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Breathe.
It’s more like a choke. The first breath is always the hardest, but this feels different.
This body feels stale. It hasn’t breathed in a long time. It hasn’t breathed in a very long time.
You can’t feel anything other than your lungs, which are burning. You try to take another breath and succeed, barely. It’s another almost-choke, another cough, but it’s better, maybe.
Sensation — your hand. There’s a hand touching your hand, holding your hand. The other fingers are calloused in a way that feels familiar; you remember this hand, somehow.
You try to close your fingers around the other hand, but you can’t.
Some time later, you can finally hear.
“God, fuck,” someone says. You know that voice. You remember that voice.
“It’ll take some time for him to really… reconnect, after this long,” someone else says. You know that voice, too, maybe. “If… if I’m honest, I’m surprised he even came back at all.”
Silence.
“Just give him time,” the second voice says, again. “I’m sorry.”
You don’t know how long it is before your eyes open. Your vision is blurry.
There’s a shape sitting next to the bed. Brown hair, maybe.
“There you are, you fucking bastard,” the shape says, with the voice you know. You know him. You remember him. “Fucking took you long enough,” he says, but it doesn’t sound quite right. There’s something like a sob trapped in his throat.
You can feel sensation around your hand again. It’s the hand you know — the hand you remember.
You still can’t move your fingers.
Romano, the person you know says, once. I’m Romano and you’re Veneziano and we are Italy and you’re going to be okay.
You reach out with your fingers, as much as you can. The remembered hand slips into yours again and squeezes gently.
[How long has it been?] you sign. You can lift your hand, move your fingers, just enough that the gestures are interpretable. Speaking is out of the question.
“You were asleep for a month, and then dead for two,” Romano says. He remains frustratingly outside of your vision, even though he’s sitting right next to the bed — but you suppose that’s his right, after everything. “It’s been a month since you woke up again.”
[There was a dream, before,] you sign. [There were other people there.]
“Who was there?” your brother asks. He wants you to keep signing — the more you do it, the better control you have over your hands. “Do you remember?”
You exhale sharply — it’s the closest you can get to a sigh. [I don’t know their names,] you sign. [I don’t remember them.]
“Germany and England have been asking about you,” Romano says. It's not really a question, but it's more than a statement.
[Yes,] you sign, [and Friend.]
The two of them show up, together, a few days later. Romano gives each of them a stare and a curt nod before leaving the room.
They sit by the bed, opposite the side where Romano usually does. Their hands are entwined together — it brings the slightest smile to play at the corners of your mouth as Germany uses his free hand to reach for your own. He probably thinks that you don’t notice the index finger on your wrist, but you do, and give a loud exhale as extra reassurance.
[I’m sorry,] you sign. [I can’t speak well yet, but I’m here.]
The two of them smile and drop their connected hands as England reaches for something tucked under his other arm. It’s a book, which he begins reading aloud — it’s something about a rabbit that becomes real.
You remember this story.
Your voice is getting stronger. Romano asks you more questions, or says more things that he expects responses to. It’s difficult, but getting better.
You can sit up now, sometimes.
You still think about the dream, from time to time. Blue skies and green grass and a friend.
A friend who killed you. A friend who cared for you.
Your friend.
The chair feels familiar.
Romano says it shouldn’t be. You also know it shouldn’t be.
But it is.
You glance at mirrors, every so often.
There are no piercing blue eyes. No pitch-dark shadows. No snow-white hair.
It’s for the best.
“Baby tigers,” you insist. Your voice is still quiet, but it’s closer now to what you remember. “I want to see them with my friends.”
Romano scoffs, but he doesn’t mean it. You know him better than that — you can tell.
“Fine,” he fake-groans, attempting to sound annoyed. He’s trying to hide it, but he’s smiling. “Have fun.”
Germany, England, Prussia. And baby tigers.
It’s a good day.
The cane is in addition to the chair, for now.
You remember this: something to the tune of this, but in reverse?
Part of you still remembers the feeling of… shrinking.
