[Fanfiction] States
Title: States
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Genre(s): General/Angst/Humor
Character(s)|Pairing(s): South Korea, Prussia
Rating/Warning(s): R, language, implied violence
Word Count: 1,576
Summary: Originally a kink meme fill - Prussia confronts South Korea on the matter of the origin of “awesome.” Uniform kink and language kink.
The last thing Gilbert was expecting was a 9 mm to the head. The owner of the gun smiled at him, an expression that reminded him eerily of the cute little Italian that his younger brother was shacked up with, but the smile did not quite reach the unblinking, impossibly dark eyes.
“Prussia-씨,” the other nation said quite pleasantly. “Usually, it’s polite to at least knock. Or perhaps if you can, send me an email?”
The current personification of East Germany, once the personification of Prussia, gave a very wry grin, though his almost scarlet eyes betrayed his fury. “What’s this I hear about awesome originating from you?” he asked, cutting to the chase. He momentarily savored the use of his original name but that was hardly enough to mollify him.
“Hands where I can see them,” the Asian nation said quite calmly. He was in military uniform, all deep green with gold stars and ribbons. The kid looked good in it, Gilbert thought grudgingly. He seemed gangly and uncoordinated but he had decent shoulders and once he straightened up…
“Awesomeness does originate from me,” the kid-what was his name again?- said with that frozen, mask-like smile. And it wasn’t like that bastard Ivan’s, all bright and brittle and fucking creepy… no, it was a different sort of creepy. “And I don’t appreciate people breaking into my own house.” The Asian’s lips curled upwards again; it looked way too much like a snarl. “I get touchy about that, you see.”
“Gonna shoot me then?” leered Gilbert. Right. He could bluff. He could bluff his ass off; he’d been at this game longer.
The gun hardly wavered. “It won’t make a difference, you know,” the Asian country said calmly. “I’ve been shot in the head at least twelve times.” He said it far too matter-of-factly to be, well, real.
“Bullshit. You’re fucking kidding me.”
The gun slowly traveled downwards. “This is a standard issue Daewoo K5. It’s has a ‘fast action’ trigger action. I’ve gotten very good scores on my marksmanship tests.” The snarl remained on his face. “Not too different from a bow. And I don’t lie. I never lie.
“I know better than that.”
Gilbert swallowed. The kid was actually making him nervous. Maybe it was the flat-shiny quality of his almost black eyes, like buttons or the scope of a sniper rifle.
“Funny though, my dog usually warns me,” mused the Asian nation after a moment.
“I’m good with animals.”
“…”
“What do you want from me then? An apology? Want me to bow and kiss your feet?”
“An apology is generally a good start.” The gun was pointed right at Gilbert’s knee. Shit, the kid definitely knew where to aim.
“I don’t apologize.”
The click of the gun being cocked; if you didn’t know what to listen for, you would have missed it.
“I’ll take you to the hospital of course,” South Korea said pleasantly. “They know how to take care of people in my hospitals.” He scrutinized the other man carefully. “You’ll be walking out on your own in about a week or so.”
“And if I don’t want to be kneecapped?”
“You can apologize to me for breaking into my home, probably drugging my dog, and being a general 나쁜 새끼 all around.”
“You’re a real prick, you know that?”
“Am I?”
“Mein Gott. Look, I’m sick of this bullshit I’ve been hearing that you’ve been saying about awesome originating from you. Awesomeness is named Gilbert Beillschmicht, asshole.”
“…It’s called email, you know. Your brother has my address.”
“Fuck that!”
The Asian nation gave him a long, steady look and then he smiled again, and this time he did almost look like Russia. “If you want a brawl,” he said, voice deliberately light and mild. “You only had to ask.”
“Put down that gun then.”
“Outside?”
“Sure.”
…
The dog had not in fact been drugged but bounded up to Gilbert happily while Yong-soo stared. No one got along with Cloud like that. No one. But there stood a former European nation scratching her ears while she practically snuggled up to him.
“Good dog. I’m not much one for dogs but she’s… a good one,” Gilbert said, grudgingly.
Yong-soo hid his shock and growing irritation as best he could as he slid his gun back into his holster after putting the safety back on, shrugging off his jacket and carefully placing it on the veranda.
“Best dog in the world,” he said, always one for modesty in face of nation symbols. “진돗개. Go on, Cloud.”
