Girl Next Door [1/4]
anonymous
April 19 2009, 10:12:58 UTC
The first time she sees him, he's sitting on the front porch of her parents' house for no good reason, looking around as if the faint rolls and slopes in the land under an almost-full moon are the most fascinating things he's ever seen.
She gives him a silent count to five before she hits him with a broom.
"Ow!" He manages not to roll off the steps - a miracle, with all that flailing - but somehow ends up tilting his head back and peering up at her upside-down. It makes the kicked-puppy expression he gives her look just a little ridiculous. "What was that for?"
"For sitting on my porch in the middle of the night for no good reason." She puts her free hand on her hip, holding the broom at ready with the other. "And keep your voice down," she adds. "If you wake my parents up, I'll do worse."
The boy - because he really is only a few years older than her - claps his hand over his mouth as if to physically stifle his voice. He also twists around so he can look at her right-side-up, or maybe so his glasses will stop trying to slide up his forehead. "What's your name?"
She raises her broom threateningly.
He scuttles off the porch and hurries away, good-natured laughter carrying on the warm thick summer air.
"Hmph," she says, and then turns on her heel and marches back into the house.
*
The second time is in the middle of the war.
She is older now - old enough that she works in the factories and has her share of soldiers looking at her admiringly - and she's quite forgotten about the boy on her parents' porch until he taps her on the shoulder and ducks into her line of vision.
He's one of those people who hardly ages at all. She spends a happy moment hating him for it before she thwaps him with her purse. "Don't do that."
"Sorry," he says cheerfully. He's still much taller than her, for all that she's wearing heels this time, and he looks like he belongs in a bomber somewhere over the Pacific.
He's handsome. She'll give him that.
He also seems determined to follow her, falling into step with her and offering his arm in a way that seems just a little old-fashioned, so she ignores it. "What are you doing now?"
"Visiting a friend," she says. "You?"
"Waiting for my boss to tell me what to do." He makes a face. "I was bored and I thought I'd look around, and when I saw you I remembered you from the porch."
"I remember you too," she says. "Trespasser."
He doesn't seem to hear her. "So I have some time until my boss figures out where to send me. Do you want to have lunch?"
She stares at him. "I hit you."
"Yeah, but it wasn't that hard." He tries to kicked-puppy routine again, which is really far more effective when it's right-side-up. "Just lunch wouldn't hurt, right? I'll pay."
"Of course you'll pay," she says, annoyance outweighed by the fact that he did offer her his arm, old-fashioned or not - that, and she's not the type to say no to a free lunch. "And just this once."
"Sounds good to me," he says.
Somehow - right at that moment - she knows that there's going to be a second lunch, and possibly a third and a fourth and maybe a dinner or two, and dancing if she has anything to say about it, which of course she will.
Girl Next Door [2/4]
anonymous
April 19 2009, 10:14:57 UTC
"Who in the world are you?" she asks.
He shifts in his seat. One of the things she rather likes about him is that he can't lie to save his life. "Um."
She quirks an eyebrow.
"I'll tell you after the war," he says.
*
Sometime in the Fifties - several dozen lunches and dinners and dances and other things later - he does.
"You're America," she says, after a moment.
He shuffles his feet.
"You're America."
He looks from side to side as if hunting for an escape route, before finally settling on, "Um. Maybe?"
"I have America dating me."
"You can call me Alfred if you want," he says helpfully.
She decides hitting her country would be unproductive - because somehow it doesn't occur to her that he's lying - and settles for putting her hands on her hips. "Why me? Why not a movie star or something? Am I special?"
"No," he says - so quickly that it doesn't occur to her to be angry, because he so clearly means it as a compliment. "No, you're just you."
"Then why?"
He shakes his head. "I don't know."
No, of course he wouldn't. She leans on her doorjamb and rubs the bridge of her nose. "Do you do this to other girls?"
"I don't cheat."
"Of course not. I'd kill you if you did." She dismisses the fact that she's threatening her country - who, to be fair, is striking her as too dim to notice - and makes herself look right at him without so much as blinking. "I mean other girls before."
"Oh," he says, and then his expression changes into something careful and soft. "Yeah, sometimes. Mostly girls, anyway."
Oh. Well, then.
She kicks her leg out, stopping just short of his shin, and wonders what her friends will say if they see her out with him. The rumors will be interesting, at least.
"All right," she agrees. "Dinner."
