FIC: She Had Been There, Mexico, T
Title: She Had Been There
Author: Dementis
Fandom: APH
Characters: North Mexico, South Mexico, brief USA
Rated: T
Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia, but I do own Mexico's characters.
Summary: For 200 years, Maria has been there.
Prompt: Celebrating a birthday.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
"My children: a new dispensation comes to us today. Will you receive it? Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen by three hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must act at once... Will you defend your religion and your rights as true patriots? Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government! Death to the gachupines!"
-Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Roman Catholic Priest.
September 16, 1810.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there the day her brother was born. She remembers the day with crystal clarity, her mother's screaming as the contractions started, her mother's hands clenching into the quilt beneath her, her mother's legs splayed, and Maria had watched as the baby came out bloodied and messy and gasping for those first few breaths of air.
She had been utterly amazed by the sight, stunned as her baby brother - unnamed then, since Spain had yet to decide on a good male name for the second Spanish child - as her baby brother opened his mouth and shook and made no sound at all. When his eyes opened, they were as brilliantly green as her own, but more curious, more silently blinking, staring widely and in awe at the world around him, the beautiful world that he would come to experience as she herself had.
Maria had been the one to clean the baby off from the perspiration and the liquid that shone white and red and orange over his tiny, slippery body. A small shred of pink tissue had been caught in the baby's mouth, and was softened between steadily working gums.
Focused as she'd washed the baby's hair, just as curly and dark as her own. Little head, tiny flopping arms, and even tinier hands reaching and pulling at her hair. The tiny wet tongue poked out from the child's lips and his little fuzzy eyebrows came together as though in confusion and Maria had laughed and cried in the miracle that lay cleaned now in her arms.
Spain had wanted to name the boy Antonio, after himself, but luckily, her mother had cut in. "He can have a Spanish name," she compromised as she took the baby back into her own arms from Maria's. "But not yours. You have stolen enough from us. Let the child at least have an identity of his own."
And so Spain had named him Pablo instead, a good Spanish name meaning "little one," and Maria felt tears prick her eyes again.
Yes, Maria had been there the day that Pablo was born, kissed the baby between the eyes, and promised to love him until the end of time.
- - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there the day of her mother's death; she had, in fact, witnessed the brutal murder for herself, watched as her father's sword drove straight through her mother's heart and their last exchange of words.
She could have run, this is true. She doesn't have anyone to blame but herself for standing there and watching the blood pour from Azteca's body like a morbid waterfall. She could have grabbed the opportunity to run instead of blindly ignoring it, could have sprinted until her feet were blistered and forged a different mask for herself than the one she wears today. This is very true.
But she didn't; she stood and watched, with horror in her eyes, as her mother choked out her last breath, her last words, a plea for the safety of her children.
Pablo had been almost her own age by that point, no longer several years younger than herself as their population expanded under the rule of the Spanish Empire. He hadn't believed her when she told him the news. Only when Antonio himself came to their home and brought them into his lip did the boy know for sure.
Surprisingly, again, the child didn't cry. Not once. He nodded and said, "I understand," and after Antonio left, he looked to Maria and asked when their mother would come home.
Such a painfully childish question and Maria couldn't properly answer it either. Her brain hadn't been able to form the logical connection between the bloodbath she'd witnessed and the permanence of the situation. The Aztec Empire was strong, wasn't she, strong enough to overcome anything in the world? That's what the children believed back then, and what Pablo had taken to heart.
But Maria did her best. She whispered to him, "I don't know," and together they held hands and waited for a mother that would never again return home to them, never again lead them outside to view the stars, never again tell them magnificent stories of the Gods and omens that Antonio would return to her.
Maria had been there the day of her mother's death, held her brother's hands, and promised to protect him from danger.
- - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there when Spain had first taken Pablo to the back of the house.
Not in the room with them, of course - Antonio never would have allowed that. She had tried to open the door when she'd gotten hungry, but it was locked when she tried to turn the knob, and Antonio's voice from inside had told her to run along and play with her toys.
She never found out what went on behind those locked doors, but she had her suspicions when Pablo began to smile less often and would flinch whenever a hand was raised. The bruises that darkened his eyes, the steady trembling in his thin shoulders, the dinners that went cold and the gardens that became obsessively tended to.
