hetalia | [fanfic] Class Four [2/?]

I'm fairly amused that when I finished writing up the outline for this whole fic, "Gay" by Steven Lynch came on. Whoo boy.

Okay, I know I said every friday for updates, but I finally outlined the story pretty well, so I've actually got stuff to go from. I'm working through it bit by bit, so I can't really say how many chapters this'll be in the end.

Title: Class Four [2/?]
Chapter Title: 1
Author: me
Characters/Pairings: This chapter: America, England and his family
Rating: Overall, somewhere between an R and an NC-17, for violence and a bit of sex. This chapter, eh, a T.
Warnings: Gore, violence, kinda depressing but overall pretty awesome. Involves zombies, as anyone familiar with the survival guide should be able to tell by the title.
Overall Summary: It had always been there--that unexplainable scourge--but never like this. Never so widespread, and never ever this severe. [An APH/WWZ crossover]
Chapter Summary: Wherein bureaucracy fouls up a decent chance at a vaccine, and England is concerned for his siblings.

A/N: This is not a page by page faithful crossover, I'm taking a large number of liberties with the story on both ends, so just be prepared.

Previous Chapters:
Prologue.
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Alfred has never quite liked politics. He liked action, he liked excitement, he liked doing--something that politics seemed wholly devoted to being against. Bureaucracy was never his strong point, and it was too complicated---too much red tape and so much god damned paperwork.

No way around it, though. The blonde hitched his glasses up his nose and observed the Congressional floor from the platform. Voting whether to go to war. Again. He was already fighting in so many different places, places with names he couldn't pronounce or remember. He doesn't care anymore, and he's quite sure all those men and women down there don't care either.

His phone buzzes in his pocket, and he sees a new alert from some unnamed source; another outbreak (he doesn't bother tracing--it's from a disposable mobile and it's different each time). Alfred sighs and rolls his shoulders back, his eyes gazing at the ceiling. Below him, the thunder of applause, but Alfred doesn't pay too much attention. He glanced back to see a majority yes vote before he clears the door.

Alfred misses Teddy. The first Roosevelt had been one of the very few leaders he'd actually befriended. He'd followed the man from his early days in the military to the White House and beyond and they'd been all for ACTION.

But that's not why he's left Capitol Hill.

There is a vaccine. They have one, and they're keeping it behind American borders. For a moment, Alfred wonders if they should at least plan to have enough for Canada. But he's not supposed to actual know this is all going on.

It's not like he hasn't encountered these things before. He can remember that man with the dark hair and the dark eyes catching him by the collar at the sight of one of the ghouls. The Native America would reprimand him in harsh tones and harsher language to never go near those who walked again. Alfred learned from that man how to kill the creatures, if he had to.

He never had to. Arthur had come before long, and wanted to here of no such nonsense. So the British man hears nothing of what really happened at Roanoke, or how several tribes seem to just vanish. In time, Alfred forgets, too. There's hearsay, sure, but he doesn't hear a lot of actual proof.

Then again, he muses, he probably wouldn't. His leaders always professed to be 'thinking the best' for him. Alfred couldn't decide whether that meant he really shouldn't know, or if they just thought him a child.

He meets with Arthur over lunch. The elder nation looks tired, and Alfred tells him as much. Arthur furrows his eyebrows, but cannot muster the energy to be snarky, so he chooses to roll his eyes.

"Ah yes, and you are the picture of youth in springtime, my friend," he drolls. Alfred misses the sarcasm completely.

"Really?"

A glare in response.

"Oh....," Alfred stares into his glass, tracing the edges of the ice with his eyes. His reflection almost stares back, distorted and melting.

They talk about everything they are 'allowed' to speak about, but that conversation falters after Alfred missteps and a question about the countryside slips through.

There's a long list that Alfred has had to familiarize himself with when speaking to an Englishman (especially when talking to the Englishman), and he has countless others that tell him how he is to speak with the other nations in these unsteady times. By and large, he disregards these, but he is being watched, so he'd rather not take his chances.

After all, his leaders did not know just what he was, and there were a certain number of men with medical degrees and white coats who would have loved to find out.

