Archive of Our Own

They were childhood enemies, and perhaps that’s the perfect explanation for how they’d ended up in bed together a millennium later.

Well, it’s not really an explanation, but Gilbert doesn’t like to think of the war that much. Things had been bad, for him and Ludwig, and when the war was over Ivan had been there with a firm grip and eyes that never hid their sorrow convincingly. Ivan tried to laugh things off, to make it seem like the past four years had not shaken him beyond repair, but no matter how many beers he downed or how many times he pulled Alfred in for a kiss while the cameras watched them, it wasn’t enough to convince Gilbert that his old friend (neighbor, enemy, frenemy, take your pick) was happy.

Even with what limited news Gilbert had received during the war, he knew well enough what had happened to Ivan’s daughter. Nazi newspapers hadn’t hesitated, either, to spread the pictures of Wang Chun’s broken body or the way that Ivan had collapsed in tears in front of her coffin. Two deaths in three years; if Ivan had been human, Gilbert has no doubt he would’ve followed them.

When they fall together, it is never in Ivan’s own home, and certainly not in his bed. Gilbert has a flat in East Berlin, distant enough from the organs of power and politics that play out in his rebuilding land (he goes to the meetings of the now-merged Socialist Unity Party, sometimes, and though he does not throw himself into the work the way many of his human leaders and citizens do, they seem to accept his uncharacteristically quiet presence as he is) and more important to his own preoccupations, near both a theatre and a library. Most of the nations who’d known Gilbert over the years would never accuse him of having an artistic or thoughtful side, but when he is left largely alone it is what he falls back on. His flat has two bedrooms, one of which serves more as a library and storage room, though it still has a bed for the visitors who sometimes grace him with their presence. Ludwig makes his attempts, in the months immediately following the war, before the distance between East and West solidifies into a first mental, then physical barrier. Elizaveta comes once every few months as well, always making sure that he’s eating enough and dragging him outside for a few hours. Roderich visits when he can, though he tries not to overlap timing with Eliza (they’re on good terms, but recently-divorced pairs rarely enjoy being in the company of their mutual lover at the same time) and Gilbert occasionally enjoys the company of their other allies. Natalia is particularly intent on seeing him often, and Katya quietly tells him that it’s because Natalia has always been half a step behind Ivan, acting as a protector for a brother who has rarely needed one.

Gilbert’s own bedroom is quite humble, something he would’ve never foreseen a century before. A spartan, neatly-made bed that is only disturbed for sleep or sex; walls that bear no photographs or paintings; a desk in the corner that bears a pen, a stack of blank papers, and whichever book he is currently reading; a dresser of neatly-folded clothes, absent any military uniforms or other symbols of officialdom. Ivan’s clothes always look out of place, folded on the top of Gilbert’s dresser, his jacket and hat bearing the symbols of the ideals his people had fought and died for. Gilbert has grown used to those symbols, can even say he harbors a certain fondness for them, but he still shrinks away from growing involved in politics the way that Ivan is embedded in the politics of his own nation. The future of Germany is uncertain in a way that the future of Russia–and the Soviet Union, more broadly–rarely seems to be. Gilbert would not mind a life beneath a red flag, but he knows he would sacrifice it for a life with his brother. A part of him thinks himself weak for it, and it is why he never voices those thoughts aloud, not to Ivan or Ludwig or anyone else who asks his mood or tells him they’re sorry for everything he has gone through in the past two decades. Identities are fashioned, and Gilbert is still figuring out whether family or ideals will be worn on his sleeves.

Ivan lights a cigarette, as they lay side-by-side in Gilbert’s bed. Gilbert used to be in the habit, but he’d lost it during the war, and Roderich had told him he shouldn’t pick it up again. He lays his head flat on his pillow, so thin that it’s more a pillow in name than in function, and stares up at the ceiling and watches the way shadows dance in the moonlight. If he turned his head a little, he’d find himself looking at Ivan’s waist, but they both already know that neither of them remember to eat often enough. At the end of the war, the first time they’d seen each other in years, Ivan’s cheeks seemed hollow, his eyes sunken into his head, his waist too thin. They’d faced each other as two skeletons, and though they grew healthier as the effects of the war were abated in peacetime, their personal conditions kept them closer to a state of death than the life they wished they could celebrate.

“Tell me about her,” Gilbert says, six months after the war has ended, over a year since she died. It’s the first time he’s mentioned her to Ivan (Gilbert didn’t see much sense in telling Ivan that he was sorry for his loss when they’d both lost so much) and even without saying her name, it has an immediate effect.

“You knew her,” Ivan says, “decades ago, sure, but you knew her too.”

“Not the way you did.” Even setting aside their legal relationship, it’s obvious that Ivan had known her in a way that few others had. What Gilbert had known of Wang Chun, it had always been legend, mythology. There’s a woman like us, far to the East, who is older than time itself, and so beautiful that empires have been conquered over and over in her name. When he’d met her, she’d been a shadow of herself, withdrawn, ill, overly-medicated and rarely aware of her surroundings. She’d looked at him and her eyes had passed right through him; when he’d spoken, her responses had come in mumbled versions of her own language rather than in the language of nations. He’d pitied her, and though he and Ludwig had both been sent in the hopes that if one would bow out the other would take his place, Gilbert had taken his brother by the arm and pulled him from her room, making Ludwig swear that he wouldn’t further harm her while she was in such a state. Obviously, Ivan’s knowledge of her had stretched both earlier in time and deeper in intimacy.

