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She's not really sure when she comes to be. It's before 1830; that she knows for sure. It might be during the 800s, with a bejeweled hand reaching out to grab her.
She could swear she'd seen a flash in the distance; the glint of blue eyes against sunlight. She likes to think it was France.
.
It might have been the late 1200s, when she's sure she saw her brother in the shadows, leaning against a post far off in the distance. She'd reached for him, but her fingers had been coated in cracks, split down to the seams. He'd been just out of reach, a painting whose colour she couldn't smear.
.
It might even be the late 1500s, with Spain's drawn sword and cocky smile faced up and lost to her brother. Even then his eyes were pure steel. She remembers thinking something, something like that'll be me one day. But before she could do that the darkness pulled her under again, left her grasping at straws.
.
Either way, by 1830 she's awake, fully and conscientiously, to the burning blood in her veins and the roaring of her people in the streets. There's bustling and bodies in the streets; fistfights and fish markets and ocean spray splattered against the shore like paint to canvases.
It's painful; she pulls up the hiked shirt thrown loosely over her chest only to find a scar stitched around her waist, front side and centre. It burns like all hell when she touches it, so she doesn't, refuses women's clothing for as long as she possibly can.
The first thing she remembers with absolute certainty is the cross. It's cheap silver coating wood or maybe steel; though it costs all the money she finds in her pockets (she never does find out how that got there) until she’s adjusted to the pain well enough to wear a corset. It hurts, but she gets used to it.
She gets used to the courts, too, and sitting in the back of them, hair cut and knees knocked together, arms crossed over her chest. She watches them write the constitution. She watches her new prince ascend the throne, in spite of everything, even though she can hear France in the back of her mind, muttering his dissents, A German, Belgique? Even you could do better than that. But she still watches when they put the crown upon his head, thinks maybe this will heal the scar.
She meets him once, tells him something along the lines of I am your country. She’s laughed at. Our country, a woman? What a nice joke, do you file in for the courts?
She walks out, and doesn’t come back for years. Why would she, when it’s clear no one wants her?
Instead, she walks down her streets and smiles, wide and stretching like a cat while she blinks the tears out of her eyes.
.
It’s years later, when she’s almost half normal, working as a fish merchant until the night bell tolls, when the industrial revolution rolls in from England and the other nations seem to remember she exists, when the Netherlands drags her into the palace and announces to all, “This is my sister, she’s yours now, don’t forget her.” And then leaves, and that somehow works better than her begging and pleading ever would.
She learned a lot from her brother. She never stopped.
.
She throws herself into industrialisation, copies England studiously and watches with glee as everyone seems surprised. She has grit on her hands and smudges on her face from being at the factories for more than sixteen hours a day, and diplomacy seems like so much of a less important affair than it should.
She’s grateful for it. If the work’s hard enough, she can pretend her scar still doesn't bleed, that she feels no pain.
.
She wasn’t an empire until they tell her she is, but she always knew. She grabs Congo by the reins and stares down Germany and Portugal and France and the whole of a continent until they let her have it, until there’s a state set up to colonize and civilize the savages alongside the rest of them.
The Congo was Leopold’s in name, certainly, but she still went there. It was her army, after all. Even if she had to cut her hair and wrap her chest to get in. She fought the Swahilis and Arabs, didn’t flinch when ten thousand men faced her army barely a third of the size, didn’t doubt they would win, and they did. The fact that the natives stared at them with unabashed fear and spat in their direction when the passed was inconsequential. The wounds she got didn’t matter either. They all faded with time.
What mattered was that it was her colony. Her land to annex, her territory to take. Her ticket to being one of the key players on the chessboard and a pawn no longer. France, Germany, England, they could watch. She could be like them, She could play their game.
And she could beat them at it.
.
When her people could not vote in her own colony, she didn’t protest. Leopold had an ego, and everything she’d heard from France to Russia to her brother had told her that questioning it would only get a nation hurt. He’d gotten her a colony. What right did she have to question that?
None, she thought with a glance to the marble and copper of the mirror room, the one Leopold had dictated be themed after the colony, all beautiful lush greens and blues, the chandelier casting a low light over the royalty mingling.
She thought of the grime that’s coated her hands just a few decades past, the fish guts spilled out over her cramped workspace decades before that.
She thinks that the room’s pictures are so different from the reality it aims to represent.
.
Germany walks into her house, tamps his boots out on the rug, sits down on the couch, and says, still in his military uniform, “I will be staying here for a while.”
