself. It would bury him, too, if he stood still.

And his future did not lie upon this shore.

Like America’s shout ringing: You have everything you ever wanted!

No , he thought, I am not yet satisfied.

There was another truth that lay beyond that horizon, like the rising sun beyond the curvature of the earth, the evidence of something too great to comprehend: 

Perhaps I never will be.

The Crown Empire was free, now and forever. He walked from the darkness and left the bonds of his past behind.

Chapter Text

Late 19th Century
Canada West
The aftermath of a battle lost

☙

A needle of light split the window in twain as the bedroom door inched open. The needle widened into a swathe—hinges creaked—and then a figure stood silhouetted in that swathe of light, reflected ghostly in the windowpane.

America didn’t turn his head. In his mind he had the words lined up, envisioned how he wanted them to land, like thrown stones, like musket balls. Are you happy now? Done tormenting my brother?

Then the figure made as if to step forward, and the way he did sent all those stones scattering, clattering away, until America had no words left at all.

All he could do was stare at the reflection in the window as his visitor slid into the room, tugging the door shut behind him. His face came clear, lit from below by the candle he held: a spot of warm light on the cold glass.

America saw his own face, very near. And, on the other side of the room, his brother.

The door remained open a sliver; the bright line of its firelit edge drew an immaterial border between their reflections. Canada’s mirrored self shifted his feet, pressed against the wall, and finally America turned and looked.

(His brother.)

Seasons and a war later, Canada still held himself as if something would shatter if he moved too loudly. Candlelight threw strange shifting shadows across his face. Perhaps he was an inch taller, a touch older, or perhaps that was the darkness, or only America, brought low, dragged back into the cage of his childhood, looking out at the world with glasses not shaped quite the way they were before. Perhaps nothing had changed but the space between them.

Canada looked back at him, shoulders hunched as if expecting vituperation, as if expecting a blow, and America reached out, grimacing as his shoulder twinged, and patted the bedside stool.

“You can’t just stand there all night,” he rasped. 

Canada winced at the sound, but approached and seated himself, carefully, setting the candle on the nightstand and folding his hands in his lap.

“I have,” and the words came out with a rehearsed quality, “a gift for you.”

America raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? What’s the occasion?” He gestured at himself. “‘Get well soon’? Or is it ‘happy getting your ass kicked by Britain day’?”

“‘Get well soon’ isn’t a bad guess,” replied Canada, diplomatic as ever. He withdrew something from his pocket, keeping it hidden in his fist. “Actually, I missed your birthday. Hold out your hand?”

America shot him an incredulous look, but obligingly offered his palm. Something cold and heavy clinked into it, gleaming silvery in the candlelight.

An overflowing ring of keys.

“Seriously?”

Canada smiled like weak tea. “Happy late birthday.”

There were too many things America could say to that, and they crowded into his mouth, crowding each other out, until in the end, all he said was, “No way your house has this many doors.”

“It doesn’t.” Somehow, his lukewarm response seemed to set Canada at ease. “They’re not all for this house. Some are for your houses in the States, or for government buildings. I’m not sure all of them are on here, but I tried to get the ones I could.”

America looked from the keys in his hand to Canada’s expression, now downright serene. “How did you get my keys?”

“Britain had them.” Canada shrugged, easy, like shrugging off a coat. “I borrowed them from his desk and had them copied.”

A laugh bubbled just behind America’s teeth, waiting for release. He imagined it felt like drinking champagne, light and fizzy. “You stole Britain’s keys?”

“I put them back after I was done with them. That’s borrowing.”

America wagged a finger at Canada. “Nuh-uh. You don’t get to wriggle out of this one. You. You. You stole Britain’s keys.”

“They’re your keys,” said Canada, wrinkling his nose in that annoyed way of his, and at that the laugh spilt out of America like a knot coming undone. It was a giddy, impossibly light feeling. He celebrated by leaning out and pulling Canada into a hug.

Canada hugged him back, and for a moment they were just as they had been before. 

Then America drew back, wincing.

Canada’s brow furrowed. “Did I hurt you?” 

“I was hurt way before you came along.” America dismissed the concern with a wave of one hand, weighing the keys in the other. “So, not that I’m not grateful and all that, but—” I’ve been in your house for weeks and this is the first time you’re actually talking to me. “Your talk didn’t go well, huh?”

Canada grimaced. America watched as he removed his smudged glasses, cleaned them with the hem of his shirt, and stuck them back on his face. 

“Let’s not—let’s not talk about that.”

“Sure,” America conceded—no skin off his back. He shook the keys, making them jangle. “So I’ll just chalk these up to the spirit of brotherhood?”

That made Canada smile. “You can do whatever you want.”

“That’s my line.” In America’s mind the flint met the steel; something sparked. “Hey. Come with me.”

He might as well have started speaking Greek. “What?” 

“Come with me,” America repeated, and that spark of an idea blossomed into something bright and tangible, a mad candle-flame. He could see him and Canada on the road, taking trains together, exchanging messages only they understood—Canada slipping into places without suspicion, America bluffing their way past. The things they could do, out from under the eye of the Crown.

“I’m going to leave,” said America, and he folded his fingers over the keys in his hand, the keys Canada had given him. “I’m not going to come back. Leave with me. You stayed, you stuck the war out, fine. You saw how it goes. You’re seeing how it goes. You don’t matter to him the way power does. He’d barter you away if—”

Something in his words hit Canada like a slap; America fell silent. 

“You can do whatever you want,” repeated Canada, some of the levity gone out of his voice.

America raised his eyebrows. “And what, you can’t?”

“I’m not you.” Canada shook his head. He gestured—at the floor, the walls, the window that made up America’s prison. “This is—this is my home.”

“So what?” America spread his hands. “I’ve been staying here. Britain’s been staying here. We can visit each other’s homes, can’t we?” 

“You aren’t talking about visiting,” Canada said, “you aren’t—” He shook his head again. “I can’t just disappear, America, I’ll have—meetings, and government people who want to talk, and paperwork, and letters—”

“They won’t listen to a word you say,” said America. “Just like he didn’t listen to a word you said.” His hand tightened into a fist around the keys, hard edges digging into his skin. “It’s no use staying here, they just want to twist you around, use you to control your people, use your people to control you, it’s some stupid game and the only way to escape it is to get out—”

“I have to do something.” Canada’s face was pale, imploring. Please understand. “I can’t just run away. I have to try.”

America looked at his face, the face that others said was so much like his own, and it was nothing like looking into a mirror. He didn’t see his nose on Canada’s face, or his chin, or his hair. But America looked and for a moment saw the way he felt in the eyes of another, like firelight, reflected.

He understood. He did.

“I have to do something, too,” said America.

It was as simple as that: two brothers, a line of light, the divide as old as the two of them. A divide that was in jeopardy and yet still felt as if it would always be.

America set the topic aside like a bad hand of cards and picked up another. “Why didn’t you come talk to me? You know, it was that old man day in and day out. And I know you were lurking outside the door for at least half his lectures. You could’ve come in.”

Canada looked away, towards the candle that burned on the nightstand. The firelight flickered on his glasses. 

“I didn’t know what to say,” he said. Then, “I didn’t know if you’d want to see me. I thought you'd be angrier at me. You—you should be angrier.”

