[fanfic] blue is most beautiful
Title: blue is most beautiful
Author: sonofon
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Hungary, Belarus, Austria; Hungary/Belarus, Austria/Hungary
Rating: PG
Warning: heh, wouldn't you want to know.
Summary: Berlin, 1919; a relationship in progress: there's no business like show business.
Notes: written for m_nemonica because her beautiful writing inspires me to write second-rate versions of her stuff. (: happy early sixteenth, bb. &hearts i will get the bnw!giripan up one day, just you watch.
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(there's this group of people, waiting to stall time)
-
i.
Nowadays, she only remembers the heartache; sometimes they haunt her dreams and other times they haunt her reality. They are the stars and the morning dew, the gentle caress of lazing music notes, but none of them really mean anything until she sees the shredded V letters. They don't belong to her, the letters. Could it be considered stealing if the presumed owners and authors are dead? Some of these letters are dated but most are not. They come from servicemen with their big blocky, illegible handwriting and their incomplete secondary school education; they are crushed, the corners smudged with the burnt out tip of an army-issued cigarette. The letters are not of significant content, and they've been so damaged that she can only read a little of what it says. The most common words are love, damn, regret, and dying. She keeps them in a shoebox, one of his, and on rainy days she takes them out to read.
It's a practice, a routine, hardly torturous in nature, because there is something very intimate to be gained from reading the terse notices of young soldiers. They're babies, really. Half the time they misspell words or misplace their modifiers; and that makes her smile. It makes her want to take out a pen and correct the mistakes but that would be tampering history that would be destroying primary evidence that would be blasphemous.
(And she, ladies and gentlemen of the world, is anything but.)
ii.
Once, she was going to marry a boy. She and this boy had known each other from childhood. When they were three they used to take off their clothes and run outside to lie naked under the naked sun. They chased up and down the two-lane town where they lived. They shared meals, secrets, homework answers, a bed, and then they grew up. When they grew up the boy began preparing for the ministry in Vienna, and after he'd settled in the city he sent for her. She was just eighteen; so she left her family and her friends and her church but the church wasn't as important anymore, in her heart, least-ways, and they lived in a simple apartment, with separate rooms. In the mornings he made coffee and then headed off for class. He came back for lunch sometimes, and they always ate dinner together.
"Listen," said Elizabeta, a fork dangling by her mouth, a touch of cream smeared across her lower lip, "after we get married, we're going to have two children. I know what their names will be. We're going to live in a pleasant house, not necessarily a big one, but a good pleasant home. I won't live in the city. The city's no place for children, I won't have it. And besides, you've always loved the country. There are plenty of places for you to teach and on Sundays we'll take a picnic with a huge basket of food and a violin for company. It'd be wonderful."
"Isn't it a bit early for such talk?"
"But it makes me happy. Oh, I don't mean to press-"
"It's fine."
Roderich was much too sensible for her tastes; he dressed like an old stuffy man, even talked like one. Elizabeta only wanted to love him but he loved his country first, his God second, Elizabeta third. So she didn't stand a chance. "Pardon, dear," he stood up, wiping his lips with a handkerchief, "I must flee; there's a concert at the conservatory and I'm expected."
"Okay," she said, "if you say so."
"We'll talk about it later."
"Okay. Of course."
"We'll be married in the spring."
"Okay." He kissed her gently on the forehead.
The boy never wrote her a V letter. That was a pity. She could have saved something that was distinctly his but instead she had ambiguous belongings: his clothes, his polished shoes neatly packed in their original boxes, his big damned piano which she eventually gave away to the local center because she hated it so much. It was around the time the armistice was called. Everyone had gathered in the middle of the city, in the square, and prayed together, the air buzzing with vibrant cacophony, an energy that had scarcely been seen in the dwindling days of the war. Then, all of a sudden, it went silent. There were probably a couple thousand people present, maybe more, she forgot how to count. It was a beautiful day and that made sense, because good weather never corresponds with good events, and vice-versa.
The sky was a luscious blue. She had never seen such a beautiful blue before.
iii.
