Archive of Our Own

You come around here just to watch me writhe
Am I what you think about all late at night?
You can try to stop me, hold me
Do all the things that you do
But it's no good

Though it had been of his own will to come into the room originally, to barricade and board himself away from anyone aside from himself that he could possibly injure in his fits of madness, it had soon become so that he had lost track entirely of how long it had been since he’d last been free.

It was hard to extrapolate the passage of time entirely with as little proof as he had that time was even passing at all. He had picked a windowless room by design to prevent escape in the moments he was beside himself, and so there was no view of sun and moon to help him discern what was day and what was night. The only light in the room came from the oil lamps and sparse candles that were posted up in the corners. They were changed on occasion, when the wicks burned short or the oil ran out; the men who would come in to grant him his meals would bring with them the replacements. And meager things, those meals, for he could hardly stand to keep anything hearty down anymore. The nausea was a devil. But then, so was everything.

It was the lone outside interaction he got, those short moments when the men would pop in. They said hardly a word to him of general things, only asking when necessary if he needed for anything material, clothing or bandages unsoiled, or a doctor on the worser days. They said nothing of the war, only putting forth the smallest scraps of information when Alfred beseeched desperately for it, but they did not need to.

Sometimes, he did not mind the silence. His own mind filled it more often than not; the biting southern twang rattling around his skull, teasing and tormenting. He was tired, he was angry, he was upset. He fought with himself near endlessly. And so, when the quiet truly did come, he relished it, bathed in it like the fountain of the water of life, washing from his soul all the cruentus befouling him. It did little and lasted not long at all. When it came back, his eviler self, he almost wished there was someone else he could speak with. Even for all that he, most times, could scarcely muster up the energy to even lift his heavy head let alone entertain polite conversation, distraction beckoned him like a drug. Oh, the days he had scorned the tediousness of political drivel! He’d considered that even that would be preferable to all of this.

Even so, he supposed that the sight alone of others was sustainable; the smallest visible reassurance that he was not completely alone down here. That he, for every fault, had not been forgotten in the face of brutal battle. He would think, perhaps, that he was the only person left on Earth, if only he did not feel upon his weary body the marks of the common man as they all warred each other far off.

It all hurt so terribly. It seemed almost that every time he moved, some new wound would sprout up upon him, reddening his sore skin with their weeping of hot, viscous gore. It had become so that he could hardly even stand to walk anymore, and as such spent most of his time lain upon the dingy cot, trying to keep as still as possible so as to not reopen the tentative scabbing across his back and have it all bleed afresh.

There had been an especially violent battle in recent, he knew. It had been a sort of irresolute hypothesis of his initially, because he felt like there was always a battle in some place or another, leaving him hardly any time to recuperate — but he had awoken once to a pain so terrible, so visceral, that had left him so immobile that all he’d been able to do was lie there and take it. He’d not been able to turn or look down to view all of the gore that poured from his every orifice, the cruor he could feel all around him, drowning him, so scarlet and so sick. He’d not been able to flee, to run from it, for it’d been inside him, across him, soaking into his very bones. He’d not even been able to scream.

He had writhed there, all alone, for maybe hours or maybe decades. It had seemed almost an entire lifetime before his chest clenched, before his breath stuttered, before the darkness overtook and he slipped into the merciful graces of unconsciousness. The sensation of the binding veil of death.

But still, some eternity following, he had awoken from it; primitive, already marred with new wounds all across, destroying the fresh canvas death had reset his body to. He knew not for how long he had been out, and wondered if it had been especially long. He wondered if it’d be the longest time, or if it would only get worse the more it dragged on.

How many times, Alfred had asked, begged, pleaded to know, shall this war kill me?

The answer had come to him in a protracted, cruelly amused drawl; words from the mouth of a babe, the evil other trapped inside his head. As many times as it needs to.

