hetalia_kink

Original request: http://hetalia-kink.livejournal.com/10530.html?thread=18061090#t18061090
Sequel to 'Maybe you're a Sinner' - Asian nations. This turned out more philosophical than I though it would. >.<
-

A line.

Two.

Quick strokes, cross hatching, and then a pair of circles. A line that turns down at the edges.

A frown.

And Kiku Honda is born.

-

This didn’t happen:

Once upon a time a man named Kiku Honda, a little shy but well meaning, was shot in the hip. Twice. It hurt more than anything he’d ever felt in his life, shattering bone and ripping muscle and melting flesh into cold scar tissue. But human bodies are nothing if not resilient. In a few months he was on his feet and limping to work and back, blessedly alone.

And although he hated the pain and the bullets in his pelvis, it wasn’t as though he didn’t deserve it.

In a realm outside the thin paper medium of Kiku Honda’s reality, two atomic bombs claimed more than 220 000 lives.

He traces the burnt paper edges that separate one dimension from the next, tastes blood and then moves on to the next panel.

(If only it were that simple)

-

After Kiku leaves hospital with two gunshot wounds in his hip, Yung Soo starts to forget things.

Little things. Like his new constitution, and where he’s been for the past 4 months. There’s blood on fingers. Yung Soo is reasonably sure he does not remember painting the walls of his house red.

He does remember the hot iron taste of Kiku’s katana and bile in the very instant that he tried to cut the Korean words from his mouth along with his tongue. That feeling lingers along with a prickling on the other side of his retina that makes everything wash over in waves of scarlet while he sleeps. This is something that one half of him will never forget.

Another night he is suddenly aware of his feet carrying him home in the rain- flash, like that- and he’s carrying a gun he has no idea where he found. Hate is slipping off of his lips and into the raindrops that trickle down his uniform.

Then Alfred comments that he’s getting thinner as they discuss the government of his new country, and wouldn’t he like a donut? But Yung Soo looks at himself in the mirror and does not see anyone else, the other him living in the scarlet blood of the past.

When Ivan comes and grabs him by the collar Yung Soo tries to twist away, breath catching in his throat. “I don’t know you,” he gasps desperately, pushing him away with panic writ large on his face. “Why are you in my house?” Yesterday Yung Soo had welcomed him in and sipped vodka and buried his face in the blond hairs at the base of the other’s neck.

Then, finally, when everything doesn’t make anymore sense, Alfred takes his shoulder in a vicegrip and demands to know why the papers in his drawers are all blood red communist conspiracy, something delicate within him snaps. “I’m not!” he screams at Alfred, an inch from his face and flushing frantic. “I didn’t do this! This isn’t me!”

Sometimes when he wakes up with that electric sizzle buzzing behind his eyes, Yung Soo just lies and stares at the ceiling. He’s pretty sure now, that he’s insane. Somewhere deep inside. But still, as crazy as he feels, he sits and broods anyway.

It’s alright to hate, sometimes.

And he does. When he’s like this, Yung Soo hates Kiku. He hates Kiku’s DVDs that are scattered on his desk. He hates Yao for being goddamn greedy and avoiding him. He hates Ivan, and Alfred, and their fucking meddling, capitalist, greedy, disgusting grins on their faces, and what goddamn fucking right do they have to be happy when Yung Soo isn’t, and-

Yung Soo has rage pent up in his blood up to his eyelids, and the only thing he hates more than the rest of this twisted, fucked-up world-

(Yung Soo hates and fears and hates and stabs the inside of his thigh with a ballpoint pen)

-is himself.

(North Korea declares war on South Korea, tortures, starves, rapes, enslaves and murders its own people)

But Yung Soo doesn’t-

(200,000 in detention and labour camps)

-think he can-

(Kidnaps Japanese and South Koreans)

-stop himself, and-

(Sends missiles sailing over Asia’s head)

-he’s so afraid-

(Rangoon bombings on the South Korean government)

-of what he’s going to do next.

