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The second time around, she meets him at 9:05 precisely. She knows this because her eyes on are the clock the whole time.
“Miss Héderváry.” A voice says, somewhere in the dull ring of the back of her mind, and she’s not listening.
“Miss Hédérvary,” the voice says, a little more forcefully. “Elizabeth,” Austria finally give out in a frustrated sigh, desperately trying to get her attention to the wire strung up to her earpiece.
“Erzsébet.” Someone says, and that’s when she turns. That’s when she starts listening. She turns and sees the boy, maybe seventeen, across from her at the grocery store.
Except he’s not a boy, and she knows him, and for a second all Hungary can do is stare gap jawed at red eyes and silvery hair and thin lips she knows curve up into a sly smile.
The boy runs a hand through his hair and casts her a nervous grin, a shadow of something she once knew him to do without second thought. “Uh- sorry, don’t know why I called you that. You want- you want this bagged?” He gestures to some loose groceries she’s not paying attention to.
There’s an awkward pause, where he sort of grimaces painfully. “Is it the eyes? It’s rude to stare, you know.” He gives another grin with that. She suddenly wants to kiss him. She suddenly wants a lot of things.
“Pru- Gilbert.” She says, almost gasps. “Is that your name?”
“Uh- yes.” His eyes are wide. “How did you kn-“
She leaves before he can finish his sentence, with nothing but a pool of half paid groceries for remains.
.
The first time she meets him she has no clue what time it is- hell, she barely remembers the year. She’d have to check a history textbook for the answer.
She doesn’t remember much. She doesn’t remember the particular way light danced with shadow, the way his eyes glinted when she’d pulled out a longbow and shot, straight to his heart. She’d missed and he’d laughed, but she tells herself she doesn’t remember that either, doesn’t remember thinking killing him would’ve saved me so much trouble.
.
The first time he dies she doesn’t care. The first time he dies she’s the one who did it.
The first time he dies he’s laughing, even though her arrow hit him straight to the heart. He tells her I’ll be back, I always am, and he chokes on his own blood instead of crying, and she tells him she hopes he dies and goes to hell and that no one remembers his name.
He tells her, that’ll never happen.
She doesn’t have the time to ask why.
.
Once upon a time, Hungary had been in love with Austria. Once upon a time, Austria had loved her back.
That was a long time ago.
As it stood, there were adjacent to each other on the infinite plane of a crooked table, him staring at her over the edge of his glasses.
“I saw him,” she says, and watches his frown deepen.
“That’s impossible,” He says, and she replies, “I trust my own eyes, Austria.” And his eyes remain skeptic.
“You need to stop seeing him everywhere,” he says and leans forwards, places a hand over hers, warm and settling.
She smiles. “I don’t,” Is what she says, but what she thinks is I wish I could.
.
The millionth time he leaves, it turns out to be that last.
He doesn’t die by her hand, nor Austria’s, nor Russia’s.
Prussia dies by his own brother’s knife, and Hungary had only been there to watch Ludwig cry inconsolably, the sole worlds he’d uttered, ‘I’m sorry,’ over and over again until the syllable sounded like molasses on his tongue.
The millionth time he leaves, he tells her he loves her.
The millionth time her leaves, he leaves for good.
.
She sees him again, and it’s just as awkward and unpleasant and heartracing as the first time.
It’s outside of a library, halfway to nowhere, when he rounds a corner- no books in hand, he never did enjoy reading- and crashes straight into her.
It takes a good five seconds to realise she’s fallen, and another five seconds to realise who’s knocked her down, and a slice of infinity to realise she doesn’t really want to get up.
He stares at her, steel eyed with determination, and his hands dig into the fabric on her shoulders as he pulls her up.
“Do I know you,” he says, not like a question but a statement, and she can’t help but stare.
.
“Do I know you,” he reiterates, and she thinks everything is on fire, because she says- she says-
“Yes.”
“How?” He says, and it’s odd to see that particular look of confusion on his face because all her eight hundred years knowing him she hadn’t seen him like this- open, vulnerable. Nations could not afford that.
.
“I love you,” he tells her one night, over a bottle of hard liquor sometime in the eighteen hundreds.
“I love you so much I don’t know what to do with it. It’s like this big stupid weigh I gotta- carry around everywhere, and it sucks. You know your hair smells like flowers? And you- you do that- that thing. Whenever you’re around Austria. You always lean in a bit to close and laugh at all his non-jokes and I hate you for doing it.” He takes a long, unsteady breath, eyes on the table. “I hate myself for noticing.”
She stares at him. His posture is curved and hunched in, a study in contrasts to his words.
“Shut up, Prussia,” she tells him. “You’re drunk.”
“I know.”
“And I’m married.”
“I know.”
.
“You used to be someone else.” Is all the truth she tells him, talks around it because she’s always been good at that.
“I knew you, and you knew me.”
“For a long time,” she adds as an afterthought.
He stares.
.
It feels like ten years later when he grabs her by the collar and frames her lips with his own.
“Tell me everything,” he says, and even if her knees feel weak and her heart is dissolving into her ribcage she still finds the strength to push him away. That type of fortitude, she always had.
“No,” she says, and shoves him off, the fabric of his pseudo army- or maybe actual army, who knows- coat catching in her fingers as she does, frayed strings tangling under her nails.
“Why?” he says, and she thinks, I’m sorry.
“Why,” he says, and she thinks, because I never had the courage to love you back.
When he’d been alive she’d never spared him much, but in this life she thinks perhaps she could keep him from the heartbreak.