She stares, gape-jawed and amazed. The audacity. He was barely even- he was younger than her, how dare he-
He shrugs. “War is war.” As if that justifies it all.
She stomps up to him and punches him, practically shaking with rage.
He stares, affronted. Maybe Prussia thought he could keep his brother from the world, but it Germany wanted her home he'd have to kill her for it.
After that, he simply looks at her, touches the place where his cheek is already starting to bruise.
“There are some things I need to do. I apologize if they inconvenience you, but let me say that things will go better if you comply.”
She doesn't. And if she receives cuts for such, so be it. She will not have her citizens slaughtered for nothing.
And when he loses, she sees the high tax of reparations he's due to pay, and can't help but smile.
.
She’s handed a knife and told to cut off the boy's hand.
“Kill them or they kill you,” is what she's told, that if each of her men do not hand in a quota of hands, the fate of these savages will seem like mercy.
She looks down, a little boy trembling on the cramped mud and sticky wet slush that coats the whole of the Congo. He has dirt and grime smeared over his fingers from working in the mines and never having the time or ability to wash it off. Reminds her of years ago, when she worked.
But that's no longer the case, now. And at home, she is an aristocrat, a figurehead.
Here, she is a soldier.
She looks down the long blade of the knife, the empty basket below her. The boy is shaking. Her fingers keep trembling, despite her orders to them not to.
She pulls out his arm, dark brown. Inferior. Inferior like the Flemish of her country are to the French, inferior like she was for so long-
Her scar burns all the way through her chest. She slices down violently, can't keep the catlike grin off her face to keep from collapsing in a heap of pain. The boy screams in a language she can't understand, but she is a soldier, so she smiles.
She turns to the lined-up criminals of the rest of the village, who stare between the boy's collapsed bleeding wrist and dangling white tendons and rushing red blood and her carved smile with blatant fear. She thinks that this could be much worse. They could massacre them, kill them, torture them, execute them by firing squad like England or France. They're just losing their hands. It's fine.
She gestures for the next one, and the girl shuffles forwards.
The basket of hands fills. It becomes a pattern, eventually; chop, scream, clean the knife of blood.
There's a voice in the back of her head, one that keeps repeating in her head, history will judge, but she ignores it.
They deserve this. For all she has done for them; more education, better literacy and economy than France or England or her brother could ever hope to give them. If they are to drain her resources like that, then she returns the favour.
And besides, if she cannot be whole, then why should they?
.
Twenty-five years later, Germany is not so amicable.
He kicks down the door and brandishes a gun, shouts.
“I know you are there, Belgium.” He says with certainty. And he's right, and she's no coward, so she hides in the closet for a few minutes before pulling together every inch of courage she has to her name and storming out.
She could swear the knife almost hit his heart. But she missed.
He grabs her hand midair, twists the knife out and shoves her against the wall, hands bracing her hips.
She kept her guns downstairs, and his grip was nothing short of an iron vice.
Germany's eyes meet hers as he tilts his head at her, wide with slightly parted lips, almost like he wants to ask her a question.
And then before he can ask it he kisses her.
She goes stiff as a board under his grip, practically shakes and this time it's not with anger.
Czech is occupied. As is Austria. France and England are failing. America doesn't care. Neither does Russia.
And Germany wants her. Like- like this.
The back of her throat tastes like bile.
She breaks the grip her hands have on her clothing, draws a hand back, bunches her shaking fingers into a fist, just barely. Germany tastes like half stale beer and blood in her mouth because she bit halfway through her tongue.
She shoves him back, leaning against the wall to keep steady.
“Don't.” She thinks her voice is steady enough.
“Just-don't.” She swallows, but Germany isn't paying attention to her words.
No, somewhere in there her shirt rode up. Her scar is there, gnarled tissue wrapping entirely around her chest, a good few centimetres thick.
“Yo- you- what is that?” They all know a country's scars fade once a conflict finishes.
“It- it isn't- that's not- me-”
She shakes her head. “No.” And then she tilts her head. She'd think Germany would have a similar one, from being pieced together by Prussia, nothing more than a loosely federated coalition of peoples who speak a similar language. But apparently- apparently he didn’t. Apparently she was alone.
(She has always been alone)
She knows why her people fight, after all. She barely knows why she's here in the first place, with how little they can agree.
Germany is still gaping at her. “I never- what-”
She glares, tugs her shirt down quickly. “Don't stare. You should have them too, by now.” She doesn't mention this scar she was born with. There was nothing to earn.
Germany is still paralyzed, only mobile enough to just slightly shake his head.