Pablo had always been a farmer at heart, and was truly brilliant with any sort of plant life or vegetation, but flowers were his specialty even as a child. When the gardens in the back of their home had shown truly meticulous work in every inch of the finely clipped grass and the golden blooms that blossomed from tufts of green, Maria knew that something was seriously wrong. Never had any flowers looked so perfect, as they weren't meant to be.
But her brother had said nothing about it when Maria prodded for answers. Just turned his head away from her and whispered something about behaving better, and wouldn't let Maria kiss his head or tend the bruises - just wanted to be left alone.
Not hungry, not playful, and certainly not smiling.
Antonio changed too in those times, no longer grinning from beyond the door when he called them to him during his visits, but had instead glared sharply at them from across the table and told them to recite their Bible verses. Hit Pablo hard upside the head when he stuttered over some of the longer words, and set before them plates of dinner that weren't even close to the fabulous meals he had prepared for them before. Cold meat and uncooked potatoes, and Pablo had merely let the plate sit there and had pulled his sore knees to his chest in silence.
Finally, Maria watched her brother snap out of that silence with a boiling temper that she had yet to come to fear, watched as Pablo stood straight and defended himself with words, with long words, intelligent words, defended himself with Bible verses and historical facts, called their father a thief and a killer, and demanded independence after so many, many decades of locked-door punishments.
Maria had been there when those punishments began, and had seen the reasons behind Pablo's declaration. However, she could not promise her support when he tried to break up their family.
- - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there when Pablo was declared dead.
She didn't expect any different once she'd heard that the Inquisition had captured him in a small town in Coahuila. Those that were taken in by the Spanish Inquisition didn't come out of it, and certainly didn't return alive. So when the messenger came to her door, a tall and heavily-built man with a full beard and tragedy in his eyes, she didn't even need to read the note to know what had happened.
Upon receiving the news, she hadn't felt anything at all, strangely enough. She felt numb, even physically so, until the tips of her fingers tingled with lack of feeling. The paper in her hands shook and the ink was smeared with sloppy penmanship, written painstakingly by hand, and soon the words began to swim on the page until it seemed to crumple on its own in her fist.
Senorita Maria Carriedo,
I regret to inform you that your brother, Pablo Montoya Carriedo, has been missing now for two years and has been declared legally deceased. The government of Mexico would be happy to pay compensation for the death.
I'm very sorry for your loss.
Signed--
An illegible signature had scrawled the bottom of the page. It didn't matter to her. All that mattered when it finally kicked in was that her brother was dead - gone, out of her life forever, just like her mother had been. Only this time, there were no questions of what death meant, no questions of when Pablo would come home to her. She knew with that chilling, haunting feeling in her stomach that Pablo was dead. She knew what that meant and was prepared to move on from it just like she'd moved on from the death of her mother.
It proved to be more difficult than she thought it would be.
Pablo came to her in her dreams, sometimes as a small and smiling child and sometimes as that painfully shy little thing that bore the bruises of Spanish cruelty. Some nights, he would tell her to be strong and remember their good days together, and other nights she would just hear him crying and be unable to reach tangible contact with her brother. Other nights still were complete nonsense to her, arcs of time that made no logical sense in the real world, situations that could never realistically occur.
Every night proved the same in one manner, however. Every time Maria woke up from these dreams, her face was streaked with tears and sobs wracked her body, and that loneliness had settled into her heart as she blamed herself for his death.
(I regret to inform you--)
She walked the beaches of his shores and pretended to hold his hand.
(--declared legally deceased--)
She had been tempted to surrender. So, so tempted, uncaring for this war against the Spanish that she couldn't fight without Pablo's voice to guide her. This war that she didn't want to fight, for Spain was her father, and why would she ever want to leave?
(--compensation for the death. I'm very sorry for your loss. Signed--)
Maria had been there when Pablo was declared dead, and took up her gun in a promise to protect his memory since she hadn't been able to protect him in person.
- - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there when she finally kept her promise.
The Revolution had confused many people, largely due to the fact that Porfirio Diaz was a great leader while he was actually running. He gave Mexico grand reforms in industry and modernization, but it had been at the expense of basic civil rights. Maria hadn't even realized this until she'd seen Pablo's hands bleeding as a sign of the toiling working class, how sick he was becoming, how well-fed and plump she herself had been.
