A/N: O_o Wow...this is late as hell. Well, sorry about that, I seem to have lost my muse for this. But I'll keep going, and there'll be a lemon (a real one, not the food this time) somewhere in the future. Be aware though, I'm not incredible at lemons, so it WILL take longer to write and it MIGHT suck badly.

America sighed, lying haphazardly on his bed, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. His hands were tucked behind his head and his legs crossed at the ankles - a picture of relaxation. Though the young American was anything but relaxed.

He groped around beside him, hand falling on the bedside table and pulling a small orange bottle from the cabinet. Alfred looked at it, biting his lip and tangling his other hand in his hair.

He couldn't keep doing it.

XXX

"Here," America's boss said, pushing a small box into his nation's hands. "Take it, use it."

"What is it?" America asked, trying to peek into the box, but it was sealed tight. His boss glanced furtively over his shoulder; Ivan and his own boss were standing on the other end of the G8 conference room, not listening to the two Americans.

"You remember what it is. Just remember not to open it until you're alone," his boss told him. "Keep them out of sight of the Russian."

"...Aren't we supposed to be promoting peace? Not secrecy and underhandedness," America reminded. Yes, his boss was higher than him politically and power-wise, but when he failed to see something, it was America's job to point it out. That was, after all, what the United States of America was all about: founded by men who were tired of unjust laws and decided to make their own, replacing a King with democracy. Ultimate power is wielded not by one man, but by a hierarchy of government, and more importantly, the People. If Alfred let his boss have all the power, he'd be undermining everything his country stood for.

"It's not secrecy, it's for the good of the World," his boss reminded him. "You'll be thanking me and everyone will be thanking you when they're not under total Russian control for eternity."

When he put it like that...the entire world under control of that Commie bastard didn't look too great. There was too much blood and...well, creepy-ass shit (in America's words) for him to allow that.

"Yeah, I guess it's better this way," Alfred said slowly, taking the box and shoving it into one of the massive pockets of his bomber jacket.

XXX

America thought of Russia then, and Russia now. On the plus side, the man wasn't trying to kill everything. True, he was still being morbid every so often, and America had to spend an intricate five minutes leading him the other way from a rabbit that the man seemed to fantasizing about smashing with his pipe. However, there had been little to no casualties. So far.

On the negative side, it just felt wrong. Not only was America supposed to be free, but he was supposed to be honest. It sort of fell under 'justice,' which was in the Pledge of Allegiance. America was about not lying your ass off for your own personal gain. Technically, it was sort of for everyone's gain, but the facts still stood. What America's boss had told him to do may have been for the good of everyone, but it was wrong, morally. Well, even that fell under two groups: it was morally right because it saved a lot of people. It was morally wrong because the whole thing was underhanded.

XXX

Alfred and Ivan were at the Russian's home, and the American was exploring. Every little room had something else interesting, though America had gotten lost several times. A weird room with old weapons, a creepier one with what looked like centuries-old bloodstains on the walls, the rooms were endless, each more confusing and strange than the last. Ivan had accumulated years and years of things, artifacts from wars and conquests, defeats and victories, and they all bore some semblance of past violence. Now, relieved of their duties, they stood brokenly against the cold stone walls, dusty and untouched.

Unable to admit to himself that he was lost, Alfred continued to take random turns and peek into doors. Oddly, a few were locked, and he decided that, even though he was massively curious, he didn't want to see what was in those, based on what was in the unlocked rooms. A few more turns, down a metal spiral staircase, and he ended up back on the first floor by the front door.

A quick glance around confirmed that Ivan was still upstairs, and the Baltics were still somewhere on the second floor. Alfred took the small vial out of his pocket and glanced at the familiar small white capsules inside.

xxx

Not after all that had happened between them. America had never meant to fall in love with the Russian, not in the middle of their political uneasiness. Sure, his people were happy about the renewing about the START treaty, but any business with Russia always put them on edge.

In fact, America had never really meant to fall in love, period. He had always thought of himself as a hero, someone who saved the girl from danger, made out with her, but the story never went beyond that. Maybe it was all the comic books he read, but he'd never thought about his romantic future. To him, it had been simple: the hero saves the girl. Almost nothing he'd read ever mentioned life after making out in the middle of a ravaged, dust- and plaster-covered city, watching admiringly by grateful townspeople.

Hell, he'd never even thought about the gender of whomever he saved. Now that he thought about it, while it was always a girl in the comic books, when he thought about it, the person didn't have a face, or even a gender. He or she was just a gray blur, a foggy hint of a theory of a person. Sure, Alfred liked girls, he'd looked at more than his fair share of porn in his time. However, every so often, he'd caught himself looking at a guy that way. Actually, he remembered having some kind of crush on Japan when he was a colony - the man might be old (allegedly), but he looked in his early twenties.

XXX

Ivan's long, tan- and blood-red-colored coat hung on an ornate wooden coat rack by the door, along with Alfred's bomber jacket. Alfred knew that in the inside pocket of Ivan's coat, there would be a bottle of vodka, just like there always was. In fact, he'd never been at a G8 meeting when Ivan didn't have the bottle in his coat, for he was always taking it out to drink from it, though he never got drunk. Then again, a drunk Russia probably couldn't be much worse than a sober Russia - they were both still insane.

After another furtive sweep of the room, Alfred shook out two of the small pills into his palm, and carefully dropped them into the bottle of vodka, where they made a delicate sound as they hit the surface.

Plink.

Plink.

He watched as they dissolved, slowly at first, like two little circles flying to the bottom, milky specks and streams swirling after them. When they hit the bottom of the bottle, the gray-white substance around it mushroomed across the lower half of the bottle, and Alfred quickly recapped it and shook it up, dispersing the medication. Quickly, he stowed it back into Ivan's coat and left the living room.

Back on the second floor, Alfred ran into Ivan, who was hefting his pipe over his shoulder.

"Ah, Amerika," Ivan said. "I thought you had gotten lost."

"Just a bit, but I got it," Alfred assured him, grinning.

XXX

Alfred groped around under the bed and grasped the handle of his suitcase. Sifting through clothes, sugary snacks he'd brought in case the food in Russia sucked, and his choicest comic books and magazines - one featuring a quiz, 'How girly are you from 1 to Justin Bieber' - he found the box his boss had given him. Its cardboard top still had the silver duct tape across it, marred only by the rip in it made by America's keys when he opened it once he'd settled in.

Inside the box sat even more orange-tinted plastic bottles, each one filled with those little white antipsychotics. Disgusted, he tossed the three-fourths-empty bottle he had been holding back into the box with its full counterparts. Snatching a piece of paper, he scribbled something on it, hastily folded it and dropped it into the box, and taped it shut again; he'd ask Russia to get him somewhere to mail it later.

Boss,

Find someone else.

I'm not doing it anymore.

Find someone else to de-crazify Ivan.

Adios,

America, bitches.

A/N: Well, this chapter is WAY shorter than normal. Huh. Well, the next one'll be better, I promise. But just FYI, I'm really, really busy this year, and I'm trying to take a class to be eligible to volunteer at a hospice, so yeah, I'm busy like YOUR MOM. ...Wow, I haven't been that immature since freshman year of high school. XD

In any case, the end of this chapter. ^^ Reviews would be lovely.