“I've seen- Prussia-” he backs away slowly, to the door.
“I didn't want this.” He says lowly, as he backs up to the door.
“Neither did I.” She says, keeps her back to the wall.
“I will- I think.” He shakes his head, lets his hand fall to the gun at his belt. Steps forwards, pulls it out.
She pauses, puts a hand up.
“Wait.” She says. Surprisingly, he does.
She pulls off the thin thread cord from her neck, and slowly kneels down to the floorboards. They're loose enough already from having no money to repair them, so it's easy enough to pull one up and slip her old cross under the boards, where she prays it will not be found.
She is Catholic. Germany is Protestant. The Nazis are some other monster entirely.
She meets Germany's eyes, nods.
“I'm sorry,” he says, levers his finger over the trigger.
He kills her, and she's pretty sure that's mercy.
.
She's back just in time to join the army. Again. Although it's the resistance this time, not the army really but close enough. She fights, she spies, she convinces her people of the righteousness of their great cause.
And eventually she proves right.
She and Germany never do speak of that occasion again. He's the only one who knows, and she'd like to keep it that way.
She shines her gun and polishes her decade-old boots and manages to survive the next five years.
She doesn’t talk to Germany, after that. She isn’t even there when they partition him. She has no desire for revenge. She has no desire to see him. She has no desire to mention any of this ever again.
.
They still look at her with fear in Africa. The people do not forget, and they do not forgive.
They don't send her on soldering missions anymore; she's relegated to diplomacy, locked inside concrete and marble buildings filled to the brim with her people and none other.
But one night, she steps outside. She doesn't know the Congo the way she knows Belgium; every street and dirt packed road is not innately navigable without a map; when she closes her eyes the country still feels strange, an undercurrent of the unfamiliar. But she has been here before, has marched this country well enough to navigate in dimmed light and settling moon.
Her politicians would tell it is a dumb idea. But they're not her; they're not immortal.
She's out of Léopoldville by the time the sun sets, the concrete fading to barely packed dirt almost as soon as she leaves the city. The trees keep falling in front of her vision, blocking her view.
She gets lost, she thinks. Wanders into the jungle, might never come back. But she will- she knows which way is north by the irreversible compass that is her land.
Not this land. She doubts it was hers to begin with.
.
There’s no blades and severed limbs when she promenades through the country this time, at least not on her part. The locals eye her with suspicion. She’s attacked more than once, and gets fired on more than once. She sees everyone’s soldiers in the land; she gets glimpses of America, Russia, but only when she closes her eyes. When she opens them, she’s alone, with only the locals. When she opens them, she’s losing the colony.
When she closes her eyes, there’s no unrest.
When she closes her eyes, she’s missing a hand, too.
.
So she bakes. She can make waffles; she can make fries; she has the best chocolate in the world and all can fight her on that.
She lets sugar cover up the scent of blood and has only the finest of traditions. She cleans herself up, prides herself on diplomacy, lets them set up the base for that new union directly in Brussels.
She lets Germany walk on her soil, keeps her breathing steady when he is around. They don’t talk; sometimes she’ll see him glancing at her, but before she can return his gaze he snaps back to whatever he happened to be doing, posture stiff and unresponsive.
It’s better that way.
She doesn’t forgive, but she pretends to forget. For all their sakes.
.
Whenever Zaire calls her, she hands the phone off.
When Zaire becomes the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she forces herself to talk to him for two minutes and thirty three seconds of stilted conversation.
“Belgium? ... Bonjour?” His French sounds rusty; she doubts he’d want to practice it much. She swallows hard, tightens her toes in her cinching heels, and for the first time in years, talks back.
“Ah. Yes. Bonjour, République Démocratique du Congo. How are you?”
“I am… wondering if I could discuss economic policy with you.”
She nods, then remembers he can’t see her.
“Yes. I’ll- get one of my managers on that.”
Silence falls.
“Belgium…” She hears his voice trail off, cracking in the static. They don’t have great phone lines there. Or roads. Or...much, really.
“Do the scars ever go away?” He says, whispers almost, for reasons she can’t fathom- maybe because she pretended to be his guardian, and at some point it got stuck in the back of his consciousness like that.
But that can’t be true. Because she never asked about the scars. She never wanted anyone to know.
Air sticks in her throat, like humid clogging in the forests of his country.
“I…” she swallows. “I’ll pass you off to one of my ma..nagers.”
She can hear the ring of dead silence through the phone.
She wants to tell him, but the truth is she doesn’t know. Only some of her scars have faded.
Some, she thinks, never will.