o'er the land of the free [1/2]
anonymous
February 5 2009, 04:09:40 UTC
I think this kind of sucks? D:
--
At first no one realizes that Alfred is, in fact, a country. He's captured after a nasty firefight and a hasty, disorganized retreat across a loading dock and through one bombed-out city or another and down winding Georgia backroads, where he's finally surrounded with a dozen other survivors and told in halting English to put down his weapon.
He and two others - a white-haired man who walks with a limp and a pretty red-haired girl who might be fourteen - are dragged to one side and guarded, hands bound behind their backs. The rest aren't white enough to pass muster, everyone from the two sharecroppers to the businessman's wife who still wears her pearl earrings to the trio of little boys even younger than the girl. As usual, they're dragged off in another direction. Alfred knows he won't be seeing them again.
For the next several weeks he's kept in a labor camp that mostly reminds him of Andersonville. He's half-starved and filthy and his lungs make a funny sound when he breathes too hard, but he's still almost as strong as he used to be. He works with everyone else, whistling "My Country 'Tis of Thee" in the most obnoxious way he knows how and scribbling Kilroy was here on the useless lumps of metal he passes off as artillery shells and counting stars late at night, thinking of the bombers he flew not so long ago and occasionally allowing himself to miss the sky.
When he's dragged back from a mass escape attempt - after leading the Germans on a weeklong chase, thank you very much - he's not really surprised to find Ludwig waiting for him, flanked by tall, solemn men in black SS uniforms.
Mostly he just wonders what took so long.
*
"There are things we need to discuss," Ludwig says for somewhere around the thousandth time.
Alfred sucks in a deep breath - or he would; the wet rattling in his chest is definitely worse now - and part of him takes some small comfort in the fact that he thinks he sees a twitch starting around the other nation's eye. A much larger part of him, coincidentally the part that includes the broken bones and probably some burns and he bets there's internal bleeding going on too, has developed a new and healthy respect for Ivan and Feliks.
He had no idea being invaded hurt this much.
He's got a pretty good idea what Ludwig wants, but there are gaping sores where the mass graves are beginning to appear and there are scars up and down his back from the bombings - and if anyone is going to be using experimental weaponry, if anyone is going to decide where atomic bombs are dropped, it's going to be him.
Berlin is his current target of choice, but only because the East Coast hurts more than the West right now - and anyway, Tokyo is a very close second.
"Know what?" he asks. His smile isn't quite up to movie-star standards - partly because movie stars don't exist anymore and partly because it's missing too many teeth and full of blood and much too savage - but a hero has to be unyielding in the face of impossible odds.
Ludwig considers him for a moment, sighs, and very calmly breaks the rest of his fingers.
*
The advantage to welcoming people from all over the world - some with more reluctance than others, admittedly - is that Alfred is more or less a child of a hundred different nations. There are German soldiers who shoot him anxious sympathetic looks because their second cousins are somewhere in his borders. There are Austrians who furtively ask if he's seen their sisters. There are the occasional Italians who give him extra food because their nephews fought under his flag and served in his armies.
"I'll look for them," he says when he can still talk. "When I'm free, I'll let them know you're here. Promise."
The possibility that he might never escape must know a futile effort when it sees one, as it doesn't bother to cross his mind.
o'er the land of the free [2/2]
anonymous
February 5 2009, 04:13:34 UTC
Alfred thinks he has a decent enough reason for optimism. Matthew is still loose somewhere in the tundra he claims is an ordinary winter, and Lakota and Cherokee and the other nations he suddenly and abashedly realizes he still can't pronounce the names of are out there somewhere - and really, if anyone could survive attempts at annihilation, it's them. The last time he saw Mexico - who has a name he can pronounce, but who refuses to let him call her by it until he gives Texas back - she was arming his soldiers as well as her own and fighting a delaying action somewhere on the California border, because she may hate his guts, but at least he's not condemning the majority of her people to mass extermination.
Last he heard, Arthur's still clinging to his island, stubborn as ever.
That's something, at least.
*
"The bomb," Kiku says.
"Maybe I'll tell Ludwig first," Alfred says - or slurs, really; he's in too much pain to be picky.
He has the satisfaction of seeing the other nation's shift slightly in his chair and thinks, Ha, got you.