His face splits into a wide grin - he is very handsome - and he darts forward and kisses her cheek before she can stop him.
"I hope you like hamburgers," he says.
She doesn't know whether to laugh or scold him.
*
The world changes. She gets older. The rest of her friends marry and she is the maid of honor and the bridesmaid and isn't exactly jealous, not really.
Her mother begins to hint that she wants more grandchildren. They fight about that.
She tries seeing other people - ordinary people, people like her, who don't swat her hands away when she tries to fix crooked glasses and tell her in all seriousness to stop adjusting Texas. It never works. It's her, not them.
In many ways, there is something terribly unfair about dating a country.
She meets the family, as much as Alfred can have a family in the regular sense of the word. She smiles politely at his brother and chokes down his father's cooking with as much grace as she can and tells his, er, other father that if he doesn't keeping his hands to himself she's going to permanently damage certain vital regions. There is something giddily wonderfully surreal about the whole mess.
Throughout the Sixties her turns up on her doorstep battered and bruised time after time, not looking the least bit contrite. She rolls her eyes at him and bandages him up as best she can - and then sees him off to Vietnam or waves off his bus as it heads south or tells him to not try anything that stupid with Cuba again, for Pete's sake.
"You're pretty good at this," he says once.
She's sure he means the lifestyle - the sideways way of thinking the comes with having a nation sitting in her kitchen, wolfing down eggs and feeding toast to her dog when he thinks she's not looking and occasionally wrapping his arms around her when she's trying to do something useful like beat the broken faucet into submission, the talking about the good and bad done in the world as if every complexity can be boiled down into an argument between neighbors.
"Of course I'm good at this," she says, and pretends he means her first aid. "I have practice. You're a walking disaster."
He grins at her. She does not blush, just to make a point.
Girl Next Door [3/4]
anonymous
April 19 2009, 10:17:10 UTC
"You were always so driven when you were little," her mother says before she dies. "I wonder what happened to you."
She touches her temples, runs her fingers over the first really visible traces of silver and gray. "Nothing I'm sorry about," she says.
Most of the time she even means it.
*
He slouches across her sofa, still looking for all the world like he's nineteen years old. He could pass as her son, now.
"This is such a mess," he says, never taking his eyes from the news. "I've never had a boss resign before."
"You'll survive," she says - less rude and unsympathetic than she sounds, because they both know it's true.
He slides down the sofa slowly, as if he's trying to melt off it, and makes a pathetic little noise that might be "ow." If she didn't know any better, she would think he's hung over.
She kicks at his feet until he shuffles them over - still making little pained noises under his breath - and sits at the edge of the sofa. "You look terrible," she says.
"You try having your boss resign. This is worse than Johnson."
"I wouldn't know," she says. She's never actually met the various presidents, just the others countries; she suspects the assorted "bosses" have never known she or any of the others before her exist, and she'd be annoyed about that if she didn't understand the reasoning behind it.
He slumps even further on the sofa - really, it's a miracle he doesn't just slide off it - and makes a motion as if to lean on her shoulder, although he's slouched so much that he's closer to the general vicinity of her waist.
"Knock me over and I'm making you sleep on the porch," she says.
He grins up at her, around what's probably an overexaggerated wince.
Girl Next Door [4/4]
anonymous
April 19 2009, 10:21:37 UTC
By the Eighties her hair is entirely gray. Her face is lined and her skin sags against her bones, but she refuses to try to disguise any of it. She is and always has been a proud, stubborn woman.
She does start refusing the offers to go to dinner, though.
"People will think I'm robbing the cradle," she says tartly right at the end of the decade, even though she supposes it's the other way around.
He frowns at her - still much taller than her, still exactly the same. "Since when do you care what people think?"
She presses her hands against his chest and shoves - hard - and doesn't even care that he looks at her like she's punched him in the stomach.
"You don't like me anymore?" he asks quietly.
She holds her clenched hands tight against her sides and sets her jaw and looks away. "You're a good person," she says. "You're a moron, but you're a good person and I love you for it."
He waits, silent. She can almost see the physical effort it's taking for him not to say something, but he doesn't - and yes, God help her, he really is a decent human being, whatever else he is, and he probably really wouldn't care about what the neighbors think or the gossip or that she is well into her sixth decade.
That doesn't make things any better.
"I'm not just a person," he says finally.
She nods.