“Well, I was.” America shrugged. “But it wasn’t much fun, so I decided to stop and just be angrier at Britain instead.” He gave Canada a look. “You know, it’s your house. If that’s what you were worried about, you could’ve just come in and asked.”

Canada turned his gaze back towards him. “I guess I could’ve.”

America made an exasperated noise. “Did you leave the book on the nightstand?”

“I—yeah.”

“It was gone when I woke up for real. I was wondering if I’d made that up to myself.” America shook his head. He dropped the keys on the nightstand. “Hey, Canada?” 

“Yeah?”

“You looked like you’d seen a ghost last time I saw you. What gives? I mean, not that I’m keen on what’s going on, but I’m pretty resigned to everything Britain does being some bizarre sideways attempt on my life at this point. This being the time you actually disagree with him, though...”

Canada hesitated. “I was—” 

“Yeah?”

Canada took off his glasses and cleaned them again. As he replaced them on his face, his too-long sleeve fell back.

America frowned. “What’s that on your hand?”

“Oh—this?” A patch of shiny red skin marked the back of Canada’s right hand—a burn, America realized. Canada quickly tugged down his sleeve to hide it. “Nothing. I just—I was pouring tea, and I heard a noise and it startled me, and I burned myself.”

It didn’t ring of a lie, but America still squinted at him, trying to puzzle out what more there was to the story. The seconds stretched out.

Canada didn’t budge.

They were getting off-topic.

“The merger,” America prompted. “Is sharing a country with me really that bad?”

Canada fidgeted with the sleeve he’d tugged down. “It’s not that, really. It’s just—” He sighed. “I was afraid.”

“What were you afraid of?”

By candlelight, Canada wavered, looking at once tired and oddly young.

“The same thing I’m always afraid of,” he said. “That I’ll disappear.”

“Huh.” America mulled it over. It was a thought that was harder to refute, in the dark, with the edges of everything uncertain; it was harder to say, yes, we will wake up in the morning, again and again and again. Hadn’t he worried about the same thing? But this was Canada. “Well, I don’t think so.”

“England thought so too,” said Canada. “But none of us can really know, can we?” The words spilled out of him. “Maybe someday people will look at the maps and I’ll just be the northern bits of you. Maybe I’ll change so much I’ll just be someone else wearing the same face. Maybe there’ll be another war and everything will burn so bright that both of us will disappear in the fire. Or maybe we’ll fight again, the two of us, and—only one of us will survive.” Canada lowered his voice to a whisper. “I don’t know where we’re going, America. I don’t know what happens to me or what happens to you. And I don’t know who or what we’re going to be, at the end of it. That’s what scares me.”

And when he spoke America could see it, the great darkness they were journeying forth into, and perhaps it should’ve scared him too. But the fact of the matter was that America had never let himself falter, because he was too accustomed to the notion that doubts could become cracks could become the places where you fell apart.

America remembered the light of the stars. Night after night after night. Inexhaustible.

He tried to find the same certainty inside himself, the certainty of a path wide enough to hold the two of them, just as they were, for as long as they might walk it.

“Well,” said America, finding the words, “that’s easy. You’ll be you, and I’ll be me. I won’t disappear, and I won’t let you disappear.”

Canada blinked, hard. “You always sound so sure of everything. I wish—I wish I could just believe you.”

America stretched his hand out into the darkness. He remembered a hallway now, snow melting on the doormat, and an offer rejected. That was where he’d gone wrong, asking for something Canada couldn’t truly give. This request would be simpler. Simpler, and easier.

“Believe me,” he said.

Canada took his hand. His hand was colder. It always had been.

“I’ll try,” he said. 

It would have to be enough.

“We’ll get through this,” America vowed. Couldn’t let Britain walk out of this round holding all the cards. “Even if we’re not in the same place. People might forget who we were but we’ll remember. I’ll remember. Promise.”

Canada nodded.

“So will I,” he said. 

Then, “Don’t tell England I was here?”

“I won’t,” America assured him. “Hey. Sit awhile?”

Canada opened his mouth to reply, and then—

—something changed.

Some indefinable quality had been altered, between flickers of candlelight, between blinks of an eye, like the world had played switcheroo, presto-chango, a magic trick, the flourish of a signature, and it would never be the same.

Canada’s mouth was still open, but he didn’t reply, didn’t say a word. His face drained of colour, as pale as the time he first saw the map over England’s shoulder.

America felt it, the seismic shift in the bedrock of his self, and he found the air to voice it, like a whisper, like a prayer—

“Crown States of America.”

Both their heads turned at the sound of the name, hanging in the air, their name, and Canada was still holding his hand and America—

Saw. He looked through eyes not his own and he saw himself, America, a gaunt, bandaged figure, eyes still bright with determination in the candlelight, but couldn’t find that same bedrock firework faith in the heart that beat in his own chest, looked ahead for the angles forward he was so accustomed to finding and saw only a whiteout snowstorm, no way through without getting lost. 

Felt. He was afraid. He was afraid because he recognized the name like it was his own, because he knew what had happened and he did not want to. He was afraid because everything that could be his now seemed on the verge of being snatched away, his aspirations, his culture, his name and identity, and there was something in the foundation of those thoughts that America found himself following, not a fracture line, but something that could become one, a crevasse, a line of stress, built on family and pieces and France’s departure and America’s shadow and England’s distance and quelques arpents de—

Canada wrenched his hand away, and they were themselves again and nothing more. Two brothers and one nation, staring at each other, faces unsteady in the candlelight, blurring at the edges. Name ringing in the air like a declaration, like the clap of a bell.

Canada stood. He took a step back, then another, light and hesitant, and then he turned and ran from the room, leaving his candle behind.

America reached out, too shocked to call out, to say, you can’t run from this, come back, we can face it together.

Don’t let it get to you.

Don’t let him win.

There was a sinking feeling in his chest, then. Because of the expression on Canada’s face. Because of that bright line between them, because of that fear. Because, in that moment, he was too slow to chase Canada, and because he had never, ever been able to find Canada when the other didn’t wish to be found.

I will keep looking, he thought.

He was not going to forget.

America glanced at the window. His face floated alone in the reflection now, lit only by the candle that still burned on the nightstand. Outside the stars had come out in their glory and his eyes found the patterns that drew out the bear, the lyre, the snake-bearer, the north star sailors had used to find their way here before the first lights of his own memory.

America scooped up the keys on the nightstand and tucked them beneath his pillow. Then he picked up the candle and blew it out. The firelight vanished from the window, and his reflection went with it, leaving only the stars beyond.

Make a wish.

I wish, America thought, I wish—

—that I’ll be able to keep all my promises.

His wounds pulsed still with a dull, steady ache, and the edges of his name were wearing away in sun and sea, and he remembered England’s eyes and England’s bayonet, blood beneath snow and sky and Canada fleeing into the night.

Running on fumes and anger, staring unblinking into the uncertain darkness ahead, he was not going to forget those things, either.

☙

The next morning America woke to a single key upon his nightstand, small and gleaming gold. Attached was a brief note in England’s practiced script.

An apartment suite in New Amsterdam has been procured for you. I trust that you will know the way.

Beneath was an address.