There is a pause, a hesitance and deep breaths, before Ivan sighs and begins to speak. He is still careful with his words, but once they start to tumble out, they don’t slow. “She was my life,” Ivan says, with a conviction that makes Gilbert unable to doubt him. “Centuries ago, she was the first person other than my sisters to ever love me, and even though it was a different kind of love than we shared later, it– It changed me. Even being separated for centuries at a time, I always knew that someone loved me, not out of obligation, but unconditionally nonetheless. And when I became a man, she accepted my love for what it was. When she– We thought she was going to die, in the months before our daughter was born. I told her I didn’t know how to live without her, and she told me that I had to go on living and fighting for a better world in order to honor her the way she would want. So… I guess that’s what I’m doing.”

Those words weigh heavy on Gilbert’s chest, even with his own unsettled ideals. “She’d be proud of you,” Gilbert says. “You defeated fascism, even while mourning her. You’ve done your duty, Ivan.”

He scoffs. “I didn’t save her.”

“You couldn’t have.”

“It feels like I should have, still.” Ivan snuffs out the butt of his cigarette in the ashtray that is always left on Gilbert’s bedside table for occasions such as these. “Our Katya, our daughter, she wanted to go to China to fight in the war against Japan instead of staying and waiting for the Nazis to strike against us.”

“You didn’t let her.”

Ivan shakes his head. “I thought I could keep her safe. She was devoted in the way I’d raised her to be, though, and she was signed up to fight as soon as she could, once it was an issue of defending our homeland instead of something I could reasonably disapprove of.” His fingers worry against each other, calluses brushing past each other too harshly for it to be anything but self-punishment. “She wrote me letters from the frontlines, you know. Telling me all the times that she’d seen news from Tokyo, that she’d never forgive me for not letting her fight for her mother.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. I knew there was no good response to that, and she knew it too.”

The light coming in from outside is waning as the moon shifts. “You could’ve told her that you wanted to protect her. Even though she disagreed with you, she would’ve understood your love for her.”

“Maybe,” Ivan murmurs. “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”

That should be the end of their conversation, and if this night were like most, Ivan would pull himself out of Gilbert’s bed, take his neatly-folded clothes from the dresser and sleep in the guest bedroom among the bookcases and stacks of gifts that Gilbert doesn’t quite know what to do with. But Gilbert has the sneaking suspicion that this topic will be put to rest for another six months, after Ivan has left his bed, and he needs to know the answer to this question before it eats away at him.

“Ivan… I know I shouldn’t ask this, but…”

“What?”

“When we have sex, do you think about Chun instead of me?”

Ivan looks away. If Gilbert didn’t know him well, he might take that as an answer, but he knows that Ivan is blunt enough to tell him straight, no matter which way the answer falls. He is considering, genuinely, how to answer him.

“No,” Ivan says, after a moment. “You and her are too different for that.”

“You wish that you were with her, though.”

“Of course.”

That’s an answer Gilbert can accept. When he was younger, perhaps he would get angry at the idea of any of his partners holding someone else in their heart, despite the fact he himself has never been good at monogamy. Given the past century, the past decade in particular, he doesn’t have the energy for anger. “Do you actually desire me, then, or is this just convenience?”

Another pause. 

“I rarely desire much, anymore,” Ivan admits. “But I enjoy you. I implore you not to ask for more than that from me.”

“I won’t,” Gilbert promises. “Goodnight, Ivan.”

“Goodnight.”

The bed creaks and shifts as Ivan leaves him for the night, and in the silence that comes when the door shuts behind him, the ever-present chill settles deeper into Gilbert’s bones. He has not known loneliness like this in a long time, and he knows the emotion is not entirely his own.

====

“I’ll admit,” Roderich says, his newspaper spread out across Gilbert’s kitchen table and unread despite that, “it’s amusing to me to see you and Ivan acting as friends.”

“We are friends,” Gilbert responds, stealing a bite from Roderich’s plate. “You know I wouldn’t put up with political theatre, not after the thirties.”

Roderich rolls his eyes. “After watching you two fight for the past thousand years, forgive me if I don’t view your supposed reconciliation as entirely authentic.”

“If you think Ivan could convincingly pull off any type of act like that, you’re insane,” Gilbert says. “You’ve known him long enough to know that he’s just as straightforward as he looks, and that he’s an absolute disaster at trying to pretend anything.”

“He seems quite good at pretending his marriage with China was anything other than political,” Roderich mutters. “I mean, there’s no shame in political marriages, and if you grow to love each other, that’s lovely, but…”

Gilbert knows Roderich is speaking from experience. It doesn’t make it any less of a misunderstanding. “He loved her before they were wed,” Gilbert corrects. “From what he told me, at least.”

“Still. We all know the show that they would put on if she were still alive. I mean, it would be a wasted opportunity not to get a little publicity out of it, right?”

“Publicity, sure, but publicity and theatre are two different things.” If she were alive, there would be photos of the two of them printed in every newspaper around the world, whether attacking them or supporting them. Chun in her red army uniform, a rifle strapped to her back and Ivan’s hand on her shoulder. The photos exist, Gilbert has seen them, but the photos of martyrs before their deaths are the material of textbooks and memorials, not of newspapers trying to promote something. No, the only photos of Ivan and Chun together that are ever printed in the news are of their wedding or of Ivan mourning her. The Communists spread the wedding photos, as if it were a symbol of devotion that lives on even after her death, guaranteeing the Chinese Communists’ inevitable victory; the capitalist press, in turn, spread the images of her corpse and Ivan’s tears as a symbol of both fascist terror and communist moribundity. Watch her die, wait until he joins her.

