26Epica (AudioMachine), No Turning Back
I'm baaaaack!
And: HOW DID I MAKE THAT MISTAKE? Thank you to the anon who pointed out that I said Sweden instead of Norway in Prussia's list.
Fascist State
Republic of Salo
The answer was in the paperwork, the documents strewn across that blood-splattered, bullet-riddled room. Italy's body was lifted and taken outside to be hosed off and that left Gilbert and West to pick through the mess and figure out what happened. Actually, if Gilbert wanted to tell the truth then it was just him sifting through the documents, West was too shell-shocked by what had happened to move.
"He… He just-"
"He attacked you."
"We made a pact..." Well, that was over now, wasn't it? "We promised to protect each other, to help one another no matter-"
"West, look at this." His brother was sitting in one of the meeting room chairs, his hat on the table and his eyes staring blankly at the thick pool of black blood where Italy had been lying. Gilbert finally assembled the documents and brought the blood-smeared pages over to him, pointing to one of the rigidly typed clauses on the first sheet.
The undersigners hereby consent to the lawful dissolution of the Kingdom of Italy, on this day the twenty-third of September in the one-thousand-nine-hundred-forty-third year of the Lord…
There were a dozen other clauses and tens of pages dedicated to the legal jargon and political impact of the document, but this line was critical. The blanks for the date had been filled in already and the names of the Italian Dictator and a few of his staff decorated the page, but there was one more blank that had only scratches and ink blots over it, only the F and V visible after whoever had signed it had tried to undo the horrific damage.
Gilbert didn't even have to ask, he knew just by watching West's blue eyes widen and his teeth lock up that he didn't understand what he was reading.
"Italy hates his King…" He was still trying to rationalize it the way he had everything else, West still wanted to believe that his friend was just as simple as he'd ever been. How long was he going to pretend he didn't know how much double-talk Italy used in a given conversation? "He's hated him ever since the Depression, so why would he want to remain a kingdom? Why would he fight this?"
"You know that's not what this is." This wasn't just Italy rejecting his king and declaring himself a Republic, this was so much more than that.
"He… he can't be dead…"
"We'll have to wait and see."
"His territories, his people-"
"Wait and see, West."
That was all they could do.
It took two days before the back of the Italian's hollow skull began to flesh itself out and rebuild from the brain matter out. Ludwig obeyed his boss and kept the body sequestered in the same room he'd been keeping before, but with a German guard outside the door and a white sheet placed over his best friend's grey face.
He knew his boss and the Italian Dictator were drafting a new constitution for him, and that was why the bullet wounds in his chest and forehead began to mend and stitch themselves together. That was why his flesh didn't start to rot and turn black on the bed. Italy wasn't dead, he couldn't be dead, not really.
One of the most terrifying sights Ludwig had seen since the war really got underway came four days after Feliciano was shot dead in front of him. The Italian had begun breathing again, and Ludwig pulled the white sheet down off his face to check the black and bloody mark from his caved-in skull. And then he opened his eyes.
Feliciano opened his red, red eyes and said:
"Get out."
There was no wishy-washy feely-filled reason why the Italian rejected West, but there was a very, very good reason why the rejection was made in German, not Italian. Gilbert knew that all of this was a shock to West, but that was only because he couldn't remember the last time the same thing had happened to him. Japan would understand, but Japan wasn't here, he was fighting in the Philippines and would be away for a few more weeks taking care of the Australians and the New Zealanders in Oceania.
If you were going to die then a nation had to know how to change, it was adapt or collapse sometimes, and it was one of the most painful processes any of their kind could go through. Overnight the Axis and Ally-reinforced line across the Italian peninsula went from a painful welt bleeding across the brothers' backs to a physical barrier separating the two of them. Gilbert couldn't relate completely, but he knew from centuries spent bordering on the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth that if Romano's heart was still beating, he'd probably spent the last few days paralyzed on one side of his body trying to cope.
But Feliciano was the one who'd broken away, so he was taking the brunt of it even without the gunshots and obliterated skull. He'd probably signed the document without reading it just so he could get away from his boss, only to realize his mistake as soon as the pain started. Gilbert could only guess but that seemed like the most likely way for things to break down. The Dictator sure as hell wasn't talking, he wouldn't even visit his nation and specifically sent Gilbert to make sure he was sane.
Hah.
Nothing could save Feliciano's blue uniform this time, so when Gilbert got there and entered with only a quiet knock, the Italian paused with his fingers around the knot of his new maroon red tie. The colour made the poisonous red of his eyes stand out, the honey brown colour now permenantly stained that new hue. It had scared West away, Gilbert was sure, now the Prussian just wished he didn't have to recognize it.
