Happy birthday to Narroch! Please don't be disconcerted that, for your birthday, I wrote you a fic in which your country gets abolished. You know I would never support such a thing due to my love of American McDonald's fries, grape soda and anime cons.

Two things about this fic stylistically:

One: It is, as you can no doubt see, centred instead of being aligned to the left.

Two: The segments are not in chronological order.

I could say that both of these things are for artistic reasons and whatnot and to an extent they are but also it's pretty much JUST BECAUSE.

Let's just hope that FFNet doesn't murder the formatting and haphazardly bury it under a railway bridge with an elbow and a leg still sticking out.

Falling Stars

[The flag flutters in the breeze and the stars dance along its bedraggled edge.]

"How was the meeting?"

The voice floats from the living room as England shuts the front door behind him; injectedly cheerful, bitterly resentful beneath it.

"Fine." England takes off his coat. "It was fine. Quiet."

Horribly, horrendously, sickeningly quiet. Nobody knows what to say. It was like this after Prussia, too.

England goes to the living room and stands in the threshold. America—

No. Not America. Not United States. Not anymore. He has to remember that.

He's sharing his house, his bed, his life, with a human.

"Did you fill out the citizenship paperwork?" he asks after a long, awful moment.

Alfred, lying on the sofa with his eyes glued to the grainy little television, gives an offhand shrug.

"I'll do it," he says tonelessly.

England hesitates.

"I can… I can do it for you, if you want," he says gently, "but you'll still need to sign it yourself."

Alfred gives a snort and reaches for his cold cup of coffee.

"It's ironic, isn't it?" he says quietly. "After all this, all these years – after 1776, after my people and I fought to be free of you, for the right and the freedom to declare ourselves American and America, this is what it comes back to. Just two hundred years of borrowed time and I'm right back where I started."

"…I'll get the paperwork. The sooner it's out of the way, the sooner—"

"The sooner I can get to living my remaining fifty-odd years as a British citizen." Alfred smiles sourly at him. "It's fine, England. You can say it."

"But I don't want to." England clamps his hand hard around the doorframe, fingers numbing under the pressure of his grasp. "Think what you will of me, take it out on me if it makes you feel better, but know that I didn't want this." He inhales sharply. "I would never have wanted this, Alfred. You know that."

Alfred doesn't answer for a long moment, looking fixedly at the television. The news. It's been three months and it's still all over the BBC.

"I know," he says at length, closing his eyes. "I know you didn't. That doesn't mean that it isn't your fault."

England stiffens.

This again. Alfred always accepts the invitation to blame him. And England always half-agrees with him.

"You should have done something," Alfred goes on expressionlessly – because it's an old, tired argument by now. He's screamed it and he's sobbed it and now he's reduced to merely sighing it. "What about all that Special Relationship bullshit, huh? Why didn't you help me?"

But he's asked before and England has tried to answer. He had his reasons.

They seem meaningless now, of course.

But he hadn't known. Neither of them had.

"It's all well and good for you to be kind now." Alfred lies across the sofa, making himself comfortable enough to take a nap. "It's fine for you to go out of your way for me, to bend over backwards for me, to be flailing round me if I so much as cough. It doesn't matter anymore, though, can't you see that? 1955 to 1975 – you had precisely two decades to be nice to me and you never lifted a fucking finger, did you? If you feel guilty, good. I hope the guilt eats you alive the way time eats me."

It has been worse than this. Much, much worse. There have been tears. There have been exchanged blows that bruise for days. There have been horrific bouts of silence. Alfred's pain and despair and hatred and anger and fear are all far more reserved now – or must be, at least, if all he can do is cast out bitter words curled up on the couch.

Not that it makes it any less real.

Any of it.

England pushes off the doorframe.

"I'll get the paperwork," he says again. "You would do well to fill it out, lest you continue this bloodless existence of yours."

"Oh, it's not so bad," Alfred assures him lightly. "Existing without a nationality or a country, I mean." He sighs and puts his arms up behind his head. "Not that you'd know, if course."

There are so many replies England could give—

And yet they'd all be worthless.

So he doesn't say anything.

