Work Text:
Prussia was always surprised when people said that he and Germany did not look much alike.
There was the frustration, the anger at the implied insult of it, because Germany was his brother. But it was more than that, because to Prussia their similarities were so obvious, he could not help but see them, could not think how two people could more obviously be brothers without being identical, and it was always so strange to him that that wasn’t how they were perceived from outside.
He could understand it. Their differences were obvious sorts of things; Prussia’s pale, pale skin and white hair and red eyes,the near foot of height difference between them, and it was understandable that no one noticed they had the same nose when Prussia’s had been broken so many times over the centuries. The similarities outnumbered the differences a million to one, but the were subtler things, obvious in the intimacy of long acquaintance, of love, but easily unnoticed by strangers.
It was like that with them, true of their personality as well. Their differences, brought about by one part nature, and two parts circumstance stood out loud as Prussia’s excited shouting (or Germany’s in a meeting gone sideways), but their similarities were comfortable things, filling all the spaces between. Germany was baffled, the first time he was told that he was nothing like his brother. Ashamed of it when he was young, proud in the bitter Nazi years, and grieved in the years that followed. Prussia always said that those people had no idea what they were saying. Germany can understand it now, why people would think them opposites, but he still knows that they are wrong. He and Prussia share all the little things, and in the quiet domesticity of life, it is the little things that matter.