Title: A Soft Reboot (1/?)
Rating: PG (Subject to change)
Warnings: Swear words
Summary: Once every couple centuries, the nations inexplicably disappear and are reborn as humans. But the memories and nationhood gradually return and they have funny ways of getting back to each other.

England dreams of the sea. He dreams of white frosted waves and of the wide expanse of the ocean. He breathes the salt so deep into his lungs, they form shining white crystals in the cavity of his chest. He dreams of mermaids and their iridescent pearly scales, of lusty sirens and songs that are so haunting and sad, that a deep yawning hole tears his heart open.

James is five-years-old and he dreams of the sea. The biggest body of water he's been to is Derwentwater in the Lake District, yet his bed rocks beneath his body as he tosses and turns like the waves he knows so well. He can command a crew of a hundred of the worst seadogs anyone could have the displeasure of meeting (and he'd probably be the worst of them.) but he still needs mum's help tying his shoelaces before racing off to school. Dad makes bangers and mash for tea and laughs when his son demands to be called Captain. "I am Captain Kirkland of Her Royal Majesty's fleet," he proudly declares. His parents can only shake their heads and wonder what kids are being taught at school nowadays.

James is six-years-old, lives in Upper Warlingham, just inside the London Commuter belt and dreams of the sea five hundred years ago. His natural sea legs and sea lust and sea soul don't go unnoticed but are attributed to the childish desire of wanting to be a pirate. He goes sailing with a playmate and her parents don't believe that he has never been on a dinghy before. He reads the wind better than birds and flies the boat higher and faster than any of them. He loves and loves how the water clings to him and his clothes, possessively trailing down his cheeks and working its wet way into his shoes.

He grows and dreams some more. He falls in love with his Kings and Queens again and again and mourns their dream-deaths. Henry VIII breaks his heart and country and Queen Victoria strengthens him and elevates him until he becomes the world itself. The Golden Age is truly a sparkling bright gold and the fire of London fills him with fever. He wakes sweating under his Buzz Lightyear duvet, but the back of his eyelids are stained red and orange and blinding yellow and his heart burns so much he retches.

He grows some more and his head becomes a battlefield. The Jerries are the enemy for a while and walks with a limp – his body can't tell that he doesn't really have trench foot. When a mouse terrifies his teacher and sends the class into hysterics, James calmly picks it up and pops it out the door. His friends ask if he's handled mice before. The truth: Rats on the front line are huge monstrous things that lumber and climb over your body as you try sleep.

Sleeping in a dream, sleeping while sleeping – that had to be a sign of something. James first realises that he's different when they have an assignment in handwriting class. Everyone wrote of dreams full of public nakedness, of terrifying monster ducks, of shrinking and living in shells. Miss Marigold smiled at him when she looked at James'. "Did you watch a documentary before bedtime, dear?" she asked, sticking a gold star on his descriptions men in poofy trousers – the Tudors. Had the assignment been a day later and James would have written about the Plague. He itches for a week afterwards.

His parents worry as he talks to them of all the death – "People die so much," he had said while pouring milk over his coco pops. They were the same colour as the mud at the battle of the Somme.

"What do you mean?" Mum asks, hiding her concern behind a lipstick smile.

"There are so many ways to die!" he exclaims and lists the ways he had seen (beheading/burning/hanging, drawing and quartering) and his mother's already on the phone to a therapist.

The therapist is American and knows nothing of their islands' history and claims James just has an overactive imagination and shouldn't be watching those sorts of films at his age anyway.

James is ten and they start history at school. He notices the similarities – no, he notices the differences, the inconsistencies and doesn't hesitate to point them out. He gets in trouble for backchat. But the books get most things right and he's smart enough to realise that maybe these aren't dreams after all. He's also smart enough not to say anything – three different therapists and five detentions have taught him that.

James Plender is sixteen. He likes football (he supports Leeds), Dr. Who and the Hoosiers. He's good at history and politics and rubbish at math and home economics. Passable at French. Enjoys debating. He has a couple of close friends but not enough to be 'popular'. He is sixteen, dreams of the sea and has the whole history of the United Kingdom inside his head.

James is sixteen and he feels terribly, terribly alone.

He also feels old; older than his parents, than his grandparents. The weariness is heavy and settles deep into his bones. Every exhale leaves him feeling emptier than before, as if something more than air drains out of his body and James has to remember to recapture it, to suck it back in before it escapes. Whatever it is.

Only eighteen and already tired of everything. James is hollow; someone must have come along and scooped everything out of him until he was just skin and bone and veins and blood. His heart rattles around inside his chest like a coin in a can as he goes along his daily life. Wake up, breakfast, walk to school, skim through class, walk home, rinse and repeat and spit more of himself out as people all around him live and he merely observes and fails to take notes. One day, school will be replaced with university and then with work and then with retirement and then with death when he's actually, properly old.

Something important is missing from his being. He feels it in his dreams – a connection, a bond with something much greater than his own tiny body. As he sleeps, he is filled with a million voices and is bursting with life, bursting until the light nearly shines from his eyes, his mouth, his fingertips. The land under him pulls at his feet. He feels the people tilling the earth, turning him over and over so that he can breathe into crop and seed. He feels the water lapping at his edges, the rush inside his soul as the waves batter against him and his cliffs. The clouds over the mountains are in his breath. He is a piece of this planet, a small piece of land and water and people and history.

And he wakes up and feels even smaller. Suddenly he's just James again.