He doesn’t know if he’ll survive like this for much longer.

Yung Soo wakes up grey scale, eventually, with blood on his sheets and his family knocking on his bedroom door. Then, he pushes himself up, faces south and collects the scattered CDs and DVDs on the floor.

Then, Yung Soo looks at himself in the mirror, swallows down his own guilt and fear, and plasters a grin back onto his face.

(North and South Korea never sign a peace treaty)

“Aniki’s breasts are mine!” he claims in a chipper tone after that. As if that’s all on his mind.

-

South Korea objected the airing of Hetalia because of its portrayal of the country.

OhcomeonIt’sonlyabunchofpictures-

(If only it were that simple)

-

This didn’t happen:

In spaces between the margins of white paper frames there is naked, bleeding white skin. The air smells of fog and the barely-there traces of opium that hang around the younger boy’s hair.

“What I want,” Kiku says, “is your unconditional surrender.” The man under his booted foot trembles under his weight, but narrows his thick eyebrows and says nothing.

Kiku sighs in almost regret. The long high hum of a katana being drawn resonates in the crammed confines. His captive really starts to shake now- real (real?) shivers of fear and trepidation like an animal that knows what’s coming next.

The pounding heat of the rising sun throbs mad in Kiku’s arteries. He feels powerful- in one movement, abruptly, he ceases all quivering.

“What I want is your unconditional surrender,” he repeats once more in a low, dangerous, matter-of-fact whisper. “Or I will force this sword a metre down into your anus.”

He breaks, metal pressing against the gap between his naked rear, begging, please, not that, please, anything, I surrender, GOD!–

-Crack. The boot on the Asian man’s throat stamps whiplash into the back of his head.

“What did I say-“ (Kiku is guiltless) “-about speaking in English?”

Kiku thrusts.

Hong Kong lets out scream after scream after scream after scream after-

(You see, Kiku never did this, but Japan did. Hong Kong still remembers)

-after scream.

(Hong Kong the city. Not the person. Because in Hetalia, this never happened.)

-

Sometimes Yao thinks he loves his children so much that it physically hurts.

Everything he can do is for their good. He tries hard, he works long hours to feed each and every last one of them. He has sacrificed so much for them, and all he wants is for them to be a family. Is that too much to ask?

Obviously it is.

Although Yao likes the colour red, he does not like the way it dogs him in his footprints. Every step that he takes rusts with blood and when he looks back the imprint of military boots has crushed the earth in marching lines of scarlet.

There are savage boot prints on the back of Tibet’s monk’s robes where Yao has stamped him down onto his knees and rammed the words of Mao down his Buddhist throat. More of his 55 minorities, his younger siblings, are broke and broken, and covered in redredred like communist propaganda.

They are a family, goddamnit. (One million Tibetans had to die.)

He also hates the way that red fills his vision when his children leave without asking. When they read things on the Internet without checking to see if the hurtful lies have been removed. He only wants to be a good parent and to inspire his children (one child policy) to greatness.

(No religion, no free speech, no protests.)

He hates when Taiwan wears a red dress, as if to simply mock her brother’s lack of authority.

(Taiwan believes in a Republic. China scoffs and wants to swat her like a fly.)

He stares forward to keep the red trail behind him out of his line of sight.

But still, Yao loves his children and his brothers and sisters more than anything. The ground he stamps down into crimson mud is proof of how much he cares.

Because Yao is an idealist. Sharing is good, and if his children have to share their vital organs to make sure that everything is fair then so be it, whether they like it or not.

In bound book pages and on television, China has holiday houses all around the world and grins cheerfully.

(Again, if only reality could be as simple as a world in two dimensions.)

-

This didn’t happen:

Yao is tied to a tree with ropes that burn the tender flesh at his wrists. His hair has been hacked off, his clothes ripped and muddied with his soil. Kiku sits at the campfire metres away, staring at him. There is a light in his brother’s eyes that is like the fire, something red and proud and terrifyingly like madness.