America picked up the key. He weighed it in his hand. Felt the chill of the metal.

Yeah, America thought. He tossed the key back onto the nightstand. 

When his eyes were open all America saw were the walls of this room of this house of this country that had become his prison, but when he closed them a map unfurled in the darkness and it was wider than walls, than the span of railways, than a city by the sea. There was gold in the west and fire in the south and above all the stars were burning. His feet would tread lightly upon the paths of his home and doors would open before him. He could go anywhere, anywhere at all, evading the weight of his chains.

Despite the uncertainty, despite the doubts and regrets, despite the memory of the night before, America found it within himself to smile at the clear morning sky outside the window.

Yeah, I know the way.

Chapter Text

Late 19th Century
The Crown States of America
The aftermath of a war won and lost

☙

America packed for his departure in the dead of the night. Old injuries twinged as he moved, but his work was quick, quiet, efficient. He had little to take; he left little behind. Only the slip of paper Britain had left him, with the address of an apartment in New Amsterdam scrawled upon it. 

That he considered tearing into shreds, or incinerating in his candle-flame; but in the end he merely snuffed out the candle with his fingertips and crumpled the note in his hand.

His elbow banged against the wall as he turned a corner; a floorboard creaked. Every sound was a declaration in the silent house. He wondered if Canada was awake. If he heard. If he knew.

But the time for words were over. Like birds that headed south when winter came knocking, they were all taking wing, scattering to the winds.

America left the address and the apartment key on the kitchen table. The first thing Canada would see after going downstairs the next morning. Merry early Christmas, he thought, since I won’t be around then. Not like I’ll be staying at that place, so you’re welcome to it. 

Come visit sometime. 

The night was cool but not frigid as America stepped out the door. He looked up and found dark cloud cover, the moon only a dim spot of silvery light, like rain was coming. Around him, a city that was not his slept, strangers dreaming dreams that were not his own.

He could not forget the dreams of his own.

It was time for him to go home.

America walked the silent streets to the train station. Once there, he bought a ticket that would see him to the end of the line, not knowing if he’d reach it, or if he’d get off at some point along the way. Not knowing where he would go, now that the Crown held his home in his grasp, but knowing it wouldn’t be where the empire wanted him.

He would find a way. In the land that was his birthplace and his home, he would find places to sleep, doors to open, and paths to walk. He would survive.

He could do no less.

America was the only person in his compartment on that night train. Leaning his head against the cool glass of the window, he heard wheels trundling over metal, saw fields and stars blurring past. He felt his people, their sorrows like putting his hand into a fire. They slept in their multitudes. He was alone.

Anger, burning low in that moment, weary and taxed.

America closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.

☙

He was chopping down a tree under the cover of darkness, one that was old and sturdy and anchored deep in the ground. It was a cherry tree, an elm, some ancient oak. But no, the tree was young, and it grasped at him with roots and branches, seeking to tangle him up in its wood and make him a part of it.

Make itself a part of him?

Others joined him in his struggle against the tree, wielding axes and clippers and machetes, but one by one they were overwhelmed. He saw a soldier lifted and hurled into the distance, a youth crushed into the ground, families impaled by roots. A branch dove into one man’s mouth, and America heard the echo of his scream.

Grabbing at the branch, America succeeded in breaking off a piece of it. He lifted it into the heavens and it caught the starlight and burst into flames, a torch in the darkness, and the tree flinched—

America woke with a start, breathing hard.

In the seat across from him, staring out the window, sat a bespectacled young man with wavy blond hair, wearing a threadbare blue coat. 

America blinked, trying to clear the dream from his eyes. Blinked again, but the passenger remained, outlined in the pale dawn light, pensive and oh-so-familiar—

He looked at America, and America registered his face in full with a lurch like the world turning over again.

“Oh, hello,” the new passenger said, in a voice as familiar to America as his own. “I was watching the sunrise just now. If you’d woken up a little earlier, you might’ve caught it too.”

He spoke quietly, carefully, as if something might shatter if he raised his voice, and behind his glasses his eyes were violet.

“...Canada?” asked America, and he’d been wrong to trust his own voice, when the word came out shakier than he’d intended, but silence was no option at all. It never had been.

“You could call me that,” said his companion, agreeably. He looked very much like Canada. He sounded very much like Canada. But he wasn’t—-

You could call me that.

“What’re you doing here?” asked America.

“I’m taking the train home.” 

“Sure, yeah, that’s what I’m doing,” said America. “You, on the other hand...”

He looked close, searching for the tell, for the trick that would reveal the forgery, but saw only the feature of his brother looking back at him.

His brother’s features, and his own.

“You look in the mirror all the time,” said the figure who was not Canada. “Seeing your own face shouldn’t be so scary.”

“I’m not scared.” America drew himself up and squared his shoulders. “But seriously, spill. Who’re you? Why are you here?”

What are you?

Not-Canada tilted his head. He looked down at his hands, moved his fingers and watched the interplay of tendons, and then said, in a thoughtful sort of tone:

“You know… I don’t think I am here. Not really.”

That startled a laugh out of America, breathless and full of bravado. “...’course you’re here. You’re sitting right there. I can see you.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m here, you know.” 

America laughed again, incredulous. “What else is it supposed to mean?”

Not-Canada didn’t reply. 

America blinked, and he was alone in an empty compartment. He looked around, but there was no trace of the Not-Canada, no shadow, no footprint.

He passed a hand over the opposing seat and found it cold.

“It’s like I said,” and America’s head snapped around. Not-Canada wasn’t sitting across from him anymore, but beside him, expression grave. “Seeing isn’t believing.”

A chill ran down America’s spine. He was accosted by the memory of attending an inauguration, buffeted by the crowd, turning around and seeing his own face, glittering with anger, or maybe it was the other America who had turned around. He couldn’t remember. It was hard to remember. He was too used to being one person.

“Are—are you a ghost?”

The figment of Not-Canada held a hand up to the soft morning light through the window. It wasn’t transparent. There was nothing extraordinary about it, really. Only a pale hand, a familiar hand, casting a hand-shaped shadow on a familiar face. 

Real as anything.

“I don’t think I’m a ghost,” he said. He adjusted his glasses by the corner and peered intently at America. In that moment he didn’t look much like Canada at all. He looked like light off glass. He looked like the glare of a mirror. He looked like—

“I think I might be you.”

The answer clicked into place like a puzzle piece. I won’t claim my traitors. America’s leg in the trap, his veins filled with poison, his traitorous heart. He had known that as long as he defied how this new map defined him, he would always be running from himself.

It was truer than he’d ever imagined. 

❧

Canada picked up the key upon his kitchen table. He closed his eyes seeing sandcastles on a beach far from here, decades and decades ago, and the tide that had smoothed them away. He opened his eyes knowing that he would build another anyways, on a different shore, hoping perhaps that the ground would be higher or the waters gentler, because this was all he had, a mari usque ad mare. However many decades passed, he could not escape the sea.

❧

England set sail with the evening tide. Standing at the prow of the ship, he searched for the future in the light of the rose-pink dawn. The deck swayed and pitched beneath his feet on the fickle waves of the Atlantic.

All he saw was an ocean washed with blood.

