Attainder by Process
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I get to write ghostsex again! This makes what, four times? Five if you count Albert and Eleanor’s thing?
Anyway, another one for aph_rarexchange.
Title: Attainder By Process
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England, some Parliamentarians, the severed head of Oliver Cromwell, and the ghost of Rome.
Original prompt: I would LOVE to see ghost!Rome and either Imperial!England or Modern!England get it on (not necessarily in a naughty way, but that's fine too).
Words: 3000
Rating: Hard, cold and dead R. Heads on pikes and sex with incorporeal people levels of R.
Warnings: Grotesque imagery, bad puns, and some things that cannot be exhumed.
Summary: 30 and 31 January, 1661. England chooses to pursue his childhood dreams of Empire at the cost of so much else. A head on a pike would like to warn him about precisely what the price will be.
Attainder By Process
30 January, A.D. 1661
The whole way home from Tyburn, snow melts as soon as it touches England’s shoulders. God, the warmth that’s flooded him, a delirious and greedy warmth that leaves him sweating in his cloak and sets the hood slipping down his hair. Every time he pulls it back up the static mistreats his hair, animates it, makes it cling to the wool like ivy vines.
He blames the streets, and the people in them, and their contagious jubilation. London gets hot over a good hanging, and this wasn’t just a good hanging, this was a good hanging of a man who was already dead, long before they strapped him to a coach and dragged him through the streets. England’s always thought the streets themselves rather hungry. It stands to reason that, as he walks, most of Cromwell’s blood is gone-though he can’t have shed much, being several years dead.
“And what of his children,” they had asked, in Parliament, in summary, in the name of God and King Charles II. “His wife, and theirs, and all who remain?”
“He himself was no king,” others had answered. “Let none reap the benefits of his despotism. Let the brood pay the debt of the father, as it has been for all the issue of England.”
And England had laughed with the rest.
But truly, a good hanging-a celebration of the seat of the divine, having returned to England in the form of a King once again. Why, even England’s dissidents will yield more readily to a King-England thinks on the colonies in the New World, those he’ll wrangle from Holland soon enough now that he can see a little straighter. England feels lighter, breathes deeper, to consider how few obstacles lay before him now that he’s not standing in his own way.
The path carved by the corpse through the snow and slush is clean, the cobblestones contoured but not quite visible beneath. England walks it to its end, wonders if the severed head is still watching, sightless and bound shut with twine, from its pike at the other end of the city.
And Cromwell had asked him, once, “Or are you the whore of Rome?” when England was bound on his knees and exposed and unable to answer him yes or no. Cromwell had asked him again and again, in some form or another, until he took his power and actualised it, gained the right to reopen those scars with all the rest. England had ceded to him, capitulated to him, let a human reenact and reconstruct what a Nation had done.
His house is even warmer than his streets, somehow, despite the January chill and all its portents. He hangs up his cloak and shakes off his boots and pats down his hair where the wool and wind have rubbed it to spidery, grasping tendrils. He laughs as the static shocks his fingers, pats it down and rakes his nails through it and scratches his eyebrows to rule them just the same.
The image of Scotland in his cage hits England like a vision from God.
And that’s only the first of it, the best and most sudden-Wales, entombed in his library in the monastery of a faith he hates, follows that image like thunder after lightning. Jamaica, turning his back on Spain-Spain, spilling as many bloodstained teeth as gold ingots, staining the water for the sharks to feed on-Holland, wasting away to nothing and leaving England dust to bribe the natives with, all of his lands and all of his ships and all of his people. The Indies in their chains. Asia opening to him. France in ruins. Ireland tearing herself in twain.
It occurs to England that there is more water on Earth than land, and that he, in the name of his King and all Kings before him, is master of the seas.
He is still laughing when he goes upstairs to the cabinet he’s let all the liquor and excesses out of since Cromwell’s death, still laughing as he pours himself something generous that heats him from the inside out, still laughing as he collapses into his largest chair and looks out the window, down the street with the sight of a Nation. If he squints, if he focuses past the humans and the crowd and the snow, he can still see the severed head.