"Ah, sorry, I mean um....new...York. How did you like New York? Didn't you have a layover there?"

There was something in Arthur's smile that said oh yes, you've fooled them in the sardonic way that only centuries of perfecting could.

"I did," Arthur replied, his fingers occupied with the spoon stirring his tea, "it's...alright."

It's not. The humans are losing ground in York, and the scourge is spreading. His people may not know it now, but they will soon.

Arthur can remember centuries before, when he and his siblings bore different names; names he won't speak aloud now. He remembers when Scotland was not Scotland, but Caldonii, back when names held a magic of their own. Caldonii had been older than Arthur had been. Not much, but enough to lord his height over the smaller Nation. He'd been a scrappy lad (and somehow had managed to retain that quality throughout adulthood), scared of very few things.

If Scotland was terrified, there was reason to be afraid. Arthur had watched the wall go up between them, to stop it all.

It wasn't helping now, though. They were keeping it suppressed, but there was only so long they could hold it. Ioan had already left his country and taken refuge with his brother.

Arthur didn't know what was going on with the Irelands. Northern Ireland was refusing to speak with him, and the Republic...well, she never talked to him much anymore.

"Arthur!"

The Nation came back to reality with Alfred's fingers prodding at his shoulders. Arthur shrugged them away.

"Ah, sorry. What were you saying?"

"The uh, the shows. Did you see any shows?"

"Alfred, I was there for two days, most of that recovering from jetlag,"

"That's enough time. I've seen three shows on the West End in that time," Alfred beams. Arthur cocks an eyebrow. For a moment, he forgets the stresses and is just amazed by Alfred's stupidity. And then he laughs, and Alfred laughs, and it's not so bad for a moment. The waiter pours each of them a new drink, and neither of them ignores how he lingers at the table for a few seconds longer than he should have.

He's from one of those organizations with an ominous acronym, though whether it's one of Arthur's or one of Alfred's, they've stopped caring. It's obviously time for them to move on.

Both are adept at evading their 'stalkers'. Arthur has had practice for ages, squirming away from those who tried to conquer him. Eventually, they are able to simply walk. They talk about America's wars and how the politicians want the United Kingdom's help.

"They say there's a vaccine," Alfred quips as he stretches his arms over his head. He hopes that Arthur understands what he means, or better, doesn't get it at all.

"Ah," is all he says, "for that?"

"For that...," Alfred's uncertain, and he has to bring himself to actually meet England's eyes to see if he knows. It's almost as if he is a child again and Arthur is trying to get him to confess to bullying Matthieu.

The younger Nation's eyes widen.

"Oh shit," he mutters, "oh shit oh shitohshit," and he begins to sink to his knees. It's in more than one place, at the same time. Arthur grabs Alfred's shoulders and makes the younger nation stand on his feet again.

"Breathe," his tone is calm, but his thoughts are anything but. He can only pray that these outbreaks are a bizzare coincidence. They will live by the motto "no news is good news", on the edge of their seats as one by one the dots connect.

Alfred calms himself, trying not to recall how it was foolish to believe in coincidences.

"There. Better?"

"Yeah. Sorry."

Arthur shrugs.

"It's not something that can't be handled. We've made it before."

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--Class 4, as defined in "The Zombie Survival Guide", is essentially when the world is over run by the undead. The zombification is found to be caused by a virus called Solanum, which destroys and rewires the brain to create the zombie.

--Theodore Roosevelt was pretty badass. In my head, Alfred's always been prone to hero worship, and Teddy went on tons of adventures both before and after the White House.

--In the Guide, the disappearance of the colony at Roanoke is blamed on a zombie outbreak. There is also some record of Native American tribes 'vanishing' from records--the most accepted theory is that tribes joined together and formed a new tribe.

--Again, in the guide, the reason for the building of Hadrian's wall wasn't because the Scots were so vicious, but to keep the outbreak from spreading.

--Cymru is Welsh for Wales, and Ioan is a Welsh name meaning "God is Gracious". I'm still unsteady on what I actually consider headcanon when it comes to nation names. It's tricky, too, because of the common legend of name magic in older Europe

To chapter 2.

Next chapter: France laments the loss of culture, and the Germanic brothers enter the fray