[fanfic] if happy ever after did exist
Title: if happy ever after did exist
Characters: America, F!Philippines
Warnings: I believe I totally made America OOC and that I no longer understand what I have written. I am sorry.
Summary: You’ve never dreamed of becoming someone’s knight in shining armor.
You’ve never dreamed of becoming someone’s knight in shining armor.
What was the use of wearing fancy armor and wielding crazy-ass swords if you had to do everything under some old fat bearded guy’s flag, anyway? You were born for greatness, you were born to be a hero, damn it, and a hero is only supposed to dance to the tune of his own drum.
You’ve always thought that you were a prince. A prince pretty much was the hero of all those cheesy fairytales that all the ladies loved, wasn’t he? A prince fought under his own flag and got all the girls and could get armor fancier than a knight would ever hope to have, for he was just that awesome. It is for those reasons and more that you are a prince - a prince was also the hero of his own stories, and that’s how you know you were destined to become a prince.
More than anything - although you’ll never deign to admit it to anyone, you’ve thought of yourself as being a prince because you’ve always thought that she would make a wonderful princess.
And the more you thought about it, the more it made sense. Besides, a knight never got the princess in all those stories, right? All a knight was supposed to do was pine and pine and fantasize and protect and maybe die, all for the sake of a princess who he definitely couldn’t marry because, well, royalty looks down on knights marrying princesses and all that, since princesses are obviously meant to be with princes! (You are so going to remind Alejandro about that one of these days. That is, that’s what you’re going to do, if only both your parents didn’t happen to be on opposite sides of an unspoken war. A shame, a pity.)
When you grow into your breeches and your vests and grow old enough to throw out the play swords, grow old and angry enough to switch them with real blades, you pull the ground out of England’s feet, rip off his crown and show him his place. You have no room for imperialists and oppression, and so you tell him goodbye with bullets and bloody blades underneath a raging curtain of rainfall.
You remain the prince for no other reason than that you know you are too young and too un-hairy to become a king, and because being a prince is awesome. Now that you have finally freed yourself from the trappings of being a prince operating under the whims of a stuffy bushy-browed old king, you decide to set forth and do what it is that you have always wanted to do.
That’s why you set forth and take her, after a century or so had passed. You swipe her out of her father’s hands like the gallant princes who save princesses from dungeons and evil demons. (She never has to know about the Treaty, however - and besides, even princes had to follow the rules of dowries, didn’t they?) You take her in your arms and swear to her, in the lines that all princes use, that you will always love her and that you will never leave her.
This is true, however, to at least a degree. You love her like you love Puerto Rico, and Guam, and Hawaii and even your brother’s silly friend Cuba, and so you take them all in one fell swoop without them even knowing. You love them so you take them under your wing; you grasp them tightly in your hands so you’ll never lose them. You never leave them because you want to forever stay at their side, always guiding and protecting them, always waiting for them to get better.
Maybe you actually do know, somewhere deep in the charred black remains of what used to be your perfectly normal heart that they would never get better. They would never get better because you say your “I love you”s with guns and show them how much you care for them with bullets, because you teach them the ways of the world in the same way you stole away the world itself; by brute and relentless force, with sheer unbridled aggression.
But most importantly, you know that the more you grip her tight in your hand, the more she slips from your fingers.
That’s why when she - they sprinkle out of your grasp, little by little, you are not surprised.
You are not surprised and that’s why you are perfectly to call them back to your gilded mansion, to your prince’s arms, to your American Dream. That’s why you continue wooing them with arson, why you continue proposing to them with bloodshed.
It goes on and on until they get sick of your antics, of your ministrations, of your self-professed love. You convince yourself that it doesn’t matter to you that they’ve left you, that it doesn’t matter remembering war-worn memories of ungrateful colonies who had the gall to proclaim themselves nations. This is what you decide on doing, until she looks at you and you actually look back, as in really look at each other, for the first time since she raised her gun against you and demanded independence years ago.
Spain had ‘raised’ her, you had ‘loved’ her, and Japan had ‘saved’ her, but still she stands in front of you, so frail and yet so strong. Years of turmoil did nothing to quell the tenacity etched in her brow, the resiliency sunk in her frame, the fire inextinguishable from her dark eyes. She should be shying away from your gaze, she should be begging you to take her back, she should not be looking past you, moving on and leaving you to mull on broken dreams of failed imperialism.
Before, you had thought that she had been someone you had to save, someone you had to protect with bloodied blades and guns with barrels worn from being shot too many times. But right now, as she marches past you, holding that cloth with blue and red and yellow, holding her peoples’ sun and stars and peace and war, she is as fierce and sharp as any queen Russia may or may not have used to annihilate you on a chessboard. She has never been frail enough, weak enough to be boxed in a silly title like ‘princess’, and right now you know that as well.
It this then that it dawns on you that this was never a fairytale in the first place. You are not a prince. She is not a princess. She is not, and will never be, your princess.
And even if it was, if you, Alfred F. Jones, were ever a prince, it only meant that you were doomed to destroy each and every person you ever claimed to love.
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fin.
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A/N: Okay. I seriously do not know what this is I have made. I am sorry. I am very, very sorry. This didn’t turn out the way I expected it to be. Urgh.
This comes from a Homestuck principle where a 'Prince' is apparently a 'destroyer'. So if you were a Prince of Hope, you destroyed all hope. So on and so forth.
Happy Independence Day, Philippines. This isn’t my actual independence piece, though…if you could see me on tumblr, you would be able to pick up on what exactly I am going to be writing next. =3