"You don't like that, do you?"
"I don't mind it," she says, and is half-terrified to realize that she means it. "It's just that I thought I'd be a grandmother now. I thought there'd be someone getting old with me and you - you don't. It's lonely like this."
He seems to deflate before her eyes, folding in on himself. She can't make herself comfort him.
"Aren't you used to it by now?" she asks, visions of the others he told her about decades ago flashing through her mind. "Losing us?" Maybe she shouldn't ask - but she's never been quiet, never one to hold her tongue, and she knows that if she had run crying for her brothers instead of bashing him on the head with her broom, she wouldn't be where she is now.
He looks at her, appalled. "Why would I be used to it?"
"Because." She doesn't know exactly when she sighs and takes for his hand, thin fingers curling as far around his palm as she can reach. "You're hopeless."
"You're still mean to me," he says, but he smiles a little.
She remembers him spinning her around just a few months ago to celebrate the end of the Cold War - a mix of him belting out "we are the champions!" and her telling him that song is terrible and put her down - and wonders what it would be like to have squabbles that aren't international incidents and dinner guests who don't introduce themselves by geography.
"Of course I am," she says. "Someone has to be."
"I can get dinner. Takeout or something."
"No hamburgers," she says, in no particular hope that he'll listen to her.
Hopeless man. Country. Whatever.
*
She looks at the Christmas cards decorating the mantle - except France's, because it's obscene - and wonders if she can make fast food presentable on the good china and silently prays that the newest president won't inspire certain countries to take up the saxophone.
It isn't what she wanted - not any of it, not really.
Re: Girl Next Door [4/4]
anonymous
April 19 2009, 20:03:24 UTC
This was wonderfully, beautifully written. I love the caustic-humored, blunt OC, who really is incredibly endearing and very much human. I love Alfred's puppy dog personality but his genuine, almost heart-breaking dedication to this woman, despite the fact that he surely must know that she will grow old and die. It seems very much Alfred to do that. -wipes a tear from the corner of an eye-
The mentions of other nations are quite hilarious, particularly France, down to that last parting shot of an obscene Christmas card. I loved it! I loved it in all of its bittersweet, powerful glory.
Re: Girl Next Door [4/4]
anonymous
April 20 2009, 04:23:21 UTC
Ya had me grinning like an idiot throughout the entire story. Very very well written and very very amusing. I absolutely adore the lighthearted tone used throughout the entire story.
Personally, I don't care much for OCs but you managed to pull off an OC who is not only believable but also very enjoyable. In all the years of reading fanfics, I've rarely found an OC to be likable but you managed to pull it off. Thank you so much for the good read. =)
Re: Girl Next Door [4/4]
anonymous
April 20 2009, 06:19:34 UTC
Oh, anon, this was fanstastic. I love the sense of time passing both on a personal level and at a historical level (and the way that the two inevitably intersect). I loved how wonderfully practical your OC was, grounded and sensible in a way that made her a great foil to Alfred.
She gives him a silent count to five before she hits him with a broom.
"Ow!" He manages not to roll off the steps - a miracle, with all that flailing - but somehow ends up tilting his head back and peering up at her upside-down. It makes the kicked-puppy expression he gives her look just a little ridiculous. "What was that for?"
"For sitting on my porch in the middle of the night for no good reason." She puts her free hand on her hip, holding the broom at ready with the other. "And keep your voice down," she adds. "If you wake my parents up, I'll do worse."
The boy - because he really is only a few years older than her - claps his hand over his mouth as if to physically stifle his voice. He also twists around so he can look at her right-side-up, or maybe so his glasses will stop trying to slide up his forehead. "What's your name?"
She raises her broom threateningly.
He scuttles off the porch and hurries away, good-natured laughter carrying on the warm thick summer air.
"Hmph," she says, and then turns on her heel and marches back into the house.
*
The second time is in the middle of the war.
She is older now - old enough that she works in the factories and has her share of soldiers looking at her admiringly - and she's quite forgotten about the boy on her parents' porch until he taps her on the shoulder and ducks into her line of vision.
He's one of those people who hardly ages at all. She spends a happy moment hating him for it before she thwaps him with her purse. "Don't do that."
"Sorry," he says cheerfully. He's still much taller than her, for all that she's wearing heels this time, and he looks like he belongs in a bomber somewhere over the Pacific.
He's handsome. She'll give him that.