In the present, Alfred shuddered one long, harsh exhale, and his eyes slipped closed. It seemed now that there was no battle on, and perhaps that there’d not been for a little while, for he’d had no new wound sprout upon him since he’d woken up. The voice of the rebel was eerily silent; it made Alfred wonder if he was sulking, or something of the like. Had the Confederates lost something? Alfred never knew the outcomes of any of the battles, only that they occurred at all, for there was no one who would tell him, and he had none of the will or strength to look inward to try and find out—but, by all logic, he would have thought that if the Union had been bested, and the other scoured his soul to know about it, that he’d be more than happy to gloat all he could. Perhaps he was just as weak as Alfred, sharing the same body as they did, or perhaps he was yet to awaken himself. Whatever it was, Alfred could take this reprieve while he had it, this short moment to catch his breath…

It could not have been more than a minute after he bid the darkness toward him that a sharp, austere voice cut through the silence. “Get up, you indolent boy.”

It was not the southern tone he had grown accustomed to since the war’s beginning, nor any of the men who came in to bring his provisions, for they had never been so impolite to him. It was an older one, a biting one, something he had not heard for decades. At the sound of it, he jerked in surprise and wrenched his eyes open again.

A stiff figure cut a stark shadow in the low light. Even for all that Alfred squinted to try and make it out, it still stood blurry, an intangible blight overtaking the chamber. He figured his glasses might be well in aiding him, but he’d not had them since they’d been broken in his first boutade the month before the war’s beginning. He’d not been able to get replacements, stuck in this room as he was, and hadn't really needed for any anyway. Though it made the circumstances now all the more of a hassle.

Slowly, he tried to prop himself up on one elbow, then held back a muted cry of pain when it trembled and gave out from under him, slamming his back against the hard cot once more. The figure let out a short, irritated huff. It was a masculine voice, proper and low with contempt.

“How pathetic,” it said, and stepped forward until its cruel face was lit by the orange luster of the candles. “For all of your bark, all of your vigor, you really are such a weak child.”

Glowing green eyes stared him down, boring ruinous holes into the carapace of his very being. At that, Alfred’s next exhale stuttered and died in his throat, which had constricted at once in his sudden terror. There, in the center of the room, clad in his crisp red uniform, with his hands clasped at parade rest behind his back, stood Arthur Kirkland. 

…But then, was it truly? Arthur Kirkland had, once upon a time, been his father. A kind man, a caring man. One who had, in the sparse times Alfred was able to be around him, raised him up with love and given whatever he could for the sake of his child’s wellness. Would Arthur Kirkland have been so cold? Would he have raised his firm hand against Alfred? Stood before him in the rain, his bayonet pointed steady in the space just between the baby blues of the child—his child, beckoning a life away from the maltreatment of the blossoming European empire? Would he have set Alfred’s capital aflame, and watched then impassively as he choked on every reaching, throttling tendril of the black miasma of smoke?

Oh, how Alfred could recall it still: the great pain. Sharpness around his lungs, around his heart, as though the tender innards of his flesh body had been swaddled like a babe in razor-sharp barbs. Thick, dragging chainlinks, pulling him down toward damnation. Something that had told him that his father was gone, long gone—or maybe that he had never existed at all; that it’d all been a farce, some terrible pretense, and all that had ever truly been real had been England, and only that.

England, now here, tall and straight, casting blackness over the stone and wood prison that enclosed the two of them together. The flames of the lamps behind him lit the blond spikes of hair like a halo, like the gold-leaf glorioles behind the heads of the divine, in the old paintings of angels and gods and holy beau idéals. They had stared at him in similar manners, as though judging him. Like they knew something that he, juvenile and naive, did not.

“You,” Alfred rasped. “What- What are you doing here? How did you get here?”

Even for all of his haziness, he surely would have noticed the door opening and someone entering, would he not? When was the last time someone had come in, anyway? The candles looked somewhat fresh, so perhaps while he'd been maybe-dead. Then, there'd be no reason for anyone to enter, no? Alfred looked up in confoundment, and in turn, England looked down at him severely, his lip curled just so in distaste.

And Alfred demanded, again, when no word came from the other, “Why are you here?”

“Why are you?” England returned snidely. The way the fire’s glow hit the slants of his face made him look like the Devil. “What are you doing, Alfred?”

“What am I doing?” he repeated, parroting in disbelief. “What does it look like to you? I am fighting a war.”

England peered at him, one thick brow raised up, then barked a short, mocking laugh. “This is you fighting?” he asked. “How terrible. At least in the others, you actually put some force into it. Now look at you. All you do is lie on your backside, belly-up like a dead fish, conceding to all that is done to you. All that those bellicose people do.”