(This is how she lies her way out of Austria and into Germany:
"I've got my papers right here, yes, sir, I'm clean, I'm really clean," she says. She laughs, and holds her hands up like a mock arrest, throwing her hair back with a swish of her head. "Please let me through, I've a husband waiting for me. Our children are waiting. I haven't seen them in weeks. I was visiting my mother in Vienna. She had a fever but she is much better now. I couldn't do much for her, after all. I can play an okay imitative piano, and my singing's a bit off-key but I can cook and I am a good companion. We gossiped about the neighbors and I went to the markets in the morning to buy fresh milk and the day's dinner. I'd forgotten how much bigger markets in the city are. My mother's much better now. When she dies she will at least be at ease and there is not much more you can ask for. So it goes. Do you want to know? Ada is two and Robert is four months old, and I miss them so much. They're my babies, sir. I wish I had pictures to show you but my husband and I, we cannot afford the film. Won't you let me through, kind sir?"
The officer gives her a look, and she warmly smiles, handing him her passport. "Home's a good place to be, Miss Héderváry," he says when he is done, his eyes softening, the sharp edges melting away. "You're very fortunate."
"I know," she says, carefully tucking away her papers, "I know.")
iv.
On the corner just before the red-light district, there is a sleazy nightclub. Everyone goes there, or everyone of enough boredom or self-conceived importance. Well, sleazy isn't quite the correct word to use. Elizabeta's rather certain being so flamboyant and ostentatious requires a special kind of talent. It's a show. A purposely bad show is what makes it so attractive. The yellow feathers are gaudy, the dress's cut is cheap and unattractive, but the girl is so pretty that nothing else matters. Her hair is waist-length, ashy blond. She has two visible cuts on the inside of her left wrist, two curved lines that form the outline of a grotesque heart. Her eyes are dulled over. "Hi," says Elizabeta, afterward. "You work here?"
The girl looks down first, then looks up. When she frowns, her brows furrow together. She has high, aristocratic cheekbones, and her eyes are a murky muddled blue that Elizabeta wishes were more clear so she could see through her pupils. "Uh."
"Oh! Of course you work here. I should've known."
"'Scuse me."
"Here, sit down! I'm sure you're tired."
"I've work."
"I know. I mean, I'm sure you do, dear. But I thought you could have a break-"
"That's hardly necessary."
The girl frowns even more, and it breaks Elizabeta's heart. They haven't known each other thirty seconds and already she thinks it's much too early for this girl to be so serious and so broken.
v.
"My name's Elizabeta. What's yours?"
"Uh, Natalia."
"A pleasure!" She holds out her hand.
The girl stares, and stares more some at the outstretched gesture. She blinks.
vi.
Natalia has awfully warm hands. When they are eased onto Elizabeta's shoulders, it's like a furnace, a roaring, chip-splinting furnace. It's cold today, like it is every other day, this being winter and December and four-fucking-degrees; she can hear their teeth collectively clatter and it'd hardly be considered an attractive noise. Natalia's room is better furnished than her's. She has been in Berlin since 1917.
"I wish it were spring already," Elizabeta murmurs into Natalia's throat. "I wish the sun were out, I wish I didn't have to wear five layers of coats just to freeze myself to death. I want to see flowers, I want to see green, I like green, I've always liked green. Don't you like green?" She presses herself as tightly as she can against Natalia, as if she doesn't want the girl to disappear, as if she were in danger of disappearing. "But then, I really like blue also. What a tough decision to make: blue or green. Blue's a pretty color. Like your eyes."
And Natalia, having always been practical, looks up and says: "So why don't you pretend."
"Oh I am. But it's not working. All I see is rain and it's a day much much colder than today. There are soldiers and shouting and noise everywhere, but the rain is the worst. Sometimes I'm in it and I see myself dead. I-I-"
"Then pretend harder," she replies, and promptly forgets everything herself.
vii.
Natalia Alfroskaya forgets her name, her age, her body. She forgets her family, her friends, the little town on the outskirts of Minsk where she came from. She forgets the school she attended, the classmates, the teachers. She forgets the tests she took, the homework she never bothered to finish, the rods, those awful mean rods. She forgets the smell of spring, piping hot dinner, the playmates with whom she gathered worms every May when she was five. She forgets her morals, her beliefs, her decisions, her compromises.
She forgets the boy she loved, she forgets the touch of his ice-cold lips against her colder fingertips, she forgets the feeling of ice-skating on a lake and falling on her bum. She forgets what it means to cry and to feel hopelessly young and restless and stupid and oppressed. She forgets her culture, her customs. She forgets her language. She forgets so much that by the end she is a stripped away person with no personality or life or soul, completely adrift and immobile; mute. She has no feelings for herself or others and she is a robot she is not a robot-
"You're so silly, do you realize that?" says Elizabeta, and brings her back to life.