Yao swallows. “Kiku? Kiku, please- I never wanted this, I-“ Kiku cocks his gun and his head as if to dare him to keep talking. Yao tries to mouth his way around the fear in the stale air. “…Please. Brother.”

Kiku shoots him through the heart. It hurts, hollow, like his palaces and people burning, and puppet governments, and it stings like acid. Yao slumps and sobs but a hand seizes his hair, and Japan is right there in front of him, eyes narrowed in rage just before his head is bashed against the ironbark. Yao knows no more.

(Japanese soldiers rape 200 000 women, put 10 million to forced labour and another 10 million to death.)

He screams before he opens his eyes- he doesn’t need to see to recognise that a sharp blade is making parallel slices into his yielding stomach. More pain. Oh God, but Yao doesn’t know how Kiku could torture him any more than this-

-he stares in hazy, horrified disbelief as Kiku tears a lump of quivering flesh from his side and looks at it, blankly appraising. He leaves without another word, but the savoury smell of frying meat from behind his back tells him more than he needs or has ever wanted to know.

Yao is violently sick to his bones.

A lifetime later a gentle hand lifts his chin and wipes it of bile. Kiku’s kiss then tastes like vomit and the smoky flavour of Yao’s own liver.

This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening to Yao right now, because this is something that not even a nightmare could replicate.

This didn’t happen, he begs.

(It didn’t happen. Instead, on an idyllic island China attacks Japan with a wok and wins.)

-

What we must remember is that where in one world there is life, in another there is absence.

There’s no one there yet, only in the third dimension and not in the first and the second. An illusion, perhaps, of peace as nothingness, or simply university student sloth. In these dimensions there is no young girl with a straw hat, or a jolly young man and his thinning, stubborn neighbour. There is no woman with pinstripe eyebrows and a severe look and bronzed skin.

(Does this mean that the Vietnam War never happened? That the Khmer Rouge simply…wasn’t?)

In our world there is Indonesia and East Timor, and UN peacekeepers. In our world there is Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Burma and Bangladesh.

In their world there isn’t. In their world there is peace.

In the space between the second and third dimensions Cambodia is a woman who loves showing tourists her temples, and who once was responsible for the genocide of 7.1 million of her own children. She jerks awake in the dark of the night as the echoes in her head whisper that “to keep her is no benefit, and to kill her is no loss.”

Bangladesh is a bride beaten and bloodied and broken by her husband Pakistan before rising, hateful and alive and silent behind her black, black fringe.

Vietnam is a young girl with her hair in a plait. A straw hat covers her face to hide the pockmarks from Agent Orange, and she has long sleeves to hide the scars from the stitches where she’d tried to tear herself in half with her fingernails.

“Let me be free,” East Timor whispers.

Indonesia shoots him in the face to shut him up.

Asia has gaps, due to selective memories and denial. Like Kiku forgetting about War Crimes, and Yao forgetting that there’s more to being a good parent than strict punishment. Like Yung Soo when he wakes up in the South, not the North, and asks himself why he’s so fucked up.

-

“This didn’t happen,” Kiku Honda tells himself as he washes the blood from his forearms and collapses against the walls of his palace. A shaking fear of the past. “This…This never happened.”

But as he watches the bricks across from him and almost finishes swallowing the remains of the past in censored textbooks, a door appears before him.

-

He knows all this. He knows that history hurts. But just maybe he could make it easier for them all.

Somewhere in between worlds, a young man with a cat asleep on his lap picks up his mechanical pencil and dreams of a place where peace exists, at least, in two dimensions.

He draws a door.

-

Kiku Honda turns the handle.

And

looks

through

at

something

impossible.