Phantom pain, but not really pain. More like... something... slowly dissolving.
Through the eye of a needle, you think.
You learn to avoid your reflection. It’s always empty.
It hurts.
“Did you kill it,” you say, one day. It’s a question, but it’s not really a question — not with the way you inflected it, anyway.
England makes a curious noise. He doesn’t know who you’re talking about until you vaguely glance in the direction of the mirror in the corner.
“Reve?” he asks. You want to correct him, somehow, but you don’t. “No, he — we didn’t kill him. He… he didn’t need to be killed.”
You let silence intrude, for a moment. Then: “Good,” you whisper. “That’s good.”
You leave fingerprints on the mirror glass.
Sometimes they disappear before you come back.
A dream of pale sunlight and a bed of flowers. You can’t stand up.
Your friend is there to help you after a moment. You’re going to be okay, your friend says. Don’t worry, I can help you. You’re going to be okay.
The chair is comfortable.
You keep the chair around for a while, just in case.
You still need the cane, but you’re getting better.
Your reflection flickers, sometimes. It’s you, and then it’s not, and then it is.
You’re not sure you want to talk about it.
Once in a while, you remember things that Germany does not. Things that it would not make sense for you to remember. Things that it would not make sense for Germany to not remember.
England bites his lip whenever you bring it up. He says something that feels somewhere in between an explanation and an apology. There’s something else, too, but he never mentions it.
The tip of your tongue is covered in ‘parasite’. You bite it away.
You wake up in the middle of the night to find the mirror clouded over from the inside.
I’m sorry, the message says, traced in precise, reversed cursive by delicate claw-tips.
It’s gone in the morning.
You remember a dream of pale sunlight and soft flowers and warm summer wind.
You remember a dream of blurred darkness and muffled echoes and cold-ever-colder.
You remember a dream-not-dream of waking up without your own name.
“I remember the dream,” Romano says, after some badgering. It wasn’t quite begging on your part, but you think he still heard the desperation. “But mostly I remember your funeral.”
A memory:
You can’t speak. Not anymore.
Your friend realizes this. Your friend is there to hold your hand.
It’s going to be okay, your friend says. You’re going to be okay. I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere. You’re going to be okay.
It’s the first time that you can feel the trickle-pain.
Late at night, you can hear something that sounds like fingernails tapping on glass.
You don’t look for a source.
Germany asks you if you’ve had any dreams recently.
You say no. It’s not quite a lie, but it’s close. You have dreams almost every night, now — you just haven’t dreamed in a long time.
A far-away memory of pain. Something is draining away and you can feel it and it hurts.
I know it hurts, your friend says. I wish I could make it better.
A far-away memory of fear. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die.
I’m sorry, your friend says. I’m so, so sorry.
The grass here is noticeably shorter than the other grass around it. The wind is cold.
“You were down there for six weeks,” Romano says.
England seems worried about something. He brushes you off whenever you try to ask what’s wrong — says it’s nothing important, he’s just stressed — but you can tell that that’s not it. This is something else, and he just won’t tell you.
You catch him staring into mirrors in a daze, sometimes, from around a corner. The moment you can see the mirror itself, he snaps out of it and looks at you with an expression you don’t understand.
At some point, you set the cane down and don’t need to pick it up again. The chair is already long gone.
You spare a glance back at the mirror after you’ve begun walking away from it. Your reflection is still facing you — it's standing right behind the glass and staring at you with a pleading look and piercing blue eyes.
It hesitates for a moment before resolving itself and stepping through the glass. In the room, it’s half-transparent like a ghost, and it takes a moment to adjust to the change as if it had just stepped into cold water.
“I’m sorry,” it says, though it makes no sound. “I’m so sorry.”
It takes another hesitant step towards you. Something in you seizes up. When it takes another step forward, you can’t keep yourself from running as far and as fast as you can to get away. It’s probably trying to call out to you, but its voice can’t carry outside of dreams.
You end up outside in the garden, far away from any mirrors, and take some time to think.