He retreats upstairs, finds the citizenship paperwork on his desk and shreds it.

"I'll fix it," England promises, in tears himself as America clings to him and sobs. "I'll fix it, I'll fix it somehow, I swear to God I will."

But he doesn't.

What on earth can he do for a country they physically ripped apart?

England stands under the birch tree with the little flag in his hand.

Birches attract butterflies, he remembers.

It's autumn. Gold leaves spiral gently to the ground around him like falling stars and the faded, cheap Fourth of July flag with its plastic pole, probably meant for a child to wave at a parade, flutters in the breeze, those stars twisting too.

A glance at the house. He can see Alfred in the window seat upstairs, slung across it with a book open on his stomach. He's looking at it but probably not reading a word.

England drops to his knees and plants the flag into the ground between two thick, curved roots. The plastic burns his palm as he pushes it into the dry earth as far as he can.

Another look up at the house as the flag falls still beneath the shelter of the tree.

Alfred is gone.

He remembers when they dismantled the United States and still shudders.

Cables, cranes, explosives, great assembled wrecking crews assigned to the task. A nation, a whole huge country, gone, just like that – like they had been stripping down the carcass of an old ship on the bleeding shore. It was humbling and terrifying and sickening and the world stood by and watched.

Fear. It had been fear. They had been afraid of America, of his power, of his militaristic pursuits; and so they had swarmed on him in his moment of weakness, as he retreated battered and bruised and beaten from the Vietnam War, and torn him apart. Insurance, then, too. To stop him doing it again – to stop him from meddling, from interfering, from reducing the world to ash. To stop the Cold War altogether, they said, before it got out of hand (and because it had been far easier to take out America than Russia). Because he was a worse threat than Prussia had ever been.

It had been diplomatic, of course. There had been a meeting. There had been a vote. Canada had voted against the motion. So had France, Australia and New Zealand. England's vote had been declared biased and discounted on principle – he had raised America as a child, he was his military ally despite not being involved in the Vietnam conflict, he was his lover. He and the other naysayers had been locked out of the meeting room while the motion was passed.

While they signed America's death warrant.

"I begged."

Exhausted, they sit side by side on the kitchen floor against the wall, the room dark.

"They wouldn't listen to me. They wouldn't listen to France or Canada. I pleaded for your life and I never plead for anything. I wouldn't even plead for my own, had I but the means to lose it."

"I'm going to die, Arthur. Not right away. Humans live, what, about seventy or eighty years? I've probably got another half a century in me or so, at least – but I've lived for over four centuries. And now I'm going to wither up and die in a pathetic little butterfly lifespan."

A cracked, humourless laugh. A tighten of the clasp of their hands. A shaky rasp of a breath.

"I'm going to die."

They have stopped celebrating birthdays but at the physical age of what must be about twenty-five or twenty-six, Alfred is handsomer than ever. The few extra years on his face suit him, even though it would be sickening to say so.

He and England also – noticeably – finally look the same age.

It doesn't last long.

The alarm goes off and England sits up, shivering in the cold grey morning light as the sheets pool at his waist. He looks down at Alfred, on his side and turned away from him, still fast asleep.

His scars are gone. All of them. Vanished as if they were never there.

Don't cry. Don't cry again.

It's guilt. Guilt because he could have helped and maybe Alfred would have won and this wouldn't have happened – they'd have been too afraid to lift a finger against him. Guilt because he helped do exactly this to Gilbert Beilschmidt in 1947.

Gilbert has to be almost sixty by now.

Don't cry. It only makes him angry. It makes him ask what the hell you have to cry about.

As if he doesn't know.

"What's it like out there?" Alfred glances up from his book. "Arthur?"

England shrugs, pausing.

"I don't know. I cut ties with Europe, remember? I'm not having anything more to do with any of them."

"What about Francis?"

"He went over to Matthew's to..." England hesitates, immersing himself in peeling potatoes again. "...To, ah, help expand his borders. Downwards."

"Yeah." Alfred exhales. "Suppose there's no point letting it all go to waste."

"I'm still angry with him about it." The knife slips and red blooms against the blade. "Oh, bugger—!"

