Title: Between You and Me

Pairings: UK X China

Betaed by Blind Alchemist! truly a savior! Thank you so much! Also, please check out our combined story together, in my profile page XD.

Background: A crossover between Hetalia (not canon) with Sentinels AU. The idea of Sentinels was taken from this link: .#cutid1

I have declared I don't own the idea of Sentinels, Hetalia or any of its characters. However, the plot and the ending are mine.

Enjoy!

Parte 1

Arthur looked around him. Nothing to see but a massive sea of dead bodies. What did he expect though? It was the first front line of war after all. And completely comprised of the normal soldiers—the normal humans. They were Normals: weak, but massive in number. That's why they got to be the first in line to die. They were quite worthless.

He stood where he was, and nobody even realized he was there. Yes, he was a member of the particular unique breed of Sentinels that had the ability to disappear by blending into the air. No, people couldn't see him; but he was still a solid body and a bullet could still be aimed at him and hurt him. His fellow Sentinels could detect him by using their keen sense of smell, but normal people would look through him and wouldn't realize he was there. That's why Arthur Kirkland was specifically assigned to spy duty. He was the perfect Sentinel for the job. And he was wearing a bulletproof vest anyway, so he was fine.

As bullets were shot around him, Arthur stood there motionlessly. He was fed up. He didn't like his job. He didn't like being a Sentinel for the Western military at all. He wanted to be Normal, even though being Normal would entail being part of the massive, sea of valueless people. It wasn't as though he hated his Sentinel friends and community; it was 100% the job that got him fed up.

He didn't care about the war, frankly. It was invented by the Normals as a means to control each other. Sentinels, as the community of people with heightened senses and special abilities, used to hold their own neutral stances during these wars. But Sentinels are living weapons; they were bred by nature for one purpose: to protect. They were mostly born from Normal couples; and the majority of Sentinels had close bonds with their normal families. They were forced to choose sides, just because their families were involved in the war. Thus the endless war between the East and the West finally made the Sentinels community divide accordingly into two: East and West. This occurred about two years ago.

His alarm signalled to him that it was lunch time.

It was funny and ironic, Arthur laughed to himself as he stepped away from the first line of the war zone. The Normals were still killing each other and he left the front lines because he was on lunch break. He felt like he was just a common office worker that somehow worked on the first front lines of the war. Weird. Ironic. Sad.

He wanted to go away. He'd had enough.

Yeah, as if. If only he could go away. No, he was burdened by the Sentinels' bond to the Tower. Like its name, the Tower is a high and mighty building, and each country has its own Tower. The Tower is the Sentinels' centre, where all the Sentinels are collected and educated and bonded to their Guide. The Tower gathers Sentinel children from all over the countryside and confines them inside the building. It was safer that way, so that all the children could learn to control their (suddenly) heightened senses and powers, as well as their destructive tendencies. And because the children are collected as soon as they start showing their Sentinel abilities (technically at around 5-6 years of age, although the majority of the sentinels first become aware of their power at around 13-17 years of age), they were bonded by some kind of community family sense to each other and The Tower acted as the 'Main Home' for them. Moreover, Arthur was an orphan who had been rescued from living in a trashcan. He was brought to the Tower when he was around four years old, after he'd incidentally broke a homeless man's finger when the scum tried to have his way with Arthur.

What had exactly happened sounded nearly cliché to the community—the homeless man had screamed, people had noticed, Arthur was brought to the police centre, and then the Sentinels came and got him. After that, Arthur was never hungry or cold anymore, so he was fine with the Tower. The Tower also regularly gave him pocket money and some kind of scholarship, in exchange for a life-time contract dictating that Arthur work for them for the rest of his life. But it was good for Arthur, since he was an orphan with no other means to support himself that time.

But now, he was getting severely fed up of with his job. He knew that the Normals paid the Tower a huge sum of money each year for their assistance in the war. And Arthur, as one of the West Tower's main on-field workers (read: lackey), was assigned to the post straight away. He was nineteen when the job started and he thought it was cool how he'd landed into the middle of the war and got to observe it; but now, after two years of watching, he had become sick and tired of it.