Roderich hums. “I’d never heard you say something good about him before the war,” he says, after a moment. “And here you are defending him like a lover.”

“Defending his character doesn’t imply anything of the sort.” Yes, Ivan goes to his bed sometimes. That’s not where Gilbert would draw the line for a lover. Roderich and Elizaveta are lovers; Ivan (and before him, Antonio and Francis) are friends who occasionally fall together in the most natural of ways. It’s the sentiment that matters, more than the action. Roderich, ever so proper, wouldn’t see the distinction.

“You like to think him genuine,” Roderich says. “You don’t want to see the implications of him being a capable liar.”

“Do you think he’s a liar?”

“I think he’s learned to manipulate you. Found the parts of you that are sore to the touch.”

Gilbert looks away. He knows what Roderich is implying, knows that he could turn that logic back on Roderich but that it would be cruel to do so. He avoids the statement, instead. “I haven’t lost a daughter. Or a wife.”

“No. But you’ve lost a brother, haven’t you?”

He tries not to think of the way Ludwig’s eyes look when they meet his, on the rare times that they are able to meet in back-alley cafés and pretend that they are not the people they are. The way that Ludwig tells him stories of Feliciano, impassioned and full of details and so obviously smitten that Gilbert cannot help but smile for his brother. The way that the smile drops from Gilbert’s face when Ludwig pauses, hesitates, and shifts backward into his seat, gripping his coffee mug and bringing it to his lips as he swallows down his own devotion and murmurs, quiet and fatalistic, “Not as if it means anything,” because the fascists may be gone but their ideas still linger, still lap at the roots of peoples’ minds and paint Ludwig’s unconditional love as something ugly. 

Something in both of them died, in 1933, and it had been killed over and over again over the next twelve years. It would be foolish to believe that something capable of being resurrected, even with the war over and the fascists gone.

“Not yet,” Gilbert answers, and he doesn’t believe it, but he says it anyway, like a prayer. Not yet. Not my brother, please, not my brother. So much has been taken from them, but there is always more to take. 

Roderich sighs. “The war wounded all of us.” He picks his fork up, stabbing it through the single piece of sausage left on his plate. It is crude, so unlike how he would have been a century earlier, telling Gilbert off for the most minor of breaches in etiquette. “Some of us came home, some of us didn’t, and some of us brought the war home to dwell, didn’t we?”

Ivan’s uniform and cap, neatly folded on Gilbert’s dresser and displaying their insignias as clearly as they would in the morning sun. Polished, cared for, the way that they never could have been in battle. A sign of peace, as much as they were a sign of war; the fact that Ivan had given himself to the minute and repetitive task of polishing metal pins to avoid thinking about the way the world seemed always to be creeping closer to oblivion instead of to the future he had fought for. The way that Gilbert wished he had something to be so certain of, instead of always lingering on the what-ifs and the memories that intrude at the corner of his mind until he swats at them like flies. (The memories don’t die, though, they’re not as fragile as flies. They’re more like roaches, invisible and rotting until there’s too many of them to ignore; unkillable and unbearable at the same time.)

“Yes,” he says, “I suppose we did.”

====

Whenever Natalia comes to him, Gilbert anticipates bad news.

He brews her a cup of tea, the way she had done for herself the first three times she’d visited him, dissatisfied with the coffee he’d offered her and too stubborn to give him proper instructions on what to do better. He’d figured out her routine after that third time, noted down all of the steps, how long she brewed it, how much cream and sugar she took with her tea, and he’d served it to her no-questions-asked every time since. She’d never thanked him; not out of a lack of gratitude, but simply because the ability to say words like that has never been in her nature.

“Hyunsoo has come to stay in Moscow,” she says, after she’s tasted her tea and the ever-present worry-lines at the edge of her lips have unfurled, ever so slightly. “He’s in that stage where he doesn’t know what to say and what not to.”

“And?”

She glances at him, as if the implications are obvious. “He refers to Chun as ‘mother.’” Natalia swallows. “Apparently, it was part of whatever theatre that bastard had set up, he had Chun playing mother to all three of his children, as if she weren’t married to my brother and as if his sons’ mother hadn’t already died at his hands.”

“And Hyunsoo has told Ivan this?”

“Parts,” she says. “He won’t say it like that, of course, but everything he says implies enough.”

That’s the issue with nations who are stuck as children or teenagers. They rarely grow mature enough to know what is worth saying and what needs to be buried; they see and suffer just as their adult counterparts do, and yet their childlike minds cannot filter or interpret it in the way that is necessary to learn to deal with it. Gilbert remembers being a child like that, young and foolish and brandishing a sword that bled . Gilbert hadn’t truly comprehended what death was, being a child such as he, unaging and invulnerable. Humans came and went, with time, and death had never felt lighter.

The first time he had watched one of the other German states die, someone who had been more like a cousin than a sister but family, all the same, he had stared into a face drained of blood and seen the corpses piled in his wake. Gilbert had never felt comfortable holding a sword again, much less the guns that had been shoved into his hands as the humans had found newer and more efficient ways to end each others’ lives.