“More than you know,” he says, in answer to a question the man asked while he was still alive. “Well, I suppose you know now, how deep it goes.” He raises his glass and toasts, thrusting the glass forward. “You thought to make me stronger, Lord Protector, and oh, didst thou achieve,” he adds, slipping, drinking first the liquor and after that the burn it leaves behind. “Whether I had the strength at the first, I suppose we can’t be certain-but the drive, oh now, the drive is driven in.”
Through the heat, the severed head asks England, And what drive is this, beloved Commonwealth?
“Commonwealth no longer,” England corrects, smirking at it to flaunt his teeth. “And Beloved, that is to what thy soul can feel. Have the fires of hell afforded thee any comfort?”
None so great as those thou once afforded me.
“I only exhume the ones I love,” England taunts, and drinks again.
And attaint?
“The ones who pretend at loving me,” he says. The glass does not rest on the cushioned hide arm of the chair, and so England holds it in place.
The severed head does not blink or anything of the kind, but the shadows within it effulge and darken what remain of Cromwell’s eyes. My love for my Nation was true, however long in the coming.
“And that Nation was Commonwealth, and I am not he.”
And to what drive have I spurred thee?
“That which I held before I knew thee,” England says, and feels the chair envelop him. “Dominion and Empire, the likes of which the world has never known, nor shall again.”
If it is possible for a trunkless head, three years in the grave and six hours on a pike, to exhibit shock and derision, this head has done. An aim worthy of you.
“I should hope so,” England snaps, “having held it a thousand years or more.”
And what did thy tormentors think of that? The head does not sound smug-Cromwell himself so rarely did-but the tone is far from accepting.
“Cause for harm,” England admits without a second thought, “and duly so-and those who feared it least found it endearing.”
Rome.
“Yes.”
Rome fell.
“And left me with instructions to stay myself from the same,” England says. He drinks, again, and the heat is welling up behind his eyes now. Perhaps it is not joy, but fever. “My god, that I heard those words for caution-that I took them to dissuade me from the pursuit of Empire at all! Folly, all of it. And by your hand, I see it clear.”
The wrinkles of the head’s bloodless brow deepen just as the eyes had, sunk in on themselves with water and snow and the people’s hate. And what does my Nation see?
The window is dark, that peculiar opacity that affords reflections from the inside and scrutiny from out. England sees past the head to his own shadow, reclined in his chair as if he, not Charles II, rules these streets.
“I see an Empire of trade,” he says. “I see the people I conquer not as citizens but subjects abroad, bound to their own lands as fiercely as I but compelled by love to serve me. I see them neither subsumed nor subjugated-subject to influence, yes, and rule, but I shall be no tyrant unto them. Oh, but to my foes I think I shall be terrible indeed-it was a thought of Scotland that reminded me, you know. Your gift of my brother, of that which I thought I lacked the strength to take myself. It showed me, that perhaps I could have, if not with brawn then cunning, and cunning I suppose you have sharpened in me, dulled as it was in my years since Rome. He taught me with that in mind, you know, and I was just a child-taught me to best him by the means afforded by my own disadvantage.”
“Which it looks like you’ve outgrown, my boy.”
The jaw of Cromwell’s head is bound shut with twine-or had been, and is hanging open now on the few threads of flesh that bind it to the rest, and Rome is smirking out of it, a second set of sharper, cleaner, straighter teeth behind the first.
England holds on tight to his glass and the arm of the chair, and does not dare move beyond speaking. “Please tell me you haven’t always been there.”
“I’d be lying if I said I was,” Rome says, and England can see deeper into the corpse now, not just the teeth but the strong red tongue behind, spectral and translucent but indisputably there. “I mean, you only just called me up. How’s life, Britannia?”
“No one calls me that since you,” England corrects, over the shock enough to loosen his grip on the glass and take a sip. “How’s death, Roma Antiqua?”