The dog whined a little but trotted off to her little shelter in one corner of the yard, where she gnawed on a rawhide and stared at both of them intently. Yong-soo grinned wickedly as he rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt.
“How good are you?”
“The best of course,” Gilbert replied with an evil grin of his own.
“We’ll see about that.”
…
A few hours later, two nations sat against the wall, sharing a cigarette. Yong-soo had the beginnings of a spectacular black eye and Gilbert’s shirt had definitely seen better days (the bleeding from his nose had stopped a while back). Both of them were probably going to be limping for a while and getting up wasn’t going to be easy.
“You’re not bad,” said the Asian, putting away his lighter.
“Not shabby yourself,” grunted the European, taking a long drag. “You weren’t joking about the shot to the head, were you?”
“Nope.”
“How’s it like?”
“Messy.”
“I figured.”
Yong-soo had a far away look for a moment, his cigarette dangling from his fingers. He exhaled slowly and then said, “There’s a concept in my country that I think might apply to you.”
“What is it?”
“We call it 한.’” The nation grimaced. “It’s hard to translate into other languages. It’s hard to even define it in mine.” He found a stick and scratched out something into the dirt. In the moonlight, Gilbert could make out the symbol.
恨
“Right… ‘han,’” he said, staring at it. It didn’t mean anything to him; how could it?
“It’s about sadness,” Yong-soo said. “But it’s… more than just sadness. It’s about loss. It’s about injustice, pain, despair. It’s about being completely empty…” His voice trailed off.
“Yeah?”
“I know what they did to you, after the war,” the personification of South Korea said simply. “To you and your brother.”
“You don’t know anything.” Gilbert’s voice had become a growl.
“I think I do,” the other nation replied quietly and seriously. “I’m sure that it still haunts you, doesn’t it? Because 한 is all about the past. It’s about those defeats that keep on giving you nightmares, it’s about the humiliation that still makes you see red. It’s about raging about what could have been, what should have been. It’s about knowing that you can’t ever have the single thing that you ever wanted in your life, that it’s beyond your reach, that it’s always been beyond your reach.”
“Shut up.”
“At least you have your brother,” said South Korea. “At least your wall came down. Mine will. It has to.” Underneath his calm voice was something hysterical, something that made a listener squirm in nervous discomfort because it was similar but different to that little kid waiting for a dead father to come home, a dog waiting by the railroad tracks after the train with a coffin had just left.
Gilbert glanced over at the nation still in an expensive dress shirt and dress slacks, at a kid who looked no older than sixteen or seventeen but had eyes like any other nation, eyes that were far too old, had seen too much. Sometimes when you go crazy, you go so far around the bend that you come around the other side. Maybe they were so crazy, they were practically sane. Or so sane that they’d gone crazy, just to try to deal with being sane.
Somehow, he couldn’t bring it in himself to hate the fellow nation sitting next to him, when mentions of his… “time” with Russia by almost anyone else would set him off like a fire cracker.
“Huh. Right. Maybe you’re almost as awesome as me then,” Gilbert said. “You can kick like hell.”
“Maybe you’re almost as awesome as me,” corrected Yong-soo. “You’ve got a good hook.”
They smoked in silence for a few more minutes, until they stubbed out their cigarettes in the dirt and the Korean pulled out his case to get two more.
“And yet… sometimes 한 is about hope,” he mused. “Sometimes it keeps you going, because you just can’t stop.”
Gilbert snorted. “All that in one word?”
“German seems just as bad,” said Yong-soo far too sensibly for an individual who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy.
“You know German?”
“I like languages. Since they all originated in Korea.” The phrase was accompanied by a rather sly wink.
“Go to hell,” said Gilbert, without any rancor. “What kind of words are you referring to anyways?”
“Schadenfreude,” replied Yong-soo promptly. “‘Malicious delight at the misfortune of others.’ Who comes up with that kind of stuff?”
“It works. German doesn’t try to shove twenty different meanings into a set of scribbling.”
“Because you’re an uneducated barbarian,” said Yong-soo cheerfully. “And not the kind with good stats either.”
“Asshole.”
And Yong-soo only laughed, feeling his ribs ache and pulse.