Chapter Text

Summer 1924
Corinth, the Crown States of America
Corinth burns with its own war

❦

The Crown States is heading out of the train station when he glimpses a familiar face in the corner of his eye. A double-take proves him mistaken: there’s no one there, nothing but a tattered poster clinging to the wall, half-obliterated by time and weather.

What remains bears the ink portrait of a boy, fifteen or so, with sharp features and a mess of unruly dark hair. Typeset words, bold and authoritative, march off the torn edges: Traitors to the Crown, one Sylvester Lambsbridge to be delivered as corpse or secure prisoner—

I know you, the Crown States thinks. He can’t shake that sense of knowing. The face in the crowd. There’s a memory that slips like smoke through his fingers, leaving nothing but fire and voices in the night.

We’re not safe at all. 

The poster comes loose easily when he tugs at it. He folds it up and slips it between the pages of his journal.

A scream rings out in the distance. The Crown States spins about, sees nothing, but somewhere voices are shouting over each other, echoing, the words indistinguishable—

—we’re not safe—

He breaks into a fast walk, ignoring the way his body aches and complains, following those voices. He passes beneath the looming shadows of crenellated towers, beneath the dim curves of swooping archways.

And he begins to hear crackling.

Orange light blooms suddenly in the dark. Hot air washes over his face. The Crown States chokes on the next breath he takes, and the coughs that tear themselves from his throat are harsh and ragged. He presses his sleeve over his nose and mouth, the world spinning around him.

When he tips his head up to the darkening sky, he finds the heavens smudged with smoke. Not a single lonely star pierces through the haze.

Corinth is burning.

❦

It’s moments like these when he feels like a candle wick, the flames consuming each passing year, each year passing like water or sand through his fingers. Coming up empty. When cities poisoned and plagued lie in his wake—when fire races down the street—when he gasps for breath and feels his skin crawl and burn and sting—and old wounds throb and new ones won’t heal—that is when the Crown States thinks he must be running out of time. He’s sure this all felt easier once, though he’s not certain how. He’s sure too that the path ahead of him once wound blindly into the fog, when now, at times, he can almost glimpse the end.

Can he blame this on the words of a firebrand Reverend, three years ago? No. Every path must come to an end, even those of his kind. And a wildfire won’t start without tinder for the spark to set alight.

Once the Crown States pried a brick from a wall, pried up his own past and decided to dig it all up again, every hidden page, every lost memory. Once he thought that if he remembered enough of the past, he would know of the future, too. He would know what he was becoming. What he needed to become.

Now, with the taste of ashes in his mouth, he understands his future is beyond his deciding—now he questions how much of a future he has.

And still the question remains, as heavy as a fetter, as light as a leaf on the water:

❦

Who are you and who will you be?

What is your perfect world?

❦

Another night, long ago, a hazy and fractured memory. Darkness. Candle flame. Two voices, murmuring, before the inevitable parting.

❦

I wish—

I wish—

I promise—

❦

Voices echo in the dark. Children and youth, gathered in an open yard around the corner. They confer, without knowing he hears them, and he keeps quiet and leans against the wall of the clubhouse and listens.

“—leave, and I’m making this pledge to you, things will be stable.” The speaker behind the bold words is fifteen or sixteen, perhaps. “The fighting will be done with. Nobody will prey on children in West Corinth, and there will be sanctuary here. Should that situation change, I’ll appear, or I’ll send agents.”

A game? Make-believe? No. The Crown States hears nothing he cannot believe.

He had been young once too, after all, and there had been things he believed in he would’ve worked to the bone for. And now, in the turning of the years, in this season of war again, he hears that promise settle in the night and thinks only —

I know you.

“—started a war!” 

“What did you expect?” demands the voice of the young rebel. “You know as well as I do that people have been preying on the people in this city. Some of you are the prey! You’ve done nothing. Some warnings here and there, some counsel, but things are what they are and they haven’t changed for a long, long time. Yes, I started a war, or I didn’t stop the Devil from starting it, but there’s a cancer here and I’m doing the cutting necessary to get it out. It might hurt now, but it’s going to feel worlds better when we’re done.”

The words ring out like the clang of a bell and reverberate with others inside his skull, crying for action, for the fire and flood, for the falling blade and the sacrifice for a new age. The Crown States’ fingers twitch, close around a knife that is not there and then come apart, trembling slightly. Those words were true: it hurts now, it does, his head, the bandaged wounds on his arm where he once excised red lesions, the scar carving across the back of his hand, the seams of him where his common purpose is coming undone, everything tearing open, burning anew.

The weight of a knife in his hand, of a scalpel, a blade that flashed in the sun long ago. He remembers. Yes, sings the call to action, fever pitch in this hot and choking summer night, and the Crown States presses his eyes shut, sees lights flare in the darkness, red against black. Feels the pulse of his heart throb in time with the pain of his wounds throb in time with his headache.

Yes, sings the same old song of ills excised. Yet the wounds keep bleeding. Surgery after surgery. Is it a price or mere bloodletting, like the superstitions of old? How many operations can the patient survive?

What comes after?

Words, fragmented, filter through the haze of his headache. Children. Prey.

What came before?

A swinging door—stone steps—nothing but fog.

By the time the Crown States pries his eyes open once more, the voices have gone silent. He peers around the corner and finds the yard empty. Yet the night has not settled; it crackles still with flames, the wind rushing high above. The war that touches this place has not ended. It rages on around him in a city wide awake and he feels it like he feels the reverb of gunshots, the pain of red roots, the heavy step of a great beast, somewhere else.

Like he feels the war that is trying to consume him.

The Crown States rubs his forehead and tries to think.

Corinth is a city like a balanced coin, a two-faced city. Once its stone walls made it a fort, a place of holding fast; now it is a station of the transient. The wealthy come as lakeside vacationers; the desperate arrive to cram themselves into cheap hospitales , selling their flesh to science for coin. 

The face of Corinth that is bright smiles beneath the summer sun, remedies in its outstretched hands, city of medicine. In the underworld, children scurry through the alleys, and criminals peddle their wares. City of drugs.

Corinth, as it truly is, holds the two faces within one city. When the war for what was him raged, long ago, it balanced on the precipice between two factions, a hand outstretched to each for coin. And even now, it balances.

It has not changed for a long time, pledges or not.

❦

The Crown States has, over the years, come to know his waters well: the way they move, the way they sit, the way they mirror and drown and flow through him, familiar as the blood in his body. Once upon a time, the waters of Kensford were tainted. Once, a red plague took root in a city by the sea, spores floating in the salt surf. Now and always, to the north, at the heart of him, a strip of ocean divides island and mainland, past and future. Some places it never ceases to rain.

And Corinth, here, is a city that rings two lakes. Even now, they are drawing water from those lakes and pumping it into the wagons that trundle away into the smoke of the streets. City of waters.

The four basic elements of life: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen.

Once the Crown States was a student here, and he walked upon the shore, sat upon the sun-warmed rocks that are now dark and cold. Once he saw himself reflected: a young man in some Academy’s uniform, a textbook tucked beneath his arm, serious, worried. Nothing like a nation.

Once, he saw himself reflected in the dying light. A traveller, wild-haired and wild-eyed. Something in his hand that he cast down, down, down into the waters, and watched the ripples obliterate his reflection. The sweep of his coat as he turned and fled.