“That’s what they call me now?” Rome tsks, his lips huffing against Cromwell’s from the inside. “It’s not so bad. Drop in on my grandkids a couple of times a century, pull ‘em out of a few scrapes-bet you know how scary a ghost can be if you do it right.”
“Better than many.” God, either this drink’s taken him quick or not quickly enough. It’s beastly in here, no longer warm, but hot all over like only the worst summers.
“Ha! So am I doing it right?”
“I’ll admit to being somewhat disturbed,” England says-and oh, there’s no more drink. A pity. “I was talking to that head, after all.”
Rome cheers, and that’s by far the strangest sound to ever come out of Cromwell’s mouth. “Sorry if I was interrupting your tête-à-tête. Get it? Tête-à-tête? It’s funny because he’s only got a face, and not much of one at that. I picked up the French when my littlest was staying over there.”
England winces. “You’ll forgive me if that’s the last thing I want to hear coming out of your mouth.”
“What, humor?”
“French.”
“Glad to see you still despise the little bastard,” Rome says, and Cromwell’s head tilts sideways, enough that England can see deeper in than he ever wanted to. “You mind if I actually come out of this thing?”
“Be my guest.”
The spectre passes through Cromwell’s lips like a snake casting off its skin; since the head was never precisely there to begin with, it melts into the glass of the window, thickening it to almost solid black. Rome, for his part, is looking quite well as dead men go, older than England remembers and copiously wounded in the chest and abdomen. Frozen gangrene crawls up out of the gash and past the neck of his cuirass, but other than that and a few grey hairs he looks much as he left England, a thousand and several years ago.
His sandals leave no prints on the rug as he comes nearer, pulls up a chair to face England’s, and sits in it. The cushion doesn’t dent either. “So seriously, Britannia, how’s it hanging?”
“Rising, I’d say,” England does, with a somewhat daring smirk. “I assume you heard the earlier parts of this decapitated conversation.”
“Yeah, that’s what tipped me off. You’re really going through with it, huh?”
“I’d taken steps toward Empire already, you know.”
“Oh, I know. Been to a couple of the colonies. Can’t say I’m behind everything you’re doing but I’m definitely impressed.” Rome settles into the chair, leans a little too far through the back and then laughs, rights himself, leans forward onto his own knees instead. “Then again, you’ve been through the whole colony thing-well, province thing-so I guess it’s a little different for you.”
“Are you saying I’m being vindictive to my colonies?” Of all things. Honestly.
“Sins of the fathers, you know.”
“I’ve actually gone out of my way to avoid it.”
“That’s usually when you find yourself caught up in it, you know.” The head-tilting and jaw jutting forward suit Rome’s ghost much more than Cromwell’s severed head. “You tell yourself never, never, never, and you’re telling yourself never because you’re really at risk of giving in.”
England considers that for a moment, looks from Rome to the window and then down at his carpet. “There are some things which repulse me too greatly.”
“Yeah, there are those,” Rome agrees. “I mean more the ones where you swear, I’ll never let him get to me or I’ll never steal or kill or I’ll never become like him. Hell, I became like a lot of people I didn’t even like. But I can see that you’re never gonna do to any of your colonies what I did to you.”
At heart, England cannot believe that they are discussing this so-so amicably.
“I mean, for one thing, you don’t value them enough. You’re not gonna diddle any of that bunch on your knee because that’s not what they’re there for, you know? Said it yourself, you don’t want ‘em subjugated. And for another thing, if you do get one that’s a child, you’re gonna want to keep him a child forever because that’s who you are. You’re gonna want him worshipping the ground you walk on and dangling off your shoulders and seeing your faeries and all. So you’re right, that’s one sin you’re not repeating. Or you’re putting another one in its place.”
“It matters not,” England lies.
Rome smiles his easy, awful smile, and slides out of or through the chair onto the floor at England’s feet. It’s one of very few times in England’s devilishly long life that Rome has looked up at him-few enough to count on one hand.
“Overall, though,” Rome says, “I like how you’ve grown up.”
England’s breath scalds his lips. “In spite of you.”