“Ivan must have already suspected, I’m sure.”

“Yes,” Natalia says. “But it is one thing to suspect and another thing to have proof. Especially when the proof is a teenage orphan who looks to you like a father.”

Lose a daughter, gain a son. The math, while cruel, makes it all seem more like a sadistic joke than like reality. “And does Ivan indulge him, in that?”

“He doesn’t have much of a choice.” Natalia sets her tea down on the table, pursing her lips. “He writes letters to Chun’s other sons. Never receives replies. He suspects that the letters aren’t being delivered, in the first place.”

“And her daughter?”

“She answers.” Natalia shrugs. “She’s not a Communist, and she’s far too fond of her fa– That bastard,” she corrects herself, “for what she’s been through, but she means well. Barely mentions Chun at all, which is better than what Hyunsoo says, if I’m being honest. She likes to pretend that Ivan is just a concerned outside observer, rather than a step-father.”

“If that’s what he is to her, then… I suppose that’s for the best.”

“Indeed.”

The quiet settles over them, as it often does, and Natalia takes long sips of her tea while Gilbert, half performatively and half out of genuine compulsion, begins to scrub little stains off his kitchen counters. Though the two of them are uncomfortable in their silence, too untrusting to ever let a silence linger without a thought to its end, they have grown familiar enough with each others’ silence that there’s no sense of urgency as they find their next topic. It’s a dance they’ve done before, Natalia acting as his guest, concerned yet welcomed, and Gilbert acting as a competent host, always hoping that the truth of his own instability will evade her notice, in the way that it never evades Roderich or Elizaveta.

“Natalia.”

“Yes?”

“After the war, did they send Chun’s ashes home? So that her people could bury her properly?”

It was something that Ivan had always avoided answering, whenever Gilbert asked for the timelines of Chun’s death and her body arriving in Moscow to be cleaned and cremated. The fact that Kiku had been willing to send her body to Moscow at all had been surprising, to Gilbert, but Ivan had said that he suspected Chun had traded obedience for that promise. “She was always practical like that,” Ivan had said, “she would sacrifice anything, if it meant she would get her way in the end.”

Natalia sets her mug down on the table. She looks out the window, for a moment, and then returns her gaze to where her fingernails dance against the porcelain of the mug’s handle. “They said they did,” she murmurs, low and soft, not quite a whisper. “I have my doubts.”

“Doubts?”

She nods.

“My brother is a selfish man. And I know he wouldn’t let go of that last piece of her, no matter how much he knows that he should.”

====

“Sometimes,” Ivan says, the air thick with smoke and his voice quiet like a confession, “her face still comes to me at night. Even before she was dead, I used to see her like that. I’d feel my bed dip, as if there were another body there, and I’d turn my head, opening my eyes, and she’d be there. Always the way she was, a week before she left Moscow in 1919. You’d think she’d return to exactly the way she’d been before her pregnancy, being immortal like we are, but I think it always took her body a few years to fully recover. And she was… I can’t explain how beautiful she was, even with remnants of her illness, to see her after she’d born my daughter, I couldn’t imagine there being another person more beautiful, not if I lived a hundred-thousand years. But whenever she comes to my bed, now, she’s always silent. Always still. This quiet, thoughtful look on her face that isn’t quite a smile, and I know if I reach out to her that she’ll disappear, but… I never last long. Something in me can’t help it. I have to touch her, even if it means I’ll wake up.”

“Can’t say I’ve had a dream like that,” Gilbert says, because he knows Ivan doesn’t want to be analyzed, doesn’t want Gilbert’s thoughts or advice on what he’s said. He’s told it to Gilbert because he knows Gilbert won’t say it to anyone else. Both of them had grown used to the sacrament of confession, at one point or another in their histories, and even the blatant evidence they’d seen of a lack of a benevolent god could not erase the way that habit urged them to confess their sins unto each other, as if their mutual benediction were worth anything. “But sometimes I dream about my brother. Not– Not seeing him in the environment around me, it’s always like I’m in a memory, stuck there and reliving it. It’s always his loss that breaks my heart, not my own. After centuries of caring so much about myself… It feels strange. I used to be alone, you know. Not truly alone, I had dozens of cousins, but never anyone close enough to call a sibling, never someone that was close in the way that you were close to your sisters. And then Ludwig came along, and I looked at him, and I knew that nations are never born into this world already adults, and yet… I knew him. I knew exactly what he was, I knew every part of his soul like he was my own, in one way or another. And I called him my brother, because that was the easiest way to explain it, to humans or to him, but… I almost thought of him more like my child, in some ways, but… He’s older than me, I think.”

“You think?”

“He’s… Well, none of us have particularly clear memories of our origins, but you and I were born at around the same time, right? You, perhaps a little earlier.”

Ivan hums, putting out one cigarette and reaching immediately for the next.

“I remember having another… Well, at that time I guess he was more of a cousin, than a brother, but our relationship fluctuated over the years. He never told me his human name, not once in the centuries we knew each other.”

“Holy Rome,” Ivan guesses, and Gilbert is sure that Ivan remembers the other nation as well: the boy perpetually stuck in his early teens, never quite an adult despite all of the expectations and power placed on him, no matter how many years passed. “He always struck me as being a bit narcissistic, seems like the type who wouldn’t even give his name to those he trusts.”