Tonight, the waters are ink-dark, and the reflections flicker with the orange of captured firelight. The Crown States finds that he is a silhouette of a person, a cut-out shape, ghostly above and below the surface, worn-out like a creased and sun-faded picture. He almost does not recognize himself.

❦

Corinth is a city of mirrors, too. Two Academies, Bergewall and Corinth Crown, different and the same. Two lakes. West and east, shadow and reflection, the same old song. 

The location comes back to the Crown States, then, because once he too was nothing but a shadow and a reflection. Incomplete.

❦

The air may be hot and smoky, but the waters are cold. They soak into his shoes, the ends of his trousers, the mud sucking his steps down, down, down. The Crown States takes another into the lake. Another.

Going deeper.

In his mind’s eye something falls again into the water, ripples expanding. Concentric circles. Bulls-eye.

His foot knocks against something hard in the sediment. He plunges his arm into the water and his fingers dip into mud and find glass, close around the neck of a bottle. Mud and water slough off the surface as he pulls it up and out of the water: a wine bottle, securely corked. Something rustles inside when he shakes it.

Paper.

Messages in bottles. A flash of a feeling: childish mirth. Sticks for swords, sandcastles on the beach; relics of a time that is now gone.

The Crown States wipes muck off the glass with his sleeve. Finds a label, too rotted to read, and wipes that away too. The wounds on his arm sting with lake water. He hopes vaguely that they won’t become infected.

He stows the bottle inside his bag and begins the cold and sodden trudge back to dry land. 

❦

That night the Crown States does not sleep. His feet are weary and his eyes are heavy and his head spins and spins and throbs, but Corinth is wide awake and Corinth is burning. In the whispers that come on the wind he knows there to be a war brewing in this city’s underground. When he looks up he sometimes spots children perched on the rooftops, here and there and then gone again, figures in the smoke like figures made of mist.

The war touches them, too.

Or should he say that they touch it? Leaving their own fingerprints?

Where do you go, when you vanish? Where do you return from?

What do they make of you?

And what will you make of me?

He thinks he has been trying to understand for a very long time. He still does not.

That night the Crown States wanders the streets. He hears whispers of things that cannot be believed, tales of villains and predators and monsters, Corinth turning itself inside-out and upside-down. Tales of a Witch with her cauldrons of brews, drowned in her own work. Of the Devil who takes a drug that gives him two faces, two selves. He climbs up to the balcony of a restaurant and watches the flames. The hours blur into one another, dreamlike. 

The explosion comes near dawn. He hears it in the distance; he feels it in his bones, in his flesh, like a ruptured vein, a disruption to the natural flows of things. Smoke and fire plume into the air, over the tops of buildings: the shattering of the train station, the ground on which he tread when he arrived at this city. His headache spikes; his head splits in two and the halves slide away from each other, apart—

In this two-faced city, the Crown States sways. He—

—clenches his hand until his nails dig into his palm, grim, pained, yet bitterly triumphant, knowing that it’s another blow against—

—twists his fingers into his sleeve, fearing, dreading, wishing everything would go back to—

—clasps his hands together. Feels the ground beneath his feet. The cold water in his shoes. The hot wind on his face, the smoke from the fires.

And then, his people, in all the places they are. All the causes they sing out or keep burning in their chests, and yet their flesh remains the same. Flesh and blood stay the same. 

The Crown States comes back to himself, breathing hard. 

Hasn’t felt this close in a long time. But he’s kept it together this long, after all. He is not a Devil or a coin in motion that flips from face to face. Win or lose, fight or flight, north or south or that same old song—no matter how he cracks and bleeds, there is only one set of footprints behind him these days, and a path only wide enough for one ahead. 

That is what he promised himself, long ago.

For better or worse, in a burning city, amidst a civil war, he is still nothing more and nothing less than the Crown States of America.

❦

The light returns, rays of gold falling through the dust that still hangs in the air. Like the calm after a storm, the wind quiets.

Not for long.

The Crown States is seated by the lake shore, watching sky-blue break over the water. He is holding the bottle he dredged from those waters, and carefully, delicately, he smoothes out each scrolled page he removes from it. He tucks them into his journal, for fear they’ll crumble like desiccated leaves.

And he tries to read them, though the words shift and blur before his bleary eyes.

Chemical formulae. Postcards of his own creation, captioned sketches of the city. Like looking at an old picture of himself, at once familiar and strange. A glimpse at a time he was here, in this city like a coin standing on edge, watching it wobble from both sides. The things he learned. The things he never did.

Stifling a yawn, the Crown States pulls the last coiled page from the bottle, and his fingers come away stained with graphite. He unfurls it to find a pencil rubbing of some engraved surface, stark carved letters preserved in smudged greys. A name he does not remember. Two dates, fifty or so years apart. A list of roles.

Husband, friend, respected colleague. His work lives on. 

A rubbing of a gravestone.

A frown forms on his face. He turns the page around and finds only four words, written in his own hand:

Once upon a time.

For a moment the Crown States simply stares at it, this beginning of a story that challenges him to finish it. Then all at once like a ray of sun through the haze he understands, that it was finished, that this is the story of how everything ends and begins—

Chapter Text

Year 2, Q4 & Year 2, Q4
Two Academies, Corinth, the Crown States of America
History repeats itself

❦

He woke from a dream of a boy in a field whose face blew away in a storm of blue petals, and the feeling of searching for something in a place where it could never be found.

The Crown States cracked open his eyes to blurry shadows and wan light. He fumbled for his glasses and put them on. The shadows sharpened, but the light remained weak and cold. On the other side of the room, his roommate was a bundle of blankets, dead to the world.

But he wanted—

—to walk and walk until he found that field again—

The Crown States rose from bed, padded over to the window and drew open the curtain. It was barely dawn out, the morning light still pale and unsteady, glimmering on the dew that spangled the glass. Blue flowers in round pots tilted their faces towards that light. 

He wiped the glass clear and peered down, saw the crenellated stone walls of Corinth Crown Academy, the cobbled path and the iron gate that blocked it. A man in a labourer’s muddy clothes was trudging towards that gate, carrying a young boy in his arms. Each step dragging, like a prisoner with a heavy chain clasped around his ankle. Marching towards his execution—or delivering another to theirs—and hoping without hope at each step that the path would lengthen, that the gallows would withdraw.

The chill from the glass clung to the Crown States’ fingertips. Sank into his bones. It felt like rain, cold and heavy as it soaked into the soil. Perhaps there were tears being shed down there that he could not see. Some final memory before the separation, like the flowers in his dream. A memory of rain. 

Of the feeling of being abandoned.

The Crown States rested his forehead against the window. The man and the boy passed temporarily behind shrubbery, and for a moment there were only stone walls like the sort you might find on a castle, wrought iron gates with the shield of the Academy. Beyond, tidy gabled rooftops, the soft glimmer of the lake. He could picture the view painted on a postcard, smooth and pristine. 