“That too,” Rome laughs, “that too,” and where his ethereal head touches England’s thigh, it burns and sears and stings.
The cushions of the chair slide and creak when England arches out of them, not sure if he is flinching toward or away-and then deciding, vehemently, toward, abandoning the empty glass and winding his fingers in Rome’s hair. He can’t feel a thing, can’t disturb the image, but oh can he conjure it down to the scents of blood and oil. The spectral hairs pass through his hand entirely, as if England is nothing as well.
He does not move from the chair, and lets Rome serve him-Rome, too, on his knees before Britannia! he laughs, to think that Rome did not live to see the day-and watches in the black window as the ghost draws him out. Rome is all laughter, his breath and his taunts more like the seizure of sickness than the stirring of flesh, but England feels it all the same and takes his control of it. He sees himself in Rome’s mouth, as Rome was in Cromwell’s. He spends, and it is lost in whatever world Rome has come to him from, a libation upon ground that is not London’s.
Rome wipes his lips when he is done as if there is something there they both could see. “You’re not my heir, you know,” he says.
England knows, and tells him so. “That’s why I’ve found a new world.”
31 January, A.D. 1661
“And I wouldn’t worry,” Rome had said, when England wasn’t England and very small indeed. “You can’t build roads that lead to you from other places. Takes a special kind of Nation, to be the center of the world!”
England had scowled at him, and asked him why he built all those roads in the first place.
It is beastly in this room, in this sweat-soaked chair, and England is, of course, alone. The fever has not passed, but left him chilled where his clothing clings to him. He is hungry, and out the window the sun on the snow is far too bright. Rays of it breach the window and stretch across the floor to England’s chair, climbing up his body.
He basks in it.
-
---
-
Once again, The severed head.
In British law, Attainder is the decree by which a condemned traitor or enemy of the state loses his or her rights to property, and via “corruption of blood” also loses the right to pass it on to his or her descendants. Oliver Cromwell was posthumously attainted by an act of Parliament.
England is not the heir of Rome. Not that that ever stood in his way.
-
.
I get to write ghostsex again! This makes what, four times? Five if you count Albert and Eleanor’s thing?
Anyway, another one for aph_rarexchange.
Title: Attainder By Process
Author: Mithrigil
Fandom: Axis Powers Hetalia
Characters: England, some Parliamentarians, the severed head of Oliver Cromwell, and the ghost of Rome.
Original prompt: I would LOVE to see ghost!Rome and either Imperial!England or Modern!England get it on (not necessarily in a naughty way, but that's fine too).
Words: 3000
Rating: Hard, cold and dead R. Heads on pikes and sex with incorporeal people levels of R.
Warnings: Grotesque imagery, bad puns, and some things that cannot be exhumed.
Summary: 30 and 31 January, 1661. England chooses to pursue his childhood dreams of Empire at the cost of so much else. A head on a pike would like to warn him about precisely what the price will be.
Attainder By Process
30 January, A.D. 1661
The whole way home from Tyburn, snow melts as soon as it touches England’s shoulders. God, the warmth that’s flooded him, a delirious and greedy warmth that leaves him sweating in his cloak and sets the hood slipping down his hair. Every time he pulls it back up the static mistreats his hair, animates it, makes it cling to the wool like ivy vines.
He blames the streets, and the people in them, and their contagious jubilation. London gets hot over a good hanging, and this wasn’t just a good hanging, this was a good hanging of a man who was already dead, long before they strapped him to a coach and dragged him through the streets. England’s always thought the streets themselves rather hungry. It stands to reason that, as he walks, most of Cromwell’s blood is gone-though he can’t have shed much, being several years dead.
“And what of his children,” they had asked, in Parliament, in summary, in the name of God and King Charles II. “His wife, and theirs, and all who remain?”
“He himself was no king,” others had answered. “Let none reap the benefits of his despotism. Let the brood pay the debt of the father, as it has been for all the issue of England.”
And England had laughed with the rest.