-

This didn’t happen:

When the door opens, Kiku is met with the sounds of many voices that he thinks he recognises. Yao’s face tenses as he turns from scolding somebody in Mandarin- maybe his Taiwanese sister, the one Kiku had always smiled at- to see who is at the door. They stand and don’t speak for a while.

“Kiku,” he begins finally, wistful half smile on his face. There’s a mouth-watering smell in the air, all Sichuan chillies and crispy skinned dumplings. “Nice…nice to see you, aru.”

Japan swallows. “I needed to give you something.”

Yao looks down at the paper in his shaking fingers and has no words to say. After he takes it, Kiku feels like his insides have lifted uncomfortably to a giddy part of his lungs- weightless and dizzy. Slowly the paper is unrolled and opens before them.

I’m sorry.

He can’t see the Chinese man’s face behind the roll of rice paper between them, but he does see the whitening of his knuckles and the crinkle in the paper running from top left to bottom right. But this is important, and he doesn’t just want this to stay like this. This is important.

Kiku doesn’t want to run from the things that strain his family anymore. “I know it’s late.” Low and almost broken. “…I’m always late.”

Still nothing. Just when Kiku thinks his stomach will fall and keep falling until he walks away, alone, Yao lowers his message.

He’s smiling.

“Kiku. You have always been, and always will be, welcome in this family.” He sounds choked. That’s good. Kiku is.

He hardly dares to meet the other’s eyes, but when he does, they might just be full of tears. “Is it…alright? Can you forgive me?”

And at that, Yao just hides his face in his red sleeves, crouches over and cries, and asks himself why he isn’t the one on the doorstep with the calligraphy and the sorry eyes in front of everything that he could have stopped and didn’t, or everything that he shouldn’t have done but did. Why everything that had seemed so important when they’d hated each other was now so insignificant, and why he suddenly felt like an old old old man.

Deep down, Yao knows that he should be asking for forgiveness too.

Today Yao’s house is filled with laughter and a strange kind of happiness that had been absent until now. Kiku sits next to his sister and Yung Soo and passes pickles down the table. Cambodian mixes with Vietnamese and Indonesian and Cantonese. Watching this from the doorway, red jacket stained with oil and tears and blood, Yao thinks that something small but very important may have changed.

His sister leaves on Kiku’s arm. Yao watches her go as he washes up in the kitchen and he waves a quiet farewell.

Later, he makes a phone call to Tibet and listens to the rings buzz in time with his racing heartbeat.

-

Asia looks at itself in loose graphite drawings and in 5-minute sketches. And perhaps, just perhaps, in a myriad of translated, scanlated languages, perhaps someone is learning a lesson.

About peace, as it flows from popular culture out into the real world.

Maybe it’s not that impossible.

-

This is happening:

Kiku shuts the door gently and sits. He’s thinking about history, and Korea and China, and the rest of the world- self reflection.

Japan exists here; Kiku lives there.

Like he often is, in history, Kiku has been accused of misrepresenting and sugar-coating the atrocities of the past. This time in a comic, in rough sketches on the internet. But if sugar-coating makes history and self-awareness that much more palatable, and makes Japan think that little bit more about Asia and apologies, and family, and the mistakes of wartime feudal lords-

(On paper on the desk are grey lead smiles and happiness that make the world stop and wonder, and laugh for a moment.)

-if it makes Japan more aware of itself-

(Together.)

-then is dreaming such a bad thing?

-

Yawning, Hidekazu Himaruya shuts down his computer, looks at the cats snuggled on his bed and wonders where he’ll sleep tonight.

And maybe peace is a matter as simple as that.

-

Taiwanese!anon here loves you for the more correct representation of her country, on top of a lot of love for this well thought out fill.

Ha. More correct indeed, 小姐。

When I was initially reading this, I thought that it was one of the most cynical interpretations and representations of Hetalia as a series that I've ever read in my life. Not the mindless ranting of someone who's heard of the idea and takes offense, but from someone who bothered to read the series, research the background of the countries represented, and quite coolly analyze and eventually deconstruct the representation (or lack thereof) of all the Asian nations in the series.