But on the other side of the card were the stains, that clumsy farewell, ink bleeding where the tears had fallen—soon I will be going far away, and it will be long before we—

I wish I could find you. Wherever you wind up. Save you, maybe. Like grasping at petals, catching snowflakes. Perhaps someday he’d close his fingers around something solid, or perhaps someday he would have seen too many people walking with that ball-and-chain, heard too many farewells, known too many faces who disappeared. Perhaps someday those individual tragedies would be nothing more than drops of rain on newspaper obituaries, and he would let the fragments fall from his hands and draw shut the curtain and be numb to it all in the summer-morning chill.

I wish I could.

❦

Memory was a strange and fickle creature. Some things the Crown States remembered clearer than anything: the flash of a blade in the noonday swelter, the clasp of a handshake, windowpane ghosts. Others were harder: the face of a boy against a blue, blue sky, a glimpse of white fur, an old melody, an old friend. Some things were solid—he died and lived again and again and yet they remained, shapes in the fog like the masts of boats rising over the harbour. Others disappeared like the mist when the sun was rising, like snow beneath winter rain.

Memory shifted like the names of places did, like the shapes of buildings did, like the ground shifted beneath their feet as year after year went by. The map changed; so did the territory. Sometimes there were moments he didn't even recognize himself.

(The Crown States flipped through the pages of his journal sometimes, looking, looking for a time that was now gone. But the boy who had hunted for flowers or built castles on the beach had been unbothered by the transience of memory, and he had not thought of keeping a record. No sketch existed of the face framed by blue, of the wave of France’s hand as he bid this shore farewell, of toy soldiers or suit jackets. Only the flashes that came, sometimes, like a ship drawing nearer, the glimpse of the sailor on the deck, of the name painted on the hull, before the vessel drifted away.)

There was a science to it, he knew, as there was to most things. If memory was a book, then its pages were rolled around themselves like the rings of a tree. Each new growing layer buried the last a little deeper, and the pages that were never opened fused into each other, becoming harder and harder to access.

The Crown States had encountered enough children in the labs to know that they hardly ever remembered anything. He used to wonder why that was. The answer lay, as it often did, in the science. A drug, a careful formulation intended to wash away memory, wipe the slate clean, pulp the wood and serve up a slew of fresh pages up which the scientist could scribe their own will.

Born anew.

❦

The shoots in the agar plate were developing well, slender green stems emerging from pale, fragile root systems. His first batch had been lost to fungus; he’d taken more care with the sterilization this time around. The Crown States jotted down the date, the number labelled on the plate, and then his own observations.

Sometimes he wondered why he kept the flowers. It wasn’t precisely convenient; they sprawled, and weren’t accustomed to this climate, and it was difficult to justify spending lab time on changing that. Seeing them gave him strange dreams, and reminded him of someone—

Someone—

Perhaps he was simply sentimental. Memory withered and dried out but a plant rooted in soil stayed green. Or perhaps it was because of what he remembered, because he did remember: the field, the docks, a face, a body in a casket. Perhaps he clung to what he saw as he lay dreaming that he had never set down in ink.

Once upon a time, the Crown States had been sitting at the bottom of a set of stone steps, feeling as if he had awoken from a long dream of his life, the pieces of it slipping between his fingers. He had grasped for something to hold onto and remembered his name.

Now he pipetted three crimson drops of antibiotic into the glass plate and watched as they dissipated into the agar. He was about to replace the lid overtop and return it to its shelf when he heard footsteps approaching.

A man’s voice, the words indistinct, the tone harsh. 

The Crown States paused, then held up the plate and tilted it, as if he were checking his reflection in the glass. At this angle, however, the reflection showed not his face, but the lab behind him. 

A black-coated professor stormed past the open doorway, grip claw-like on the shoulder of a girl—two girls. The conjoined twins. Red bite marks on the back of his hand, a torn black sleeve, one child’s face twisted in rage.

Another in fear.

“It hurts,” came the cry, the same words in two very different tones—

The image cracked. The Crown States instinctively reached for his glasses, before he realized he’d broken the agar plate. Agar dripped out from the cracks, tinted pink by the antibiotics. A shard of glass came loose and clattered to the floor as the professor dragged his charges out of the jagged reflection.

The Crown States tilted what remained of the plate and for a moment saw his own face, warped, broken, washed in the colour of diluted blood. He set it down on the counter. The tip of his finger stung, drops of a richer red mingling with the glass and agar and green shoots. 

Ruined.

“I—” He was surprised to hear himself speak aloud.

I remember, he wanted to say. To the flowers. To no one. To the face in the broken mirror that was not his own. I remember flowers.I remember—I remember the docks. I remember the sound of his laugh. I remember the chickens in the yard. The taste of a cigarette. The notes of the anthem. The words of the pledge .

He was still—

But remembering is not enough, came the memory of his own thoughts, carved out from the past by a knife of glass. Then the words twisted, whittled into new shapes. Enough remembering is not. Not remembering is enough. Enough of not remembering. Enough remembering. 

Somewhere not here: a man’s harsh voice. A child’s shouting. A child’s weeping.

When the Crown States blinked he saw the visage of a student, bloody, fragmented, cold. He shook his head and went to find a dustpan.

❦

Tick.

The hand of the clock inched forward, and the murmurs grew louder.

Tick. 

Students glanced at each other, as if seeking some secret permission. Some smiled, raised their eyebrows. Others furrowed their brows, tapped their feet, tapped their pens against the desks.

Tick.

The Crown States kept his gaze on the empty lectern, but his hand moved as he doodled in the margins of his notes. A bitten hand. A broken reflection. An empty lectern and a clock’s steady beat.

It was fifteen minutes past the start of class.

The door burst open with a bang that silenced most of the chatter. Students straightened as a man who was not their professor strode to the front of the class. He stopped behind the lectern, took a deep breath and turned to face them, and a moment the Crown States thought he might simply start teaching their lesson as if nothing was amiss. But when he opened his mouth, the words that came out of his mouth were heavy and cold and they landed like shovelfuls of dirt in an open grave. 

He did not speak of twinnings or replications, clonings or nerves. He simply told them that their professor would not be making it to class that day, and that he would never make it to class again.

The Crown States closed his eyes and saw the face of a girl, twisted in some all-consuming emotion. At the time, he had identified that emotion as rage. Now, though—

Now he knew it to be hate.

❦

There was a story he’d set to paper of a doctor who turned a child into a monster and kept the monster in a cage, until one day he forgot to lock the door. The details of the incident differed each time, with each Academy, but the bones remained the same.

All the way back to the very beginning, this was how those in their profession met their ends: at the hands of their own creations.

❦

“Nothing but flowers,” were the first words the Crown States heard when he awoke into the greying half-light. The fragments of his dream dissipated like cobwebs. He had woken into so many different places that at first it did not bother him that he heard voices in the room. Uncertain of whether it was late or early, he simply closed his eyes again and listened. 

“They aren’t his. The pots are labelled. Under the bed?”

The Crown States heard shuffling at the other side of the room.

“Cobwebs. Nothing else on the beast. Found a few bottles, though. Kid had a stash.”

“That does explain some of it. We’ll take his books and report back.”

A muttered phrase, mostly incomprehensible, except for—“—poor bastard. Getting up at the crack o f dawn for this, though… look, his roommate’s still out.”

The Crown States heard the sound of a door creaking open.

“He’ll learn about it soon enough. Let’s go.”

The door closed. Footsteps, receding.