But truly, a good hanging-a celebration of the seat of the divine, having returned to England in the form of a King once again. Why, even England’s dissidents will yield more readily to a King-England thinks on the colonies in the New World, those he’ll wrangle from Holland soon enough now that he can see a little straighter. England feels lighter, breathes deeper, to consider how few obstacles lay before him now that he’s not standing in his own way.
The path carved by the corpse through the snow and slush is clean, the cobblestones contoured but not quite visible beneath. England walks it to its end, wonders if the severed head is still watching, sightless and bound shut with twine, from its pike at the other end of the city.
And Cromwell had asked him, once, “Or are you the whore of Rome?” when England was bound on his knees and exposed and unable to answer him yes or no. Cromwell had asked him again and again, in some form or another, until he took his power and actualised it, gained the right to reopen those scars with all the rest. England had ceded to him, capitulated to him, let a human reenact and reconstruct what a Nation had done.
His house is even warmer than his streets, somehow, despite the January chill and all its portents. He hangs up his cloak and shakes off his boots and pats down his hair where the wool and wind have rubbed it to spidery, grasping tendrils. He laughs as the static shocks his fingers, pats it down and rakes his nails through it and scratches his eyebrows to rule them just the same.
The image of Scotland in his cage hits England like a vision from God.
And that’s only the first of it, the best and most sudden-Wales, entombed in his library in the monastery of a faith he hates, follows that image like thunder after lightning. Jamaica, turning his back on Spain-Spain, spilling as many bloodstained teeth as gold ingots, staining the water for the sharks to feed on-Holland, wasting away to nothing and leaving England dust to bribe the natives with, all of his lands and all of his ships and all of his people. The Indies in their chains. Asia opening to him. France in ruins. Ireland tearing herself in twain.
It occurs to England that there is more water on Earth than land, and that he, in the name of his King and all Kings before him, is master of the seas.
He is still laughing when he goes upstairs to the cabinet he’s let all the liquor and excesses out of since Cromwell’s death, still laughing as he pours himself something generous that heats him from the inside out, still laughing as he collapses into his largest chair and looks out the window, down the street with the sight of a Nation. If he squints, if he focuses past the humans and the crowd and the snow, he can still see the severed head.
“More than you know,” he says, in answer to a question the man asked while he was still alive. “Well, I suppose you know now, how deep it goes.” He raises his glass and toasts, thrusting the glass forward. “You thought to make me stronger, Lord Protector, and oh, didst thou achieve,” he adds, slipping, drinking first the liquor and after that the burn it leaves behind. “Whether I had the strength at the first, I suppose we can’t be certain-but the drive, oh now, the drive is driven in.”
Through the heat, the severed head asks England, And what drive is this, beloved Commonwealth?
“Commonwealth no longer,” England corrects, smirking at it to flaunt his teeth. “And Beloved, that is to what thy soul can feel. Have the fires of hell afforded thee any comfort?”
None so great as those thou once afforded me.
“I only exhume the ones I love,” England taunts, and drinks again.
And attaint?
“The ones who pretend at loving me,” he says. The glass does not rest on the cushioned hide arm of the chair, and so England holds it in place.
The severed head does not blink or anything of the kind, but the shadows within it effulge and darken what remain of Cromwell’s eyes. My love for my Nation was true, however long in the coming.
“And that Nation was Commonwealth, and I am not he.”
And to what drive have I spurred thee?
“That which I held before I knew thee,” England says, and feels the chair envelop him. “Dominion and Empire, the likes of which the world has never known, nor shall again.”
If it is possible for a trunkless head, three years in the grave and six hours on a pike, to exhibit shock and derision, this head has done. An aim worthy of you.
“I should hope so,” England snaps, “having held it a thousand years or more.”
And what did thy tormentors think of that? The head does not sound smug-Cromwell himself so rarely did-but the tone is far from accepting.
“Cause for harm,” England admits without a second thought, “and duly so-and those who feared it least found it endearing.”
Rome.
“Yes.”
Rome fell.