There are tears.
It’s so cold. It’s so dark. You’re going to die.
You’re going to be okay, your friend cries. The sound echoes in the dark. You’re going to be just fine. Just hold on, I’ll help you. I promise. I promise. I promise.
You can hear sobbing.
England tells you about what it was like for him.
“It’s difficult to get used to,” he says. “To the idea that you care. But just… take your time, take things as they are, and eventually things get easier.”
“It hurts,” you whisper. “It’s wrong.”
England sighs, but says nothing for a long time. Then: “I know. I wish… I wish it was less complicated. For your sake.”
You plant flowers on an empty grave.
It’s not the same.
Your eyes in the mirror are piercingly blue.
The face destabilizes when it realizes that you’ve noticed it. It flickers, slightly, between many forms — it’s still your face, mostly, but shimmering with something pale and animalistic underneath.
The reflection reaches up a long-nailed index finger and scratches something in flowing cursive on the other side of the glass. It only manages to write I miss before you set your left palm against the cool surface, hiding the rest of the reversed message.
It stops writing and looks at you with some kind of expression you can’t read — sadness? apprehension? hesitation? — before it slowly, slowly sets its mirrored hand against yours. You blink, maybe, and the mirrored hand’s bone-white fingers are now two inches longer than yours and tipped with curving black claws.
Its true face is visible now. Its ears are low, and its eyes are unsure, and its lips are closed.
You give it a soft half-smile when it looks at you. Its ears perk up slightly as it smiles back a little wider. Its teeth look decidedly less like daggers than you sometimes remember.
You blink again. Your face is in the mirror, looking back at you with honey-brown eyes.
Your reflection flickers and changes to something else. It waves at you when you look at it and smiles somewhat nervously. You wave back, offering a slight smile in return.
Eventually, this becomes almost routine.
“He does love you,” Germany says. “He did love you.”
You don’t ask him about the tense change. The ice clinks in your glass while he finds what he wants to say. The night air is crisp and cool.
“I loved you, too,” he whispers. “But mostly I just missed you.”
You find yourself staring at nothing for a moment. You look up again and see his hand held out to you in the distant half-light from the window. You take it.
“You’ll figure it out,” Germany says. He gently rubs his thumb back and forth over your knuckles. “You’ll figure it out.”
You begin finding messages written on the mirror in the mornings. The writing is less clean, at first — it seems slightly unsteady, slightly uncomfortable — but as the days pass, it starts to become just as precise and flowing as the reversed cursive from before.
You can’t help but touch them, sometimes.
The next time the reflection steps out of the mirror, it’s on your terms.
It obviously can’t hold the cards — it's not corporeal outside of dreams — so you deal its hand at the edge of the table instead, such that it can see the numbers and suits where the corners hang over the edge. It manifests ghostly versions of them in its fingers to maintain the illusion of normalcy.
You teach it how to cheat at cards. Or you try to, anyway. It’s hard when it can’t actually slip them back into the deck when you’re not looking.
You talk, sometimes, late at night. You both sit on the floor in your room (because it’s just not worth it to find chairs — it doesn’t need one and you don’t care) and talk about anything that comes to mind. This involves a lot more eye contact than normal conversation, because neither of you can hear the other speak — something that you gradually grew to wonder over the course of several weeks before finally asking about.
“I can’t hear you out here, no,” it says. It turns its head down to look at its hand while it traces a ghostly claw along a crack in the floorboards. Its body softly glows in the darkness — it probably does during the day, too, but it’s not noticeable in brighter light. “It’s different in there because it’s… hm.” Its hand freezes in place as it seems to think for a moment.