Notes:
-The gun that South Korea has is a standard issue pistol of the ROK military (as well as police forces), a Daewoo K5. Shooting is actually a fairly popular activity in South Korea and let’s consider the fact that military service is compulsory for males…
-Archery is also another fairly popular activity.
-My head canon is now officially that Yong-soo would be incredibly touchy about people going into his house (owing to the situation with North Korea). He does not like people barging into what is his and he will get pretty trigger happy (He and Switzerland would get along in that account I suppose).
-I figure Yong-soo is about the rank of a Colonel at least, though he has ranks in all four divisions of the military (In South Korea, like in the United States, the Marines are considered their own part of the military, not part of the Navy). I’m shite at military knowledge/history so forgive a total neophyte in these sorts of matters.
-Props to anyone who caught a slightly obscure Terry Pratchett reference.
Glossary:
씨 - Pronounced somewhere in between “shi” and “ssi,” a fairly polite form of address equivalent to “Mr./Mrs./Ms.” and equivalent to the Japanese “-san.” In fact, the Korean and Japanese terms are cognates (derived from Chinese).
나쁜 새끼 - “na-poon sae-ki” - literally “bad offspring,” so basically, you’re calling someone an animal. The equivalent would be calling someone a bastard, or a bitch, depending on the gender of the person in question, though “bitch” would be slightly more accurate. Cussing someone out in Korean isn’t very fun when you literally translate the stuff; generally, most insults are improper use of formalities.
-진돗개 - “Jin-do gae” - Jindo dogs, a Korean national symbol. A handsome, medium size hunting dog with somewhat fox-like features and a distinctive curled tail. Prized for good looks, intelligence, and almost frightening loyalty.
恨, 한- “Han” is a Korean concept that’s quite popular in literature, poetry, and various other parts of cultural history. Yong-soo’s musings are pretty much the definitions that are attributed to it from various sources. An American suggested an equivalent word to be “forlorn” but that doesn’t quite encompass it. Really, you can write pages upon pages and it won’t be enough. At the same time, I think it’s something you could attribute to Gilbert, particularly during the Cold War.
Schadenfreude - A German word that means exactly that, as popularized by an Avenue Q song. As a professor of mine put it dryly, “Only the Germans think of things like that.”
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Genre(s): General/Angst/Humor
Character(s)|Pairing(s): South Korea, Prussia
Rating/Warning(s): R, language, implied violence
Word Count: 1,576
Summary: Originally a kink meme fill - Prussia confronts South Korea on the matter of the origin of “awesome.” Uniform kink and language kink.
The last thing Gilbert was expecting was a 9 mm to the head. The owner of the gun smiled at him, an expression that reminded him eerily of the cute little Italian that his younger brother was shacked up with, but the smile did not quite reach the unblinking, impossibly dark eyes.
“Prussia-씨,” the other nation said quite pleasantly. “Usually, it’s polite to at least knock. Or perhaps if you can, send me an email?”
The current personification of East Germany, once the personification of Prussia, gave a very wry grin, though his almost scarlet eyes betrayed his fury. “What’s this I hear about awesome originating from you?” he asked, cutting to the chase. He momentarily savored the use of his original name but that was hardly enough to mollify him.
“Hands where I can see them,” the Asian nation said quite calmly. He was in military uniform, all deep green with gold stars and ribbons. The kid looked good in it, Gilbert thought grudgingly. He seemed gangly and uncoordinated but he had decent shoulders and once he straightened up…
“Awesomeness does originate from me,” the kid-what was his name again?- said with that frozen, mask-like smile. And it wasn’t like that bastard Ivan’s, all bright and brittle and fucking creepy… no, it was a different sort of creepy. “And I don’t appreciate people breaking into my own house.” The Asian’s lips curled upwards again; it looked way too much like a snarl. “I get touchy about that, you see.”
“Gonna shoot me then?” leered Gilbert. Right. He could bluff. He could bluff his ass off; he’d been at this game longer.
The gun hardly wavered. “It won’t make a difference, you know,” the Asian country said calmly. “I’ve been shot in the head at least twelve times.” He said it far too matter-of-factly to be, well, real.
“Bullshit. You’re fucking kidding me.”
The gun slowly traveled downwards. “This is a standard issue Daewoo K5. It’s has a ‘fast action’ trigger action. I’ve gotten very good scores on my marksmanship tests.” The snarl remained on his face. “Not too different from a bow. And I don’t lie. I never lie.