“And left me with instructions to stay myself from the same,” England says. He drinks, again, and the heat is welling up behind his eyes now. Perhaps it is not joy, but fever. “My god, that I heard those words for caution-that I took them to dissuade me from the pursuit of Empire at all! Folly, all of it. And by your hand, I see it clear.”
The wrinkles of the head’s bloodless brow deepen just as the eyes had, sunk in on themselves with water and snow and the people’s hate. And what does my Nation see?
The window is dark, that peculiar opacity that affords reflections from the inside and scrutiny from out. England sees past the head to his own shadow, reclined in his chair as if he, not Charles II, rules these streets.
“I see an Empire of trade,” he says. “I see the people I conquer not as citizens but subjects abroad, bound to their own lands as fiercely as I but compelled by love to serve me. I see them neither subsumed nor subjugated-subject to influence, yes, and rule, but I shall be no tyrant unto them. Oh, but to my foes I think I shall be terrible indeed-it was a thought of Scotland that reminded me, you know. Your gift of my brother, of that which I thought I lacked the strength to take myself. It showed me, that perhaps I could have, if not with brawn then cunning, and cunning I suppose you have sharpened in me, dulled as it was in my years since Rome. He taught me with that in mind, you know, and I was just a child-taught me to best him by the means afforded by my own disadvantage.”
“Which it looks like you’ve outgrown, my boy.”
The jaw of Cromwell’s head is bound shut with twine-or had been, and is hanging open now on the few threads of flesh that bind it to the rest, and Rome is smirking out of it, a second set of sharper, cleaner, straighter teeth behind the first.
England holds on tight to his glass and the arm of the chair, and does not dare move beyond speaking. “Please tell me you haven’t always been there.”
“I’d be lying if I said I was,” Rome says, and England can see deeper into the corpse now, not just the teeth but the strong red tongue behind, spectral and translucent but indisputably there. “I mean, you only just called me up. How’s life, Britannia?”
“No one calls me that since you,” England corrects, over the shock enough to loosen his grip on the glass and take a sip. “How’s death, Roma Antiqua?”
“That’s what they call me now?” Rome tsks, his lips huffing against Cromwell’s from the inside. “It’s not so bad. Drop in on my grandkids a couple of times a century, pull ‘em out of a few scrapes-bet you know how scary a ghost can be if you do it right.”
“Better than many.” God, either this drink’s taken him quick or not quickly enough. It’s beastly in here, no longer warm, but hot all over like only the worst summers.
“Ha! So am I doing it right?”
“I’ll admit to being somewhat disturbed,” England says-and oh, there’s no more drink. A pity. “I was talking to that head, after all.”
Rome cheers, and that’s by far the strangest sound to ever come out of Cromwell’s mouth. “Sorry if I was interrupting your tête-à-tête. Get it? Tête-à-tête? It’s funny because he’s only got a face, and not much of one at that. I picked up the French when my littlest was staying over there.”
England winces. “You’ll forgive me if that’s the last thing I want to hear coming out of your mouth.”
“What, humor?”
“French.”
“Glad to see you still despise the little bastard,” Rome says, and Cromwell’s head tilts sideways, enough that England can see deeper in than he ever wanted to. “You mind if I actually come out of this thing?”
“Be my guest.”
The spectre passes through Cromwell’s lips like a snake casting off its skin; since the head was never precisely there to begin with, it melts into the glass of the window, thickening it to almost solid black. Rome, for his part, is looking quite well as dead men go, older than England remembers and copiously wounded in the chest and abdomen. Frozen gangrene crawls up out of the gash and past the neck of his cuirass, but other than that and a few grey hairs he looks much as he left England, a thousand and several years ago.
His sandals leave no prints on the rug as he comes nearer, pulls up a chair to face England’s, and sits in it. The cushion doesn’t dent either. “So seriously, Britannia, how’s it hanging?”
“Rising, I’d say,” England does, with a somewhat daring smirk. “I assume you heard the earlier parts of this decapitated conversation.”
“Yeah, that’s what tipped me off. You’re really going through with it, huh?”
“I’d taken steps toward Empire already, you know.”