Ire swelled in him at that. Was it not true, that he would fight if he was able? It wasn’t as though he was lying here, cosying up upon a plush bed, contented and vacationing. It wasn’t as though he were up carousing while his people died in the fields for him. He would be in the trenches with his men if he could, was that not assured? He couldn’t, and that was the problem. He was here, alone, paralyzed in agony as he felt in every way both sides of the battles suffered. It would be an impossible thing, to ship him out. It would be a waste, when he’d not since the war’s beginning gone more than a seldom few days without phantom injury. In the wars of before, it had never been so bad, not like this. It had always been an outside force he had raised up against, the English and the Canadians and the Mexicans, but never his own, not until now. Even those who had severed from him, they were still his, and he still endured their every torment.

“It does not matter,” Alfred bit. “They’re still mine, still my people. All of them are.”

England mused in turn, “I do not believe the other one would be very pleased to hear such a thing.” 

The other one. He spoke, Alfred knew without needing ask, of the voice. The southern one, the terrible rebel, he who was tearing Alfred violently in two, utterly pitiless. He had come to him in the autumn of 1860, on the horizon of the first secessions. Alfred had read the news of it, still and shell-shocked, and the sibilant whisper of the serpentine devil had there crested his mind for the first time of many. He had mocked him, laughed at him, promised Alfred with such surety of his fate of all that was to come; the burning hellfire that would be rained down upon him, as he would be made to stand and watch, down in the deep dark, as his land was ripped intemperately in two. And Alfred, throughout it all, every tormentous decree, had been able to do nothing about it but listen.

He had thought at first, in a feeble attempt at self-reassurance, that perhaps the situation only exhausted him, to be making him hear such terrible things. But it never went away, even as the days passed and tensions grew worser and worser. He never went away, and so Alfred had decided instead that maybe he had lost his mind entirely.

“What was his name, again?” England asked, looking almost theatrically contemplative. “I know it was similar to yours, of course, the three same initials and all. Perhaps you are not so different in every way.”

He had been caught screaming at himself, howling of vacuous Yankees and backstabbing Confederates, in such a savage state of fugue that it had taken multiple men to pull his hands away from his attacking of himself. He had been like a rabid animal, going forth with every conceivable abuse upon himself until he bloomed purple and blue with watercolor bruises. Now, once again, his first instinct above all was to fight it, to lunge and take the accusation in his teeth until blood drew. I am nothing like him, Alfred almost said, He is… he…

He still could not move. Even if he could, it would do him no service; practically anyone could subdue him in the sorry state he was in, he was almost certain of it. So instead, as venomous as he could make it, Alfred spat, “What do you know, anyway, about him, or about me? What do you know of any of this?”

In truth, someone like England might be one of the only people to know well about it, of anyone that Alfred knew personally. Someone as old as him, with as much history. But he would not share it, of course, which was the problem. And even if he would, Alfred wasn’t so certain that he wanted to hear any sort of advice from the wicked tongue of such aggressor. Especially now, when all that England seemed to be in want of partaking in was toying with him.

What is the point, Alfred asked himself, weary with it already, to be so needlessly vile?

He thought, perhaps, that he knew the answer to that question too. His father had grown cold as Alfred had grown up, as America had progressed and England expanded. After the war with France and the Indians, after Arthur Kirkland had taken from Francis Bonnefoy his only son, the only fruit of his every labor—Alfred had, all at once, both gained a brother and lost a father in such a short, impossibly swift span of time. Arthur became another victim of the bloody hand of the British Empire, leaving only ashes for this evil visitant to rise up from, to torment Arthur Kirkland’s child for all the rest of time. He was so vindictive, and Alfred could see it in the jutting angles of his expression; the minute tilt of his head, the glint in his bright eyes, the pursing twist of his thin lips. 

“What do I know about you?” England returned, almost cynically humored by the very words. “Oh, too much. I am very well versed in dealing with baleful, spoiled little children.”

“Right,” said Alfred shortly. What he did not add, if only because he hadn’t the will to do it: You raised me the bare minimum. You left me most often to the care of the humans you show such distaste for now. For all that I cried, all that I begged, you never stayed, and you rarely came back. All I wanted was you, my father, and you were not there. You could not deal with me if you were never there.

He thought he could predict what England would say to all of that anyway.