And yet, you somehow, somehow, managed to turn it around. Even when during the beginning, however, you pin blame on everyone; no one is innocent or the complete victim, even Kiku, who is the closest to a major villain in the face of modern Asian history.

This, this should help represent the Hetalia fandom. Because it shows that even a parody series, in its flaws and stereotypes and potential for offensiveness, can be an astounding thing. It shows that we as Hetalia fans aren't just silly little fangirls who are rabid for yaoi and moe, that a lot of us bother to learn, to find out, to create, even when it takes us to some astonishingly uncomfortable and dark places in human history.

This was brilliant. I can't say anything else.

Thank you, all of those are so true. In the East Asia, there are hardly any lands that does not know the horror of war.
Vietnamese anon love you especially for remember Agent Orange. It was what happened when a country was nothing but a pawn in the game between much much more powerful nations: people killing their own people, and the hatred, the urge to revenge becomes has run so deep for many to forget or forgive. Out of all the countries that had been divided in the cold war, it seems only Germany had a (sort of) happy ending.
Yeah, our people love to laugh at our country, it really helps a lot :)! Many truths have been (and will be) denied, but there's still some hope as long as people don't forget.

This is so beautifully written. Like, seriously. Wow.

Although. When Indonesia took and raped East Timor for the first time, the memories of throwing bodies - friends (if there is such a thing)- into crocodile pits, eliminating all the names on the list America gave him and (...). Would they still be fresh in his mind? Or would he have buried 1965 already?

On the May of 1998, would East Timor be looking on as Indonesia started bleeding, deliriously stabbing himself with the hatred for the government that took control after he had carried out genocide all those years ago? He was applauded as a hero, mind you.

All this after only 64 years (or 60, it depends) of independence. There was war back then, too.

In 1965, Indonesia carried out a mass killing of suspected 'communists', even if they were only Chinese. The New Order began on this bloody note, and ended on the same in 1998. 1998 saw riots against the Chinese (because they were seen as having all the economic power while the country suffered under the 1997 East Asian Financial Crisis, and even before), seeking to overthrow the leader that was hailed as a victor all those years ago. The end of the Cold War also meant that Indonesia was no longer without competition from countries like Vietnam in terms of TNC investment and the like. How sad, if not ironic.

/okay will end the fagging now
/Also am not sure what gender Indonesia is so am going with headcanon.

Even though all these horrible things have happened, Indonesia is still growing. I agree with author!anon. There is horror in what has happened but we should pursue the beauty that is in hope, and not abandon a nation just because of the past. There is still a future, after all.

/is a sap.

*Crocodile pits should be Lubang Buaya... As in the site where the generals were killed 'supposedly' by the communists. And not literal crocodile pits. My bad.

O-okay, going to stop ruining the beauty now.

I was just scrolling through for fills about my own country, bored and casual, and I come across this.

There are tears in my eyes; if I were alone there would be more.

This anon loves you for this. Just... cannot even type a proper response, sorry. I just thought this was stunning and heart-wrenching and so... true. To Hetalia. This is the fandom where you love and hurt and hurt to love the characters and just...

Sorry. Is incoherent. -wipes tears away in embarrassment- Thank you so much for writing this!

This fill hits home, anon. It hurts in more ways than one and a lot of us wouldn't have it any other way.

I applaud you for this. This is perfect.

We can't change our past, no matter how complicated and bloody and dark but it doesn't mean our future has to be the same too.

*hugs*

This was so beautiful and amazing and powerful and honest, fjhdslfdlkjd thank you so, so much. I agree, this should be used to represent the fandom. You've done a wonderful job.

This anon won't say much, since what has to be said, and what this anon is feeling right now, has mostly been said in the replies above. Still, she thanks you for writing this exceptionally moving and absolutely wonderful piece, she thinks that this is one of the best things she's ever read.