A/N: In blatant disregard for my other, numerous, languishing commitments – Eight Deadly Sins and King Arthur, I know I know, true to myself I bury them a little deeper under their layer of dust and start a new one. Yaay.

Because Sealand is too unexpanded and un-elaborated-upon and unexplored a character to let pass.

Enjoy.

Reading Between The Lines

For Fear of Drowning

Sealand has been frightened of many things.

Once they had been trivial, or trivial at least in doubtful, disbelieving retrospect, the monsters that slunk not just under the bed but in the stiff, abrading fabric of his starched clothes, in the heavy cutlery that threatened to slip from trembling fingers and lose their food, in the first hints of a frown in England's eyes that he, playing the amateur meteorologist, playing the fool, must anticipate and chart with painful care and precision so as to try and diffuse the coming storm. They gripped him with all the tenacity of a plague, one that rotted and rendered him into useless nothingness in England's eyes, and they wracked his limbs in involuntary shivers, burnt and stung his eyes, and slid hot and saline down his cheeks, where he must wipe them quickly, smearing them hastily onto the back of his hand before England saw.

For a while, and Sealand wishes for anything that he could have that short while back, he had been happy to denounce England at every turn of his tongue, and pull his lips back in the sneers of a child who looks down with folded arms that bespake righteous judgement upon those who have done them oh so wrong.

Donning his sailor cap, gate-crashing important world meets, at which he was so iffy for being denied attendance, but behind their backs laughed in relief that he did not have to wear tight, airless suits, and have to grasp at every tiny nuance to scrape out all its meaning, just in case there was a threat. And everyone had to sit as if they had an iron rail to their spines, and anyway, he had thought them boring.

The crowning glory was, of course, annoying the holy heck out of England by nonsensical, babbling jabs to poke at him until he very nearly boiled over, then ran and ran himself silly in his grand escape from the steaming green-eyed dragon, laughing until the worry that he might seriously crack a rib at the rate he was going brought him up short, then promptly set him off again in a cacophony of satisfied sniggers.

And that, he thinks, is what truly defines carefree: to be able to run as much as one liked without actually running from something.

That something had been England's disappointment, once, disappointment he had known to be inevitable, but had flung himself over cliffs in attempts to outperform himself just to stay for even a minute longer. As if crashing down into the rocks below and lying twisted and jammed between them with the negligible mass of his body in the gaps could somehow keep back the waves. A few seconds was all he asked, a few seconds until dinner-time, where the eruption of caustic, searing words would always take place, just a few more seconds to be ticked off by the bomb on his desk, the miniature clock that England had gifted him with, and that he didn't dare touch unless it was very, very carefully with is little finger.

Multiple devils had ridden on his shoulders, fear and despair being his chief tormenters, but the dance must go on even though he was never competent enough to learn the steps, or to execute them to an acceptable standard.

Fear and despair hold his hands now, turning them clammy as he sits alone with his legs hanging over the pitiful strip of concrete that is his birthright, over the cold sea below, whereupon the sun has set, and the moon has yet to make her appearance from behind dense swirls of indigo clouds.

The night air brings mottled eddies of purple and blue to his hands, to his calves, to his bare arms, where goosepimples rise, stark and ineffectual. Slowly siphoning away his colours and replacing them with the cold tints of a sea that did not give back what it claimed. Those it claimed.

It was claiming Sealand, he can feel it like the slow seeping of numb, icy knowledge through muslin cloth, and it will soak him through until his heart has been thoroughly invaded by the frigid and gelid black of the brine-water, the crystals that will grind at every heartbeat preserving it that way.

Like so long ago, he does not want to cry, but this time so that he is not given the affirmation that the saltwater was already inside him, and overflowing. A childish thought, he knows, and the child who stays entwined around his lungs and shares his skin shudders and weeps of monsters, sea-monsters, who claws at his throat and begs him not to breathe any longer, lest he breathes in the infection that will scrape down his throat and at his skin, drenched-though with cold sweat, and the child sobs that it will drown them both.

He cannot see England, he thinks in a surge of sudden anguish that momentarily gags the child, he cannot see him even though he knows he is right there, the harsh, ragged rise and falls of his coastline but a few miles away. Of course, papa is right in the other room, close by if not for just one wall, but the monsters, they're closer still.

He sits hunched over the edge of what could pass off as a bridge leading nowhere on either side, its whole population coming to the awe-striking total of four, four humans for whom a much deadlier clock ticks, and whose imminent cessation hangs over their heads. In him the child writhes, and keens again.

He fears: he fears to die.

Because England would lose no sleep over it, and indeed may rejoice the removal of a literal thorn in his side. Maybe even call America and tell him in a voice of celebration, and this brings the acidic taste of jealousy raising its head in his gut like some dormant sea-monster. America.

Maybe England wouldn't notice at all, a voice whispers, winding and insidious past his ears, and he believes the detestable voice to be America's, even though he's never heard him whisper. He clutches something tighter, and seems only to realise that it is there when he does.

In his hands is a notebook that he is afraid will fall from them, and only now does he appreciate the richness of the leather-bound covers, the thick, smooth cream of its heavy pages, pages that he had cramped with inelegant cursive that stuttered without eloquence the comings and goings of his days. A diary, then, in other, more succinct words.

He realises, a little late, that England was more thoughtful than he'd appeared: size-wise, it hovered between medium and small; not so large as to be intimidating, and he convinces himself that this was England's intent. It's the thought that counts, he supposes, and count it he does despite the fact that it had intimidated him a whole lot nevertheless.

He doesn't see that as England's failing. He sees it as his own.

He opens the cover, painstakingly cautious, and inside Property of Peter Kirkland is written in hesitant, inadequate script, and he remembers practising those same four words over and over on scrap paper, afraid beyond measure that he would slip up in the real thing and ruin the book. When he had finally mustered up the courage to put fountain pen to paper, the nib had jarred over the downwards loop of the 'l': he had pressed too hard coming down to the lowest point, and had buried it too deep in the paper to bring it up again. The rest of the word had been finished in an intensely distressed panic that he had messed up, why could he not do anything right just this once, and he had pushed the book away from him upon completion.

Examining it again, he is still upset to see that though, overall, it was not so terrible as he once thought it was, and it did not in fact ruin everything before he'd even started, the mistake still drew his eyes to it. It wasn't even a blot, which would have been disastrous, and justified his agonised misery: merely a white line contoured by two thicker black ones darker than any other on the page on either side, verification to a split nib.

He lingers a moment longer, ruefully, and turns the page.

A/N: That turned out unprecedentedly long.