When she revolted, Pablo had been surprised. She couldn't blame him for that since she had taken little to no steps toward fighting in their War for Independence until Pablo had "died." But President Gonzalez had stepped up to the plate and began an era of political corruption and incompetence, throwing them back by decades where Diaz had wanted a reign of moving forward.
However, that wasn't what made her decide to fight.
The event that caused her to pick up her gun wasn't one that would inspire most to do so. It had been a warm and humid day in Mexico City, and Diaz had run once again for reelection, and Pablo had merely spoken up about the mistreatment of the working class; Diaz hadn't taken it well, and in the next moment, had grabbed a fistful of Pablo's hair and shook him like some sort of misbehaved dog.
So the fight commenced, Diaz's people against several other groups - socialists, liberals, anarchists, populists, agrarians - all fighting for whatever they believed in. As for Maria, all she believed in was equal treatment; for her brother, for her people, for herself.
The fighting was done in the streets, on steps of buildings, shots fired and men screaming for medical attention. The noise is what she remembers most. The fact that she hadn't heard the gunfire so much as felt it, and instinctively shoved Pablo down to the floor just as she'd done in play a million times as a child, and had taken the bullet for him without thinking. Anything to keep her brother safe, that was her promise to him from hundreds of years ago.
She thinks, still, that Pablo had been more hurt than he let on, clutching his ribs even while he screamed her name. Maria screamed his name as well, but mostly had been unable to do much but hold both of her hands over the place that had been shot through - her stomach, entry and exit wound - to try to stop the bleeding.
The bullet had torn through organs and bones, had left behind evidence other than the wound itself in the form of infections and poisoning. She'd gotten a terrible fever and hadn't been able to stop bleeding out until the doctors managed to sew it shut with the hopes that her abilities as a nation would let the wound heal itself from the inside. Pablo had come to visit her in the hospital but the nurses chased him out for fear of causing her to become upset, and she'd cried, but not in the fear of death, however near it felt.
She cried because she kept thinking about what could have happened had she not been there to shove her brother into those steps. How Pablo could have so easily been in her place.
Maria had been there when she finally kept her promise. No matter what failures Pablo would point out to her later, she could at least say she did.
- - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there when jealousy tore them apart.
Her brother has always been a bit of an alcoholic, with his first real drink coming to him most likely during their War for Independence, when she imagines that it had brought some sort of comfort where human contact lacked.
But the Pablo she would come to know today hadn't truly started morphing until the Cold War, the same time they had both been charmed by the Soviet Union and the aspect of communism, the same time that the siblings had been so easily pitted against one another in favor of romantic attention from Russia.
Ivan Braginski had charmed her with frightening ease, or at least she looks back today and finds it repulsive how simple it was to win over her heart. She's always had a preference for tall, polite men, and Ivan seemed to wear a mask to outdo even her own. He'd provided her with warmth (ironic, isn't it?) and human comfort and the promise of something better.
He'd called her "mariposa" in place of the "papillon" she had become to used to hearing from France, complimented her on her beauty, made her feel sure of herself for once in her life.
Of course, she hadn't paid much attention to her brother back then, with the economic collapse of the seventies sweeping the nation and depression setting in. She always assumed that he was fine - he'd made good friends with the handsome fellows in South America back in the thirties when their economy had been booming, so he seemed happy enough as long as he was in the company of one of those wavy-haired, smirking gentlemen. She could have Russia to herself and Pablo could party down south; it seemed a fair enough solution to both of their problems.
Pablo's relationship with Cuba came to an end, which she had expected it to, and she couldn't really care for the bitterness that followed, dogging her brother with a heavy cloud of bad temper. More often than not, he would come home reeking of booze of some sort - vodka sometimes, other times expensive beer or Brazilian wine, most often tequila since that seemed to be his preference - staggering in through the door and slurring curse words when he collapsed face-down on the sofa or sideways in the armchair.
He would shout at her when she asked what was wrong, and she would leave him be for days on end, once going an entire month without saying a single word to him despite living under the same roof. Only when she noticed the delicate white chamomile flowers in the garden did she finally speak up about her concerns; not concerns of his health or happiness, but concerns that he could be taking Ivan's attention away from her.
