Loneliness was a stalwart companion. Once loneliness has been befriended, then there's nowhere you can't go, and no one you need to depend on but yourself, or so Matt had found. It had been that way for a while now. He wasn't sure when he had started to hang with loneliness, but all the same they were pretty tight.

On the other hand, loneliness is a drug that's hard to kick. Matt would find himself tempted to maybe not be lonely for a while, or even to be lonely with someone else. But then the call of his solitary existence would overwhelm him, dragging him back in to the depths of his own mind. Quiet and slumped, watching others from afar, his eyes too hooded with something that was never quite going to be narcissism to bother identifying faces and placing names to them.

But then he walked past.

Somewhere in the middle ground. Somewhere in between the peace-keeping parties between the nations and their alternate counterparts, he wandered through. On a coffee run, the softly curling wings of his hair pushed back by a passing air current. There was something transient about the way he held himself, as though he was simply moving through this meeting, this world, and Matt's line of vision with no intention of staying.

But then he paused, feeling someone's eyes on him, his head turned, and Matt's dull gaze met Matthew's clear, fresh face. The ephemeral solidified, present and there. Too far too call out, too far to smile. But not too far to raise one hand in a mock salute. Hesitantly and, much to the distant Canadian's pleasant surprise, fearlessly the salute was returned. It wasn't sloppy and limp wristed, but rather carefully straight and precise; a proper military salute.

Just as quickly as he had appeared, solidly ephemeral Matthew strode off with his quick, clicking steps and shined leather shoes. But still he remained in the forefront of Matt's mind and the meeting he had distanced himself from grew further still from his mind. The colour of the other's eyes was duller, but they themselves were brighter. Too full of honest intention and good will to be in any way suited to Matt's own violent apathy. And yet somehow, from that single glance, he was drawn. He wanted to find more differences, more opposites. More ways in which they balanced each other out.

~====o)0(o====~

"Yo, Matt," Alfred called, his felicitation somewhat underappreciated when the man to whom he spoke only wanted to go back to his old friend loneliness. Loneliness who was currently attempting to dissuade him from his train of thought. He didn't want that. He wanted to think and here was Alfred with his chestnut tan and his mahogany tan, looking like the burned remains of a city after nuclear fallout. "You talked to your alter yet? Mine's a pious little shitbag, but yummy as fuck."

The American flopped down, uninvited, his legs tangling with Matt's, merging like the borderlands between them. His neighbour licked his lips, wetting them, feeling cracks and scars and stinging splits he hadn't known he had.

"Nah," Matt sighed, voice creaking with disuse, "Looks a little baby-faced. Clean cut."

"You two are kinda the same though. Both quiet like. Only he's legit passive. Peace-keeper, y'know? Fuck. I think you start most of our fights," Alfred's laughter was too loud in the silence that Matt wanted to have.

"I finish them too," he said warningly, looking sidelong at Alfred before letting his eyes wander along the lines off nations in the distance, trying to catch bright eyes and softly waving hair.

"That's cause you're not a person, you're a fucking machine. You still owe me a tooth," the American's words rain from the sky, softly onto Matt's face. He doesn't say that he want to be left alone, but something in his mood shift made it obvious, and the conversation ended as Alfred got up and walked away.

Like snow, the words came. He didn't notice them falling, but when he looked around, they were everywhere. In his reflection, in the bottom of his coffee cup. In the tremulously brief glances he caught of an angel's golden halo.

You're not a person.

You're a machine.

~====o)0(o====~

"You're supposed to be interesting," Matt said flatly, looking at Matthew with the same, flat disinterest as he usually does everything else. But he didn't mean it. He wanted to look honestly curious, maybe even politely interested, but his face seemed to have forgotten how and all he got was the hooded expression of impending malice that appeared on his face by default.

"Sorry?" Matthew tried, leaning backwards slightly as he attempted to fathom whom had said that about him, when, and why they had felt the need to relate it to his pants-shittingly scary alternate.

"Why?" The question didn't snap out like a rubber band on a bare arm, but it had the same effect, and the more put-together Canadian flinched away from his double.

"Because I'm not interesting?" he asked, knowing that it shouldn't have been a question and hating himself because it was.

"I never said you weren't interesting," Matt shrugged with careless disinterest, though there was a spark to his too-bright eyes that had perhaps been missing before, "I stated my expectation of you."

"What gives you the right to expect anything from me?" Matthew said at last, finding his footing in this seemingly non sequitur conversation, "You don't know me."

Again, Matt shrugged, eyes wandering curiously over the affronted frown, the little M-shaped crinkle on his forehead, and wondered what would happen if his own face could pull that sweetly disgruntled expression.

"No," the alternate said slowly, "I don't."

~====o)0(o====~

"You eat a lot of meat," Matthew said reproachfully as he eyed Matt's rack of ribs and the way the alternate was peeling the flesh from the bones with his teeth the way only a born carnivore could.

"And you eat a lot of birdseed, chickadee," the other Canadian said, sparing a glance at the plate that his double had carefully divided into essential food groups.

"You keep calling me that," Matthew said, the frown that was so often on his face around Matt once more present. He had the look about him of a man with a problem that he can't solve, no matter how hard he tries, "Why?"

"What, chickadee?" Of course, chickadee. Matt knew exactly what the other was taking about, but it was it was nice to see the frown drop, even if it was only for the second that it took chickadee to roll his eyes, "It's the provincial bird of New Brunswick."

