Countryhumans Oneshot book

Time is running out (Nuclear AU)

TW: Mentions of self harm.

Spain Madrid is alive.

Well, maybe not alive, but real, for sure.

There is a line between real and alive, and Spain sits narrowly on the tightrope in between, singing like the canaries, crowing like the vultures, screaming to the universe, whispering to herself.

Caught in the middle of the crossfire, her body is riddled with bruises and blemishes and cuts bleeding underneath skin that announce their presence and settle at home and smile and say they don't plan to leave in the next few decades.

Despite it, there is a strange peacefulness she gets when looking over them, as if they serve as a reminder of the whirlpool that is the past but also the calm fog of the future.

There is a sense of bittersweet happiness, she thinks, as she holds her arms out for herself to see and knows that, at least, it's over and done.

After it ended, she would stroll across the wasteland, in the way that she once explored the oceans and charted the new world, only now there was no purpose, nothing to chart.

And it was fascinating, at first. Spain had never lived without purpose before. She had lived fast, she had lived slow, but she had always lived rich, of emotion, of culture, of laughter from a life long gone that sometimes seems to get so close she could maybe just reach out, and drag herself out of the container and back into the past.

Out of the container?

Sometimes her thoughts confused her too, and sometimes she felt phantom pains on her neck as if someone was tearing her head from her body, and all her nerves would burn, screaming, screaming NO, I DON'T WANT TO GO BACK JUST YET or Please just let me stay a little bit longer.

It was probably a side effect of all the radiation, plus the fact that she hadn't drank clean water in weeks. Months?

Huh. She didn't really remember what drinking water was like. Everything tasted like liquid on her tongue at this point. That was okay. It was fine by her.

And when she came across Germany, who offered her a place to sleep in exchange for being his assistant in his experiments, she decided that life was fine by her too.

She never did have to go through with the parts Germany didn't want her to see but everybody knew about anyway.

Didn't have to go near the rotting flesh, didn't have to conduct the interrogations. No, she just had to take care of the recording. Graphs and observations, and that was fine by her.

And it's fine, too, that she and Germany don't really click- even though they look like they do, and that is enough proof that it'll probably turn out okay, at least to them, because neither has a better choice.

They never talked too much. No one in the wasteland really does.

Although, sometimes, late into the nights, they would spend their time in the same room, taking turns lighting each other's cigarettes, Germany cozied up on the couch, humming the tunes of a war song back home, Spain dancing to sequences her memories had lost but which her feet hadn't.

And they shared a sort of clouded understanding in that, missing.

Everybody in the wasteland misses.

And against her better judgement, when in a violent twist of fate, Germany is murdered, a small part of Spain's mind misses him with a pang.

His life is taken by the blue and yellow girl with burns down her face, whose arms hang by her side, weak and loopy, but Spain can see her knees hold her up steady and strong and maybe, just maybe Spain thinks of breaking them and throwing her out, that leaving her at mercy to the dust and the air wouldn't be such a bad idea.