"I fucked him," Pablo had told her with a dizzy, unapologetic shrug. "I'm not as pathetic as you think I am."
Initially, anger and jealousy flooded her until she was nearly blind with it, pushing at her brother and shouting at him and calling him a whore, calling him a million things she didn't quite mean, until he finally hit her. She hit back, and together they went tumbling down into those chamomiles until the flowers lie flattened and the siblings lie covered in dirt and petals.
And then they laughed and Pablo drank some more, and Maria never apologized for calling him a whore.
Maria had been there when jealousy tore the siblings apart, and neither one of them ever apologized for it.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Maria is here now, on the afternoon of September 16th, and though she doesn't feel her best, Pablo makes sure not to let her feel at her worst either.
There's a cake that Alfred made himself with his limited but effective culinary skills, and both of them are smiling at her now like the two idiots they are, the candles atop it simply reading "200" and lit with small orange flames. The year is 2010, exactly two hundred years after the Grito de Dolores had been cried from the city steps. Maria's heart is heavy with pride and without a moment's notice, she feels her eyes flood hot with tears, and the men hold either of her hands in their own, telling her to make a wish.
A deep breath, and the candles are extinguished with a gust of carbon dioxide, and Pablo takes up the knife to begin cutting equally thick slices of chocolate cake.
"What did you wish for?" Alfred prods, and Maria simply laughs.
"I can't tell you," Maria responds, "or it won't come true."
In reality, though, it's already come true. She looks to Pablo, healthy and happy even if he looks so different from the tiny baby she'd held in her arms so many hundreds of years ago, and smiles.
"Besides," she continues as she takes the plate of cake her brother offers, "I already have everything I could ever want."
It has been two hundred years since they've gained independence from their father, and even more than that since the Aztec Empire had given birth to these two siblings. And in all that time, Maria has found that she wouldn't trade in a single moment, since she remembers being told once that all experiences, good and bad, form the modern personality.
Maria is here now, and together, her and her brother are two hundred years independent, and with his hand in her own, she wouldn't dream of asking for anything more.
Author: Dementis
Fandom: APH
Characters: North Mexico, South Mexico, brief USA
Rated: T
Disclaimer: I don't own Hetalia, but I do own Mexico's characters.
Summary: For 200 years, Maria has been there.
Prompt: Celebrating a birthday.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
"My children: a new dispensation comes to us today. Will you receive it? Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen by three hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must act at once... Will you defend your religion and your rights as true patriots? Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government! Death to the gachupines!"
-Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, Roman Catholic Priest.
September 16, 1810.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there the day her brother was born. She remembers the day with crystal clarity, her mother's screaming as the contractions started, her mother's hands clenching into the quilt beneath her, her mother's legs splayed, and Maria had watched as the baby came out bloodied and messy and gasping for those first few breaths of air.
She had been utterly amazed by the sight, stunned as her baby brother - unnamed then, since Spain had yet to decide on a good male name for the second Spanish child - as her baby brother opened his mouth and shook and made no sound at all. When his eyes opened, they were as brilliantly green as her own, but more curious, more silently blinking, staring widely and in awe at the world around him, the beautiful world that he would come to experience as she herself had.
Maria had been the one to clean the baby off from the perspiration and the liquid that shone white and red and orange over his tiny, slippery body. A small shred of pink tissue had been caught in the baby's mouth, and was softened between steadily working gums.
Focused as she'd washed the baby's hair, just as curly and dark as her own. Little head, tiny flopping arms, and even tinier hands reaching and pulling at her hair. The tiny wet tongue poked out from the child's lips and his little fuzzy eyebrows came together as though in confusion and Maria had laughed and cried in the miracle that lay cleaned now in her arms.
Spain had wanted to name the boy Antonio, after himself, but luckily, her mother had cut in. "He can have a Spanish name," she compromised as she took the baby back into her own arms from Maria's. "But not yours. You have stolen enough from us. Let the child at least have an identity of his own."
And so Spain had named him Pablo instead, a good Spanish name meaning "little one," and Maria felt tears prick her eyes again.
Yes, Maria had been there the day that Pablo was born, kissed the baby between the eyes, and promised to love him until the end of time.
- - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there the day of her mother's death; she had, in fact, witnessed the brutal murder for herself, watched as her father's sword drove straight through her mother's heart and their last exchange of words.
She could have run, this is true. She doesn't have anyone to blame but herself for standing there and watching the blood pour from Azteca's body like a morbid waterfall. She could have grabbed the opportunity to run instead of blindly ignoring it, could have sprinted until her feet were blistered and forged a different mask for herself than the one she wears today. This is very true.
But she didn't; she stood and watched, with horror in her eyes, as her mother choked out her last breath, her last words, a plea for the safety of her children.
Pablo had been almost her own age by that point, no longer several years younger than herself as their population expanded under the rule of the Spanish Empire. He hadn't believed her when she told him the news. Only when Antonio himself came to their home and brought them into his lip did the boy know for sure.
Surprisingly, again, the child didn't cry. Not once. He nodded and said, "I understand," and after Antonio left, he looked to Maria and asked when their mother would come home.
Such a painfully childish question and Maria couldn't properly answer it either. Her brain hadn't been able to form the logical connection between the bloodbath she'd witnessed and the permanence of the situation. The Aztec Empire was strong, wasn't she, strong enough to overcome anything in the world? That's what the children believed back then, and what Pablo had taken to heart.
But Maria did her best. She whispered to him, "I don't know," and together they held hands and waited for a mother that would never again return home to them, never again lead them outside to view the stars, never again tell them magnificent stories of the Gods and omens that Antonio would return to her.
Maria had been there the day of her mother's death, held her brother's hands, and promised to protect him from danger.
- - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there when Spain had first taken Pablo to the back of the house.
Not in the room with them, of course - Antonio never would have allowed that. She had tried to open the door when she'd gotten hungry, but it was locked when she tried to turn the knob, and Antonio's voice from inside had told her to run along and play with her toys.
She never found out what went on behind those locked doors, but she had her suspicions when Pablo began to smile less often and would flinch whenever a hand was raised. The bruises that darkened his eyes, the steady trembling in his thin shoulders, the dinners that went cold and the gardens that became obsessively tended to.
Pablo had always been a farmer at heart, and was truly brilliant with any sort of plant life or vegetation, but flowers were his specialty even as a child. When the gardens in the back of their home had shown truly meticulous work in every inch of the finely clipped grass and the golden blooms that blossomed from tufts of green, Maria knew that something was seriously wrong. Never had any flowers looked so perfect, as they weren't meant to be.
But her brother had said nothing about it when Maria prodded for answers. Just turned his head away from her and whispered something about behaving better, and wouldn't let Maria kiss his head or tend the bruises - just wanted to be left alone.
Not hungry, not playful, and certainly not smiling.
Antonio changed too in those times, no longer grinning from beyond the door when he called them to him during his visits, but had instead glared sharply at them from across the table and told them to recite their Bible verses. Hit Pablo hard upside the head when he stuttered over some of the longer words, and set before them plates of dinner that weren't even close to the fabulous meals he had prepared for them before. Cold meat and uncooked potatoes, and Pablo had merely let the plate sit there and had pulled his sore knees to his chest in silence.
Finally, Maria watched her brother snap out of that silence with a boiling temper that she had yet to come to fear, watched as Pablo stood straight and defended himself with words, with long words, intelligent words, defended himself with Bible verses and historical facts, called their father a thief and a killer, and demanded independence after so many, many decades of locked-door punishments.
Maria had been there when those punishments began, and had seen the reasons behind Pablo's declaration. However, she could not promise her support when he tried to break up their family.
- - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there when Pablo was declared dead.
She didn't expect any different once she'd heard that the Inquisition had captured him in a small town in Coahuila. Those that were taken in by the Spanish Inquisition didn't come out of it, and certainly didn't return alive. So when the messenger came to her door, a tall and heavily-built man with a full beard and tragedy in his eyes, she didn't even need to read the note to know what had happened.
Upon receiving the news, she hadn't felt anything at all, strangely enough. She felt numb, even physically so, until the tips of her fingers tingled with lack of feeling. The paper in her hands shook and the ink was smeared with sloppy penmanship, written painstakingly by hand, and soon the words began to swim on the page until it seemed to crumple on its own in her fist.