“I know better than that.”
Gilbert swallowed. The kid was actually making him nervous. Maybe it was the flat-shiny quality of his almost black eyes, like buttons or the scope of a sniper rifle.
“Funny though, my dog usually warns me,” mused the Asian nation after a moment.
“I’m good with animals.”
“…”
“What do you want from me then? An apology? Want me to bow and kiss your feet?”
“An apology is generally a good start.” The gun was pointed right at Gilbert’s knee. Shit, the kid definitely knew where to aim.
“I don’t apologize.”
The click of the gun being cocked; if you didn’t know what to listen for, you would have missed it.
“I’ll take you to the hospital of course,” South Korea said pleasantly. “They know how to take care of people in my hospitals.” He scrutinized the other man carefully. “You’ll be walking out on your own in about a week or so.”
“And if I don’t want to be kneecapped?”
“You can apologize to me for breaking into my home, probably drugging my dog, and being a general 나쁜 새끼 all around.”
“You’re a real prick, you know that?”
“Am I?”
“Mein Gott. Look, I’m sick of this bullshit I’ve been hearing that you’ve been saying about awesome originating from you. Awesomeness is named Gilbert Beillschmicht, asshole.”
“…It’s called email, you know. Your brother has my address.”
“Fuck that!”
The Asian nation gave him a long, steady look and then he smiled again, and this time he did almost look like Russia. “If you want a brawl,” he said, voice deliberately light and mild. “You only had to ask.”
“Put down that gun then.”
“Outside?”
“Sure.”
…
The dog had not in fact been drugged but bounded up to Gilbert happily while Yong-soo stared. No one got along with Cloud like that. No one. But there stood a former European nation scratching her ears while she practically snuggled up to him.
“Good dog. I’m not much one for dogs but she’s… a good one,” Gilbert said, grudgingly.
Yong-soo hid his shock and growing irritation as best he could as he slid his gun back into his holster after putting the safety back on, shrugging off his jacket and carefully placing it on the veranda.
“Best dog in the world,” he said, always one for modesty in face of nation symbols. “진돗개. Go on, Cloud.”
The dog whined a little but trotted off to her little shelter in one corner of the yard, where she gnawed on a rawhide and stared at both of them intently. Yong-soo grinned wickedly as he rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt.
“How good are you?”
“The best of course,” Gilbert replied with an evil grin of his own.
“We’ll see about that.”
…
A few hours later, two nations sat against the wall, sharing a cigarette. Yong-soo had the beginnings of a spectacular black eye and Gilbert’s shirt had definitely seen better days (the bleeding from his nose had stopped a while back). Both of them were probably going to be limping for a while and getting up wasn’t going to be easy.
“You’re not bad,” said the Asian, putting away his lighter.
“Not shabby yourself,” grunted the European, taking a long drag. “You weren’t joking about the shot to the head, were you?”
“Nope.”
“How’s it like?”
“Messy.”
“I figured.”
Yong-soo had a far away look for a moment, his cigarette dangling from his fingers. He exhaled slowly and then said, “There’s a concept in my country that I think might apply to you.”
“What is it?”
“We call it 한.’” The nation grimaced. “It’s hard to translate into other languages. It’s hard to even define it in mine.” He found a stick and scratched out something into the dirt. In the moonlight, Gilbert could make out the symbol.
恨
“Right… ‘han,’” he said, staring at it. It didn’t mean anything to him; how could it?
“It’s about sadness,” Yong-soo said. “But it’s… more than just sadness. It’s about loss. It’s about injustice, pain, despair. It’s about being completely empty…” His voice trailed off.
“Yeah?”
“I know what they did to you, after the war,” the personification of South Korea said simply. “To you and your brother.”
“You don’t know anything.” Gilbert’s voice had become a growl.
“I think I do,” the other nation replied quietly and seriously. “I’m sure that it still haunts you, doesn’t it? Because 한 is all about the past. It’s about those defeats that keep on giving you nightmares, it’s about the humiliation that still makes you see red. It’s about raging about what could have been, what should have been. It’s about knowing that you can’t ever have the single thing that you ever wanted in your life, that it’s beyond your reach, that it’s always been beyond your reach.”
“Shut up.”