The Crown States opened his eyes, put on his glasses, and examined the room. He saw dusty wine bottles strewn across the floor, handmade labels in some scribbled hand, the drawers of his roommate’s desk yanked open. His roommate wasn’t in bed.

Around him, the school was already waking up. 

❦

Location, like memory, was a strange and permeable thing. The Crown States had travelled from coast to coast until anywhere he slept felt as much like home as anywhere else. He remembered that he had wanted to set down roots, once, a yard, a chimney, or even the rattle of a key in an apartment door, but roots were dangerous. Even when it seemed he had something to stay for, he couldn’t seem to remain.

He remembered that he’d wanted to run once, too, to take the night train, the carriage west. Yet in a way he couldn’t do that either. If everywhere was home, nowhere was. No matter where he went, he went in circles, finding himself in the same places over and over again.

Once he’d wondered why the experiments stayed, when their collars were removed, when the doors to their cages were opened. Why they obeyed and then returned. He didn’t wonder that anymore, either. There were other sorts of leashes and other sorts of bonds, ones that were wired into the brain or slid into the veins or fed through the mouth or put into the water.

Ones of pledges and promises. And ones of the heart.

❦

The view out the window of this Academy looked nothing like a postcard. Students loitering on the green, stuffed into uniforms and sweating even in the dusk heat, taking off their jackets and loosening their ties, a plume of smoke from a dark corner, the flash of a needle that dipped into a bottle. A city stark in the dying light, sunset on the broken window of a hospitale, strange shadows stretching out. What would this image be captioned, if he captured it? Bergewall Academy tries to forget. Always trying to remember, or trying to forget.

The Crown States felt as if he ought to return to his room, study or sleep or stare at flowers, but he couldn’t seem to make his feet move. He remembered bottles on the floor, an empty bed. His eyes roved over the dimming scene outside, searching for—something. A bloodstain on the grass? The gleam of eyes in the shrubbery? A silhouette on a distant rooftop?

A messenger, come to report of a monster?

You should be there, came a little voice. You should be there, there, there. There’d been a time he’d thought he might be rid of it, but now he knew he never would be. No matter where he stood, there would always be the call of there, there, anywhere but here.

Chatter filtered into his awareness—a familiar pair of voices, passing through the hallway behind him. Two professors appeared briefly in the window’s reflection. It won’t survive long out there, one said.

Shoddy work, replied the other. He wouldn’t have lasted the quarter regardless.

Less work for us if he’d failed out instead. Now that thing’s loose, and the family’s kicking up a fuss.

We're not here to coddle them. Twenty-odd of these incidents, every year, across the country. They never learn.

They passed out of sight and earshot.

It only takes one mistake.

The investigation had been short. The causes of the tragedy easy to determine, filtering to the Crown States through rumour and gossip and probing questions and overheard conversations: human error. Too much drink, too much drugs, not enough sleep. Another student consumed by the pressures of academia, a forgotten lock, a bloody scream, a beast fleeing into the night.

The Crown States thought, strangely enough, of the rain coming down on a battlefield. The way it got into his eyes. 

He kept standing at this window, blinking hard. Looking out into the lengthening shadows. Waiting, watching, for the thing that had killed, the thing that had fled. 

The thing that had wanted to be free.

❦

Tick. Tick. Tick. A steady heartbeat, immortality in iron, the same from classroom to classroom, school to school. Countdown and metronome for those of them whose rhythms were more fragile and inconstant. And as they waited, the Crown States sketched out a face with dark shadows carved beneath the eyes, the face of someone who was no longer here. A spill of grey light, bottles on the floor, a cautionary tale.

The morning their room had been searched, on an impulse, he had taken one of those empty bottles and hidden it beneath his own bed. A grotesque memento, perhaps. A private rebellion. Or something permanent, like a stone in a stream, when the rest of the world seemed intent on flowing on. The dead buried, the monster slain, the blood scrubbed from the lab floor, the sun rising each morning as it always did.

So little was permanent, for him. 

The Crown States looked up at the face of the professor who was striding to the front of the class, and he remembered another professor in another Academy in this selfsame city, the reflection in a glass dish, a child yanked by the arm. Pain that was rage that was hate, or one becoming another, and the promise that someday a moment’s opportunity would allow that hate to coalesce into a knife. The moment the monster broke its chain. The moment the child did.

That professor must’ve had a gravestone too, somewhere north of here. Likely a larger one, somewhere the grave robbers knew better than to try their luck.

The Crown States turned to a fresh page, leaving that dismal chapter behind, and prepared to take notes.

So what do we learn?

I come back, thought the Crown States. It hollows me out like a bottle, and I run, but I always come back to these places.

Why, then? 

So that I can see and hear this.

What were his bonds? Why did he return to the lab, the classroom, the ticking of the clock? Maybe because he wasn’t bad at this, and it felt good to be good at something. Maybe because he wanted to stitch wounds and fix bones. 

Or perhaps for the same reason he had started to attend, he had been able to attend: because he had bargained for this education some might kill for, and someday he would complete it. 

Yes. That was why. Because there were things inside these walls that those outside could never hope to see, like the treasure of a castle all-gleaming, like the dungeons of a castle, chains clanking. Secrets of water, of memory, of leashes, of the places children disappeared. Of the gun that must be aimed at his head. 

Once upon a time there was—

Someday, he would tell the Crown across the sea what he had learned. Someday, he would show him. Someday, it would be his turn to complete the story. 

One way, or another.

Chapter Text

Summer 1924
Corinth, the Crown States of America
The ash settles

❦

In West Corinth, amidst fields of rust-red wheat, there stands an orphanage. It resembles nothing less than a manor home, ringed by cranes, shored up by scaffolding where the walls are still under construction. In the yard out front, children kick a ball to and fro. A faint breeze cuts through the swelter of the summer day, stirring the wheat fields and the billowing white curtains in the windows.

The word on the wind tells the Crown States that construction began a scant few months ago. Scant days ago, Corinth burned. It knew war, in the bones of its buildings, as surely as it knew its own name. Now, the scene that lies before the Crown States is nothing less than peaceful. The breeze on his face relieves the harsh heat of the noonday sun. Ash and smoke, blood and bullets, grasping hands and devils with human faces—they do not touch this place.

Sanctuary.

As the Crown States watches, a woman in a grey dress emerges from the house and calls to the children. With some reluctance, they break from their play and file past her into the house. 

The woman in grey turns her head and sees the Crown States standing by the roadside. He turns away from that house in the shadow of cranes and heads back down the road. 

I want, he thinks, I want — 

Brickwork. Simple things. Something possible. A foundation that would last. 

He thinks sometimes he catches a glimpse of it.

❦

In the restaurant from which he watched the flames that night, the Crown States finds a corner table and orders lunch. He pulls his journal out of his bag, and it falls open naturally to the page where he stowed the poster of the dark-haired boy. The traitor.

Sylvester Lambsbridge.

It’s clear the poster once bore a second person’s name and face, but time and the elements have obliterated their identity. Only fragments remain to mark their existence, stray references and plurals.

… experienced killers, talented improvisers, and remain devastatingly intelligent in individual, complimentary ways.

Flattering, for a wanted poster.

