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It seemed that the entire world was displeased with her.
Where was she now? The great America, land of the free and home of the brave? Why wasn’t she helping any one? Why wasn’t she trying to prevent the slaughtering of millions? She claims to be neutral, yet she is giving money and supplies to the Allied Powers! The nerve of her!
Truth is, Amelia F. Jones was tired. She just wanted peace. So yeah, she was helping the Allies in a small way; two of them had practically raised her and another had been one of her best friends growing up. She didn’t care much for Wang Yao, but what could you do?
But she wasn’t as stupid as people made her out to be. She could feel that the Axis were starting to get restless. They knew that if she entered the war then their cause would be finished. Ludwig had made that mistake nearly thirty years previous; with the Zimmerman Telegram and sinking the Lusitania. So she wasn’t worried. If they wanted all-out war with one of the most powerful nations in the world, that was their decision. Her army was ready.
But out of all the things that she had prepared for, she hadn’t expected her best friend to be the one to attack her.
December 1941
The screams. That was all she could hear.
Amelia had been in Hawaii checking on the status of her navy in case some European idiots came knocking at her door. A plane had been swooping overhead; she hadn’t thought anything of it. Amelia thought it was one of hers.
Oh how wrong she was.
A cry came from the plane above, faint but still heard, “Kōtei no eikō no tame ni!” And then came the explosion. The plane had swooped down suddenly and took a nose dive into the nearest battleship. The ship groaned from the weight of the aircraft, but hadn’t collapsed yet. More aircrafts came out of the sky, dive bombing the planes. The metal bent from the heat, and soon the gas tanks caught fire. The harbor exploded.
Amelia could feel the burns begin to blossom against her skin, could see the lives of her people begin to fade away. She was in pain, so much pain. But still, she helped evacuate the harbor, making sure the people who had survived got away. She could’ve sworn she saw a silhouette in the distance. Amelia ran towards the person, “Hey! Come on! We need to get out of here!”
She got closer and closer to the silhouette, close enough to reach out and touch it. She put her hand on the person’s shoulder, “Hey, you okay dude?” The man turned around to her and she gasped when she saw who it was.
The man had black hair cut a bit shorter than his chin; when the light hit it just right, it seemed to have a red tint. His brown eyes looked slightly red (much like his hair) and looked disinterested in all the chaos around him. He wore a black uniform with golden epaulettes and a golden rope hanging across the front. A purple cape was draped across his shoulders and fell to his ankles. White gloves covered his hands, the right of which held a katana. Poking out of the collar of his uniform jacket was the tip of a black tattoo; Amelia could only imagine where it ended.
This man was Japan, no doubt about it. But he was different. The Kiku that Amelia knew would’ve shown concern for all the carnage around him, this man almost looked bored!
Amelia reached out for the man’s face, expecting him to wince back like he normally did. But this man let her put her palm to his face. “Kiku…?” she whispered. The man’s face hardened, but his expression did not change.
“Kiku” looked down at her (even though she was only an inch shorter than him) and said, “Kiku is gone. I am Kuro. I am in control of his body now.” Amelia’s cerulean eyes widened and she went to pull her hand away, but Kuro grabbed her wrist and kept her hand on his cheek. The rest of the world seemed to slow down; she couldn’t hear screaming or the groaning of the metal.
Amelia tried to keep her breathing even, but she whispered, “W-Where is Kiku?” Kuro gave a small pitying smile to her. He said, “He is me and I am him.” He observed the burning around him and said, “I have not seen the world through my own eyes for a while. It is…refreshing. I was always stuck behind Kiku. It is nice to be free,”
Kuro looked back to Amelia, his red eyes blazing, “We will meet on the battlefield again. I will not be so merciful next time.”
The man unsheathed his katana and hit her on the head with the blunt end. Amelia’s eyes rolled up into her head and she collapsed onto the concrete, the burning harbor a mere five feet from her body.
When she woke up he was gone.
August 1945
She had learned who ‘Kuro’ was.
Shortly after she had been bombed, she had declared war on Kiku. Ludwig and Feliciano soon declared war on her as a show of friendship towards the eastern nation. The world was at war once again.
Amelia had asked her older brother Arthur who this mysterious ‘Kuro’ was. Apparently, when a country became extremely militaristic, a different side of their personality was shown. This side was known as their ‘second player’ and was often responsible for war crimes or horrible occurrences within the country. This second player was within a nation at all times, but never physically visible until they did something truly awful.
Kuro was apparently Kiku’s second player and had been doing horrible things to people of Japan for years.
But she still couldn’t make that decision.
For years, the best and the smartest of her country had gathered in order to create a whole new kind of weapon. President Truman had gotten the call today. The atom bomb was ready. It had been tested in the desert, and had obliterated everything within a twenty mile radius of the drop zone.
Everyone knew it was their only hope against the Japanese, who simply refused to surrender. Truman had left the decision up to her, as she understood how it would affect Japan much better than he did. But how could she do that to her best friend? She had felt a slight pricking all around her body when the bomb had been tested, and it hadn’t even been near anything important! Amelia didn’t want to imagine what it would do if it was dropped on a city.
But when she had seen her men dying in the trenches, faced with murderous Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender. She had admired their resilience, but now it was going too far. The man that Kiku had become, this ‘Kuro’ character, was not her friend. He was not the man she knew.
Amelia turned to the president with her face set.
“Drop it.”