"New Brunswick, Minnesota and Michigan," Matthew rattled off, "I never took you for a birdwatcher."

"And I took you for a bird," the alternate's lips pulled in the facial equivalent of a shrug, "What the hell are Minnesota and Michigan?"

"What do you-? Wait, what do you mean-? They're Alfred's states!" The mobile Michelangelo in front of him opened his palms, begging Matt to admit to a joke.

"Alfred has states? Jesus, that's rich!" Matt's head tipped back and Matthew just stared as his double's hollow, lonely laughter echoed around the room, bouncing emptily off the walls. It was an unused sound, as though it hadn't had cause to exist before. Matthew felt both honoured and afraid to hear it. Once he'd calmed down, the Alternate leant in, something that was almost a smile on his lips, "You're interesting, chickadee. Tell me more."

~====o)0(o====~

"Your Alfred broke mine," Matthew said, a statement of fact, but it hadn't come off as cool as he had intended. There was anger beneath it. Justifiable anger, but anger none the less.

"Looks fine to me," Matt answered, sparing only the barest glance for the blond American who was currently gathering a circle of spectators to one of his conversations. He spotted his own Alfred lurking at the back of the pressing crowd, a sleepy smile on his lips.

"He looks fine, sure! But he's broken. There's something wrong with him. He's gone cruel," Matthew looked genuinely upset, and Matt did his best to affix some kind of sympathy to his face, but he got the feeling that it looked more like a grimace.

"How is that my Alfred's fault?" the alternate asked, trying to get to the root cause of all this distress and remove it. Little, compassionate thoughts were worming their way into his mind. Making him kind.

"I don't know! They spent a weekend together. Both of them came out of it limping and your Alfred had a black eye, and Al's been… different ever since. He doesn't care as much. Yours has rubbed off on mine. I don't like it," And Matthew looked so desperately forlorn that his world was being tugged out from underneath him and he wasn't managing to keep his balance.

"We are all of us transient," Matt said, eyes shifting just a little away from the Canadian before him as he thought his words through, trying to make himself sound like he cared the way he did rather than the opposite, "We're two worlds meeting. We can't collide like this and not change. Maybe your world gets a little darker; maybe mine gets a little brighter. It's balance, chickadee."

"The world isn't changing, it's just my brother!" Matthew's hands closed into fists and he paled in his anger, his transient skin almost translucent. There were so many words for fleeting and temporary and all of them so horribly applicable, even for eternal beings. You can never cross the same water twice.

"Everyone is changing. Look at you. Look at me," the alternate's voice was soft, pitched to be comforting and missing the mark and that familiar friend loneliness was reeling him in, promising to forgive everything if he would just abandon this attempt and go back to wandering his own North woods the way he used to.

"I am not changing!" the soft frown of Matthew's face had hardened and solidified into an actual scowl, and he wasn't as lax with his attitude any more. He was hard, and resistant.

"You're bold, chickadee," Matt's voice wasn't intended to comfort any more. The denial was grating at his nerves, and he had never really had all too many of those to begin with.

"Bold," the angel's face darkened, and Matt was just a little bit angry that he had tipped the scales too far in this exchange of good and bad, "You're just trying to justify your own weakness."

The resurgence of his own personality was almost what the alternate had wanted, and almost what he feared, some point in the middle that made him feel the neutral thrill of familiar nostalgia as his hand closed around Matthew's soft throat. Not hard enough to actually choke, just hard enough to hurt. Just hard enough to make him cough and splutter when he tried to swallow. Just enough to turn that sweet face pink and widen those pretty, dull-bright eyes with fear.

"The chickadee," Matt's tone was conversational at face value, but there was an unpleasantness simmering just below that frost-thin surface and his fingers flexed, "Is a pretty common bird in the Northwest. It's New Brunswick's provincial bird, and it's most famous for being bold. It'll eat right out of your hand if you let it. But the thing about being a brave little chickadee, Matthew, is that you have to watch out that your bravery doesn't become cockiness. Because when that happens, the little birdie," it didn't take too much effort to lift that pink, gasping face to his own, "Is lunch."

Matt's lips whispered barely a hair above his alternate's skin and he was tempted to steal a kiss from those soft lips before they hardened too much and ended up as chapped and repugnant as his own.

But Matthew was right, he wasn't as hard and cold and cruel as he used to be. Instead, his grip softened, and his fingertips stroked over the red marks that would later be bruises. Excitement at having left his mark warred with remorse over the pain caused. Hand lingering a moment longer, Matt wished he could take back the way the other Canadian flinched back from him as he had done the first time they'd met, when Matt was still an unknown variable.

Thinking perhaps that he should have taken that kiss, he turned and walked away, listening masochistically to the way the little birdie's breathes scraped at his sore throat.

~====o)0(o====~

Matthew was just sitting there on the desk, his shiny shoes replaced with a pair of heavy-duty, clod-hopping hiking boots now that the meetings were all over and they could go back to wherever they came from or move onto wherever they were going to without restraint. Matt stopped, just looking. Watching as the other Canadian swung his legs back and forth from his perch, his boots scuffing Morse code into the floor.

"Back again, chickadee?" the alternate said, moving forward to lay his hand on Matthew's cheek, above the fading bruises he had left. The slowly hardening Canadian jerked away from the touch, refusing to look at his double, choosing instead to examine the wooden veneer on his table top.

"That's the thing about birds," he muttered sullenly, "We're stupid."