“It’s not really speaking?” it finally says. “It probably feels the same way to you, but that’s more because it’s what you’re used to rather than how it actually works.” It scowls at its hand as it drums its claws noiselessly against the floor. “Everything in the dreamscape communicates using pure thought. The host can influence how these thoughts are presented to an extent, but it’s more like… a convention?” It’s still looking at its hand rather skeptically, but keeps explaining. “Complex beings tend to abide by that convention whether they realize it or not, but lower-level thoughtforms often lack the energy required to maintain it. Those smaller thoughts still exist, they’re just…” The tip of its tail twitches in irritation. “You would probably tune them out because they’re not using a convention you can understand. Just like how I can’t hear you, here, because you can’t use a convention I can understand.” It sighs, but it makes no sound. “I can’t even really feel the air — how could I sense vibrations passing through it?”
It looks at you, then, but you don’t really know what to say in reply. It resumes idly tracing patterns on the floor while both of you think. It finally looks back down at its hand as it traces a claw-tip around a knot in one of the floorboards.
“I miss your voice,” it says. A soft, wistful smile decorates its face, though it doesn’t reach its eyes. It lets its claw circle around the knot one more time before it sets its palm flat on the floor. “It’s very pretty.”
It doesn’t notice you rise to your hands and knees and move towards it. You reach out a hand to attempt to touch its face, and its eyes fly open to stare at you when you manage to get a not-grip on its jaw. Its form isn’t solid, but you can still feel the slightly lower air temperature around where its face should be.
Its eyes are still darting wildly between your eyes and your mouth and your hand on its jaw. You close your eyes tightly as you take a deep breath in through your nose and hold it, concentrating as hard as you can. After a long moment, something cold not-touches the back of your hand and stays there.
You let your breath out slowly before opening your eyes. Its hand has reached up to lightly curl against the back of yours. Its piercing blue eyes are glowing very brightly as it looks at you with a very particular kind of smile.
It’s the kind of smile that you make when you know that you’re about to cry.
“Thank you for trying,” it says.
The three of you — yourself, Germany, and England — are taking a walk along one of the forest trails you’ve come to frequent. It’s early autumn and the leaves are beginning to change; the trees aren’t completely awash with orange and yellow and red yet, but there are small splashes of color among the sea of green.
You grab Germany’s hand without warning and swing it playfully — and England does something similar on Germany’s other side, since he no longer needs an excuse. Germany looks momentarily exasperated, but then sighs and accepts his fate, and a warm smile spreads across his face a moment later.
It’s nice, but something about it feels asymmetrical.
You finish telling the story about the time that Prussia nearly lost three fingers trying to fight a wild badger. It laughs soundlessly from across the table, but looks at you with a smile that seems a tad too mischievous.
“So, then,” it says as it fans its hand of four ghostly cards. “Did I win?”
There are six cards sitting at the edge of the table. A transparent two of clubs and seven of hearts are narrowly sticking out of the side of the deck.
“Hey,” it says, one day. “I want to show you something.”
It beckons you from where it’s standing by the mirror. It’s smiling happily and holding out a hand for you to take from where it’s halfway submerged through the other side of the glass.
Suddenly, it becomes easiest to think about your feet. They’re rooted to the floor.
You don’t know where you’re looking in the room. You’re not looking at anything, actually, until you feel a cold not-touch on your face. Your eyes open slowly to see it standing there in front of you, its hand cradled along your jaw and its ghostly thumb attempting and failing to wipe away the tear tracks.
“It’s okay,” it says. Its ears fall low around its face as it looks at you with careful concern. “You don’t have to. It’s okay.”
“I want to,” you whisper, so quietly that it’s little more than moving your lips — so quietly that even if it could hear you it wouldn’t be able to. “I want to.”
But I can’t, you don’t say. You can’t even form words as to why not — there’s just a certain kind of fear that you don’t know how to express.
Or that you do know how to express, but that you’re afraid to admit. Because admitting that you’re still afraid of what it did to you feels like something that should have scared you away long before now, but it hasn’t.
You wish things weren’t so complicated, but they are.
For once, it’s almost like it’s able to read your thoughts on this side of the mirror. Because something in its face breaks, and its eyes fill with tears, even as it attempts to blink them away.
