Hetalia kink meme part 24

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hetalia kink meme
part 24

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Madre de Esclavo (2/4)

[anonymous]

When he wakes up the next day, weak with pain, there’s a dressing over the throbbing brand on his upper arm, and his mother isn’t there. Nobody he knows is there. Carlino has never in his life seen the slave who wakes him. There’s nobody he knows, not Maria-who-had-twins or her pale-haired son, not Frances or her daughter Monique, none of them. There’s only his master, looking at him expectantly even though they only met the day before, and it doesn’t matter if Carlino is alone for the first time in his life. He has been a slave all of his life. He knows to obey.

His master calls him Seb, and Carlino wears the name obediently; it’s not really a name, more of a handle, because his master needs something to address him with. He keeps his shh, secret not-real name underneath, written across his breastbone, and carries out the work asked of him even though the pain in his arm threatens to overwhelm him. He guesses he must do all right, because in the evening his owner’s father glances at the tools in his hands and says We got a bargain out of that one.

He whispers his family’s secret names when he lies down to sleep, breath-quiet so that nobody will hear him, and it’s only then that he realises he doesn’t know what his mother’s name is. He gets Lovino-Feliciano, and Marco-Elena for the baby just in case it’s either sex, and then he has to say Madre because he doesn’t know what she called herself, and the sense of loss hits him like a hollow shock under his breastbone. Suddenly he has to fight to breathe, let alone to keep his breathing steady. He never paid attention to what other slaves called her, because to him she was always Mother, so the only other name he knows for her is what Sadiq called her, Spaniard, and that’s a label, not a name…

He puts a smile on his face, wearing his easygoing nature like a shirt (which makes it hard to hold onto when he has to take his shirt off, and maybe he should have made it like his underwear instead, but he manages), and he lives. He tries to find a little happiness when he can - in food he sneaks off his owner’s plate, in slow-growing friendships with the other slaves, and when Matilda turns eleven and Master Jake comes back with someone he knows, Seb-Carlino can take a little comfort in Angel-Johan’s vaguely familiar face.

A little comfort only, because he’s forgetting things. Maybe the branding drove them out of his mind, maybe the pain shattered his ties to before, maybe it’s only now that Johan’s here that he realises how much he’s forgotten.

He can’t remember much about his family. Lovino is dark-haired and bad-tempered and tall, impossibly tall, even though when Carlino thinks about it he knows that he must be as tall now as his brother was when he vanished out of Carlino’s memories. Feliciano is only a little clearer, cheerful and friendly and red-haired, because their mother used to say that they were so alike, but even with an extra year there’s not much left of him in Carlino’s head.

And he’s losing their mother. He knows that her hair was dark and long, and that her eyes were green, and he knows she used to smile and call them cute and sing them to sleep, but he can’t remember her smile or the tunes, and when he digs in the sand-filling vaults of his memory, he can’t see her face. The only scraps of her he has left are his name, and his eyes, and his accent, and two of those never really belonged to her.

He’s lost everything about his family except for their shh, secret names, and he doesn’t know the most important name of all.

(He tells Johan ‘Maria’ while he can still remember it.)