As for the rest of him, the brown pants and jacket of his militia were dull after all the blue he'd worn before, rough black boots done up over his ankles. A length of red cord was looped around the plain black of his belt and trailed down to his knee with a set of tassels at the end. Gilbert couldn't figure it out but it probably had some kind of meaning, just like the patches sewn on the upper arm of the tunic slung over the back of the desk chair. The Italian tricolour was preserved on that patch, but instead of the shield of the House of Savoy, a Fascist Eagle done in gold had its wings spread over the green white and red bars.
The fact that Feliciano just stood there staring at him without words was unsettling, but damn him if it wasn't familiar.
"Refresh my memory." Now if only Gilbert could remember which, if any, of North Italy's previous incarnations had spoken fluent German. In the meantime he answered with:
"The year is nineteen-forty-three, September twenty-seventh. Four days ago you were compelled to declare independence from your brother and forswear the Royal House of Savoy to, I assume, become a Republic."
"You assume." His voice had the same tone, he was still a tenor, but it was oh so cold again.
"They don't tell me everything." Gilbert didn't even know whether to think of him as Italy, Feliciano, or something else entirely. It had been too long, and as the Italian dropped his red eyes and went back to mechanically looping and twisting the tie under his chin, Gilbert took that as a sign to continue explaining.
"We're four years into the biggest war the world has ever seen, we are fighting on every continent."
"We?"
"You're allies include the Third German Reich and the Empire of Japan." The brunet in the black shirt swung his brown jacket on and buttoned it up tight over his chest, no medals on his breast this time as his fingers strapped the belt around his waist with precision.
"That's not a lot of allies." For the biggest war in history? Probably not.
"The Third Germany Reich includes the former territories of Austria, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria, France, Czechoslovakia, Poland… and now you." The other nation watched without expression as Gilbert listed off the names. If anything he looked like he was trying not to frown, but then he just picked up the small black-edged hat from the table and tucked his copper-red hair under the brim. He pulled on a set of black gloves without comment, and it was only after he was completely satisfied with his appearance that he asked his next question.
"And who am I, exactly?"
"I could ask you the same thing." Gilbert had heard… pieces, but to be honest he'd tried just keeping himself busy over the last few days. Gossip wasn't for him when there was a war going on. "What's the last thing you remember?"
It took him a few moments to answer, it was probably all a blur. He'd experienced rapid changes in government, language, culture, economics, and borders. All of those things could disorient and confuse a nation, especially if it was a side of them who'd been asleep for a very, very long time.
"The referendum." Gilbert didn't know what that meant, and the Italian spoke so softly in German that he could barely hear him, his red eyes drifting away back to the bed where he'd been healing for four days. "In Veneto. The referendum to decide loyalty between the Austrian Empire or the Kingdom of Italy…" The very end of the third Italian war of independence… Gilbert had been right all along: Italy had slowly been devolving back into the cut-throat fighter who had made the Sardinians a small, terrifying force to be reckoned with in the 19th century. The pizza and pasta lover had cast down his paintbrush to take up the sword that had consolidated all the tiny kingdoms and communes of North Italy…
"So why are you speaking German?"
"Because the Kingdom of Italy is dead."
His name, officially, was the Italian Socialist Republic. The name lacked something and they all knew it: the government had written the constitution too fast and without much idea of what exactly he was supposed to be. Half the documents referred to paperwork in Berlin or lost to them in Rome, and the laws of the land were changed to limit the freedom and mobility of his people. With a flag and a few semi-loyal militia men, Kiku was not sure he approved of the changes happening in Europe.
They could not call him Italy anymore, he did not recognize it and when he wasn't just confused by the name then he would simply ignore it. Calling him "RSI" was irritating as well, because it wasn't a name, it was the Italian abbreviation of the same technical information. He did still recognize and accept his human name, Feliciano Vargas, but Kiku was not interested in referring to him so informally when they had important business to attend to.
So they called him Salo, because that was the name of his… eh… Kiku was not quite sure what the town of Salo constituted as, but he was the one to determine that it was not, in fact, the capital of the new republic.
"Have you made any progress against the Allies?" It was not his capital, although Salo did spend most of his time there and it was the place Kiku was expected to travel to if he wanted to see him. He would not make the journey up to Berlin anymore, he claimed he was too busy in the south.