“At least you have your brother,” said South Korea. “At least your wall came down. Mine will. It has to.” Underneath his calm voice was something hysterical, something that made a listener squirm in nervous discomfort because it was similar but different to that little kid waiting for a dead father to come home, a dog waiting by the railroad tracks after the train with a coffin had just left.
Gilbert glanced over at the nation still in an expensive dress shirt and dress slacks, at a kid who looked no older than sixteen or seventeen but had eyes like any other nation, eyes that were far too old, had seen too much. Sometimes when you go crazy, you go so far around the bend that you come around the other side. Maybe they were so crazy, they were practically sane. Or so sane that they’d gone crazy, just to try to deal with being sane.
Somehow, he couldn’t bring it in himself to hate the fellow nation sitting next to him, when mentions of his… “time” with Russia by almost anyone else would set him off like a fire cracker.
“Huh. Right. Maybe you’re almost as awesome as me then,” Gilbert said. “You can kick like hell.”
“Maybe you’re almost as awesome as me,” corrected Yong-soo. “You’ve got a good hook.”
They smoked in silence for a few more minutes, until they stubbed out their cigarettes in the dirt and the Korean pulled out his case to get two more.
“And yet… sometimes 한 is about hope,” he mused. “Sometimes it keeps you going, because you just can’t stop.”
Gilbert snorted. “All that in one word?”
“German seems just as bad,” said Yong-soo far too sensibly for an individual who looked like a sixteen-year-old boy.
“You know German?”
“I like languages. Since they all originated in Korea.” The phrase was accompanied by a rather sly wink.
“Go to hell,” said Gilbert, without any rancor. “What kind of words are you referring to anyways?”
“Schadenfreude,” replied Yong-soo promptly. “‘Malicious delight at the misfortune of others.’ Who comes up with that kind of stuff?”
“It works. German doesn’t try to shove twenty different meanings into a set of scribbling.”
“Because you’re an uneducated barbarian,” said Yong-soo cheerfully. “And not the kind with good stats either.”
“Asshole.”
And Yong-soo only laughed, feeling his ribs ache and pulse.
Notes:
-The gun that South Korea has is a standard issue pistol of the ROK military (as well as police forces), a Daewoo K5. Shooting is actually a fairly popular activity in South Korea and let’s consider the fact that military service is compulsory for males…
-Archery is also another fairly popular activity.
-My head canon is now officially that Yong-soo would be incredibly touchy about people going into his house (owing to the situation with North Korea). He does not like people barging into what is his and he will get pretty trigger happy (He and Switzerland would get along in that account I suppose).
-I figure Yong-soo is about the rank of a Colonel at least, though he has ranks in all four divisions of the military (In South Korea, like in the United States, the Marines are considered their own part of the military, not part of the Navy). I’m shite at military knowledge/history so forgive a total neophyte in these sorts of matters.
-Props to anyone who caught a slightly obscure Terry Pratchett reference.
Glossary:
씨 - Pronounced somewhere in between “shi” and “ssi,” a fairly polite form of address equivalent to “Mr./Mrs./Ms.” and equivalent to the Japanese “-san.” In fact, the Korean and Japanese terms are cognates (derived from Chinese).
나쁜 새끼 - “na-poon sae-ki” - literally “bad offspring,” so basically, you’re calling someone an animal. The equivalent would be calling someone a bastard, or a bitch, depending on the gender of the person in question, though “bitch” would be slightly more accurate. Cussing someone out in Korean isn’t very fun when you literally translate the stuff; generally, most insults are improper use of formalities.
-진돗개 - “Jin-do gae” - Jindo dogs, a Korean national symbol. A handsome, medium size hunting dog with somewhat fox-like features and a distinctive curled tail. Prized for good looks, intelligence, and almost frightening loyalty.
恨, 한- “Han” is a Korean concept that’s quite popular in literature, poetry, and various other parts of cultural history. Yong-soo’s musings are pretty much the definitions that are attributed to it from various sources. An American suggested an equivalent word to be “forlorn” but that doesn’t quite encompass it. Really, you can write pages upon pages and it won’t be enough. At the same time, I think it’s something you could attribute to Gilbert, particularly during the Cold War.
Schadenfreude - A German word that means exactly that, as popularized by an Avenue Q song. As a professor of mine put it dryly, “Only the Germans think of things like that.”