He also seems determined to follow her, falling into step with her and offering his arm in a way that seems just a little old-fashioned, so she ignores it. "What are you doing now?"
"Visiting a friend," she says. "You?"
"Waiting for my boss to tell me what to do." He makes a face. "I was bored and I thought I'd look around, and when I saw you I remembered you from the porch."
"I remember you too," she says. "Trespasser."
He doesn't seem to hear her. "So I have some time until my boss figures out where to send me. Do you want to have lunch?"
She stares at him. "I hit you."
"Yeah, but it wasn't that hard." He tries to kicked-puppy routine again, which is really far more effective when it's right-side-up. "Just lunch wouldn't hurt, right? I'll pay."
"Of course you'll pay," she says, annoyance outweighed by the fact that he did offer her his arm, old-fashioned or not - that, and she's not the type to say no to a free lunch. "And just this once."
"Sounds good to me," he says.
Somehow - right at that moment - she knows that there's going to be a second lunch, and possibly a third and a fourth and maybe a dinner or two, and dancing if she has anything to say about it, which of course she will.
She doesn't mind all that much.
*
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He shifts in his seat. One of the things she rather likes about him is that he can't lie to save his life. "Um."
She quirks an eyebrow.
"I'll tell you after the war," he says.
*
Sometime in the Fifties - several dozen lunches and dinners and dances and other things later - he does.
"You're America," she says, after a moment.
He shuffles his feet.
"You're America."
He looks from side to side as if hunting for an escape route, before finally settling on, "Um. Maybe?"
"I have America dating me."
"You can call me Alfred if you want," he says helpfully.
She decides hitting her country would be unproductive - because somehow it doesn't occur to her that he's lying - and settles for putting her hands on her hips. "Why me? Why not a movie star or something? Am I special?"
"No," he says - so quickly that it doesn't occur to her to be angry, because he so clearly means it as a compliment. "No, you're just you."
"Then why?"
He shakes his head. "I don't know."
No, of course he wouldn't. She leans on her doorjamb and rubs the bridge of her nose. "Do you do this to other girls?"
"I don't cheat."
"Of course not. I'd kill you if you did." She dismisses the fact that she's threatening her country - who, to be fair, is striking her as too dim to notice - and makes herself look right at him without so much as blinking. "I mean other girls before."
"Oh," he says, and then his expression changes into something careful and soft. "Yeah, sometimes. Mostly girls, anyway."
Oh. Well, then.
She kicks her leg out, stopping just short of his shin, and wonders what her friends will say if they see her out with him. The rumors will be interesting, at least.
"All right," she agrees. "Dinner."
His face splits into a wide grin - he is very handsome - and he darts forward and kisses her cheek before she can stop him.
"I hope you like hamburgers," he says.
She doesn't know whether to laugh or scold him.
*
The world changes. She gets older. The rest of her friends marry and she is the maid of honor and the bridesmaid and isn't exactly jealous, not really.
Her mother begins to hint that she wants more grandchildren. They fight about that.
She tries seeing other people - ordinary people, people like her, who don't swat her hands away when she tries to fix crooked glasses and tell her in all seriousness to stop adjusting Texas. It never works. It's her, not them.
In many ways, there is something terribly unfair about dating a country.
She meets the family, as much as Alfred can have a family in the regular sense of the word. She smiles politely at his brother and chokes down his father's cooking with as much grace as she can and tells his, er, other father that if he doesn't keeping his hands to himself she's going to permanently damage certain vital regions. There is something giddily wonderfully surreal about the whole mess.
Throughout the Sixties her turns up on her doorstep battered and bruised time after time, not looking the least bit contrite. She rolls her eyes at him and bandages him up as best she can - and then sees him off to Vietnam or waves off his bus as it heads south or tells him to not try anything that stupid with Cuba again, for Pete's sake.
"You're pretty good at this," he says once.
She's sure he means the lifestyle - the sideways way of thinking the comes with having a nation sitting in her kitchen, wolfing down eggs and feeding toast to her dog when he thinks she's not looking and occasionally wrapping his arms around her when she's trying to do something useful like beat the broken faucet into submission, the talking about the good and bad done in the world as if every complexity can be boiled down into an argument between neighbors.
"Of course I'm good at this," she says, and pretends he means her first aid. "I have practice. You're a walking disaster."
He grins at her. She does not blush, just to make a point.