“Oh, I know. Been to a couple of the colonies. Can’t say I’m behind everything you’re doing but I’m definitely impressed.” Rome settles into the chair, leans a little too far through the back and then laughs, rights himself, leans forward onto his own knees instead. “Then again, you’ve been through the whole colony thing-well, province thing-so I guess it’s a little different for you.”
“Are you saying I’m being vindictive to my colonies?” Of all things. Honestly.
“Sins of the fathers, you know.”
“I’ve actually gone out of my way to avoid it.”
“That’s usually when you find yourself caught up in it, you know.” The head-tilting and jaw jutting forward suit Rome’s ghost much more than Cromwell’s severed head. “You tell yourself never, never, never, and you’re telling yourself never because you’re really at risk of giving in.”
England considers that for a moment, looks from Rome to the window and then down at his carpet. “There are some things which repulse me too greatly.”
“Yeah, there are those,” Rome agrees. “I mean more the ones where you swear, I’ll never let him get to me or I’ll never steal or kill or I’ll never become like him. Hell, I became like a lot of people I didn’t even like. But I can see that you’re never gonna do to any of your colonies what I did to you.”
At heart, England cannot believe that they are discussing this so-so amicably.
“I mean, for one thing, you don’t value them enough. You’re not gonna diddle any of that bunch on your knee because that’s not what they’re there for, you know? Said it yourself, you don’t want ‘em subjugated. And for another thing, if you do get one that’s a child, you’re gonna want to keep him a child forever because that’s who you are. You’re gonna want him worshipping the ground you walk on and dangling off your shoulders and seeing your faeries and all. So you’re right, that’s one sin you’re not repeating. Or you’re putting another one in its place.”
“It matters not,” England lies.
Rome smiles his easy, awful smile, and slides out of or through the chair onto the floor at England’s feet. It’s one of very few times in England’s devilishly long life that Rome has looked up at him-few enough to count on one hand.
“Overall, though,” Rome says, “I like how you’ve grown up.”
England’s breath scalds his lips. “In spite of you.”
“That too,” Rome laughs, “that too,” and where his ethereal head touches England’s thigh, it burns and sears and stings.
The cushions of the chair slide and creak when England arches out of them, not sure if he is flinching toward or away-and then deciding, vehemently, toward, abandoning the empty glass and winding his fingers in Rome’s hair. He can’t feel a thing, can’t disturb the image, but oh can he conjure it down to the scents of blood and oil. The spectral hairs pass through his hand entirely, as if England is nothing as well.
He does not move from the chair, and lets Rome serve him-Rome, too, on his knees before Britannia! he laughs, to think that Rome did not live to see the day-and watches in the black window as the ghost draws him out. Rome is all laughter, his breath and his taunts more like the seizure of sickness than the stirring of flesh, but England feels it all the same and takes his control of it. He sees himself in Rome’s mouth, as Rome was in Cromwell’s. He spends, and it is lost in whatever world Rome has come to him from, a libation upon ground that is not London’s.
Rome wipes his lips when he is done as if there is something there they both could see. “You’re not my heir, you know,” he says.
England knows, and tells him so. “That’s why I’ve found a new world.”
31 January, A.D. 1661
“And I wouldn’t worry,” Rome had said, when England wasn’t England and very small indeed. “You can’t build roads that lead to you from other places. Takes a special kind of Nation, to be the center of the world!”
England had scowled at him, and asked him why he built all those roads in the first place.
It is beastly in this room, in this sweat-soaked chair, and England is, of course, alone. The fever has not passed, but left him chilled where his clothing clings to him. He is hungry, and out the window the sun on the snow is far too bright. Rays of it breach the window and stretch across the floor to England’s chair, climbing up his body.
He basks in it.
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Once again, The severed head.
In British law, Attainder is the decree by which a condemned traitor or enemy of the state loses his or her rights to property, and via “corruption of blood” also loses the right to pass it on to his or her descendants. Oliver Cromwell was posthumously attainted by an act of Parliament.
England is not the heir of Rome. Not that that ever stood in his way.
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