"Your navy," Kiku says. "The Pacific fleet."
"Haven't found MacArthur yet?" he asks.
Kiku says nothing.
He doesn't do anything either - he's not as blunt as Ludwig - but Alfred wakes up in the middle of the night, gasping and retching and choking on his own blood, and wonders which one of his cities is burning.
*
The Appalachians are still full of guerilla fighters, as are the national parks. There are still cohesive parts of the Army scattered across the deceptively empty western states.
There are homemade bombs and sabotage in the Rust Belt, deliberately burned fields across Kansas and Nebraska, intelligence passed in Gullah and Navajo, snipers hiding among cotton bales and ruined skyscrapers and amber waves of grain.
Alfred cradles his mangled hand with his relatively uninjured one. One of his eyes is swollen shut and at least a couple of ribs are broken and he can't breathe well unless he sits up and he's pretty sure he's going to start coughing up his lungs with all that blood and it hurts, it hurts to breathe.
He props his head against a cement-block wall and hums to himself - and the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, thinking of nothing in particular.
Ludwig and Kiku don't know him as well as they think. If he did, his cell wouldn't have a window.
Re: o'er the land of the free [2/2]
anonymous
February 5 2009, 04:57:08 UTC
This is incredible, anon. I'm crying over here, and I don't ever just say that. I loved the little details, like the Native American nations and how MacArthur is still running around in the Pacific. I loved how you mentioned what was being done to resist--I can see all of that happening.
And the last line...That's when I started bawling.
Re: o'er the land of the free [2/2]
anonymous
February 5 2009, 05:36:11 UTC
Shit. This is...god, it's amazing and...I don't even know. The optimism and the resistance and the last line and...yes. Thank you for filling this so wonderfully. ;_;
Re: o'er the land of the free [2/2]
anonymous
February 5 2009, 07:10:50 UTC
*whistles* Wow. This is really impressive. I loved all the details of it, the Native American Nations, the Axis soldiers sympathetic to America because of relations, all the little details of the resistance. And then the sky. Lovely work! :D
Re: o'er the land of the free [2/2]
anonymous
February 5 2009, 07:10:55 UTC
BIG DAMN HERO.
*sob*
I was honestly afraid that reading this would hurt, and it did, but...he's alive in this take, he's been invaded but he's still fighting, and "there are homemade bombs and sabotage in the Rust Belt, deliberately burned fields across Kansas and Nebraska, intelligence passed in Gullah and Navajo, snipers hiding among cotton bales and ruined skyscrapers and amber waves of grain," just...a;sldjgfklad. Thanks for not destroying my soul, i.e., for letting America keep some hope and fight in him.
In short, I love this and I love you. Thank you so so much.
apologies for the tardiness of this comment, my computer became infected with viruses of a particularly malicious sort, and thus I did not have a computer for a while. And a kink meme is not the sort of place to visit on a library computer.
--
At first no one realizes that Alfred is, in fact, a country. He's captured after a nasty firefight and a hasty, disorganized retreat across a loading dock and through one bombed-out city or another and down winding Georgia backroads, where he's finally surrounded with a dozen other survivors and told in halting English to put down his weapon.
He and two others - a white-haired man who walks with a limp and a pretty red-haired girl who might be fourteen - are dragged to one side and guarded, hands bound behind their backs. The rest aren't white enough to pass muster, everyone from the two sharecroppers to the businessman's wife who still wears her pearl earrings to the trio of little boys even younger than the girl. As usual, they're dragged off in another direction. Alfred knows he won't be seeing them again.
For the next several weeks he's kept in a labor camp that mostly reminds him of Andersonville. He's half-starved and filthy and his lungs make a funny sound when he breathes too hard, but he's still almost as strong as he used to be. He works with everyone else, whistling "My Country 'Tis of Thee" in the most obnoxious way he knows how and scribbling Kilroy was here on the useless lumps of metal he passes off as artillery shells and counting stars late at night, thinking of the bombers he flew not so long ago and occasionally allowing himself to miss the sky.
When he's dragged back from a mass escape attempt - after leading the Germans on a weeklong chase, thank you very much - he's not really surprised to find Ludwig waiting for him, flanked by tall, solemn men in black SS uniforms.
Mostly he just wonders what took so long.