“His name,” the shade repeated. He was not asking for it, not anymore. Perhaps the vulnerability of seeking truth from Alfred, whom he respected less than anyone, had been a farce as well.

His name is Ambrose, he did not say outwardly. He says that his men may call him Beau, which means beautiful, but there is nothing such about him. He is a vile, cruel beast. He is no fine man. He is a fractured figment of my overwhelming turmoil, a terrible demon taking over my mind, and he is going to kill me, over and over again until I am destroyed for good. Ambrose, that is his name. The fallen angel, and the great defiler.

Slowly, England nodded. “Immortal and divine,” he recalled. It had always been a quirk of his, the proclivity for drawing forth the meaning of names. “What an omen. Do you find it very accurate, Alfred, wise counselor? Do you believe that Ambrose Fitzroy shall best you?”

Fitzroy. Alfred almost wanted to laugh at that. Son of the king. God, of course the southerner would be such a toady, such a suck-up to those Alfred had shed so much dignity severing from. He’d not even known the nomen of his insurgent counterpart, and thus wondered, very briefly, how it was that England did. He would have asked, maybe, if only the very thought of his other self had not begun already to make his stomach churn.

What would it mean for him, he asked himself, if the Confederacy truly did best the Union? Would he cease to be if the greybacks decimated the blue-bellies? His body overtaken, as his land had been, and he himself forced out into oblivion—oh, what a thought, a terrible thought. And even then, if both factions were allowed to be by the end, all which had once been united suddenly split in two, would it be the same for him? Would Alfred be doomed to an existence done in halves? Would days be taken from him, months, years, as his one body was forced to cater to two different minds, two representatives of two separate soils? What would happen if he truly did lose? And how dare this apparition make him struggle so in entertaining such a notion?

“Why does it matter?” Alfred returned, biting. “You seek to ally with him, or something? Old Great Britain with the greedy traitors of America?”

He knew naught of the credibility of such an accusation, as little as he knew about all of the intricacies of the goings-on outside of his self-imposed prison cell, but that seemed right up Great Britain’s alley, didn’t it? Just like England, to be such a spiteful bastard.

The other shrugged a half sort of thing, one noncommittal jerk of his shoulders upward. “I said nothing of the sort. But surely, he could be no worse than you.”

Alfred scoffed, and then regretted it immediately for the way it burned like acid up his throat, the viscous and stinging bile. “Well,” he retorted sharply once he’d found his voice again, “I am sorry that he cannot be here to entertain your company, in that case. I’m afraid neither of us knew that you were coming.”

England hummed, unconcerned, like it didn’t really matter to him either way. Alfred wanted to demand again for the answer he had dodged, to know why the other had come to him now after so many decades of nothing, why he appeared before him now, in his darkest hour, to only gibe and taunt. Like the Devil, punishing him for his sins. Was this Hell, then? His eternal punishment?

“Don’t be so dramatic,” England dismissed, those poison irises of his rolling back in his exasperation. (O, beware, the green-eyed monster.) “It is practically a rite of passage, civil wars. Goodness, I had two in the span of less than a decade, and here you are, so torn up after just a year from only one.”

Alfred paused, and he could feel the crease form slowly between his brows. A year, came the faint thought, has it really been a year? A very long beat of nothing passed them by, before, as the old recollections came unto him then, he murmured low, “I know.”

He had been maybe four or so, in mortal years. Standing at the port, the firm hand of the governess he’d been left in the care of—the only other person who knew of his unusual state of being—pressing down his small shoulder. He had felt cold, for more reasons than just the brushes of saltwater wind coming up from the churning ocean. Frigid, rather, with the loneliness.

“I remember. You left me here, and you were…”

How long before Alfred met him in person again? Two decades, or more, perhaps an entire eternity in and of itself. His governess had grown aged and frail, and they’d moved around until she was physically unable, lest anyone else notice how, in those two decades, Alfred had failed to age as much as she had.

(Though all that work hadn’t mattered much in the end, anyway. The next time Arthur had left him, under the care of those nescient to his unholy nature, Alfred had been hanged on the coast of Massachusetts Bay for that very reason. Perhaps it had been bound to happen, at one point or another.)

“You were gone for so long.”