"You okay?" Alfred gets up and comes over to look. "Ooh, that's nasty. I'll get you a band-aid." He pauses, then shakes his head. "Sorry, I mean a plaster."

"Band-aid is fine." England smiles weakly at him. "Call it what you like."

Alfred arches an eyebrow. He's beginning to get crow's feet. England can't remember how many years it's been. Twenty? Twenty-five? Is Alfred forty yet or is he older than that? England barely looks at the calendar anymore.

"You always say that now," Alfred notes, not without that lingering touch of iciness to his fading-accent voice. "That I can call it what I like. You used to correct me all the time."

"Alfred, I'm bleeding." England's own tone is a little desperate.

"Right, right."

Alfred doesn't bound about the way he used to; he takes his time getting the plaster and England wipes his hand on some kitchen towel while he waits. There's no point, really. It's already healing.

"Here." Alfred comes back, the waxed backing already off the plaster. "Hold out your thumb and I'll put it on for you."

Which England does; Alfred puts it on very neatly. It's something he had to get good at those first few years. Humans don't heal the way nations do.

"Be more careful," Alfred says easily, pressing a little kiss to the pad of England's thumb when he's done.

He quirks a little smile and the creases around his blue eyes become more noticeable. He is still unspeakably handsome, for he has aged well.

But he has aged nonetheless.

"Yes," England says faintly. "I will be. Thank you." He looks at his forlorn, clumsily-peeled potatoes, at the pot of cold water on the stove. "We... we could go out to eat."

Alfred frowns. He has become increasingly self-conscious about going outside, particularly in England's company. England might be the old man at heart, the elder in actual years, but he hasn't aged a day since 1975, naturally.

Since about 1650, to be perfectly accurate.

"We don't have to," England adds. "I... I just thought it would make a change."

"Yeah, it would." Alfred chews at his bottom lip. "Okay, we'll go. Let me go try and shed some years."

He still looks forty-odd, of course, when he's cleaned up; he frets in the mirror as England moves about the bedroom behind him. He is really beginning to leave England behind.

"People are gonna start thinking you've got some weird kink for older men, you know," he sighs, running a hand through his hair.

It's all still blonde for the moment.

"They can think what they want," England murmurs behind him, appearing at his back. "We both know you're the one with that particular weird kink, my boy."

"Have you ever fucked a human before?"

"No." England kisses him. "Of course I haven't."

"Neither have I." He takes England's wrists as his belt is worked undone. "...Do you want to?" His voice is bitter again. "I'd understand if you didn't. You'll feel me dying beneath your touch."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Well, it's unnatural, isn't it?" Alfred insists. "Humans fuck humans and nations fuck nations. That's how it works. You're breaking the rules."

"It doesn't matter." England grips at him desperately, terrified that he'll pull away. "You're still you. I still love you. I'll always love you."

Alfred smiles sourly, turning his face away as England tries to kiss him again.

"You say that now," he says softly. "It's only been a few weeks. I still look as I've always done. Will you say that in ten year's time, Arthur? What about twenty? What about fifty?"

"I think you're the one that doesn't want to," England says coldly. "Are you afraid?"

"Shouldn't I be?" Alfred breathes. "I'm a measly little human. You're a country."

"I'm still me, too." England takes Alfred's collar and pulls him down, wrapping his arms around his neck. "Please. I know this is difficult. I know it hurts. But please. I still love you as I've always done. You're no different to me."

"It'll probably feel different," Alfred mutters. "I doubt I'll satisfy you."

"Alfred, nothing has changed about either of our bodies—"

"Apart from the fact that mine is dying."

England doesn't say anything, looking at the wall as Alfred sits back. He doesn't know what else to do.

Alfred sighs above him, his hands coming to rest either side of England's head.

"What about this?" he asks in a low voice.

"The position?" England replies blandly.

"Mm." A pause. "Me on top. You want to take it up the ass from a human, Great Britain?"

"How crass."

"Well, you like your plain vanilla missionary position, don't you?" Alfred mocks. "Because you're a romantic or some crap like that – so we can look into each other's eyes while we're doing it or whatever. Let me tell you something, babe." He touches England's face, making him look at him again. "I favoured fucking you like that in the Forties 'n' the Fifties because I was a bully. I was super-powerful and you were weak from the war – once I had you in that position, that was it. My weight was on you, I was in you and there was no escape for you."