Senorita Maria Carriedo,
I regret to inform you that your brother, Pablo Montoya Carriedo, has been missing now for two years and has been declared legally deceased. The government of Mexico would be happy to pay compensation for the death.
I'm very sorry for your loss.
Signed--
An illegible signature had scrawled the bottom of the page. It didn't matter to her. All that mattered when it finally kicked in was that her brother was dead - gone, out of her life forever, just like her mother had been. Only this time, there were no questions of what death meant, no questions of when Pablo would come home to her. She knew with that chilling, haunting feeling in her stomach that Pablo was dead. She knew what that meant and was prepared to move on from it just like she'd moved on from the death of her mother.
It proved to be more difficult than she thought it would be.
Pablo came to her in her dreams, sometimes as a small and smiling child and sometimes as that painfully shy little thing that bore the bruises of Spanish cruelty. Some nights, he would tell her to be strong and remember their good days together, and other nights she would just hear him crying and be unable to reach tangible contact with her brother. Other nights still were complete nonsense to her, arcs of time that made no logical sense in the real world, situations that could never realistically occur.
Every night proved the same in one manner, however. Every time Maria woke up from these dreams, her face was streaked with tears and sobs wracked her body, and that loneliness had settled into her heart as she blamed herself for his death.
(I regret to inform you--)
She walked the beaches of his shores and pretended to hold his hand.
(--declared legally deceased--)
She had been tempted to surrender. So, so tempted, uncaring for this war against the Spanish that she couldn't fight without Pablo's voice to guide her. This war that she didn't want to fight, for Spain was her father, and why would she ever want to leave?
(--compensation for the death. I'm very sorry for your loss. Signed--)
Maria had been there when Pablo was declared dead, and took up her gun in a promise to protect his memory since she hadn't been able to protect him in person.
- - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there when she finally kept her promise.
The Revolution had confused many people, largely due to the fact that Porfirio Diaz was a great leader while he was actually running. He gave Mexico grand reforms in industry and modernization, but it had been at the expense of basic civil rights. Maria hadn't even realized this until she'd seen Pablo's hands bleeding as a sign of the toiling working class, how sick he was becoming, how well-fed and plump she herself had been.
When she revolted, Pablo had been surprised. She couldn't blame him for that since she had taken little to no steps toward fighting in their War for Independence until Pablo had "died." But President Gonzalez had stepped up to the plate and began an era of political corruption and incompetence, throwing them back by decades where Diaz had wanted a reign of moving forward.
However, that wasn't what made her decide to fight.
The event that caused her to pick up her gun wasn't one that would inspire most to do so. It had been a warm and humid day in Mexico City, and Diaz had run once again for reelection, and Pablo had merely spoken up about the mistreatment of the working class; Diaz hadn't taken it well, and in the next moment, had grabbed a fistful of Pablo's hair and shook him like some sort of misbehaved dog.
So the fight commenced, Diaz's people against several other groups - socialists, liberals, anarchists, populists, agrarians - all fighting for whatever they believed in. As for Maria, all she believed in was equal treatment; for her brother, for her people, for herself.
The fighting was done in the streets, on steps of buildings, shots fired and men screaming for medical attention. The noise is what she remembers most. The fact that she hadn't heard the gunfire so much as felt it, and instinctively shoved Pablo down to the floor just as she'd done in play a million times as a child, and had taken the bullet for him without thinking. Anything to keep her brother safe, that was her promise to him from hundreds of years ago.
She thinks, still, that Pablo had been more hurt than he let on, clutching his ribs even while he screamed her name. Maria screamed his name as well, but mostly had been unable to do much but hold both of her hands over the place that had been shot through - her stomach, entry and exit wound - to try to stop the bleeding.
The bullet had torn through organs and bones, had left behind evidence other than the wound itself in the form of infections and poisoning. She'd gotten a terrible fever and hadn't been able to stop bleeding out until the doctors managed to sew it shut with the hopes that her abilities as a nation would let the wound heal itself from the inside. Pablo had come to visit her in the hospital but the nurses chased him out for fear of causing her to become upset, and she'd cried, but not in the fear of death, however near it felt.
She cried because she kept thinking about what could have happened had she not been there to shove her brother into those steps. How Pablo could have so easily been in her place.