*
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She touches her temples, runs her fingers over the first really visible traces of silver and gray. "Nothing I'm sorry about," she says.
Most of the time she even means it.
*
He slouches across her sofa, still looking for all the world like he's nineteen years old. He could pass as her son, now.
"This is such a mess," he says, never taking his eyes from the news. "I've never had a boss resign before."
"You'll survive," she says - less rude and unsympathetic than she sounds, because they both know it's true.
He slides down the sofa slowly, as if he's trying to melt off it, and makes a pathetic little noise that might be "ow." If she didn't know any better, she would think he's hung over.
She kicks at his feet until he shuffles them over - still making little pained noises under his breath - and sits at the edge of the sofa. "You look terrible," she says.
"You try having your boss resign. This is worse than Johnson."
"I wouldn't know," she says. She's never actually met the various presidents, just the others countries; she suspects the assorted "bosses" have never known she or any of the others before her exist, and she'd be annoyed about that if she didn't understand the reasoning behind it.
He slumps even further on the sofa - really, it's a miracle he doesn't just slide off it - and makes a motion as if to lean on her shoulder, although he's slouched so much that he's closer to the general vicinity of her waist.
"Knock me over and I'm making you sleep on the porch," she says.
He grins up at her, around what's probably an overexaggerated wince.
And he's still as handsome as before, damn him.
*
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She does start refusing the offers to go to dinner, though.
"People will think I'm robbing the cradle," she says tartly right at the end of the decade, even though she supposes it's the other way around.
He frowns at her - still much taller than her, still exactly the same. "Since when do you care what people think?"
She presses her hands against his chest and shoves - hard - and doesn't even care that he looks at her like she's punched him in the stomach.
"You don't like me anymore?" he asks quietly.
She holds her clenched hands tight against her sides and sets her jaw and looks away. "You're a good person," she says. "You're a moron, but you're a good person and I love you for it."
He waits, silent. She can almost see the physical effort it's taking for him not to say something, but he doesn't - and yes, God help her, he really is a decent human being, whatever else he is, and he probably really wouldn't care about what the neighbors think or the gossip or that she is well into her sixth decade.
That doesn't make things any better.
"I'm not just a person," he says finally.
She nods.
"You don't like that, do you?"
"I don't mind it," she says, and is half-terrified to realize that she means it. "It's just that I thought I'd be a grandmother now. I thought there'd be someone getting old with me and you - you don't. It's lonely like this."
He seems to deflate before her eyes, folding in on himself. She can't make herself comfort him.
"Aren't you used to it by now?" she asks, visions of the others he told her about decades ago flashing through her mind. "Losing us?" Maybe she shouldn't ask - but she's never been quiet, never one to hold her tongue, and she knows that if she had run crying for her brothers instead of bashing him on the head with her broom, she wouldn't be where she is now.
He looks at her, appalled. "Why would I be used to it?"
"Because." She doesn't know exactly when she sighs and takes for his hand, thin fingers curling as far around his palm as she can reach. "You're hopeless."
"You're still mean to me," he says, but he smiles a little.
She remembers him spinning her around just a few months ago to celebrate the end of the Cold War - a mix of him belting out "we are the champions!" and her telling him that song is terrible and put her down - and wonders what it would be like to have squabbles that aren't international incidents and dinner guests who don't introduce themselves by geography.
"Of course I am," she says. "Someone has to be."
"I can get dinner. Takeout or something."
"No hamburgers," she says, in no particular hope that he'll listen to her.
Hopeless man. Country. Whatever.
*
She looks at the Christmas cards decorating the mantle - except France's, because it's obscene - and wonders if she can make fast food presentable on the good china and silently prays that the newest president won't inspire certain countries to take up the saxophone.
It isn't what she wanted - not any of it, not really.
She decides that maybe she's okay with that.
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I laughed whenever you mentioned the other countries france XD
It reminded me of Benjamin Button and The Notebook >w<
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Thanks for filling my request! ♥♥♥♥♥
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The mentions of other nations are quite hilarious, particularly France, down to that last parting shot of an obscene Christmas card. I loved it! I loved it in all of its bittersweet, powerful glory.
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Personally, I don't care much for OCs but you managed to pull off an OC who is not only believable but also very enjoyable. In all the years of reading fanfics, I've rarely found an OC to be likable but you managed to pull it off. Thank you so much for the good read. =)
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