"I'm just tired," Natalia says, and it's true, it's so so true.
viii.
"I'm going to make you better, I'm going to make you happy," Elizabeta says these kinds of things because these are the words she wishes were being spoken to her. "You're going to eat more, and I'm going to cook you more goulash than you've ever seen, and we'll-"
Natalia always lets her talk. She lets Elizabeta do whatever she wants, pretty much all of the time, and Elizabeta accordingly takes advantage. She lavishes all her energy and focus and love on Natalia because there is no one else to bestow it to. Elizabeta is twenty-two and she wants to love, nothing more.
Shaking her head, "I want liberty," says Natalia.
"Oh, darling, didn't you know you already had it? You're free from the war. You live comfortably, you have food to eat, you have work and some money, and you"-here she becomes self-conscious-"you have me. What more do you need? Your country is dead. Say it with me. Say it for me."
"My country is dead."
"Your God is dead."
"I never had one," she bristles.
"All the better, then. You poor, poor girl."
"But there is so much more than just that. So much more I want," she groans and presses one hand to each side of her head so all she hears is the pounding sound of blood running through her ears. She is not ungrateful, quite the contrary. She is merely human and greedy and she wants what she can't have and she is a Belorussian girl in Berlin in 1919 living with a girl two years her senior. She is unspeakably lonely and homesick, she suffers from insomnia and is slightly anaemic. She has been a kleptomaniac and afraid of the dark since 1916. She believes in ghosts and as such cannot stand to be be in a room by herself after eleven o'clock at night. For absolutely no reason, a part of her has always loved American literature, and always will. "I know what I want. I want everything. I want the world." As an afterthought: "And I want an American-made sandwich with light mayonnaise and pickles, on the side."
"No you don't," Elizabeta is saying, crying and laughing all at once so it sounds really awful, "I don't see why you'd want that, it's too impossible too stupid reckless, you'll only ruin yourself, because you think you need something when everything is already in front of you in the palm of your hand and yet you're not convinced and it's a horrible dream or a stupor and I wish for once you'd understand and listen to me just this one time-oh God. God. Idiot. Idiots." Outside, the first flowers have bloomed and two cars are honking at each other.
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a masterlist of all my hetalia fic can be found here.
Author: sonofon
Character(s)/Pairing(s): Hungary, Belarus, Austria; Hungary/Belarus, Austria/Hungary
Rating: PG
Warning: heh, wouldn't you want to know.
Summary: Berlin, 1919; a relationship in progress: there's no business like show business.
Notes: written for m_nemonica because her beautiful writing inspires me to write second-rate versions of her stuff. (: happy early sixteenth, bb. &hearts i will get the bnw!giripan up one day, just you watch.
-
(there's this group of people, waiting to stall time)
-
i.
Nowadays, she only remembers the heartache; sometimes they haunt her dreams and other times they haunt her reality. They are the stars and the morning dew, the gentle caress of lazing music notes, but none of them really mean anything until she sees the shredded V letters. They don't belong to her, the letters. Could it be considered stealing if the presumed owners and authors are dead? Some of these letters are dated but most are not. They come from servicemen with their big blocky, illegible handwriting and their incomplete secondary school education; they are crushed, the corners smudged with the burnt out tip of an army-issued cigarette. The letters are not of significant content, and they've been so damaged that she can only read a little of what it says. The most common words are love, damn, regret, and dying. She keeps them in a shoebox, one of his, and on rainy days she takes them out to read.
It's a practice, a routine, hardly torturous in nature, because there is something very intimate to be gained from reading the terse notices of young soldiers. They're babies, really. Half the time they misspell words or misplace their modifiers; and that makes her smile. It makes her want to take out a pen and correct the mistakes but that would be tampering history that would be destroying primary evidence that would be blasphemous.
(And she, ladies and gentlemen of the world, is anything but.)
ii.
Once, she was going to marry a boy. She and this boy had known each other from childhood. When they were three they used to take off their clothes and run outside to lie naked under the naked sun. They chased up and down the two-lane town where they lived. They shared meals, secrets, homework answers, a bed, and then they grew up. When they grew up the boy began preparing for the ministry in Vienna, and after he'd settled in the city he sent for her. She was just eighteen; so she left her family and her friends and her church but the church wasn't as important anymore, in her heart, least-ways, and they lived in a simple apartment, with separate rooms. In the mornings he made coffee and then headed off for class. He came back for lunch sometimes, and they always ate dinner together.