The Crown States removes the poster from his journal and smooths it out on the table, then flips back through the pages of his journal. Seasons and years pass in reverse, one after the other, rows of ink and pencil and memory, until he arrives at a summer’s day three years ago, when the Reverend tried to rally his congregation to arms—to rebellion, open and deadly.

Two portraits mark the pages of that day. One is of the Reverend himself, his rifle aimed skywards, smoke trailing from the muzzle. The other is of a child he’d spotted in the crowd—a boy with a head of unruly dark hair.

The Crown States compares the face in his journal with the face on the wanted poster. His artistic abilities may be merely serviceable, but the resemblance is clear.

I know you, he thinks, and for once, it sounds more like an answer than a question.

The Crown States breathes and hears how the sound of it has changed, the rusted edges, the way it catches and aches. Three years later and he feels no more whole than he did on that summer day, no matter the places he’s been, the things he’s seen, the times he’s remembered. Ever less certain of his future, in an increasingly uncertain world. 

Even after all his searching, he is plagued by blank and blind spots, questions unanswered and unanswerable, missing pieces of some terrible puzzle. Messages behind brickwork, chemical formulae in discarded bottles, the stark memory of a set of steps. Faces that fade and disappear into the fog. Where did you come from? Where are you headed? What are you, and what will you make of me? Like the torn-out pages of a journal, the ink blurring in the rain, or the blank pages he has yet to fill. Some pages perhaps he never will. 

And yet—somewhere, sometime, there was a promise of sanctuary spoken into the night, and that promise was upheld. That much he has seen and heard with his own two eyes and ears.

And it means something, to uphold a promise.

It is why he is sitting here today, as he is.

❦

Dark birds circle overhead in the sky as the Crown States takes the road out of Corinth. He sets his eyes on the horizon and strides forward into the new day.

It hurts, he thinks. Fabric chafing against wounds, joints and aches, the pulsing headache of the rising sun in his eyes, the ringing in his ears. Another promise come true. It hurts, now.

Another promise yet to be upheld. It’s going to feel worlds better when we’re done.

The Crown States sees the path that unfolds before him in the dawning light and though it has twists and turns aplenty, though there are crossroads and shortcuts and trails through dark and burning woods, those trails all converge the same way and there stands the Crown Empire, clad in red, holding a bayoneted rifle and standing before an open grave. Even now, the Crown States feels the prickling of his faraway gaze, like the eye of the sun when it’s rising. 

Win or lose, there will come a day when the Empire comes across the ocean to settle the unrest in this land. Rise or fall, he will be waiting there upon the road. He will pass his judgment on the sheep that strayed from the flock, and his judgment will be black as grave dirt, red as blood.

Fields of rust-red wheat sway around the Crown States. Awaiting the harvest. The gleam of the blade as it scythes through the air. 

An end that is also a beginning.

It is not yet a lie to say that a better day may come. Something must follow the harvest, after all. Barren fields, then spring. The grave dirt thaws; young grass grows over. Something new could grow, the Crown States knows, in this country that is his world. The seeds of it have already been planted. Monsters crown themselves gods. Children defy kings. Nobles fall. The natural order turns on its head, like it was only ever make-believe to begin with.

The judgment of an empire marks a journey that ends in a grave, but the road itself continues past that station.

Among the hills of a world that does not exist yet.

Does a better day truly wait in that world, as each rebel’s new and ancient song has promised? If it does, will they ever reach it? No man has ever found the key to flight, after all; with feet rooted to the earth, they bleed and burn and stumble and crawl, while the eye of the sun rises blazing over all their heads, until they succumb to its pitiless gaze.

Somewhere across the sea, a land whose name has been lost lies barren beneath that same unerring glare, sectioned away from its neighbours by tall walls, graveyard and corpse and cautionary tale. Is that the promise that proves true? 

The world that path winds towards?

The breeze picks up, stirring the wheat and the scent of good soil and sunlight and carrying with it the iron and smoke of some distant battlefield, and on that wind is a question: Who are you and who will you be?

The question is an old friend that rings ever louder, these days, and some days it tastes of soil and others it tastes of blood. It sounds as if, someday soon, the answer will matter. It sounds as if it will make a difference when the blade is levelled at the Crown States’ heart, when he’s staring down the barrel of his own demise. It sounds as if, when his own blood and soil fill his mouth and blind his eyes, it will matter what he makes of them.

I am—

—a farmer—distant figure leaning on his pitchfork in a field of red—a young soldier digging graves beneath the circling carrion birds—child, pushing aside a white curtain—a traveller on the road in a red coat, blue coat, black coat—

—am—

—a two-faced man—a two-faced city—a tree, lightning-struck, all its rings of memory charred and laid bare—

—am—

—another promise-maker, trying to keep the promise that keeps him. Resolutions of another time, by another him, but the heart, the heart of it stays the same: Our people above all. 

From many, one. No amputations or excisions, fractions or divisions. No spilling his own lifeblood on the field of battle, facing himself across the no-man’s-land, leveling the gun. No chasm opening up inside him, rocks tumbling away into the void.

United we stand. 

The Crown States takes a deep breath, to the rhythm of his own steps over his own land. Now, more than ever, amidst the distant patter of gunfire, the echo of angry voices, that promise rings hollow. Like a bell with no clapper—empty words. Behind him lies a city nursing its burns—lies an orphanage, curtains billowing in the windows. Some shoot, some build, some speak and some crack the whip in pursuit of their promises. And the Crown States—

A young voice, accusatory. You’ve done nothing!

An eye reflected in a bloody shard of glass—the perpetual observer, empty hands in the air. Circling his own history like a scavenger bird, afraid to touch it while it’s still living. A bystander in a nation of bystanders, waiting to see how the coin lands. 

Fearful of reaching out to catch it, metal on skin.

Even as it’s falling.

As he’s running out of time.

The Crown States reaches down his bag. Past his journal, the edges scraping over the scar on his hand, deeper still. 

His fingertips brush cool steel. 

And he thinks: 

There is something I could do.

The thought still comes easily to him; he has thought it more times than he can count. He has thought it with a gun in his hands; he has thought it while holding a book. He has thought it holding nothing at all, grasping at hope, and feeling it slip through his fingers like sand, like time.

He is still grasping, and now there, at his fingertips, at the bottom of his bag, there is a medical kit.

Will it save us? he asks himself.

No. He knows that it will not. He has, after all, after all, only one pair of hands. One cannot shift the sun with one pair of hands. One would struggle even to build a home, or dig a grave.

Will it enlighten me?

No. He is still in pursuit of his answers, and they do not lie in a box at the bottom of his bag. They are carved into his cities, his bones. In the recesses of his memory, like ink on paper on the rings of a tree beneath the peeling, burning, rotting, dying bark.

Will it matter?

Yes, he thinks.

Yes, it will matter. Like an orphanage matters. Like a hand stretched out, stretched down to a trampled man. It will not be clean or simple; it will be tangled, like some young nation long ago tearing out the emblem on his uniform, his fingers twisted in the red threads. But somewhere there will be fewer weeping wounds, fewer corpses down here in the dirt for some other young soldier to retrieve. 

Who are you? the wind calls, and it is fire and bloodshed, ash and plague and metal and rot. It has been calling for a long time.

The Crown States smells the battlefield upon it, and knows where, in the end, he needs to be.