“That’s a good way of putting it.” Gilbert sighs. Some of what he’s about to say, he hadn’t consciously put together when he’d first met Ludwig as he knows him now, hadn’t had the context until Roderich had given it in some other conversation, casual and unknowing about the secrets he was giving and the way those secrets were piecing themselves together. “He was… Well, rarely pleasant, in the way that few teenage boys are pleasant to be around. But he was in love.”

“That does have a tendency to make teenage boys even more insufferable.”

Gilbert chuckles. “You’ll never guess who Holy Rome was in love with.”

Ivan breathes out smoke into the air above their faces before he turns to look at Gilbert, lazily raising an eyebrow. “Feliciano?”

“Yes.”

The other man nods, taking another sharp inhale and then letting it leave him. “So he’s your younger brother, your older brother, your cousin, and your child, all in one. Quite a relationship to have.”

“You understand why I don’t tell him, then.”

Ivan nods. “You worry you’ll burden him.”

“His love is already something he worries will suffocate him,” Gilbert says, remembering each and every time that Ludwig had been beaten for mentioning Feliciano in anything other than a military context, and even then for using his human name. Ludwig was harder to beat the spirit out of than the fascists had wished, but he knew when to grow quiet. Rage and anger might have been what he projected when he knew it would work, but he knew obedience and deception just as well. All Gilbert could hope was that that obedience never turned to true apathy. “He doesn’t need to know of centuries that he cannot remember. Whether he is Holy Rome or not, Holy Rome is gone. And I’d rather have Ludwig than Holy Rome, no matter the centuries I spent with the latter.”

“If anyone is allowed white lies,” Ivan says, “it’s us.”

Gilbert’s not sure which “us” Ivan means, whether the two of them, the nations affected by the war, the nations of the slowly-solidifying socialist bloc, or nations in general. Whichever group he means, Gilbert thinks he has reason to mean it. 

Of course Ivan is lying to him about something, as much as they play at confession like it will relieve the weight of their guilt. They have always lied to each other. They always will.

====

It takes nearly four years after the war for Gilbert to recognize the way that Elizaveta’s things are slowly invading his apartment.

At first it is a few extra items of her clothing, then one of her hair brushes, and slowly it becomes even such everyday things as pots and pans and her favorite mug. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it at first because Roderich does the same thing, if on a smaller and more purposeful scale, a quiet claim that might as well be screaming “remember my presence even when I am absent.” Even Ivan, for as little sentiment is actually shared between them, occasionally leaves behind a book he’d brought to read before bed. It isn’t something that Gilbert had wanted to attribute any intention to, but as time wears on and Elizaveta’s things are increasingly accompanied by the woman’s own presence, Gilbert starts to believe it’s intentional.

“You are making a home of my apartment,” Gilbert says, leaning back against his own countertops and feeling not quite at ease. The two of them have always had a more volatile relationship than either have had with Roderich. Roderich has his sharp points, yes, and he is as stubborn as they come. But he has always known when to bend, when to let his actual opposition turn into murmured complaints that cover up his acquiescence as some kind of gesture at saving face. Gilbert and Elizaveta are not the same way, they will fight until the end until they either get their way or someone breaks them apart.

Elizaveta raises an eyebrow at him as she stirs the soup that is slowly cooking on the stove. “I spent much of my life in political marriages; now that I am allowed marriage of my own choice, would you deny me that?”

“That is what this is, then? Marriage?”

“Something like it.” Elizaveta sighs. She turns, closing the distance between them and running her hand over Gilbert’s cheek. “This is what we are, Gilbert, what we will be for the foreseeable future. I don’t see a point in resisting it.”

“But– I don’t understand why you would want to marry me, after all that–”

“After all that you’ve done? You haven’t done a bad thing in years, nothing that was actually your own will, at least.”

“To you specifically, then. Over our lifetimes.”

“If I were measuring the weight of a lifetime, I would have to toss the scales out and start again. So that’s what I’m doing.” She takes a step back, reaching for the cabinet where Gilbert keeps shot glasses. “Will you drink to that with me? New beginnings, throwing it all out and starting again as the new people that we are now?”

A little liquor has never scared Gilbert. “If that’s what we are, then a toast has never hurt.”

Elizaveta pours out two shots of whiskey, passing one to Gilbert. They click the two shots together, and each of them downs it with the practice and intensity that their ages demand of them. They each stand in silence as it goes down. Gilbert doesn’t feel much effect, and even though Elizaveta is of lighter weight, physically, he knows she could drink most human men under a table. He looks at her for a long moment, thinks of his own choices, of how many men have fallen into his bed at one point or another and how the only woman who’s ever done so is her. Gilbert is never willing to put labels on things, whether it’s because names give things identifiability that they cannot always afford, or simply because those labels cannot begin to express his experiences in their whole. But it’s hard for him not to think of Elizaveta as the exception to a trend; the only woman he’d ever even consider marrying, for as much as he’d envied her the possession of Roderich’s heart as he had Roderich of hers.

“Do you actually wish to marry me, then? Legally?”

“Better you than anyone else,” she says. “There’s no one else among our allies I would consider.”

Roderich isn’t an ally. Roderich is neutral, just neutral enough to come to their homes and stay a few nights and kiss them goodbye in the mornings and offer opinions on politics that never seem quite correct or informed. And Elizaveta was married to him, was given to him politically and divorced him politically and still casts glances to his photos like she might marry him willingly if no one cared who either of them were.

“I can’t promise monogamy,” Gilbert says.