How he aches for this connection. He spoke of this once, with a counselor who was more competent than the others. He had told James that he should think about socialising more. So James does, but he fucks rather than socialises. He talks to a girl at his sixteenth birthday party and his sand coloured hair and his diamond cut accent draw her in, but it is when he touches her and smiles that she falls. They touch a lot more that night and for the first time, James feels a flicker of it along with the physical pleasure, like a light bulb about to die. He feels it again with the next girl. And the next. Curious, he tries it once with a boy and it is the same. What he does discover is that he only feels this tug inside him if his partner is British. He spends the night with an American girl once, all long legs and kilowatt smile, and there is nothing. (The sex is still amazing though.)

It would have been so easy to get addicted. He could have spent his teenage years drinking and smoking and screwing anything with a hole and his grades wouldn't have suffered one bit. (His teachers were already considering calling him a genius.) But he didn't. James might have gone down that route if it hadn't been for him.

It is the beginning of school and James is just entering the sixth form. There are a lot of new faces in that first tutor class meeting and everyone has to introduce themselves and it is boring as hell and he smiles and nods politely and then –

"My name is Yama- ah. I mean, Mitsuru Yamada. I am here for a year from Japan. It is nice to meet everyone." For a moment, Mitsuru looks like he's about to bow, of all things, before he sits down.

James can't take his eyes off him.

He doesn't hear anyone else's self-introductions and doesn't care. Mitsuru's voice strikes something deep inside his memory and as soon as they have to vacate the classroom, James chases after the new Japanese boy.

"Excuse me," he says, grabbing Mitsuru's shoulder and in that brief moment of contact, something runs through the both of them that makes Mitsuru drop his books and makes James choke on his own breath. Everyone rushes by and the two of them are static islands in a sea of people.

"Oh, sorry!" James shakes himself and crouches to help Mitsuru pick up his belongings. "I didn't mean to surprise you."

"It is okay," Mitsuru replies, bending down.

They make eye contact, proper eye contact, for the first time and James immediately thinks of something a girl said, back during the summer when he was trying to discover that spark in more and more people. The girl had been an English literature student at some university in London and liked trying to turn everything into poetry. "Your eyes are deep," she had said, trailing a hand along his cheek. "Deep but empty. If I shouted, I could hear my voice echo inside. You have holes in your eyes that lead to the universe."

"Okay," he had replied, wondering if she was high. "That's what the pupil is, isn't it? Just a hole to let light through."

"The pupil is a hole, yeah. But last night, when we were fucking, you let the light out."

James dismissed her as mental and hadn't seen her again. But when he looks at Mitsuru's dark eyes, he kind of understands what she was trying to say. He shows Mitsuru where the science block is, even though his history classroom is on the other side of school. Mitsuru thanks him in careful English and James offers to be his guide until he settles in. "We're in the same tutor group, so it's no problem," James says, unaware of the desperate note in his voice. For reasons unknown to everyone else, they became fast friends - their friendship didn't even make sense to their classmates.

(But they both like tea a lot, so that says something, they guess.)

Mitsuru sleeps over at James' house one time to prepare a presentation on a current event for tutor period. They finish quickly and spend the rest of the time playing video games. At 2:38am, they're still awake even though they have long turned off the xBox. "Hey," James says and hears Mitsuru turn over in his camp bed, sees Mitsuru's deep eyes flash at him. "Do you… do you ever dream?"

"Yes, I see dreams." [1]

"I do dream," James corrects. (Mitsuru made him promise to help him improve his English and to correct him no matter where they are. This is tough for James' innate British politeness, but he tries.) "What do you dream of?"

Mitsuru is silent and James knows him well enough to know that the Japanese boy is searching for the right words, sifting through the files in his head. (But they have only known each other for a month but it feels like centuries longer than that. Why?)

"I do dream of people and places and things that have happened before," Mitsuru says and James feels a tightening in his lungs.

"And how do you feel?"

"Excuse me?"

"In your dreams, how do you feel?"

"I don't know what you mean."

James rolls over on to his back and stares at the ceiling. "In my dreams," he says, trying to remember how he explained the feeling to his therapists when he was a child. "I feel like a million people." He spreads his arms. "I feel huge, like I'm actually important."

"Ah," says Mitsuru. "Is that so?"

"Yeah," says James.

Mitsuru is silent and James' heart falls down and down. Maybe he is wrong. Maybe this Japanese boy isn't like him-

"Today," Mitsuru says suddenly. "We studied about space in physics class. Mr. Barth taught us about black holes. You are familiar with them?"

"Yeah."

"A black hole is very dense and has a lot of gravity – a lot of mass in a small space. If you make the mass of the Earth into a black hole, the whole Earth, it would only be an inch big. All this matter in such a tiny space…

"This is what I feel when I do dream."

James isn't wrong.

That night they both dream – they smile at each other over the shoulders of the British foreign secretary and the Japanese minister as the Anglo-Japanese Alliance is signed in 1902. When they wake, Mitsuru sleepily mumbles, "Good morning, Igirisu-san."

"Morning Japan," James replies and nothing is weird about that at all.

So then they are two. And James feels a little fuller inside.

[1] In Japanese, to dream is 夢を見る which is literally 'to see a dream'.

And with this I leap into the Hetalia fandom. (Technically my first Hetalia fic was a Germany/Paul the Octopus prompt but I'm ignoring that for now.) I needed a little break from Gundam Wing and KHR to be honest and this seemed like a good idea. c: Because I'm experimenting with my writing, comments would be adored. Thank you for reading!