What had that war been about? A clash of ideals, as his own was? Was it a matter of rights, of liberties? Freedom from suppression, or from oppression? He did not know; his father had never told him. The details of war need not concern someone so young, he had said to Alfred, like he had never expected that his little child would go to face his own. Yet only a century later, the British-Americans had been made to work with their superiors against the French, and then some decades forward, against those superiors themselves. Over and over and over again. How many wars in his two great hundreds? How many times had he been made to bear the wounds of battle? When, he wondered, had he ceased to be young enough for it not to concern him?

A strange look came upon England’s face, but he seemed to be trying to cover it as best he could with the lingering contempt. He excused, briskly, “There was unrest in the homeland. I could not drop everything solely for the sake of tending after you. What an ignorant idea.”

“Then why make me, if you could not care for me proper? You left me, over and over, when all I had was you. I was just a child, didn’t you realize?”

The shade needed not say it, not aloud, for Alfred could hear in his hindmind regardless the ringing, echoing words of his reply. The terrible bane of the simple, dreaded answer: You were land.

One fluttering exhale. It felt like all of the oxygen had gone from the atmosphere, and what little was left he could hardly pull in. A tempest in the land; the tornado that had put out the fire of his core. Way back when, the summer heat his kinsfolk had set upon him. He felt almost as he had back then in the swelter of flame-soaked August, choking on the smolder. He could see the flames reaching up in the reflection of England’s eyes. Blood-splattering ruby tarnishing sharp-cut emeralds. Carnage strewn over ravaged, dead fields.

“Why did you take me,” Alfred began next, in a harsh rasp that grated his throat, “if you didn’t really want me? Why did you… Why did you let me believe that you cared for me, that you… loved me… if I have always been so awful?”

England studied him wordlessly, his expression having gone, in that instant, almost artfully blank. Alfred felt himself being unmade in the viewing, like the storm of the eyes of his old master were flaying him open, exposing all his unguarded innards. His stuttering heart and stained lungs. His lacerated, abused soul in all of its reviled desecration. When England approached, painfully slow, and stopped there just before him, Alfred felt his aching chest clench.

Towering over him, his sharp face shadowed by the angle of his looking down, England said, “I was a fool.”

To make it only worse, more cruel, he began to card one calloused hand through the greasy tresses of Alfred's hair. Despite himself, before he could gather his wits enough to hold back, he preened just so at the contact, trapped by the memories of how his father would do the same when he’d been little. He’d not felt the touch of another—a caring, guiding hand—in so long.

“I believed I could escape from my duties and play human, play father,” England said; like the snake in the Garden of Eden, giving forth knowledge the ignorant would be better off without. “I was a fool, and so it seems are you. Out of anything I tried to pass down, of course you would only pick up the worst of it.”

Alfred shuddered one long, wet breath and said, “I'm not your son.”

“No,” England agreed, and his hand stilled at once in its combing. “I had a son, a beautiful boy who never would have forsaken me. And you killed him. It will be better, Alfred Jones, when you accept what you truly are.”

“...And what's that?”

England refrained from answering, only pulling his hand away and continuing to tower. His shadow upon the wall stretched up, up, dancing against the ceiling until every meager flame seemed to have extinguished. He felt the cold again, the terrible cold, and it was like he was four years old and back on the pier, gelid with the sickness of seclusion.

What am I, he asked himself, and the answers came to him unbidden. A plight, a disease, a terrible invader.

(You were land.)

Was England right, then, that I am the same as my own enemy? Is Ambrose Fitzroy to me what I was to Alfred Kirkland? As I had been so adamant in detaching myself from my former life, the prodigal son never having returned, has my karma now come in turn to detach me? The disease mutates, and I am doomed to be overtaken. Oh, God.

“I hate you,” he whispered. He was shaking his head slightly, awkward from where the side of his face was pressed into the cot. His blue eyes, ever so wide, burned with moisture and something vicious. “I really… really hate you.”

(“I had a son, and you killed him.”)

(I had a father, and you killed him too.)

England nodded once, firmly, and stepped away again. He stood with his back to the cot, hands folded behind him again, and seemed to stare transfixed into the swaying flames of the fast-shortening candles. Enraptured, like he could see incorporeal prophecies unfolding in the orange and yellow. Just like the paintings, knowing all that Alfred found impossible to grasp.