“I won’t ask you to, if you’ll allow me the same.”

“Of course.” Gilbert nods. “A good promise should always go both ways.”

Elizaveta raises an eyebrow. “You’ll share your secrets then, if I give mine?”

“Only what’s mine to give,” Gilbert says, because so few of his secrets are, now, so many of them are bound up in Ludwig and in Ivan and in loves and lives that were not his to experience or to mourn and yet still build up in pitiful, broken piles in his lungs when the night seeps in. So much of Gilbert seems no longer to exist, when you take away everything that is not truly his. And when he thinks about that, when he thinks about the way that so much of himself has come to rest upon his family and on his friends–his old enemy, the only companion who understands him in quite the way that he does–he already worries about the day when they are taken from him too. Ludwig is already unreachable, in so many ways. Ivan seems inevitable, at the moment, but Gilbert has lived long enough to know that things–situations, nations, relationships of any kind–rarely last as long as he would want.

“Tell me, then,” Elizaveta says. “Tell me what really happened to you during the war.”

Gilbert hesitates. Of all the things she could ask, it is something that belongs to him and that he is so unready to give into anyone else’s hands, even Ivan’s. Even Ludwig’s.

“I know what was printed in newspapers, of course,” Elizaveta continues, when he doesn’t answer. “I know that you and Ludwig were in the military, first, and then that both of you seemed to disappear, for a time, and then sometimes, when they needed a spectacle, one of you would appear in the photos, but…” She swallows. “You’ve never told me the truth, Gil. And Ludwig hasn’t told anyone either, at least not that I’ve seen.”

Everyone assumed something had happened to them, to both of them. It was the only reason they’d been greeted with pity after the war instead of hatred.

“They kept us in the military,” Gilbert confesses, quiet and slow. “Like you said. And then Ludwig started to talk too much about Feliciano, and you know what the fascists thought about homosexuality, and I couldn’t– I couldn’t let the attention fall on the two of them. Or on Roderich, for what it was worth. And so I– I talked about Francis, instead. I never loved him, never really could have, not like that, but… If the attention was on me, if it seemed like I was the bigger problem, I thought maybe they’d get rid of me and let Ludwig live. Let him be normal, let him play the game and pretend that he agreed with them until he could find his way out.”

“Until the war ended,” Elizaveta supplies.

Gilbert nods. “But I didn’t succeed, not at diverting their attention from him. At first they just put us on worse assignments, in more labor-intensive roles and away from sensitive information. Sometimes they’d punish us, for saying certain things, always with a warning that things would get worse if what we were got any harder for them to ignore. And eventually… They put us in a POW camp. Not a–” He can’t say the words, but Elizaveta knows what he means, knows the way his breathing chokes up and he looks away and his eyes look like they’ve seen too much, just from the photographs that he’d seen in files after the war was already over. “We were lucky, like that. I think part of the leadership wanted to send us there, wanted to throw us away once and for all. But others… They thought we were still useful. Thought we could still be brought out and paraded around when our image meant something.

“And the thing is, more than what happened to us, to me, is that– We stayed. We could have run, could have played our roles and crossed a border we were supposed to be fighting over and sought refuge. We could have been so much more useful as figureheads against the fascists, if we’d been on the outside denouncing it. But we didn’t do that. We were cowards. Too honest, too self-serving, too caring about each other to think about things like that.”

“You were trying to survive,” Elizaveta says. “And you succeeded.”

It’s hard for Gilbert to look at anything from the war or the years before it and agree with her. Yes, they survived, but succeeding, they’d been far from that. If they had succeeded earlier, if they had done what braver men would do, perhaps they could have saved someone. 

(Perhaps Ivan’s daughter would still be alive, if Gilbert had managed to give the Soviets intelligence during the war. Perhaps he and Ludwig could have turned the fascists’ soldiers against their commanders, perhaps they could have ended the war in Europe years earlier. Perhaps everyone could have concentrated on the Japanese empire instead of splitting their resources.)

(Perhaps Wang Chun would still be alive, and Ivan wouldn’t spend far too many nights in Gilbert’s apartment seeking forgiveness from the wrong person, from someone who has never been qualified, let alone deserving, of giving it.)

“Don’t tell me that,” Gilbert says. “You know I don’t deserve that kind of reassurance.”

Elizaveta looks back at the soup she’s cooking, checks it and stirs it once more and pulls it from the stove a minute later.

After she’s ladled it out into bowls for each of them and set it on the table, in that moment when they sit down and might have said grace if they hadn’t been through the past few decades, she finally looks at him again.

“You’re looking for forgiveness, Gil. You think things are your fault, when you never wanted that government in the first place, would’ve done everything you could to oppose them if you weren’t so worried about your little brother getting hurt.” Elizaveta holds out her hand on the table, palm up and fingers outstretched in invitation. “It’s not mine to give, not the kind of forgiveness you’re looking for. But if it means anything– I do forgive you. Whatever that means, coming from me.”

“It doesn’t mean nothing,” Gilbert answers, and he won’t tell her this, but somehow his chest does feel so much lighter. “We’re new people now, right?”

“Exactly,” Elizaveta says, a soft smile returning to her lips, that same smile that could rarely be drawn out of her and that Gilbert loved so dearly. “So, Gilbert Bielshmidt, as a person and not a country, will you marry me?”

“You know I will.”