He gives another bitter smile.

"That's why I reckon it's no good anymore. You could push me off with two fingers now, I bet."

England snorts incredulously.

"I doubt it. Your eating habits haven't changed."

Alfred gives a sharp little smirk.

"Well?" he presses.

"Let me tell you something, babe," England intones flatly. "That position. The plain vanilla missionary one you used to assert yourself over me around the time you were making them all so terrified of you. It has other names. One of them is 'the English-American Position'."

Alfred leans back with a hollow, echoing laugh.

"They're gonna have to rename it then, huh?"

(It takes another few days to get Alfred to actually do it with him. It feels exactly the same as it always has and they both cry when it's over.)

England is careful in laying his head on Alfred's chest. It's growing fragile now.

It's been over half a century since the United States was abolished and it shows in Alfred; even though he's fit for his physical age, active and aware, age is age.

His blonde hair finally went white just over fifteen years ago; it wisps across his lined forehead the way it always has, that one little spike still sticking up waywardly with a mind of its own.

One of his wrinkled hands is in England's own ever-gold locks as he sleeps. England watches him for a moment before closing his own eyes.

Alfred is in good health. He'll probably live to be a hundred, knowing him.

Still, a hundred years is nothing, really, is it? Not to someone already over a millennium old like England – someone stuck with always-blonde hair, with skin that doesn't line or wrinkle, with an immortal body still tied to a thriving country.

A tiny, isolated little island.

He's had no contact with Europe for decades. There have been other wars, he's heard. He hasn't involved himself with them. He's spent all of his time with Alfred – every day since that day in 1975.

It doesn't seem long enough and it never will.

Alfred is fifty when they go back.

Fifty, he insists. Once for each fallen star.

It is a vast wasteland that nature has begun to reclaim, rusted unreadable signs and broken spikes of old foundations lovingly wrapped in shrouds made of weeds. There are flowers everywhere, rooted between the bricks in broken walls and the shards of shattered windowpanes.

"Guess Matthew didn't come down this far," Alfred says gently, looking around at the flattened remnants of New York City. "I suppose he had to expand, though, to take in all his new citizens."

"The five of us took all we could," England replies absently, looking at Lady Liberty's crumbling empty pedestal still standing out in the bay. "The majority of the United States' citizens came to me or went to Canada, Australia, New Zealand or France. I suppose some might have gone elsewhere if they had family."

Alfred is silent for a long while, standing with his hands in the pockets of his suit trousers. England leaves him alone, stalking a butterfly instead as it flits ahead from flower to flower in a zig-zag line. It stops and spreads out its dappled-copper wings on the filthy, faded yellow of what was obviously a McDonald's 'M' thirty-odd years ago.

The curves of it break the ground like old roots.

The land smells the same as it did four hundred years ago when England first set foot on its wild shores; it has been remade in Nature's image once again. Perhaps, then, it wasn't Alfred who was punished for playing God back then.

(Ironic that Europe punished him, though.)

"Arthur?"

"Yes?" England looks up; the butterfly, which he had been debating slamming his hand down on, flaps away and is gone from his peripheral as he turns to Alfred. "What, my love?"

"Do you think it made a difference?" Alfred pushes up his glasses. "Them destroying me, I mean. Do you think it changed anything?"

"I think it changed everything, America."

Alfred tilts his head at the name. It's been a long time, after all.

"For good or bad?" he wonders.

"I don't know." England comes back to him and slips his hand into Alfred's.

"Maybe it was a good thing," Alfred muses. "I'm not gonna lie; there was a time where I was thinking it wouldn't really be so bad if I blew everyone sky high if it got rid of the Commies."

"That doesn't mean you would have."

Alfred squeezes his hand.

"Can you be so sure?" he whispers.

"You're such an old man," Alfred muses; his head is in England's lap and the fabric taut across the embroidery hoop as England works at it is translucent with the sun streaming through it.