*
"There are things we need to discuss," Ludwig says for somewhere around the thousandth time.
Alfred sucks in a deep breath - or he would; the wet rattling in his chest is definitely worse now - and part of him takes some small comfort in the fact that he thinks he sees a twitch starting around the other nation's eye. A much larger part of him, coincidentally the part that includes the broken bones and probably some burns and he bets there's internal bleeding going on too, has developed a new and healthy respect for Ivan and Feliks.
He had no idea being invaded hurt this much.
He's got a pretty good idea what Ludwig wants, but there are gaping sores where the mass graves are beginning to appear and there are scars up and down his back from the bombings - and if anyone is going to be using experimental weaponry, if anyone is going to decide where atomic bombs are dropped, it's going to be him.
Berlin is his current target of choice, but only because the East Coast hurts more than the West right now - and anyway, Tokyo is a very close second.
"Know what?" he asks. His smile isn't quite up to movie-star standards - partly because movie stars don't exist anymore and partly because it's missing too many teeth and full of blood and much too savage - but a hero has to be unyielding in the face of impossible odds.
Ludwig considers him for a moment, sighs, and very calmly breaks the rest of his fingers.
*
The advantage to welcoming people from all over the world - some with more reluctance than others, admittedly - is that Alfred is more or less a child of a hundred different nations. There are German soldiers who shoot him anxious sympathetic looks because their second cousins are somewhere in his borders. There are Austrians who furtively ask if he's seen their sisters. There are the occasional Italians who give him extra food because their nephews fought under his flag and served in his armies.
"I'll look for them," he says when he can still talk. "When I'm free, I'll let them know you're here. Promise."
The possibility that he might never escape must know a futile effort when it sees one, as it doesn't bother to cross his mind.
Reply
Last he heard, Arthur's still clinging to his island, stubborn as ever.
That's something, at least.
*
"The bomb," Kiku says.
"Maybe I'll tell Ludwig first," Alfred says - or slurs, really; he's in too much pain to be picky.
He has the satisfaction of seeing the other nation's shift slightly in his chair and thinks, Ha, got you.
"Your navy," Kiku says. "The Pacific fleet."
"Haven't found MacArthur yet?" he asks.
Kiku says nothing.
He doesn't do anything either - he's not as blunt as Ludwig - but Alfred wakes up in the middle of the night, gasping and retching and choking on his own blood, and wonders which one of his cities is burning.
*
The Appalachians are still full of guerilla fighters, as are the national parks. There are still cohesive parts of the Army scattered across the deceptively empty western states.
There are homemade bombs and sabotage in the Rust Belt, deliberately burned fields across Kansas and Nebraska, intelligence passed in Gullah and Navajo, snipers hiding among cotton bales and ruined skyscrapers and amber waves of grain.
Alfred cradles his mangled hand with his relatively uninjured one. One of his eyes is swollen shut and at least a couple of ribs are broken and he can't breathe well unless he sits up and he's pretty sure he's going to start coughing up his lungs with all that blood and it hurts, it hurts to breathe.
He props his head against a cement-block wall and hums to himself - and the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air, thinking of nothing in particular.
Ludwig and Kiku don't know him as well as they think. If he did, his cell wouldn't have a window.
Alfred can still see the sky.
Reply
And the last line...That's when I started bawling.
This is the best piece I've seen here.
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Great job!
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Lovely work! :D
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*sob*
I was honestly afraid that reading this would hurt, and it did, but...he's alive in this take, he's been invaded but he's still fighting, and "there are homemade bombs and sabotage in the Rust Belt, deliberately burned fields across Kansas and Nebraska, intelligence passed in Gullah and Navajo, snipers hiding among cotton bales and ruined skyscrapers and amber waves of grain," just...a;sldjgfklad. Thanks for not destroying my soul, i.e., for letting America keep some hope and fight in him.
In short, I love this and I love you. Thank you so so much.
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AND I LOVE IT
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Seriously, I'm way too amazed and in awe to be coherent right now. J-Just...well done. That was exceptional.
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*bows*
apologies for the tardiness of this comment, my computer became infected with viruses of a particularly malicious sort, and thus I did not have a computer for a while. And a kink meme is not the sort of place to visit on a library computer.
THANK YOU, WRITER!ANON
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