Grass

Disclaimer: I do not own Hetalia.

With Austria he needs no words, needs not justify himself with turns of sentiment that fall stilted and lugubrious and distort themselves into the wrong metaphors entirely, needs not explain the situation, paint the layers of context and subtext and smear a careful thumb over the details.

He does not deny their potential – in a world removed from this. This, is the bubble in reality where redaction swirls the absurdities of history and its baggage they clutch to their chests from one new city to another all hazy and iridescent somewhere high above their heads.

The dirt is damp and unevenly dark with the stains of rainwater, and a hand pressed to the rocks comes away with grit rather than dust. The grass, though, isn’t too bad, at least if they brush them flat and sit on the dryer parts. No, not grass, but the type that are longish with thin stalks that are surprisingly tough to pull apart, that range in haphazard patches from tickling at his ankles to brushing his calves and knees. Some of them, if he looks, are topped with speckles of purple or a shade similar, and there are others that end in feathery yellow-brown or tufty ears of green. He’s seen them everywhere, though they seem to take a more abundant root anywhere a stone’s throw closer to remote than civilisation.  He doesn’t know their name.

The wind lifts now and again, rustling the grasses and bringing up their rain-mingled scent – they’d be a pretty shirr of rippling colours if the sun shone too. It isn’t sharp enough to be chilly, but he shifts closer to Austria anyway, heels dislodging small clots of earth from the beneath the overhang. He turns his head towards him and buries his face into the crook between neck and shoulder, and reaches out for a hand. Austria’s fingertips are as cold as his own as he laces his past them.

Austria, for his part, looks out onto the ditch below them and the steppe beyond, neither sweet enough to be called taking in any weather, nor expansive enough to be rugged, lays his other arm around Prussia’s shoulders and holds him as he weeps.