Maria had been there when she finally kept her promise. No matter what failures Pablo would point out to her later, she could at least say she did.
- - - - - - - - - -
Maria had been there when jealousy tore them apart.
Her brother has always been a bit of an alcoholic, with his first real drink coming to him most likely during their War for Independence, when she imagines that it had brought some sort of comfort where human contact lacked.
But the Pablo she would come to know today hadn't truly started morphing until the Cold War, the same time they had both been charmed by the Soviet Union and the aspect of communism, the same time that the siblings had been so easily pitted against one another in favor of romantic attention from Russia.
Ivan Braginski had charmed her with frightening ease, or at least she looks back today and finds it repulsive how simple it was to win over her heart. She's always had a preference for tall, polite men, and Ivan seemed to wear a mask to outdo even her own. He'd provided her with warmth (ironic, isn't it?) and human comfort and the promise of something better.
He'd called her "mariposa" in place of the "papillon" she had become to used to hearing from France, complimented her on her beauty, made her feel sure of herself for once in her life.
Of course, she hadn't paid much attention to her brother back then, with the economic collapse of the seventies sweeping the nation and depression setting in. She always assumed that he was fine - he'd made good friends with the handsome fellows in South America back in the thirties when their economy had been booming, so he seemed happy enough as long as he was in the company of one of those wavy-haired, smirking gentlemen. She could have Russia to herself and Pablo could party down south; it seemed a fair enough solution to both of their problems.
Pablo's relationship with Cuba came to an end, which she had expected it to, and she couldn't really care for the bitterness that followed, dogging her brother with a heavy cloud of bad temper. More often than not, he would come home reeking of booze of some sort - vodka sometimes, other times expensive beer or Brazilian wine, most often tequila since that seemed to be his preference - staggering in through the door and slurring curse words when he collapsed face-down on the sofa or sideways in the armchair.
He would shout at her when she asked what was wrong, and she would leave him be for days on end, once going an entire month without saying a single word to him despite living under the same roof. Only when she noticed the delicate white chamomile flowers in the garden did she finally speak up about her concerns; not concerns of his health or happiness, but concerns that he could be taking Ivan's attention away from her.
"I fucked him," Pablo had told her with a dizzy, unapologetic shrug. "I'm not as pathetic as you think I am."
Initially, anger and jealousy flooded her until she was nearly blind with it, pushing at her brother and shouting at him and calling him a whore, calling him a million things she didn't quite mean, until he finally hit her. She hit back, and together they went tumbling down into those chamomiles until the flowers lie flattened and the siblings lie covered in dirt and petals.
And then they laughed and Pablo drank some more, and Maria never apologized for calling him a whore.
Maria had been there when jealousy tore the siblings apart, and neither one of them ever apologized for it.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Maria is here now, on the afternoon of September 16th, and though she doesn't feel her best, Pablo makes sure not to let her feel at her worst either.
There's a cake that Alfred made himself with his limited but effective culinary skills, and both of them are smiling at her now like the two idiots they are, the candles atop it simply reading "200" and lit with small orange flames. The year is 2010, exactly two hundred years after the Grito de Dolores had been cried from the city steps. Maria's heart is heavy with pride and without a moment's notice, she feels her eyes flood hot with tears, and the men hold either of her hands in their own, telling her to make a wish.
A deep breath, and the candles are extinguished with a gust of carbon dioxide, and Pablo takes up the knife to begin cutting equally thick slices of chocolate cake.
"What did you wish for?" Alfred prods, and Maria simply laughs.
"I can't tell you," Maria responds, "or it won't come true."
In reality, though, it's already come true. She looks to Pablo, healthy and happy even if he looks so different from the tiny baby she'd held in her arms so many hundreds of years ago, and smiles.
"Besides," she continues as she takes the plate of cake her brother offers, "I already have everything I could ever want."
It has been two hundred years since they've gained independence from their father, and even more than that since the Aztec Empire had given birth to these two siblings. And in all that time, Maria has found that she wouldn't trade in a single moment, since she remembers being told once that all experiences, good and bad, form the modern personality.
Maria is here now, and together, her and her brother are two hundred years independent, and with his hand in her own, she wouldn't dream of asking for anything more.