"Listen," said Elizabeta, a fork dangling by her mouth, a touch of cream smeared across her lower lip, "after we get married, we're going to have two children. I know what their names will be. We're going to live in a pleasant house, not necessarily a big one, but a good pleasant home. I won't live in the city. The city's no place for children, I won't have it. And besides, you've always loved the country. There are plenty of places for you to teach and on Sundays we'll take a picnic with a huge basket of food and a violin for company. It'd be wonderful."
"Isn't it a bit early for such talk?"
"But it makes me happy. Oh, I don't mean to press-"
"It's fine."
Roderich was much too sensible for her tastes; he dressed like an old stuffy man, even talked like one. Elizabeta only wanted to love him but he loved his country first, his God second, Elizabeta third. So she didn't stand a chance. "Pardon, dear," he stood up, wiping his lips with a handkerchief, "I must flee; there's a concert at the conservatory and I'm expected."
"Okay," she said, "if you say so."
"We'll talk about it later."
"Okay. Of course."
"We'll be married in the spring."
"Okay." He kissed her gently on the forehead.
The boy never wrote her a V letter. That was a pity. She could have saved something that was distinctly his but instead she had ambiguous belongings: his clothes, his polished shoes neatly packed in their original boxes, his big damned piano which she eventually gave away to the local center because she hated it so much. It was around the time the armistice was called. Everyone had gathered in the middle of the city, in the square, and prayed together, the air buzzing with vibrant cacophony, an energy that had scarcely been seen in the dwindling days of the war. Then, all of a sudden, it went silent. There were probably a couple thousand people present, maybe more, she forgot how to count. It was a beautiful day and that made sense, because good weather never corresponds with good events, and vice-versa.
The sky was a luscious blue. She had never seen such a beautiful blue before.
iii.
(This is how she lies her way out of Austria and into Germany:
"I've got my papers right here, yes, sir, I'm clean, I'm really clean," she says. She laughs, and holds her hands up like a mock arrest, throwing her hair back with a swish of her head. "Please let me through, I've a husband waiting for me. Our children are waiting. I haven't seen them in weeks. I was visiting my mother in Vienna. She had a fever but she is much better now. I couldn't do much for her, after all. I can play an okay imitative piano, and my singing's a bit off-key but I can cook and I am a good companion. We gossiped about the neighbors and I went to the markets in the morning to buy fresh milk and the day's dinner. I'd forgotten how much bigger markets in the city are. My mother's much better now. When she dies she will at least be at ease and there is not much more you can ask for. So it goes. Do you want to know? Ada is two and Robert is four months old, and I miss them so much. They're my babies, sir. I wish I had pictures to show you but my husband and I, we cannot afford the film. Won't you let me through, kind sir?"
The officer gives her a look, and she warmly smiles, handing him her passport. "Home's a good place to be, Miss Héderváry," he says when he is done, his eyes softening, the sharp edges melting away. "You're very fortunate."
"I know," she says, carefully tucking away her papers, "I know.")
iv.
On the corner just before the red-light district, there is a sleazy nightclub. Everyone goes there, or everyone of enough boredom or self-conceived importance. Well, sleazy isn't quite the correct word to use. Elizabeta's rather certain being so flamboyant and ostentatious requires a special kind of talent. It's a show. A purposely bad show is what makes it so attractive. The yellow feathers are gaudy, the dress's cut is cheap and unattractive, but the girl is so pretty that nothing else matters. Her hair is waist-length, ashy blond. She has two visible cuts on the inside of her left wrist, two curved lines that form the outline of a grotesque heart. Her eyes are dulled over. "Hi," says Elizabeta, afterward. "You work here?"
The girl looks down first, then looks up. When she frowns, her brows furrow together. She has high, aristocratic cheekbones, and her eyes are a murky muddled blue that Elizabeta wishes were more clear so she could see through her pupils. "Uh."
"Oh! Of course you work here. I should've known."
"'Scuse me."
"Here, sit down! I'm sure you're tired."
"I've work."
"I know. I mean, I'm sure you do, dear. But I thought you could have a break-"
"That's hardly necessary."
The girl frowns even more, and it breaks Elizabeta's heart. They haven't known each other thirty seconds and already she thinks it's much too early for this girl to be so serious and so broken.
v.
"My name's Elizabeta. What's yours?"
"Uh, Natalia."
"A pleasure!" She holds out her hand.