==== 

Gilbert isn’t often summoned to Moscow on unofficial grounds. He visits when his leaders visit, and occasionally he’ll make the trip of his own volition if rumors make it to him that Ivan is having a particularly bad string of weeks. Those visits had been less and less over the past four years, slowly changing from Gilbert spending most of his time as Ivan’s co-commiserator to passing months in Budapest or, when he could manage it, weeks in Vienna. But Gilbert had expected for something to come up: with the Communists winning the war in China, it was inevitable that something (be it real or be it in Ivan’s mind alone) would happen to cause Ivan great concern. The biggest surprise was that the call had come from Ivan himself and not from Katya or Natalia.

It’s obvious how the trip will turn out. Gilbert will arrive, Ivan will be distraught but attempting to push it down, and Gilbert will get the man either drunk or pleasured enough for him to speak about it honestly. They might take their pleasure from it, if Ivan is in the mood for it, but ultimately they will leave in the same condition that they had begun the trip. Ivan, broken, and Gilbert, all too willing to fall into the beds of those he cannot quite bring himself to love in an honest way. (Even Elizaveta, with Gilbert’s ring on her finger and with a smile that could change Gilbert’s mood in an instant, still sometimes feels too good to be true, too good to be something that will last.) At least they are both aware of their own limitations.

Ivan doesn’t meet him at the airport, despite making the invitation, and it isn’t until they’ve reached the Soviet nations’ home and he’s led by Raivis to the formal sitting room that he lays eyes on the man. He’d expected for Ivan to look depressed in the way that he always did, exhaustion seeping from his pores and a quiet sadness covered up with soft smiles that didn’t quite reach his eyes. Instead, he’s pacing behind one of the two couches in the room, his steps coming to a halt when he hears Gilbert enter.

The taller nation doesn’t look exhausted, on the contrary, he exudes a nervous energy that Gilbert hasn’t seen from him in over a decade. His eyes are full of hope and apprehension, and Gilbert immediately understands why. Sat on the couch in front of Ivan is a smaller figure with long black hair and tan skin, a loosely tailored red dress obscuring the finer details of their form. Still, Gilbert knows that face, for as impossible as it is.

“Wang Chun?” Gilbert asks, a hand subconsciously reaching out to touch the older nation as his feet take him closer. And yes, those features are the same he’d seen a century earlier; the same he’d seen in newspaper photos and in the frames that Ivan keeps around his home.

“Yes,” she responds, not meeting his eyes.

Ivan’s hand rests on her shoulder. “She was recently revived, as I suspected she would be.”

“As you suspec–” The realization hits Gilbert like he is back in 1933 again, struggling to process the implications of events even for as clear as they are. “You kept her body, instead of burying her or cremating her.”

“Yes,” Ivan says. His hand stays on her shoulder, and to Gilbert it looks as if she leans back into the touch, ever so slightly. “She had been dead two days when her body arrived in Moscow, yet her wounds were healing instead of her body decaying further. That is how I knew she would survive.”

“You’ve known since 1944, then.”

“I hoped.”

Gilbert nods, but he still feels some kind of betrayal settle in his gut. The past four years, had they all been a lie on some level? Letting Ivan use Gilbert as an outlet for his mourning when Chun hadn’t even been truly dead? And yes, Ivan was still entitled to grieve for his daughter, and yes, Gilbert can imagine that Ivan grieved for what he suspected had happened to Chun in Tokyo, but the fact of her impending resurrection had always been left out of Ivan’s quite sorrows. Still. It isn’t her fault, and though things have changed between Gilbert and Ivan (he tries not to apply the word “irreparably,” though it comes to mind) there is no fault that Gilbert can lay at Chun’s doorstep.

“It’s good to see you alive, in any case,” Gilbert says to Chun, sitting down on the couch across from her. He doesn’t know how to talk to her, not yet, not like he knows all of their other allies. Gilbert is rarely a political creature, but it is still a second skin that feels like it fits entirely too well. “I know the last time we met wasn’t pleasant, but I hope that you can let it stay in the past. It would be an honor to call you my comrade, if you’ll allow it.”

She looks at him for a long moment, their eyes not quite meeting, and Gilbert is almost afraid she won’t respond at all. He wouldn’t blame her, but it would make the interaction more awkward than it already is. “I forgave you long ago,” she says, leaning forward to grasp the teacup that sits on the table in front of her. “We have all done things in the name of our country which we were ashamed of as people. There are very few of us who delight in pain and sorrow, and I reserve my anger for them alone.”

“Your brother, you mean.”

“He is first among them, yes.” Chun takes a long sip of her tea (Gilbert can’t quite make out the scent, but it smells pleasant, whatever the exact flavor) and sets the cup back down. Her expression softens, slightly, as she glances back up at Gilbert, flitting over each of his features. “I wasn’t aware of much beyond my own confinement, during the war, but Vanya has told me you suffered greatly for your beliefs.”

Gilbert’s lip stiffens. His gaze drifts to Ivan, who has resumed his pacing, albeit slower and more thoughtful, less filled with obvious anxiety. It’s not unlike Ivan to lie about details he believes are unimportant, but that’s an interesting detail to lie about. He’s no doubt told Chun about Gilbert and Elizaveta’s engagement, as well. Has to play the devoted husband, doesn’t he? 

“That wasn’t the only reason I suffered,” Gilbert offers, splitting the difference between truth and Ivan’s vision, “although I’m sure it was part of it, it was rarely the stated reason for what I went through.”