It wasn't just that he didn't like the job. The Sentinels are people with enhanced senses and special powers. And the sharpened senses sometimes brought them into another kind of hell. Because of his sharp hearing, he could listen to the Lieutenant laughing in his tent, safe and comfortable and protected from the reality of his war, twenty miles from where he stood. He could even listen to the radiowaves, and worst of all he could hear the slowing heart beats of the dying soldiers, the Normals who cried and called their Gods' names in their last breath. He could clearly see all the details, the splashed blood all over the fields, drip by drip; how the bullets ripped the Normals' skulls; and all the details jammed his senses until he didn't know what to focus on. His sense of smell was the worst. He was nauseated by the smell of sweat, fear, blood and gushing intestines all around him. The gun powder, the smoke, the fire; everything smelled of hell. He used to be scared of his own senses before he was taught in the Tower on how to eliminate the unimportant inputs.

But the ultimate thing that the Tower provided for its Sentinels was the Guide. The Guide is another breed of human who is actually weaker and softer than a Normal, as well as smaller and gentler. However, most importantly, they are able to control the Sentinels. They provide the weaknesses that Sentinels are naturally bound to protect, and in return, the Guide can 'guide' and provide comfort and relief to the Sentinels' disturbingly heightened senses. It was common for Sentinels and Guides to end up being each other's life partners, because Sentinels are famous for their possessiveness. A Sentinel and a Guide are like lock and key; each Sentinel needs their own Guide. There used to be as many Guides as there were Sentinels; however, Guides became scarcer as each generation passed. Since Sentinels were generally viewed as the more valuable of the two, more Sentinels were bred out. Furthermore, there was a foolish stereotype that Guides were for the weak, and Sentinels were forced to make do without the Guides. At that time, many Guides were neglected, killed and massacred because they were viewed as the 'weaker' and 'more feminine' species, although Guides could be males too. The real, cynical truth was, Normals found Sentinels easier to control when they didn't have their Guide to show them the right way.

Aggressiveness, possessiveness and hot bloodedness were the core characteristics of Sentinels.

The Tower tried their best to get acquire as many Guides as possible; but Guides nowadays didn't want to be caught. They were afraid that if the Normals discovered their existence, they would be killed; and they were afraid that if the Sentinels found them, they would be brought to the Tower and be imprisoned there for life. Now that the Guides were scarce, the country laws were changed to basically remove every single human right a Guide previously held, in the name of 'protecting' the balance between Normals and Sentinels. If a Guide were to be bonded to a Sentinel, he/she would become his/her Sentinel's doormat, or slave, so to speak. So either way they were screwed, and thus, nowadays Guides were even harder to find.

The Tower provided a single Guide per every twenty Sentinels. It was nowhere near enough, of course, but it was still helpful in guiding Sentinels that were nearing their limit to control themselves. Especially Sentinels the likes of Arthur, who faced the grim reality of war scene every single day. So Arthur was bonded to the Tower because the Tower provided everything he needed and the Tower was the only place he belonged.

He ran fast throughout the land. Nobody saw him; because he was still in his blending mode. He wanted to go away, become truly invisible, and live his own life inside the woods; but his need to be guided was too strong, especially given that he was still young, with immature self-control tendencies. He wanted to bond with his very own Guide, and not only Francis Bonnefoy, the Guide that was provided currently for him. He wanted his own Guide whom he could protect and be loved and cared for in return. Arthur was jealous of the higher up Sentinels who got their own Guides. He wanted someone too… someone he could depend on.

His stomach grumbled. Arthur sighed. Maybe it was really time for lunch. He still needed to run about half an hour with his Sentinel's power to reach the nearest city to get some decent lunch and tea. Maybe he should eat some salad today; he wasn't in the mood to see any meat, because the view of all the dead bodies had erased his appetite.