He thought he could hear, almost, the droning timbre of the southern Other in his head again: Because you know nothing.

“Shut up,” he muttered, gritting his jaw until his teeth creaked with the force. He’d have reached his hands to clap over his ears if he could bear the pain of movement. “Both of you, shut up.”

So came the evil laughter; the cackling of the cacodemon, voluble and unending. It rang like death in his bleeding ears, the seven trumpets of the rapture playing all at once.

“Do you hear him?” England asked. “As you hear me? Does he come before you too in these visions?”

“It isn’t real,” Alfred answered. “None of it. Not him, and not you.”

But it felt real, didn’t it? It felt so terribly, horribly real, and he said the words without even really believing them. As if, perhaps, releasing them into the universe might make them true. Might make the Lord have pity over him, and take from him the wickedness. The world, the flesh, and the devil; all that haunted him so readily, entwined throughout him like his very viscera. Ambrose, his animaga, and England, his draconian forefather. (Hell is empty and all the devils are here.)

“I am here because you want me to be, Alfred,” said England, monotone. Bored, almost, as though he had somewhere more important he’d much rather be. As though he wasn’t, in simple essence, a drawn-up figment of Alfred’s own fragmented mind. “Somewhere, deep down, it is what you want. To see your father, to be comforted. You cannot deny that which your heart desires.”

If that really was so, Alfred figured, then the issue was as such: even if this specter held any semblance of honesty laden upon his forked tongue, if there was truth in him saying that Alfred craved for the presence of his father, this man was not it. England had come because that was what Alfred could remember best. The cruelty, the harshness, the overpowering drub of rancor—it had taken over the few memories Alfred had of his father at his best, at his sweetest and most giving. The spirits come in their last and recent form, and England had not been Arthur Kirkland since the day he could call himself an empire. He could never comfort Alfred in any honest, guileless way, not like this. And still, Alfred knew he could never be comforted at all, not until this disunity ceased. Fruitless, it was all so fruitless. What a terrible waste.

“I don’t want to see you,” Alfred denied, vehement and desperate. “I should never want to see you, you beast. Go back… to whatever pit you crawled from, whatever circle of the Inferno you ought to be chastened in, and leave me be.”

England tilted his head a little, and that terrible smug, knowing spoor of a look came there upon his face again.

Alfred repeated, louder, “Go away!” And when the visage remained still, he clenched his eyes shut until it hurt and he screamed, voice raw, “You’re not real! Go away!”

It seemed that the universe coalesced there, that perhaps the crust of the Earth itself had split open, and the hounds of Hell had dragged the demon back down, leaving Alfred to his solitariness again. The laughter rang and rang, higher and higher, until it could have shattered glass, and then ceased to be at its very peak. The silence again; the awful silence, the merciful silence, the lonesome silence. He laid with it, and it suffocated him.

In the black behind his lids, visions played out as dreams before him. Kalediscopes of sinew and barbarity. The barbs of punishment that came with the acts of self-torment. Somewhere far in the fields of the seceded South, the first shot of another battle rang out from the end of a worn musket, or a ball pushed forth from the gaping mouth of a cannon, and Alfred felt himself swallowing the impact. In the second ring of the circle of violence, his damned pneuma was feasted by harpies in the forest, and he felt that too.

A hard, quick succession of three knocks upon the outside of the door ripped him from his reverie, and Alfred opened his eyes again with a strangled gasp. One look to the wall, to the barren floor, to every shadowless place he could feast his gaze upon told him two things: one, of where he remained still, and two, that the beast had fled him. England was gone.

One soft, intangible huff of a snicker told him that his own other self was not.

“Mister Jones?” called a hesitant voice on the other side of the door. One of the men come to replenish the light, he figured, and perhaps see if his stomach did not roll with sickness enough to be able to stomach some food. Alfred held his breath for a long, long moment, and the wracking sobs came anew. It was all that he could spill forth, and evidently, it was more than answer enough.

(Across the ocean, home safe in London, Arthur Kirkland folded carefully the newsletter in his hand and tossed it after a second of contemplation into the roaring hearth before him. It is a rite of passage for every nation, he told himself. But it was a feeble reassurance.)

Don't ask me why I hate myself
As I'm circling the drain
'Cause death, it takes too long
And I can't wait
(Forever)