Not without a sense of irony, of course; but nonetheless he's deadly serious, watching England stitch away so diligently at his butterfly-on-irises pattern as though it's the most enthralling thing in the world.

"I know," England agrees mildly, pausing to card his fingers through Alfred's greying hair. "And you're just a baby."

"I'm not a baby!" Alfred says indignantly, shifting to get more comfortable on the grass beneath the tree sheltering them from the mid-afternoon sun; he kicks at the picnic basket with his heel as though to check it's truly empty.

"You're my baby," England sighs out like a song.

And that's why it isn't fair.

"It's not so bad, you know," Alfred says gently. "Existing without a nationality or a country or those stars. I think this is freedom, Arthur."

He looks up at him, at undying evergreen, and smiles.

"Don't cry. You always cry when I talk about freedom. It's damn selfish of you."

England's shoulders shake but he doesn't utter a sound. Alfred takes his hands – his young, calloused, cruel hands.

"How I love your hands," he says. "They are what made me."

Something has begun to grow around the plastic stem of the poor, ragged, faded little flag where it flaps forlornly at the base of the birch.

Something green, something bright, something new.

England doesn't know what it is but takes care to water it every day when he does the rest of the garden.

(Anything to get him out of that quiet house.)

"Is this truly a tree?"

"Of course it is."

"But it is so small! Trees are big, Arthur!" The child spreads out his arms to demonstrate.

"This is a baby tree, Alfred. It is little at the moment, just like you, but one day it will grow to be very tall just like other trees." England puts aside the trowel and dusts off his hands. "Now then, shall we not plant it?"

America nods and helps grasp the tiny birch's thin trunk as they lift it and then lower it into the deep hole England has dug for it. They cover it in and America stands next to it as England finishes patting the earth down.

"I am taller than it," he announces. "How long will it take for it to grow?"

"Oh, a great many years, I expect."

"I shall stay taller than it for a very long time, then!" America laughs and clutches at England's cravat. "Maybe I will grow taller than you, too, Arthur!"

"Ah, the likelihood is certainly there." England stoops and pulls America into his arms, lifting him. "You will grow older and taller and handsomer and I shall no doubt look as I always do."

"I like you as you are!" America says, hugging England about his neck. "Stay like this forever, please!"

"I will try my best, poppet." England hitches him up in his arms. "Ah, but we tarry when it is growing late. We ought to get you bathed and to bed."

America nods; but looks over England's shoulder at the baby birch.

"May I come to look at our tree tomorrow morning?" he asks.

"Of course – and every day after that, if it pleases you, for you will have all the time in the world to look upon it."

England starts walking back towards the house as the wind scatters sun-coloured leaves across the paling grass, America snuggling contentedly, sleepily, in his grasp.

"But now, to bed," he whispers, "for night falls fast about us and hence come the stars with its descent."

I reckon Alfred is probably like fellow Americans Johnny Depp and George Clooney in that ageing doesn't seem to make him any less attractive. XD

Trufax: Another, less well-known name for the missionary position is indeed "the English-American Position". The name was coined by someone called, ironically, Alfred Kinsey. XD When I first heard this factoid, it was one of those moments where you know Hetalia has just spammed your life completely because I immediately went 'lol USUK'.

I argue that the world without the United States, especially from 1975 onwards, would be a "dystopia" of a kind given that so many of the things we now take for granted were created in the USA. I mean, yeah, who's to say that other countries might not have invented the personal computer (as we know it), the internet and the mobile phone, but as it stands the United States holds the records on all three of those (according to Wikipedia, anyway – which is also a US invention). It's a weird thought, kind of like the 1800s without the British Empire or the BCs without Rome. Well, I guess they don't call it a world power for nothing!

Australia and New Zealand were involved in the Vietnam War on the USA's side; Britain was involved in Korea but stepped back from Vietnam for all sorts of political and monetary reasons.

Hope nobody got too confused reading this! Yes, I know it's sad – but maybe it's not as sad as it seems. :)

Narroch, while I hope you enjoyed it, I am nonetheless going to take this opportunity to tell you that YOU SUCK because I got your birthday fic done and posted before you got mine finished.

My birthday was almost two months ago, if anyone was wondering.

RobinRocks

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