Work Text:
Prussia is walking. He is walking because he has feet. He has feet because he was born. He was born because the Earth vomited him out.
... Prussia is walking because someone vomited.
He doesn’t like thinking about it. But sometimes images of his very beginnings will creep into his mind, and he’ll remember being vomited out by Mother Earth. It’s something all nations had to go through. Mother Earth’s belly would get too full with the humans of Human Earth, and she would get sick and release them out her mouth, creating a puddle of vomit/the nations.
Right now though, none of this matters because Prussia is walking. He is walking somewhere. He has to walk really far and really fast to get where he’s going because walking isn’t walking if you’re not going anywhere, because to not be going anywhere means to not be moving and to not be moving is to not be walking.
“This is all really stupid,” thinks Prussia. Then he starts to cry, because he knows he’s gonna be walking forever unless this story finally goes somewhere. But it’s not going anywhere, because Prussia’s been stopped.
“Stop,” says the silly man. This man, however, is not very silly. Not once has anyone ever seen him smile.
“You cannot go through here, fool,” explains the not-very-silly man.
Prussia tells the man he’s stupid, though it’s unclear if he meant the man or himself.
“I know you are,” says the man. “You can’t read, because otherwise you would have seen the sign and known not to continue forth.”
Prussia is annoyed because he’s been called stupid, but also because the sign was never there until this guy brought it up. He looks at the sign at the edge of the path that was definitely not there before. It reads: “Hey idiot, did you know that if you never read this, the sign could’ve said anything? But you read this and now I’m going to spoil the ending of this story for you...” Prussia stopped reading at that.