“I’m sorry,” it says. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”
You step forward without entirely knowing what you’re doing. You just want shameless comfort, to hold and be held and —
And your arms pass through its torso like nothing, because it’s not really there. It’s just a column of cold air not-standing in the middle of your room.
A cold sensation slowly traces along the underside of your jaw, and you look up — not because you have to, but because you don’t have to. The coldness could pass through your skin like nothing if you let it, but you don’t want it to.
It says nothing when your eyes finally reach its face. Its lips are wavering as it wipes its face with the back of its other hand. And then it leans in, and its arms wrap around you in a ghostly-cold embrace.
Your own arms follow suit, a few moments later, as you wrap them around it, but less tightly — only enough to feel the cold against the inside edge of your arms to mirror the cold you can feel around your back. Only enough to feel the illusion, rather than to break it.
You can’t help but shed a few more tears as you half-remember a dream of something soft and warm and solid.
“I know,” Romano says. “England explained it to me after he came back. And I guess I expected it, to an extent.”
“Do you…”
“Trust him?” Romano asks. You nod, and he sighs. “I don’t think it really matters if I trust him or not. I don’t know why you’re asking me that in the first place. Just…”
He trails off. The silence persists until you reach your hand across the table towards him. He takes it in both of his and holds it for a long moment, squeezing gently.
“Please be careful,” he finally says. “I could hear you scratching the inside of the lid before it was even out of the ground. I don’t want to hear that again.”
“He has changed,” England says. “When I went back, there was — well. He said some things, and didn’t say some other things. It’s… not really my place to tell you, though. Not when he can tell you himself.”
You don’t say anything. You’ve already said all you can bear. You just listen.
“I know he hasn’t told you,” he continues, “because we talk, sometimes. He asks me for advice like this, too, because he —” He suddenly stops as he seems to reconsider his phrasing. “Because he doesn’t want to hurt you. Because he cares about you.”
“I’m still just…” Afraid. Worried. Anxious. Nervous. Scared.
“I know, but you didn’t…” England says, then trails off. He remains silent for a long moment — thinking, or maybe remembering. “You didn’t… hear him,” he finally whispers, so quietly, so carefully, as he shakes his head with wide eyes and a soft frown. “At the end. When he let us go. You didn’t… you didn’t hear him.”
He’s right — you don’t remember the end of the dream. All you can remember is a transition from cold, echoing void to stale, confined darkness.
Right now, maybe, you wish you could remember. Maybe, if you could, you wouldn’t still be afraid.
“There’s never… a guarantee, perhaps, of safety,” he says, eventually. “If he wanted to hurt you, he could. But he won’t.”
“I don’t remember that dream as well as you do,” Germany says. Part of you can’t help but bite your tongue to keep from saying there’s a reason. “But with what I do remember… well.” He pauses and looks at you like he expects you to say something.
“I just —” you say, but you don’t know how to say it. “I just don’t know what to do.”
Germany grunts and playfully smiles at you with knowing eyes. It’s a familiar expression — it’s the way he smiles when he thinks you’re being silly.
“I think you already know,” he says, “and you want me to tell you that you’re right.”
You’re silent for a long time. “Maybe,” you finally say. It’s the kind of ‘maybe’ that won’t admit that it’s a yes.
“Then maybe,” Germany says, smiling softly, “you should do what you feel is right.”
“I want to,” you say.
A guilty expression crosses its face. “Are you sure?” it asks.
Silence.
You take a deep breath.
Finally, you whisper: “Yes.”
The mirror no longer reflects your room. Behind it — within it — is a long, dark stone tunnel. A distant light is barely visible at the end.
It’s standing half-submerged within the glass, holding out tentative fingers for you to take. It looks as uncertain as you feel.
It won’t hurt, you remember it saying.
You slowly, carefully, set your fingers on its own. You take a deep breath, and both of you walk — it backwards, you forwards — through the mirror.
The glass ripples when you touch it. Finally passing through brings a sensation that is impossible to describe: like stepping into cold water, but also like ceasing to exist. The light from your room disappears as the mirror-portal closes, leaving you in darkness. You’re afraid.