Kiku did not approve of this inhospitable attitude, had this friend not once driven him clear across Asia in order to take him home after one of their meetings? Now he could not be bothered even to take a day and travel from the Republic up into the German heartland. Kiku could have simply left it at that and refused to deal with his newfound attitude, but with a troubling comment made by Prussia and the sharp way Germany dismissed the issue, he was compelled.
"I've been monitoring them." Kiku would have expected to find Italy, any incarnation of Italy, lounging around and sleeping in the brisk December air. Instead, he arrived in Salo at the end of '43 and was barely able to keep up with him as they marched and drove back and forth across the town. The Republic of Salo was the not the kind of nation who was prone to much sleep.
"Have you engaged with the enemy?" Kiku was an old man, but he could still keep up with the quick pace the Italian set, it was not the severity of it that made him lag behind, it was the fact that this was supposed to be his friend…
"No. Germany takes care of that."
"Then you're outfitting his men."
"They bring their supplies from Berlin."
"Your farmland-"
"-did not produce well this year." So what, pray tell, was keeping him so busy running around all day? Kiku was not in the mood for this kind of useless exercise, and as the two of them ducked out of the cold winter sun and under a tall archway leading into a newly constructed military compound, he stopped and said as much. Directly.
"What have you been wasting your time with?"
"You could have just asked Germany, I submitted my report to him last week." Meaning he was actually taking the time to fill those things out? He was kneeling to the bureaucracy that made Germany as efficient as he was rigid? No wonder Ludwig refused to hear any criticism about this new nation that had taken North Italy's place, and of course Prussia would pressure him to come down here and witness this. This much change in such a short time was not healthy for a nation, he would not survive like this.
"Feliciano, answer me." He did not like to use such an informal name, but at the same time this could not be allowed to continue. "Listen and tell me- what are you looking at?" Feliciano turned at his name but his red eyes shot right past Kiku's head, focusing on the wall behind him with surprise and then a frightening surge of anger. What on earth-?
"You there, boy! Who was on guard?" As Feliciano yelled at a young man in militia garb standing nearby, Kiku turned and felt his eyebrows creep up at the sight of crimson paint bleeding down the stone wall he'd just been walking by. Some slogan in Italian was dribbling and drying in the cold air, a propaganda image of a plucked eagle slapped over the red and sticking just to the paint.
Resistance propaganda on a government building? Rebellious words painted in the middle of his capital? This was intolerable.
The gunshots Salo unloaded into the stones at the boy's feet to make him run were terrifying.
Two days was all Kiku needed to understand that the town of Salo was not a capital city, and he did not understand why Germany was allowing this to happen. His suspicions, long in forming, were confirmed with the simple act of a handshake that Salo did not want to give him and which Kiku barely wanted to receive. They both would have been happy with a salute, but Germany was incensed about keeping them all friendly and on the best of artificial terms.
So they shook hands, and he felt it.
Or rather, they shook hands and Kiku did not feel it.
"Ve, you can let go now, he's not actually watching." Kiku barely heard the sniping comment, but when Salo tried to pull his hand back, the Empire clenched it harder. No. Why couldn't he feel it? They'd only grudgingly made eye-contact with each other and when Japan tried to re-establish it, Salo looked askance and wouldn't face him. His tanned face was uncomfortable, his red eyes staring at the flags hanging limp in the cold air.
Kiku reached out with his other hand and curled his fingers around Salo's wrist, just to be sure. The false republic squirmed to show he didn't like it, and Kiku understood implicitly why he had remained far away from the encroaching allied line.
The Italian Socialist Republic had no heartbeat.
Feliciano Vargas was a dead man walking.
In the memory of his good friend, Kiku Honda of Japan murmured the only words he could think of as he let the dead man's hand fall from his grasp:
"You must take back Rome, or you will not survive this war." One bullet, one stray explosion, and he would no longer have to fear the humiliation or pain of collapse: he would simply die. If he was injured again then he would not heal because a nation without a capital was not a nation at all, it was only a man in a uniform with a tattered flag and a useless name. And he knew it.
"Please." They both knew it.
"You will have my report by the end of the week. Travel safely, Japan."
Lots of headcanons~ Originally I wanted a 2P!Italy who was closer to MiaMan's characterization on Tumblr (where he's this bratty, destructive child that I love) but it doesn't quite fit with what I've got here. Oh well, next time maybe. I haven't started chapter 6 yet, but the end is outlined and I just finished my TESL program today, so I have lots of time for all my projects!
Leave a review below! Are the headcanons okay? What about the history? This chapter is a little bit rough so if you saw any errors, please point them out!