The girl stares, and stares more some at the outstretched gesture. She blinks.
vi.
Natalia has awfully warm hands. When they are eased onto Elizabeta's shoulders, it's like a furnace, a roaring, chip-splinting furnace. It's cold today, like it is every other day, this being winter and December and four-fucking-degrees; she can hear their teeth collectively clatter and it'd hardly be considered an attractive noise. Natalia's room is better furnished than her's. She has been in Berlin since 1917.
"I wish it were spring already," Elizabeta murmurs into Natalia's throat. "I wish the sun were out, I wish I didn't have to wear five layers of coats just to freeze myself to death. I want to see flowers, I want to see green, I like green, I've always liked green. Don't you like green?" She presses herself as tightly as she can against Natalia, as if she doesn't want the girl to disappear, as if she were in danger of disappearing. "But then, I really like blue also. What a tough decision to make: blue or green. Blue's a pretty color. Like your eyes."
And Natalia, having always been practical, looks up and says: "So why don't you pretend."
"Oh I am. But it's not working. All I see is rain and it's a day much much colder than today. There are soldiers and shouting and noise everywhere, but the rain is the worst. Sometimes I'm in it and I see myself dead. I-I-"
"Then pretend harder," she replies, and promptly forgets everything herself.
vii.
Natalia Alfroskaya forgets her name, her age, her body. She forgets her family, her friends, the little town on the outskirts of Minsk where she came from. She forgets the school she attended, the classmates, the teachers. She forgets the tests she took, the homework she never bothered to finish, the rods, those awful mean rods. She forgets the smell of spring, piping hot dinner, the playmates with whom she gathered worms every May when she was five. She forgets her morals, her beliefs, her decisions, her compromises.
She forgets the boy she loved, she forgets the touch of his ice-cold lips against her colder fingertips, she forgets the feeling of ice-skating on a lake and falling on her bum. She forgets what it means to cry and to feel hopelessly young and restless and stupid and oppressed. She forgets her culture, her customs. She forgets her language. She forgets so much that by the end she is a stripped away person with no personality or life or soul, completely adrift and immobile; mute. She has no feelings for herself or others and she is a robot she is not a robot-
"You're so silly, do you realize that?" says Elizabeta, and brings her back to life.
"I'm just tired," Natalia says, and it's true, it's so so true.
viii.
"I'm going to make you better, I'm going to make you happy," Elizabeta says these kinds of things because these are the words she wishes were being spoken to her. "You're going to eat more, and I'm going to cook you more goulash than you've ever seen, and we'll-"
Natalia always lets her talk. She lets Elizabeta do whatever she wants, pretty much all of the time, and Elizabeta accordingly takes advantage. She lavishes all her energy and focus and love on Natalia because there is no one else to bestow it to. Elizabeta is twenty-two and she wants to love, nothing more.
Shaking her head, "I want liberty," says Natalia.
"Oh, darling, didn't you know you already had it? You're free from the war. You live comfortably, you have food to eat, you have work and some money, and you"-here she becomes self-conscious-"you have me. What more do you need? Your country is dead. Say it with me. Say it for me."
"My country is dead."
"Your God is dead."
"I never had one," she bristles.
"All the better, then. You poor, poor girl."
"But there is so much more than just that. So much more I want," she groans and presses one hand to each side of her head so all she hears is the pounding sound of blood running through her ears. She is not ungrateful, quite the contrary. She is merely human and greedy and she wants what she can't have and she is a Belorussian girl in Berlin in 1919 living with a girl two years her senior. She is unspeakably lonely and homesick, she suffers from insomnia and is slightly anaemic. She has been a kleptomaniac and afraid of the dark since 1916. She believes in ghosts and as such cannot stand to be be in a room by herself after eleven o'clock at night. For absolutely no reason, a part of her has always loved American literature, and always will. "I know what I want. I want everything. I want the world." As an afterthought: "And I want an American-made sandwich with light mayonnaise and pickles, on the side."
"No you don't," Elizabeta is saying, crying and laughing all at once so it sounds really awful, "I don't see why you'd want that, it's too impossible too stupid reckless, you'll only ruin yourself, because you think you need something when everything is already in front of you in the palm of your hand and yet you're not convinced and it's a horrible dream or a stupor and I wish for once you'd understand and listen to me just this one time-oh God. God. Idiot. Idiots." Outside, the first flowers have bloomed and two cars are honking at each other.
-
a masterlist of all my hetalia fic can be found here.