“What was the stated reason, then?”

Ivan stares at him, a warning evident in his eyes, but he makes no attempt to intervene. “My brother and I were both punished for our sexual histories,” Gilbert admits, locking eyes with Chun once more. “Ludwig has only ever loved one person, a man, and I am known for keeping the company of both men and women. Needless to say, the fascists were less than pleased with the both of us. Thought they’d lock us up and hope someone would come along to replace us as their nation sooner or later.”

Chun nods, not seeming surprised by the information or judging him for it. “My leaders–former leaders, now–often wished the same of me, although they weren’t willing to kill me themselves. They just put me in the path of danger and waited for the results they wanted.”

“You were hated for your beliefs, I take it?”

That manages to draw a smile from Chun, and she glances back at Ivan. For all that Gilbert has heard stories from Ivan about how dearly he loved her, it is another thing to see that quiet fondness in Chun’s own gaze. Gilbert has known of her for a long time, in whispers and rumors for all of his long life, and she is rarely called anything but reserved. To see such open emotion from her, it is something rare, something precious. “They weren’t exactly fond of the nation who spent seven years on the run with those they called ‘red bandits,’ so if you take that as a signal of my beliefs, then I suppose it was my beliefs that led to my reputation.”

Gilbert can’t stifle the laugh that erupts from him, and even Ivan chuckles as well. Perhaps this topic, for as fraught with danger as it is, will pass them by easily.

“Ivan tells me that you’ve been a great source of comfort for him, over the past few years while I was asleep,” Chun says, glancing back to Ivan. There’s no hesitation in her words, no layering of emphasis like she’s trying to insinuate anything. “I’m glad that you were here for him.”

“Of course.” Gilbert looks at her, examining her face for a moment. “You weren’t– Aware of anything, while you were asleep, were you? Was it as if you fell asleep one moment and woke up the next, or–”

“You’re asking whether it still feels like 1944 to me.”

“Essentially, yes.”

Chun presses her lips together, looking away. “Yes,” she answers after a moment. “It still feels as if a week ago I was in Tokyo. But no, I am not still mourning my daughter as if I had just heard the news. I had nearly two years to mourn her, and being as old as I am… I am unfortunately accustomed to losing my children. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me or to avoid the topic.”

Gilbert nods. She’s braver than any of them, in a certain way, the way that Gilbert had always known her to be from the things Ivan would say about her. “You’re proud of her,” Gilbert guesses. “For what she did, while she was alive.”

“Incredibly so,” Chun answers, and her eyes settle on Gilbert like she approves of him, like she recognizes something in him that she doesn’t see in most people. “She did what she knew was right.” She looks down at her hands, then, and her expression changes. “Still, though, a part of me cannot help but thinking that I would have preferred her to be alive than to be a hero. But war doesn’t spare human families that loss, and there’s nothing in what we are that gives us a privilege to be spared in a way that humans aren’t.”

Perhaps Chun doesn’t mind Gilbert bringing up her human daughter, but Gilbert doesn’t dare to mention her other children, who are still so far from her and who politics will likely keep from her for a long time, the same way that politics will keep him from his brother. They can both believe with everything they have that the path they have chosen is right, is just, and that still will not make that separation any easier to deal with.

“I’m too selfish to believe that,” Gilbert admits. “I’ve never had children, but…”

“You’d do anything for your brother,” Chun says.

“Yes.”

“In my culture, we’d call that a virtue,” Chun says. “Still, it never ceases to hurt, does it?”

“No,” Gilbert says. “It never does.”

====

“You didn’t tell her, did you?” Gilbert asks Ivan, later, when they’re out for a walk with some of the other nations and Chun has been pulled away by Natalia. “About the kind of comfort I was giving you?”

“I told her enough,” Ivan answers. “She’s not naïve.”

“And you think she’d still welcome me like that, if she knew what I’d done with her husband?”

Ivan shrugs. “Your fiancée knows what I’ve done with you, and she treats me pleasantly enough.”

“Eliza and I have an agreement. You and Chun–”

“Are old enough to have an understanding, whether we’ve talked about it or not.” Ivan glances at Gilbert, for just a moment, in the soft evening light of autumn. “She understands, Gilbert. She knows that I was grieving her, even if I hoped she’d come back. And she knows that my grief looks a certain way, whether she always likes it or not. And now… We have a future to look forward to. A war that’s over, nations that are being rebuilt, allies that we can truly call friends… This is more than most of us have had for centuries, you know that.”

“My brother, then? Her children?”

“She didn’t have them with her before, either,” Ivan says. “This is not new to her, in the way it is to us.”

To you, that’s what Ivan means, but in this moment he’s trying to be empathetic enough for Gilbert to drop the topic. They’ve always been most honest with each other in the dark of night, and this moment is not one that will give them that honesty.

“I just hope that all of us will survive it,” Gilbert says, and he doesn’t mean Ivan, even for the ambiguity that ‘all’ entails. He means himself, and he means Ludwig, and he means Chun and her children, and he means Hyunsoo and Yongsoo, and maybe he even means Roderich, on the days when neutrality feel a little too much like he’s on the other side of a border that Gilbert’s only allowed to touch and not to cross. He means all of the nations who are losing years of their loved ones to this new Cold War, even if their hearts are willing to bear the separation for the sake of what they know to be right.

“We will,” Ivan says. “Someday, you’ll forget these years ever hurt as much as they do now."