But after a moment, you notice the sensation in your fingertips again. You look down at your hand, even though there’s no light to see anything. An illusory darker-than-black shadow is lingering underneath it, or so it would seem.
The invisible shadow pulls, without pulling, against the edge of your fingers. You hear something — several somethings, small and hard and covered in cloth — scraping against stone.
You take a careful step forward, or you try to. You stumble on nothing in the darkness, but the invisible shadow helps you back to standing. A few moments after you make it to your feet, you feel the not-tug on your fingers again. You take another step, and this time your footing is more sound, more solid.
You keep walking. You go slowly, at first, but as the lingering and too-familiar sensation of nonexistence fades, you’re able to pick up your pace. The tunnel is dark, and the only sounds are of your footsteps and the several small hard cloth-covered somethings that remain next to you, scraping the ground not quite in time with your steps.
The tunnel is very long, but as you get closer to the light at its end, the ground under your feet starts to sound less like stone and more like grass. The light at the end is almost blinding as you get closer, but as you approach it, you think you almost recognize the obscured shadows on the other side.
The shadow sensation drops from your fingers as you start walking faster, and eventually break into a run towards the light. You close your eyes before you emerge from the tunnel, and keep them closed after you exit; you slow to a stop and then just stand and sense.
The scent of lilacs and daisies and tulips and clover — and cooking, somewhere. The sound of cool waves lapping against a distant shore, and warm wind whispering through leaves. The taste of the air on your tongue: subtle sweetness like a kiss. The warmth of the pale sunlight falling across your shoulders.
You open your eyes.
The tree is exactly as you remember it: an ancient oak standing proud and tall under the blue-blue sky, with greener-than-green leaves casting dappled shadows on the ground beneath it. The curve of the lakeshore, far north beyond it, is equally as familiar.
The little village, off in the distance to the west, is new.
You hear footsteps behind you, and turn around. The tunnel has disappeared, like it never existed.
He’s standing there, smiling, like he never left.
“Welcome back,” he says, and you can hear him.
He reaches out a long claw-tipped hand towards you, and you gingerly take it in both of your own. It’s warm, and solid, and real, and suddenly you’re struggling to blink back tears as his other hand comes up to your face to so, so gently wipe them away. You grip the hand you’re holding as hard as you can, and then you clench your jaw and close your eyes tightly and think:
Reve.
He takes a sharp, unsteady breath in, and suddenly he’s holding your hands tightly, too. You open your eyes and look up to see him crying; his smile is crooked and wavering as the tears slip down his cheeks.
“I’m here,” he whispers, blinking back his own tears. “I’m here.”
You wake up face down on the floor of your room. This is interesting, at first, because you don’t remember going to sleep — much less on the floor in front of your mirror — but then your headache catches up with you.
Now this might hurt, you suddenly remember him saying. He was trying so hard to keep from laughing — his resulting smile was contagious, even if it was at your expense. You hit your head pretty good out there.
You make a noise somewhere between “ah” and “ow” as you push yourself up onto your hands, then shift your weight to sit on your knees. You half-glance at your watch as your hands come up to hold your forehead — it felt like you’d been there for half a day, but it’s been barely half an hour.
Interesting.
It only takes a minute or so for your headache to abate, which is good. You finally glance up at the mirror to see him looking at you through the glass with the most hilarious expression: an incredibly nervous combination of an apologetic grimace and a sheepish smile. It makes you want to laugh.
He gives an exaggerated, inaudible sigh of relief when you smile back at him. “Oh, good, you’re okay,” he says. You can’t hear him anymore, but you still remember his voice. “I’ll… see you later?”
He smiles again, but it’s a different smile: a shy smile. You softly smile back, nod, and wave.
“See you soon,” you whisper.
His eyes glow brighter, and he waves back. The next time you blink, he’s gone — all that remains in the mirror is your own reflection.
After he disappears, you take a moment to think of what to do about the floor.
Pillows would be a good start.