The wind was blowing softly; Arthur could smell the grass, and the fainter smell of blood and gunpowder. But another smell slipped in. It was sweet, purely sweet, as if though he'd gotten a vanilla-flavored candy under his nose. It was quite faint, but that also meant he wasn't terribly far away from the source. And the smell was intoxicating. Arthur stopped in his tracks to sniff, and he was rewarded with a longer, more prolonged waft. And it was so good, almost tickling his longing for intimacy.

It was the scent of an un-bonded Guide.

Unconsciously, Arthur followed the smell.

Yao pulled his son closer. They were hiding behind the trees and rocks. It wasn't much, but with their small bodies, they could crawl behind the rocks and trees and the Normals couldn't see them.

They were running away. Yes, they were trying to escape the ridiculous war between the East and the West. Ever since the war had started, the Eastern side where Yao came from changed from a mostly agricultural country into a purely militaristic one. Every man was required to enter military service and the women were forced to work on the land and provide food for the soldiers. And Yao was not spared, even though his wife had just given birth to a baby boy and had died in labour.

Yao didn't want to enter the military and leave his son alone; moreover, since he had no other family member to depend on, his baby would surely be sent to the military orphanage and be trained to be a soldier. He didn't want that, his baby was just two years old, for Tian's sake! His baby needed him, and he needed his baby.

He knew he was a Guide. He could sense it himself and was aware of the Sentinels ever since he turned eighteen. He was a naturally beautiful and feminine man; his parents had tried their best to make Yao look more masculine, but they'd failed. He grew and grew more beautiful and feminine each year; until everybody started to suspect his true nature as a Guide. His parents didn't want to admit that their only son was a Guide, because if it were true, Yao could be either killed or taken in by the Tower in their country. In desperation, they married Yao with a daughter of a small local family.

It was a short marriage, but they were kind to each other. Yao loved his wife like he would a little sister; and his wife knew it and was satisfied with it. They were about to have their first son when she died, and then the war erupted. The boiling tension between the East and West had existed for decades, but it was only two years ago that they decided to wage war against each other. Their village was destroyed during one of the battles, and tragically Yao's parents were killed in the attack. Yao had saved himself by using his Guide sense, the one that had made him so sensitive to nature, rendering him able to detect the presence of any human in a five-mile radius from his sides. He ran away from village to village and tried to blend in, sometimes posing as a woman to survive. But a woman with her baby attracts quite a lot of attention; especially as he was far too pretty, even by usual women's standard.

Until recently he stayed in a small village nearby, but then the area became the first front line of war and the soldiers, both from the East and West, came into the village and selfishly took everything they wanted—food, clothing, and women. Yao was not spared, because they thought he was a woman. Yao so far had successfully eluded those soldiers by using his ability to blend in, making the soldiers fall asleep whenever they started touching him; but they became even more curious and persisted, starting to disturb him more.

Yao didn't want them to know about his Guide ability. But without his Guide ability, he couldn't survive. And since he had used it so many times, the soldiers became even more intrigued and the last time they raided the village, they brought a Sentinel with him. Yao could sense it; the Sentinel smells felt so strong and intoxicating, making his own body melt with neediness. He almost came out from his hiding place to welcome the Sentinel. But he was brought to his common senses when his son suddenly whimpered and started to cry. Yao knew that he couldn't stay much longer. Once a Sentinel appeared, the rest would follow. And he knew he couldn't reject a Sentinel's appearance next time.

So Yao ran away to the woods, hoping that maybe he could make it somewhere deep inside the woods, or maybe to another village where Easterners and Westerners weren't fighting. He was too naïve, of course, but he didn't have the privilege of reading the latest news, as his last village was a small and traditional one. The baby in his arms was sobbing, but Yao blew his face gently, trying to soothe his child.

"Sleeping child…" Yao started to hum. The baby slowly went to sleep. Yao watched as his son started to close his eyes. And he wondered whether they should continue to go forward deeper into the wood or wait for the next day. The woods and rocks around them could provide a better place to stay the night. If he moved forward, the wood would become even thinner and more exposed to Normals.

Well, maybe sleeping there wouldn't be that bad. He was tired anyway, from running all day…

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